“How do you like your eggs cooked, Daddy?” I asked on one of the first mornings of my new life at 26 Westcott Road, the big white colonial house in the elegant western section of Princeton that was now my home during the school year. This homely question about his breakfast was my awkward attempt to start building a normal father-daughter relationship with a parent who had so far moved in and out of my life with unsettling frequency. Neither one of us knew exactly how to go about it, but we were both determined to try. I sensed that every aspect of our relationship—his genuine affection for me and his yearning for it to be returned, his stratospheric expectations for my academic achievement, his treatment of me as an intellectual equal even as he played the role of an old-fashioned father in matters relating to my behavior, my social life, and even my allowance—were going to be at the center of my life for the next few years. On his side, my father wanted desperately to make up for lost time in creating the emotional bond that should have been building gradually over the years.
It didn't take me long to figure out that I had walked into an emotional minefield. Despite his brilliance and outward sociability, my father was both inept and insecure in handling the intimacies of marriage. I couldn't ignore the tensions in his relationship with Klari, tensions that leaped from every page of the letters he wrote almost daily, throughout their nearly twenty-year marriage, whenever they were apart.
A painful theme ran through nearly all these letters, which I read only long after they were both dead: his despair over the fact that they seemed to quarrel whenever they were together, his assurances that he adored her, and his vacillation between self-defense and self-flagellation for whatever sin of commission or omission she had most recently taxed him with. In her eyes, it seemed, he could do nothing right. Yet he worked constantly to bolster her fragile ego: “You are nice and clever and intelligent, believe in yourself.” Beset by the chronic depression and profound insecurity that would haunt her for the rest of her life, she could not be reassured. Once I had intruded on this already fragile relationship, both Klari and I found ourselves competing for my father's attention not only with each other but with what remained throughout his life his central preoccupation: the output of his brilliant mind.
As the threat to American security shifted from the defeated Axis powers to the increasingly menacing Soviet Union, my father's focus shifted as well. As he described it to his friend and colleague, physicist Freeman Dyson, “I am thinking about something much more important than bombs. I am thinking about computers.”1 He had first become seriously involved with computers when he was introduced to an early electronic version, the ENIAC, being built at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania under contract with the Army's Ballistics Research Laboratory (BRL) at the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland.
The original goal was to use the machine for the incredibly complex calculations required to develop mathematical tables to guide the trajectories of guns and bombs, but it was eventually enlisted to study the feasibility of a variety of ideas generated at Los Alamos, including the development of an effective trigger for the hydrogen bomb. The ENIAC could perform in hours or days calculations that required hundreds or thousands of person-hours when performed by hand by the large group of women, actually called “calculators,” whom the army had recruited as civilian employees.
The ENIAC was a huge advance, but it still couldn't keep up with the computational demands placed on it, primarily because it had to be physically rewired, a time-consuming process, every time a new problem came along. In a 1945 paper, a group led by my father proposed changes in the logical design of the computer's memory to turn it into an “electronic brain” that could store not only data but instructions (programs, later called software) to perform different kinds of logical functions. This design, known ever since as the “von Neumann architecture,” was used to retrofit the ENIAC into a primitive version of the modern stored-program computer. Computer-related conversations filled the adults' dinnertime conversations at home, and Klari even named her Irish setter puppy Inverse, after one of the computational problems that weighed on my father and some of his close colleagues.
Now my father was determined to build a machine embodying the von Neumann architecture from scratch, and to do it on his own home ground, the Institute for Advanced Study. It was not an easy battle. Money had to be found, a team assembled, and above all, he had to overcome the determined opposition of his colleagues on the IAS's Mathematics Faculty. They regarded his dream as an engineering project, totally inappropriate in an institution devoted to abstract thought. And once he was able to get the project under way, the practical obstacles were formidable. The transistor that made miniaturization possible had not yet been invented, so the machine had to be constructed from bulky vacuum tubes. The result was that the completed computer, with only a millionth of the computing power of the flash drive we hang on our keychain, filled a brick building of its own. It overheated at the slightest provocation and quit functioning for a thousand different reasons—once because a mouse had gotten inside and chewed on some wires. My usually irrepressible father often came home for dinner tired and discouraged, but as determined as ever to see the project through.
