An Atomic Love Story

by Shirley Streshinsky

  * * *

  * Natalie Raymond was born in Pasadena, daughter of a well-to-do lawyer. She spent a lifetime weaving in and out of the lives of Robert, Frank, Ruth Benedict, Ruth Valentine and Ruth Tolman, among others. She at one time talked of becoming a psychologist or an anthropologist or a medical doctor. She was a talented writer and freelanced for various magazines, including The New Yorker.

  Jean's greatest fear in 1930 was that high school would never end, that her future would never arrive. Ruth was facing her own personal disappointment and the need to rethink her future. Kitty was in college, frantic for life to begin. As for Robert, who was twenty-six that year—he was so intensely excited by all the discoveries in the esoteric world of physics, the sweetness (his word) and thrill of it, that he could scarcely break away long enough to notice life beyond the classroom and the lab. His students, caught up in the same great excitement, often followed him from Berkeley to Caltech and back again, sensing that they were part of an exciting new age, and that the work they were doing would change the world.

  Even Robert, who had never had to consider money, who had little interest in politics or economics, became aware that times were hard, that most of his students were struggling, that family members in Germany were being persecuted because they were Jews. It was an adventurous, formative, intense decade for Ruth, Jean and Kitty, and for the man whose love each would claim.

  THE SENIOR OPPENHEIMERS ARRIVED IN Pasadena during their elder son's spring semester. They rented a Packard with a chauffeur, so they could come and go as they pleased. The Chrysler Roadster his father had bought Robert in Denver two years before had suffered several accidents and was now unreliable. When setting out with Robert, you never quite knew if you would get to your destination. Ella knew her son's reckless side only too well, and she knew how fast he drove.

  The Tolmans invited Robert's parents to tea on several occasions. Julius was particularly taken with Richard. Ella noticed that her husband seemed somewhat less charmed by Ruth, perhaps because he was not used to a woman who took such an active part in conversation. Invariably, Julius liked to lead a lively exchange. Sometimes too lively, according to Robert, who in the past had been embarrassed by his overly ebullient father. But Ella found both Tolmans charming. Ruth kept a beautiful house and dressed with style, on the conservative side. She not only appreciated music but was a fine pianist herself. She took them to a Tchaikovsky concert in Los Angeles.116 It probably occurred to the woman who had spent so many years fearful for her son's well-being that Ruth Tolman was the kind of wife she would wish for Robert.

  That spring Robert did not stay in the Tolmans' guesthouse, but in a oneroom "efficiency" apartment. Ella approved, but she worried about Robert's cough that wasn't going away, and there was the memory of that awful winter in Brittany and Paris, when he had been so distraught that he had locked her in her room. Now, with Robert in such good spirits, she hoped he had found his place in the world. And she thought it quite a fine world. People were drawn to Robert; his students were clearly devoted. He and Richard were engrossed in something called "cosmic ray theory." And, of course, Julius was beside himself with pleasure that his Roberty had succeeded magnificently. Only twenty-six, and already an important Herr Professor. America had worked magically for the immigrant Julius Oppenheimer, who had sold his share of the family business shortly before the previous year's stock-market crash, so the Oppenheimer fortune was secure.

  Near the end of their Pasadena visit Julius bought his son an early birthday gift—a new Chrysler. After insisting that he could manage with the two-year-old roadster, Robert graciously accepted the new car and named it Gamaliel, Hebrew for "reward of God." A proper thank-you to his father and, in a way, an acknowledgment of his Jewish heritage.

  JEAN SPENT HER DAYS AT the Williams Institute quietly avoiding new friendships, and tucked into her room with a view of the Golden Gate. Throughout the rainy winter months, her door closed, she read the letters from Cambridge. Then, pen firmly in hand, she emptied her thoughts onto page after page. At times it was difficult to know which Jean was appearing on the page: sometimes her words mimicked the novels and poems of the books she and her friends were all reading and recommending to each other, or she would lapse into the rhythms of Edna St. Vincent Millay—my candle burns at both ends; it will not last the night—or echo May's theatrical prose. But the question that began to plague Jean no longer troubled May, who now understood that she preferred women. For her, their last night in New York had been a disappointment, while for Jean it remained an exciting yet disturbing enigma.

