They had joined their parents at the Broadmoor Hotel in Colorado Springs to spend a few days together before Robert was to return to Caltech to pack up his belongings. At that point, their father decided it would be a grand idea for Brother—meaning Robert—to have a new roadster for his tour of the West Coast. And then it occurred to the ebullient father that Frank should ride along. He would, after all, be off to college soon, and it would be good to have a look at the West Coast universities.
Never mind that neither brother knew how to drive; in Colorado, the father signed them up for a few lessons and waved them off. The logical route would have been to drive south to Route 66, a new interstate that twisted through Gallup, New Mexico; Flagstaff, Arizona; and on to Winona, Kingman, Barstow, San Bernardino and then to Pasadena. Easy enough, especially at a cruising speed of eighty miles per hour.
"Easy enough" was never Robert's style; he thought it would be interesting to experience the splendor of this unknown country, so he spread out the maps, noticed roads marked with a dotted line throughout the high mountain wilderness, and plotted a different course, one that would cut across Utah and northern Arizona, on through Cortez, Moab and Lees Ferry—through some of the wildest mountains in the American West, the kind of country where outlaws could vanish when necessary.
The "roads" indicated on the maps turned out to be no more than two ruts in a dirt path. At each fork, the brothers learned to take the least traveled road, because the other would inevitably end at the entrance to a ranch. They decided to take turns driving as they passed through Pueblo, then climbed up and into the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, over icy La Veta Pass, which even late in the season had remnants of snowpack at its 9,413-foot crest. Onward then to the next pass, called Wolf Creek, elevation 10,863, teetering on the Continental Divide. At that elevation, it was cold and the air was thin. Frank commented, "Although it was my brother's turn, he broke out into such rivers of sweat that he could hardly see and asked me to drive."
They carried on, passing through Durango and Cortez. Not long after Cortez, the Chrysler made it up one steep incline and sailed down again, gathering speed. Frank tried to negotiate a close turn, but the car skidded in loose gravel and went flying, landing upside down in a ditch alongside the road.
"You okay?" each asked the other when the car came to a rest.
Frank thought he felt warm blood spreading over him, but realized it was battery acid. They managed to crawl out. As Frank explained, "The only damage to the car was that the cloth top was completely ruined and the windshield was broken. As was my brother's arm." In fact, Robert's arm was fractured and two bones in his wrist were broken. Eventually a local came along, pulled the roadster upright and towed it back to Cortez. Robert had his arm set and chose the red sling.
The next day they tried again, this time with Frank at the wheel for the duration. By dark they were almost at Moab. Almost. The car got hung up on a high rocky rut in the road, unable to go either forward or back. Robert spent the night on the ground, hungry and cold and in pain from his arm. He lay sipping from a bottle of spirits of ammonia and sucking on some lemons while Frank, "bit by bit, jacked up the front wheels of the car and built a rock runway so that by morning we could back off the rock."
Finally mobile again, they gave up the quest, and headed south to pick up Route 66 at Gallup. The trip, as plotted by Robert, had been foolhardy. Still, it should have been a fine tale to tell, the kind that gets better with embellishment. Frank was having none of it; he would insist that it had not been an adventure; that they were never in any real danger. What was good, Frank insisted, was that they had come through it together. And there would be other, more difficult challenges ahead for the brothers.
Ruth would have been attuned enough to the vagaries of human behavior to wonder about those "rivers of sweat" that poured over Robert's face at a chilly 10,000 feet and kept him from being able to drive. Was it fear? And there were other questions to ponder: Did this episode expose something about how Robert, this genius everyone was talking about, looked at the world and railed at its limits?
In the end, Robert divided his time between Berkeley and Caltech, spending most of each year in Northern California. Berkeley's academic year ended early in the spring, allowing him to move to Caltech. In a letter to Frank, he explained that he wanted to keep the connection so he could be checked by the Caltech theoreticians "if I got too far off base." He also had an open invitation to stay in the Tolman guest cottage, and wanted to see more of Richard Tolman's "extremely intelligent and quite lovely" wife,64 and to hear her stories about her work with psychologically troubled youth.