Although my father had hoped that his computer could be built in three years, it actually took six, from 1946 until 1952, before a celebratory cocktail party was in order. The party at our house had as its centerpiece an ice-carved model of the computer, which my father dubbed the MANIAC but later was given a less playful designation as the IAS machine. The vacuum tubes were represented by silver thumbtacks, which of course started falling out as the ice melted. Margaret Rabi and I kept busy for a while replacing the fallen tacks, but eventually entropy defeated us and the computer became a formless puddle.
The fate of the celebratory ice carving was, in a way, emblematic of the fate of the IAS machine itself. Opposition on the part of much of the institute's faculty never really faded, and, once my father had gone to Washington in 1955 to serve on the Atomic Energy Commission, some members of his team departed and the ones that remained were poorly treated. At his death, in 1957, the computer project was closed, and the institute's faculty passed a motion decreeing that henceforth no experimental science would be conducted there.
The machine itself, superseded by newer and faster models with the same basic von Neumann architecture, was dismantled and the brick building in which it was housed became a storage unit for cleaning and maintenance materials. Today it is shared by a fitness facility and a preschool for the offspring of visiting members at the institute. Until recently, a segment of the machine, which had been donated to the Smithsonian, was on display in one of its buildings, the National Museum of American History. With the latest remodeling, that, too, has been consigned to attic storage. But its millions, nay billions, of progeny shape nearly every moment of our waking lives.
My father had no inkling of the ways in which his invention would revolutionize our world. He expected that the whole world wouldn't need more than a few, perhaps a dozen, computers, since their purpose was cutting-edge research with huge computational requirements. His immediate goal was more accurate weather forecasting; he saw it as the first step toward control of the weather, which, he believed, would become a more effective weapon than bombs in future conflicts. But the notion that computers would sit on millions of desktops and in millions of pockets, would be used to transmit business documents, love letters, and pornography instantaneously across the miles, and would set adults to fulminating about the time their children waste on computer games—all this was beyond his wildest imagining, although the ubiquity of computer games might have appealed to the childlike, playful side of his nature.
When he was at home, the main private time my father and I had together was in the morning, before his workday and my school day began. Klari generally slept late in her own bedroom; she was so grouchy in the morning that waking her up before I left for school was a task I dreaded. So I would fix breakfast for both of us, and we would talk as we ate. My father enjoyed teasing me, and he fell into the habit of calling it “a dying father's last request” when he asked me to fetch him the newspaper or toast him a second English muffin. When he really was dying, and the requests he made of me took on a new urgency, he never used this phrase, but the memory of its use in happier times sharpened my pain and, very possibly, his.
It wasn't easy to penetrate the surface cheerfulness and bonhomie with which my father armed himself against the world, to reach the deeply cynical and pessimistic core of his being. Indeed, I was frequently confused when he shifted, without warning, from one of these personas to the other—one minute he would have me laughing at his latest outrageous pun and the next he would be telling me, quite seriously, why all-out atomic war was almost certainly unavoidable. But I enjoyed being talked to as an equal and cherished the glimpses he gave me into the complex, fascinating world in which he lived. I could not, and still cannot, begin to penetrate the realms of higher mathematics that occupied so much of his thoughts, and to which he made such major contributions. But I could follow and relish his humor-laced accounts of his dealings with a wide range of people and institutions, and his opinions on world affairs.
Just in time for these breakfasts, my father would change from his striped pajamas into the three-piece banker's suit, complete with watch chain across the vest, that he habitually wore, no matter what the occasion. In all our years together, I never saw him wear anything else. There is even a famous photograph of him—first published in a Life magazine article just after his death—in a train of people descending the Grand Canyon on mules. Whereas everyone else is wearing blue jeans and sitting on a downward-facing mule, my father, dressed in his usual three-piece suit and necktie, is perched on a mule facing in the opposite direction.
