The Goddess of Small Victories (38 page)

“Same here.”

1954

Alice in Atomicland

“The L fifty-one is available in two colors. The baby blue is particularly popular.”

“I don’t trust the Prescot line. The L eighteen had definite safety issues. Were they able to fix the Freon leak?”

“I don’t know, Mr. Gödel. No one has ever complained about it. Except you.”

Our prosperous appliance salesman shifted his weight from one leg to the other, all the while admiring his nails. With his rabbit’s teeth and a smile that promised heaven on the installment plan, Smith looked like a Mickey Rooney gone to seed. He endured my husband’s interrogation with a lack of interest that bordered on insult. In his defense, this was only the latest of numerous sessions in which his patience had been tested.

“You don’t carry any European models?”

“Why not Russian while you are at it? Your husband sure is a card, Mrs. Gödel!”

Kurt dodged a manly punch on the arm. Smith had to recover his balance by making an awkward lunge.

“There is a whole world between the USA and the USSR. Are you unaware of it?”

“They’re all commies! What we sell here, Mr. Gödel, is good old U.S. technology.”

“Smith! You can’t suspect an appliance of being Communist, now, can you?”

“I know what I know, ma’am. And I’ll give you a $25 rebate on the Golden Automatic because you’re such good clients.”

“It costs $400, Kurt! We can’t afford to buy ourselves a refrigerator at that price every year!”

Ignoring my distrust, Smith polished a dazzling, chrome-appointed Admiral Fridge, priced at $299. He tried to clinch the sale with a series of unanswerable arguments: the model had an extra freezer compartment and the door opened either to the right or to the left. I hadn’t suffered the conversation of the greatest visionaries of the century to take the oily condescension of a local hardware man lying down. I dragged my husband outside.

“Adele, we need a new refrigerator! Ours is a hazard. We’re liable to get gassed by it.”

“We’ll have one sent to us from New York. Smith is too certain that we’ll buy from him. He’s stopped making any effort. He’s robbing us.”

“You’re wrong, Adele.”

“It’s fascinating, Kurt. You see plots everywhere except where they really exist!”

I pushed Kurt ahead of me down the sidewalk, the salesman’s sardonic grin boring into my back.

“Try to understand that our wanting to change refrigerators as often as we do makes people take us—if we’re lucky!
—for thorough lunatics. And right now, it’s best to keep a low profile.”

“It’s such a shame that Herr Einstein never marketed his patent!”
³⁸

“He has plenty of other projects to occupy him. If you keep on with him about your fridge, he’s going to lock you up inside it! Get a move on. You’re late for your appointment with Albert, and I’m late for mine with the hairdresser.”

Rose had set my hair and was preparing to take the rollers out. From the shampoo onward, I had sensed that she had a juicy bit of gossip that she couldn’t wait to pass along. Knowing the likely subject, I played deaf to her hints. Finally she couldn’t wait any longer: restraint was just too painful for this professional gossip.

“So, did he or didn’t he? All of Princeton is buzzing about it. Your husband’s director is supposed to have sold the bomb to the Russians. It was in the papers this morning.”

“If you believe everything the papers say, Rose, I can’t help you.”

She roughly unrolled a lock of hair.

“But the Oppenheimers are your friends.”

I hesitated to say anything. In Princeton, a harmless lie could come back at you like a meteorite after orbiting the town three times.

“I trust them completely.”

“Mrs. Oppenheimer does seem to think she’s better than everyone. Don’t you think?”

“Rose, just because you lost her as a client doesn’t give you the right to accuse her of horrible crimes!”

She removed the last roller with a yank.

“Selling our secrets to the Communists. All the same. If the Russians have the bomb, it’s surely because one of ours who knows something gave it to them!”

“You don’t think they could have made one all on their own? You don’t think that they have their own quota of mad scientists?”

Rose’s comb stopped in midmotion. The idea had never occurred to her.

“The Oppenheimers are not members of the Communist Party, Rose. I’m sure of it.”

She looked at me in the mirror. “You don’t understand, Mrs. Gödel. The most important figures in the Communist Party aren’t actually members, because it would restrict their activities. I read it in the newspaper.”

“You should stick to
Harper’s Bazaar
!”