ABOARD SS MINNEKAHDA, ATLANTIC TRANSPORT LINE, 1928
"O snab of all snabbists," Jean Tatlock would write on the first day of the crossing to England, "I would stand 4 years of seasickness if this boat were going the other way."65 The fourteen-year-old lost no time in finding a quiet corner in one of the ship's public lounges to write the first of many impassioned letters to her friends at home. The "snab of all snabs" was her close friend May Sarton. With Letty Field, Jean and May had formed their own exclusive little triumvirate at Cambridge High and Latin School in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Jean's father, and May's as well, were professors at Harvard; Letty's father was Herbert Haviland Field, a humanist and Quaker pacifist, who had died of a heart attack when Letty was eight.66 She was fifteen now; May, at sixteen, was the eldest of the three. Two others, the Clark sisters, Margot and Jean, were on the edge of the group. All the girls were vibrant, passionate, precocious and often charming, as well as sure of their own intellects.
Snab, the name they adopted for themselves, was probably meant as a play on snob, which they agreed was a label that applied to them, not out of any sort of social conceit but on the basis of their obviously superior literary skills. The girls read incessantly and wrote poetry and plays. They adored Ibsen's Hedda Gabbler, shared bits of gossip about Edna St. Vincent Millay, critiqued her new poems while immersing themselves in Galsworthy, Khalil Gibran and Amy Lowell. Their bodies were beginning to bloom, feelings they didn't understand to stir, and the three shared it all—pouring out their unformed desires, often in bursts of poetry.
In Cambridge, the trio rode their bicycles around the neighborhood, bought chocolate ice-cream sodas at Gomaos', had dinner or stayed the night in one another's homes, smoked Pell Mells, called each other "darlingest," and swore that all boys were fools. (Though occasionally either Letty or Jean would timidly admit to running into a boy who wasn't totally awful.) They went to the theater as often as they were allowed and became infatuated with their favorite actresses, Jean with Katherine Warren and May with Le Gallienne, at twenty-nine a doyenne of the American stage.
The girls haunted stage doors, begged for photos and autographs, wrote the actresses fawning notes, invited them to tea with their mothers, and swooned when they responded. The actresses clearly enjoyed these educated and, for the most part, charming young fans, and offered them advice. Eva Le Gallienne was certain that a college education was totally unnecessary, even an impediment, for an actress.
May had declared her intention of forgoing college to become an actress. Jean followed suit, announcing in one of her letters, "May, I have decided not to go to college! Oh boy. Everybody I know says that when you have a specialty, college is death to it. No actresses ever go. I have terrible faith in my powers of acting. I'm perfectly sure I can do it. I don't always feel this way, but I will henceforward. I know, I know."67 Jean wrote her way across the Atlantic in long letters, filled with longing to get back to Cambridge, and to Boston and New York and the theater.
May—petite and self-confident—was clearly the ringleader of the Snabs. She had one more year at Cambridge High and Latin, and Le Gallienne had offered her a place in her student repertory company in Gloucester for the summer. And now that Jean had declared her intention to become an actress, May would speak with Eva about making a place for her Snab friend in the company.
THAT FALL OF 19
28, ROBERT returned to Europe for his last postdoctoral studies. He started at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands. In his first six weeks he managed to learn enough Dutch to deliver a lecture in the language, which earned him the nickname Opje. When he returned to California, it would become "Oppie," which would stay with him for life. From Leiden, he went on to Zurich to study under Wolfgang Pauli.
THE TATLOCK CHILDREN GREW UP reading aloud in the evenings, memorizing Shakespeare, becoming familiar with the cadences of Old English. In the summers they went to outdoor performances and to the theater in Boston. Marjorie understood that she had contributed to her darling daughter's decision to become an actress. And there were other reasons to worry about Jean, now clearly in the full throes of adolescence. Marjorie would have noted her daughter's mood swings, though it was difficult to say how much of Jean's emotional distress could be attributed to adolescent angst, and how much might have signaled problems to come.