His mode of dress, however incongruous at times, suited him well and lent dignity to his rotund frame, which Klari described in her autobiography as “roly-poly…babyishly plump and round, like a child's drawing of the man in the moon.”2 Sometimes, at a particularly lively party, he would top the outfit with some sort of funny hat. Especially memorable was the half pineapple, immortalized in a photograph, that sat comically atop his round face and balding curly head.
That picture reflects yet another aspect of my father's complex personality: his love of children's toys. Three of his particular favorites sat on his desk, and he often studied them intensely for long periods of time. These were a bird perched upright on a metal stand that would lean over to drink from a water glass and then right itself on a precise schedule; a handblown glass tube filled with soap bubbles; and a wooden disc with everyday objects (a heart and a four-leaf clover, for example) painted on its face and a metal pointer that, when spun, would land on one or another of them.
When I asked him why he found these toys so fascinating, he explained that each embodied some principle of mathematics or physics. Watching the changing pattern of the soap bubbles after he shook the glass tube, he contemplated the effect of surface tension in making them obey the law of entropy; noting where the pointer on the wooden disc landed on spin after spin stimulated his ideas about the laws of probability. Had LEGOs been available at the time, he might have built a model of his computer from them.
Because my father traveled so much, a great deal of my time was spent with Klari. She had the best of intentions toward me, and I had had fun with her during the years when I was just visiting; but her neurotic personality and profound sense of insecurity had ill-prepared her for her new role. To make things tougher, her new charge was neither infant nor toddler but an awkward near adolescent, already taller than she, who arrived with a very clear view of how a mother should look and act and sent unspoken but clear messages that she didn't measure up. Her sometimes clumsy attempts at discipline infuriated me, and I found her frequently tense exchanges with my father emotionally wearing. She persuaded my father to buy elaborate gifts for me when I was a teenager—a fur coat, an evening gown from Paris, even a small car for my sixteenth birthday—but somehow these fell short of the mark, embarrassing me because they marked me as different from my friends.
Once I was an adult and had children of my own, I felt considerable sympathy toward Klari and her efforts at parenting. This sympathy increased when I learned two secrets that had been assiduously kept from me: that her father had committed suicide by jumping under a train shortly after her marriage to my father; and that she had had a late-term miscarriage, which she blamed on my father for not having been around to help her lift a heavy garage door. But at the time, ignorant of these tragedies, dealing with the emotional turmoil of adolescence, and struggling to adjust to a new and different home life, I had little thought to spare for other people's emotional problems. In fact, when Klari became too irritating, I would tell my father bluntly, “If you don't get her off my back, I'm going back to Long Island,” despite what the divorce agreement said. Today I'm ashamed of this emotional blackmail, but at the time I used it as the only weapon I had in the struggle to keep my home environment emotionally tolerable.
Whenever my father and Klari were both traveling, Granny Gitta came down to Princeton from New York. She had been living with my father's younger brother Mike ever since Johnny, the oldest sibling, had persuaded his widowed mother and two younger brothers to come to the United States shortly before war broke out in Europe. She had been a beauty in her day, the adored wife of her husband Max. When the patent of nobility bestowed on my grandfather by the Austro-Hungarian emperor in 1913 entitled the family to its own heraldic crest, the one Max designed was emblazoned with three daisies—or marguerites—in honor of his wife, Margaret.
My father and his mother were very close; in fact, I sometimes think that he was more emotionally attached to her than to either of his wives. By the time I knew her she was a tall, thin, chain-smoking lady, still elegant, though given to wearing too much bright-red lipstick, which bled into the wrinkles bordering her upper lip. Now that I am about the age she was then, I take inordinate pains to prevent my own lipstick from creating that same effect, which was imprinted on my child's mind as one of the more unattractive symbols of old age.
