The Mountain Cage (24 page)

JP: So it was rough for you.

RB: Imagine the Pope and the Catholic Church having to deal with the first women in the College of Cardinals. We were intruding on the all-male priesthood of science. We didn’t belong there, the way some saw it, or else we were freaks. It’s a lot different at Caltech now, but with us, about the best you could hope for was to be treated as a kind of honorary man.

JP: Did Hillary Rodham, coming into that extremely male environment from a women’s college, ever get discouraged?

BEDOSKY: If she did, she never let on. Hillary was about the most together person I’d ever met, even back then. She was kind of driven, if you want to know the truth, and she knew exactly what she wanted to do. She was going to get her doctorate in biochemistry, and then she was going to teach and do medical research on calcium deficiencies and bone loss and osteoporosis, because she guessed that would give her a better shot at being an astronaut someday. And she was right, given the physiological problems the early astronauts developed on
Skylab One
, before the Doughnut—excuse me,
Skylab-Mir Two
—was built. And even with a revolving space station—(pause)

JP: She told you back then that she wanted to be an astronaut?

RB: Yeah. It was something she basically kept to herself, but I could tell she really meant it. She’d drive up to JPL—the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena—every time she had a free moment, to see what the latest unmanned probes were sending back. Sometimes she was with her husband, when he was doing some consulting there, but other times she went by herself. Met some important people there, too—like I said, she was always more political than the rest of us.

JP: You were with Hillary when she met her husband, weren’t you?

RB: Oh, yeah. That was in the spring of 1970. Hillary and I were sitting in the Greasy—in the cafeteria, having some coffee. He was sitting at a table near us with some other students, talking and occasionally beating out a rhythm on the tabletop with his hands—he played the bongo drums, you know—and he kept staring at Hillary. This wasn’t the first time, either. About a week before, in the library, he was staring at her, too. I remember wondering why, because Hillary wasn’t really his type—he was more into California blondes, your basic babe type. Hillary had started lightening her hair some, but about all she ever wore were sweatshirts and jeans or loose dresses with Peter Pan collars, and she was still wearing thick Coke-bottle glasses, but obviously he must have noticed
something
that interested him. So he’s staring at her, and she’s staring right back.

JP: And then what happened?

RB: Hillary said, “I’m going to go over and speak to him,” and before I could say anything, she got up and walked over and said to him, “Look, if you’re going to keep staring at me and I’m going to keep staring back, I think we should at least know each other. I’m Hillary Rodham.” And then she put out her hand.

JP: Her daughter told me that her father used to tell that story to their friends.

RB: I think that’s what got to him, that Hillary had that much chutzpah and just came right up and introduced herself. So he said, “Well, I’m Dick Feynman.” But of course she already knew that.

“That’s Chelsea with her aunt Joan, Dick’s sister,” Hillary said to Judy Resnik as the other woman sat down on Hillary’s bunk. “And this photo was taken during her freshman year at M.I.T.” Chelsea Michelle Feynman strongly resembled her father, with the same lean body, unruly hair, and slightly goofy smile. There was so little of Hillary in her daughter that it was almost as though she had been no more than a receptacle and incubator for her husband’s seed, as medieval physicians had believed women were.

“And she’s going into physics,” Judy said, “just like her father and her aunt Joan. It must run in the family.”

“Dick was a great father,” Hillary said. “He liked being a father so much that he wanted another child right away. We kept trying, and we were thinking of adopting when—” She paused. Even after all the years that had passed, she found it painful to remember that time. “He’d be so proud of Chelsea now,” she finished. Her daughter, she knew, had saved her marriage.

Edited portion of interview with Daria Derrick by Deborah Norville for “Inside Edition,” to be aired February 12, 1998.

DARIA DERRICK: It was after Hillary moved into Dick’s house. Supposedly she was still sharing an apartment with her friend Rita, but that was just for cover—everybody knew she was living with Richard Feynman.

DEBORAH NORVILLE: He’d broken up with you by then?

