I am American born and bred, yet my earliest memories are of Budapest. My recollections are typical: sharp, concrete, disconnected images of particular objects—a bed and bedside lamp in the room where I slept and a very large, rough-hewn amethyst that stood by a decorative pool in the garden of my great-aunt's house. Of people and relationships I remember nothing, although, according to my mother, I learned during the course of that year to speak “perfect German to the family and perfect Hungarian to the servants.”
These memories were formed because my mother, occupied during 1937–38 with divorce and remarriage, left me in the care of my grandparents and a nanny in the home where she herself had grown up. She brought her new husband, now permanently christened Desmond, to Budapest shortly after their marriage, partly to introduce him to her parents and partly to take me home to their new household in the United States. There was no question about which parent I would live with. After their separation but before their divorce became final, my parents had drawn up a carefully constructed document regarding my care. It provided not only that my father would contribute 10 percent of his income to my support, but also for an unusual form of joint custody. Until I was twelve, I would live during the school year with my mother and spend vacations with my father; after that, the situation would be reversed until I reached the age of eighteen, when the decision about how my time would be divided between the two households passed to me.
As my mother explained it to me, this arrangement was made with my intellectual and emotional welfare in mind. She felt that the child of a man as remarkable as John von Neumann should have the opportunity to live with him and get to know him well. At the same time, she believed that he would be better suited to parental interaction with his daughter once she had reached something approaching the age of reason and no longer needed physical care. It was a thoughtful and well-intentioned agreement, but they were too inexperienced to realize that adolescence is often the stage of life farthest removed from of the age of reason.
Because I had no memory of living with my parents together as a single family, I accepted the new household arrangements with equanimity as a natural state of affairs. In fact, I quickly came to regard Desmond as a loving parental figure, without his displacing my actual father in my affections—I just basked in being loved by both of them. But the emotional fallout of the arrangement on some of the adults involved turned out to be more painful than anyone could have anticipated.
By the time he and my mother were married, my stepfather had completed his PhD in physics at Princeton and had a job with the National Institutes of Health in Washington, DC. It was there that we settled into a rented house and I started nursery school, an environment that erased my multilingual abilities in short order. As rapidly as I had substituted Hungarian and German for English when I lived in Budapest, I now reversed the process. My desire to fit in, to be “just like everyone else,” led me to insist, even at home, that the only language I would speak or understand was English.
Within a very few weeks, apparently, my stubborn insistence had become reality. When, some twenty years later, I tried to learn enough German to pass an exam in the language for my PhD, my mother was amazed to discover that I “couldn't even make the sounds correctly.” My Hungarian vocabulary now consists of one sentence taught me by my grandmother, “I would like to speak Hungarian, but I don't know much,” and a few stray bits of profanity.
The lengths I would later go to in order to shape my four-year-old's world by sheer force of will also showed up in other ways. Apparently concerned about my strong resistance to change in any detail of my life, my mother and Desmond followed the advice of a child psychologist and completely rearranged the furniture in my room. They were taken aback when they discovered, a few hours later, that everything was back in its original position. My only comment was “Please, dear Desmond, don't move it again; it's so heavy.” Confronted with my stubbornness, the adults capitulated and the furniture stayed.
Expecting to live in the DC area more or less permanently, my mother and Desmond immediately hired an architect and built a house, with my mother playing a hands-on role in the design and Desmond supervising the construction almost day by day. Its location, on 30th Place just off Ellicott Street, was at the time right at the edge of urban Washington; just beyond their block were untouched woods. Today those same houses are very much in the midst of a city that has expanded well beyond the Maryland state line.
Of particular interest to me and my best friend, Mariana Moran, was the fact that J. Edgar Hoover, at that time at the height of his formidable powers as head of the FBI, lived next door. Mariana, a dark-haired, dark-eyed, Spanish-style beauty, daughter of an American naval officer and a wealthy Panamanian mother, grew up to be a fashion model and a pillar of Washington society. At the time, though, she was my partner in juvenile—very juvenile—delinquency. Looking for some excitement to spice up our lives, we delighted in thumbing our noses at the nation's most feared authority figure by spreading mud on Mr. Hoover's laundry hanging on the line and writing the naughtiest words we knew in chalk on his sidewalk. To our disappointment, he didn't call on the resources of the FBI to catch us in the act, probably because his housekeeper didn't bother to tell him about our desecration of his property. But we didn't escape unpunished; when my mother found out, she responded with a solid spanking for me and a sharp report to Mariana's parents.
