September 11
Jerry was right. Moving to MIT turned out to be a good idea in more ways than Dad and I had ever imagined. First of all since I’m grown-up now (five foot five and a half in track shoes), nobody on the campus whispers, raises eyebrows, or points fingers as I walk past. A lot of freshmen look my age, and one or two of them are actually younger.
There’s a math whiz from the Bronx High School of Science who’s only fifteen and—lucky guy—he’s got at least half a dozen kids his age to talk to. Probably the most amazing thing is that he lives in the dorm with other students.
Also I’m here incognito. This I owe to Karl, who arranged with the MIT press office not to make any noises about my arrival.
In a highly charged community like Cambridge, Mass., there are not as many undergraduates eager to pay thirty dollars an hour to be tutored by Isabel da Costa’s father. But fortunately, one of the conditions of the offer Karl struck for me with Tech (which is how the locals refer to MIT) is that—despite my dad’s objections—I’m obliged to work two afternoons a week as a teaching assistant instructing kids in the Intermediate Physics labs. My course work to prepare for the Ph.D. won’t pose a problem. The real challenge will be the dissertation. My M.A. thesis was a pretty hard act to follow. But I’ve got to come up with something even better—hopefully less controversial, if the two don’t necessarily go hand in hand. I find it incredible, but even now letters attacking me continue to fill the journals.
Dad says—not entirely in jest—that now I know how Galileo felt.
In a sense, Isabel da Costa was living a double life. First, her assault on the Fifth Force theory had given her a worldwide reputation. There were scientists both pro and con, and she was variously regarded as illustrious or notorious.
Yet, on the campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology she was just another grad student sweating out the requirements for her doctorate.
Perhaps her most significant accolade was a follow-up article by Karl Pracht in The Physical Review reporting that he had repeated the various experiments and that her refutation of his argument had been correct.
Although some of the students occasionally invited Isabel to join them for a dinner or the movies, she was forced to limit her social activities to Kaffee and Klatsch in the common room, which housed what passed for a coffee machine. Isabel’s day was divided between supervising and being supervised.
At MIT she encountered an array of new minds, if not more brilliant than those at Berkeley, at least with refreshing new hobbyhorses, for the university had no fewer than fifty full professors of physics.
Everyone on the faculty wanted to be her thesis adviser. For they knew wherever Isabel excavated, she would find gold and some of its glitter would inevitably shine on them.
As usual, she was breezing through her course work, and keeping the profs who taught her seminars on their toes. But they seemed to enjoy the challenge as much as she. In fact, Isabel could not recall ever being happier.
At least intellectually.
Even as a lowly T.A. she was granted a cubicle, grandiosely referred to as an office. But since it had a telephone and her very own computer terminal hooked into MITNet, the room had a legitimate claim to officiality.
In direct contrast to the unchanging routine of Isabel’s life, Jerry’s schedule was highly erratic: different cities, different time zones, different motels. But he never failed to phone her at a time when she would be able to talk privately.
Though they had not met face-to-face since midsummer, an astonishing intimacy was growing between them.
Jerry was young to be making the tour—especially on his own.
He was getting beaten fairly regularly, and began to count it a victory when he was not totally shut out by the big boys or speedily aced into oblivion.
Though not rising in the rankings, Jerry was nonetheless gaining a following—at least in Pracht’s lab. For his career gave the scientists an aura of athleticism by association. Whether he knew it or not, he was fast becoming a hero to dozens of sedentary physics types, for whom he was their vicarious Sir Lancelot.
Also, even when he appeared briefly on the Cable Sports Network enacting the minor role of straw man for superstars like André Agassi to dispatch, Jerry was holding his own in another department.
A great many of the female sports fans were more interested in the good looks of the players than the quality of their play. And here Jerry Pracht gave even the flam-boyant Agassi a run for his money.
Imagine the cannonade of emotions hitting Isabel all at once as she sat in the lounge watching him play, and hearing coeds sigh about his blond good looks.
She was at times joyful, proud, lonely—and embarrassed. For in one early qualifying round when Michael Chang took a mere forty-five minutes to relegate Jerry to the showers, a female graduate commented loudly, “Just imagine, that gorgeous hunk’ll be hanging around Houston with nothing to do. I feel like calling him up and offering my company.”
“You mean your services?” quipped a waggish undergraduate.
“Why not?” the girl replied. “He’s fair game, and so am I.”
“Well don’t get too excited, honey. A guy like that has probably got his choice of half a dozen consolation prizes waiting outside the locker room.”
This ostensibly harmless banter upset Isabel terribly, and she was barely able to reach the safety of her office before breaking into tears. To her delight, virtue was rewarded. Less than ten minutes later the phone rang.
