The last part of the ride was as formidable as the first; another long drop was covered with masses of fallen timber. Their horses could jump some of the logs, but the brothers had to remove the horses' saddles to scramble under others. Finally they had to chop their way through; it was midnight before they reached Truchas. Not long after the excursion, the two made their way to the county seat and filed their claim. Later that summer they rode back to survey the mine. The Oppenheimer boys were living the legends of the Old West.
Soon enough, they would return to another plateau in these mountains, where another legend would be created.
8
JEAN GOES
WEST TO A NEW LIFE IN BERKELEY, WHILE ROBERT MEETS LINUS AND AVA HELEN PAULING AT CALTECH
Her junior year behind her, Jean left Cambridge in 1929 and returned to Berkeley and her family. She wrote to May, "Our house is marvelous and big with weeping willows and rocks and eucalyptus and bushes. The tennis court is perfect. But I haven't found any people yet."100 Marjorie had discovered the house on San Antonio Avenue, high in the Berkeley Hills, a scant two miles from the university. It had a wide entry hall that looked through to a library, an elegant staircase that wound to the second floor and seven bedrooms scattered throughout. There was room for every family member, including Jean's grandmother, with several rooms to spare. A basement had servants' quarters and a music room with remarkable acoustics; a second staircase connected all the levels. Every west-facing room had large windows that looked out onto San Francisco Bay and the Golden Gate; in four years, the family would use binoculars to follow the building of the great bridge that would span this gateway to the Pacific.
Jean thought the summer-brown hills that rose, soft and round, to the east looked like sleeping elephants. Walking trails meandered through woods heavy with the scent of eucalyptus, and opened up to views where Jean could watch the sun throw great swaths of pink and orange skyward before being swallowed by the Pacific. There was a small flat roof on the house, next to a deck, and Jean found a way to climb onto it.101 She spent clear nights there watching the moon float above her and dreaming of joining Eva Le Gallienne's theater group. Art was beauty and she lived for beauty, she continually reminded herself and May in the letters that flew between them. Jean also wondered whether high school would ever end, and life would ever begin.
With the months of July and August looming, long and empty, Jean's letters began to pose questions, concerns that she was not progressing as she had hoped. The changes she had expected in herself were not happening. She had wanted to be rid of the anxieties of adolescence, to grow up and emerge into a calmer, clearer time. She wrote that perhaps she was expecting too much. In letters, she told May of the added distress that the poems she wanted to write were not coming—and she needed them because she had so much to say.
Her languor was aggravated by a fight she'd had with Priscilla on the journey west. It should have been a small thing. Pris asked to read Jean's poems. Jean had, very politely, she thought, explained that she would rather not show them to her. Pris had pushed, and tried to wrest the book from her. Jean had panicked, she was shaking, her adrenaline pumping. At last Pris had backed off, but not without pouting and telling Jean that she acted as though she were a mother protecting her child.102 More likely, Jean was a child protecting her mother—from the love poems she had written to May. If Pris read them, Jean suspected she would tell her aunt, and Winifred would tell her best friend, Jean's mother. She couldn't let that happen. Jean vowed never to forgive Pris after their incident on the train.
THE TATLOCKS' FRIENDS ELIZABETH AND James Whitney were medical doctors who had gone to Zurich in 1926 to be analyzed by Carl Jung, and had returned to San Francisco to practice psychoanalysis. The Whitneys became part of the psychoanalysts and psychologists who were drawn to the Bay Area. Berkeley turned out some of the earliest psychologists. Edward Tolman and Jean Macfarlane (the first female Ph.D. in psychology from the university) and her husband, Donald, were also part of an early group, along with other followers of Freud and Jung. Jean often joined Marjorie and Elizabeth Whitney on their hikes.103 The women took long walks in the hills together, Jean sometimes tagging along, tuning in and out of their conversations but dismissing most of them as boring—"they talk about rats," she wrote a friend. In fact, much of the groundbreaking research that psychologists were doing on human behavior was being done by Edward Tolman—Macfarlane's mentor, Jean's future teacher—at Berkeley's psychology program, and rats were at the center of many of his laboratory experiments.
