An Atomic Love Story

by Shirley Streshinsky

  Cabarets, Gertrude Stein, Shakespeare & Company, sidewalk cafés, waiters in black with long white aprons. For Jean, Paris was at once the most beautiful city she had ever seen, and something more: "The sort of grand effect of space and unhurried sure loveliness of the whatchucallit square, the Champs Elysees and L'Arc de Triomphe. The vistas and fountains and the art oh . . . Jeanne d'Arc too. I'm glad there is so much of her in Paris. I don't know what but Shaw's play and everything about her have taken a tremendous hold on me. . . . After I finished it I thought I'd burn up or drown and I tried like a fool, to do parts of it. It'll be a long time before I try again, methinks."79

  She haunted the art museums, lingered in front of the Mona Lisa and Da Vinci's Madonna, found it all unbelievably beautiful. She wished, she said, that "somebody would paint Christ as a live, intensely strong, dream figure. I'm sick of crucifixions. After all, his life and words and revealing actions were the main thing. Not his blood and people weeping. Anybody can weep and shed blood."80

  The images that bombarded Jean's mind, of blood and intense dream figures, would presage the struggles to come, of color and movement and a racing mind, everything suffused with velocity and energy until she plunged into depression and despair. All now suffused with the religious images that filled the vast, soaring spaces of Saint-Sulpice on a Sunday afternoon. Jean would write: "I've never been through such a variety of moods as I did in that hour. I gazed most of the time at God in a white beard sitting on a velvet cushion in the clouds. It made me quite ill to think that humanity thought that way, and I almost cried about it but then I decided it wasn't any more worth crying about than dreams or stories." The theatrical pulpit atop dual staircases, with its gold-encrusted canopy, made her want to "ask how many hairs there were in God's beard." She thought that a shocking thing to say—she knew most people believed you shouldn't make fun of other people's ideals and dreams—but she was adamant. The sooner people "crawl out of the shells of other centuries the sooner we'll progress," she wrote. "At any rate, we can't stand still."81

  She didn't intend to stand still, and a letter from May's mother arrived, formally inviting her to stay with the Sarton family for the spring semester. Jean wrote May to say she hadn't words to express how much the letter had meant and promised that "I shall be like the shepherdess, unlike Mary Jane, Tartuffe, Edward Jones, The Vicar of Wakefield, Uriah Heap . . . In short, I shall be a model to you. Please tell your mother, do. I really want to compliment you on the bravery of asking me; I had no idea you were so lion-hearted. But I will be good."82

  Before her mother left in September, Jean moved into a pension near the American school to live with a French family named Boué. She reported to May: "Mme. Boué is most respectable with dyed red hair and an irritating manner of calling me 'ma pauvre petite.' She is the kind (not necessarily French) that strokes your hand on the slightest provocation and tries to get under your skin by breathing in your face . . . The only nice thing about her is that she calls her dwarfed parent 'petite Maman' . . . I've been in bed with a cold since I got here. I always did have a grudge against people who mess around you when you're sick. It's my ungrateful nature. I like to be left alone in emotional and physical crisises."83

  Then, like the fourteen-year-old she was, Jean changed the subject: "I did meet Monsieur Sympole, a young gentleman boarder here, just as I entered the door. He looked nice, but was terribly scared of me. Which is rather exciting for a change. I wish I would fall in love with him or somebody different. (I don't really; I detest men.) This point of view was given me by Isadora Duncan. She must have been a perfect bug-bear; I can't imagine anything more wonderful than being able to fall in love any moment, and to have it realized. She was a bit too sensual. I don't think she was exactly wrong morally though . . . Of course, personally it disgusts me that she should let herself go so easily; just like a gluttonous person eating. After all, she was primarily an artist; not a writer or a saint. (This whole paragraph is slightly unbalanced. Don't take it to heart.)"84

