Martian's Daughter: A Memoir (6 page)

While World War II was engulfing the world, my life in Cambridge was astonishingly, even embarrassingly, normal. Although the rationing of meat, butter, sugar, and gasoline may have made household management a bit more complicated for my mother, about all I remember of it is that mixing yellow coloring into the margarine, so that it would look more like butter and less like lard, was my job. And why was the margarine white? Because Wisconsin farmers, fearful that the substitution of margarine for butter might become a habit that persisted even after the war was over, managed to push through a regulation requiring that it be sold in its original, pasty-white state. Packagers, ever creative, promptly attached little cellophane packets of coloring to each container of margarine.

That manual mixing task, along with collecting tin foil into shiny round balls for recycling and remembering to pull down the blackout shades when the lights went on in the evening, constituted my contribution to the war effort. And, oh yes, I was responsible for pasting the ration stamps that ruled our lives as consumers into the proper booklets and keeping track of the piles of little round cardboard circles, some red and some blue, that represented fractional values of the rationing “points” assigned to each family. This last responsibility made me feel very important.

Most of my waking hours, of course, were spent in school. I had entered first grade, in the middle of the school year, at Shady Hill, at the time one of the leading “progressive” schools in the country. Its reputation arose from its uniqueness in a variety of ways. One was physical; Shady Hill consisted of a cluster of small wooden structures scattered about on its own campus, one for each grade. Running between buildings during the cold New England winter helped to toughen both bodies and minds, in the British tradition.

What really set the school apart, though, were the new ideas about children's education that underpinned it. The academic requirements were demanding, but much of the teaching and learning took the form of individual or group projects, with teachers acting as coaches and guides as much as authority figures standing at the front of the classroom. We reenacted the original Olympic Games as part of our third-grade study of Greek civilization, a project that included making our own garments and athletic props, after appropriate research to ensure authenticity. In the fourth grade, we had a contest—participation required—to see who could draw the best map of the world from memory. This sort of education had two very positive effects. It pushed me, along with my classmates, to value independent thinking over rote learning, to be active participants in our own intellectual development. And it opened our eyes—far more effectively than just reading and memorizing could—to the world's infinite variety, both in the past and in different places during our own time. Even today, when many of these so-called progressive approaches are no longer novel, the Shady Hill School continues to be recognized as one of the best of the breed. And it reinforced my own appreciation of all kinds of people, places, and experiences that I was already absorbing from my family life.

The richness of our school experience was enhanced by an unexpected fallout of wartime: the international element it brought into our classrooms. Most of my classmates were the offspring of successful local lawyers, doctors, professors, and businessmen. But scattered among us were a number of British children who had been packed off by their parents to escape the bombing they knew would strike their homeland, crossing the Atlantic alone on some of the last nonmilitary ships to make the voyage. Once landed in Boston, some of them lived with relatives, while others
were taken in by volunteer families. Although these boys and girls were at first traumatized at finding themselves alone in a strange land, they soon fitted quite naturally into our world, and many of them have, in fact, maintained close relationships with their American families throughout their adult lives. But their initial panic at suddenly being torn from everything familiar brought home to us the reality of a war that was leaving the security of our own lives pretty much untouched.

My mother's first parental encounter with the formidable headmistress of Shady Hill, Miss Katharine Taylor, was not exactly felicitous. She was greeted by that lady's comment, “You know, Mrs. Kuper, I don't approve of mothers who work.” The meeting continued for the appointed forty-five minutes, at the end of which, as my mother rose to leave, Miss Taylor fired her parting shot: “On the whole, Mrs. Kuper, it is probably better for your children that you are working.” My mother laughed as she told this story, but Miss Taylor had a point. George and I were fortunate that our mother's boundless energy and fierce competitive spirit were not focused exclusively on us; surely we would have shriveled in the flame.

While I was going about my routine of school, dancing school, skating lessons, and playing with my friends, the adults around me were working harder, and playing harder, than they ever had in their lives. For my mother and Desmond, long workdays at RadLab were punctuated on most weekends by large, raucous parties at our house where they and their colleagues drank a lot, danced a lot, and made up clever, mildly dirty ditties about their lives. Mingling with the guests during the early hours of these parties, I got to know many distinguished scientists in their more relaxed moments. Margaret, the daughter of the Nobel Prize—winning physicist I. I. Rabi and, like me, a high-powered scientist's child dropped into new surroundings by the demands of the war effort—Rabi was a professor at Columbia University in normal times—became my closest friend and playmate, and remains my friend today.

Even this life of hard work and hard play did not exhaust my mother's boundless energy. To take up the excess, she volunteered with the Red Cross at least one night a week, serving coffee and doughnuts to policemen and firemen at the sites of fires or large accidents. Thus it was that she found herself at the scene of one of the most horrific fires in our country's history. The Coconut Grove, one of Boston's largest and most
elegant nightclubs, was packed well beyond capacity on the night of November 28, 1942, when it caught fire. Many of the exit doors were locked, and the main revolving door was soon jammed with people, turning it into a death trap. Nearly five hundred people, many of them servicemen on leave celebrating with their girlfriends, died there.

Although my mother must certainly have edited out the most graphic parts when she recounted to us what she saw that night, the memory of the report she gave was burned indelibly into my brain. American civilians never experienced the carnage of World War II firsthand, but that fire gave us a glimpse of what people in many other cities around the world were going through on a daily basis.