MARJORIE, INCREASINGLY AWARE OF JEAN'S moods, and wanting to find a way to ease them, found a theater group that happened to be putting on Saint Joan, a play that fascinated Jean: the Maid of Orleans had visions when she was thirteen, led the army that vanquished the British at eighteen, and was martyred in 1431 when she was nineteen. Jean got a walk-on part. Her role in Saint Joan helped earn Jean the lead part in three more plays that summer—and revealed an obstacle to her dream of an acting career. She confessed to May that she was "stricken with unbelievable stage-fright so that I didn't see how I could utter a word or move. I was mortally afraid that I would forget my lines and was so self-conscious that I shook. Unless I can do something about it I certainly will never be able to act." She added: "I can tell you I died more than once, this summer."104
She was determined to learn to settle her nerves. Marjorie thought that perhaps going to camp would help. It would get Jean out in nature, to sing songs around a campfire, to have a new experience. Jean agreed only because, as she wrote May, "one night I just about went insane with despair and would have done anything under the earth."105
Enormous coastal redwood trees—great giants that reached to the skies as if planted just to make humans feel insignificant—surrounded many Northern California campgrounds. Around the campfire one night, as a talented young camper played the violin, Jean was transported, as if "some curtain seemed to be lifted from me and I was laid bare to a sort of blind and all-powerful pain and beauty. I became nothing, and everything became nothing; it was unbearable and yet it was the greatest thing that can happen to a human, as far as I know. All the trees and the blackness and the whole world was one and 'immensity was made manifold.'" She wrote, "I ran away from everyone and looked at the violinist, till I became her soul and she became mine, and everything together was Beauty choking us and yet deadly clear."106
The quote "immensity was made manifold," is from the Edna St. Vincent Millay poem "Renascence."* The poet was a favorite of the Snabs; any of them could recite the verses, written when Millay was just nineteen. The poem describes with compelling accuracy the progression of the kind of psychotic interlude that therapists would come to label manic-depressive.
* * *
* Edna St. Vincent Millay was a friend and classmate of Winifred Smith at Vassar. She would write "Renascence"—a favorite poem with adolescent girls for almost a century—the year before she entered Vassar. She would receive a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and would suffer from recurring bouts of depression later in life.
Jean's experience that night—girls gathered around a campfire, sparks rising in the night air, the sound of a single violin piercing the darkness—sent her from ecstatic revelations to a painfully beautiful awareness. And it was not the only time: in November she would write that, "The other night when the moon was up . . . I had a religious ecstacy."107 She understood that something alarming and important had happened, so suffocating that to regain her breath she needed to share the intensity of it with her closest friends. She wrote to May, Letty, and Jean Clark. Alarmed, all three girls responded. Jean's visions were intensifying and she was desperate to understand them.
TWO TALL, GOOD-LOOKING YOUNG Americans, Robert Oppenheimer and Linus Pauling, were on similar levels intellectually and professionally; Pauling, though, had already made a professional mark in chemistry. A few years older than Robert, Pauling had the same sort of questioning, profound mind as Robert—the kind of mind tha
t seemed to operate at higher RPMs than those of most people. Each man was at the beginning of a career that gave every sign of being spectacular; each had been courted by the same top universities. It was not surprising that they should become instant friends at Caltech.
But in fact, the two men were different in more ways than they were alike. Born and reared in Oregon, Pauling had a decidedly western outlook. He had grown up poor and his widowed mother saw no need for college, no matter how precocious he was. He went anyway, working his way through Oregon Agricultural College by mopping floors and chopping wood, and very quickly was drafted to teach basic chemistry in freshman home economics. It was not Harvard; his social skills were not up to "Old School" measure. Older faculty at Caltech, including Richard Tolman, found him a trifle too brash, perhaps a little too ambitious. When Harvard made him a handsome offer, Pauling used it to leverage a better deal with Caltech, one very much like Oppenheimer's, whereby he could work at other universities for part of each year.
