“You were terribly blond.”
“You have never dyed your hair. It’s not your style. Mein Gott! The pain I endured getting my hair dyed! It was the fashion. Look at those boobs! I was still trim in my forties! At that time, women my age were already in the garbage can.”
The Adele who looked out in black and white wore a dark-colored dress suit with muttonchop sleeves, a low neckline, and a skirt that was gored below the knees. Next to her, looking straight ahead, stood Kurt squarely, his raincoat open to reveal an impeccable suit.
“I had my old brolly tucked under my arm. Someday I’ll tell you about that umbrella.”
“You were looking away from the camera.”
“Adele the Egyptian, always in profile. Adele the invalid, always half a woman.”
Anna spread the photos over the bedspread. A lifetime appeared in relentless fast-forward: Adele put on weight; Kurt seemed to shrink inside his suits. They ended up looking like those pairs of birds whose name she couldn’t remember. She picked a snapshot at random. Against the backdrop of a ship’s rigging, Mr. Gödel stood like an old man, his back bent.
“Were you on the boat coming to the States?”
“I don’t like that picture, forget it. Look at this one of our wedding anniversary. We were having dinner at the Empire State Building.”
“You were dressed to the nines! Who took the photograph?”
“The local professional, probably. The one who harasses you with a big sales pitch. Thirty years later you are happy that you fell for it.”
“Nice hat!”
“I bought it on Madison Avenue. It was an extravagance; we were so hard up. But I made a scene. After ten years of housework, I had earned it.”
“You were happy.”
“This one is a wonderful souvenir. It was 1949, we had just moved into Linden Lane. Finally we had a real home!”
“It’s rare to see him smile like that.”
“Kurt was not expansive with his emotions.”
“You had a lot of courage. You lived an absolute life.”
“You’re very naïve! On the scale of a person’s life, the absolute is the consequence of many small renunciations.”
“I was in high school when my parents divorced. Renunciation was not in their career plans.”
Adele gathered the photographs and tried to put them in order, eventually giving up. She rested her hand on Anna’s thigh. “At a certain age, you must learn to pay the bill yourself, sweetheart.”
Anna got to her feet; Adele’s words had struck her with the force of a ruler, as though she’d been thwacked on the back to straighten her posture. In her low moments, Anna thought she would have preferred to be an unwanted child. She knew better, even wringing all the romanticism out of her family mythology. She had no cause for bitterness over that. She wasn’t the furtive offshoot of a tussle in the backseat of a Buick but the natural outcome of a sincere mutual affection. George, a smart-looking doctoral candidate, had met Rachel, the only scion of an old, well-to-do family, at a history department reception for new students at Princeton. The girl was shivering, the boy lent her his sweater. She had been impressed by his convertible and his Beacon Street accent. He had admired her Hollywood-goddess body and her still reasonable determination. He had telephoned her the next day. She presented him to her family. They had married, learned to hate their differences after originally loving them, betrayed each other first for the sport of it, then out of habit, and at last parted stormily. Anna was fourteen.
“Well within Gaussian norms,” said Leo, trying to comfort her when the divorce was announced. Pretentious metaphors came as profusely to the budding genius as the hairs on his chin were scarce. He’d started at an early age to draw up the bill he’d eventually present to his progenitors. Anna had little with which to reproach her own parents. They had hired competent governesses for her and sent her to unimpeachable schools. Her family had never endured a crisis that builds character and later gives you a history. No revelations of incest, no alcoholism or suicide. Her parents didn’t even suffer from a healthy middle-class neurosis. Disillusion wasn’t fashionable enough. They benefited in their thirties from the postwar economic boom and in their forties from the loosening of social mores. The ghosts of the Holocaust remained shut within the apartment of grandmother Josepha. She was alone in remembering the dead. If Josepha dared bring up the topic at the dinner table, the subject was quickly changed. Anna couldn’t blame her parents for dropping off their luggage at the baggage check. They had wanted to live.
“You’re very thoughtful, young lady.”
“I was thinking of the Gaussian curve. It’s a representation of the statistical mean.”
“You’re not going to start talking to me about mathematics, are you?”
“It shows that the features of a set’s elements tend to be distributed along a bell-shaped curve. The average values form the bump, the majority. The higher and lower values, by contrast, are relatively fewer in number. Like the distribution of IQ in a given population.”
“I’ve sat through my share of discussions of this kind.”
“You’ve broken beyond Gauss’s law, Adele. Beyond normal law. You’ve had an exceptional fate.”
“As I’ve already told you, Anna, every gift comes with a price.”
18. 1937: The Pact
If people do not believe that mathematics is simple, it is only because they do not realize how complicated life is.
— John von Neumann
Halfway up the hill to the cemetery, I felt my stocking slither down my leg. Readjusting it, I caught a snag. I was late. I would arrive in front of his mother disheveled and sweating after I’d wasted my time picking out the right clothes for our meeting. I didn’t have much to lose, but I was still nervous. If she’d decided to put an end to our affair, why hadn’t she laid down the law to Kurt before leaving Vienna and returning to Brno? Before finally allowing us our chance to live together.
So what did she want from me? She openly suspected me of having a child hidden somewhere, as Kurt had confessed. This I found particularly galling. She couldn’t accuse me of having designs on the family fortune at this stage, the crash having made precarious inroads on their wealth. The older brother, Rudolf, a radiologist in Vienna, was the Gödels’ real source of financial support. Kurt was still a long way from earning enough for our needs, even if I’d always managed to get by on very little. She must have realized that I now belonged within the family circle, whether the issue was Kurt’s multiple relapses or her own run-ins with authority. About Marianne’s courage, at least, I was not in any doubt: she broadcast her disgust for the Nazis loud and clear, with total disregard for caution.
Her card arrived out of the blue: Frau Marianne Gödel wished to speak to me, in private, in a quiet place. In plain speech, she wanted to see me without Kurt. I had never previously had the honor of meeting her, though Kurt and I had been together for ten years. I sent her a letter in reply, which I drafted and redrafted a dozen times, proposing that we meet at the Café Sacher, next to the opera house — this was intended as an allusion to her love of music and as a gesture of goodwill. She returned a curt note saying that she would require a quieter setting. Most likely she didn’t want to be seen in public with me. I suggested the Grinzing cemetery instead, near the grave of Gustav Mahler.
This irony was not calculated to put her in a good mood, and I expected no less from her. She had refused point-blank to visit our house. I had held out to her the advantage of seeing her son’s cozy living arrangements in Grinzing firsthand. We lived right next to the last stop on the 38 line, so Kurt only had to catch the tram below the university to make the commute home. All the greenery was good for his health. The celebrated Dr. Freud had a country house in this quiet suburb — we were in respectable company. My grudges against her had been accumulating for some time, but the temptation to meet the liebe Mama with all her many talents — incomparable hostess, accomplished musician, attentive mother — was irresistible.