An Atomic Love Story

by Shirley Streshinsky

  By Christmas, Kitty was back in Aspinwall with her parents and Frank was in Cambridge, playing in a Christmas recital. He had been expunged from Kitty's past, along with his unborn son.

  11

  RUTH MAKES A DECISION; JEAN GOES TO VASSAR; KITTY FALLS IN LOVE AGAIN AND ROBERT HAS A PERFECT SUMMER AT PERRO CALIENTE

  Ruth was forty and childless; she had skipped all of those years when academic wives were having babies and worrying about their husband's tenure. Physicists' wives joked that they would always be second to physics in their husbands' affections; as with most such jokes, there was a kernel of truth to this. Ruth knew what Richard's family thought, even said to each other: that the terriers they owned were their children, that Ruth "didn't really want children." In fact, Richard tolerated the dogs; away on one of his frequent trips, Ruth wrote him, "I let Nitz sleep in the room with me last night, but I certainly will not do it again, as he barked much of the night and in general behaved very restlessly and badly. I told Nat that for once all the unpleasant and unflattering things you say about him are, or were, pretty close to true."155 But to Ruth, the dogs were so responsive to her moods, such good companions, that they filled a need. The little terriers would follow her around, crawl into her lap whenever they could.

  Fulfilling the social obligations of the dean's wife, running his house, playing the piano like the talented amateur she was, were not enough. Had there been a child, Ruth would have established a certain kind of work schedule—it was always a given that Ruth was going to work. Now, she needed to be part of a larger and more demanding world. At her part-time job administering psychological tests to delinquents at Los Angeles Juvenile Hall,156 the young people she worked with were angry, sullen, in despair; their families had fallen apart, their lives were stunted. For Ruth, these young people became an antidote to the ivory tower, and the work gave her an idea of the practical applications of psychology.

  When Ruth went to UCLA—with the title Associate in Psychology—counseling students and doing research, she was able to audit psychology courses. She stayed in this holding pattern for two years, keeping up with the field. In 1929, she enrolled at nearby Occidental College, which had ties to Caltech. In little over a year, she completed her master's degree and started a new job—half-time again—lecturing, counseling, and giving aptitude tests to freshmen at Occidental. After that she began working, again part-time, at Scripps, one of the prestigious Claremont colleges, where she was paid smartly—$250 a month,157 a big leap from the $75 she had earned at Juvenile Hall. Still, the real-world troubles of the young people must have challenged this preacher's daughter, for teaching was to prove only a way station.

  In the fall of 1934, after a semester at Scripps, she signed on with the Federal Emergency Relief Administration in downtown Los Angeles as a consulting psychologist. Ruth became witness to the devastations of the Depression, to the most afflicted populations in a country struggling to regain its balance. At the agency she had access to a world most Californians never enter, one that offered rich material for a dissertation. She became engrossed in the field of criminal behavior; she wanted to understand the prisoners themselves.

  Ruth brought some of the reality of life in downtown Los Angeles up the hill to Pasadena. Val had seen her share of troubled children in the public schools, and both understood better than Richard or Robert the toll poverty was taking. Robert was far from any contact with the barrios or with those who lived in "the Nickel," Los Angeles's Skid Row (named the Nickel because it was on Fifth Street) or, for that matter, the growing urban poor regions of the city—the places that served as breeding grounds for criminals.

  After a year, Ruth decided—obviously counseled by her brother-in-law Edward—she could combine her consulting work at the Relief Administration with study for a Ph.D. at Berkeley. Richard was pleased that his wife had taken on a challenge equal to her energies and needs. For her studies, Ruth had to appear regularly at Berkeley, which meant she was able to spend time with the two Lillies—her mother and her sister—in the house on Ashby Avenue, and with her cousin Alma, who had married into the socially prominent Chickering family in nearby Piedmont.

  EACH SPRING THROUGHOUT THE 1930s, Robert appeared as usual in Pasadena, trailed by his own small troupe of admiring grad students who would rent cheap rooms, take classes and stay close to their leader. "He was like a comet coming with his stream of students," one admiring Caltech colleague said. "There was an electricity in the air."158 One year the group arrived in time for a birthday celebration for Robert at the Tolmans', where Ruth served a first course of avocados brimming with caviar and, for dessert, apple pie decorated with candles.