Still, I loved having Granny Gitta in charge. She did wonderful handiwork—knitting, crocheting, embroidery—and, although none of these talents rubbed off on me, I delighted in going through fascinating books of Hungarian designs that she brought with her to choose the right pattern for her next project. She cooked odd but delicious things for dinner, like fried bread, a staple of the Hungarian peasant diet. And, above all, she didn't shout. My memories of this period in my life are filled with parents and their partners shouting at one another, constantly caught up in some emotional Sturm und Drang. Granny Gitta was as tightly wound and tense as any of the others, but she was outwardly calm and gentle with me.
The move to Princeton gave me the opportunity, once again, to go to a truly remarkable school. The quality of education delivered at Miss Fine's School for Girls totally belied its prissy, finishing-school name. Within the walls of a converted mansion in the middle of town, the environment was one of an intellectual intensity that could perhaps be achieved, in the 1950s, only in a single-sex institution. Many of our teachers were brilliant women who today would be doctors, lawyers, or, most likely, professors at first-class colleges or universities, but for whom already-limited opportunities were narrowed further by the fact that they were faculty wives or otherwise tied geographically to the Princeton area.
Not only did we get first-class instruction in the usual basic high-school subjects, but if three or more students wanted a more advanced class in Latin or Greek or calculus, one of the faculty members would teach it. We read Racine and Molière in French class, Virgil and Ovid in Latin. But what really stretched us to our intellectual limits were the history and English classes taught, in alternate years, by Anne Shepherd.
Mrs. Shepherd, a Vassar graduate divorcée with a brilliant only son (who, tragically, grew up to become one of the first American casualties in the Vietnam War), was the sort of teacher who comes along once in a lifetime. Surely everyone in our class could not have been geniuses, but she somehow inspired us to think and probe and imagine as if we were. When, in 1965, Miss Fine's School merged with its male counterpart, Princeton Country Day School, to become the Princeton Day School (PDS), Mrs. Shepherd's intellectual passion and brilliance proved as effective with adolescent boys as it was with adolescent girls. When she died, at the age of ninety, she was still teaching, as a volunteer in the Princeton Adult School. And today plaques in the library, the computer center, and an assembly hall, as well as a bust in an outdoor garden at PDS, honor her memory.
The results of this nurturing were amazing. Four of the twelve members of my senior class applied to Radcliffe College, the women's branch of Harvard, which in those days conducted a nationwide test in English literature for all applicants. One day in the spring of our senior year, the headmistress of Miss Fine's received a phone call from the president of Radcliffe, inquiring about the school. She told him it was a private school for girls in Princeton, New Jersey, then asked why he wanted to know. It turned out that the four applicants from Miss Fine's had placed something like first, third, sixth, and ninth in that competitive exam (I placed third).
Some of us not only stretched our minds for Anne Shepherd but we also opened our hearts in candid outpourings of our hopes and fears. In one essay, written loosely in the form of a poem, I described the stage of life I was going through.
Adolescence is a bittersweet hour
Between childhood and the time
When we meet the world face to face,
And become a part of it. Now all
Is new, confusing, the joys so strange,
So sharp, that they are almost pains.
…
…Now the warm,
Close security of childhood dissolves
And we see the world, a frightening place
But, oh, so tempting, promising success,
Yet warning of a thousand pitfalls on the way.
Will we succeed or fail, will happiness be ours,
Or grief? Will we even have a chance to try
This world, or will everything end tomorrow
In a blinding ball of flame? No one knows.
We can only work, and hope, and think.
And, in the dark, become children again,
And dream.
Also stashed in my attic is a yellowed copy of a paper I wrote in tenth grade, tracing the literary history of a classic morality tale, the battle for his soul between Dr. Faustus and the Devil, which had grown and developed in several languages over hundreds of years. When, as a college freshman, I went out for coffee with a Harvard PhD candidate in English whom I had just met at an informal dance, the man who was to become my husband swears that it was my ability to talk knowledgeably about such an arcane subject that first made him take serious notice of a seventeen-year-old. And there is no question that the intellectual challenges my classmates and I received and rose to at Miss Fine's, and the self-images they nurtured, created a firm foundation for the intellectual self-confidence that I carried into adulthood. As an early and often lonely entrant into professional arenas dominated by men, that faith in myself was an absolutely essential ingredient.
