The Goddess of Small Victories (37 page)

The Vienna-born child might have become a musician. What might the one born in Princeton have been? A sculptor, maybe. In which case Rudolf Gödel senior would have sold girdles so that Kurt Gödel could be a scientist and his grandson an artist. And what would the son of my son have done? He’d have closed the circle by selling his father’s art.

And what if our boy had had a talent for sports? If what gladdened him was running with the big crew-cut youths one saw on campus? I’d have congratulated fate on its sense of irony, for making Kurt accompany his son to baseball games when he avoided physical exercise like the plague.

But Kurt never gave me permission to have a child. It would have opened the door to the unforeseen, the uncontrollable. To disappointment. Our son chose well in staying away. I wouldn’t have had enough strength for all three of us.

The psychiatrist’s right eyebrow remained cocked upward, as though he had worn a monocle for too long. He pursed his thick lips.

“Who would like to say something about this hospital business?”

“He was rushed to the hospital for a perforated ulcer that he’d refused to have treated. He’ll go to any lengths to avoid seeing a doctor. He’d rather complain or drink magic potions. He almost died! He even dictated his last will and testament to Morgenstern!”

“I had other things to worry about. I had to prepare my talk for the International Mathematical Congress and the Gibbs Lecture.”
³⁷

“Adele, do you feel responsible for Kurt’s health problems?”

“Do you mean, do I feel guilty? I’ve spent my life rescuing his!”

I got to my feet, determined to walk out.

“Sit down!” boomed the drum.

“You see? She’s hysterical! She’s incapable of holding an adult conversation!”

“He keeps a journal about his issues with constipation and he has the gall to talk to me about hysteria!”

“I take good care of my health. In my own way, I follow a very strict diet.”

I sat down again, tossing my purse onto the couch. If Hulbeck only knew how strange Kurt’s normal diet was, he would have him committed immediately: a quarter pound of butter on a tiny square of toasted bread and beaten egg whites. No soup or fresh fruit. Almost never any meat. A chicken could last us all week if I didn’t slip some into his pureed food. Food that was white, neutral, reduced to the minimum for survival.

“He doesn’t want to admit that he’s afraid of being poisoned, even by me! When we’re invited somewhere, I have to bring his meal in a box. Think how embarrassing it is for me!”

“My wife exaggerates. I find her cooking too heavy, and she gets upset over nothing. This room is very smoky, could you open the window?”

“Why don’t you take your coat off, Kurt? Are you in a hurry to go?”

“I’m cold.”

I rolled my eyes. One more illogical argument, who cared?

“That will be enough for today. As a doctor, though, I’d like to recommend an outdoor vacation, Kurt. To get your health back. In a scientific way.”

“Why not go to Switzerland and visit the Paulis? You’d like Switzerland. It’s clean. And quiet. Or maybe Vienna? I’d even agree to visit your mother!”

Hulbeck coughed with unmistakable meaning.

“You know very well what I think of that, Adele.”

“I can’t stand Princeton anymore. Why not accept the offer from Harvard? The people there are very friendly.”

“We’ll talk about it later.”

The thunder of the drum prevented us from carrying the conversation any further. The session was over.

“We’re making progress. My assistant will schedule you for your next appointment.”

Kurt rose and paid the psychoanalyst, who walked us to the door of his office. I was pulling on my gloves in the lobby, a little shell-shocked, when Hulbeck stuck his shaggy dog’s head around the edge of the door.

“By the way, Adele. I keep that death mask for a particular reason. Anger has its good side too. I try never to forget it. I intend to keep shitting on Goethe until the day I die. Will we see you at Albert’s on Sunday?”

Anna, not wanting to arrive early, walked around the IAS on foot. She had followed Adele’s advice and bought herself a new outfit. Under her severe coat, she wore a red crepe dress with a neckline scooped too low for her small bust. She felt dolled up. She had put on makeup and, at the last moment, loosened her hair, all the while questioning the point of assembling such an arsenal when the war was already lost.