  Robert's graduate students adopted his mannerisms, even his walk. It seemed as if everyone always had a cigarette balanced between nicotine-stained fingers. (During one of the department's Monday night Journal Club meetings at Berkeley, where reports were given on recently published articles, an acrid smell filled the room. It took several minutes to discover that Oppenheimer's cigarette, held too close to his head, had set fire to his bushy black hair.)159

  THE SUMMER BEFORE RUTH STARTED at the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, she drove to Perro Caliente with Val. Nat was already there; she had stopped in New Mexico on her way home from New York to help open camp.

  JEAN WAS JUST SEVENTEEN IN 1931, when she started at Vassar. The prescribed courses in nineteenth-century Italian literature, zoology and medieval history didn't thrill her. The second year, she granted, sounded better: economics, political science, music theory and singing, and German. The year in Europe had steadied Jean, produced in her a new grace, an ease of movement. Her classmates at Vassar didn't seem to know what to make of this tall, elegant young woman who spoke French fluently, who recited John Donne and critiqued Galsworthy. She did not flaunt her achievements, but had a depth of knowledge most of them did not. Not surprisingly, Jean made many of them uncomfortable. Priscilla, who had graduated but stayed close to Jean and to Vassar, explained that from the first Jean "seemed set apart from the other girls." Some were scared of her, Priscilla surmised, and it took the brighter girls time to figure out that there was nothing superficial about Jean, that she did not posture. Eventually, she found a niche, writing for the Vassar Miscellany News and the Literary Review.160

  Jean Tatlock finally began to make new friends, among them Eleanor Clark and the poet Elizabeth Bishop. Jean continued to correspond with May, though sporadically. As if to apologize for going to college, she wrote, "I know that this college business is irrelevant and therefore fearfully mask-like and artificial as anything—being a beauty specialist for instance. My best friend there at Vassar, Eleanor Clark,* feels it so strong, she's probably going away to England, maybe to Oxford." Still, she closed the letter with, "Honestly, I love you wildly now, and surely all the time."161 But her letters were now absent the emotional abandon of her younger years.

  * * *

  * Eleanor Clark attended Vassar and contributed, along with poet Elizabeth Bishop and Mary McCarthy, to the college magazine, Con Spirito. Elizabeth Bishop would, among other honors, win a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1956 and was Poet Laureate for the United States in 1949–1950. Eleanor Clark would win a National Book Award in Arts and Letters in 1965, and marry the two-time Pulitzer Prize winning Robert Penn Warren. Mary McCarthy would write the bestselling novel The Group, about eight Vassar graduates.

  The atmosphere at Vassar was accepting of loving and intense relationships between women, sexual or not. The college had a reputation for being discreet about lesbianism. By the time Jean arrived, she seemed to have navigated the worst storms of adolescence and was able to write, "My darling, I'm glad we couldn't lay hands on one another. With me at least, it would have been a giving in, not a consummation. . . . I hope to God we may one day simply love one another."162

  Within a few years the exuberant, talented May would abandon the theater for a successful writing career and a succession of lovers who served as muses. Jean had
longed to understand the completeness of emotional and physical love; now she was intent on finding something to believe in that was larger than herself: a crusade, a quest worthy of a Joan of Arc.163

  Even at this oasis of privilege, the Depression made its mark. More than a hundred women of Vassar's class of 1934 would withdraw before graduation, many for financial reasons. Capitalism and democracy were increasingly called into question as solutions to the country's ills, and Americans, especially in college settings, began to see an answer in socialism. Aunt Winifred—Vassar's Dr. Smith—would be remembered by some as one of the college's "greatest rebels," while others lamblasted her as an "indefatigable Socialist Agitator." In the 1930s, she would travel to Russia to see how the new form of government was working. Jean took up the cause so vehemently that one of her professors gave her Max Eastman's "Artists in Uniform," hoping that the book, written by one of the country's most avid radicals with solid socialist credentials who had turned skeptic, might temper her passion.164 It did not.

