Yannick Grannec - The Goddess of Small Victories

“You’re lucky to have a mother-in-law like Antoinette. Mine is a real dragon.”

“It took me two marriages to find a proper one!”

She then changed the subject, a little too quickly for me not to feel there was some awkwardness.

“Are you getting along better with Oskar?”

“We tolerate each other.”

“He takes good care of Kurt, you have to admit it. It would be a lot harder without him.”

I lit a cigarette.

“Are you still smoking? Your husband hates it.”

“Just to irritate Mr. Morgenstern! Would you like a drink?”

“You’ve started without me, Adele.” She gave me a friendly tap in reprimand.

It was good to have a friend like Lili: a sister in exile, a companion who guided you upward, without condescension. She was richer, more intelligent, more cultured, and more sociable than me — she had all the basic virtues of a Princeton spouse. But she had a quality rare in that little world: none of it mattered to her any more than her first permanent. My friend Lili was no beauty. She had a big nose and thick lips, but her eyes were direct and enormously kind. She was a haven of compassion for a tired soul. Albert, whose standards of friendship were high, liked her a lot.

I opened my arms wide, aping an eager salesman, to present the living room to her. We hadn’t had to buy any new furniture, we already had too much. Kurt complained about not having an entrance hall as in Europe. The open American plan was an assault on one’s privacy. I shared the pragmatic view of the locals: an entrance hall was a waste of space. We had two bedrooms, giving us a substantial area in which to spread out. I had lots of plans: I was going to change the back of the main room into a dining area and set up a soundproofed office behind the kitchen. That way, I wouldn’t have to hear him complain about my restlessness. Lili listened to me prattle on with her best smile.

“I’m so happy for you, Adele! You’re finally going to be able to invite people over. You spend too much time alone.”

“You know Kurt. He doesn’t like social occasions.”

“Still, he might concede that there are points on the scale between seclusion and perpetual partying.”

“At his age, I’m not going to change him. We could have hoped for so much more, like the Oppenheimers. Robert is someone who knows how to make his talents pay off.”

“Glory isn’t everything, Adele. Or money either.”

“Stow it!”

Lili frowned imperceptibly.

Deep inside, I still had the outlook of a Viennese working girl, which surfaced at times despite my being a “lady of leisure.” I had never held a factory job, but I’d shown my legs on an assembly line of sorts. It all came down to the same thing. I envied the Oppenheimers’ position. The couple lived with their two young children in a huge eighteen-room house on Olden Lane, right at the entrance to the IAS, at the same time enjoying the income from Robert’s many outside activities. Kitty’s future was secure. She staved off boredom by gardening and mixing gin and tonics. She had abandoned her studies to play the lady of the manor in her oversized schloss. I’d heard many spicy stories about her from Kurt’s secretary. “Oppie” was her fourth husband. His predecessors had been a musician, a politician, and a radiologist. The next to last, a militant Communist, died fighting in Spain. I wondered how Robert, who had worked for the government during the war, managed to live with that.

“Come see the kitchen. It’s a little too modern for me, but I’ve got an idea for it. I’d like to turn it into a Bauernstube . Something warmer, with wood, like in the old country.”

Although I couldn’t restrain myself from the guilty pleasure of gossiping, I enjoyed the Oppenheimers’ company. Robert became director of the IAS in 1946, shortly after leaving the Manhattan Project. Only forty-two years old, he had acquired considerable influence thanks to his work at Los Alamos and his contacts in the political and military spheres. Behind the wall of his cryogenic arrogance, Oppie had a dangerous charm, and it owed much to his being known as the “father of the atomic bomb.” Like my husband, he had a stringy body and an emaciated face — the austere look of a pastor, its wattage increased by a disturbing gaze. His light blue eyes seemed to dissect your soul and your anatomy along the way. Those near to him said he threw himself into his work and hardly ever slept. His wife had to make him eat, a tiny point of commonality between us, because unlike Kurt, he also had a side that was fond of good living. I never saw him without a cigarette dangling from his lips, the last one lighting the next, an index of his inexhaustible inner fires. If Kurt was taciturn and asocial, Robert was a leader, a man of words and power, able to master any subject however far removed from nuclear physics, his field of expertise. He aspired to transform the IAS into an interdisciplinary team of excellence, recruiting from every point on the compass beyond the usual breeding pools of mathematics and physics. Unlike the livestock at his previous stable, the Los Alamos lab, the thoroughbreds at the Institute — my husband and Einstein included — had a tendency to trot alone. And in different directions.

“I’ve planted camellias in the garden. I’m going to build a fountain. And why not an arbor? I’ll invite you to tea there. Like a real lady! Speaking of real ladies, would you like a cocktail, darling?”

“Ease up on the martinis, Adele.”

Lili was right, I’d drunk more than I ought. I was nervous about having people over. Compared to Lili, Kitty, and the Dorothys of this world, women who had been steeped since childhood in an intellectual milieu, I was countrified in my tastes, I knew. But I had no others to draw on. What was the point of aping an upper-middle-class décor? This odd and possibly shabby house was my home, a world in my image. I wouldn’t apologize for it, even if I needed a few glasses of alcohol to bolster my pride. Dismissing her protests, I fixed us a couple of stiff martinis. We sipped them, watching the two men amble back and forth across the lawn.

“How is Albert? I notice he seems tired since his operation. He always works too hard.”

“He hides his fatigue behind his humor. The other day he gave me a photo with the dedication: ‘What a shame that you won’t spend the night with me!’ ”

“You’re already his chauffeur. Try not to fall for his dusty charm!”

“Albert is like a father to me.”

“Watch your ass all the same.”

I stuck out my tongue at her, in a parody of the famous snapshot of the physicist that had rocketed around the globe. 26The venerable elder statesman never censored his salty language. One day at table when the others were talking in guarded terms about sex, I’d heard him say, “The whole thing lasts two minutes and it’s over!” Kurt almost fainted. Albert hated the hypocrisy of social conventions such as marriage, which he thought incompatible with human nature. I followed his thinking, but if he hadn’t acted on this postulate — any more than I had — he at least had managed to profit from his freedoms as a man while holding on to the comforts of home. Some principles have only relative weight.

“The steaks are ready.”

“Adele! What has happened to your Viennese cooking?”

“I am an American, Herr Einstein. I own an American house. And I cook in the A-me-ri-can style.”

“We are all Americans, don’t make too much of it. And if you really want to be a patriot, then you should know that in this country, barbecuing is a man’s job.”

These sunny days in early September were a magical interlude. Kurt was in relatively good form, and I had my house, good company, and enough alcohol in my veins to believe the moment imperishable. I wasn’t the only one drinking. The Oppenheimers were always a length ahead when von Neumann wasn’t around to lead the pack. I’d worked night and day since we’d moved in. To my surprise, I’d even found myself humming: my husband had showed me a few miraculous signs of affection.