In memory yet green : the autobiography of Isaac Asimov, 1920-1954

by Asimov, Isaac, 1920-1992

  The next day I casually brought up the marriage date. She discussed it equally casually, as though she were taking marriage for granted. It apparently could not be before July at the earliest. I would simply have to wait.

  4

  The Navy Yard was a large and sprawling place, spread out over acres and acres of what was not very far removed from swampland at the southern edge of Philadelphia where the Schuylkill ran into the Delaware.

  There were numerous buildings, in some of which all sorts of construction and engineering work went on. With my usual concentration on the task immediately before me, however, and with my usual lack of curiosity concerning the rest of the world, I never had the urge to explore. I spent virtually all my time in the building that housed the chemistry laboratory and, for the most part, stayed within that lab.

  Naturally, there were numerous naval personnel present, all of them in snappy uniforms with much in the way of gold braid, but I virtually never saw any ordinary sailors. The officers made me uneasy with their aura of authority and through the fact that they were reminders of the world of armed forces I was hoping to be able to avoid.

  Within the laboratory, however, those present were civilian almost entirely. As for the work done in the laboratory—its purpose, I was told, was to maintain the quality and performance of hundreds of different materials used by the naval air forces, and on my work

  depended the safety of men and the course of battles. I strove to believe this so that I could justify to myself my not doing research and my not being drafted.

  One factor that made the early days in the Navy Yard pleasant was that Heinlein was working there; I saw him every day. Sprague de Camp joined us on May 26. He was working there too. What's more, John D. Clark of the war games was in Philadelphia, engaged in work on explosives and boarding with a family within walking distance of my rooming house.

  In those early days in Philadelphia, I visited John Clark often. He had a room lined with books and I remember I borrowed a book called Under the Hog from him and read, for the first time, a historical novel that treated Richard III sympathetically.

  On May 20, I received my first paycheck. It was only for the two days of work before the fifteenth (we were paid twice a month, on the fifth and the twentieth, so it came to only $10.72, but I used it to buy a pocket mystery and a birthday present for Gertrude.

  Some cracks in the pretty picture at the Navy Yard appeared, however. A young man, whom I recognized with some surprise as one of Marcia's boyfriends, appeared in the lab to do something or other with the wiring. I rather condescended to him since I was a chemist and he was only an electrician, but I caught sight of his card (which had to be filled out by someone at the lab if he were to get credit for his time) and I found he made $5.00 a week more than I did. I was quite chagrined, but it taught me an important lesson in humility—which would be great if I didn't have to be retaught it periodically.

  Then too, I discovered that the young men working at the Navy Yard were as insecure about the draft situation as had been the students at Columbia. Through all my stay at the Yard I was to live from half year to half year, waiting to see if my draft status (2B now; a more effective deferral than 2A) would be maintained. The word about the Yard was that it was forever a case of "2B or not 2B."

  On the positive side, work at the laboratory was full of variety. It consisted largely of testing different products intended for use on naval aircraft—soaps, cleaners, seam sealers, everything—according to specifications. There were all kinds of physical and chemical tests, and I got a wide variety of experience with a wide variety of chemical techniques.

  5

  By June 7, the wedding date was set for Sunday, July 26, 1942, and I had the forethought to make an arrangement with my superiors at the

  Navy Yard that on Saturday, the twenty-fifth, I was to get in fifteen minutes early on Saturday and then leave fifteen minutes early in order to be certain of making the 5:00 p.m. train.

  But meanwhile I had to get through the seven weeks remaining till the wedding, and each weekend I was in New York. It was during this period, I think, that a curious incident took place on the beach at Coney Island. I never entered the matter in my diary so I don't know the exact day—but I remember it well.

  Gertrude and I had gone to the beach and spread out a blanket and then spread ourselves out upon it. We were talking and totally absorbed in each other, and were quite oblivious to the rest of the world.