On many weekends during the hot Washington summer, my mother, Desmond, and I would make the two-hour drive to the seashore at Rehoboth Beach for the day. Returning from one such outing in early September of 1939, we heard over the car radio that war had been declared in Europe. This didn't mean much to a four-year-old, but it clearly shook up the adults in the front seat. They knew then that the pleasant flow of their lives was about to be totally disrupted. My maternal grandparents and great-aunt were in the midst of a holiday visit, their first to the United States, and my mother realized that they would be stuck on this side of the Atlantic indefinitely, with only the clothes they had brought in their luggage. Suddenly, she was responsible for finding them permanent housing and became their sole means of support. Their return tickets to Europe, booked for November in cabin class on the luxury liner Normandie, still lie in my safe deposit box, “refundable only in Paris,” where they had been bought.
As refugees in the United States, my grandparents reversed roles from the domineering, philandering husband and bored hypochondriac wife they had been in Budapest. My grandfather, too old to resume his profession in a new country and an unfamiliar language, became gentle and passive, spending his days listening to his beloved classical music on the radio with his dog at his feet. My tiny, fragile-appearing grandmother, who for the first time in her life was needed and had something to do, became a first-class housekeeper and budgeteer (she was acutely conscious that they depended on my mother for their livelihood), an outstanding cook, and a social butterfly.
Among the elderly grandes dames of Washington, DC, Paulette Kövesi was much sought after for her skills at bridge, which included never arranging the cards in her hand, because that might give something away, or inquiring sternly of her talkative companions, “Are we here to chat or to play bridge?” The small but comfortable apartment on Connecticut Avenue—it even boasted a new innovation, central air conditioning—became the scene of many elegant ladies' luncheons and bridge teas. My grandmother, dressed in vintage black lace, was undaunted by her triple role of hostess, cook, and dishwasher.
In October of 1940, soon after we moved into the new house, my brother and only sibling was born. Christened George Henry Kuper III, he was known to the family as Gorky until he was old enough to insist on George as more appropriate to his dignity. Miss Levesconte, or “Vee,” the beloved French Canadian nursemaid who had cared for me from infancy until I outgrew her by going off to school, returned to play a similar role for the new member of the family. She had been my constant companion and had relieved the restlessness of a precocious only child by helping me learn to read when I was three. I was delighted to have her back in the household again, even though the main focus of her attention was now my brother rather than me.
My mother was clearly delighted with this new infant; the fact that she now had a boy as well as a girl, and a child by each of her husbands added to her satisfaction. But, true to her hands-off parenting style, she left his care mainly in Vee's capable hands. Her role as the gracious and elegant hostess at frequent parties in her up-to-the minute new home continued undeterred by dishes or diapers. Some of my clearest memories are of her playing that role in flowing hostess pyjamas—a new and rather daring style at the time, and one that emphasized both her vivid persona and her graceful femininity. I was proud of having such a glamorous mother and yet discomfited by the certainty that I would never, even as an adult, acquire her aura of drop-dead elegance, her ability to turn heads in any room she entered.
I regarded baby Gorky as an interesting curiosity; it was not until he became the golden-haired darling of a succession of maids and nannies that I became fiendishly jealous. The contrast was particularly painful once I, five and a half years older, had turned from a Shirley Temple look-alike—I was occasionally mistaken for her in Hungary—into a plump, pigtailed, bespectacled little egghead, always at the top of her class in school but notably lacking in social graces.
My ambivalent emotions regarding this baby, who quickly developed into a boy of irresistible appeal, were reflected in a piece I wrote for a school assignment when I was a teenager: “His most endearing yet often most annoying quality is his charm, which makes women of any age love him at first sight. After being a little hellion all day, he can go down to a party and, with one smile, captivate everyone in the room. ‘Isn't he an angel?’ they all say. It is then that I feel a desire to wring his angelic little neck!…Gorky's thoughtful, unselfish nature makes me love him with all my might, but he's enough of a little boy to make me think sometimes he should be caged.”
At about the time of Gorky's birth, the pleasant rhythm of my family environment was unsettled by the question of what role Desmond, a physicist whose specialty was studying the effects of various types of radiation on human health and designing instruments to measure it, would play in the fast-approaching war. The US Congress had authorized compulsory military service, even though we were not yet officially at war; at about the same time, the Radiation Laboratory, or RadLab, was established at MIT as a joint Anglo-American project for the further development and production of radar, which had recently been invented in England. After several months of cat and mouse between the highly placed scientists assembling a RadLab team and Desmond's local draft board, the civilians won, and we moved from Washington to an old but spacious rented house in Cambridge.
