The Goddess of Small Victories (26 page)

Pauli smiled, glad not to be the focus of the older man’s irony.

“My wife has no business meddling in these matters.”

I couldn’t resist putting his feet to the flames.

“Why don’t you try? Are you afraid of failing?”

“
Ach!
Mrs. Gödel is telling us something about incompleteness!”

“It has nothing to do with incompleteness! I’m not afraid of engaging the outer boundaries of mathematics. I simply know the limits of my own intelligence. You don’t understand the first thing about it, Adele.”

“I am all for harmony in the home! I was teasing you, Gödel. The one absolute in a world like ours is humor.”

“As you already know, Professor, my husband lacks a sense of humor.”

Kurt, choked with anger, rose to his feet and stalked out of the room without a word. There was a long pause. Einstein, a little disconcerted, tried to lighten the mood.

“Pauli, did you hear the news? Bamberger just died. Flexner’s term in office is about to end, so things are going to change!”

“The Institute has become a preserve for military interests. The next director will no doubt be a loyal servant of the state.”

“I’ll support Oppenheimer’s candidacy. Robert is a man who is open to the humanities.”

“And to leftist ideas?”

“Don’t be so partisan, Pauli! I’m thinking that the IAS should open its doors to new fields of research.”

“Do you think the next administration will reconsider my husband’s position? He is still an ordinary member. His status is so precarious.”

“Dear woman, as long as Siegel is on the council, his situation won’t improve.”

“Are they worried about his mental health? Kurt is harmless, you know that perfectly well.”

“How is he at the moment?”

“Always complaining. He says he has an ulcer, but he refuses to see a doctor.”

He patted me on the hand.

“Extreme sharpness, clarity, and certainty require an enormous sacrifice … the loss of one’s ability to see the whole. It can’t be easy on a day-to-day basis, but you are in the overall picture, believe me!”

I checked to see that my husband wasn’t listening in the hallway. If I were to say even what was common knowledge, he
would take it as a personal betrayal. I trusted Herr Einstein. He didn’t judge my Kurt.

“He is starting to see things again. He thinks he is being followed.”

“Maybe he is. I am under constant surveillance. My private mail is censored.”

“It isn’t a question of that. He sees shapes. Ghosts.”

“The atmosphere in Princeton is a little oppressive right now. The war is drawing to a close, you’ll soon be getting good news from your families, and the world will give Kurt Gödel his due. Things will work out.”

“I’m not so trustful. We’ve been through this before. But in America I don’t have any family or friends to support me.”

“He has many friends, don’t think he doesn’t. Morgenstern looks after him as though he were a brother. Your husband is the kind of man you don’t run into often. I’ll do everything I can to advance your material situation. Keep your spirits up! I’m so sorry that I brought strain to your dinner. Wolfgang has known me a long time, he knows that my intentions are good.”

“The professor has only the best inattentions.”

Kurt came back into the room. I beamed a big, reassuring smile at him.

“Why don’t we all go for a drink somewhere?”

The two men rose as one in rejection. Kurt slipped away without further ado, leaving me to say goodbye to our guests. They showered me with thanks before disappearing arm in arm, momentarily reconciled by their common digestion. I reopened the windows to rid the apartment of smoke and the smell of grease, cleared the table, and emptied the ashtray. I squashed the bread-dough figurine with the flat of my palm.
Many friends
. Oskar Morgenstern was too polite to show his contempt for me.
Our marriage was a complete conundrum as far as he was concerned. These fine gentlemen were willing enough to eat my cooking but not to hear my worries. My husband might have many friends, but what of me? I snuffed out the candles without wetting my fingers; I liked the pinprick of pain.

The sink overflowed with dishes; I attacked the heap without worrying about the noise. The door to the bedroom slammed in retaliation. When I finished, I allowed myself a cigarette. Somewhere in New York, a woman my age was smoking the same cigarette while drying her nail polish. She was deciding what to wear to go dancing at El Morocco, still hesitating between two pairs of shoes. One by one, the windows around town winked out. Princeton went to bed early. I wasn’t tired.

