The Goddess of Small Victories (23 page)

I’d asked the question whose answer I had been afraid to learn. Yet even today I still believe that he left part of himself in Vienna. He quit an environment made rich by the encounters and the atmosphere it afforded: those cafés where musicians, philosophers, and writers rubbed shoulders. In Princeton, he had access to the greatest living mathematicians, but he walled himself off. Inside his closed system he went around in circles. I, too, captured by his gravity, looked for a meaning in this endless dance. We returned to Princeton frustrated: I, by this shadowy half life; he, by his partial proof, which was not elegant enough by his
standards to publish. At the hotel in Blue Hill he had said, “I’m having problems.” He implied an unspoken list, the list of his defeats. He took pains to protect himself from others but didn’t know how to insulate himself from the disappointment of his own limitations. In that summer of 1942, he disappointed himself; I disappointed myself; we disappointed each other. Two people, three possibilities—living with someone teaches you to count all of your frustrations.

Anna waited in the hallway while the nurse fussed over Adele. Bored, the young woman closed her eyes and tried to identify the owners of the footsteps she was hearing: the staccato heels of an administrator, the rubbery squeak of a health worker’s clogs, the swish of slippers.

Before entering the room, Anna tucked in her shirt. It had worked free of her tweed skirt, which now floated loose around her hips, as did most of her clothes. Mrs. Gödel was buried under the sheets and seemed despondent. The contrast with her exuberance of a week before was striking. Anna chose to see it as a sign of health. In her multicolored scarf and flowered pajamas, with her piercing gaze, Adele had something of a wild gypsy air. Where had her turban gone? Someone had finally sent it to the cleaner’s. Unless she had decided to let it molder in a drawer.

The young woman had to set down her bag and sit: her legs were trembling. Her concern over Mrs. Gödel had left her exhausted. She couldn’t even remember how she had gotten to Pine Run.

“You have lovely circles under your eyes, my dear. Boarding at this house of the dying is not doing you any good. I can see
that you are growing thinner and thinner. It’s time to call the nurse to take your blood pressure.”

Anna leapt to her feet a little too quickly. She felt an onset of dizziness. A black veil came down over eyes. She heard a distant voice, then nothing.

“Just what we needed!”

She woke up in Mrs. Gödel’s bed, her feet raised and a cold compress on her forehead. Anna recognized the lavender scent of Adele’s cologne. The old woman, wrapped in her usual scruffy bathrobe, was sitting beside her. She patted Anna’s hand. “Are we getting the vapors now?” Anna tried to sit up, but Adele firmly held her down. Gladys appeared in the doorway with a squadron of octogenarians at her back. Adele swung her head menacingly toward them.

“No need to cluster like that! We need peace and quiet.
Raus!
”

They left sheepishly, but not before depositing an offering of sugary treats. Adele stuffed a cookie into Anna’s mouth.

“Force yourself to swallow a real meal from time to time. Not that garbage from the vending machine! If I were still living at home, I would have made you schnitzels.”

Anna felt her stomach heave, but she forced herself to keep chewing.

“You’re today’s big attraction, along with the election of that old matinee idol. They’ll be talking about it for at least two weeks.”

“I take it you’re not a Republican.”

“I would rather believe in men than in ideas. Reagan does not inspire me with trust. Too many teeth. Too much hair.”

The young woman arduously swallowed her mouthful of food. Adele handed her a glass of water.

“You aren’t having a little depression, are you, dear girl?”

“Carter had even more teeth. It’s not a reliable criterion.”

“My dear child, if there is one aspect of people I can read, it is their state of mind. So stop pretending, please! Is that why you are so interested in my husband’s personal history? You don’t have to be ashamed to tell me. You are already lying down.”

“Do you have a diploma for this?”

“I studied at the source. Viennese specialty.”

“It’s complicated.”

“I know. I know it intimately. There are such pretty words for it in every language:
mélancolie, spleen, the blues, saudade
. The international hymn of sadness.”