My mother's penchant for benign neglect and the exigencies of wartime combined to give me a degree of freedom and independence unthinkable today. From the time we moved to Cambridge, when I was in the first grade and not yet six, I walked the mile or so to school and home again alone—my mother was too busy with work and rationed gasoline too scarce to expend either time or fuel on getting me back and forth. I wasn't much older when I began to take the streetcar to Harvard Square to attend Saturday afternoon movies at the University Theater with my friend Margaret. On one of those afternoons, we were so mesmerized by
The Song of Bernadette
that we sat through it twice. It was dark by the time we got home, and even my doughty mother was beginning to panic. Her fear turned to anger, though, when we showed up, and I was subjected to a sound spanking. I felt it was unjust that Margaret didn't get spanked also.

I was on my own for much longer trips as well. With wartime restrictions, there was only one way to go from my mother's home in Cambridge to my father's in Princeton, and that was by train. My brother and I had a nanny who might have been called on to escort me on these journeys, but she was Austrian and, classified as an “enemy alien,” was forbidden to travel across state lines. So my mother would buy me a first-class ticket, tip the railroad car porter five dollars to keep an eye on me and make sure I got off at the right stop, and send me on my way. I didn't see anything remarkable about this; I thought the wartime trains, jammed with young soldiers and full of hustle and bustle, were rather
fun. The independence I learned early from these experiences has been invaluable many times along my adult career path.

The unconventional family arrangements that defined my life had other profound effects on my growing up. At least in those days, most families were defined by parents and children together in a single household. For me, though, family meant two households, four adults, all brilliant and all emotionally complex, with me shuttling back and forth between them and adapting on the fly. Without being conscious of it, I became precociously adept at figuring out the soft spots in their personalities and relationships and exploiting them to my advantage.

Dealing with this complicated situation also developed in me an emotional self-sufficiency that was reinforced by my mother's parenting style. In some ways we were very close; she took me and my concerns seriously and never condescended. But she was prone to fly into sudden rages, and her humiliating slaps in the face, sometimes in front of other people, continued until I was well into my teens. Nor did she make any bones about the fact that, if the exigencies of wartime forced her to choose between being separated from her husband or from her children, she would leave us in the care of others in order to stick with the person who would be her lifetime companion after we grew up and left home. In the face of all these challenges, I developed a surface unflappability and unwillingness to examine my own feelings, traits that have lasted all my life and made writing this memoir inordinately difficult.

While my mother and stepfather were busy making their contribution to the war effort in Cambridge, my father's much higher profile role had him commuting between Princeton and Los Alamos, New Mexico. In that supersecret location, he was a major participant in the Manhattan Project and one of the very few people permitted to go in and out of Los Alamos while the war was on. He was even involved in selecting the sites in Japan where the two atom bombs then in existence were to be dropped, displaying in that task the cool rationality that dominated his thinking about any decision that affected the ability of the United States to win the war. In one of history's finest ironies, the signatures on a patent filed on the US government's behalf for a method to set off a hydrogen bomb were those of two Los Alamos colleagues, John von
Neumann and Klaus Fuchs, the German-born British citizen who, as a spy for the Soviet Union, gave the Russians crucial information about first the atomic and later the hydrogen bomb.

As if the Manhattan Project wasn't enough to keep him busy, my father made a secret trip to England in 1943 to apply his game theory to the problem of sweeping highly sophisticated German mines from the English Channel. This last assignment was extremely dangerous: not only was there the possibility of being blown out of the sky on the flight over or killed by a bomb in ravaged London, but there was also the danger of being taken prisoner should the Germans manage to invade Britain. With this latter exposure in mind, he was temporarily assigned a high military rank, so that he would fall under the rules of the Geneva Convention for officers if taken prisoner. The ever-present danger did not, however, prevent him from including the latest additions to his store of dirty limericks in the letters he wrote to his wife back in Princeton. All of them were clever, but most of them were not as clean as this one.

There once was an old man of Lyme

Who married three wives at a time.

When asked, “why the third?”

He said, “One's absurd,

And bigamy, sir, is a crime.”

All this activity meant that my vacation visits with my father were somewhat catch-as-catch-can as long as the war lasted.

The other half of the Princeton household, my father's new wife Klari, was an excellent writer, even in the English she learned only as a teenager at a British boarding school, and a remarkably perceptive observer of people. The chapter in her autobiography entitled “Johnny” captures the many aspects of my father's complex personality as no one else could. “I would like to tell about the man,” she begins, “the strange contradictory and controversial person; childish and good-humored, sophisticated and savage, brilliantly clever yet with a very limited, almost primitive lack of ability to handle his emotions—an enigma of nature that will have to remain unresolved.”
²

Sadly, Klari was also profoundly insecure and intensely neurotic, as the letters my father wrote to her during their engagement attest. Her
view of herself in relation to the world around her is reflected in the title she chose for her autobiography: “A Grasshopper in Very Tall Grass.” From the very beginning of their relationship, this insecurity had imposed an enormous burden of constant reassurance on my father, one that continued to be reflected in the many letters he wrote to her during his frequent trips away from home during and after the war: “You are scared. Your fear is only to a very small extent based on reality…You are
not
old, you
are
attractive.”
³
Apologies for some perceived misbehavior on his part and pleas for her forgiveness were also a recurring theme: “Why do we fight when we are together? I love you. Do you loathe me very violently? Let's forgive each other!”
⁴
These outpourings continued even when he knew that he was dying: “Let's not quarrel. Believe me, I love you and more than ever before.”
⁵