At the appointed hour, which she allowed to slip past until she was fashionably late, she walked up the driveway toward Olden Manor, the opulent neo-Victorian mansion whose twenty or more rooms had been the prerogative of the IAS director since 1939. It was in that house that Robert Oppenheimer’s children, among others, had grown up. As a child, Anna had explored its every nook and cranny, but she hadn’t set foot inside for years. Its heavy freight of memories added to her anxiety. She was on the point of turning and walking away when the door opened onto the beaming face of Ernestine.

Of Creole stock, Ernestine had been working for the Adamses for almost twenty years. She was part of the furniture, as were the flamboyantly colored blouses she invariably wore. Despite
Virginia Adams’s best efforts, Ernestine stayed true to her tropical tastes and refused to adopt the sober uniform of a traditional nanny, more in keeping with the family’s social position. Indeed, with the passage of time, Ernestine’s plumage had grown bigger and brasher. She had never conceded on a single point, including her unsettling habit of sprinkling her speech with obscure French expressions.

“Anna,
mon bel oiseau
, my beautiful bird! I’m so happy to see you!” She straightaway kissed the young woman on both cheeks. Anna recognized her particular smell: vanilla and yeast.

“You haven’t changed, Tine.”

“
Taratata, je suis une vraie baleine
, I’m an absolute whale! But look at you, you’re pretty as a picture.” She pinched her waist. “If you were eating my food, there’d be more flesh around those bones. Good God. Young women today!”

Anna handed her a small package. Both of them gave a sudden start at the sound of a hysterical summons from the second floor. Ernestine sighed, her hands pressed into the small of her back. Calvin Adams appeared in the hall. He had chosen to dress casually in a warm-toned flannel shirt over a white turtleneck sweater. Anna suspected him of hiding an incipient goiter behind his dandyish affectation. “You look lovely in your new haircut, Anna.” This time, she managed not to touch her hair. She wouldn’t be caught out again by easy compliments. Calvin’s always had the effect of a sweaty palm placed on her breasts. Luckily he didn’t dwell on the subject but asked Ernestine to go upstairs and give Mrs. Adams a hand.

Virginia Adams materialized in a thick cloud of heady perfume, a glass in one hand, a cigarette in the other. This was how Anna had always known her.

“You’re early. Nothing is ready yet.”

Anna let it pass. She had been inoculated against Virginia Adams’s venom during childhood. She wondered how long it would take her hostess to spoil her perfect makeup with one of the theatrical crying jags she was prone to. Virginia still knew how to make herself stunning, although age had forced her to increase the dose of artifice. She was a spectacular grenade, pin pulled and ready for launch, whose explosion her husband had been trying for years to retard.

Anna stood there with her arms full until her hosts condescended to take her things from her. Mrs. Adams put her through the customary inspection. She fingered the red dress without letting go of her cigarette. Anna prayed that the lighted tip wouldn’t set fire to the delicate fabric. She had never bought herself such a costly rag before. Still, she fell a long way short of the luxury exhibited by Virginia, who was draped in a silk caftan.

“It will never stand up to being cleaned. Still, that red does make a statement.” Virginia was one of those people whose every pronouncement had to be read in the contrary sense: her enthusiasm as an insult, and a vague reproach as a hidden compliment. The young woman handed her hostess a bottle of Orvieto, an Italian white she had enjoyed a little too much during her stay in Umbria with Gianni. Virginia accepted the humble offering without interest. Calvin, a practiced diplomat, invited his employee to take a seat in the living room. “This house is your home. As you well know.”

Anna chose a remote spot in the depths of one of the overstuffed sofas by the fireplace with her back to the library. The smell of leather was somehow reassuring. She had good memories of this room. As a schoolgirl, she had done her homework here with Leo while Ernestine made them waffles in the kitchen. Before she could compose herself, Leonard walked into her field of vision and collapsed on the couch across from her.

“Elegant as ever, Leo.”

“I did make an effort. Did you notice the necktie?”

“You look awful. Your shirt is all wrinkled.”

She straightened his necktie, thinking of all the times she had tied his shoelaces, rounded up his schoolbooks, and rescued him from punishment with an apt lie. He drained his glass in one gulp, his eyes studiously avoiding the library. The same memories must have been flooding through his mind. Anna kicked herself for having gone back so quickly to maternal gestures. Under his sloppy clothes, she recognized the tight-lipped boy who was either too shy to show his teeth or too clever to let his self-satisfaction show. His nose, which was extraordinarily large for such a narrow face, had given Leo quite a complex at puberty. Without his dark, laughing eyes, he could have been ugly. Embarrassed at being examined so closely, he waggled his eyebrows like a dime-store crooner.