DD: Oh, yeah. Not that we were ever really going together. Dick was a real Lothario. I always knew he wasn’t serious about me, but—(pauses).
 

DN: Yes?

DD: When I was with him, when he was focusing all his attention—all that high-powered genius—on me, it was like I was the only woman in the world. He might have been this Nobel Prize-winning physicist, but he was also a very sexy guy.

DN: So you went over to his house to get something you’d left there.

DD: Yeah, and Hillary answered the door. She’d only been living with him for a couple of months, but she already looked different—her hair was a lot blonder, for one thing, and she was wearing contact lenses. She was definitely looking more like a California girl—probably thought that was the way to keep him interested.

DN: Richard Feynman had a lot of unhappiness in his personal life, didn’t he?

DD: You can say that again. I still remember the night he pulled out this old battered suitcase with all these old letters and photographs from his first wife—Arline, the one who died in the Forties from tuberculosis. I realized then that I could never be what she was to him, or what his third wife had been to him, either. He never talked much about his second wife.

DN: The one who divorced him during the Fifties on the grounds of mental cruelty?

DD: The one who claimed he drove her crazy with his bongo drums and with doing calculus problems in bed. I think he knew that marriage was a mistake, but Arline—Arline was always going to be perfect in his mind, because she passed away so young. And Gweneth, his third wife—if she hadn’t died in that car accident, I think he would have stayed happily married to her. She was really good for him. That’s what one of his old friends told me, anyway—she loved him, but she was sort of independent-minded, too. Maybe that’s what attracted him to Hillary. I think maybe he married her to keep her from moving out. She wanted a serious relationship, and I guess he was ready for marriage again by then.

DN: Did Hillary tell you that herself?

DD: Oh, no. She didn’t talk about personal stuff with anybody, and I wasn’t exactly her bosom buddy. I mean, she had to have known Dick had a roving eye, but she must have forgiven him for it. After all, she was married to one of the most brilliant men in the world, and that’s worth more than monogamy, isn’t it?

“I’m getting married,” Hillary said to her parents over the phone.

“Who’s the lucky young man?” her mother asked.

Barely pausing for breath between sentences, Hillary explained that she was going to marry a man who was almost thirty years older than she was and that this would be his fourth marriage, quickly adding that he was the world-renowned physicist Richard Feynman, that he had worked on the Manhattan Project to develop the first atomic bomb during World War II, and that he had won the Nobel Prize in physics for his work in quantum electrodynamics in 1965.

A long silence ensued. “He’s a Jew, isn’t he?” her father said at last.

“Well, yes. He’s from a Jewish family. Dick’s not very religious, though. If you must know, he’s basically an atheist.” Hillary heard her mother sigh. “We want to get married before the fall semester starts, and I hope you’ll both come out here for the wedding. Dick’s mother and sister will be there, too, but we’re not making a big fuss.”

“A physicist,” her father said, still sounding too bewildered to get really angry. “Probably an absent-minded professor.”

“He won the Nobel Prize, Dad.”

“There’s money in that, isn’t there? Did he put it into some good investments?”

“He used some of it to buy a beach house in Mexico.”

“Well, Hillary, if you’d told me you were marrying some hillbilly from the Ozarks, I couldn’t be more surprised.” Hugh Rodham heaved a sigh. “You’re of age. I can’t stop you. I just hope you know what you’re doing.”

“You will finish your doctorate, won’t you?” her mother asked. “You won’t drop out.”

“Of course I’ll finish it,” Hillary replied. Her marriage, unlike that of her parents, would be a true partnership, a relationship of equals, a meeting of minds. It occurred to her only later that being the wife of Richard Feynman would automatically give her a status it might otherwise have taken her years to attain.

“Shit,” Victoria Cho said, not for the first time.

Hillary floated up from her chair as the Sacajawea fell around Venus. They had been in free fall for almost thirty-six hours now, and had launched the two probes, one toward the area of Maxwell Montes, the other toward an unusual volcano near Artemis Chasma. Both probes had failed less than an hour after entering the atmosphere.

