“Your mother lives with us. But mine can’t even spend a few nights at our house.”
“Why don’t you offer to pay for your mother’s hotel room? Your brother can perfectly well afford it!”
Eighteen years had passed since we had left Vienna, and Marianne and Rudolf were finally agreeing to visit Princeton. Thrilled at the prospect of rediscovering his family, and relieved not to have to travel to Europe himself, Kurt was worried there might be a renewal of family hostilities. He couldn’t understand my resentment toward them; he had never understood the first thing about other people’s feelings. I had promised to be on my best behavior: I would feed them amply and walk them around Princeton with a smile. As long as she didn’t pick on me! I had to admit that Kurt never reproached me for the money I spent on travel or for having to give my mother a place to stay. But in this our hands were tied: I couldn’t let her die alone in a hospice. And she couldn’t find her way from the bedroom to the kitchen. I often had to rescue her in extremis from the street; she thought she was still on the Lange Gasse.
“What a shame that my mother never had a chance to meet Albert! I would so have loved to introduce them. They were the same age.”
I went and kneeled beside him.
“Would you like a nice cup of hot tea? You look petrified with cold.”
“Did you remember to order the meat for tonight? My mother loves veal.”
We were counting our dead. Papa Albert had already died three years before. The news from Europe was that Pauli was dying in a Swiss hospital.56 Earlier in the year, cancer had drained the last of John von Neumann’s gigantic life force.57 At his funeral service at the Princeton cemetery, I remembered Albert’s terrible joke about the three nuclear physicists who are told they are going to die. Each would be granted a last wish. What had John asked for? Not to meet Jean Harlow, not to see the president, not even for a second opinion; he had insisted on pursuing his research. He had had himself transported to the lab on a stretcher. What had Einstein asked for? Peace. In a letter to Bertrand Russell, he agreed to sign a new petition urging every nation to renounce nuclear weapons. In the hospital, laid low by an aneurysm, he had made Bruria bring him the papers on his desk. He had written: “Political passions, once they have been fanned into flame, exact their victims.” Protesting, warning, working, researching. Fighting until his last breath.
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.