The Goddess of Small Victories (44 page)

I sometimes wondered what my husband’s last wish would be. I worried that he wouldn’t last much longer. With Albert gone, Kurt had become imprisoned by his loneliness. Oskar Morgenstern and Robert Oppenheimer, even if they were still there to support him, had forward-looking lives; they had children, projects. Although Kurt knew and socialized with a few other logicians—Menger, Kreisel, and the young Hao Wang, whom he particularly liked—my husband was of a different species from most, a white tiger among lions. Albert had been one of the few to speak his language. Kurt was a stranger—a
stranger to this century and to this world. A stranger even to his own body.

“Do you want me to bring you the
New York Times
?”

“I have to fill out these grant applications. Administrative duties are weighing me down. And I have an article on recursive functions to finish.”

“All that can wait.”

“I’m already late.”

“As usual.”

“Last night I stopped in front of Albert’s office in Fuld Hall. It hasn’t been reassigned yet.”

“No one dares to. But life goes on.”

Kurt got out his box of medications. He lined up on the tray at least ten pills, then swallowed them with a swig of milk of magnesia. Under his blanket, he looked like a mummy, an ageless body. I sat down beside him with my sewing. Penny tried to grab a ball of yarn from my work basket.

“The tea is too strong. They haven’t called yet?”

I looked at my watch.

“Their airplane has only just landed. Give them time to disembark.”

“They’ve taken the first step. Now they’ll be able to come back more often.”

“Delightful prospect!”

I would soon have the opportunity to visit Europe again. I missed traveling, and I couldn’t help but know that my poor mother was eking out her last months. It would cost me little in the way of lost intimacy: Kurt and I had had separate bedrooms for a long time. Our social life, always sparse, was fraying, just as my hair was falling out in fistfuls in the bathroom sink each morning.

Kurt picked up my sewing basket. He attacked the imperfect balls of yarn, putting back in order what had no need of it.

“How sloppy you are, Adele. Look at all these threads.”

“I hear the telephone.”

Since Albert’s death, Kurt had been living in a state close to stupor. His friend
couldn’t
die. His demise was incompatible with logic.
Der kleine Herr Warum
was still asking himself disconcerting questions: “Isn’t it strange that he died fourteen days after the twenty-fifth birthday of the Institute?” He disliked my answer: death
is
logical, since it’s in the nature of things. Once more he had stopped eating and drinking. He went nowhere without his satchel of medications. He had again chosen inner exile.

“A student asked to talk to you about his grant. I told him you weren’t available today.”

“Good. I’m always being harassed by students.”

He was exaggerating. His reputation as an odd duck mostly kept the bothersome at bay. He scratched his head. His balaclava made him itch terribly, but he refused to take it off. He had finished neatening up the spools and was looking at his empty hands. I smiled, remembering Albert’s tortuous way of getting rid of unwanted visitors. He would ask to be served soup; if he wanted to continue the conversation, he would push the bowl away from him; if he kept it in front of him, Helen, his assistant, would know that it was time to show the visitor to the door. Given his status, he could have acted more directly. Kurt’s tactic was to give an appointment and not show up. This minor form of cowardice didn’t surprise me.

“You should take a nap, Kurt. To be in top form tonight.”

“I can’t sleep.”

“You’re not getting enough exercise. You don’t walk anymore.”

“Who is there to walk with?”

Reminding him of my own existence was useless. He missed his walks with Albert, but he missed their endless arguments more.

“
Ach!
I hear something. My mother is awake.”

I rose painfully from the deck chair. My knees ached.
Tief wie die Erde, hoch wie das Tier, meine Freunde!
The ground is low, and the animal is high, my friends!

Shortly after Albert’s death, Kurt had helped Bruria Kaufman, Einstein’s scientific assistant, to sort through the papers still in his office at the IAS. He had resigned himself to this mission, in place of a farewell ceremony. Albert had died in his sleep on April 18, 1955. His body had been cremated in Trenton that very day. His friends had scattered his ashes in secret. Einstein hated the idea that his grave might become a site of pilgrimage, a sanctuary holding the bones of a saint. During his lifetime he had refused to become an idol; he didn’t want to be stuffed and mounted after his death. Yet he would be.