  Jean did not know how she could love May, could hunger so much to be with her, yet not be certain that this love was sexual. She told May: "Last year there was a period when I thought I was a homo-sexual. I am still in a way, forced to believe it, but really, logically, I am sure that I can't be because of my un-masculinity. Do you ever think of it?" Then she lapsed into a kind of poetic concatenation of a "curious torturing feeling . . . of the pain and passion and desolation . . . the dying joy and utter weakness" that flashed through her, and she wanted an explanation. "Wasn't that night a leavening, an equaling, a molding, a dissolving?"117

  Finally, tired of the subject, she wrote, "Beloved, life is so short; reality and beauty, just be true; it isn't unbalanced. I don't love you that way. Only I have to give in to this beauty, any beauty." Plaintively she added: "You are my friend this year, as I have said, lots, I am friendless. I suppose I am a sly self-conscious and repulsive creature. . . . Adolescence is harder even than I had thought."118

  ON THE LAST DAY OF January 1930, spring blew in soft and warm and the Williams Institute student body emptied out to watch a tennis match. Jean sat on a stone bench, going through what she described as "tortures of self-consciousness," which made her feel like crying because she was turning out so differently from the person she had "vaguely supposed and desired" she would become. Gusts of the warm spring weather propelled her up the hill to home, where she took her violin and spent the rest of the afternoon practicing, feeling some kind of fresh new hope rising. Finally she put down the bow and began to commit her springfed feelings to paper: "I want to pull myself straight and clean—I am now really going to try to get into Vassar." In the next paragraph she backed off, saying she didn't really mean it, that she still planned to be an actress. Adding there was little hope that she'd get in to Vassar—because she was failing chemistry.119 Yet she interjected a note of hesitation, a hint that she might go to college after all, and made it real by mailing the letter off to May.

  VIENNA'S ALFRED ADLER WAS THE first of the European psychoanalysts to arrive in the San Francisco Bay Area in the late 1920s. He gave a lecture on "Understanding Human Nature" at Berkeley's Wheeler Auditorium. The following week, he spoke about the "Inferiority Complex" at Mills College. He was pleased enough with his reception, and the San Francisco area, to let Cora Williams talk him into teaching a summer course at Williams Institute.

  Almost certainly, Marjorie Tatlock went to one or more of these early Adler lectures, along with her friends Elizabeth and James Whitney. The psychology group included Jean and Donald Macfarlane and opened its doors to academics in other fields, as long as they had a grasp of the discipline—primarily the teachings of Freud and Jung—and a desire to explore the field of psychotherapy.120 Robert Oppenheimer became part of the group.

  During his fall semester at Berkeley, Robert lived in an elegant if spartan guest room at the University Faculty Club, tucked into a grove of live oaks on campus. During these early years at Berkeley, Oppenheimer met John Tatlock. The two men had a great deal in common: a Harvard education and a sense of loyalty to that university, ambition and a love of medieval literature.

  In June, Hugh Tatlock finished his freshman year at Berkeley with both an award for academic excellence and a determination not to return. Marjorie was aware that neither of her children was happy. Hugh was fair and slender—the brother and sister resembled each other more than they did t
heir parents. Although he had been a bit shy as a boy, he had fit in easily at Andover. Called "Tats" or "Hugo" (his father called him "Hughby"), he swam and played tennis for his school, but baseball was his love, the Boston Red Sox his team. All San Francisco had to offer was the minor-league Seals.

