A Beautiful Mind (76 page)

Despite such moments of insensitivity, the truth is that Nash expresses hope and pleasure when there is the prospect of a new medication, a new therapy, or when he gets an idea — like teaching Johnny how to play chess on the computer — that he thinks will help him. When his friend Avinash Dixit invites him for dinner, he immediately asks if he might bring Johnny along.
²⁴

At Dixifs, Johnny takes out a chess set, and father and son sit down to play. Nash is “less than mediocre.” At one point, he says he wants to take back a bad move. Johnny lets him. Then Nash wants to take back another.

“Dad, if you keep doing that, you’ll win,” says Johnny.

“But when I play against the computer, I’m allowed to take back moves,” Nash says.

“But, Dad,” protests Johnny, “I’m not a computer! I’m a
human being!”

When it is time to go to the pharmacy for Johnny’s “meds,” Nash accompanies Alicia.
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When it is time to attend an open house at the outpatient program where Johnny is sometimes enrolled, Nash is there and on time.
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Alicia sees this and feels supported by him. She feels that she couldn’t do without him.

Marriage is easily the most mysterious of human relationships. Attachments that seem superficial can become surprisingly deep and lasting. Such is the bond between Nash and Alicia. In retrospect, one feels that this is not an accidental pairing, that these two people needed each other. Strong-minded, pragmatic, and independent as she is, Alicia’s girlish infatuation has survived the disillusionments, hardships, and disappointments. She takes Nash clothes shopping. She frets, when he travels, that he’ll be kidnaped by terrorists or killed in a plane crash or merely worn out. When his ankle swells from a sprain, she leaves a dinner party and sits with him for four hours in the emergency room. More telling, she looks at an old photograph of him in bathing trunks at a poolside in California and says with a giggle, “Aren’t his legs beautiful?”
²⁷

He, meanwhile, sets his clock by her. Stubborn, reserved, self-centered, and jealous of his time (and money) as he is, Nash does nothing without consulting Alicia first, defers to her wishes, and tries to help her, whether it is by washing the dishes, straightening out a problem at the bank, or going with her to family therapy every Monday night. She is the one to whom he faithfully reports the day’s events, whom he ran into, what the lecture was about, what he ate for lunch. They argue about money, the housework, Johnny, social engagements, but he has committed himself to making her life easier and more joyful.

Nash is trying to be more sensitive and accommodating. He said, self-criticallv, “I know I have my social faults and I make Alicia very angry when she is saying
something that I can anticipate before she’s finished and then I start saying something as if what she’s saying is not of an importance.”
²⁸
He accepts, with some humor, that his genius does not make him the authority on all matters. When it comes to refinancing their mortgage or choosing between gas and oil heat, he complains humorously that Alicia does not take him seriously as an “economics sage … notwithstanding the Nobel.”
²⁹

He does, of course, often wound her. But he catches himself, too, and makes amends. A typical exchange: at Gaby and Armand Borel’s dinner party,
³⁰
Alicia announces to the assembled company that their son has received a tentative offer to teach mathematics at a small college in Mexico. Nash engages in an act of cruelty. “Yes,” he says, “my son is in a mental hospital in Arkansas but he got a job offer!” He is laughing at the absurdity of this juxtaposition. This is too much for Alicia. “You have to be fair to Johnny,” she returns. Nash says nothing. But later in the evening he goes to some lengths to make amends. He brings an offering, maps of Mexico, that he found in books on the Borels’ shelves, to Alicia. He takes the opportunity — during a conversation about Andrew Wiles’s successful proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem — to point out that Johnny had done some “classical” number theory in graduate school. Johnny had published “one correct result, one incorrect, but the correct one was a breakthrough of sorts,” he tells the other guests. Alicia responds by paying attention, by taking in what he means.