I settled my mother, Hildegarde, in a chair in the shade. I wrapped her in a plaid blanket and gave her a plate of crackers so that her hands would have something to do. Penny, who knew my mother for an easy mark, circled her chair yapping with joy. Kurt inquired after my mother’s health, less because he was interested than because he had nothing else to do. She looked at him suspiciously, then lost all interest in him. She offered the dog a cracker.

“She doesn’t recognize me this morning. She thinks I’m Liesl.”

“I couldn’t stand to see my own mother in such a state.”

I bit my tongue. It was a good bet that Marianne would live to be a hundred. Tough meat goes bad slowly. My poor mother was slipping away in a desperate state of mental deterioration: she got
lost, spat out her food, and shat where she stood. Kurt worried about growing senile himself. At the age of fifty-two, he thought his life was behind him. He’d been singing me the same sad song for more than twenty years. I’d never had a chance to drive in a landau; between my man and my mother, I’d been stuck with a wheelchair. Fate had given me a wimple to wear.

“Adele, your mother is drooling.”

I rose to straighten her out and wipe her mouth.

“Is that the telephone?”

“You’re fretting. You should do some work instead.”

“Knowing that they’re going to arrive in less than an hour? I’ll never manage to concentrate!”

“Go sit in the living room. Listen to some music. Watch some television. Don’t you have any letters to write?”

“I don’t feel like it. Are you sure that isn’t the telephone ringing?”

Once in his dead friend’s office with the door closed, Kurt had tried to say his goodbyes. He had sorted through mountains of paper, looking for a last trace of genius. The boxes he filled contained nothing more than barren equations. He came home steeped in dust and sadness. He, too, needed someone to admire. He had loved Albert’s all-powerful faith, his energetic yearning for the quest, for battle. In this heap of yellowing documents, he had recognized his own failings. It was no longer his fight. He was no longer the young warrior thrusting darkness aside. He was—and for a long time had been—an old man.

Einstein had not caught his white whale. He had pursued his research on the Grand Unification for years, his theory of unified fields.
⁵⁸
The system would bring together all the basic interactions of matter with the inconvenient fact of gravitation, as he had explained to me on that long-ago night. Quantum mechanics
had never satisfied him as a description of the physical world. At the end of his life, Albert had become a respectable antiquity. With quantum physics showing irresistible momentum, the father of relativity had been relegated to the role of kindly benefactor, conferring flowers on the scientific stars of the moment. Gravitation continued to separate the two worlds, like an apple seed lodged in the cogwheels of the machinery of the cosmos. Newton must have been having a good laugh up there. If there was one person capable of dismantling and reassembling the “grandiose mechanism” of the universe, it should have been Albert Einstein. In the harmony of nature’s forces, coherent from the infinitely small to the infinitely large, he saw evidence of the divine spirit. He wanted to know God’s thoughts; the rest was all detail. And now he had reached the last rung of Jacob’s ladder, the one that takes you to the feet of God. He had no doubt discovered Truth, but he had lost the power to impart it.

Had my husband ventured into these realms in the secrecy of Albert’s office? Had he tried to surpass the father? Or did he know that the attempt was vain? Pauli had taken the place of paterfamilias, but he wouldn’t carry that torch for long. When it came to his old friend’s blackboard, Kurt couldn’t bring himself to erase it. Time would smear the chalk marks. Entropy would take care of the slate. It had already had its way with Albert’s hide.

“That was our neighbor’s radio. I asked him to make less noise while you were napping.”

“I caught him spying on me over the hedge. I don’t trust that man. We were right to buy the adjoining lot in back. Who knows what might have happened to us?”

“A little less peace and quiet, maybe.”

“Did you get the meat? Rudolf has a big appetite.”

“Enough to feed the Gödel family tree back to its roots.”

“And for side dishes?”

“Why do you care? You don’t eat anything!”

“I want Rudolf and my mother to feel comfortable in my house.”

“Our house.”