My mother wasted no time setting up her household and establishing our home as the social center for the group of scientists and their spouses who were rapidly being assembled in Cambridge from all over the country. But it soon became clear that the role of well-off housewife was not going to be enough for her quick brain or her boundless energy and dominant personality. As a European whose parents had just lost their home, their belongings, and their country, she was passionate about the importance of an American victory in World War II and felt an increasing urge to play a more direct role. She was egged on by her husband's half-teasing insistence that keeping household servants in wartime was downright unpatriotic; either the maids would have to go or she would have to justify their existence by going to work herself. And now that her parents and aunt were totally dependent on her for their financial support, she felt an obligation to earn much of their keep herself.
The question of what kind of job she should apply for was a real one, since nothing in her education or experience had equipped her for the world of paid work. So she joined the army of Rosie the Riveters who made up an increasing part of the civilian work force as their husbands and brothers went off to war. Risking her long, elegantly manicured fingernails, she started out assembling radar sets at the Harvey Radio Laboratories in Cambridge. “You're just another socialite who'll quit as soon as you're bored,” was the response she recounted to a reporter who interviewed her for the women's page of a Boston newspaper. Instead, she was promoted to foreman within three months and, six months later, became the supervisor in charge of training women technicians at the same RadLab that had recently recruited her husband.
My mother was long on conviction and self-confidence and short on patience, a combination that made her a tough but fair taskmistress in the workplace as well as at home. When the women she supervised were asked to vote on whether they were willing to have “Negroes” as coworkers, she drew on the sheer force of her personality, along with some well-placed Hungarian profanity, to ensure that they voted yes. When she organized annual reunion dances for RadLab and Los Alamos alumni during the spring meetings of the American Physical Society after the war, she was equally adamant. These meetings were held at posh Washington hotels, which, at the time, were strictly whites only. Her insistence that a black physicist and his wife be included in the party meant that she had to find a different hotel every year in which to hold it. These events were, in the words of one of the participants, “the first unsegregated dances at first class hotels in Washington D.C.”1 Although her enormous energy had been focused virtually 24–7 on winning the world war against the forces of darkness, my mother also seized opportunities to conduct her own small battle against the injustices rampant in her adopted country.
While World War II was engulfing the world, my life in Cambridge was astonishingly, even embarrassingly, normal. Although the rationing of meat, butter, sugar, and gasoline may have made household management a bit more complicated for my mother, about all I remember of it is that mixing yellow coloring into the margarine, so that it would look more like butter and less like lard, was my job. And why was the margarine white? Because Wisconsin farmers, fearful that the substitution of margarine for butter might become a habit that persisted even after the war was over, managed to push through a regulation requiring that it be sold in its original, pasty-white state. Packagers, ever creative, promptly attached little cellophane packets of coloring to each container of margarine.
That manual mixing task, along with collecting tin foil into shiny round balls for recycling and remembering to pull down the blackout shades when the lights went on in the evening, constituted my contribution to the war effort. And, oh yes, I was responsible for pasting the ration stamps that ruled our lives as consumers into the proper booklets and keeping track of the piles of little round cardboard circles, some red and some blue, that represented fractional values of the rationing “points” assigned to each family. This last responsibility made me feel very important.
Most of my waking hours, of course, were spent in school. I had entered first grade, in the middle of the school year, at Shady Hill, at the time one of the leading “progressive” schools in the country. Its reputation arose from its uniqueness in a variety of ways. One was physical; Shady Hill consisted of a cluster of small wooden structures scattered about on its own campus, one for each grade. Running between buildings during the cold New England winter helped to toughen both bodies and minds, in the British tradition.
What really set the school apart, though, were the new ideas about children's education that underpinned it. The academic requirements were demanding, but much of the teaching and learning took the form of individual or group projects, with teachers acting as coaches and guides as much as authority figures standing at the front of the classroom. We reenacted the original Olympic Games as part of our third-grade study of Greek civilization, a project that included making our own garments and athletic props, after appropriate research to ensure authenticity. In the fourth grade, we had a contest—participation required—to see who could draw the best map of the world from memory. This sort of education had two very positive effects. It pushed me, along with my classmates, to value independent thinking over rote learning, to be active participants in our own intellectual development. And it opened our eyes—far more effectively than just reading and memorizing could—to the world's infinite variety, both in the past and in different places during our own time. Even today, when many of these so-called progressive approaches are no longer novel, the Shady Hill School continues to be recognized as one of the best of the breed. And it reinforced my own appreciation of all kinds of people, places, and experiences that I was already absorbing from my family life.