But the major impediment, in terms of the Oppenheimer-Pauling friendship, was Pauling's wife, Ava Helen. The same age as Robert, she was high-spirited and flirtatious, "smarter than any girl I'd ever met," Pauling said.108 And she had definite ideas of her own about how the world should work. The tenth of twelve children, Ava Helen had grown up on an Oregon farm with a schoolteacher father who was a socialist and expected his clan to be aware of what was happening in international politics.
The Paulings found the Caltech senior faculty stuffy and boring, and avoided them socially. But Robert was their own age, and the couple was intrigued by the hints of scandal (the poison-apple affair) and gossip (was he a homosexual?) that swirled around him. Before long, Robert asked Pauling for help with his lecture techniques, and Pauling asked Robert to work with him on the mathematics of carbon's tetrahedral bonds. Socially, they formed a threesome. Robert's old habit of gift-giving resurfaced—he could not resist. Armloads of flowers, always for her; and no less than his entire, extensive, and very expensive mineral collection for him. He also gave Pauling a collection of his poems, some with sexual references, which Pauling found "obscure and troubling."109
Ava Helen grew up expecting to participate in conversation, to introduce ideas and have opinions. And she couldn't resist flirting. She didn't seem to realize that her actions might be misinterpreted. Wasn't Robert a man of the world? A rich New Yorker, sophisticated world traveler, experienced with women?
In fact, at this juncture in his life, Robert Oppenheimer was almost as inexperienced in the rituals of love and sex as was Jean Tatlock, a teenager, reading a novel about lesbians and wondering whether she might be one, then deciding that she was not because she didn't look masculine. Robert's confusion on matters sexual was about to take a fateful turn. On one of those nice pastel days in Pasadena, after Pauling had left for his chemistry laboratory, Robert appeared at the Pauling house. Ava Helen answered the door, happy to see him but puzzled by a sudden awkwardness and confusion in one of the most articulate people she had ever known. Suddenly he blurted out something about going to Mexico. The two of them. Together. Ava Helen, the disingenuous coquette, could be forgiven if she was thoroughly confused, before she realized that Robert must have completely misunderstood her. She said the only thing she could say: No, of course not. She took her marriage seriously, and she had no intention of going off with him to Mexico.110
She had the rest of the day to consider her part in the debacle, to decide how to present it to her husband. When Pauling came home, she very calmly told him what had happened. She was not angry; she may have even smiled. Her husband was not amused. He was furious. At the man he thought was his friend, yes. But at Ava Helen too, for what he perceived to be her too-calm reaction. As if she took pleasure in being propositioned, like she were some femme fatale.
Pauling would never again be anything but cool to Robert, and eventually "the Oppenheimer affair" would become part of Pauling family legend. Many years later, Ava Helen would say to her husband, "I don't think Oppenheimer was in love with me. I think he was in love with you." Pauling, with the passage of time, and with reflection, decided that was probably true.111
Either way, Robert's bumbling proposition to Ava Helen at the end of those flirtatious years illustrated a serious flaw in Robert's persona. He had figured out how to present himself as charming and self-assured to the point where women found him attractive. But when it came to reading sexual innuendo, he was still in poison apple country.
IN THE FALL OF 1929, Jean started her senior year in Berkeley at a private, progressive school originally named the Institute of Creative Development, and now called simply the Williams School, founded by the innovative educator Cora Williams. With its focus on poetry, music, language and literature, the school seemed right for Jean. It also offered interpretive-dance instruction in the style of one of Jean's idols, Isadora Duncan. Performances were held in the nearby Temple of Wings, where Duncan herself had danced. The Tatlocks' new home was no more than a three-minute walk up the road from the expansive school property. Once on the grounds, Jean passed by fountains and a reflecting pool on her way to the grand Spring Mansion, a two-story Beaux Arts building modeled after the Empress Elisabeth of Austria's Achillion Palace in Corfu, and now the school's main building.