Einstein had missed knowing his great-grandson by a few months. He’d never been on very good terms with his son Hans Albert anyway. His personal relations, including those with his wife and his children, had all been failures.
⁵⁹
He was too fond of sex and science to burden himself with a family. Kurt hated to hear me talk like that about his old comrade. For him, Albert would always be the personification of friendship. He often reproached himself for not having paid more attention to Albert’s health. Kurt put his friend’s memory under a dome and found no consolation in remembering the imperfections of his life. Albert would have tweaked him for his nostalgic idolatry. For my part, I’d always distrusted selective memory. It prolongs mourning.

“Where did you put the bust of Euclid that he gave me? It used to be in the living room.”

“In the cellar, with the one of Newton. Their blank stares gave me the willies. I put them side by side, they’ll have plenty to occupy them.”

“They’re waiting for us. They’ll make us pay for it when we get up there.”

“Don’t be so macabre! Black humor isn’t suited to your complexion, Kurtele.”

He leaped from his deck chair.

“This time I’m sure I heard the telephone!”

Herr Einstein would remain a man of flesh and bone for me. I would remember his thunderclap laugh, his half-open bathrobe, and his tousled hair. I could never be angry with him.
He would subject me to his salacious jokes and his unflattering comments, then take my hand and win back my affection with a smile. I loved him like the father-in-law I never had. I liked his paradoxes: he claimed to be a vegetarian but always asked for my schnitzels; he could live neither with nor without women. Always taking pleasure in things, he was Kurt’s double negative. What separated them had brought them together. I would forget relativity; I would forget the bomb; I would forget his genius. The only sentence of his I kept preciously guarded in my memory was from an official ceremony in his honor. His stepdaughter, Margot, reproached him for not changing his clothes for the occasion. He had inspected his moth-eaten sweater with satisfaction: “If they’re interested in me, then here I am; if they’re interested in what I wear, then you can just throw open my closet and show them my clothes.” I was jealous of his freedom.

“They’ll be here in an hour! Put the roast in the oven!”

I gathered my sewing, ignoring my husband’s impatient noises. I grabbed my mother under the arms and led her indoors. I had to keep an eye on her while I prepared the meal.

Even if the Gödels were planning to put me under inspection, I was easy in my mind, almost happy to welcome them. The visit would distract Kurt from his sadness; he was filled with something like energy at the prospect of seeing his family again.

My house and garden were irreproachable. My husband, despite his oddities, still inarguably enjoyed prestige in his profession. After twenty years of marriage, despite everyone and everything, we were still Adele and Kurt. I could show Marianne Gödel that she had been wrong; I had been more than a nurse to her son.

“Take that horrid balaclava off, Kurt! Your mother is not going to recognize you.”

Anna looked into her cat’s eyes without smiling. “You’re so strong!” The sphinx made no response. “What lovely fur you have!” He approached and favored her with a bump of his backside. Adele’s theorem didn’t work. Or else it was a female cat. Anna shooed the animal away with her foot. Someday she might decide to name it. She went into her tiny kitchen and hunted around for something to eat. The cabinets were empty, except for a dusty old box of All-Bran. She settled for the slabs of turkey from the night before, wolfing them straight from the plastic container. She suddenly noticed just how dirty the room was. She pulled on a pair of rubber gloves and started sponging the shelves, humming a little tune. “
Do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, ti, do.” The Sound of Music
had been playing continuously in her head since her outing with Adele. What nutty criteria was her brain using that it retained only the sappiest tunes? Roger Wolcott Sperry should have looked into it. She scrubbed the sink, then addressed the stove top, crusted with burnt milk from the days when she was still interested in breakfast. Her neurons had reached saturation with Julie Andrews’s trills. She rooted through her record
collection.
Ziggy Stardust
. Fräulein Maria could go back to her Alps. Today would be a new day.

She liberated the vacuum cleaner from a cluttered closet and piloted the appliance around her three rooms like a dervish. The noise made the cat hide under the bed. Dripping with perspiration, she mopped the kitchen floor. She was going to empty her wardrobe when the downstairs doorbell rang, stopping her short. She thought twice about answering at all: she was covered in a mix of sweat and dust. She smoothed her hair and pulled on a bathrobe over her ratty pajamas. Leo would hardly dare show up unannounced again. But he did have a flair for impossible situations. The voice on the intercom dispelled her fears: it was her father paying a royal visit.