The richness of our school experience was enhanced by an unexpected fallout of wartime: the international element it brought into our classrooms. Most of my classmates were the offspring of successful local lawyers, doctors, professors, and businessmen. But scattered among us were a number of British children who had been packed off by their parents to escape the bombing they knew would strike their homeland, crossing the Atlantic alone on some of the last nonmilitary ships to make the voyage. Once landed in Boston, some of them lived with relatives, while others were taken in by volunteer families. Although these boys and girls were at first traumatized at finding themselves alone in a strange land, they soon fitted quite naturally into our world, and many of them have, in fact, maintained close relationships with their American families throughout their adult lives. But their initial panic at suddenly being torn from everything familiar brought home to us the reality of a war that was leaving the security of our own lives pretty much untouched.
My mother's first parental encounter with the formidable headmistress of Shady Hill, Miss Katharine Taylor, was not exactly felicitous. She was greeted by that lady's comment, “You know, Mrs. Kuper, I don't approve of mothers who work.” The meeting continued for the appointed forty-five minutes, at the end of which, as my mother rose to leave, Miss Taylor fired her parting shot: “On the whole, Mrs. Kuper, it is probably better for your children that you are working.” My mother laughed as she told this story, but Miss Taylor had a point. George and I were fortunate that our mother's boundless energy and fierce competitive spirit were not focused exclusively on us; surely we would have shriveled in the flame.
While I was going about my routine of school, dancing school, skating lessons, and playing with my friends, the adults around me were working harder, and playing harder, than they ever had in their lives. For my mother and Desmond, long workdays at RadLab were punctuated on most weekends by large, raucous parties at our house where they and their colleagues drank a lot, danced a lot, and made up clever, mildly dirty ditties about their lives. Mingling with the guests during the early hours of these parties, I got to know many distinguished scientists in their more relaxed moments. Margaret, the daughter of the Nobel Prize—winning physicist I. I. Rabi and, like me, a high-powered scientist's child dropped into new surroundings by the demands of the war effort—Rabi was a professor at Columbia University in normal times—became my closest friend and playmate, and remains my friend today.
Even this life of hard work and hard play did not exhaust my mother's boundless energy. To take up the excess, she volunteered with the Red Cross at least one night a week, serving coffee and doughnuts to policemen and firemen at the sites of fires or large accidents. Thus it was that she found herself at the scene of one of the most horrific fires in our country's history. The Coconut Grove, one of Boston's largest and most elegant nightclubs, was packed well beyond capacity on the night of November 28, 1942, when it caught fire. Many of the exit doors were locked, and the main revolving door was soon jammed with people, turning it into a death trap. Nearly five hundred people, many of them servicemen on leave celebrating with their girlfriends, died there.
Although my mother must certainly have edited out the most graphic parts when she recounted to us what she saw that night, the memory of the report she gave was burned indelibly into my brain. American civilians never experienced the carnage of World War II firsthand, but that fire gave us a glimpse of what people in many other cities around the world were going through on a daily basis.
My mother's penchant for benign neglect and the exigencies of wartime combined to give me a degree of freedom and independence unthinkable today. From the time we moved to Cambridge, when I was in the first grade and not yet six, I walked the mile or so to school and home again alone—my mother was too busy with work and rationed gasoline too scarce to expend either time or fuel on getting me back and forth. I wasn't much older when I began to take the streetcar to Harvard Square to attend Saturday afternoon movies at the University Theater with my friend Margaret. On one of those afternoons, we were so mesmerized by The Song of Bernadette that we sat through it twice. It was dark by the time we got home, and even my doughty mother was beginning to panic. Her fear turned to anger, though, when we showed up, and I was subjected to a sound spanking. I felt it was unjust that Margaret didn't get spanked also.
I was on my own for much longer trips as well. With wartime restrictions, there was only one way to go from my mother's home in Cambridge to my father's in Princeton, and that was by train. My brother and I had a nanny who might have been called on to escort me on these journeys, but she was Austrian and, classified as an “enemy alien,” was forbidden to travel across state lines. So my mother would buy me a first-class ticket, tip the railroad car porter five dollars to keep an eye on me and make sure I got off at the right stop, and send me on my way. I didn't see anything remarkable about this; I thought the wartime trains, jammed with young soldiers and full of hustle and bustle, were rather fun. The independence I learned early from these experiences has been invaluable many times along my adult career path.
The unconventional family arrangements that defined my life had other profound effects on my growing up. At least in those days, most families were defined by parents and children together in a single household. For me, though, family meant two households, four adults, all brilliant and all emotionally complex, with me shuttling back and forth between them and adapting on the fly. Without being conscious of it, I became precociously adept at figuring out the soft spots in their personalities and relationships and exploiting them to my advantage.