  Hugh had been accepted at Harvard, but he decided he did not want to go back to school at all. He wanted to go to sea. Professor Tatlock must have felt a certain exasperation with a son who would rather go to sea than to Harvard and a daughter who wanted to become an actress. The observant Marjorie waited, wrote her own long letters to her friends and tried to be as patient as a saint—an effort that her daughter, in her better moments, acknowledged. Marjorie watched her daughter challenge and charm a dinner table of distinguished scholars, listened as she filled the house with soaring music, and the next day appeared so full of woe that she locked herself away in her room. This was a girl who wandered about at midnight or in the early hours of morning, climbed on the roof of the house and swam alone in the pool, who wrote a friend: "I am despairing. I am a different species from you and from the rest of the world . . . I don't know what to do."121

  On his next trip to New York, Jean's father—following in the footsteps of his erstwhile Harvard colleague George Sarton—appeared at the office of Miss Eva Le Gallienne. She seemed vague about Jean; she hadn't remembered promising her a place in the student company. Soon Jean received a letter written by a secretary at the theater, saying that she would have to apply and go through the usual routine. Jean's feelings were bruised, but she did not intend to give up. She would audition, and she would do well. She knew that Vassar was still an option. The first choice of her parents, certainly. But she had to give her father credit for going to see Le Gallienne, though how earnestly he pled his daughter's case could only be guessed.

  THE TOLMAN HOUSE AT THE edge of the Caltech campus was well positioned to become an unofficial headquarters for the friends Richard and Ruth had brought together. Some were Richard's colleagues, though not all were physicists and not all senior faculty. Charlie Lauritsen had received his doctorate the year before; he was on the physics faculty, working on the use of X-ray tubes for radiation therapy on cancer patients, a new field altogether. His wife, Sigrid, was in medical school at the University of Southern California, also intending to work in radiation therapy. Lauritsen was a dozen years older than Robert, who slipped easily into this group. Ruth provided friends as well, most with links to Berkeley and to psychology.

  As a discipline, psychology was considered a soft science by most of the physicists, not something to pursue when the hard sciences presented such tantalizing questions. But, like Robert, Richard found psychology intriguing. He was twenty-three years older than Oppenheimer, but the two were fairly well matched in their abilities—with quick and inclusive minds drawn to the unknown, and interests ranging from music and literature to ethics and the new study of human behavior. Both had younger brothers with whom they were close. Richard's younger brother Edward was leading the field of behavioral psychology at Berkeley, while Robert's brother Frank was at Johns Hopkins, getting his undergraduate degree, and then would be heading for Caltech.

  Richard introduced Robert to astrophysics, and on his monthly visits, Robert would stay in the guesthouse and the two would spend hours in the study that Ruth dubbed "Richard's Folly," involved in lively arguments. With Richard, and a covey of remarkable graduate students, Robert would accomplish some of his most original work in physics at Caltech, including studies of compressed stars known as "white dwarfs."122

  Ruth was halfway, in years, between what seemed like parallel versions of the same man—one a New England patrician, and the other a first-generation German Jew. At the beginning of the 1930s, both Richard and Robert encouraged Ruth to find her own place in the world. She would complete her master's in psychology at nearby Occidental College. Ruth, though, was acutely aware that as she approached thirty-eight, the prospects of having a child had diminished.

  RUTH WAS A POPULAR NAME for girls at the turn of the twentieth century. Ruth Sherman would likely have met Ruth Valentine*—always called Val—at Berkeley, where she was getting a doctorate in psychology. Val was also working with Lillie Margaret at the YWCA, as a secretary and managing the Y's Golden Lantern Lunchroom. Ruth and Val were the same age; Val had graduated from Vassar in 1915, and stayed there long enough to get a master's degree before returning to her wealthy—and troubled—family in Oakland. Val had a somewhat bawdy sense of humor and a direct manner combined with a sensitivity that made her appealing to both men and women. When she finished her doctorate under Edward Tolman, she went to work in the Los Angeles school system as a psychologist. It would not have been an accident that she bought a house in Pasadena with a back garden that adjoined the Tolmans'. Val became Ruth's closest friend,123 and a regular member of the homegrown, informal stammtisch—a relaxed gathering of Tolman friends and colleagues. A gate was built to connect their gardens.