Friends and adults used the word brilliant to describe Jean. Effusive in her Snab letters, she was in fact a quiet girl, intellectual and with definite opinions, but not yet a rebel. Having been transplanted from one coast to the other, she knew she should make new friends, but resisted, perhaps feeling it would be disloyal to replace the Snabs so easily. She settled in to read poetry and books, and to write long, aching, lonely letters. In her concise hand, with excellent grammar and punctuation and spelling, Jean again poured all her yearnings and love and terror onto multiple pages and mailed them off to May and Letty, and the Clark sisters. Once, Jean wrote to May: "I am in deep despair about boys. Haven't you had any experiences yet? You are so old. Letty seems to be growing up rapidly."112
And she fretted about her relationship with May. "I ache and ache for your presence," she said in one letter, the longing almost palpable. Then she added: "But I am not a lesbian. Are you?" Soon after, she wrote about a boy she had run into in Carmel, a favorite vacation town on the coast. Jean reported that he "fell in love with me. It was silent, as things are apt to be with me . . . The feelings he inspired in me were humorous. First excitement, then distain, then terror."113 He walked up and down a few times, glanced at her without speaking. He left. The terror prevailed.
Fog shrouds summer mornings in Berkeley. At about eleven, the fog lifts and the sun comes out. It graces the sky until close to four in the afternoon, when the fog rolls back in through the Golden Gate and floats up and over the hills, wafting like a sea of chiffon. It isn't until September, when school starts, that true summer weather arrives, with bright-blue skies and temperatures that move toward 80 degrees.
Hugh and Professor Tatlock spent their days that September on the university campus. Hugh made new friends, but stayed in touch with those from Phillips Academy who had gone to Harvard. Even with the natural beauty, the dramatic geography of the Bay area, he preferred the East. Jean couldn't shake off her longing for Cambridge. Of the four Tatlocks, only Marjorie seemed to want to be in Berkeley.
III
FOREBODINGS
9
JEAN WORRIES THAT HIGH SCHOOL WILL NEVER END, ROBERT'S PARENTS COME TO PASADENA FOR A VISIT AND RUTH FINDS HERSELF WITH PARALLEL VERSIONS OF THE SAME MAN
The golden decade was over, the optimism of the '20s shattered by the stock-market crash of 1929. Banks failed, steel mills went dark, topsoil blew away in clouds of dust, farm boys' dreams of college and career evaporated as they helped pile family possessions on trucks to join the procession west. The madness crossed the Atlantic and wreaked havoc there as well. The world moved inexorably into chaos, both economic and political.
The Oppenheimers, Tolmans, Tatlocks and Puenings remai
ned above the economic maelstrom but could not escape the social upheaval. They managed to afford private schools, comfortable homes, trips to Europe and elaborate presents (for Easter, Robert's mother gave the Tolmans "a beautiful crock of stuffed figs . . . It must have cost a million dollars"114)—but they could not deny the misery that was all around them.
In the 1930s, the movements of Robert, Ruth, Jean and Kitty had one or the other skimming up and down the West Coast, covering the 350 miles between Pasadena and Berkeley and back again. They looped out and over the mountains and plains of the country's vast interior on steam trains with names like Gold Coast Ltd. and Zephyr; then moved routinely up the East Coast, from Pittsburgh to New York City, to Vassar in Poughkeepsie and on to Harvard and Cambridge; and they sailed over the Atlantic on the great steamships —the SS Europa, SS Kaiser Wilhelm—to land at Southampton, Cherbourg or Bremen.
Robert spent the decade moving with the academic calendar between Pasadena and Berkeley, with a wide, high summer swing over to Perro Caliente (the wilderness cabin that he and Frank had discovered and the family had subsequently purchased) in the mountains of New Mexico. The Tolmans had been among the first to stay at the cabin on Grass Mountain (Frank would remember their visit as a "lovely, lovely" memory).115 Ruth continued to make summer trips to New Mexico with her friends Ruth Valentine and Natalie Raymond,* as well as frequent forays north to Berkeley to see her family and friends. Jean divided her time between the West and East Coasts and Europe until midway through the decade. Both Jean and Kitty—four years apart in age—were moving urgently, if for different reasons, to commit themselves to a cause, and to respond to the turmoil that arose from competing ideologies: the Fascism that spawned Hitler in Germany, Mussolini in Italy, and Franco in Spain and the Communism that shaped the USSR.
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