Dealing with this complicated situation also developed in me an emotional self-sufficiency that was reinforced by my mother's parenting style. In some ways we were very close; she took me and my concerns seriously and never condescended. But she was prone to fly into sudden rages, and her humiliating slaps in the face, sometimes in front of other people, continued until I was well into my teens. Nor did she make any bones about the fact that, if the exigencies of wartime forced her to choose between being separated from her husband or from her children, she would leave us in the care of others in order to stick with the person who would be her lifetime companion after we grew up and left home. In the face of all these challenges, I developed a surface unflappability and unwillingness to examine my own feelings, traits that have lasted all my life and made writing this memoir inordinately difficult.
While my mother and stepfather were busy making their contribution to the war effort in Cambridge, my father's much higher profile role had him commuting between Princeton and Los Alamos, New Mexico. In that supersecret location, he was a major participant in the Manhattan Project and one of the very few people permitted to go in and out of Los Alamos while the war was on. He was even involved in selecting the sites in Japan where the two atom bombs then in existence were to be dropped, displaying in that task the cool rationality that dominated his thinking about any decision that affected the ability of the United States to win the war. In one of history's finest ironies, the signatures on a patent filed on the US government's behalf for a method to set off a hydrogen bomb were those of two Los Alamos colleagues, John von Neumann and Klaus Fuchs, the German-born British citizen who, as a spy for the Soviet Union, gave the Russians crucial information about first the atomic and later the hydrogen bomb.
As if the Manhattan Project wasn't enough to keep him busy, my father made a secret trip to England in 1943 to apply his game theory to the problem of sweeping highly sophisticated German mines from the English Channel. This last assignment was extremely dangerous: not only was there the possibility of being blown out of the sky on the flight over or killed by a bomb in ravaged London, but there was also the danger of being taken prisoner should the Germans manage to invade Britain. With this latter exposure in mind, he was temporarily assigned a high military rank, so that he would fall under the rules of the Geneva Convention for officers if taken prisoner. The ever-present danger did not, however, prevent him from including the latest additions to his store of dirty limericks in the letters he wrote to his wife back in Princeton. All of them were clever, but most of them were not as clean as this one.
There once was an old man of Lyme
Who married three wives at a time.
When asked, “why the third?”
He said, “One's absurd,
And bigamy, sir, is a crime.”
All this activity meant that my vacation visits with my father were somewhat catch-as-catch-can as long as the war lasted.
The other half of the Princeton household, my father's new wife Klari, was an excellent writer, even in the English she learned only as a teenager at a British boarding school, and a remarkably perceptive observer of people. The chapter in her autobiography entitled “Johnny” captures the many aspects of my father's complex personality as no one else could. “I would like to tell about the man,” she begins, “the strange contradictory and controversial person; childish and good-humored, sophisticated and savage, brilliantly clever yet with a very limited, almost primitive lack of ability to handle his emotions—an enigma of nature that will have to remain unresolved.”2
Sadly, Klari was also profoundly insecure and intensely neurotic, as the letters my father wrote to her during their engagement attest. Her view of herself in relation to the world around her is reflected in the title she chose for her autobiography: “A Grasshopper in Very Tall Grass.” From the very beginning of their relationship, this insecurity had imposed an enormous burden of constant reassurance on my father, one that continued to be reflected in the many letters he wrote to her during his frequent trips away from home during and after the war: “You are scared. Your fear is only to a very small extent based on reality…You are not old, you are attractive.”3 Apologies for some perceived misbehavior on his part and pleas for her forgiveness were also a recurring theme: “Why do we fight when we are together? I love you. Do you loathe me very violently? Let's forgive each other!”4 These outpourings continued even when he knew that he was dying: “Let's not quarrel. Believe me, I love you and more than ever before.”5
Despite the fact that her formal education had ended with high school, Klari wasted no time in finding a way to partner with my father in one aspect of his all-consuming work. As he was developing the modern stored-program computer, he trained her, at her request, to become one of the original programmers, writing instructions for different computational tasks in a form that the machine could understand. She was a quick study, and I remember the flowcharts she produced, filled with rectangles and arrows and circles, on huge sheets of white paper that spilled over onto the floor. The Princeton household, like the one in Cambridge, was totally consumed in the job of winning the war. And, by failing to pay attention and never learning to make sense of Klari's flowcharts, I passed up completely the unique opportunity to become an early expert in computer programming. To this day, I'm profoundly ignorant of what is going on inside my desktop computer, or how to fix it when something goes awry.
From my vantage point, the adults saw the war as an onerous task that required maximum effort from everyone, but one in which we would ultimately be successful. I knew nothing of the extent to which European civilization was being destroyed by the horrors inflicted on huge swaths of civilian populations—Jews, Poles, Russians—by the Nazis and their allies. It never occurred to me, listening to the conversations that swirled around me, that the conflict would end any way other than with a victory for our side. I was startled to learn years later, from old copies of Life magazine when I was helping to clean out my father's Princeton home after his death, that in the dark days of 1943 an Allied victory was by no means assured.
