The Goddess of Small Victories (9 page)

All my love, take care of yourself
,

Kurt ∞

With my finger, I was tracing the small infinity symbol, already nearly erased, when I was startled by three loud knocks on the nightclub’s wooden shutters. Through the peephole I saw Lieesa, readjusting her girdle with a total unconcern for modesty. I hesitated. My friend had changed. She was no longer the blond tightrope artist who passed from hand to hand with a guileless smile and could match vodka for vodka with a Hungarian. I didn’t care for her new acquaintances, and she had never liked Kurt. I answered with three identical knocks and went out by the courtyard door. Lieesa was leaning against the ivy-covered wall smoking a cigarette.

“Come for a drink? There’s someone I want you to meet.”

“My father will be here any minute. I’m going home.”

She dropped her cigarette stub and crushed it with a heel worn down from dancing too much black bottom. I’d always envied her small feet.

“He’s not coming back. You were just a pastime for him. You’re thirty-four years old and you’re wasting the best years of your life waiting. Come on! The night is young!”

I shivered in my light coat. The winter would be cold, and I no longer had the money to buy pretty things.

“You’re clinging to a ghost. What do you still see in that mommy’s boy who can hardly bring himself to say a word?”

I was too tired to listen to her criticisms. I scanned the street, worried only because my father was late. She forced me to turn
my face toward her. Her hands were scaly and dry. I pushed her away and settled my hat on my head.

“You think he’s going to show up and ask for your hand, have children with you, and invite you to Sunday dinner with his mother? Jesus, wake up! He’s gone!”

“He’ll come back.”

“You know perfectly well that your guy hasn’t got both oars in the water! He’s a nut job and his friends are all Yids and Communists. You spend too much time at the movies, honey. There isn’t going to be a happy ending. Look after your fanny, toots, while it’s still worth looking at!”

“He and I have something special between us.”

“How long has this business dragged on? Six years? Seven? And have you even met his family? Not once!”

“Who are you to lecture me?”

“You’re putting on airs above your station, sweetie. Think of where you come from! As far as they’re concerned, you’re just a whore, Adele! But at least a whore gets paid! And you work as a serving girl so you can buy him luxuries. Christ, what world are you living in?”

“Not yours, anyway.”

She gave a snort and walked away, pumping her rump from side to side. It was at that moment that I said goodbye to my carefree youth.

She had chosen to survive. And she was pressing me to do the same. Every person in Vienna had to make a decision, not on the basis of hope but of fear: Who was more dangerous? Was it the Reds or the Browns? Who would save Vienna as we knew it? Anyone who could was fleeing the city. The party was over. There was confusion everywhere. I was alone. I didn’t want to choose, I didn’t want to be afraid. I only wanted to get off the merry-go-round, sit with Kurt at the Café Demel, and eat an ice cream. And make him sit up and beg.

Anna sat very tall, her knees together. She always felt oppressed when she was with the Institute’s director. He reminded her too much of her father: the same self-sufficiency, the same hereditary sense of the world as consisting of vertically stacked, watertight compartments. His office even had the same smell as her father’s: of leather-bound books, Ivy League mementos, and faint whiffs of expensive liquor behind mahogany panels. She focused on the dandruff speckling his navy blue jacket. The turtleneck under his shirt made her think of Adele.

“You seem pleased with yourself, Miss Roth. Have you made any progress?”

“If you mean will I drop off three crates of documents on your doorstep tomorrow, then no, I haven’t made any progress, sir.”

Calvin Adams rose to stare down at her from his full height.

“Do I detect an edge of aggression, Miss Roth?”

She made herself shrink. She mustn’t antagonize him. She had already seen him fly into a rage.

“I apologize, really. It’s just that I’ve been working so hard.”

“Then get some help. I’m not a torturer, damn it! You don’t have to make those geriatric visits every three days. We have
enough to keep us busy right here. We have a delegation from Europe about to arrive. I’ll need your skills as a translator.”

“That’s not my job.”

“I’ve discussed it with your father. You need work that brings you into closer contact with people. You’ve spent too many years in the company of old papers.”

The young woman had always expected her father to poke his patrician nose into her business one day or another. Princeton’s motto, engraved above the entrance to the library, reminded her of it constantly:
Dei sub numine viget
, “Under the protection of God she flourishes.” Under her father’s omnipotent eye, she had wilted.

“I’m very grateful to have been offered the position, even knowing that I owe it to my father.”

The director unbuttoned his blazer and shoved his chair back. Anna’s world was full of furniture on wheels.

“We’re among ourselves here. George and I are old friends, and his concern is perfectly legitimate. I would do the same for my own son.”

“We were talking about Mrs. Gödel.”

The director’s mention of Leonard had left her drained. Especially here in this office where, twenty years earlier, Leo had offered her his collection of
Strange
comic books if she would pull down her panties. Both their fathers were in the next room, deep in discussion, but she’d had the time to give him a furtive glimpse of her privates behind the padded door. Not because of his comics, which were stupid, but for the pleasure of taking his dare.

“If the business drags on, there’s no point in wasting more time on it. I have still another Einstein biographer to cope with and a dozen lectures to prepare.”

“Mrs. Gödel has assured me that she didn’t destroy the documents.”

“That’s an excellent start. You need to convince her at this point that we’re acting in good faith.”

“It’s not so simple.”

“All the same, you’ve managed to soften her up. Congratulations.”

Anna had had no choice, she’d had to throw Adams a bone or he would have put her on a new assignment. He now came to the real purpose of their interview, fingering the gold buttons of his blazer in a familiar sign of embarrassment. To the extent, at least, that he was capable of showing sentiment.

