An Atomic Love Story
Page 10
That August, Robert wrote to his brother Frank, who was in England, "I have seen Val and the Tolmans and Nat . . . Nat has gone east, having worn out the Pacific coast. She will be in New York, probably at the Cornell Medical School or the Rockefeller."130
Nat and Benedict moved into an apartment on West 72nd Street and lived together for most of the decade, with Nat taking classes, being distracted, starting one thing and moving on to something else, with time out every summer for regular excursions west, keeping her place in the Tolmans' circle. Sometimes she turned up at Perro Caliente, and occasionally she met Robert when he happened to be in New York City. She continued to move through life delighting and exasperating her circles of friends with her small insurgencies and "always moving miseries."
10
JEAN IS OVERWHELMED, RUTH AND ROBERT GRIEVE, AND KITTY FALLS IN LOVE
The spring of 1930, as graduation approached, Jean's handwriting changed from the precise, bold, upright script to a rather chaotic, right-slanting scrawl. "I would anything were real, even my body," she wrote to May. She then leapt into fantasy: "Had I a man, I should give myself to whatever that is. I can easily imagine becoming drunk over his body and more over his delight in mine. He could have all that and whatever of the rest of me he could find. I imagine, were he a fine man he could make something out of me." Then she added, with a certain poignancy, "I'm in terribly deep, Snab."131
Jean graduated from high school early in June, predictably contemptuous of the ceremony: "It is the most awful graduation I can conceive of. So hypocritical." She went through the motions because she couldn't bear to hurt her mother, who she felt was saintly for tolerating what Jean called her "overwhelmings."132
Just when she finally decided to apply to college, Jean received an invitation to audition with Eva Le Gallienne and worried that she might faint—her doctor had said her blood pressure was much too high for her age. "In the last year my body has gotten more and more out of hand. I can't be sure of anything, and these silly overwhelmings are omnipotent," she wrote May.133 The word became a code for those times when Jean felt unable to move, to think, to act. All she could do was shrink into herself, close down, try to control her breathing. Her parents hoped this was all part of adolescence. Her father wanted her to grow up, to get on with it. Her mother wasn't sure. She did not share her husband's attitude that Jean was going through an annoying but passing phase, to be ignored as much as possible.
IN LETTERS TO LETTY, THE Clark sisters and May, Jean complained that her parents wanted her to be more active, to take summer classes at the university so that she would be able to get into Vassar. She revolted and decided she must go to Europe before she could do anything else. When her mother suggested they were "too poor," Jean shook it off as an excuse to deny her the trip.
Jean's dear friend Letty had been having troubles of her own, but hers were physical. Jean owed her a letter—a point Letty chided her about in typical Snab melodramatic style: "Unless you write to me immediately I shall pray God to condemn you to live forever upon this painless earth." Doctors were having difficulty diagnosing Letty's problem. Jean wrote May to ask whether Letty was in pain, adding, "Last year I used to feel sometimes in great surges that she was greater than any of us and anyone else."134
On June 9, a week before she was to graduate from Cambridge Latin and High, Letty Field underwent surgery. The fifteen-year-old died that same day of peritonitis. A shock washed over her friends in Boston and New York, Berkeley and Switzerland. The news all but buried an already tenuous Jean Tatlock. May and Margot and Jean Clark were stunned, but Jean could not shake loose the dread. Death became a recurrent theme in her letters.
"Dears," she wrote, "I am so tired and small and young, the only thing Letty's death has done to me is to make death seem too sweet." She echoed Joan of Arc: "Sometimes a fear grips me. I don't know what it is. It's supernatural. I see in little things, that God has been preparing me for this all year, all my life. A miserable creature, he." Her impulse was to run, as far and as fast as she could. To Cambridge first, to be with Mrs. Field and live in Letty's room if possible (it was not), then on to Europe—to Geneva, where Letty had lived when her father was alive. Or to France or Italy or anywhere; she felt she could not stay in America. Jean announced that she was going to "ditch my heart-felt plan of going to Eva's . . . But I am in such a state . . . that I don't think I could give much to it. I am quite empty and all tied up inside . . . This is the time in my life when I must find salvation or go without forever."135 Shaken by their daughter's tortured reaction to Letty's death, and perhaps relieved that she would not be going to the theater school, the Tatlocks decided that a year in Europe might give Jean time to gain equanimity. They hoped the year would also help her decide in favor of Vassar, where Winifred could watch over her. The Clark and Tatlock families conferred and decided that Margot Clark would go with Jean to Geneva.