  Really oblivious, for we came to at one point and found that there was an enormous crowd all about us. No, they weren't watching us, for we weren't actually doing anything worth watching. They were watching a police car that was just pulling away. Something must have happened that made it necessary to call the police, something that had successfully gathered a crowd—and there we were in the midst of it and totally unaware it was happening.

  We were ashamed to ask others what had happened and we were sure that by reading the papers that evening and the next morning we could find out. We didn't. We found nothing in the papers that would give us a clue and, to this day, I don't know what happened no more than ten feet from me that drew the police and a crowd. Now, that's concentration.

  In that period there were interconnections between Gertrude and earlier phases of my life. I got a letter from Irene announcing that she had become a mother on May 30, 1942. After some thought I consulted Gertrude and she was perfectly willing to have me answer the letter after I explained the situation. So I did, offering congratulations, and passing along the news of my own forthcoming marriage.

  Then, on Saturday, June 20, Sidney Cohen joined the two of us on an evening foray to the amusement center at Coney Island. He and Gertrude, whom he now met for the first time, got along very well. Gertrude wanted to go on the large roller coaster. I remembered my experience at the World's Fair and shook my head in a very uneasy way. Gertrude seemed annoyed at my hesitation and I decided it would not look well if I played the coward—so, too cowardly to admit my fears, I went on the roller coaster.

  It was a mistake, of course. I could force myself to buy a ticket and get in the car, but there was no way I could force myself to withstand with equanimity the sensation of falling. I crumpled up against Ger-

  trude and she held me all the way. I got off half dead and it took me a while to recover. She told me on a later day that, at that time, she had serious doubts as to my suitability as a husband.

  I had another chance to prove my unsuitability the next evening. I took the train to Philadelphia and en route I discovered that I had left my identifying badge in New York. I couldn't get into the Navy Yard without my badge.

  Of course, if I had used my head I would have realized that badges do get forgotten and that there must be some way of getting a temporary badge. All I could think of, however, was that I had to have my badge. When I arrived at Philadelphia, therefore, I took the next train back to New York and got home at 2:30 a.m. I picked up my badge, endured my mother's loud and prolonged comments on the matter, caught another train to Philadelphia, and got to Sansom Street at 6:00

  A.M.

  Naturally, I didn't bother going to bed; I went straight to work.

  In time, I learned what to do when one forgot one's badge, since I managed to leave it home now and then. What happened was that one was stopped at the gate, taken to a visitor's reception center, issued a temporary badge, and sent to work. It meant getting in about half an hour late and being docked an hour's pay. Annoying, but not desperate.

  Once, early on, Sprague de Camp and I were going to work together and when we got off the trolley, Sprague clapped his hand to his lapel and said, "I've forgotten my badge."

  I could guess what was going through his mind. He had applied for an officer's commission and he wanted nothing on his record that would make anyone think he was not officer material. Well, I wasn't applying for anything, and I was certain that my superiors already knew (or if they didn't, that they would soon find out) that I wasn't
officer material or any other kind of material either. What's more, I had already been through the I-forgot-my-badge mill and it didn't frighten me. It was very much like being sent to the principal's office.

  Consequently I handed Sprague my badge and said, "Here, Sprague. No one will look at it and they will pass you through."

  Sprague took it and had obvious difficulty in mastering his emotion, but master it he did, except to gulp out something like, "Kind hearts are more than coronets," and off he went. I went through the tedium of getting a temporary badge and of being docked an hour's pay (less than a dollar, actually), but that was a small annoyance. That evening, after we left the Yard, Sprague gave me back my badge. As I had predicted, no one had looked at it—so much for security practices.

  Ever since, though, Sprague has been convinced that I have a warm and generous heart and goes around saying so by word of mouth and in print and, in this fashion, puzzling everyone who knows me.

