Martian's Daughter: A Memoir (9 page)

Whenever my father and Klari were both traveling, Granny Gitta came down to Princeton from New York. She had been living with my father's younger brother Mike ever since Johnny, the oldest sibling, had persuaded his widowed mother and two younger brothers to come to the United States shortly before war broke out in Europe. She had been a beauty in her day, the adored wife of her husband Max. When the patent of nobility bestowed on my grandfather by the Austro-Hungarian emperor in 1913 entitled the family to its own heraldic crest, the one Max designed was emblazoned with three daisies—or marguerites—in honor of his wife, Margaret.

My father and his mother were very close; in fact, I sometimes think that he was more emotionally attached to her than to either of his wives. By the time I knew her she was a tall, thin, chain-smoking lady, still elegant, though given to wearing too much bright-red lipstick, which bled into the wrinkles bordering her upper lip. Now that I am about the age she was then, I take inordinate pains to prevent my own lipstick from creating that same effect, which was imprinted on my child's mind as one of the more unattractive symbols of old age.

Still, I loved having Granny Gitta in charge. She did wonderful handiwork—knitting, crocheting, embroidery—and, although none of these talents rubbed off on me, I delighted in going through fascinating books of Hungarian designs that she brought with her to choose the right pattern for her next project. She cooked odd but delicious things for dinner, like fried bread, a staple of the Hungarian peasant diet. And, above all, she didn't shout. My memories of this period in my life are filled with parents and their partners shouting at one another, constantly caught
up in some emotional Sturm und Drang. Granny Gitta was as tightly wound and tense as any of the others, but she was outwardly calm and gentle with me.

The move to Princeton gave me the opportunity, once again, to go to a truly remarkable school. The quality of education delivered at Miss Fine's School for Girls totally belied its prissy, finishing-school name. Within the walls of a converted mansion in the middle of town, the environment was one of an intellectual intensity that could perhaps be achieved, in the 1950s, only in a single-sex institution. Many of our teachers were brilliant women who today would be doctors, lawyers, or, most likely, professors at first-class colleges or universities, but for whom already-limited opportunities were narrowed further by the fact that they were faculty wives or otherwise tied geographically to the Princeton area.

Not only did we get first-class instruction in the usual basic high-school subjects, but if three or more students wanted a more advanced class in Latin or Greek or calculus, one of the faculty members would teach it. We read Racine and Molière in French class, Virgil and Ovid in Latin. But what really stretched us to our intellectual limits were the history and English classes taught, in alternate years, by Anne Shepherd.

Mrs. Shepherd, a Vassar graduate divorcée with a brilliant only son (who, tragically, grew up to become one of the first American casualties in the Vietnam War), was the sort of teacher who comes along once in a lifetime. Surely everyone in our class could not have been geniuses, but she somehow inspired us to think and probe and imagine as if we were. When, in 1965, Miss Fine's School merged with its male counterpart, Princeton Country Day School, to become the Princeton Day School (PDS), Mrs. Shepherd's intellectual passion and brilliance proved as effective with adolescent boys as it was with adolescent girls. When she died, at the age of ninety, she was still teaching, as a volunteer in the Princeton Adult School. And today plaques in the library, the computer center, and an assembly hall, as well as a bust in an outdoor garden at PDS, honor her memory.

The results of this nurturing were amazing. Four of the twelve members of my senior class applied to Radcliffe College, the women's branch of Harvard, which in those days conducted a nationwide test in English literature for all applicants. One day in the spring of our senior year,
the headmistress of Miss Fine's received a phone call from the president of Radcliffe, inquiring about the school. She told him it was a private school for girls in Princeton, New Jersey, then asked why he wanted to know. It turned out that the four applicants from Miss Fine's had placed something like first, third, sixth, and ninth in that competitive exam (I placed third).