“Did anyone offer you a drink?”

“I need to keep a clear head. I’ve been pressed into service as an interpreter for the French mathematician.”

“Totally unnecessary. His English is excellent. My father played the same trick on me. He’s hoping I’ll cozy up to Richardson III. Or is it IV? A goldbrick of the first water.”

Anna felt caught in a trap. So it wasn’t Leonard who had contrived their meeting. The door to the library had been closed for a long time. She said yes to the drink. Her friend slouched over to the bar. His formal shirt looked wrong on him. Anna had grown used to his inevitable T-shirts with their obscure taglines. His extreme sloppiness could easily fool an unwary observer. The younger Adams hid his crystalline mental rigor under the trappings of a two-bit rebel. He was nonetheless a pure analytic machine, like the computers that he had discovered at a young
age and that had sealed his fate. His determined nonconformism had been partly responsible for his father’s thinning hair and his mother’s alcoholism, though it may also have been their natural consequence.

He returned with two glasses the size of soup tureens. Judging from the quantity of scotch in his glass and the sparsity of hair on his forehead, Leo had inherited from both his parents. Calvin Adams poked his head into the room and waved at them: the guests were arriving. His son responded with a blink. Anna wondered at his unusual docility. She remembered a night when he had walked out of the house barefoot, slamming the door behind him. He hadn’t managed to run very far. His parents sent Tine down to the police station to pick him up. Leo had refused to speak to his progenitors for more than three weeks. He had just turned ten.

“I hear that your father married one of his grad students. That must have given Rachel fits.”

“Ancient history. Since then she’s found herself a tanned anthropologist from Berkeley. Some catch!”

“Don’t complain. It could have been the other way around.”

She smiled, imagining her white-maned and patrician father in his gold-buttoned blazer on the arm of a wiry con man in khaki fatigues. Her mother with a pretty young minx was less hard to imagine.

Leonard lit a cigarette. Anna had stopped smoking on her return from Europe, not without difficulty. She stifled the impulse. Over the past several days, her hunger for cigarettes had sharply revived. Everyone in the world smoked except her.

“Why did you come back to Princeton, Anna?”

She finished her scotch in a single long swallow. The question was too direct to elicit a considered answer. Leo lacked nuance.
As he had often said to her, “There are ten different kinds of people: those who understand binary numbers, and then everyone else.” His world was peopled with 1s and 0s, in black and white, while Anna’s harbored every gradation of gray. He was discrete, she continuous. They had never managed to define a border between them that was both simple and permeable yet also watertight enough that neither would dissolve in the other. Unlike in mathematics, Leo’s infinity seemed more voracious than Anna’s.

The Florence caper two years earlier had cut off their debate. One morning the doorbell rang in the distance in Gianni’s vast palazzo. He was asleep. He slept like a log, and the activities of the previous night gave him little reason to rise from his torpor. Anna had crawled out of bed, grabbed a man’s shirt off the floor, and yelled in Italian at the jerk who had the gall to come knocking at that hour to be patient. She’d opened the door to discover Leonard. He had a duffel bag in one hand and an indecipherable smile on his face. “Surprise!” was all he said in explanation. And surprised he had been to see a half-naked Gianni appear behind Anna. Leo had turned and walked away without a word. She hadn’t seen him since.

Gianni hadn’t made a scene of any kind, hadn’t asked her to “choose.” She’d had no choice to make. Everything was already ruined. He had let her go with only one reproach: “I wish you had told me about it first, Anna. It’s never pleasant to realize that you’re a stand-in. Especially when, like me, you spend your life tracking down forgers.” But he didn’t accept her apologies.

Leo punched her on the shoulder. He hated it when she drifted away from him.

“What happened to the Italian guy?”

“I guess it didn’t work out.”

Virginia Adams was waving her veils to draw them toward the table.

“Save me a place next to you.”

“So glad to be your all-purpose stopgap.”