Over by the viewscreen above the pilot’s station, Evelyn Holder was listening to Sally Ride, the capcom for this mission. “The imaging team isn’t happy about the probes, either,” Sally was saying, “but we’ll still have the radar mapping, and the most important thing is … everything else is nominal, everything else is a-okay.”

The
Sacajawea
had begun to decelerate on schedule, gradually slowing during the second leg of their journey to Venus. They had been orbiting Venus for less than an hour before congratulatory messages were coming in from the president and the two surviving former presidents, John Glenn and Robert Dole.

“Everything’s a-okay,” Victoria muttered, “except for the fucking probes. I was really looking forward to what those babies might tell us.”

Hillary drifted over to the disappointed geologist. “Look at it this way,” she said. “At least you weren’t the poor bastard who had to go to the Kremlin and give Commander Lebed the bad news.” The Russians had designed and built the two probes. “And there’s bound to be another Venus mission before too long, with everything going this well.”

Victoria smiled, then propelled herself toward the small screen showing the radar imaging of the Venusian surface. Hillary’s stomach lurched, then grew calmer. Evelyn was apparently over the worst of her spacesickness. Victoria, also trained as a pilot, would not have to bring them home.

They were all falling inside the
Sacajawea
as the ship fell around Venus. Hillary found herself thinking of how Dick had explained gravity to the five-year old Chelsea with a long stick and two lead balls dangling from a slowly twisting fiber.

Dick had not been the kind of father that Hugh Rodham had been to her; she could not imagine her own father crawling around on the floor with her or telling her detailed stories about an imaginary world of people so small that they could live in the cracks of wooden planks. “Remember, kiddo,” Dick had said to his daughter in what Hillary always thought of as his Brooklyn cabdriver’s voice, “there’s always plenty of room at the bottom of things. You’d be amazed how much room there is, as long as something’s tiny enough.” Hugh Rodham, with his reverence for authority, would never have told her what Dick had told Chelsea about her arithmetic. “I don’t care what the teacher told you,” he had said. “There isn’t just one right way to figure out the answer, there’s a lot of ways. You want to solve the problem, you gotta try to do it different ways and see what works. If it isn’t the teacher’s way, so what?” Sometimes, after delivering yet another criticism of accepted wisdom, he would stare at Hillary, as if daring her to object.

She knew he considered her stodgy and conservative. He could indulge his curiosity by skinny-dipping in Esalen’s hot tubs, attending an est conference on quantum-field theory, or floating around in a sensory deprivation tank, but somebody had to deal with practical matters. Someone had to study what investments to make, make certain Dick got paid what he deserved for his lectures, consulting jobs, and books, and placate the Caltech administrators and faculty he annoyed with his refusal to tend to the mundane and distracting business of writing grant proposals and attending faculty meetings. Someone had to take care of all that if he was to be free to ponder the nature of the universe. She had been, to use a metaphor drawn from her Methodist youth, the Martha to his Mary.

He was a child, still free to question and wonder, a child who was a genius, who outshone even the brilliant minds of his Caltech colleagues. As she swam weightlessly toward the
Sacajawea’s
starboard side, Hillary remembered how her husband had floated above the constraints that bound others. A partnership, a bond between equals—that was the kind of marriage she had sought, but it was clear from the start that Richard Feynman had few mental equals.

It was a privilege, an honor, to be married to such a genius. Sometimes she had believed that. At other times, she had seen it as the kind of rationalization women had always grasped at for consolation.

After acquiring her Ph.D., Hillary had accepted a position in the biology department of U.C.L.A., content to be removed from the more competitive, high-powered, and intellectually demanding atmosphere of Caltech. It was easier to use her political skills to manage the practical side of Dick’s career while being on the faculty of another university, if only to avoid conflict of interest. She was free to teach her classes and do her research without having to feel that those she worked with might be comparing her more conventional mind with the brilliance of her husband’s.