Some of us not only stretched our minds for Anne Shepherd but we also opened our hearts in candid outpourings of our hopes and fears. In one essay, written loosely in the form of a poem, I described the stage of life I was going through.

Adolescence is a bittersweet hour

Between childhood and the time

When we meet the world face to face,

And become a part of it. Now all

Is new, confusing, the joys so strange,

So sharp, that they are almost pains.

…

                               …Now the warm,

Close security of childhood dissolves

And we see the world, a frightening place

But, oh, so tempting, promising success,

Yet warning of a thousand pitfalls on the way.

Will we succeed or fail, will happiness be ours,

Or grief? Will we even have a chance to try

This world, or will everything end tomorrow

In a blinding ball of flame? No one knows.

We can only work, and hope, and think.

And, in the dark, become children again,

And dream.

Also stashed in my attic is a yellowed copy of a paper I wrote in tenth grade, tracing the literary history of a classic morality tale, the battle for his soul between Dr. Faustus and the Devil, which had grown and developed in several languages over hundreds of years. When, as a college freshman, I went out for coffee with a Harvard PhD candidate in English whom I had just met at an informal dance, the man who was to become my husband swears that it was my ability to talk knowledgeably
about such an arcane subject that first made him take serious notice of a seventeen-year-old. And there is no question that the intellectual challenges my classmates and I received and rose to at Miss Fine's, and the self-images they nurtured, created a firm foundation for the intellectual self-confidence that I carried into adulthood. As an early and often lonely entrant into professional arenas dominated by men, that faith in myself was an absolutely essential ingredient.

My classmates and I spent a lot of time in earnest discussions about the dangers of another global conflict; my own pessimism regarding the inevitability of war reflected my father's views, spelled out in the letter he had written to Klari in 1946 predicting another world war within the next decade. Hoping to avert catastrophe, several of us joined an idealistic organization called the World Federalists, whose goal was to create a world government, a gesture that doubtless earned me a spot on some FBI list of members of subversive organizations. Even then I admitted in a school essay how naive the movement was, but concluded, “There seems to be only a very slight chance that the idea will work, but even that slight chance is worth working for if it could mean the prevention of the almost inevitable next war.” My efforts to bring about world government did not survive my adolescence, but a commitment to greater coordination of national policies in a world grown increasingly interdependent has infused my entire career.

The people and the conversations around my father's dinner table were even more important than my school environment in expanding my teenage horizons. Some of them were leading mathematicians and scientists, many were fellow Hungarians transplanted to the New World, and all of them were brilliant. Among them were two friends from his high-school years in Budapest—the physicists Edward Teller and Eugene Wigner. The gruff, beetle-browed Teller, who spoke in staccato sentences that called to mind the firing of a repeater rifle, had been a colleague of my father's at Los Alamos. There he had not only played an important role in the development of the atomic bomb but became the major proponent of building the even more powerful hydrogen bomb. Slight, balding, soft-voiced Wigner, whose rabbitlike buck teeth made him speak with a lisp, also worked on the Manhattan Project, and he eventually won a Nobel Prize for his work on atoms and elementary particles.
In his later years he went a bit batty, becoming a supporter of the Unification Church, which he hoped might offer a path toward world peace and thus an escape from the vision of wholesale destruction that his work had helped create.

These three men were linked not only by their Jewish Hungarian backgrounds and their scientific achievements but also by the vehemence of their anticommunist views. In this they were joined by yet another Hungarian, Arthur Koestler, the dark, brooding former communist whose novel,
Darkness at Noon
, became one of the most powerful exposés of the cruelties of Soviet communism ever written. In a paper I wrote at the time, tracing the evolution of communism through the lens of three political novels (
Man's Fate
by André Malraux,
Bread and Wine
by Ignazio Silone, and Koestler's
Darkness at Noon
), I noted that Koestler's was “the most hopeless of the three,” a reflection of his deep pessimism and, probably, chronic depression.