By the spring and summer of 1945, the job was finished. Although the radar and other electronic technology developed and produced at RadLab had played an important role in the Allied bombing attacks that inflicted huge damage on Germany's industrial structure and civilian population, it was the capture of Berlin by Russian infantry that brought about Germany's unconditional surrender on May 8, V-E Day. My friends and I joined in the shouting and hugging and banging of pots and pans in the streets until dark, when my mother, fearing for my safety in the general crush, made me come inside.
Although the war in the Pacific still raged, the general sentiment was that the outcome was a foregone conclusion. The big question, we learned later, was whether the United States should proceed with an invasion of Japan, which was sure to produce enormous casualties on both sides, or take the shortcut offered by the fearful new weapon my father and his colleagues had developed at Los Alamos, the atomic bomb. President Harry Truman authorized the dropping of two such bombs, on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and a week later World War II was truly over.
I don't recall, though, the same unalloyed jubilation in August that had filled the streets in May. Whether this feeling of anticlimax arose from a sense that the issue was no longer whether we would win but when, or whether relief was clouded by a sense of foreboding regarding the new and terrible weapon we had unleashed, I don't know. But for one young lieutenant in the Army Air Corps, who had just received orders to leave for the Pacific as navigator, photographer, and nose gunner on one of the B-29s that would fly over Japan to map it for the invasion, there was no ambiguity. Facing an assignment in which the mortality rate was said to be 70 percent, Robert Whitman—the man who would become my husband a decade later—felt certain that the bomb had saved his life.
With its job completed, RadLab was disbanded and its scientists dispersed to old jobs or new ones. My mother and Desmond found jobs in New York, she doing for the Sperry Gyroscope Company the same kind of training of women technicians that she had pioneered at RadLab, he as a department head at the Federal Communications Laboratory. There was a severe housing shortage, but my mother, master networker that she was, managed through friends to ensconce us, in return for paying the annual tax bill, in the unoccupied brownstone mansion of an oil millionaire.
The house, fully furnished, reeked of the grandeur of a vanished age. The kitchen and dining room were just below ground level; the front steps led up to a first floor fully occupied by a reception room and a grand ballroom complete with crystal chandeliers and Louis XVI furniture. The master bedroom, sitting room, and bath were just above; then there were two more floors, each with two bedrooms and a bath, with the degree of luxury declining as one ascended successive flights of stairs. There was no elevator, but a small rope-and-pulley dumbwaiter was available for delivering necessities from the kitchen. The house stood on the corner of 70th Street and Fifth Avenue, directly across from the Frick Museum, and was an ideal vantage point for viewing the many colorful parades that passed beneath our windows.
Just as we were settling down to life in the big city and my mother and Desmond into their new jobs, my mother's reputation as a hostess, facilitator, networker, and people motivator led to a truly extraordinary job offer. A group of eminent physicists, led by I. I. Rabi of Columbia, had conceived the idea of a government-funded laboratory to do peacetime research in a variety of areas of physics and the nuclear sciences. The new entity would be managed by a consortium of universities and have as its core a nuclear reactor to be built in an as yet unspecified location near New York City.
The scientists and science administrators representing the nine participating universities quickly set out on a search for their first employee, a jack-of-all-trades (or a jill) who “would have to do everything: secretarial work, serving as liaison with [General] Groves and top-ranking scientists, investigating Columbia's government contract to see what costs it covered, and setting up the machinery to run the IUG [Initiatory University Group] accordingly.”6 It didn't take them long to find Mariette Kövesi von Neumann Kuper. Her dense network of friends and acquaintances in the world of physics, her I-can-do-anything self-confidence, and her irresistible charm, fortified by her exotic Hungarian accent—throughout her life, thick and thin became sick and sin on her tongue—made her the ideal choice.
My mother's first task in the challenging job she had accepted with alacrity was to figure out how to get herself officially on the employment rolls, obtain security clearance, and generate a paycheck. That done, she launched herself on a career as senior administrator, confidante, housemother, and chief of protocol of the as yet unnamed laboratory, a career that would end only with her health-enforced retirement twenty-eight years later. Shortly after taking the job, she set out with a subcommittee of the IUG to find a site for the new venture.
Nuclear reactors do not sit well with neighbors, so a location with lots of empty space around it was essential. Various possibilities were eliminated, one by one, until only Camp Upton, an army base located in Yaphank, Long Island, some sixty miles from New York City, remained. When my mother and the new venture's only other employee went to look at Camp Upton, most recently a prisoner of war camp, they found that “Their future business address was a muddy army camp in the middle of rural Long Island, with pitched tents, temporary wood shacks, and drafty barracks with broken windows.”7 It required a stout heart and a vivid imagination not to be discouraged.