  IN OCTOBER, JEAN CONFIDED TO May in one of her long, discursive letters: "I'm in an awful mess of mind . . . I go through more stages and nightmares in one day than I would have thought possible in a year. I think 'Oh, what's the use' and then get sudden glimpses. I get into a streetcar and am astounded at the apparent happiness of everyone; this is during black moods. Then I see lights into the past and the future, and smile sardonically, very forced, very self-conscious . . . I can't understand myself . . . Of course, I know that this is all pure and simple adolescence which everyone goes through, but that makes it all the worse." In the next breath she added, "Another thing that makes me perfectly ill is that though I detest men wholly, I am beginning to take small notice of them. Before I never even looked at them; now something utterly outside of myself, something without the slightest feeling, some sort of mechanical instinct makes me aware of them as men." Another gasp and her mind leapt: "Today . . . I got a sudden wild desire to be naked in the night. It is an impulse I get very often; to be alone among trees and wet grass with room for movement and sound; I don't know why I tell you this; it means nothing."85

  With no close friend to talk all this over with, and in the absence of any experience, the teenager's typical sensations and confusion about sex, about love, life, art and morality spilled out into letters to the Snabs. What was remarkable was that Jean had the intelligence to recognize that her line of thought was, in fact, "slightly unbalanced."

  Her failure to make friends could have been caused by a developing intellectualism; at fourteen, Jean had some definite and, for the time, even radical, opinions as well as the vocabulary to express them vividly: "You agree that there are too many people in the world, don't you?" she would demand in a letter. "I mean poor people having five or six children because of ignorance and religion. And other people because of ignorance and laws. It seems to me the most human and inconsistent thing that America should have two such broad and contradictory laws as Prohibition and lack of Birth Control. In one it wants to control a strong instinct; in the other, it doesn't want to control a stronger. In this, a so-called age of science, it will not accept what it puts forth and what must eventually become one of the main stays of humanity. (Birth-Control, not Prohibition.)"86

  All through October, more or less on her own, she rambled about Paris and wrote poetry. ("With me, poems are the inevitable outcome of good and conflict; any kind of expression has two forces behind it to make it be.") She searched out the Rodin sculptures and Napoleon's tomb and went running home to write it all down in a letter to Letty or to May, how it had a "sort of powerful, mystic quality which terrifies me. Those still, solemn figures around it, the sudden aching color . . . the unflinching serenity and sternness of it all."87

  Early in November, John and Marjorie returned to Paris and in December the three Tatlocks sailed from Cherbourg in time to arrive in New York just before Christmas. John's sister Jessie was there to meet them. For the past two years, Jessie had been teaching history at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts, and she was happy to spend the holidays with her brother's family before they left for the West.

  Jessie Tatlock adored her niece. One summer years before, when they had all been together at the shore, Jessie had taught Hugh how to swim. Jean had been only four at the time, but so determined to learn that she would walk out into the water until only the top of her head remained in sight and Jessie would have to rescue her.88

  For Christmas, Jessie had made plans to take Jean to the theater to see Le Gallienne in Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard and also had booked them a room at the Women's University Club on East 52nd Street. All across the Atlantic Jean dreamt about this night and about her plan to see the actress. Finally in the theater and seated, she sat through the first act so excited she was "shivering, but I was very sure of myself the way one is before acting. Not that I was going to act."89 At the first intermission, she gave the usher a note to take to Le Gallienne. At the second intermission, the usher returned to sa
y that the actress would meet her after the last act.

  At the end of the play, the usher led the girl to a bench outside of Dressing Room No. 1, and motioned for her to sit. Jean felt she "would throb to death." She sat patiently, drawing her feet close under her to let people pass. She didn't move for five minutes, feeling "that everything was inevitable and wonderfully tragic, that everything was sure." Then a woman in "a mottled leopard skin coat with a loose face" walked into the dressing room. Jean heard kissing, talking, and laughing that went on for a time. Then Le Gallienne came out, "her hair wild and her face splotched," and told the slender, polite girl waiting on the bench that she had picked a bad night to come. Gallienne asked, "Was it anything special you wanted to speak to me about? Can you come some other night?"90

  Jean managed to make her way through the stage door and move into a dark space to be alone, to regain her composure. Then she returned to her waiting aunt, who took her arm and "talked unbearably all the way home about how it didn't really matter."91

  Jean cried herself to sleep, and wrote to May the next morning, describing the whole humiliating experience. She was not giving up, she said. She might have left Le Gallienne kissing "vile ladies," but she was not giving up her dreams of the theater.