  After her freshman year at Vassar, Jean took a summer course in psychology at Berkeley, perhaps to learn more about her own emotional turmoil. She began to think seriously about medical school and a career in psychotherapy. Jean returned for a second year at Vassar and, like many other college students, became increasingly involved in protesting the inequities of capitalism. She elected to do her third year at Berkeley, living at home. It would turn out to be a momentous, troubling and inspiring school year.

  In May of 1934, just as Jean was finishing her Berkeley year, the ports of San Francisco and Oakland exploded with the General Strike; some 65,000 dock workers were demanding the right to unionize and the ship owners resisted. The struggle continued for weeks. Strikebreakers were called in and July 5th became known as "Bloody Thursday," with police and tear gas, shots fired into crowds, bricks and stones thrown, trucks overturned and men killed.

  One afternoon during the strike, Jean went with some members of the League Against War and Fascism to the Oakland Police Department to ask about the jailing of strike sympathizers. The group got little sympathy from the police inspector, who instead lectured them on the Constitution. When one of their group asked to speak to the prisoners, he was "bellied out the door by a big policeman, and told not to show his face around there again."165

  Jean returned to Vassar with a story for the October issue of the Vassar Miscellany. An editor's note explained it was "The fourth in a series of articles by students whose summer experiences showed them some particular aspect of Americans' social and economic life." The headline read: "Account of the General Strike in San Francisco as Told by an Eye Witness/Jean Tatlock Describes Campaign to Break the Strike With the Red Scare." Jean recounted how she had heard about the strike from two members of the International Longshoremen's Association (ILA) who spoke at the University. Neither of the two was a Communist, she quickly pointed out. They were striking for the right of collective bargaining, and asked for an increase in wages, from 85 cents an hour to $1, and $1.50 for overtime.166

  Jean had seen and heard enough that spring and summer, when tear gas drifted over the Oakland and San Francisco waterfronts, when bricks crashed into police cars and billy clubs smashed skulls, when finally the National Guard was called in and bayonets fixed, to know that her sympathies were altogether with the workers. By the end of the year, every port on the West Coast was unionized; the longshoremen's strike had worked, and Jean understood that radical action could be effective.

  THE SUMMER OF 1934 AT Perro Caliente was close to perfect. The alpine weather was cool and clear, a wood fire sent up a warm, smoky scent that permeated the cabin in its grassy clearing—it was rough-hewn, primitive, cheerfully spartan. Pipes that lay above ground carried water down from a spring, but there was still no real plumbing. No electricity, no heat for the chilly nights, except for the stacks of Indian rugs for warmth.

  Frank's college friend Roger Lewis from Johns Hopkins came early that summer and helped Nat Raymond set up camp. Ruth and Val came next. Then Robert arrived, gunning his big Chrysler Garuda up the mountain, and bringing with him physicist George Uhlenbeck and his wife Else, a young couple from the Netherlands who would become great friends of Robert and his father. Else's forté was Indonesian food, spicy enough to thrill Robert; the couple would stay all summer and Else would do much of the cooking.

  "Camp works like a charm," Robert would report to Frank, who was in England. "The chief innovations are kerosene lamps and stove, and two army cots, both to meet the fluctuating and exorbitant demands of the summer's hospitality." Those who knew Robert only in his university habitat were astonished: no coat, no tie, jeans and old boots. And Robert was an absolutely fearless, fine horseman.167

  Robert continued, "This summer more than ever we have been grateful for Vixen and Dink, who are fast, completely competent, full of spirit and even of a good deal of sense." The same could not always be said of the campers; on one trek that summer, Robert, Roger and the Uhlenbecks camped high in the Sangre de Cristos. The men were suddenly seized with altitude sickness; they all shivered through an especially cold night, and when the sun came up, two of the horses were missing. The men revived enough to set out to climb Truchas anyway. A thunderstorm caught them at the peak, and they arrived back in at their campsite wet and cold and miserable. A stop at Katy Page's for a shot of whiskey seemed to set them right. The two delinquent horses appeared early the next morning, and Robert ran out in his pink pajamas to hustle them into the corral. Else would remember the trip as one of the best parts of that summer.168