My classmates and I spent a lot of time in earnest discussions about the dangers of another global conflict; my own pessimism regarding the inevitability of war reflected my father's views, spelled out in the letter he had written to Klari in 1946 predicting another world war within the next decade. Hoping to avert catastrophe, several of us joined an idealistic organization called the World Federalists, whose goal was to create a world government, a gesture that doubtless earned me a spot on some FBI list of members of subversive organizations. Even then I admitted in a school essay how naive the movement was, but concluded, “There seems to be only a very slight chance that the idea will work, but even that slight chance is worth working for if it could mean the prevention of the almost inevitable next war.” My efforts to bring about world government did not survive my adolescence, but a commitment to greater coordination of national policies in a world grown increasingly interdependent has infused my entire career.
The people and the conversations around my father's dinner table were even more important than my school environment in expanding my teenage horizons. Some of them were leading mathematicians and scientists, many were fellow Hungarians transplanted to the New World, and all of them were brilliant. Among them were two friends from his high-school years in Budapest—the physicists Edward Teller and Eugene Wigner. The gruff, beetle-browed Teller, who spoke in staccato sentences that called to mind the firing of a repeater rifle, had been a colleague of my father's at Los Alamos. There he had not only played an important role in the development of the atomic bomb but became the major proponent of building the even more powerful hydrogen bomb. Slight, balding, soft-voiced Wigner, whose rabbitlike buck teeth made him speak with a lisp, also worked on the Manhattan Project, and he eventually won a Nobel Prize for his work on atoms and elementary particles. In his later years he went a bit batty, becoming a supporter of the Unification Church, which he hoped might offer a path toward world peace and thus an escape from the vision of wholesale destruction that his work had helped create.
These three men were linked not only by their Jewish Hungarian backgrounds and their scientific achievements but also by the vehemence of their anticommunist views. In this they were joined by yet another Hungarian, Arthur Koestler, the dark, brooding former communist whose novel, Darkness at Noon, became one of the most powerful exposés of the cruelties of Soviet communism ever written. In a paper I wrote at the time, tracing the evolution of communism through the lens of three political novels (Man's Fate by André Malraux, Bread and Wine by Ignazio Silone, and Koestler's Darkness at Noon), I noted that Koestler's was “the most hopeless of the three,” a reflection of his deep pessimism and, probably, chronic depression.
Another Hungarian who appeared often at our house couldn't have been more different from the brooding Koestler. He was short, urbane, wise-cracking Emery Reves, a close friend and confidante of Winston Churchill, whose last-minute escape from his Nazi pursuers was worthy of an episode in the Perils of Pauline. The most frequent dinner guest of all was yet another refugee from the former Austro-Hungarian Empire, Oskar Morgenstern, the tall, rigidly handsome, and forbidding-looking economist and Princeton professor who coauthored The Theory of Games and Economic Behavior with my father. Unlike the others, Morgenstern had deserted Austria for the United States not because he was Jewish—his mother was an illegitimate daughter of the German emperor Frederick III—but because he couldn't stand the thought of living and working under Hitler's regime after Germany annexed Austria in the Anschluss of 1938.
Regrettably, we never had all these men gathered at Klari's elegant glass-topped dining table at the same time—what a conversation that would have been! But even one at a time, their rapid-fire interchanges with my father, whether in the form of “can you top this” joke contests or sophisticated discussions of geopolitics, expanded my horizons far beyond the purview of an American teenager. Still, I often chafed at the adults' long, drawn-out conversations over coffee, which kept me from getting back to my homework and endless phone calls with my friends. I found Koestler's unrelieved pessimism much harder to take than the ever-merry Reves's anecdotes about his narrow escapes or Winston Churchill's foibles, but it certainly inoculated me against any belief in easy solutions to the precarious state of the world in the 1950s. This was a time when people were building bomb shelters in their basements or backyards and schoolchildren regularly ducked under their desks or filed into cellars in drills to prepare for an atomic attack.