I felt like walking out right then, even with my hair a mess. But run away from stupidity? Bad idea. It always outruns you and catches up in the end. Maybe you could ignore it. But never again would I run from it.

“Please hurry, Rose. I am expected at Professor Einstein’s.”

She digested the information. Albert was still widely admired by the public. To punish me for boasting, she sprayed me with an extra coat of lacquer.

I arrived at Albert’s house at teatime. I stank of cheap lacquer and the rancid sweat of perpetual anxiety. I hated this period of my life in America. It reminded me too much of prewar Vienna. And the rotten political climate was having a terrible effect on Kurt. The permanent suspicion, now falling on the scientific community itself, fueled his anxiety. He was brewing his usual unhealthy stew by appropriating the very real
problems of others to himself—those of Robert Oppenheimer, for instance, who was suspected of espionage. My husband saw enemies everywhere. The milkman changed the schedule of his rounds: he was spying on us. A student tried to reach Kurt to discuss his thesis: my husband locked and bolted the door and stopped answering the telephone. Someone contradicted him during a meeting: he accused the entire IAS of being in league against him. Our apartment was bugged, our mail was being read, we were being followed, they wanted to poison him. Only his closest friends were willing to listen to him and not scream with boredom. Of course a scientist of his kind would advance in his career with suspicious slowness. Where did the fault lie if not in his lack of political savvy? He attributed the unflattering rumors and comments supposedly aimed at him to professional jealousy. His colleagues, particularly those with no reason to indulge him, found his quirks more fascinating than his scientific work. Kurt saw this as an incipient plot, while I recognized it as a defensive reflex: what they really wanted to know was whether he was going to snap like a twig right in front of them. The upshot was that Kurt wouldn’t eat, or only a very little. I reassumed the role of official taster. But he managed to go on working, as though there were a watertight compartment in his mind, a space that resisted submersion when the rising flood-waters drowned everything else.

I put my scarf over my head before ringing the doorbell. Lili opened the door, paler than usual.

“What’s happening, darling? Has someone died?”

She put a finger to her lips. In the living room, Albert was just finishing a tense phone conversation. All faces were turned toward him. Lili, Kurt, Oskar, and Albert’s assistants, Helen and Bruria, were holding their porcelain cups suspended in midair.
Helen motioned me to take her place and poured me a cup of tea. I’d have preferred a strong drink. Albert hung up the phone, livid with rage, and collapsed on a chair.

“They have concluded that there is no proof or evidence of disloyalty. But it does not mean, as far as they’re concerned, that our friend is not a danger. Masters of litotes!”

“Good God! Will Robert be removed from the IAS? Or worse?”

“Let’s not lose our heads, Lili. The Oppenheimers are not in the same situation as the Rosenbergs. He will lose his position in Washington and his security clearance at the AEC. It was expiring in any case. They are planning to keep him at a distance from any sensitive work or policy decisions.”

“Why in God’s name did he want to appear before that trumped-up panel? You told him it was a bad idea, Herr Einstein.”

“He wanted to clear his good name. And I believe he wanted to make expiation for his part in Los Alamos.”

“That Teller is one goddamn bastard!”
³⁹

“Adele!”

“It’s all right, Gödel. Your wife is not wrong. Their whole file of accusations is based on Teller’s supposed intuitions. The warmongers now have a free hand at the AEC. And that’s what they wanted from the first. To discredit Robert and dispel his influence.”

No one dared to answer Albert, who seemed overcome with sadness. The old physicist wore himself out fighting battles for everyone else, whereas Kurt had never fought for anyone but himself. The German disaster was starting all over again. We were too old or too cynical to be surprised by it. Hitler, too, had conjured up the figment of a Communist conspiracy to weaken democracy. America would take the same path, unless people
like Einstein who were both sagacious and willing to sacrifice themselves intervened.
⁴⁰

“Gödel, you discovered a flaw in the American Constitution. No one would listen. Well, here we are! We have put a foot in the shit of dictatorship.”

“Don’t say that sort of thing. Our conversations are monitored.”

The old man sprang from his seat, grabbed a lamp with a beaded shade, and held it to his mouth like a microphone.

“Hello! Hello! Radio Moscow, here! Albert Einstein speaking. I have sold the recipe for pea soup to Stalin, may he choke on it, and Senator McCarthy too! What? Stalin is already dead? Ah!”