  * * *

  * Val's father had been president of the Wells Fargo Company but had died when Val was eight years old. Her mother was a socialite who had Val's brother Philip declared incompetent because she felt he was squandering his inheritance. A year later another court his inheritance. In 1934, he was arrested for highjacking a taxi in Oakland. Oakland Tribune, November 15, 1921:21; Ibid. April 21, 1934:1.Val had been caught in the middle of family wars almost all her life.

  The Tolman/Oppenheimer/Valentine vortex drew in other friends: the psychologists Donald and Jean Macfarlane—Marjorie Tatlock's close friends—traveled between Berkeley and Caltech and some of them to Perro Caliente. Natalie Raymond, the renegade daughter of a prominent Pasadena family, added excitement. Nat was a year younger than Robert and game for any exploit that promised relief from boredom and restlessness, which seemed to be her main afflictions. Ruth and Val treated Nat like an errant but lovable little sister who had a habit of putting herself in untenable situations. Nat was attractive, bright and unconventional in her search for herself. For the group, there was something oddly compelling about Nat's misadventures. A friend described her as a "dare-devil, an adventurer, as was Robert to some extent."124 Her reckless approach to life almost ensured that she and Robert would become friends.

  NAT WAS WITH ROBERT IN the roadster one day when a train came rumbling down the tracks that paralleled the coastal highway. Robert couldn't resist racing it. ("I have driven him 95 without opening the throttle wide.") He lost control, the car careened, and when it came to rest, Nat lay motionless. Robert, unscathed, was certain she was dead. She was unconscious, but after a time came around, miraculously intact. A close brush, another improbable story to attach to Robert and Nat's respective growing repertoires. Julius Oppenheimer considered it yet another disaster narrowly averted. For having the good grace not to perish because of his son's irresponsibility, Julius gave the young lady two works of art from his collection: a Cézanne drawing and a small Vlaminck painting.125

  Nat moved in concentric circles made up of friends, acquaintances and lovers, both male and female, whose lines sometimes crossed. Robert fondly described Nat's "jams" as "her always new & always moving miseries."126 Like Jean Tatlock's friend May Sarton, Nat was drawn to older women. She turned to Val and Ruth for advice, then to Dr. Ruth Benedict, already an important name in the field of anthropology, who was seventeen years older.

  Like Val—who gave Nat a bed when she needed one and a place to hide out when things went wrong—Benedict was captivated by Nat. In June of 1931, Benedict was in Santa Fe doing field studies on the Apache Indians. "Nat came, and as a bed in my room was vacant [and] she very much at loose ends, she is staying on til she is put out, she says," Benedict wrote to her former student and lover Margaret Mead. Benedict tried to describe Nat: "She is used to amusing herself—boring herself would be more descriptive—and I go on working with the Apaches. In the evening she joins in the poker games, and daytimes she walks in the pouring rain or drives one of the boys mil
es back country to find an Indian. . . . She's not in love with me, but she's used to holding everybody at arm's length and she is at ease with me." Then she asked the question both Ruth and Val, and all the others who marveled at Nat, were pondering: "What will become of her?"127

  Later, Benedict wrote Mead, who was on her way to New Guinea for fieldwork. "Natalie's jam seemed worse to me the more I knew about it," she confided. "Her plan is to take the Medical School course at the University of California, and that's even second rate as a medical school. She is way above the level of anything they're used to, and gets cum laudes with everything."128 Benedict told Mead that there were other issues that would make medical school a problem for Natalie: she could not stand to look at a corpse, and blood unhinged her completely.

  "She might be able to come to New York. I'd be glad if she could." Benedict went on, perhaps to convince Mead, or possibly herself: "She's a desperate, unhappy child and that doesn't seem such a strange state of affairs to me as it does in her home city, so she feels more at home with me. I wish I could talk to you about it. I know well enough that I could hurt Nat irreparably—as human 'irreparable' go—but I think it would be all right even if she came to New York. I care about her a lot, and it would be a no more insulting offer of benevolence. On the other hand, there's all the difference of age and the rest, and her complete unplacedness, that make me to her a symbol of security and peace rather than any end-all and be-all."129