“I’m counting on you to join us for Thanksgiving dinner. Virginia will be delighted to see you again. We have two or three Nobel Prize prospects joining us, a Fields medalist, and an heir to the Richardson fortune.”

“You’re very kind, but I never feel comfortable at this sort of gathering.”

“It’s not an invitation, it’s a summons, Miss Roth! I haven’t got an interpreter who can come that night, and that damned French mathematician mangles his English so badly I can barely understand a word he says. I need your talents. And you will make an effort to look presentable, won’t you?”

Anna wondered whether he would deliver the final thrust by reminding her of her mother’s legendary elegance. He stopped short. The shadow of her father was enough to give the conversation weight. Having to share Thanksgiving dinner with Leo would be the last straw. She rose and took her leave, the urge to scream rising in her. She would wait until she was safely in the shower. Princeton’s manicured lawns were generally unreceptive to fits of hysteria.

From his office window, the director watched the slender figure retreat. He had never understood her as a child, and he had no more insight into her now that she was a young woman. He felt a tightening in his pelvis at the thought of the girl who, thirty years earlier, had sat next to him during a reception for Princeton students. Austere Anna was her exact opposite. Rachel had been irresistible, a brilliant student with delectable breasts. As he and Rachel were already committed to other partners, they had shared just one, frustrating dance. He scratched his crotch. Times were different. Nowadays, he could have asked her out for a drink. He shut the door and allowed himself a little liquid solace to erase the vision of creamy thighs and breasts like basketballs. He’d have to tell his wife that Anna was coming to Thanksgiving dinner. Virginia didn’t like her, and she’d never liked Anna’s mother. With a little luck, his space-alien son might consent to join them. With even more luck, Leo might even be directed toward gainful employment by Andrew W. Richardson Jr. And if miracles still happened, Virginia might reach the end of the meal without getting crocked. But luck wasn’t to be trusted. He poured himself another belt before hiding the bottle and summoning his secretary.

“Mrs. Clarck, I’d like to speak to Leonard right away. Call his lab at MIT and tell the receptionist to wake up the guy sleeping on the pile of empty pizza boxes.”

JANUARY
1936

Necessary but Not Sufficient

I wanted to believe, as his family did, that his first episode of depression would come to seem like just a bad incident. His health would improve when we were together, I was all he needed. Order would return and disorder recede. But after he came back from the United States in 1934, Kurt collapsed again and had to take a long rest cure.

His second episode of depression started right after Hans Hahn died. His thesis adviser succumbed to an aggressive cancer shortly before Dollfuss’s assassination. Kurt was still at Princeton and felt horrible that he couldn’t be there for Hahn during his last moments. The disease killed Kurt’s mentor in just three months. Another father he hadn’t said goodbye to.

Entropy, he could have told himself: the disorder in a system increases. A broken teacup will never glue itself back together. The universe is disorder, revels in disorder, engenders disorder.

The Purkersdorf Sanatorium thus became his second home. I found myself having to wait for his rare outings. I was allowed a furtive embrace, dinner of a sort, and sometimes even a night at the movies with Kurt before he would rush off to his mother to show her the progress he’d made. His temporary leaves from the sanatorium were always in her hands. Redheaded Anna had persuaded me not to ask for more: “You have to be strong for both of you, Adele. That’s your mission. And be happy that you
have
a mission, since most people don’t know what to do with their stupid lives.”

Kurt never spent very long in Vienna, where the perpetual stress sapped his limited energy. The university was being drained of its life force: Jewish intellectuals and those who failed to sympathize with the Nazis were being replaced by “good Austrians” who had declared their allegiance to Chancellor Schuschnigg, Dollfuss’s successor, and to the ruling National Socialist Party. Hitler, for all his disavowals, was preparing for the Anschluss; the hyena was already pissing on the border. Only Mussolini’s reluctance kept him in check. By now the intelligentsia were leaving Austria en masse. Kurt was losing his closest friends, and also the fertile environment that he needed for thinking.

Despite his fragile health, Kurt blithely accepted a second engagement to lecture at Princeton starting in the fall of 1935. I stormed, begged, and threatened to break off our relationship, but he wouldn’t give in. His family and his medical team also tried in vain to reason with him. Although his own brother was a radiologist, Kurt was suspicious of doctors. He trusted only books. But when he started studying more medical texts than philosophical or mathematical ones, a return to the psychiatric
ward threatened. There were numerous signs of depression over the summer. Rudolf couldn’t have ignored them, and he should never have allowed his brother to travel. Kurt was hardly eating at all, spreading his food in tiny pieces around the edge of his plate to hide his loss of appetite. He complained about his teeth and his stomach. He wasn’t sleeping. He didn’t even go to bed anymore. He never touched me, or if he did it was only in a parody of coupling, meant to end any talk of it. Kurt was naturally taciturn, but now silence was starting to inhabit him.

Kurt left for America in the fall, leaving me to ponder my lack of influence over this weak, stubborn, and ill-cared-for man. A few days after arriving in Princeton, he felt himself sinking. In his last letter, Kurt wrote that Flexner had found him an American doctor who was recommending his immediate return to Vienna. By the time the letter reached me, he was already en route. Veblen, ever helpful, had seen him onto a boat bound for Europe and promised not to alarm his family. He did however send a telegram to Rudolf letting him know that his brother was landing at Le Havre on December 7. Kurt dragged himself in a near coma to Paris, where he telephoned his older brother for help. To no avail. He stayed in Paris for three days before finding the strength, I can’t imagine how, to travel by train to Vienna. Alone.