1956–57
ALTHOUGH NASH WAS TO SPEND the year at the Institute for Advanced Study, he decided to live in New York instead of Princeton.1 Within a day or two of coming to the city in late August, he found an unfurnished apartment on Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village just south of Washington Square Park, a street lined with jazz clubs, Italian cafés, and secondhand book shops. The apartment was a typical railroad flat, small, dingy, and suffused with smells of his neighbors’ cooking. Nash bought a few pieces of used furniture from a local junk dealer and sent his parents a postcard proclaiming a sentiment that they would be sure to approve, namely, that he’d rather save money than live luxuriously.2
But his reasons for choosing a five-story walk-up in downtown New York over a spartan flat on Einstein Drive in quasirural Princeton were more romantic than practical. The towering scale of the city, with its frenetic rhythms, ever-present crowds, and round-the-clock activity — “the wild electric beauty of New York”3 — seemed wonderful to him, always had, from the first time Shapley and Shubik had invited him, when all three were living in the Graduate College at Princeton, to come up for a weekend. After he’d moved to Boston, he had seized every opportunity to return, sometimes staying with the Minskys,4 just to reexperience that sensation of simultaneous connectedness and anonymity. The bohemian enclave around Washington Square had long been a magnet for those who were sexually and spiritually unconventional, and Nash too was attracted to its crooked streets, Old World charm, and implied promise of freedom.
• • •
If the decision to move to Bleecker Street meant that Nash was toying with adopting a different sort of life from the one he had hitherto imagined for himself, it was not to be. John Sr. and Virginia announced that they too were coming to New York.5 John Sr. had some business to transact for the Appalachian. Nash feared that they would confront him again on the subject of Eleanor. But the Nashes were even more preoccupied with the precarious state of John Sr.’s health at that moment. When Nash met them at the McAlpin Hotel, a few blocks from Penn Station, he tried to demonstrate that he was a loyal son by urging his father, several times in the course of the evening, to consult a specialist in New York. He told his father he ought to consider an operation.6 It was the last time Nash saw his father.
• • •
In early September, John Sr. suffered a massive heart attack.7 Virginia had a difficult time reaching Nash, who had no telephone. By the time she got a message to him, his father was already dead. Thereafter, he would think of fall as a season of “misfortunes.”8
John Sr., who was sixty-four at the time of his death, had been ill on and off all year. That Easter Sunday he had been feeling too unwell to go to Martha and Charlie’s house for dinner (Martha had married in the spring of 1954). And in late summer when he and Virginia were in New York, he suffered from a spell of weakness and nausea in the hotel.9 The news of his father’s death shocked Nash. He couldn’t fathom its suddenness, its finality. He was convinced that the death had not been inevitable, might have been prevented if only John Sr. had gotten better medical care, if only . . .10
Nash rushed to Bluefield to attend the funeral, which was held at Christ Episcopal Church on September 14, two days after John Sr. died.11
• • •
There was no outpouring of grief, no sign that Nash’s unnatural calm was shaken.12 But the death of his father produced another fissure in the foundation of Nash’s “perfect little world.” The loss of a parent before one has really stepped fully into one’s own adult life in the same role is a one-two punch — losing the father and having to step into the father’s shoes.
There was, for starters, a newfound sense of responsibility for Virginia’s welfare. It may not have signified much in practical terms, given that Martha lived in Roanoke and, as the female offspring, would have been expected to look after Virginia, but emotionally Nash was now in the hot seat. Suddenly, his mother’s wishes regarding him, in particular her intense desire that he adopt what she regarded as a “normal” life — that is, that he marry — weighed more heavily on him than at any time since he had left home for college.
For Nash this dilemma — and it was a dilemma, as his father’s shoes were not exactly the ones that he felt prepared to step into — was compounded by the particular circumstances of the summer. Nash’s misbehavior with regard to Eleanor and John David lay between him and Virginia. The thought that he had hastened his father’s death must have occurred to him. Or, if it didn’t — and this is certainly possible given Nash’s inability to imagine how his actions affected other people — the thought surely occurred to Virginia, who may have communicated it, indirectly or directly, to Nash. Virginia was not just grief-stricken but deeply angry. She wrote Eleanor a letter accusing her of causing her husband’s death. It is quite possible that she said something similar to her son, or implied as much.13
Such guilt would be a heavy burden to bear. More likely, it was not just the feeling of guilt, but also the more potent threat of losing his mother’s love on the heels of the actual loss of his father, that would have placed tremendous pressure on Nash to act. Virginia felt that Nash was duty bound to legitimize his relationship to his son. John Sr. had an abhorrence of scandal and a strong belief in doing one’s duty. Whether, by the time of her husband’s death, Virginia still persisted in the demand that Nash marry Eleanor isn’t clear. It may be that her contact with Eleanor — including the evidence of Eleanor’s lower-class origins, her lack of education, or her threats to make trouble for Nash — convinced her that even a temporary marriage was out of the question. She may have feared that Eleanor would never agree to a divorce. Or simply, she may have realized that she had no way of forcing Nash to do something that he did not wish to do.
If Virginia reacted so to Nash’s mistress and illegitimate son, how might she react to the far more disturbing facts of Nash’s liaisons with other men? As a practical matter, the likelihood of her ever finding out about the arrest seemed negligible. Yet that too must have crossed Nash’s mind. His confidence that he could keep his secret lives completely separate and keep his parents in the dark as well was jolted by Eleanor’s betrayal. He must have felt on his neck the hot breath of other potential discoveries.