Nothing could dampen my mother's enthusiasm for her new job, though. In a radio interview she gave shortly after the new enterprise was under way, she described her response to the job offer: “I broke into what could best be described as a new type of Indian Victory Dance…Who wouldn't be exuberant when privileged to be in on the birth of a new venture which would have as far-reaching significance as I now know Brookhaven National Laboratory will have.”8
Asked what impact she thought her job was having on her children (a standard question put to working women in those days), she replied, “As a mother, I consider myself unusually fortunate. When my children hear the words ‘atomic energy,’ their minds do not immediately jump to ‘the bomb’…My seven-year-old is not building an atomic pile to blow up the neighborhood. Instead he pretends to treat the sick cat with radiation…My thirteen-year-old daughter commented to me ‘…Mother, I am glad you are not making hats, designing clothes, or other stuff like that. I like your job much better…’ I am quite sure that the men who were smart enough to make the atom bomb will be smart enough to use it for something which is not only used in war, and I am glad we are all in on it.”9
In a high-school graduation speech delivered that same year, she elaborated on the need for the younger generation to be actively involved in world affairs. Citing the mistake her own generation had made in believing, after World War I, that if “each nation paid strict attention to its own business…there would be no more war,” she urged her listeners “to take an active, living interest in these two things, government and science.”10 The lessons of their youth were never far from the minds of either of my parents. My stepfather soon joined my mother in the new venture, first as a consultant and later as a department head. But until the site could be cleared and the necessary structures built, Brookhaven National Laboratory operated out of offices at Columbia University. So we stayed on for a year or so in our elegant digs in the heart of New York City. My new school was as dull and stuffy as Shady Hall had been open and stimulating. And the independence I had been so proud of in Cambridge now marked me as an outsider. I soon discovered that I was the only girl in the fifth grade who made it to school—a distance of three blocks—without either a chauffeur or a nanny.
While I was plodding my way dutifully but unenthusiastically through school days, intellectual stimulus arrived from an unexpected source. George Gamow, a brilliant physicist who was a friend of both my parents, had embarked on writing what he thought would be a book on modern science for children. After he had finished a draft of the first section, he looked around for a real child to try it out on and settled on me. I adored Gamow, a wild-haired Russian who suited perfectly a child's vision of a mad scientist, and I worked hard to carry out the task he set me. I spent evenings and weekends making notes on all the things I didn't understand, which was just about everything.
Gamow's acknowledgment in the preface to the published version of One, Two, Three, Infinity describes the outcome of my labors: “Above all my thanks are due to my young friend, Marina von Neumann, who claims that she knows everything better than her famous father does, except, of course, mathematics, which she says she knows only equally well. After she had read in manuscript some of the chapters of the book, and told me about numerous things in it which she could not understand, I finally decided that this book is not for children as I had originally intended it to be.”11
This well-intentioned bit of teasing, aimed at my father as much as me, was to cause me painful embarrassment when, as a high-school senior, I started dating Princeton freshmen who read Gamow's book as a textbook. Talk about a reputation as a bluestocking—a female egghead—scaring off the men! But when it was published, I was only eleven. Concerns about boys and dating had not yet entered my head, and I was proud and delighted by such public recognition of my efforts.
My father may not have been a constant presence in my life during my first twelve years, but he clearly adored me and worked hard to create and maintain a father-daughter intimacy. His concern on this score had shown even in the letters he wrote to Klari soon after his separation and divorce from my mother, when I was a toddler: “Marina came over…she loved all the postcards I sent…she told me she put on her beautiful rosy dress for me.”12 And “In my role as a father I have some success because Marina shows some sentimentality toward myself.”13
Once I could read, my father wrote to me often, and his letters were filled with terms of endearment and expressions of affection. They contained, as well, constant reminders of the relentlessly high expectations he held for my academic performance. Regarding one of my sixth-grade report cards, he notes, “I saw your report, I am very glad that you have shown in French and mathematics that you can do it well, but what about English?”14 Nothing short of perfection would satisfy him, and it didn't take me long to internalize those standards. Oddly enough, though, his demands didn't cause me particular stress during my precollege years because I loved learning new things, was both very competitive and very successful where school was concerned, and found meeting his expectations an enjoyable challenge.