Another Hungarian who appeared often at our house couldn't have been more different from the brooding Koestler. He was short, urbane, wise-cracking Emery Reves, a close friend and confidante of Winston Churchill, whose last-minute escape from his Nazi pursuers was worthy of an episode in the
Perils of Pauline.
The most frequent dinner guest of all was yet another refugee from the former Austro-Hungarian Empire, Oskar Morgenstern, the tall, rigidly handsome, and forbidding-looking economist and Princeton professor who coauthored
The Theory of Games and Economic Behavior
with my father. Unlike the others, Morgenstern had deserted Austria for the United States not because he was Jewish—his mother was an illegitimate daughter of the German emperor Frederick III—but because he couldn't stand the thought of living and working under Hitler's regime after Germany annexed Austria in the Anschluss of 1938.

Regrettably, we never had all these men gathered at Klari's elegant glass-topped dining table at the same time—what a conversation that would have been! But even one at a time, their rapid-fire interchanges with my father, whether in the form of “can you top this” joke contests or sophisticated discussions of geopolitics, expanded my horizons far beyond the purview of an American teenager. Still, I often chafed at the adults' long, drawn-out conversations over coffee, which kept me from
getting back to my homework and endless phone calls with my friends. I found Koestler's unrelieved pessimism much harder to take than the ever-merry Reves's anecdotes about his narrow escapes or Winston Churchill's foibles, but it certainly inoculated me against any belief in easy solutions to the precarious state of the world in the 1950s. This was a time when people were building bomb shelters in their basements or backyards and schoolchildren regularly ducked under their desks or filed into cellars in drills to prepare for an atomic attack.

A lot of what I learned, though, had less to do with science or politics or world affairs than with intimate human relationships. The formal, correct, “confirmed bachelor” Oskar Morgenstern courted his beautiful redheaded wife Dorothy in our living room, and Emery Reves's tall, bottle-blonde girlfriend from Texas, Wendy, made no bones about her efforts to enlist my father and stepmother's aid in persuading Reves to make an honest woman of her. Eventually they were married, and, despite her brassy looks and smoke-roughened voice, she proved a devoted helpmeet, attending to his every need and whim throughout the rest of his life.

Perhaps the most startling lesson of all came from Arthur Koestler, who lived only a few miles from Princeton and was a frequent dinner guest. Despite the fact that he was unusually short, with a perpetual scowl and a face only a mother could love, he often appeared with a beautiful young woman in tow. I was appalled to learn, a few days after one of these visits, that his companion that evening had committed suicide. I was even more horrified when, only a week or two later, Koestler came to dinner again, this time with an equally lovely lady who, I later learned, had become both his secretary and his mistress. My sensibilities were so outraged that I refused to speak to either of them, despite my father's and Klari's pleadings that I stop being so rude.

That mistress, Cynthia Jeffries, eventually became Koestler's third wife and died with him in a suicide pact in 1983. Why Cynthia, much younger than the terminally ill Koestler and apparently in good health, chose to die with him has never been explained. But, remembering the sheer force of Koestler's personality, his well-known ability to press his girlfriends and wives into performing as his secretaries and maids, and the ferocity of his emotions, I wasn't surprised.

The long, serious dinner conversations exposed me to one face of my father's social world; the cocktail parties at 26 Westcott Road showed me a different one. My father and mother had hosted legendary parties in Princeton before the war, my mother and Desmond had done the same in Cambridge during the conflict, and now my father and Klari carried on the tradition in their large, handsome house ideally suited to entertaining. These events brought out my father's fun-loving side, displayed in his enjoyment of children and children's toys, his renowned stock of dirty limericks, his ability to down a remarkable number of martinis without any sign of impairment, and his fondness for ridiculous party hats. But the serious side of his nature was never far below the surface; he was known to disappear suddenly from one of his own parties to work on some mathematical problem, then reappear as suddenly as he had vanished and resume his good-fellow role.