A lot of what I learned, though, had less to do with science or politics or world affairs than with intimate human relationships. The formal, correct, “confirmed bachelor” Oskar Morgenstern courted his beautiful redheaded wife Dorothy in our living room, and Emery Reves's tall, bottle-blonde girlfriend from Texas, Wendy, made no bones about her efforts to enlist my father and stepmother's aid in persuading Reves to make an honest woman of her. Eventually they were married, and, despite her brassy looks and smoke-roughened voice, she proved a devoted helpmeet, attending to his every need and whim throughout the rest of his life.
Perhaps the most startling lesson of all came from Arthur Koestler, who lived only a few miles from Princeton and was a frequent dinner guest. Despite the fact that he was unusually short, with a perpetual scowl and a face only a mother could love, he often appeared with a beautiful young woman in tow. I was appalled to learn, a few days after one of these visits, that his companion that evening had committed suicide. I was even more horrified when, only a week or two later, Koestler came to dinner again, this time with an equally lovely lady who, I later learned, had become both his secretary and his mistress. My sensibilities were so outraged that I refused to speak to either of them, despite my father's and Klari's pleadings that I stop being so rude.
That mistress, Cynthia Jeffries, eventually became Koestler's third wife and died with him in a suicide pact in 1983. Why Cynthia, much younger than the terminally ill Koestler and apparently in good health, chose to die with him has never been explained. But, remembering the sheer force of Koestler's personality, his well-known ability to press his girlfriends and wives into performing as his secretaries and maids, and the ferocity of his emotions, I wasn't surprised.
The long, serious dinner conversations exposed me to one face of my father's social world; the cocktail parties at 26 Westcott Road showed me a different one. My father and mother had hosted legendary parties in Princeton before the war, my mother and Desmond had done the same in Cambridge during the conflict, and now my father and Klari carried on the tradition in their large, handsome house ideally suited to entertaining. These events brought out my father's fun-loving side, displayed in his enjoyment of children and children's toys, his renowned stock of dirty limericks, his ability to down a remarkable number of martinis without any sign of impairment, and his fondness for ridiculous party hats. But the serious side of his nature was never far below the surface; he was known to disappear suddenly from one of his own parties to work on some mathematical problem, then reappear as suddenly as he had vanished and resume his good-fellow role.
Occasionally my father would take me to the ritual four o'clock tea in the institute's vast and elegant common room, where the resident geniuses would gather daily for cookies and conversation. Albert Einstein generally stood off in one corner, either alone or in close conversation with his one good friend, the brilliant but mentally unbalanced mathematician Kurt Gödel. My father didn't try to intrude on Einstein's isolation. The two had once been both socially and scientifically intimate, but they had grown increasingly apart, both personally and in their views on developments in physics—whereas my father had embraced quantum mechanics, Einstein rejected the uncertainty that was fundamental to that theory with the much-quoted comment, “I am convinced that He [God] does not play dice.”
My father had become an insider in both the world of mathematics and physics and the American military-industrial complex, as comfortable speaking and writing in English as in Hungarian. Einstein, a steadfast pacifist during the heat of the Cold War, remained “an outsider in his adopted country, never accepting the professional mores or mastering the national language.”3 This outsider status was solidified by his widower status and his growing frustration over his inability to achieve his life's goal—the development of a unifying theory to explain within a single framework the four fundamental forces that bind all matter.
My attitude toward the unique experiences afforded by living under my father's roof was ambivalent. I was stimulated by the range of intellects and personalities I encountered there, but I was discomfited by the growing recognition, as I compared my world to that of my classmates, that ours was hardly a regular American family. I relished opportunities to visit households very different from my own and become part of them, however temporarily. I spent every moment I could with one particular friend, Leslie, even though she lived in a cramped apartment where I had to sleep on the couch when I spent the night and it was difficult to escape the presence of her alcoholic parents. The offbeat casualness of their world attracted me, and it was only in adulthood, as I saw Leslie's own life gradually destroyed by alcohol, that I recognized I had been witnessing not an enviable family life but a multigenerational tragedy.