  I spent the final month of my bachelorhood with petty worries over blood tests, licenses, and so on. I visited John Clark a good deal in order to pass the dragging time and moan over the difficulties of waiting. John gave me a book to read that he said would put Gertrude out of my mind. I took it thankfully and when I got into bed that night I found it to be Balzac's Droll Stories. Just what I needed in the last days of my bachelorhood—sex-centered stories.

  At work, fortunately, I dealt almost entirely with "Mother Asi-mov's pies." I was testing various plastics and other substances for wa-terproofness by placing weighed amounts of water-absorbing calcium chloride in aluminum pans, covering them with the film to be tested, and sealing those films with wax around the edges. I then weighed them, placed them in a humidifier for twenty-four hours, took them out, dried them, and weighed them again. It was not very demanding to the intellect, but it meant the kind of meticulous record-keeping I liked, and it kept me absorbed.

  There was even a little bit of leftover science-fiction news that served to amuse me. The June 1942 Astounding came out shortly after I had joined the Navy Yard, and I had made the cover with "Bridle and Saddle." 3 I showed it about at the lab and it helped remind me that I was, after all, a writer.

  Then, too, Fred Pohl still needed stories, and I dug up a few of my old ones for him. He passed them on to Norton, who took "The Imaginary," my old sequel to "Homo Sol." So I had made another sale, and eventually $72 came my way. This was the first money I had obtained through my writing after I got my Navy Yard job.

  And in the large world outside, things continued to go badly. In June, the Germans opened a second offensive into the Soviet Union, concentrating on the southern front, and once again they were making huge gains. They were also gaining in North Africa. About the only scores for our side was that the air war in western Europe had shifted clearly in favor of the Allies, who were bombing German cities heavily.

  3 See Foundation, where it appears as Chapter 3, "The Mayors."

  Marriage

  On July 25, 1942 (Stanley's thirteenth birthday), I took the train to New York in order to keep my wedding date.

  The matter of my wedding was heavily distorted by the fact of war. The Navy Yard gave me exactly eight days for a honeymoon, from Sunday to Sunday, inclusive. I couldn't exactly complain of this, considering the war crisis, but neither did I want to waste an hour of the period if I could help it. For that reason, I could not have a civil wedding since that would have meant waiting to be married on Monday.

  Since neither my family nor Gertrude's family had any religion, we had no rabbis of our own, and it proved difficult to get one out of the Yellow Pages. I would have settled for a practitioner of any religion, asking only that the marriage be a legal one in the eyes of the government, but the old folks weren't quite that easygoing.

  We found a rabbi. I don't remember his name. I never saw him again.

  It was a small wedding. No one but the immediate families were present, which meant bride and groom, four parents, and three siblings. Total, counting the rabbi, ten. And it was to be in the Blugerman living room.

  It was a difficult and embarrassing session. The rabbi chanted Hebrew over us in a cracked voice, which I suffered in resignation, while Gertrude tried hard (and not entirely successfully) not to giggle.

  Nor did it go entirely smoothly. The rabbi demanded a witness and it turned out that it had to be someone who was not a member of either family.

  No such creature existed within the walls of the apartment and Mr. Blugerman was forced to go into the hall and commandeer the first innocent bystander who passed. The bystander was dragged into the apartment, rather confused, and then it turned out that to fulfill his official function he had to wear a hat and he had none on him since it wasn't raining in the hall. The rabbi therefore seized my father's hat, which happened to be resting on some piece of furniture, and planted it firmly on the stranger's head.

  My father, whose ideas on hygiene were complicated and, in some ways, senseless—but very firm—rose in horror to protest, remembered where he was and what was happening, and sank back in frustration. I suspect he never wore that hat again.

  At another point, the rabbi raised a glass from which Gertrude and I had drunk and was going to smash it under his heel for some complicated symbolic reason and Mr. Blugerman snatched it from his hand.

  But eventually, at 5:30 p.m. on July 26, 1942, Gertrude and I were man and wife (or, with equal validity, woman and husband). The marriage took place 5V2 months after we had met at our Valentine's Day blind date, and I was 22 V2 years old at the time.

