An Atomic Love Story

by Shirley Streshinsky

  Joe was not quite what he seemed to be. While he believed that class war was inevitable, that the proletariat—the workers of the world—would triumph, his own background embarrassed him. His family was affluent; his childhood had been spent with art and music, with piano lessons and travels to Europe. He had spent more than two years at Dartmouth College and, restless, left to work in the insurance industry in which he made more money than he felt he needed. The execution of Sacco and Vanzetti, anarchists accused of murder, when he was twenty, was critical for Dallet (as it was for many of his generation). To make the conversion to the working class, he went to Illinois to work in the coal mines, then east to do a stint on the docks.

  Had Kitty's mother had any idea what was happening that New Year's Eve, especially after seeing their daughter through the previous disastrous year, she would have been furious. Yet all Kitty would ever say was: "I fell in love with him at this party, and I never stopped loving him."175

  12

  JEAN WRITES FOR THE WESTERN WORKER IN SAN FRANCISCO, KITTY SELLS THE DAILY WORKER ON THE STREETS OF YOUNGSTOWN AND ROBERT BECOMES A PART OF HIS LIFE AND TIMES

  Everyone was in motion.

  Robert was pushing Garuda flat-out up and down Highway 101, top down in the sunshine, barreling to and from Pasadena, often a couple of graduate students in the backseat.

  Jean had written the year after Letty's death: "I feel at times there is something indisputable and absolutely surely set for me to do later, only I have not seen it yet."176 She would see it by the time she graduated from Vassar in 1935 and returned to the West. That left only Kitty in the East, poised to begin another life, one promising the fulfillment she longed for.

  Ruth made frequent trips to Berkeley working on her doctorate. She and Robert sometimes met there, building their friendship. Frank returned from England and came west to Caltech to do his doctorate in physics. He arrived with his flute and proved so talented that, with Ruth at the piano, they began playing Friday night concerts at Val's, across the garden.

  At Berkeley, Robert was attracting some of the best young minds in theoretical physics. In 1934, Robert Serber heard him speak at a summer seminar in Wisconsin and changed his plans completely, deciding to go to Berkeley to work with Robert. Serber was small and brilliant and spoke with a lisp; with his smart and funny wife, Charlotte, they slipped easily into the Caltech-Berkeley–Perro Caliente coterie. Serber became Robert's lieutenant—his alter ego some would say—content to stand slightly to his side and behind.

  WHEN SHE MARRIED RICHARD, RUTH'S family in Berkeley grew to include not only Richard's brother Edward, but his wife Kathleen and their three young children, who were especially fond of their "Uncle Dickie." The children didn't quite know what to think of Ruth, perhaps because their mother didn't seem to know what to make of her either. Ruth was elegant and competent, yet she didn't have any children, which seemed to make Kathleen Tolman uncomfortable. The Tolman children would remember how the men would drift into one conversation, the women into another. But Aunt Ruth seemed always to be included in the men's group;177 there was no comfortable in-between for professional women, which would be one reason they sought each other out for important friendships.

  ROBERT'S SOCIAL LIFE IN BERKELEY included his grad students and sometimes their wives or girlfriends. They went to Mexican restaurants for dinner, or into the city to Jack's Restaurant. He dated a succession of women, mostly pretty and young. Eventually Robert found an apartment near Edward Tolman's home and within walking distance of campus. On the lower level of a house that perched above a canyon filled with manzanita and bay trees, the apartment had three fireplaces and a deck. Even on cold nights, he'd often sleep on the deck—it reminded him of Perro Caliente. Robert often entertained, even making his own version of Else Uhlenbeck's spicy nasi goring.

  The house belonged to the Washburns, who lived on the upper level. John Washburn was a public accountant and politically conservative; his wife, Mary Ellen, was younger and more left-leaning. The FBI had her listed as a Communist, even though she and her husband had registered Republican in 1926. Since 1932, Mary Ellen had registered to vote as a Socialist.178 She was tall and brashly elegant, with an eclectic array of friends. As "a modern woman," she was tolerant of deviations from the social norms. (Indeed, there were murmurs about her own sexual preferences.) Mary Ellen's home became a center for the intellectuals of Berkeley, including many Communists. Robert liked the house, the apartment and his new landlady. He was ready to emerge from his singular love affair with physics to become, as he put it, "a part of [his] life and times."