While I was absorbing the complexities of social interactions among grown-ups, I was having the usual adolescent struggles over my own relationships with the opposite sex. My Miss Fine's classmates and I were labeled “townies” by Princeton undergraduates, potential dates when older and more desirable female companionship, imported from Smith or Vassar or other points north, was unavailable. We knew full well how we were regarded, but that didn't prevent us from responding eagerly to invitations to parties at the eating clubs that were, in those days, the center of undergraduate social life at Princeton. By the time I was a senior, my father and Klari succumbed to my unrelenting pressure and, somewhat reluctantly, allowed me to participate in these events as long as I obeyed the curfew they set.
I soon figured out how to turn my position of weakness into strength. Princeton undergraduates were not allowed to have cars and, given the tendencies of many of them to overimbibe, a number of lives were doubtless saved as a result. I, on the other hand, did have a car and was by nature abstemious. The party evenings often ended with me unceremoniously depositing my inebriated date on the sidewalk in front of his dormitory. This early role reversal reassured my parents and may well have helped stiffen my spine for future academic and professional competition with the opposite sex.
My mother may not have been the custodial parent during my adolescence, but she remained a forceful presence in my life and was the source of some very mixed signals I was getting about what was important and what my priorities should be. The example she set by her life was of a smart, strong, energetic woman who could not only succeed in a man's world but also leave her mark on it. Yet she was constantly anxious that I not “let my brains show too much,” lest I scare off the boys and find myself a permanent wallflower. Always glamorous herself, she put a heavy stress on physical attractiveness, and her very efforts to improve mine made it clear that she wished she had better material to work with.
She made that clear when she was helping me to get ready for a dance at the country club near their home on Long Island, where I spent my summers. I was an awkward sixteen, mildly overweight and recovering from a bad case of poison ivy that had left my face red and scaly. She had bought me a very pretty dress—white, off the shoulder, and sprinkled with dainty flowers—and worked what magic she could with my makeup and hair. When she was done, she stood back to survey her handiwork and commented, “Jesus Christ, I'm glad I'm not sixteen!” I got the message and went off to the party feeling more than ever like a clumsy cow; my social self-confidence, always shaky, took a steep downward plunge. Between my father's expectations for academic performance and my mother's about appearance and social success, I had my work cut out for me.
During the summer vacation before I started college, I bowed to my mother's pressure to improve my appearance and had cosmetic surgery done to change the shape of my nose. I hesitated to tell my father because I was sure he would disapprove. But the letter he wrote in response to my news reassured me. After congratulating me, as he always did, on my excellent report card, noting that “of course, we have grown used to this,” he added, “I also think that it [the nose job] was sillyness [sic], 200 proof, but then that's the normal condition of the world. It must be admitted, though, that at least according to one usually well informed source, had Cleopatra's nose been half an inch longer the course of whatever it was would have been different.”
In that same letter, he replied to one I had apparently written him, thanking him for the years I had spent under his roof: “For me, too, the years that we spent together are unforgettable, and the more so, because that phase of our lives is past. It has all the heartrending quality of a very fine and delicate thing that is gone. The future might be good—for you it should be better—but it will not be the same. Yet, since we will now both be “adults” (Heaven knows what that means…) we will have more to say to each other, and I hope that we will say it. There is a well-defined limit up to which I should interfere or appear in your life, but I hope that we will, even so, have much in common.”
I was deeply moved by my father's marking this rite of passage with such tenderness, and such a touching sense of vulnerability. At the same time, now that I was going off to college, I was relieved that I would no longer have to cope full time with the emotional whirlwind at 26 Westcott Road. And I was exhilarated by my newly acquired independence from my parents' divorce agreement, which gave me the freedom to make my own choices about where and with whom I would spend my time. Both my father and I believed that we had used the years together to establish a solid basis for our relationship as two adults. We could not foresee that this relationship would be cut mercilessly short, and that it would be marred by a more painful conflict than either of us could imagine.