The old woman poked the treats with a trembling finger. Anna repressed a shiver of disgust.

“I’ve tracked this nasty creature all my life. It never disappeared for very long. For Kurt, anxiety was a motor. It was an uneven fight, and a useless fight, but I fought. Today, you have chemistry. Every person takes a pill for his heart or liver. Why not one for your soul? Go on, have a second one! You’re not going to cry, are you? I don’t like it when other people cry.”

Anna ate another cookie, trying to screen off the image of Adele’s yellow fingernail scraping the food.

“I didn’t entirely escape melancholy myself.”

“I thought you were always unaffected, Adele.”

“Holding my own weakness at arm’s length was one thing. Not letting Kurt’s contaminate me was a war I had to fight at every moment. I sometimes got out of bed without the strength to face the day. Or even the next hour. And then … a smile would come to his face. The sun would shine down on the tablecloth. A reason would appear for putting on a new dress. I would reconnect with the world. Each minute of pain and suffering was
erased by a hope of happiness. Like a dotted line with nothingness in the intervals. Oops! I’m starting to blather poetry! It is making me soft, having you here.”

“Are mathematicians more fragile than we are?”

Adele picked at a crumb before pushing the plate away to where her greed could no longer reach it.

“Because of the heights they reach, the fall seems all the harder to the general public. People like to hear stories about mad scientists. It reassures them to think that great intelligence is offset by something else. That there’s a trade-off. If you raise yourself up, you must fall a long way down.”

“Life is an equation. What you gain on one side is taken away on the other.”

“It’s simply guilt, my dear. I don’t believe in this idea of cosmic balance or karma. Nothing is written, everything needs to be accomplished.”

“I’m not as optimistic as you.”

“There was this fellow in Princeton, John Nash, a mathematical genius as well.
¹¹
He was no longer teaching, but he still had access to the buildings. They called him the ‘phantom of the library.’ I came across him a few times, wandering around in his wrinkled clothes. At the start, in the 1950s, his career was dazzling, and then he imploded. He wasted a good part of his life either in hospital or getting electroshock treatment. Now I hear he has gone back to work. He managed to conquer his demons.”

“Were you hopeful that your husband could be saved?”

Adele hesitated for a moment. The young woman was sorry she had pressed the issue.

“Kurt, unlike John Nash, never suffered from schizophrenia. The doctors diagnosed him as paranoid. Mathematics may have killed him but it also saved him from depression. Thinking
kept him in one piece. But he exercised his mind to the exclusion of his body. It was his fuel but also his poison. He couldn’t live with it or without it. To stop his research would only have hastened his end.”

Anna lifted her arms, which had grown numb, to scratch her head. She could feel how tangled her loosened hair had become. Adele rummaged in her bedside stand and pulled out a hairbrush.

“Don’t worry, it’s clean. I never use it.”

The firm strokes of the stiff-bristled brush were delicious; Anna started to relax. She had no memory of her mother ever combing her hair, but she suddenly remembered Ernestine, the Adamses’ nanny, patiently tying her braids. A pang of guilt. She hadn’t contacted Ernestine in a very long time, though she lived only a short distance away.

“You have such beautiful hair. What a shame to twist it into a bun like an old maid! You’re quite pretty, really, but you don’t present yourself well.”

Anna stiffened. “I don’t care about being pretty. I’ve never had a problem attracting men. What worries me is that I’m not doing anything with my life.”

“You’ve given up being attractive? But why, in God’s name?”

“Haven’t you given anything up?”

A hard brush stroke made Anna grimace.

“
Mein Gott!
You won’t come clean unless we use forceps! I feel your brain wandering, looking for the emergency exit.”