  KITTY'S PARENTS HAD MOVED TO London, where her father represented a Chicago company in England. Even though they were a continent away, Kitty still had to be careful. She knew her mother, especially, would find it repugnant if her daughter took up with a Communist, a Jew at that, and even worse an agitator in the very industry that employed her father. Kitty could not afford to break with her parents until she had another source of income. Joe was agitating for her to join him in Youngstown; he was sure she would be a great addition to the Party; he had a place for her right by his side.

  Dallet believed in Communism with an intensity that could be exasperating to his family. When his sister confided that she wanted to become a social worker, he wrote that he felt social workers, "No matter how good their intentions, are objectively harming the workers (the 'poor'). They try to make them 'better adjusted' to the world about them, to 'help the misfits fit' etc. In other words, they try to make it easier for them to exist under capitalism . . . The only solution is to have the workers own, control and operate the means of production, in other words— Socialism, which the workers and peasants in Soviet Russia are building today."179

  Joe Dallet was going to change the world, and he wanted Kitty to change it with him. She agreed; first, she said, she needed to meet her mother in Germany. Using her Katherine Ramseyer passport, she visited relatives including her Aunt Hilde, the unmarried one, who would later work for an infamous Nazi filmmaker. Kitty's German family would not have approved of Dallet and he would have been even more repulsed by this part of Kitty's family. Kitty left Bremen on the SS Europa, arriving in New York on August 3, 1934, less than a month before the Nazi Party rally in Nuremberg where Triumph of the Will was filmed.

  Dallet was waiting for her in Ohio; he took her to the rooming house to meet some of her new comrades. She became known to them as Kitty Dallet, though the FBI would label her a "common law" wife, which probably means they could find no record of a marriage. In writing to his mother in the summer of 1934, presumably after he and Kitty had married, Joe told her a bit about Kitty: "You asked for information about K. . . . Born in Germany about 24 years ago . . . Studied at Pittsburgh U., Wisconsin, and also abroad for a year or so. Used to play the piano quite well. Family had some money until the depression. Father an engineer. Parents living in Germany the last few years." He went on to describe her: "Pretty good head. Plays good bridge. Rather slight of build, tho well-proportioned. Weight about 112." He told Hilda that Kitty was in charge of selling worker's literature and working hard to set up a worker's bookshop.180 And, yes, she had become a member of the Communist Party USA.

  Dallet might have been a gorgeous guy, musically talented and brave; he was also doctrinaire. He eschewed personal wealth for the greater good, and felt that the state, corrupt capitalist entity though it might be, had a responsibility to care for its workers. He had no compunction about writing home to tell his family his shoes were worn out and asking them to pay for a new pair, nor did he hesitate to live on the government dole ($25.00 a month) while he agitated against the system. He showed his devotion to the working classes by living in a boardinghouse with other comrades. As Kitty described it, in the shared kitchen, "the stove leaked and it was impossible to cook. Our food consisted of two meals a day, which we got at a grimy restaurant."181 An ideologue, Joe expected Kitty to be one too. She wrapped herself in his arms, and said of course she would.r />
  "I AM DEVOTING MY TIME, precious to me only," Jean wrote to Priscilla, "to reporting and writing for the Western Worker, Pacific Coast organ of the Communist Party. This means attending a couple of weekly meetings . . . Then there are sudden excitements such as . . . the trial of 25 workers for participating in a riot which never took place, in a faraway lumbering town called Eureka, to which I will get a ride in a couple of days." Jean went on: "I find I am a complete red when anything at all." But then, "I find it impossible to be an ardent Communist—which means breathing, talking and acting it—all day and all night." 182

