6.57. My basic vocational leaning, since my childhood, had been, as I’ve said, toward the sciences. In my second year at Science, the experimental math course I’d signed up for, instead of the usual twin terms of geometry and trigonometry, covered group theory, field theory, the theory of functions as ordered pairs, and elementary mathematical logic. Geometry and trigonometry would be compressed into a few weeks at the end — and we would be required to take the State Regents’ Examination in both, even though we were doing them in days.
The course was wonderful.
Our soft-spoken teacher, with his crew-cut white hair, Mr. Kaplan, was as excited about it all as we students were. During the final days, when we were trying to crush a term into two weeks, his patience was endless. My marks for both the class and the Regents’ were in the mid-to high nineties. I resumed my friendship with Ben, visiting his house, having him over to mine. I attended the math club after school regularly (where I watched a very blond boy named Mark almost lose a finger in a blood-dripping accident involving the six-foot wooden slide rule hung up over the blackboard for demonstration purposes, when his red-headed partner, Mike, shoved the oversized slide through its runner at the wrong moment) and the Science Fiction Club desultorily — with Marilyn. I stopped going to the latter when a story of mine, read to the group and based on what I thought was an infinitely clever variation on a notion lifted from Wyman Guin’s classic Beyond Bedlam, met with general incomprehension. In the Science Fair I received an honorable mention for a homemade computer (actually constructed in Danny’s basement with his father’s impressive set of power tools), and, even more important, became friends with the girl who had the exhibit next to mine, an intensely bright, somewhat heavy, Puerto Rican girl, Ana, whose project on the electrophoresis of proteins took a well-deserved second prize — the model for the heroine of that second novel.
In that same term, yes, I wrote stories and a violin concerto for a young violinist named Peter Solaff, whom I’d met at a party of some old Woodland friends up at Croton, Barbara and Greg Finger; and I composed and recorded a chamber symphony and put together electronic music and (again, with Danny’s astonishing amount of hi-fi and Ampex recording equipment) made more electronic compositions and took photographs and worked on Dynamo, the school literary magazine that had seemed so distant from me two years before. But it was all, I fancied, secondary to my scientific interests — the way, Life magazine assured us all, Einstein, down at the Princeton Center for Advanced Studies, played his violin to relax. I read Scientific American each month and memorized the names of each new meson and antimeson, each lepton, hyperon (my favorites), and boson as it was discovered (there were fifty-six elementary particles, as I recall, back then), along with each one’s charge, spin, and decay products.
Taken all together, these were what made the life of a scientist interesting, no?
At the end of the first term, we were told of another experimental course to start in the fall, this one in physics, with a syllabus some educators at MIT had set up for high schools. They wanted to try it out at Science. Many of us from the math course signed up for the experimental physics course, looking forward to an equally broadening and exciting experience as the math course had just provided.
After the Christmas break, the school moved three subway stops to the north, just west of the great gouge for the railway tracks beneath the deco overpass, with the waterworks at the end of the street, into a new, ten-million-dollar building — to a cascade of corruption scandals: while the old building’s auditorium had been able to hold all the students and their parents, the new auditorium could contain only a fraction of the entire student body. Vast amounts of expensive equipment had been bought that did not function. The stairwells, half the width of those in the old dilapidated building we’d just left, could not accommodate the student flow between classes. A huge, ugly, and expensive mosaic mural had been placed so no one could see it. There was no swimming pool. (There’d been a nice, if rundown, one in the old building.) And our prizewinning swimming team was faced with dissolution. On rainy days the cafeteria (down below the wide-paved walkway that led into the building) leaked torrentially. Dr. Meister had retired. Our new principal wanted to impose a jacket-and-tie dress code for the first time in the school’s history. Fortunately he failed.
The physics course was a disaster.
It was as badly planned as it was possible for such a course to be. Vast numbers of mimeographed pages would detail, in wooden, un-grammatical prose, brainlessly simple general concepts — followed by formulas presumably derived from them but whose variables and constants were often left wholly undefined. Following these were problems that frequently required entirely unrelated information (as well as other formulas) to solve. Revisions arrived weekly from MIT, usually to fill in absolutely necessary gaps the course designers had discovered in material we’d presumably finished with, three weeks or three months before. The teacher was as unfamiliar with the topics (mostly wave mechanics) as we were, and often two and three periods would pass in which most of the time was simply filled with head-scratching and bewildered silences.
An “experimental” physics course?
It had never occurred to me that an experiment could go so disastrously awry.
Yes, we had to take the regular physics Regents’ exam, anyway. But unlike the math course, no time had been set aside to study the traditional material.
I got a seventy-five.
But far more important, I came away with the feeling that I had been robbed of a term of science learning. I felt wholly cheated and unprepared to continue with the study of the sciences. Physics was all I had come to high school to learn. Over the same period, to retreat from this bewildering fiasco, I had buried myself more and more in the writing of fiction (I had been taking a creative writing course as well), more into my journal (which I was never now without), into notes and stories and plays and, on occasion, poems.
Often now I walked home from the 125th Street subway station with a girl named Judy, who also lived in Morningside Gardens, who also went to Science, who played the viola and sang in a folksong quartet with me and Ana and Dave (when Chuck met her on his occasional visits north to see his mother, he was perfectly friendly to her in person, but, as soon as she was out of earshot, appalled me by saying, most unfairly, “She looks like a CPA in training!” But then Chuck was incapable of resisting what he felt to be a good line), and who pointed out to me on the angled brick wall across from the firehouse and the gas station a sloping, mysterious graffito painting in foot-high letters aslant the brick:
ANGELLETTER
Later she wrote a story about it that appeared in Dynamo. And at the end of our junior year she received an early admission to Radcliffe.
But every time I returned to my mother’s or left through General Grant, the mysterious glyphic hung there, unreadable on almost any level save that of euphony (joined ten years later by a misty KNIGHTS), till I was thirty, till the firehouse was shut up, till the gas station was only a triangular bit of raised paving in the middle of the street, till Sydenham Hospital on the corner had been shut down, abandoned, and opened again — and somebody, with gray-blue paint, finally sprayed it out.
6.58. In 1958, when she was fifteen and at the end of her own junior year, after winning a spate of literary prizes in both city- and nationwide high school contests, Marilyn received an early admission into NYU, along with a four-year scholarship.