She concentrated on a particularly stubborn knot. The young woman resigned herself to the pain. Adele could never understand her. She belonged to a different generation. Having to be alluring was an archaism, and she, Anna, refused to submit to it. She had never shared her friends’ interest in window shopping or their hysterics before a party. She saw it as a revival of
the Stone Age division of the sexes: the hunter-boys chase balls, and the gatherer-girls peel coat hangers. Her theory had made Leo laugh. He believed that Anna despised the dance of the sexes only because she didn’t have the courage to own her tiny breasts. Hiding away in nuns’ clothes revealed her entirely predictable fear of the phallus and her outsized ego. He congratulated her on her lack of sartorial effort since in any case he preferred her naked. She thanked her two-bit shrink for his analysis by throwing a dictionary at his head, proving that her reptilian brain had not altogether renounced being primal.

Even the men she unwittingly attracted tried to smother her from the very first night. The curse of the Madonna. She was perfectly aware of her power. She had no interest in extending it.

“I’m a very boring person,” said Anna.

“If you were, I wouldn’t waste my time on you. What else? Say it without thinking.”

“I used to like to write.”

The brush slowed imperceptibly.

“It never to came to anything. One day my mother read one of my notebooks. She laughed.”

“Families have an unlimited genius for destruction.”

“Thank you, Doctor. I would never have guessed on my own.”

Adele caressed her cheek; the young woman felt a sudden flood of emotion, far beyond compassion.

“My husband taught me this. Life confirmed it. A system cannot understand itself. Self-analysis is very difficult. You can only see yourself through others’ eyes.”

“Submit to the judgment of others? That doesn’t sound like you.”

“Indirect lighting is sometimes stronger. I may not be the person to turn on the lightbulb for you, but I am getting to know you. You’re a person who feels empathy, you’re observant, and you like words.”

“Nothing to build a career around.”

“I’m talking to you about pleasure. Find where your happiness is, Anna!”

“And where is yours, Adele?”

The old woman tossed the brush on the bed.

“Mine is currycombing. I’m stopping for today, sweet pea. My arms ache!”

1944

An Atomic Soufflé

“He’s still out there.”

“They’ll be arriving at any moment, Kurt. Turn the lights back on! I have to set the table.”

“See for yourself!”

Irritated, I made my way to the side of the window, where he was hiding.

“Be more discreet, Adele. He’ll see you.”

I examined the quiet thoroughfare. A dank November gloom had settled over Alexander Street. I saw a single figure strolling by: a man lost in his thoughts.

“I saw that man on the way to the Institute this morning. I recognize his hat.”

“Princeton is such a small town, Kurt. It’s perfectly normal to see the same people more than once.”

“He’s following me!”

“Shut the damned windows! It’s freezing in here. Your guests will all be shivering.”

He had bundled himself up in a thick woolen jacket, knitted by my own hands.

“The apartment has a funny smell.”

“Now don’t start! I aired it out all day. I burned sprigs of sage. Every room has been thoroughly scrubbed. I can’t do any more.”

“I can still smell the previous renters.”

“You’re too sensitive. Do something useful for once. Put out the plates and shut the windows!”

I went back into the kitchen, shivering despite the heat from the oven. I lived my days with the windows open and my arms in the washing machine. Kurt had always been pathologically sensitive to smells, including those of the body. Since moving to Princeton, his reactions had become obsessive. I had to bathe scrupulously before joining him in bed. Sweat, strong perfume, or my morning breath disgusted him. He avoided me like the plague when I had my period. Of course, he never talked about it. How could he even touch on the subject? Yet I had to listen to a daily description of the changes in his body temperature and the consistency of his stools. My own internal machinery didn’t interest him. Every morning, I would sort through the wash, sniffing his clothes one by one, not so much for any trace of female contact as to inhale his smell in his absence. But he didn’t sweat. His skin had very little odor and his clothes didn’t get dirty.

When I returned to the living room, he was still peering out into the street.

“Damn it to hell, Kurt! Set the table!”

“Don’t swear like that, Adele. And don’t get so agitated. This is not a formal dinner.”

I stuck my tongue out at his back. I set the table and looked at it critically: no silver, no fine porcelain. The secondhand bride had not merited an elaborate trousseau.

He stayed planted by the window.