For those fourteen years, Dr. Stephan Pearson lived alone in a tiny house he had found about a mile and half out into the country from his place of work. He had purchased it with its acre of land from a retiring farmer who had used it to house his hired man. It lay back from the road a couple of hundred feet behind a thick untrimmed hedge of lilac bushes and maple trees. It looked very shabby indeed until Mr. Eintvold happened to drop in one day. The next day he sent over a painter and a repairman to spruce it up as best they could. But it was certainly more than adequate for Steve’s modest needs.
From the doorway, nearly overgrown with grapevines, one stepped immediately into a 12’x14’ living room quaintly crowded with a big old sofa on the inside wall to the left, an overstuffed chair in the front corner to the right, and an array of green plants stacked wherever there was room for them. In the front wall next to the door there was a window, and in the wall to the right another one. In the summer very little light made it through the big grape leaves into the room. Above the sofa on the wall to the left that partitioned the living room from the bedroom hung six medium-sized frames all in a row, side by side. Each contained a sheet of music staff paper scribbled with musical notations and words. Across the top of the first sheet was scrawled the single word, “Verily.”
The kitchen and bathroom consisted of a small lean-to behind the living room that appeared to have been an afterthought. A cast-iron wood range, a bank of crooked cupboards, a new refrigerator, a hand pump over a porcelain sink, and a small table with two wicker chairs filled this room to capacity. A window that could be swung open looked out over the deciduous woods behind the house and included in its scope an unpainted plank garage in which Dr. Pearson kept his panel truck.
If a visitor turned sharply left on entering the front door, he stepped through a curtained archway into Stephan Pearson’s bedroom, which is where guests were invited to put their coats. A single window on the far wall looked out through a mass of bushes into the open fields beyond and admitted a dim glow into the room with its simple furnishings: a single iron bed, a dresser, a kitchen chair, a lampstand, and a free-standing armoire.
In contrast to the drabness of everything else in the room, on the lampstand facing the bed stood a framed portrait of a very lovely young woman with tender features and soft doelike eyes. On the wall above the lampstand was a framed letter that began with the words, “Dear Steve,” and ended with the words, “Love, Irv and Ellie.” No one, as far as I could tell, ever managed to induce him to speak either of his unusual living room wall decorations or of the mysterious girl in the portrait. This silence of his, together with the “previously committed” indifference with which he treated all women, led to the general assumption among his colleagues that he must have sustained a great heartache at some point in his life. They wondered if he had been jilted.
Dr. Pearson’s social contacts were rather rare during this period in his life. His only real friend was Dr. Niessen, and their friendship was on a professional level. As a matter of solemn fact, Dr. Pearson seemed largely oblivious to any other level. One could say that he abandoned the trivialities and dynamics of ordinary human life to take up residence in the mesmerizing world of theoretical physics with its inanimate mysteries and mathematical regularities. You yourself had to take up residence in that strange world if you wanted to meet the Stephan Pearson of those days, and Dr. Niessen had done that. They shared the keen delight of learning the secrets of this new world whose existence was not in the least dependent on theirs. As two of the very few spectators in the astonishing amphitheater of minute existence, they were welded by their mutual awe into an unseverable comradeship.
There were two exceptions to Stephan Pearson’s seclusion from daily life. Each Thanksgiving he would invite Dr. Niessen and half a dozen indigent students from the nearby university to his home for turkey dinner, rearranging the living room to accommodate a table and chairs borrowed from the church he attended. This act of unfeigned goodwill was relegated by some of his associates to his increasing fund of eccentricities. It was noted that he even offered a prayer of thanksgiving prior to serving the food.
The other exception was his practice of attending Mass every Sunday at the church just down the road from his house. He normally went to the High Mass at 11:00 a.m. since the organist who accompanied that Mass knew how to bring sublime sounds out of the instrument.
One might suppose that these were lonely years for him, and it is true that they were pockmarked by occasional periods of engulfing sadness, especially at the approach of Christmas. Dr. Niessen also told me of one startling occasion that sent Steve suddenly plunging into depression. It seems that the two of them were working on an electronic device near a window when suddenly his mentor’s eyes froze on the window and followed, as in a trance, the form of a slender blonde young woman passing in front of their building walking down the sidewalk. He began to tremble, like a man with the palsy, and was useless for the rest of the day. The effect of this incident was weeks in wearing off. During these rare relapses into what appeared to be a state of mourning, he became impenetrable and performed his work in the perfunctory manner of a machine.
But as a rule, his work was his wife, and the fruits of his work were his children. They made a good family—no quarreling, no dissension ever. It was a much happier family than he had known in his youth. The world of symmetry and orderly balance that had become his home must have led him by degrees to making the tacit assumption that the world of ordinary human intercourse could be expected to behave in a similar way.
He certainly displayed a kindly and generous attitude toward others. He had nothing against anyone, and he had no reason to believe that the daily occupation of most people was any less fulfilling to them than his was to him. Besides this, he had received directly from Cecilia a vocation to love the people he met. And so the taciturn scientist, normally all wrapped up in his work, would now and then demonstrate absurd extremes of personal sacrifice for the presumed good of someone else. The following anecdote was told to me by one of Steve’s associates during my visit to Boston in the fall of 1938.
It seems a university student who had been hunting in the marshes of southeastern Massachusetts one rainy Saturday morning stopped at the research center on his way home to flaunt his string of ducks. Just before leaving, he took one fat mallard off the stringer and tossed it into the corner with the remark, “Here’s a little fresh protein for you, Dr. Pearson.” The doctor nodded without interrupting his train of thought.
That evening, donning the slick raincoat and fireman’s hat and the floppy galoshes he had worn in the morning, Dr. Pearson noticed the duck sprawled out in the corner, its head tucked under its wing. Supposing that the student had forgotten the bird of which he had been so proud, he picked the thing up by the neck and trudged halfway across town under the bright moonlight to return it.
The student claimed that when he opened the door at 10:30 p.m. and saw Dr. Pearson standing there in fireman’s clothes holding the duck out to him, his mind went blank. Then, quickly realizing what had happened, and not wishing to disillusion the good doctor, he thanked him kindly and asked him into the house. But his night caller politely refused, insisting that as it was past his bedtime, he needed to get on home. With that, he departed into the starlit shadows, raincoat, rubber hat, and galoshes.
From what I have gathered, it seems this is a fair representation of Dr. Pearson’s infrequent excursions into the world during these years.