Martian's Daughter: A Memoir (5 page)

The first applications of game theory, in fact, came not in economics but in simulations of possible scenarios of future military conflicts, strategic analyses conducted by the Rand Corporation for the US Air Force—a use entirely consistent with my father's ultrahawkish view of the world. It was decades before this theory became integrated into mainstream economics, but today political scientists use it to analyze countries' relationships in peace as well as war, anthropologists call on it to ferret out patterns of interaction among neighboring cultures, and biologists employ it to examine the effects living cells have on each other.

In this use of game theory to uncover previously hidden patterns,
scientists in a wide variety of fields are spurred by motives not unlike those of the theory's progenitor. In Leonard's words, “It is difficult not to see in his [von Neumann's] efforts an element of perhaps subconscious resistance to the conditions of the time; an almost defiant willingness to see order beyond the disorder, equilibrium beyond the confusion, to seek an inevitable return to normality once the present transition, with its ‘abnormal spiritual tensions,’ was over.”
²⁰

In the event, my father's domestic life would reach a new, if somewhat shaky, equilibrium long before his wider world returned to some semblance of normalcy. Indeed, near the end of his life, he seems to have concluded that such normalcy, like the Holy Grail, would remain forever beyond reach. That pessimism is certainly implied in an article he wrote for
Fortune
magazine in 1955, the year he was found to have the cancer that would kill him. Asked to give his views on America in 1980, he titled his response “Can We Survive Technology?” In it he predicted, “Present awful possibilities of nuclear warfare may give way to others even more awful…In the years between now and 1980 the (global) crisis will probably develop far beyond all earlier patterns. When or how it will end—or to what state of affairs it will yield—nobody can say.”
²¹

Despite the ambiguous wording, this last sentence reflected his fear that mankind might not survive another twenty-five years but instead would become the victim of its own self-destructive inclinations. He had quantified this fear in a letter to Klari in 1946 regarding the probable date of the
next
war: “I don't think this is less than two years and I do think it is less than ten.”
²²
It was not technology itself that my father feared but human nature: “It is just as foolish to complain that people are selfish and treacherous as it is to complain that the magnetic field does not increase unless the electrical field has a curl. Both are laws of nature.”
²³

My father's belief in a coming Armageddon, and his firm conviction that the only hope for civilization lay in American victories over both nazism and communism, was born as the storm clouds gathered over Europe in the mid-1930s and lasted until his death. The result was a clear line of demarcation between the two halves of his life as a scientist. During the first half, which spanned his youth in Europe and his early days in the United States, he made fundamental contributions in the realm of pure mathematics and mathematical physics, involving himself
in some of the major scientific issues that roiled European intellectuals in the early part of the twentieth century. In 1935, though, he symbolically put Europe behind him by resigning from the German Mathematical Society, writing, “I cannot reconcile it with my conscience to remain a member of the the German Mathematical Society any longer…”
²⁴
He was equally emphatic twenty years later in explaining his reasons for coming to America: “I expected World War II, and I was apprehensive that Hungary would be on the Nazi side, and I didn't want to be caught dead on that side.”
²⁵

As soon as he obtained American citizenship in 1937, von Neumann embarked on a collaboration with the US military that lasted the rest of his life, first with the Ballistics Research Laboratory of the Army Ordnance Department in Aberdeen, Maryland, then with the Manhattan Project and, after World War II, all three branches of the armed forces, the Department of Defense, and the Atomic Energy Commission. His work in such disparate areas as game theory, digital computers, intercontinental ballistic missiles, meteorology, and other kinds of mathematical modeling was united by their relevance to real-world problems, including military, economic, and political applications. Although he remained on the faculty of the IAS until 1955, the contemplation of pure mathematics in its tranquil surroundings was pushed aside by his involvement in crucial issues relating to the security of the United States, to the dismay of his mathematics colleagues. It was this second John von Neumann, a man of affairs in the most fundamental sense, that I knew as my father.

I am American born and bred, yet my earliest memories are of Budapest. My recollections are typical: sharp, concrete, disconnected images of particular objects—a bed and bedside lamp in the room where I slept and a very large, rough-hewn amethyst that stood by a decorative pool in the garden of my great-aunt's house. Of people and relationships I remember nothing, although, according to my mother, I learned during the course of that year to speak “perfect German to the family and perfect Hungarian to the servants.”

These memories were formed because my mother, occupied during 1937–38 with divorce and remarriage, left me in the care of my grandparents and a nanny in the home where she herself had grown up. She brought her new husband, now permanently christened Desmond, to Budapest shortly after their marriage, partly to introduce him to her parents and partly to take me home to their new household in the United States. There was no question about which parent I would live with. After their separation but before their divorce became final, my parents had drawn up a carefully constructed document regarding my care. It provided not only that my father would contribute 10 percent of his income to my support, but also for an unusual form of joint custody. Until I was twelve, I would live during the school year with my mother and spend vacations with my father; after that, the situation would be reversed until I reached the age of eighteen, when the decision about how
my time would be divided between the two households passed to me.