Much of the renewal of their marriage has taken place since the Nobel. There is now a sense of reciprocity. It is as if regaining the respect of his peers has made Nash feel that he has more to offer the people in his life, and has made those close to him, especially Alicia, feel that he has more to give. This has become self-reinforcing. At one time, before the Nobel, Alicia referred to Nash as her “boarder” and they lived essentially like two distantly related individuals under the same roof. Now there is even some discussion of remarrying, although in what was perhaps an assertion of Nash’s old insistence on “rationality,” they gave the idea up as impractical, as so many older couples have in light of the attendant tax and Social Security penalties. However, a certificate is not of real importance. They are a real couple again.

John Stier took the first step in ending his twenty-year estrangement from his father, mailing him a copy of the June 1993
Boston Globe
column that speculated on Nash’s chances of winning a Nobel.
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He sent the clipping anonymously, but Nash immediately guessed its source. He was unsure whether to interpret John Stier’s gesture as a taunt or a friendly overture. He told Harold Kuhn that something in the way the letter was addressed to him hinted at mockery. But the following February, two months after his triumph in Stockholm, Nash boarded a shuttle bound for Boston to spend a weekend getting reacquainted with his older son.

Such an encounter, inspired by hopes of putting their sad history behind them, was bound to be bittersweet, an occasion that revived as many painful memories, disappointments, and misunderstandings as it unlocked happier feelings.
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When the two men finally met face to face, John Stier was no longer the nineteen-year-old Amherst College history major Nash remembered from their last encounter, but a man of forty-four — nearly as old as Nash had been in 1972, when they had last seen each other. Physically, he resembled his father to a striking degree. The impressive stature, broad shoulders, luminous eyes, English complexion, and finely modeled nose were all Nash’s. But in his life’s choices — and in his ability to derive great satisfaction from helping others — he was his mother’s son. John Stier had stayed in Boston, remaining single and pursuing a career as a registered nurse. At the time, he was thinking of returning to graduate school to obtain an advanced degree in nursing.

In the two days they spent in each other’s company — the most time they had ever been together at one stretch — they touched on personal topics only occasionally. Indeed, they were mostly with other people; it was important for Nash to have others confirm the reconciliation. They sat looking at old photographs with Eleanor, had a meal with Arthur Mattuck, the closest friend of Nash’s “first family,” and visited Marvin Minsky in his artificial intelligence laboratory at MIT. At one point, Nash telephoned Martha from John Stier’s apartment and put his son on the phone.
³³

When father and son did venture into personal territory, Nash was, as usual, full of the best intentions. He wished to show his son how vitally important he was to him, he wanted to share with him some of his own recent good fortune, he wanted to give him the benefit of paternal advice. He was motivated by love and by a sense of responsibility. He told John that he would divide his estate equally between him and his brother and he invited him to accompany him to a conference in Berlin. All this was to the good. But, as in so many other relationships in his life, Nash’s intentions weren’t always matched by the emotional means to carry them out satisfactorily. Even as he tried to draw his son closer, he said and did things that could only be called insensitive and alienating.
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He did not try to hide his own feelings of disappointment. He criticized his son’s appearance, calling him fat (which he is not). He criticized his son’s choice of profession, suggesting that nursing was beneath a son of his and urging him to go to medical school instead of pursuing a master’s in nursing. He hinted strongly that he hoped John would help care for his younger brother, but then angered him by saying it would do Johnny good to be around a “less intelligent older brother.”
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Finally, he said he wanted John to change his name to Nash, a suggestion meant to be magnanimous, but which actually proved hurtful since it implied that he meant for John to renounce all that he was and had been. Eleanor, of course, felt injured.

A few months later, Nash did take John Stier to Berlin with him. The tensions of their first reunion surfaced again.’
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Nash remorselessly needled his son about trifles, making him turn out the light when he wanted to read, not letting him order dessert, telling him not to eat butter or bread. Yet even so, John Stier felt great pride when Nash gave his lectures.
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And Nash was able to write to Harold Kuhn, “Berlin was a great experience … my son enjoyed the trip.”
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•  •  •

A Nobel award has a finality about it. Yet despite the unique honor, life continues beyond the fairytale celebration in Stockholm. More so than for other Laureates, Nash’s immediate future is uncertain. Nobody knows whether his remission is permanent. People have relapsed after many years of being symptom-free. The present is precious.