Anna left Princeton early heading for Pine Run, determined to set the conversation back on a more professional footing. Sitting at the wheel, she felt a familiar sensation in the pit of her stomach. She was nervous. She glanced at herself in the rearview mirror and wiped away the excess blush; she had upped the dosage to make herself look healthy. In the gray morning light she looked like a corpse tricked out by the embalmer. Why did she have the feeling at every visit that she was on trial? Yet each visit had been like a day at the beach: she emerged with her muscles wrung out and her head clear, until the next sleepless night brought its onslaught of dark thoughts.

The previous evening she had looked at her gym shoes, which she hadn’t worn for months. She needed to get back to exercising; she couldn’t stand her little old lady’s body. The cat had looked at her with disdain before going back to the sofa for its nap. She had shut the closet door and flopped down beside it. If there really was a cosmic hierarchy, then a cat’s life was at the very top rung.

“
Kommen Sie rein!
” She hadn’t knocked yet, but Mrs. Gödel had recognized the sound of her footsteps. Adele was fingering
her blanket, ignoring the current of cold air that rattled the window blinds.

“Where were we?”

“Let me take my jacket off.”

“And a good thing too. It’s repulsive.”

The young woman closed the window. The armchair had been pushed away from the bed; she sat in it without bringing it any closer, her face neutral and her back at attention.

“Elizabeth and Gladys are following your case very closely. For once we agree on something. You must have a man!”

Anna stifled a laugh, at the same time cursing herself for having dropped her guard so quickly.

“It’s 1980, Adele. The world operates differently.”

“You don’t want to stare at your belly button, so you find another belly button to look at. And the best thing for that is a fellow!”

“I don’t need anyone.”

“Don’t play Miss High and Mighty with me. It’s just us girls. There is nothing like a good orgasm to set your head straight.”

Anna laid her hands flat on her lap, intent on showing no emotion. She knew that Adele was susceptible to silence.

“You think that orgasms didn’t exist before 1960? That the sexual revolution, as they call it, invented a woman’s pleasure?”

“Do you think I’m a prude?”

“You are prudish in your emotions. I am no longer ashamed of anything. Who am I accountable to, unless it is to God? And he has sent me no private word on this subject. When was the last time you had pleasure?”

“I should tell you about the last time I got bonked to give you some spice in your sexual retirement? Don’t hold your breath.”

“Who else can you discuss this with? A shrink? He will just dig up unhealthy relations with the father and rivalries with the mother. All that baloney. There is nothing like experience. You will at least benefit from my mistakes. I don’t have time anymore for pretenses.”

She resisted the impulse to walk out on the old busybody.

“So now it’s blackmail.”

“Whatever comes to hand. Just give me something! I think that for my part I’ve given you quite a bit for your documentation.”

Anna twirled a strand of hair around her finger. She sorted through intimate facts looking for ones she could toss to Adele. Hadn’t that been the idea since the first meeting? A life for a life. And so far she had not paid her share.

At twenty-three, she had tried to disrupt her linear trajectory: she had walked out on William and gone to Europe. Her friends and family were flabbergasted and put it down to a delayed reaction to the death of her much-loved grandmother. Only Rachel saw it as proof of rebellion, the inheritance of her own temperament. Any psychological weakness on the part of her daughter was inadmissible: it would imply a flaw in her upbringing. Anna had never shown any signs of depression. True, she had always been a little secretive, but in her circles, discretion could pass for a mark of elegance.

The young woman had left the two families to cancel the caterer and unravel the mysteries of her character. No one doubted that her leaving had been due to jealousy. She herself hardly dared to admit it even now. On the day of Anna’s engagement, Leo had arrived fashionably late with a space creature on his arm, the sort of woman whose long list of talents one scrutinizes in order to uncover the ugly flaw. She had none. A medical student and part-time model, she was specializing in brain surgery. Anna had been
unable to detect the slightest tinge of condescension in her compliments: she exuded kindness and good humor. Leo had introduced Anna to his stunning date as his childhood friend. Then Anna had gotten drunk and ended the evening vomiting, while William held her hair back so she wouldn’t soil her cocktail dress. At dawn, when the last guests had finally cleared out, she broke with him curtly. She, too, knew how to wield a scalpel.