The girls sailed from New York on the SS Pennland early in October. That fall, Hugh Tatlock put off Harvard for a year, and signed on as a cadet on the merchant marine vessel SS Golden Coast, and later as an ordinary seaman on the SS Golden Star, sailing between San Francisco and Hong Kong. John and Marjorie Tatlock, left in their big house overlooking San Francisco Bay, had to wonder why their two privileged children so readily turned down the opportunities offered them. John sought solace in The Canterbury Tales. Trying to understand, Marjorie asked help from the people who were probing human behavior—just as Ella Oppenheimer had done in Cambridge and Paris and Brittany, just four years earlier, when Robert was in such despair that he'd had thoughts of suicide.
FRIENDS WERE BECOMING WARY OF Jean's obsessive need to talk about Letty, even May. Lashing back, Jean wrote: "I think you idealize silence in me. There is no need to. Silence for its own sake can be unbearably, disgustingly sentimental . . . I am sorry, but I must say this: think of Letty and her silences which were always natural, elemental, terrifyingly strong. Yet she was not a silent person, nor was she ever sweet, only terribly terribly to take to one's heart."136
A family friend of the Fields, a German tutor named Leni Cahn, was there to watch after the girls. Jean would write to May that she loved Leni "in a constructive satisfying way," but that she was "not eaten by passion so disgustingly (I detest and abhor passion) as I was for K and for you too some of last year in California." Jean also wrote to May to say, in rather blunt terms, that she now found homosexuality abhorrent and "unnatural."137
For the Christmas holidays, Jean went to a ski resort in the Alps with her mother's friend Elizabeth Whitney and her husband, James. Both had close ties to Carl Jung, who had analyzed them three years earlier. Elizabeth was aware of Jean's "overwhelmings," and her struggle to come to terms with Letty's death. James Whitney was "a very heavenly person," Jean reported. She skied with him and they had long talks; she came away claiming to trust him more than any other man she had ever met. About her time with Elizabeth, she was more guarded, saying only, "She is all but a practicing psycho-analyst, and understands very well things ignorable by others."138
As winter wore on, a new equilibrium emerged. Jean wrote to May, "I feel very strongly that I have done exactly right for this year." Jean began to consider Vassar seriously enough to take the college boards at the beginning of summer. May had plans to be in Paris, and Jean looked forward to seeing her, even if she expected a tirade about college being a waste of time. To give May fair warning, she wrote, "I am not sure about acting. I feel at times there is something indisputable and absolutely surely set for me to do later, only I have not seen it yet. I now almost want to go to Vassar for a year or so."139 She need not have worried; May had become embroiled in her first real love affair, with a woman who lived in a boardinghouse on McDougal Street. She had moved on.
IN THE FALL OF 1928, Kitty went to the University of Pittsburgh and continued to live at home. Kitty's father worked at the Koppers chemical company and was successful in developing patents for blast furnaces and coking coal.140 There was enough money to s
end Kitty and her mother to Germany for summer visits with Vissering and Puening relatives.
Kitty's academic interest was botany; her love of plants would prove enduring. She would create gardens wherever she lived, and was proud of what she called her "gardener's" thumb. Her freshman classes included biology, mathematics and chemistry. Determined since high school to get an advanced degree, she managed to complete her first full year at Pitt, during which she learned that even an undergraduate degree required a certain amount of time and patience. She ran out of both by the end of the term, and did not return to school until the spring semester. She managed to stay through summer school and the next fall semester.141 Then she left again.