Before they embarked from New York, Marjorie had convinced her husband to leave Harvard and return to Berkeley. Professor Tatlock did not want to go; he had been at Harvard only four years, and, as the head of the English Department, was at the apex of his career. He was happy with his position at Harvard. Of course, the English department at Berkeley was delighted to add such a distinguished scholar to its roster. He made his discontent clear; it was Marjorie who insisted they return to the coast, but her motives were confusing. She was making a sacrifice by putting a continent between herself and her son, Hugh, at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts. And between herself and her dearest friend. But Marjorie was adamant. She was intensely interested in psychology, and from her time at Stanford was aware of the pioneering work in psychotherapy being done in the Bay Area.68 Possibly she had also seen something in Jean that alarmed her, warned her of storms to come, and felt she would be better able to face them in this far west conclave of psychotherapy.
While the professor prepared for the move to Berkeley, Marjorie sailed off to Europe with Hugh and Jean. Marjorie's plan was to get Jean settled, then return to the States to make arrangements for the move to the West Coast. She set about convincing Jean to stay on in France for a month or more; it was a marvelous opportunity, she said, a chance to become adept at French and to practice being on her own. Marjorie's hope was to find an "angelic" family for Jean to stay with, and a tutor or a school where she could take classes. If all went according to plan, the family would collect Jean in France and sail from Cherbourg to New York in time to celebrate Christmas with John's sister in New York, then on to California for the New Year.
Aboard the Minnekahda, Jean continued to write longingly about returning to Cambridge High and Latin. Jean pleaded with May to convince her parents to allow her to stay with them for her junior year. When May's mother came through with the invitation, Jean burbled, "I can't get over your mother's wonderfulosity . . . Tell her again that I will be an angel."69 Marjorie did not want her daughter to stay behind, but Jean was unrelenting. And Mabel Sarton, May's mother, was both liked and admired among the faculty wives.
At the moment, steaming toward England, Marjorie looked forward to joining Winifred and Priscilla at Stratford on Avon; she was counting on her best friend's counsel. At Vassar, Winnie had accumulated years of experience in guiding bright, starstruck young girls through their tempestuous adolescences. In London, they stayed at a boardinghouse near the British Museum, where Jean found the original scripts of English poems, including the sonnet of Rupert Brooke that begins, "If I should die, think only this of me . . ." She decided, "I didn't used to like it, but now I adore it."70
In their meanderings between museums, Jean occasionally noticed a different London: "The first two or three days I had the most uneasy feeling that I was living in the nineteenth century. Everything was so old and pleasant and cruel. The poor were so terribly poor and haggard and hopeless. The rich were so inconsistent and tasteless. The city was so silent and yet busy in a make-believe way."71
Marjorie, Jean, Winifred and her niece Priscilla went off to Stratford on Avon. Priscilla was eighteen now. She and Jean had corresponded over the years since their trip to Colorado, sharing their feelings. In England, they took off as they had before, this time swimming and rowing on the Avon. Jean didn't mention to May that she and Pris were meeting friends and going to the theater and having adventures. She wrote to explain that Priscilla was a junior at Vassar, adding rather formally, "You see her aunt, Winifred, teaches drama there, and is mother's best friend."72
MAY'S OWN LETTERS WERE LONG and splashed with poetry and gossip about the theater; she copied letters written to her by the actress Katherine Warren, sending Jean into paroxysms of envy. May's mad crushes were almost always attached to older women, often her teachers. She had not experienced that "sort of mechanical instinct" that made Jean, for the first time, aware of the physical effects men can have on women.
In August, the Tatlocks made their way across the Channel to France. Jean found a quiet place on the ship to write to May: "So very much has happened since I've seen you." Jean was still hoping for a reprieve that would send her back to Cambridge, where she could stay with the Sartons for a year, before she returned to California and the new family home.
"INTELLECTUALLY SUPERIOR" IS HOW ONE of Kitty Puening's high-school boyfriends would remember the petite brunette who graduated from Aspinwall High School in Pennsylvania in June of 1928. For four years, the Puening's capacious home on woodsy Delafield Road had been headquarters for the circle that revolved around Kitty. Small and pretty, lively and ambitious, she was popular and certainly a flirt. Her parents regularly took Kitty to Europe to visit relatives. Kitty hinted that her parents were titled, that there was a family castle; she would obliquely mention Belgium's royal family. She was bright, outspoken, daring.73 Her high-school boyfriend would remember that she had moved decidedly to the political left in her senior year. While her father most likely tolerated her political interests, he would have been less pleased by the cadre of young men who seemed to circle around Kitty—or by the fact that Kitty didn't discourage the attention.