As my mother explained it to me, this arrangement was made with my intellectual and emotional welfare in mind. She felt that the child of a man as remarkable as John von Neumann should have the opportunity to live with him and get to know him well. At the same time, she believed that he would be better suited to parental interaction with his daughter once she had reached something approaching the age of reason and no longer needed physical care. It was a thoughtful and well-intentioned agreement, but they were too inexperienced to realize that adolescence is often the stage of life farthest removed from of the age of reason.

Because I had no memory of living with my parents together as a single family, I accepted the new household arrangements with equanimity as a natural state of affairs. In fact, I quickly came to regard Desmond as a loving parental figure, without his displacing my actual father in my affections—I just basked in being loved by both of them. But the emotional fallout of the arrangement on some of the adults involved turned out to be more painful than anyone could have anticipated.

By the time he and my mother were married, my stepfather had completed his PhD in physics at Princeton and had a job with the National Institutes of Health in Washington, DC. It was there that we settled into a rented house and I started nursery school, an environment that erased my multilingual abilities in short order. As rapidly as I had substituted Hungarian and German for English when I lived in Budapest, I now reversed the process. My desire to fit in, to be “just like everyone else,” led me to insist, even at home, that the only language I would speak or understand was English.

Within a very few weeks, apparently, my stubborn insistence had become reality. When, some twenty years later, I tried to learn enough German to pass an exam in the language for my PhD, my mother was amazed to discover that I “couldn't even make the sounds correctly.” My Hungarian vocabulary now consists of one sentence taught me by my grandmother, “I would like to speak Hungarian, but I don't know much,” and a few stray bits of profanity.

The lengths I would later go to in order to shape my four-year-old's world by sheer force of will also showed up in other ways. Apparently concerned about my strong resistance to change in any detail of my life,
my mother and Desmond followed the advice of a child psychologist and completely rearranged the furniture in my room. They were taken aback when they discovered, a few hours later, that everything was back in its original position. My only comment was “Please, dear Desmond, don't move it again; it's so heavy.” Confronted with my stubbornness, the adults capitulated and the furniture stayed.

Expecting to live in the DC area more or less permanently, my mother and Desmond immediately hired an architect and built a house, with my mother playing a hands-on role in the design and Desmond supervising the construction almost day by day. Its location, on 30th Place just off Ellicott Street, was at the time right at the edge of urban Washington; just beyond their block were untouched woods. Today those same houses are very much in the midst of a city that has expanded well beyond the Maryland state line.

Of particular interest to me and my best friend, Mariana Moran, was the fact that J. Edgar Hoover, at that time at the height of his formidable powers as head of the FBI, lived next door. Mariana, a dark-haired, dark-eyed, Spanish-style beauty, daughter of an American naval officer and a wealthy Panamanian mother, grew up to be a fashion model and a pillar of Washington society. At the time, though, she was my partner in juvenile—very juvenile—delinquency. Looking for some excitement to spice up our lives, we delighted in thumbing our noses at the nation's most feared authority figure by spreading mud on Mr. Hoover's laundry hanging on the line and writing the naughtiest words we knew in chalk on his sidewalk. To our disappointment, he didn't call on the resources of the FBI to catch us in the act, probably because his housekeeper didn't bother to tell him about our desecration of his property. But we didn't escape unpunished; when my mother found out, she responded with a solid spanking for me and a sharp report to Mariana's parents.

On many weekends during the hot Washington summer, my mother, Desmond, and I would make the two-hour drive to the seashore at Rehoboth Beach for the day. Returning from one such outing in early September of 1939, we heard over the car radio that war had been declared in Europe. This didn't mean much to a four-year-old, but it clearly shook up the adults in the front seat. They knew then that the pleasant flow of their lives was about to be totally disrupted. My maternal grandparents
and great-aunt were in the midst of a holiday visit, their first to the United States, and my mother realized that they would be stuck on this side of the Atlantic indefinitely, with only the clothes they had brought in their luggage. Suddenly, she was responsible for finding them permanent housing and became their sole means of support. Their return tickets to Europe, booked for November in cabin class on the luxury liner
Normandie
, still lie in my safe deposit box, “refundable only in Paris,” where they had been bought.

As refugees in the United States, my grandparents reversed roles from the domineering, philandering husband and bored hypochondriac wife they had been in Budapest. My grandfather, too old to resume his profession in a new country and an unfamiliar language, became gentle and passive, spending his days listening to his beloved classical music on the radio with his dog at his feet. My tiny, fragile-appearing grandmother, who for the first time in her life was needed and had something to do, became a first-class housekeeper and budgeteer (she was acutely conscious that they depended on my mother for their livelihood), an outstanding cook, and a social butterfly.

Among the elderly grandes dames of Washington, DC, Paulette Kövesi was much sought after for her skills at bridge, which included never arranging the cards in her hand, because that might give something away, or inquiring sternly of her talkative companions, “Are we here to chat or to play bridge?” The small but comfortable apartment on Connecticut Avenue—it even boasted a new innovation, central air conditioning—became the scene of many elegant ladies' luncheons and bridge teas. My grandmother, dressed in vintage black lace, was undaunted by her triple role of hostess, cook, and dishwasher.