He shook the poor lamp.

“Do you copy? What, there’s no one on the line? They should invent a direct line between Moscow and Princeton. Communications are in terrible disrepair.”

We wavered between laughter and anxiety. Bruria, fearing for the general safety, took the lamp from his hands.

“Calm down, Professor! Don’t go looking for trouble!”

He patted his pockets searching for his faithful companion. Helen picked up the beads that had fallen on the rug. As she walked out of the room, she put a placating hand on her employer’s shoulder. Collapsed once more in his chair, he was tugging at the ends of his yellowing, tobacco-flecked mustache. Though his sagging features spoke of his great age, his eyes had lost nothing of their youth: two black stars.

“Unless there is a price to pay, courage has no value. Since I publicly supported Robert, I have had fifty more trench coats dogging my steps! And have you seen what the newspaper boys are writing about me? Thank goodness my Maja is no longer here to read such garbage!”

“You’ve been so brave, Herr Einstein.”

“What can they do to me, Lili? Take away my American nationality?
⁴¹
Throw me in prison? It is the one good thing about this goddamn fame! It keeps them from doing anything they want!”

He lit his pipe and drew several puffs on it, which seemed to calm him.

“Poor Kitty. She defends Robert tooth and nail although they’ve dug up an affair he once had with a Communist girlfriend! What depths will they not sink to?”

“It doesn’t concern us, Adele! I hate this fishwives’ gossip.”

I swallowed the insult. I wasn’t fooled: Oppie hardly came out of this business pure as the driven snow. I was ready to acknowledge that he had helped us a great deal, but he had also played with fire. This parody of a trial had brought to a close, to his advantage finally, what the press called the “Chevalier affair.” In this time of anticommunist hysteria, anyone who was against using the bomb was considered unpatriotic. Einstein had publicly warned against the H-bomb during a televised interview. The fusion bomb would be a thousand times more destructive than the fission bomb.
⁴²
This statement had brought down on Albert the fury of every anticommunist and of their puppet master, J. Edgar Hoover, the powerful and long-standing head of the FBI. After working zealously with the military as the director at Los Alamos, Oppenheimer had tried to put the brakes on nuclear proliferation. I had heard him discuss it with his colleagues around a barbecue grill. He claimed that the U.S. arsenal was already big enough to bomb Siberia into the Pacific—big enough to give our Red “opponents” a good scare. When the news emerged in 1949 that the Russians had detonated their first atomic bomb, a wave of espionage fever swept over
America, culminating in the arrest and execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were supposed to have sold nuclear secrets from Los Alamos to the Soviets. And just the summer before, with the witch hunt in full swing and U.S. forces mired in Korea, we learned that the Russians had set off their first H-bomb, less than a year after “Ivy Mike,” the American one. The speed with which the Soviets had developed a thermonuclear bomb gave further grist to Senator McCarthy’s mill. Those commie bastards had the gall to piss as far as we did! Who had sold them their new toy? Suspicion again fell on the Manhattan Project regulars. By posting a moderate stance, Oppenheimer drew fire. Edward Teller had never forgiven him for choosing Hans Bethe to head the theoretical physics department at Los Alamos. Teller had rolled up his white-coated sleeves and set to work digging Oppie’s grave. Robert was no plaster saint. He’d already named names, a common practice at the time, when ancient forms of inquisition were being revived. To cover his rear, he’d had to confess in later hearings, muddling his story, to having been invited, although he never accepted, to give secret information to certain “persons.” He eventually denounced his friend Haakon Chevalier, a professor at Berkeley. The new commission charged with investigating Robert’s “loyalty” had quickly picked out the inconsistencies in his earlier testimony. It also probed his past leftist sympathies, exhumed a militant girlfriend and his wife Kitty’s ex-husband, a soldier in the antifascist forces in Spain. The Oppenheimers were predictably enough caught in a web of allegations. With his arrogance and his undeniable intellectual superiority, Oppie offered a perfect target for petty spirits. An excellent chess player, he had taken the calculated risk of positioning himself as a victim: now History would remember him as a martyr, not a craven informer.
His darker aspects didn’t negate my affection for him, just the opposite. The all-powerful boss had his flaws too.