  Jean was back on San Antonio Avenue in the Berkeley hills after graduating from Vassar in 1935, at age twenty-one. She was dividing her time between political activities and attending Berkeley to complete the prerequisites necessary for medical school. When her political spirit was exhausted, she wrote Pris, she visited a "heavenly" family who was "completely oblivious of the dialectic as of the conflict under their noses—so with them I enter a Never Never Land." She felt no moral compunction, she wrote on, "As perhaps good comrades would," because, "I still have a feeling for the sanctity and sense of the individual soul."183

  The people she could not avoid quarreling with were those whose interest in psychoanalysis prevented them from believing in any other form of social action. She was especially aggravated by those who treated psychological theory as a hobby, who didn't realize it, "like surgery, is a therapeutic method for specific disorders."184 Jean spelled out for Pris one of the major conflicts of her life. She wanted to make a difference as an individual by going to medical school, but at the same time she felt a need to be part of the larger struggle that Communism represented.185

  KITTY DALLET, AS SHE WAS known, sold the Daily Worker on the streets of Youngstown, and when she handed out Communist Party leaflets at factory gates she wore tennis shoes, she said, "so that I could get a fast running start when the police arrived." She taught a class in English to workers who didn't speak English well, ran errands, was given the title "literary agent" which meant prodding Party members to read Marxists tracts.186 She stood at Joe's elbow when he ran a quixotic race for mayor of Youngstown, and listened to speeches, which could seem endless.

  The summer of 1934 was the hottest on record in Ohio: long days of temperatures climbing above 100 degrees, stifling nights with people sleeping on porches, or on lawns, to escape their suffocating houses. Drought parched the Great Plains, followed by dust storms so thick it was impossible to breathe; hurricanes ravaged the Florida Keys. The summer floods and tornadoes were followed in winter by great drifts of snow which buried the north of the country.

  Kitty persevered in Youngstown for almost two years, trying to be Comrade Kitty Dallett. The trouble with Kitty, Joe told one of his friends, was that "she was a middle-class intellectual who couldn't quite see the working class attitude." She needed a time-out, and he had no patience for people who needed time-outs. He did not tolerate weakness or wavering. They quarreled. The poverty and the heat and the unrelenting dialectic of the Communist Party wore her down. "Finally in June, 1936, I told Joe that I could no longer live under such conditions and that I was separating from him."187

  She ordered a new passport, using the name of Katherine Puening (which would seem to confirm that she and Joe had never married), and had it mailed to Zelma Baker in Philadelphia. With her passport in hand, Kitty sailed off to England. Her parents were waiting for her, probably with more than a little trepidation.

  JEAN MIGHT HAVE WALKED FROM her Berkeley home to the Washburn's more modern house on Shasta Road, something over a mile away, in the spring of 1936. The walk would have given her time to consider some of the dilemmas confronting her. Psychiatry was anathema to Communism, which she wanted to believe was the best hope for a world in despair. But she also wanted to become a psychiatrist.188 Once she had finished all the prerequisites, which were keeping her busy enough now, medical school would be far more demanding and time-consuming. She needed to make some choices—could she maintain her level of commitment to Communism? Did she want to?

  Mary Ellen was one of the few good friends Jean had made in Berkeley. The older woman (she was thirty-two, born the same year as Robert) was well known for her parties, where she regularly gathered an esoteric mix of left-leaning Berkeley professors and dock workers, some of them Communists. Others in the room would come to be called "fellow travelers." Talk merged and rose like the smoke from guests' cigarettes, Camels and Lucky Strikes from the cluster of workers, Pell Mells and a pungent whiff of Gauloise from the academics.

  At twenty-two, Jean might have been the youngest person there, yet nothing in her manner would have suggested timidity. Tall and slim, her tousled hair cut casually short, she had ample breasts, a small waist, and boyishly narrow hips—a beautiful body, but it was her face that fascinated. A slight droop in one of her eyes was her only discernible flaw; it should have detracted but in fact it added an oddly melancholic cast to her face, so that even when she smiled, as she often did, it seemed tenuous, as if part of her were held in reserve.