In October of 1940, soon after we moved into the new house, my brother and only sibling was born. Christened George Henry Kuper III, he was known to the family as Gorky until he was old enough to insist on George as more appropriate to his dignity. Miss Levesconte, or “Vee,” the beloved French Canadian nursemaid who had cared for me from infancy until I outgrew her by going off to school, returned to play a similar role for the new member of the family. She had been my constant companion and had relieved the restlessness of a precocious only child by helping me learn to read when I was three. I was delighted to have her back in the
household again, even though the main focus of her attention was now my brother rather than me.

My mother was clearly delighted with this new infant; the fact that she now had a boy as well as a girl, and a child by each of her husbands added to her satisfaction. But, true to her hands-off parenting style, she left his care mainly in Vee's capable hands. Her role as the gracious and elegant hostess at frequent parties in her up-to-the minute new home continued undeterred by dishes or diapers. Some of my clearest memories are of her playing that role in flowing hostess pyjamas—a new and rather daring style at the time, and one that emphasized both her vivid persona and her graceful femininity. I was proud of having such a glamorous mother and yet discomfited by the certainty that I would never, even as an adult, acquire her aura of drop-dead elegance, her ability to turn heads in any room she entered.

I regarded baby Gorky as an interesting curiosity; it was not until he became the golden-haired darling of a succession of maids and nannies that I became fiendishly jealous. The contrast was particularly painful once I, five and a half years older, had turned from a Shirley Temple look-alike—I was occasionally mistaken for her in Hungary—into a plump, pigtailed, bespectacled little egghead, always at the top of her class in school but notably lacking in social graces.

My ambivalent emotions regarding this baby, who quickly developed into a boy of irresistible appeal, were reflected in a piece I wrote for a school assignment when I was a teenager: “His most endearing yet often most annoying quality is his charm, which makes women of any age love him at first sight. After being a little hellion all day, he can go down to a party and, with one smile, captivate everyone in the room. ‘Isn't he an angel?’ they all say. It is then that I feel a desire to wring his angelic little neck!…Gorky's thoughtful, unselfish nature makes me love him with all my might, but he's enough of a little boy to make me think sometimes he should be caged.”

At about the time of Gorky's birth, the pleasant rhythm of my family environment was unsettled by the question of what role Desmond, a physicist whose specialty was studying the effects of various types of radiation on human health and designing instruments to measure it, would play in the fast-approaching war. The US Congress had authorized
compulsory military service, even though we were not yet officially at war; at about the same time, the Radiation Laboratory, or RadLab, was established at MIT as a joint Anglo-American project for the further development and production of radar, which had recently been invented in England. After several months of cat and mouse between the highly placed scientists assembling a RadLab team and Desmond's local draft board, the civilians won, and we moved from Washington to an old but spacious rented house in Cambridge.

My mother wasted no time setting up her household and establishing our home as the social center for the group of scientists and their spouses who were rapidly being assembled in Cambridge from all over the country. But it soon became clear that the role of well-off housewife was not going to be enough for her quick brain or her boundless energy and dominant personality. As a European whose parents had just lost their home, their belongings, and their country, she was passionate about the importance of an American victory in World War II and felt an increasing urge to play a more direct role. She was egged on by her husband's half-teasing insistence that keeping household servants in wartime was downright unpatriotic; either the maids would have to go or she would have to justify their existence by going to work herself. And now that her parents and aunt were totally dependent on her for their financial support, she felt an obligation to earn much of their keep herself.

The question of what kind of job she should apply for was a real one, since nothing in her education or experience had equipped her for the world of paid work. So she joined the army of Rosie the Riveters who made up an increasing part of the civilian work force as their husbands and brothers went off to war. Risking her long, elegantly manicured fingernails, she started out assembling radar sets at the Harvey Radio Laboratories in Cambridge. “You're just another socialite who'll quit as soon as you're bored,” was the response she recounted to a reporter who interviewed her for the women's page of a Boston newspaper. Instead, she was promoted to foreman within three months and, six months later, became the supervisor in charge of training women technicians at the same RadLab that had recently recruited her husband.

My mother was long on conviction and self-confidence and short on patience, a combination that made her a tough but fair taskmistress
in the workplace as well as at home. When the women she supervised were asked to vote on whether they were willing to have “Negroes” as coworkers, she drew on the sheer force of her personality, along with some well-placed Hungarian profanity, to ensure that they voted yes. When she organized annual reunion dances for RadLab and Los Alamos alumni during the spring meetings of the American Physical Society after the war, she was equally adamant. These meetings were held at posh Washington hotels, which, at the time, were strictly whites only. Her insistence that a black physicist and his wife be included in the party meant that she had to find a different hotel every year in which to hold it. These events were, in the words of one of the participants, “the first unsegregated dances at first class hotels in Washington D.C.”
¹
Although her enormous energy had been focused virtually 24–7 on winning the world war against the forces of darkness, my mother also seized opportunities to conduct her own small battle against the injustices rampant in her adopted country.