  7

  JEAN AND MAY INDULGE IN THEATER AND PLAN FOR A NIGHT IN NEW YORK CLTY, AND THE OPPENHEIMER BROTHERS DISCOVER A LOST MINE IN THE SANGRE DE CRISTOS AND STAKE A CLAIM

  The Tatlock family took the train west and celebrated the first day of 1929 in California. Soon after Jean crossed the country again, through the snow-clad Sierra Nevada, rolling on through the plains and into Chicago, where she changed to a Boston-bound train. Her final destination was the Sarton house in Cambridge. Marjorie and John had agreed to let Jean finish her junior year at Cambridge High and Latin; at last the Snabs were together again.

  For May, an only child whose parents had always treated her with a kind of benevolent neglect, who had been lonely through much of her childhood, life with Jean in the household was simply "scrumptious." Jean behaved as well as she had promised to, and was as delighted with Mabel and George Sarton as they were with this cerebral, tender, wistfully beautiful girl.

  The Clark sisters, Margot and Jean, previously always on the fringes, now became more a part of this intellectual "in group." All the girls immersed themselves in writing poetry, imagining emotions they had not yet experienced, then running to each other's homes to compare their efforts.92 They talked at length about love and life and their futures. The group was a force of its own, and May remained its magnetic center.

  Several of the girls' mothers had gone to college before World War I, when "smashing"—conducting romantic friendships that mimicked crushes on boys—was considered innocent. (Marjorie Tatlock and Winifred Smith came from this period.) "Smashing" became a rite of passage—a practice run before marriage. But early in the new century, thanks in part to Freud and the rise of psychoanalysis, it began to be seen as abnormal and deviant.93 The result, for girls who came of age in the 1920s, was a confused and relentless preoccupation with the nexus between emotional and physical love.

  FOR JEAN AND THE SNABS, always a step or two ahead of their classmates, "smashing" began while they were still in high school. They loved and trusted and held onto one another. Precocious enough to know about adultery and homosexuality, they would read The Well of Loneliness, the novel about lesbianism banned in England the previous year as obscene.94 Yet custom still permitted girls to walk the halls of Cambridge High and Latin holding hands, to sleep over at each other's houses, to curl up together and share a bed, to kiss and hug and pledge their enduring love. This friendship among Jean and May and Letty was, perhaps, more intense, more intellectual, more introspective about sexuality than others, but the girls were alike in the feelings that arise in the tumultuous teenage years: loneliness, uselessness, often out-of-control emotions. They squabbled with one another, pouted, cried, made up and fretted over the inevitably of leaving the safety of childhood. They felt as if they were about to fling themselves off a cliff and into adult life, and they both thrilled at and feared this development. May, for one, couldn't wait.

  As spring moved toward summer and the end of the 1929 school year, Jean went to nearby Andover to join her parents for Hugh's graduation from Phillips Academy, then returned for May's ceremony a week later. Before an audience of 1,500, May read the class poem. Immediately she wrote her mother, "Graduation is over . . . You can't imagine how happy I am!" As an afterthought, she added, "Jean left yesterday. It's awful without her—except that I'm so busy."95

  In fact, May would only see Jean one last time that year. May planned to go to New York for a day before making her way to the Gloucester Little Theatre. Jean would meet her on June 16; a hotel room would give them the luxury of absolute privacy for their last night together before May left to begin her theatrical career, and Jean would begin the long continental crossing to face her own last, lonely year of high school in Berkeley.

  The girls walked Manhattan and talked, about the theater and all that May was doing, about the people she was working with and the excitement of it all, about how wonderful it would be when Jean could join her and begin her own career. May had enough confidence for both of them; she had already spoken to Eva Le Gallienne about Jean.