• • •
In addition to commuting to the Institute in Princeton, Nash was spending a good deal of time at New York University, whose campus began a block north of Bleecker Street, at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences. One afternoon, very soon after his father’s funeral, Nash stopped at the desk of the beautiful Natasha Artin, the wife of Emil Artin and one of Richard Courant’s assistants. A famously gorgeous creature, Natasha had a doctorate from the University of Berlin, where she’d been a student of Artin’s before they married. Everyone knew that she was the latest object of Courant’s infatuation. Nash liked to chat with her on his way up to tea.
“I wonder how easy it is to get a divorce in New Jersey,” he said out of the blue one day to her.14 Natasha immediately took this for a declaration that he intended to get married. She found it quite typical of Nash to investigate the exit doors even as he was hovering near the entrance.
On another occasion, Nash gave a lecture at Chicago and had dinner afterward with Leo Goodman, a mathematician he knew from the graduate-school days in Princeton. He told Goodman that he thought Alicia would make a fine wife. Why? Because she watched so much television. That meant, he felt, that she wouldn’t require much attention from him.15 The exchange brings to mind Eleanor’s oft-repeated remark about Nash: “he always wanted something for nothing.”
Alicia has insisted that she cannot remember when Nash proposed or whether he did so in person or by letter.16 They simply had an understanding, she said. But Alicia’s actions that fall belie her later account. After Nash had left Cambridge in June, Alicia stayed on, desperately unhappy. All this suggests the opposite of any “understanding.”
Alicia’s letter to Joyce Davis on October 23, 1956, does not mention Nash at all. Presumably, if they’d gotten formally engaged by that date, Alicia would have announced the fact to Joyce.
As you might know I’ve been looking for a job in New York and had applied to several places. At first I was afraid things might prove difficult but so far I’ve already had offers from Brookhaven, as a junior physicist with the reactor group, and from the Nuclear Development Corporation of America also in the reactor field. I’m accepting the latter at $450 per month. I’m told I might get $500 some other place but I think N.D.C. offers good experience and I’ve always wanted to do nuclear physics specifically.17
It’s possible that Alicia would have left school and gotten a job regardless of the state of her relationship with Nash. She was increasingly unenthusiastic about attending graduate school. “I’m tired of the studying and procrastinating routine. . . . All I know is I want to ‘LIVE.’ ” Since she had gone to high school in New York, it would have been natural for her to think of returning there to work. But Alicia herself said later that she moved to New York on Nash’s account. She may have gone there in the hopes of renewing her relationship with him. She may have gone at his express invitation.
• • •
Alicia moved into the Barbizon Hotel, the legendary hotel for young women that is the setting of Sylvia Plath’s fifties novel The Bell Jar. References were required to obtain lodging there. And the rooms, tiny and white with metal beds, were only for sleeping, Alicia complained in a PS to Joyce.18 “This hotel — the Amazon — was for women only,” writes Plath, who spent the summer of 1952 in residence, “and they were mostly girls my age with wealthy parents who wanted to be sure their daughters would be living where men couldn’t get at them and deceive them; and they were all going to posh secretarial schools like Katy Gibbs, where they had to wear hats and stockings and gloves to class, or . . . simply hanging around in New York waiting to get married to some career man or other.”19
Whether or not Alicia came to New York as Nash’s fiancée at the end of October, she visited Nash’s family in Roanoke that Thanksgiving.20 Nash did not give her a ring, however. He had some idea, typically odd and pennypinching, that he wanted to buy one in Antwerp, directly from a diamond wholesaler.21
Virginia found Alicia charming and dignified and was impressed by Alicia’s obvious devotion to Nash, but at the same time she thought her quite different from the sort of girl she had imagined for her son’s bride.22 She thought the relationship between the two strange. Alicia was a physicist who talked about her job at a nuclear reactor company and displayed no interest in anything domestic, a young woman completely out of Virginia’s ken. While Virginia and Martha busied themselves in the kitchen, Alicia and Nash spent most of Thanksgiving Day sitting on the floor of Virginia’s living room poring over stock quotations. Martha’s reaction was similar to her mother’s. (At Virginia’s insistence, and thinking it might turn Alicia’s head in the right direction, Martha took Alicia shopping in Roanoke one afternoon to buy a hat.)
• • •
The wedding took place on an unexpectedly mild, gray February morning in Washington, D.C., at St. John’s, the yellow-and-white Episcopal church across Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House.23 Nash, by then an atheist, balked at a Catholic ceremony. He would have been happy to get married in city hall. Alicia wanted an elegant, formal affair. It was a small wedding. There were no mathematicians or old school friends present, only immediate family. Charlie, his brother-in-law, whom Nash hardly knew, was best man. Martha was matron of honor. Bride and groom were both late, having been held up at the portrait photographers. Nash and Alicia drove to Atlantic City for a weekend honeymoon on the way back to New York. It wasn’t a success. Alicia hadn’t been feeling well, Nash wrote in a postcard to his mother.24
In April, two months later, Alicia and Nash threw a party to celebrate their marriage. They were living in a sublet apartment on the Upper East Side, around the corner from Bloomingdale’s. About twenty people came, mostly mathematicians from Courant and the Institute for Advanced Study and several of Alicia’s cousins, including Odette and Enrique. “They seemed very happy,” Enrique Larde later recalled. “It was a great apartment. They were just showing off their new marriage. He looked very handsome. It seemed very romantic.”25