“God, am I glad you’re there, Isa,” Jerry said with great relief as her heart soared. “I’m as depressed as hell. I just suffered a particularly ignominious defeat. Dink could have done better out there without a racket.”
Her instinct told her it would be prudent not to mention that she had seen the match. “Want to talk about it?” she asked.
“I really want to forget it,” he replied frankly. “But quite honestly, if I don’t at least bitch a little, I’ll never get it out of my system.”
He launched into a self-deprecatory tirade about his bad performance, which lasted almost as long as the game he had actually played.
“Hey, Isa, I’m sorry,” he said at last. “I know I’m boring you to stupefaction—”
“No, Jerry, that’s fine,” she reassured him.
“Part of the reason I was so upset,” he continued, “was that I knew Paco was watching the game. The minute I hang up he’ll chew me into little pieces. If I keep playing like this, I may not even get my job back at the club.”
“Now you cut it out, Pracht,” Isabel chided him. “I don’t know anything about sports, but I know everybody has a bad day. Tonight was just your turn.”
“Why is it, Isa,” he asked affectionately, “that even though that kind of pep talk is as stale as a week-old bagel, coming from you it somehow makes me feel good?”
His compliment thrilled her.
“Do you think it has something to do with the way I feel about you?”
I hope so, she thought to herself.
“Anyway,” he continued. “I know Paco’s going to pull me off the road for a week of drills. I’ll call you when I know where I am. By the way, if you ever feel as crappy as I did and want to lean on my shoulder—even over the goddamn phone—Dad can always get me.”
He was reluctant to end the conversation, for he had another reason for calling. Finally, he confessed softly, “Isabel, I really miss you. Sometimes I get these fits of insanity that make me want to smash all my rackets on the floor and fly to see you.”
She tried to conceal her excitement by joking, “And go back to school, of course.”
“No.” He laughed. “I haven’t gotten that crazy yet. Good night, girl wonder.”
As was their routine, Isabel would call Ray when she was ready to leave the lab, and he would come and walk her home—a prudent urban practice regardless of age.
“Get much done?” he asked as they strolled through the empty streets.
“A little,” she murmured, omitting to mention how much her heart was full of Jerry’s words.
“By the way,” her father remarked ingenuously, “I saw your old friend on television tonight.”
“Who’s that?” she asked offhandedly.
“Why, none other than young Pracht, who got positively blown off the court. I must say he’s not much of a tennis player.”
That’s okay, Dad, she thought. He’s a hell of a human being.
By contrast with his daughter, Ray had a great deal of time on his hands—from the moment he accompanied Isabel to the door of the lab until he picked her up at whatever hour they would arrange.
True enough, he occupied himself with all the domestic chores—cleaning, shopping, preparing the food—and then sitting down to read through the mass of publications Isabel now subscribed to, abstracting for her those he thought of importance.
Yet it was hardly a fulfilling life, and he knew it. Still worse, it became increasingly clear to him that Isabel knew it as well.
One morning when she arrived at the lab at eight o’clock, Isabel found a Post-It notice from Karl Pracht fluttering on her door, asking her to come and see him at her earliest convenience.
Puzzled, she hurried to his office. Befitting his rank, the spacious room had a panoramic view of the Charles and the shining towers of the city beyond.
He offered her a cup of real coffee from his percolator. She took a sip and then asked, “What’s this about?”
“Your dissertation, Isabel—or more specifically, lack of it. In all the time we’ve known each other, you’ve positively effervesced with theories, ideas, concepts—enough challenges to occupy the entire American Physical Society for a century. Isn’t it strange that you can’t settle on just one topic?”
Isabel shrugged.
“May I offer my own hypothesis?”
“It’s Ray, isn’t it?”
He looked at her, but she offered no comment.
“Isabel, sooner or later you’re going to write your thesis and you’ll be offered a cavalcade of professorships. At that point there’ll be no evading the fact that your father will have played out the last syllable of his role. He’ll have done his job brilliantly, and can rest comfortably on your laurels. But what the hell are you gonna do about him?”
For what seemed like an eternity, Isabel was mute. At last she protested weakly, “He needs me. He really needs me.”
“We both know that,” Pracht answered sympathetically. “The problem is, you no longer need him.”
“Karl, let me be perfectly honest with you about Dad.…” She hesitated, then said almost under her breath, “I’m scared out of my wits.”
The fax arrived late one autumn evening at the beginning of her second year at MIT. It had first been sent to the Department of Physics at Berkeley, the affiliation Isabel had listed in her controversial article.