  The scientists tried not to talk physics at Perro Caliente. They talked mountains, and trails, and Else's recipe for nasi goreng. Before bed they played a wickedly complicated version (devised by Oppenheimer) of the simple child's game Tiddlywinks in front of the fire. Katy, Ruth and Val collected "Robert" stories. Val had a favorite, probably apocryphal: "Imagine this," she would begin, "you're riding on a mountain ridge at midnight in the middle of a thunderstorm, lightning hitting all around you; you come to a fork in the road, in the trail, and Robert says, 'this way it's only seven miles home, this way it's a little longer but it's much more beautiful.'"169

  Those few who had sailed with him on the east coast knew something of this Robert. A different picture of Oppenheimer was emerging. Summer ended with Else and George piling into Garuda with Robert at the wheel, driving north to Berkeley for the fall semester. He was the most fun, the most completely spontaneous person to be around, Else would tell anyone who wanted to know.

  NINE MONTHS EARLIER, THE UHLENBECKS, Robert and Nat had started the year together in New York City. The holidays had been a gay and hectic time, with all of them crowded into Julius' new, smaller apartment on Park Avenue. The 21st Amendment to the Constitution had been passed only weeks before, repealing Prohibition, and by New Year's Eve spirits were flowing. Robert wrote to his brother, "An even greater change: Nat has learned to dress. She wears long graceful things in gold and blue and black, and delicate long earrings, and likes orchids, and even has a hat." He added, intimating that he knew that Nat was living with Ruth Benedict, "To the vicissitudes and anguishes of fortune which have brought this change to her I need say nothing."170

  Robert described the party itself as "wild, confused, very amusing." The problem, this time, wasn't about Nat's tendency towards chaos but with one of the "jeunes filles" brought along by Frank's friend Roger Lewis. According to Robert, Roger had terrible taste in women. They were, he wrote, with an adolescent streak of viciousness,"indescribably and mournfully dreadful little bitches."171

  THAT SAME NEW YEAR'S EVE, Kitty celebrated her successful escape from both marriage and motherhood by going to a party in Pittsburgh. Her good friend Zelma Baker, home for the holidays from graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania, thought it was just what Kitty needed: have some fun, meet some new and exciting people. Zelma, who was finishing her Ph.D. in biochemistry, promised to bring along a "real Communist," a novelty from a different w
orld.172 Her guest turned out to be more real than a novelty.

  Joe Dallet was big with dark eyes and a thick thatch of unruly hair, the result of an amateur haircut. One friend described him as a "handsome sonofabitch. Just a gorgeous guy." He spoke in a kind of longshoreman's patois, yet he was perfectly at ease in this crowd of young university people. The men found him hard to fathom. According to one comrade, "He astonished them when he quoted Eliot and Yeats and Rilke at them out of the corner of his mouth."173 He fairly breathed Marxist theory, and delivered the kind of impassioned rhetoric that married idealism with action. At twenty-seven, Dallet was already at the front of the Communist Party's struggle in the U.S.; he proved his devotion to the cause on March 6, 1930, when he showed up in Chicago with 600 other activists to mark "International Unemployment Day." Dallet was one of the fourteen leaders rounded up by the city's brutal "Red Squad," while planning the march, for a select beating with blackjacks. The battering didn't keep Dallet from turning up two weeks later to march with the 75,000 who were rallying for the establishment of unemployment insurance for the workers.174 Dallet was on the dangerous front lines, and Kitty was in awe. He seemed invincible, his life filled with fervor and direction. Instantly, she turned on whatever it is that makes some women irresistible to men.

  In the course of the night, the two finally found themselves alone. He was working in Ohio, in Youngstown, organizing for labor unions in the steel mills. It was in the center of the most important steel-making region in America, about a two-hour drive from Pittsburgh, which meant he was challenging some of the same people who employed Kitty's father. But Kitty wasn't thinking about her father or her mother, she was thinking about Joe, and the exciting life he was living.