Unlike a game of Hex, outcomes in real life aren’t predetermined by the first or even the fiftieth move. The extraordinary journey of this American genius, this man who surprises people, continues. The self-deprecating humor suggests greater self-awareness. The straight-from-the-heart talk with friends about sadness, pleasure, and attachment suggests a wider range of emotional experiences. The daily effort to give others their due, and to recognize their right to ask this of him, bespeaks a very different man from the often cold and arrogant youth. And the disjunction of thought and emotion that characterized Nash’s personality, not just when he was ill, but even before are much less evident today. In deed, if not always in word, Nash has come to a life in which thought and emotion are more closely entwined, where getting and giving are central, and relationships are more symmetrical. He may be less than he was intellectually, he may never achieve another breakthrough, but he has become a great deal more than he ever was — “a very fine person,” as Alicia put it once.

As we leave him now he is perhaps just hurrying under the Eisenhart gate on his way to Fine Hall … or sitting next to Alicia on the living-room sofa watching
Dr. Who
on the big television … or losing a game of chess to Johnny … or spending 105 minutes on the telephone comforting Lloyd Shapley after his wife’s death … or giving Harold Kuhn a look like a naughty boy’s when Harold asks whether the lecture notes for Pisa are ready … or sitting at the institute math table with his lunch tray, nodding while Enrico Bombieri, who has just read the love letters of Carrington, bemoans the lost art of letter writing … or, after listening to an astronomy lecture, gazing through a telescope at some distant star glimmering in the night sky… .

Epilogue

T
HE FESTIVE SCENE
at the turn-of-the-century frame house opposite the train station might have been that of a golden wedding anniversary: the handsome older couple posing for pictures with family and friends, the basket of pale yellow roses, the 1950s photo of the bride and groom on display for the occasion.

In fact, John and Alicia Nash were about to say “I do” for the second time, after a nearly forty-year gap in their marriage. For them it was yet another step — “a big step,” according to John — in piecing together lives cruelly shattered by schizophrenia. “The divorce shouldn’t have happened,” he told me. “We saw this as a kind of retraction of that.” Alicia said simply, “We thought it would be a good idea. After all, we’ve been together most of our lives.”

After Mayor Carole Carson pronounced them man and wife, John was asked to kiss his bride again for the camera. “A second take?” he quipped. “Just like a movie.”

A few moments before the ceremony Alicia’s cousin spoke to me about “the amazing metamorphosis” he had witnessed in John’s life since the Nobel. It’s not just the many other honors and speaking invitations from around the world that have followed, or the much wider audience that now appreciates the full range of exciting intellectual contributions made during his brief but brilliant career, or even the glamour of having his remarkable story told by Hollywood.

At seventy-three, John looks and sounds wonderfully well. He feels increasingly certain that he won’t suffer a relapse. “It’s like a continous process rather than just waking up from a dream,” he told a
New York Times
reporter recently. “When I dream … it sometimes happens that I go back to the system of delusions that’s typical of how I was… and then I wake and then I’m rational again.” Growing self-confidence may be one reason that he is less embarrassed by talking about his past, and now speaks to groups that see his experience as “something that helps to reduce the stigma against people with mental illness.”

For the first time since resigning from MIT in 1959, he now enjoys a modicum of personal security for himself and his family. Little things that the rest of us take for granted — having a driver’s license again, or getting a credit card — mean a lot. “I feel I can go into a coffee place and spend a few dollars,” Nash told me last year when I was working on a story about how economics Laureates spend their prize checks. “Lots of other academics do that,” he said. “If I was really poor, I couldn’t do that. I was like that.”