“I’m not a hopeless case, Adele. I’ve even been engaged. But it didn’t work out. William was, let’s just say, too nice a boy.”

“Like you?”

Anna smiled;
nice
she wasn’t.

“I broke up with William on the night of our engagement. The next day, I freed up the funds that my grandmother had left me and took the first flight to Europe.”

Adele leaned in toward her to absorb her whispered confidences.

“I blew the whole pile in three years. It was money from the dead. The inheritance from my uncles, my grandfather. It wasn’t going to go toward a house in the suburbs.”

“Sit closer to me. My ears don’t work as well as they used to.”

Anna pushed the chair nearer the bed. She slipped off her shoes and rubbed her feet. Adele offered her the plaid blanket, which Anna wrapped around herself.

“When I got back, I was broke. I hadn’t finished college. I had nowhere to go. My mother wasn’t talking to me. My father gave me a place to stay and eventually persuaded his old friend Adams to offer me a job. He was eager for me to move out. He was in the midst of a honeymoon.”

“And since that time, no men at all?”

“I quickly get bored with people. I need to admire someone.”

“Maybe you are too cerebral, dear girl.”

“Did you admire your husband?”

“
Ach!
We are back to being practical!”

“My life is an absolute platitude. Your turn, Adele.”

Mrs. Gödel was silent for a moment, then reached for a silver frame on her bedside table. She wiped it with her sleeve. Anna took the wedding picture and looked at it without daring to say that she had already seen it.

“I admired him the way you are fascinated by something that is beyond you, but I didn’t fall in love with his intelligence.”

“His illness must have been difficult for you, all those years when you lived far from your family.”

Adele took the photograph back roughly. “You have never loved.”

Anna remembered having read that memories are not the past but memory’s representation of the past. The Gödels’ story had not been so simple, nor their attachment so absolute. Adele might think she had a monopoly on passion. More truthfully she had a monopoly on self-sacrifice. But what would be the point of refusing her this last consolation? The old woman, her eyes staring into the distance, seemed exhausted. She drew an ∞ with two trembling fingers. The wedding band on her other hand, much too small, bit into her flesh.

“I’ll leave you to rest.”

“Talking about love, young lady, when are you taking me to the cinema to see some bright bit of fluff?”

“The administration will never allow it.”

“I have lived through two wars. Out of the question that I should tremble in front of a white coat! Figure something out. Look upon it as a therapeutic exercise. Don’t run away from a fight, my sweet. Wherever you go, you always lug your bags along with you. I’ll embroider that for you as a Christmas gift.”

1946

Ambulatory Digressions Going

When his watch showed nine o’clock sharp, Kurt rang the bell at 112 Mercer Street. The Princeton address best known to the town’s taxi drivers adorned the front of a small neo-Victorian house with white siding, extremely modest given the planetary fame of its owner. I waited behind the box hedge separating the street from the front yard. A crazy head of hair poked out from a second-floor window. A few minutes later, Albert Einstein appeared. He wore an old sweater over baggy pants and his usual leather sandals and mismatched socks. His secretary caught up with him at the door.

“Professor, your briefcase! One day you’ll forget your own head!”

“What would I do without you, dear Helen?”

“I’ve organized your most important mail into two folders. One is marked “Late,” the other “Too Late.” Which doesn’t mean you can’t answer it. And don’t deliberately forget your lunch with the reporter!”

“Good God, Dukas! You’re supposed to protect me from this sort of bloodsucker!”

“Not this one. He’s from the
New York Times
. We’ll expect you here at one o’clock.”

“Gödel, you’ll join us, of course?”

“I think not, I eat too much already, thanks to Adele. The less I eat, the better I feel.”

“Dear friend, there are limits to everything! Dukas, tell the cook to set an extra place.”