The chairman then called the da Costa home in Cambridge. At first Isabel was surprised and delighted to hear her old adviser’s voice. After they had exchanged warm greetings, he said something which made her squeal with delight.
“Yes, that’d be great. Fax it to the department. I’m sprinting there so fast it’ll still be coming out of the machine. Thanks, thanks a million.”
She hung up and turned to Ray.
“You’ll never believe this, but the Italian Academy of Science has chosen me for this year’s Enrico Fermi Award.”
“The Fermi?” Raymond gasped. “That’s just about as close to the Nobel as you can get in physics. When’s the ceremony?”
“To be honest,” she said, still shaking her head in disbelief, “I was so knocked out by the news I can barely remember anything else he said. Anyway, it’ll be in the fax. Oh Daddy …” She dissolved into tears of joy and threw her arms around him.
As they embraced, she thought, I can’t wait till Jerry calls tonight.
“Isabel,” Ray murmured. “I’m so proud of you.”
“I couldn’t have done it alone, Dad,” she responded.
And as they hugged each other they realized something else that neither acknowledged: Isabel was now taller than her father.
The Enrico Fermi Prize was established by the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei in honor of the man who had been Professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of Rome. He was one of those rare scientists at home in the practical as well as the theoretical field.
After receiving a Nobel Prize in 1938, Fermi immediately escaped Mussolini’s fascism and emigrated to America, where he became a leading member of the team in Chicago that created the first sustained nuclear reaction—an experiment that culminated in the construction of the atomic bomb.
Like so many other scientific prizes, even the smaller ones, the award was not merely a plaque or statuette, but included a monetary gift as well. In Isabel’s case, her bold work in the area of high-energy physics had now earned her seventy-five thousand dollars.
Their 747 landed in Rome’s Leonardo da Vinci Airport at dawn. Three distinguished-looking gentlemen in charcoal-black suits met the da Costas as they disembarked: the president of the academy, Raffaele De Rosa, and two members of the executive committee.
As one of them presented the radiant, dark-eyed, sixteen-year-old with a large bouquet of flowers, what seemed like hundreds of cameras clicked and whirred from the roped-off areas beyond.
While the welcoming dignitaries were bowing and scraping and referring to her as Signorina da Costa, the paparazzi had no such reverence. Dozens of photographers shouted “Isabella, give us a smile!” “Run this way!” “Wave your hands to all of Italy.”
While their baggage was being fetched for them, Isabel and Raymond were ushered past customs. Then the trio led them out to where a stretch Mercedes limousine waited.
Raymond, who was unaccustomed to imbibing anything but Miller Lite, had found himself unable to resist the charms of the Alitalia stewardesses who had foisted upon him several glasses of Asti Spumante. He swayed slightly as he trudged along in the company of two professors of physics, following a few steps behind his prize-winning daughter.
On the long journey into the still-sleeping city, one of the scientists read off, in heavily accented textbook English, the timetable of events that had been meticulously planned by the organizers. It included press conferences, luncheons, more press conferences, television interviews, two dinners in her honor—one of them the night before the big event, when her stomach would already be full of butterflies. All this would be built into the ultimate apotheosis, the official presentation of the awards in the Aula Magna of the university.
Isabel was expected to make an acceptance speech, after which all would retire to the Hotel Excelsior for the grand banquet that would conclude the program.
While her father had spent most of the flight relishing the amenities of first class, she had used the time to pore over her speech, which would be carried live on RAI, the Italian national television network.
The committee had spared no expense to demonstrate their appreciation of the young physicist’s achievements. The da Costas’ luxurious quarters in the Excelsior, which they had reserved for them, were graced by at least a dozen different arrangements of flowers.
Instinct drew Isabel to the most lavish of the bouquets. As she suspected, it was from Jerry: “Break a leg. Love, J.”
She quickly hid the card in her purse.
Ray was so sozzled that he excused himself and went to his bedroom to sleep it off.
In contrast, Isabel ordered a continental breakfast and strong coffee so that she could best avail herself of the twelve hours’ respite granted them before the ceremonial tornado began.
After working for about an hour, she rose from the graceful antique desk and tiptoed to her father’s bedroom door. Hearing him snoring loudly, she hurried to the phone, extracted her little address book from her leather passport case, and dialed a number.
“Hello,” she said in a cautious whisper, still frightened that Raymond might somehow overhear. “This is Isabel da Costa. You should be expecting my call.…”
She paused for a moment, listened, and then stated, “No. I won’t have the money till the actual ceremony. But I’ve made sure your fee will be covered by a banker’s check. It’s as good as cash. Anyway, your merchandise had better be as terrific as you say, or the deal’s off. Okay, see you then. Grazie.”