Kitty convinced her parents that it would be a fine idea for her to travel around Europe. She could study modern languages, maybe take classes at the University of Munich, or at the Sorbonne, even the University of Grenoble. She could go skiing in the Alps with aunts or cousins. She sailed from New York in March 1930 with a ticket to return in May, in time for the summer session at Pitt.
If she registered at the Sorbonne, she didn't bother to go to classes. Much later, vivacious, fun-loving Kitty would admit that in those months most of her friends were musicians and that "I spent little time on school work."142 One of those musicians was a handsome young Harvard graduate named Frank Ramseyer, who was studying in Paris that year with Nadia Boulanger, the composer and conductor who taught a generation of famous musicians on both sides of the Atlantic, including the American Aaron Copland.143
Frank, who was five years older than Kitty, had a job as a teaching assistant in Harvard's Music Department, and planned on pursuing his master's degree at the university. He had an easy sense of humor, he made delightful music, and he could be spontaneous. American jazz had just arrived in France, and Frank would sit down at a piano and accompany a singer in an impromptu session. For Kitty, it was a storybook romance, clinging to the arm of a good-looking young American who loved Paris— walking along the Seine in the lavender light of a Paris evening, spending days at the picture galleries, exploring the Tuileries and the Jardin de Luxembourg.
She was scheduled to sail from Bremen on May 19. She and Frank said their goodbyes, and pledged to meet again. Pittsburgh wasn't all that far from Boston. Kitty left; Frank returned to America soon after. He returned to his position at Harvard and to his family home on Adelaide Street in the historic district of Jamaica Plain. It had taken Frank's father twenty years to become a cotton broker and to buy the house the family had rented since 1910.144
IN THE MIDDLE OF JUNE 1931, Ruth's father, the Reverend Warren Sherman, died in Berkeley; at almost the same time Robert's mother was diagnosed with leukemia. In October, he was with her when she died. When a family friend offered his condolences and said, "You know, Robert, your mother loved you very much," the son muttered: "Maybe she loved me too much."145
After Ella's death, Robert gathered his father into his life; Julius visited both California campuses and stayed for weeks at a time. In Pasadena, Ruth took the father under her wing just as she had the sons. She included Julius in her group of friends, taking him to the symphony and to musical evenings.
In the early years of his rotation between Berkeley and Pasadena, Robert's social life centered almost entirely on his students and colleagues. He took the students to dinner in San Francisco and always picked up the tab, knowing how pinched they were for funds. The wives of his colleagues invited him to dinner and then fluttered over the flowers he inevitably had delivered. He was having a good time: creating a new field in theoretical physics at Berkeley was a romance of its own. He was becoming known as an eligible bachelor, and while he had dalliances here and there, so far there were no serious contenders for his attentions.
During the last month of summer, Robert would return to New Mexico. Katherine Page—now Katy—who had seen promise in Robert when he was still a boy, remained an important part of life at the camp. The main attraction at Perro Caliente was the horseback rides into the high mountain country. Some of Robert's guests were excellent riders; others had never been on a horse. It didn't matter. They rode with graham crackers and whiskey in their saddlebags, in the rain or by the light of the moon, over trails and through trees and brush.146 Perro Caliente tested everyone's mettle, and it allowed Robert to appear the mountain man.
CHANGE CAN BE MEASURED IN the smallest things: an escaped sigh, the shadow of moving leaves, an errant thought. The moments gather, deepen over the course of a day, a week, a month. A year had passed since Letty's death; Jean took the college boards. Then she and Margot went to Paris, and were waiting when May arrived. May found Jean "wonderful and strange . . . so wise, anciently wise in some ways, and then suddenly childish." Margot agreed; Jean thought deeply about so many things, worried them in the far recesses of her mind. And all the while on the surface, she was this tall, eloquent girl with dark eyelashes so thick, they clustered when wet.147
According to May, the reunited Snabs spent two "glorious weeks" swimming naked in "fiery blue seas." May was too besotted with her new love to keep it secret, but the news didn't seem to unsettle Jean. "Love" meant different things to the two of them. For May, Jean would always be too "modest" to experience physical love. Jean's ideal involved the perfect merger of emotional love and physical love. One without the other would never work for her. And—aside from that one night with May in New York, about which she remained uncertain—she had had no experience with either at this point in her passionate young life.