  Jean was a serious woman with a serious mission. As the Depression continued to rage, the West Coast was shattered by labor unrest and besieged by refugees fleeing the poverty and dust of the country's interior. The major European powers had just signed a non-intervention pact in what those in the Washburn living room believed was a doomed attempt to ward off a civil war in Spain, the first open battle between communists and fascists. The British and the French for the most part held to the agreement not to interfere; the Soviet Union actively supported the democratically elected Spanish Republican government, with fascist Germany and Italy lined up behind General Franco and his Nationalists.

  Jean had no patience for those who chose to ignore the threat of fascism, especially members of her own privileged class. She was determined to live the resolute life, yet at this critical point in her life the battle within had become more acute than the battle without. In a month, Jean would be accepted at Stanford Medical School in San Francisco. Becoming a medical doctor and a psychiatrist was going to be her way to give, to help others, and, she hoped, to help herself as well.

  Mary Ellen would have welcomed Jean into her living room party with the smile another friend described as being so warm that "in her presence one felt like a small state suddenly granted diplomatic recognition by a major power."189 Mary Ellen often wore bohemian costumes, perhaps that night a full-length dress in a batik print, her pale face framed in a tangle of curly black hair. She would have introduced Jean to her new tenant, the young man with a stand of wiry black hair that made him seem even taller than he was.

  Jean would be in no hurry to meet yet another academic. Perhaps Mary Ellen insisted, and ushered her toward the tweeds and ties. The man holding forth would have been characteristically waving his cigarette in the air as he spoke, keeping the attention of the circle around him. He was some kind of star in the physics department. Smart, but a political naïf. He was thirty-two and rich. His gray suit was well tailored, the blue shirt and tie gave him a professorial air.

  Jean Tatlock. Robert Oppenheimer.

  Robert knew Jean's father and she would discover soon enough that he also knew a great deal about her father's passion, medieval literature; in fact he knew a great deal about a lot of things. As he did when he talked with anyone who interested him, he gave her his undivided attention, concentrating his shockingly blue eyes on her in the way that unnerved others, keeping up a small undercurrent of murmurs—"yes . . . yes"—to show how intently he was listening. Jean had grown up surrounded by academicians she sensed to be, under all the facile charm and quick wit, oblivious to the desperate realities of the world, and very often incapable of action. Mary Ellen's new tenant certainly spoke eloquently; Jean wasn't sure whether or not that was all he could do. Her life was full, and complicated. She really didn't have time for a man. Yet she responded to Robert Oppenheimer.

  Robert left for Southern California and Caltech shortly
after the Washburn party, then headed east to Perro Caliente. It was not until the fall when he returned to Berkeley that he called Jean. She said yes, she would like to see him. Robert discovered Jean to be "a lyrical, uplifting, sensitive, yearning creature." For the first time in his life, he found himself pleasantly out of control, strangely euphoric, having somehow experienced whatever biological or chemical reactions could have made him suddenly vulnerable to falling in love.

  KITTY DIDN'T FALL OUT OF love with Joe; she simply could not take being on the front lines of the labor wars in America. She had said she was ill, surely he could see that. Certainly she didn't want to have to go back to her parents in England, but there was no place else she could go. And she couldn't stay.

  Her parents now lived in a house called, in classic British understatement, "The Cottage," in the village of Claygate in Surrey, some twenty miles from London—a short train ride. Soon Kitty found village life stifling. She wrote to Joe, but got no answer. She waited, went to Germany to visit relatives, went skiing. She found Germany changed, less friendly, strained. Living with a Jew was something she knew not to mention, not even within the family. On her return to England, she became increasingly restless; she had nothing important to do, no work other than a few English-German translations. Then she discovered that Joe had been writing to her after all, and her mother had been intercepting his letters.

  Kitty was furious. She wrote Joe to say she wanted to come back to him; he answered that he was on his way to France, he would be on the Queen Mary. They could spend a few days together in Paris before he made his way over the border and into Spain, where he would be fighting with the International Brigade. Kitty was waiting at the dock in Cherbourg when he arrived.