  Jean rose early the next morning, left the hotel room and caught a bus to New Hampshire, where she joined Priscilla, who was going west as well, and at eighteen was old enough to be Jean's companion. It was not until they boarded the Union Pacific's Gold Coast Limited that Jean found a private place in the observation car to write to May. "I want to know," she asked. "I have been puzzled ever since then, did something really happen the last night or did I dream it all? The next morning after everything you are always untouched and oblivious."96

  If May had given her no hint of how she felt, Jean at least wanted her to know that she had "felt a passion that night that was pure beauty and full and fulfilling. I have never been so deeply happy in my life. I love you . . . I didn't know so much before, I am horribly thankful that I do now. Isn't it wonderful that it should have happened the last night so now nothing can break it? Even if you should say in your next letter that you hate me, it would be just as perfect."97

  It is easy to imagine Jean, sitting alone in the observation car, crossing through Iowa or Illinois, lighting one of her Pell Mells and writing with all the honesty she could muster: "I suddenly thought once that it might have been lesbian love, but it wasn't, and if it was I don't care." After a few drags on a cigarette, blowing smoke into the air and picturing it drifting off to May, she changed the subject: "I am dying for my mother; aren't mothers nice sometimes? I think mine is almost saintly. I think it is peculiar and a crime that she should have such a daughter as I."98

  May did not hate Jean, but she did know that whatever had happened between them that last night was not lesbian love. Jean had been "too shy," May decided. They were not, after all, alike. For May, erotic love with a woman would happen, but it would not be with Jean.

  In 1928, on one of the visits to New Mexico, the Oppenheimer brothers and Katherine Page set out on horseback to explore Grass Mountain, only a mile or so from her dude ranch at Los Pinos, and came upon a plot of land with a primitive cabin for lease. "Hot dog!" one of the Oppenheimers said. Katherine—now called Katy—repeated in Spanish: "perro caliente!"99

  The cabin had no running water, no indoor plumbing—no amenities at all. The brothers wanted it, and their father quickly signed an agreement to lease the cabin and surrounding acres. They named it Perro Caliente; that summer was the first spent on Grass Mountain, with any of Frank's friends and Robert's colleagues who were willing to rough it. They slept on cots on the porch, warmed by piles of Indian blankets, and ate food out of cans. Katy Page supplied them with horses, and when she wasn't tending guests at Los Pinos, she would join the gang. Katy had placed the adolescent Robert in her regal inner circle; now she was invited into his. The Tolmans visited,
and Ruth and Katy became friends, part of the widening gyre of the Pasadena-Berkeley circle.

  "Sometimes we took along camping gear and stayed in the mountains," Frank would remember. More often, he went on, they would ride all day, then drop into the desert to stay at one ranch or another where people always seemed willing to put them and their horses up for the night. One day he and Robert planned to go to Truchas, a town at 8,000 feet on a high plateau, surrounded by 13,000-foot Truchas peaks, and looking across at the Jemez Mountains and down at the Rio Grande Valley. There they knew the man who ran the general store and the post office. Their usual route to the south was about 30 miles; this time they were planning to go the long way around to the north, in a remote swath of mountains they had never covered, figuring it would be about 50 miles. They left early and stopped at Los Pinos; Katy waved them off, jokingly instructing them to keep their eyes open for the legendary Lost Mine.

  What the brothers thought would be 50 miles turned to 60, much of it through unmarked wilderness with no signs of humans, not even a lonely sheepherder's initials carved into trees. The brothers navigated over and around and sometimes through gravel slicks and rock slides that covered the trails. When they stopped to rest, Frank wrote, Robert "looked up and saw a cluster of columbine growing out of the dirt covered roof of a small log cabin." They probed as far as they dared and discovered first a horizontal shaft, then a vertical one filled with water. They had found the Lost Mine. Robert collected a small crucible from the forge, which became his ashtray, a totem that he'd keep for years.