Still, Jean spoke with precision when she thought her friend was acting the fool. May's talent as a writer was beginning to earn her some money, and she was considering a year in Russia to research a book. Jean told her that the idea was "certainly excessively exciting," but wondered how much May could possibly expect to "get of the heights and depths" of present-day Russia, to be able to write a proper book about it, when she couldn't even speak the language. Jean was clear: "It seems to me impossible . . . I think you cannot help either idealizing it entirely, or being broken by it."148 The Russian Revolution had taken place scarcely fourteen years before; the Communist Party was gaining in popularity as the Depression closed in on America and Europe.
Jean's thoughts that summer in Paris were not on the shifting politics of the world, but on how a just life should be lived. "The farther I went from Letty's death the more I felt the strongest need in the world was for compassion and kindliness," she wrote, "something to combat the cowardly puritanism and sickly stoicism which the stupid western world has somehow gleaned from Christianity."149 Jean was growing up; personal tragedy had stirred her deepest convictions.
After France, Jean traveled to Florence, where she found herself in what she called "an agony" of homesickness. She was ready to go home. Her mother was waiting for her at the dock in New York. She would be going to Vassar in the fall.
KITTY RETURNED FROM PARIS IN time for summer school at Pitt. Caught up in the incandescence of romance, she did not want to be locked into summer classes—she wanted to be in Boston with Frank Ramseyer. She told her parents he was a wonderfully talented musician, a pianist who could work on complicated scores. He was quiet, well-read, loved art and design and good books. She was certain her parents would approve. And his family? The name was German; his grosspapa had come to America from Switzerland. Kitty's mother's family had roots in Switzerland as well. The Visserings were related to the de Blonay family; the family seat was a castle, built in the eleventh century, high above Lake Geneva. Her great-grandfather, Bodewin Vissering, who had married Johanna de Blonay, owned an estate in Hannover, and was a member of the German parliament. The Visserings and de Blonays were much more prestigious, in the European scheme of things, than the American Ramseyers. Frank's grandfather had been a clock-maker; Kitty's a professor in Munster.
It took all the patience Kitty could muster to get through summer school at Pitt, completing her junior year. But the rest of the degree would have to wait. She had to be with Frank.
Confusingly, Kitty seems to have enrolled at Pitt for the semester beginning in January of 1933, almost immediately after her marriage, and to have returned to her parents' house in Aspinwall. She also sailed for Europe, returning in June 1933 to New York; on the passenger list she was Katherine Ramseyer and her address was the one she shared with Frank in Cambridge, but Frank was not on the ship with her. That summer he was in residence at Harvard. Soon after, Kitty registered at the University of Wisconsin, but never turned up for classes.151
On December 20, 1933, Kitty claimed to have been granted an annulment of her marriage from the Superior Court of Wisconsin. The testimony, she would later tell a friend, was ruled by the court to be so obscene it did not become part of the public record. That December, ten days before the annulment, Frank was in Cambridge, playing Handel and Beethoven sonatas with a string trio at Lowell House.152
Kitty's version, told much later when she was speaking more freely, was that several months into the marriage, she had found a diary of Frank's, and discovered pages of "mirror writing." Kitty got a mirror. What she read, she said, shocked and disgusted her, and caused her to conclude that her new husband was a homosexual and a drug addict.153 Some time during that same year, Kitty became pregnant.
Who arranged for the abortion, how and where it was done, who paid for it, and who if anyone was with her at the time—none of this information appears in any records. It couldn't: abortion was a criminal offense in 1933. It was also a common practice during the Depression, when many women simply could not feed the children they already had. That was not Kitty's reason. She wanted the marriage and the pregnancy to be erased. It seems likely that Frank was with her during the abortion because he would later tell his second wife that the fetus had been a boy.154