The girlfriends Kitty admired and courted were those who dreamed of personal success and accomplishment. One boyfriend would remember how determined Kitty was to succeed academically. In chemistry class, possibly after someone repeated the popular canard about women enrolling in college to get an M.R.S. degree, she stamped her feet and insisted, "I'm going to be a Ph.D."74 No one seemed to doubt that Kitty Puening was serious, even if at the time not many high-school girls with ambitions of their own were in the habit of broadcasting them. Having ambition almost always meant these women were willing to forgo marriage and children for a career. The majority of bright young women chose to marry a man of consequence and become a silent partner, living in his reflected light. A doctor, perhaps. Or a lawyer. Or an academic. Only a few women declared that they were determined to achieve a level of success on their own.
After Kitty graduated from high school in June of 1928, she enrolled for the fall semester at the University of Pittsburgh as Katherine Vissering Puening. She and her mother then boarded a steamer bound for Europe, arriving in Bremen, Germany, at about the same time the SS Minnekahda, with the Tatlocks aboard, put in at Plymouth, England.
6
JEAN WISHES THAT "SOMEBODY WOULD PAINT CHRIST AS A LIVE, INTENSELY STRONG, DREAM FIGURE." SHE IS SICK OF CRUCIFIXION, OF BLOOD AND OF WEEPING
Hugh Tatlock had two weeks before the start of his senior year at Phillips Academy, so for the last weeks of summer, he and his mother and sister crossed the Channel to St. Jacut, an ancient fishing village in Brittany, on the rugged northwest coast of France. Named for an Irish saint from the Dark Ages, the area held the remains of an abbey and the impressive ruins of the medieval Chateau du Guldo. Fishing boats lay stranded at low tide on the long empty beaches. In the village, the old houses huddled together against the winds. "St. Jacut is rather sweet," Jean wrote to May, "the type of French village made up of ston
e walls, cats, dogs, chickens and utter filth."75
The young visitors roamed the beaches and climbed the rocks, joined by fifteen-year-old George, the son of the friend who had invited the Tatlocks to St. Jacut. George presented a problem for Jean, who was content with writing about her strange new attraction to men, but not ready to confront it in real life. "He is sensible in that he isn't silly about girls and can talk decently when he wants to," she wrote, "but otherwise I hate him." What she would call "a sort of feud" erupted between them. Young George could not understand Jean's moods, or she his clumsy reactions. "Every night," Jean tried to explain, "he would get horrid and make the most sarcastic inane remarks about me and to me. He only began it three nights before they left, so I think he was mad at me for some unknown reason. He said things that made me want to slap him, but, like a Spartan, I kept silent until he made more remarks about my never speaking. It was unbearable with everyone listening attentively . . . Boys are perfect fools, I am convinced."76
AT SUMMER'S END, HUGH SAILED for home and Jean wrote May that she "almost died" when his ship pulled away, wanting so much to return to Massachusetts with him. But she dutifully agreed that staying was "probably doing me more good than being in America and Boston ever could."77 Jean was beginning to trust her mother's judgment; to accept that she was indeed thinking of her future, and of what was best for her. Even if it meant leaving her on her own for a month in Paris.
With all the fresh air and swimming and rock climbing, all the snacks of Petit Buerres and chocolate amid the ruins of the ancient chateau, Jean juggled an adolescent's adoration of favorite actresses with a growing critical thinking inspired by the books she was devouring. (Galsworthy's Saint's Progress was "perfectly horrible in every way. Badly written, sentimental, untrue and Victorian-tinged, it made my blood boil.") She managed also to copy reams of poems, some her own and others from contemporary poets published in books or magazines. Her life that summer flowed out in her small, unfaltering hand onto the fronts and backs of letter paper, addressed to May and Letty and the Clark sisters. And always, somewhere in all those solid pages of handwriting, she would manage to squeeze in, "Cambridge again in three months . . ."78
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