In many of these letters, my father included tidbits of information that he thought would interest me. In one, for example, he enclosed several samples of the paper money, with its endless strings of zeroes, issued by the Hungarian government during the postwar hyperinflation, explaining carefully the denomination of each. He took for granted that I would understand his precise, complex explanations: “Actually, the dollar went to something like a septillion pengos [the Hungarian currency]. Towards the end of the inflation the price of fat was over one pengo per molecule.”15
In return, I wrote him affectionate letters telling him how much I missed him and, in one, describing my fascination, which I knew would please him, with a science assembly at school that had explained the workings of radar and the cathode ray tube and demonstrated the effects of fluorescent and incandescent light on various crystals.16 In another, which Klari and I wrote jointly during one of his many wartime absences, every other sentence was signed “your neglected family (Klari); the slap-happy females (Marina).”17 My ten-year-old view of the war's end is reflected in a letter I wrote to Klari a few days after Japan's surrender: “Isn't it wonderful that the war is over?…Is Daddy still going to travel so much now that the war is over? I hope not.”18
During the summer of my eleventh year, my father and I drove alone across the country in one of his substitutes for a tank—in this case, a large Buick. Our ultimate destination was Santa Barbara, California, where Klari would join us and she and I would enjoy life on the beach while he went off on a secret trip somewhere in the Pacific, a “somewhere” that was later revealed as Bikini, a tiny atoll in the Marshall Islands group that had been captured from the Japanese. There, in the summer of 1946, the United States, having more or less forcibly removed the 167 residents to another island, conducted the first of a series of atomic bomb, and later hydrogen bomb, tests code-named Operation Crossroads. As one of the creators of these weapons, my father was there to observe the results.
Our cross-country trip was uneventful, miraculously unmarred by any of my father's notorious car accidents. We stayed in a series of prewar motels, unprepossessing strings of small cottages, a few of them still with outdoor plumbing, which we both regarded as a hilarious adventure. When we stopped in Santa Fe, he bought me two silver and turquoise belts made by local Indians. They would be worth a minor fortune today, if only I had managed to keep track of them. I felt snugly enveloped in a leisurely span of time that existed just for the two of us, in contrast to the hectic encounters, marked by hurried arrivals and departures, I had grown used to.
Once we reached Los Alamos, my father exuded boyish enthusiasm as he showed me around those areas I was allowed to enter—all the buildings where bomb-related work was conducted remained strictly off-limits—and introduced me to some of his colleagues from the Manhattan Project. Chief among them were Stan and Françoise Ulam. Ulam, a Polish-born mathematician who had arrived in the United States in 1935 and quickly become one of my father's closest friends, had stayed on to work in Los Alamos after the war was over. The secret city, whose existence had been revealed less than a year before, looked amazingly primitive to my citified eyes, with muddy paths instead of sidewalks and open stairs leading up to second-floor apartments in flimsy wooden buildings. I now began to understand where my father had been and what he had been doing during the war years, and the intensity of the residents' commitment to an Allied victory was brought home to me when I saw the physical discomfort his colleagues had been willing to put up with.
Not long after that trip, about the time Brookhaven Laboratory actually began to function on Long Island and the Kuper household moved from New York to the small town of Bayport on the island's Great South Bay, my twelfth birthday arrived. With it came the long-planned move from my mother's household to my father's during the school year. My parents, concerned about my likely reaction and perhaps each hoping that the other would break the news, had delayed telling me about this long-standing agreement until the move was nearly upon me. I had always handled the shuttling between two households with aplomb, but I was shaken on learning that my base would now shift from one to the other, and furious that no one had consulted me or even told me about it far enough in advance to allow me to get my mind around the idea.
Although I acquiesced without outward objection, not wanting to hurt or alienate any of the adults involved, the shift in households was an emotional wrench. Soon after moving to Princeton, I wrote nostalgically, in a school assignment, about the Long Island family I had just left: “The commander-in-chief is Mother. Good-looking, and with a wonderful flair for clothes, she seems to have energy enough for three, managing to hold down a full-time-job, run a household and, in her spare time, lead a dazzling social life…Her nature is a wonderful mixture of contradictions; her unreasonable temper is as terrifying as her warm-hearted generosity is gratifying.”
“My stepfather…is quite different from Mother, quiet and cautious, seeming to take a very serious view of life but often bursting forth with something really funny when we least expect it…Although usually quiet and undemanding, he really comes into his own on the boat, where he is complete master and a stern tyrant. It is there, watching the delighted little boy playing with his marvelous toy, that we love him the most.”
Although my mother's dominating personality and my stepfather's response through what would today be termed passive aggression were creating tensions in this marriage even as I wrote, they did not come to the surface until much later. My view at the time, doubtless heightened by the fact that blessings brighten as they take flight, was that “as a unit, they are one of the happiest, most closely-knit families I know.” I was both angry and apprehensive at the thought of leaving this comfortable nest for one less familiar and, I already foresaw, more complicated.