  Henry Blugerman gave us $300 as a wedding present, over my protests. It just about halved his bank account and nearly doubled mine. I always considered $300 of my assets as belonging to the Blugermans, however, and as unspendable. I merely held it for their use in case of emergency.

  The two families had a rather hilarious postmarital dinner at the Half Moon Hotel at Coney Island and then Gertrude and I went off to the Dixie Hotel in midtown Manhattan because that was near the place where we were to take the bus next morning to go off on our honeymoon.

  The wedding night lacked a bit of complete success. Both Gertrude and I had been raised circumspectly and, not to beat about the bush in these sexually explicit times, we were both virgins. We lacked experience and were terribly nervous.

  In addition, the premarital, marital, and postmarital tension had its effect on me, and I spent the week of the honeymoon suffering from indigestion. It was not exactly a gloriously romantic beginning.

  On the morning of July 27, we took the bus to a resort in the Catskills named Allaben Acres. It was a very pleasant place and for the first time in my life, I was at a classic resort, with shows, tennis, volleyball, arts and crafts, calisthenics, and so on and so on and so on. And a tummler too; a master of ceremonies whose only function was to make a tummel (a noise) and keep anyone from getting bored.

  It was a delightful place, and only two things served to mitigate its wonder. In the first place, it wasn't ideal for a honeymoon because I wanted to spend seven solid days with Gertrude and with no one else and that was impossible at Allaben Acres. In the second, the world

  news continued depressing in the extreme. To be sure, six weeks earlier, the United States had won the Battle of Midway, which marked the turning point of the war with Japan, but I didn't know it was the turning point and I tended to undervalue naval victories in any case since, despite the Fletcher Pratt war games, the actions of the Navy always seemed auxiliary to me. It was the war on land and the occupation of territory that I could more easily understand. And on land, the Nazi armies were pouring toward the Don River and southward toward the Caucasus. 1

  There is only one thing I remember clearly about the honeymoon that did not involve ourselves only.

  On July 30, a quiz was held during the afternoon, and guests were invited to volunteer. I raised my hand, of course, and became one of the contestants. When everyone gathered in the casino for the quiz, Gertrude retired into the balcony,
feeling rather nervous about watching me make a fool of myself at close quarters. She was all alone in the balcony.

  I was third in line, and when I rose to field my question in the first round, spontaneous laughter broke out from the audience. They had laughed at no one else.

  The trouble was I looked anxious and when I look anxious I look even more stupid than usual. The reason I was anxious was that I wanted to shine and I feared I would not. I knew that I was neither handsome, self-assured, athletic, wealthy, nor sophisticated. The only thing I had going for me was that I was clever and I wanted to show that off to Gertrude. And I was afraid of failing and of spelling "weigh" "WIEGH."

  I ignored the laughter as best I could, and tried to concentrate. The master of ceremonies, trying not to grin and failing, said, "Use the word 'pitch' in sentences in such a way as to demonstrate five different meanings of the word." (Heaven only knows where he got his questions.)

  More laughter, as I paused a moment to collect my thoughts. I then said, "John pitched the pitch-covered ball as intensely as though he were fighting a pitched battle, while Mary, singing in a high-pitched voice, pitched a tent."

  The laughter stopped as though someone had pulled a plug out of the socket. The master of ceremonies had me repeat it, counted the pitches, considered them, and pronounced me correct.

  1 In the fighting in the Caucasus, my Uncle Ephraim was killed in action. He was my father's favorite brother—or at least my father mentioned him more than he did the other two.

  Naturally, by the time the quiz was over, I had won. I didn't wait to collect the bundle of lollipops that was the first prize. I just went up in the balcony and collected Gertrude.

  I noticed, though, that winning the quiz did not make me popular at the resort. Many people resented having wasted their laughter. The thought apparently was that I had no right to look stupid without being stupid; that, by doing so, I had cheated.