IV
LOVE AND WAR
13
TWO MARRIAGES AND TWO FUNERALS
For the first year of medical school, Jean was required to spend time on the Stanford campus an hour south of San Francisco. Robert and Jean would see each other on weekends and when he drove to Stanford for one of the frequent seminars he had organized with physicists there. Or the couple would meet in San Francisco; the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge had opened that November, replacing the ferry service.
When Jean came home, Robert would pick her up at the Tatlock house on San Antonio Avenue. He would have paused to visit with Jean's parents. Then Robert and Jean would have been off together, going to lectures on campus or to political meetings in Oakland. Jean's friendship with Mary Ellen deepened; with Robert living in the Washburn house, she spent even more time there.
When Robert first presented one of his exotic corsages to Jean, she rejected it politely but firmly; there was no time for flowers when people were standing in breadlines only a few miles away. (When he forgot and did it again, she threw them on the ground and refused to go out with him.)190 But she admired his ability to grasp a difficult concept and explain it with exquisite clarity and she spoke up when she thought his rhetoric was obscuring his reason. He, in turn, was amazed and delighted with this young woman who did not see him as a brilliant aberration. (She would defend him to a friend who found him pretentious, "Remember that he never had a childhood so he is different from the rest of us.")191 Jean became his guide through the turbulent political state of the world.
In the Pacific, Japan moved ever more aggressively into China, and in Europe, the civil war that so many dreaded had started in Spain in the summer of 1936. The world waited to see if the Fascists would prevail. If that happened, it seemed obvious to those who met at the Washburns that the conflagration could spread throughout Europe. It could mean another World War, not twenty years after the first one. Robert became increasingly troubled as well by the problems his graduate students faced. He could pay for their dinners in San Francisco but he could not find jobs for them. Even more immediate, he was alarmed by the treatment of Jews in Europe, and began making arrangements for relatives in Germany to come to America.
Robert, along with Haakon Chevalier, a strikingly handsome professor of French literature at the university, became involved in the teachers' union and the movement to help migrant workers. Like many of their friends, both Robert and Jean became caught up in the effort to support the Spanish Republicans. And both began to meet the refugee psychoanalysts—students of Jung and Freud—who had fled Europe for San Francisco.
Robert didn't share Jean with his students as he had the other women he had dated; the intensity of the relationship set it apart. Their friends tended to be people with shared political views. When Pris wrote a chatty letter about people they knew, and where they were, Jean answered, "most of my friends and I have the habit of not noticing events like commencements and departures—so I thought I didn't care, but letters like yours with mystical combination of casual friendliness and apropos-ness are strangely pleasant to get, I find."192 Even so, it is likely that Robert and Jean avoided socializing with the physics senior faculty, especially Ernest Lawrence, who disapproved of any of his colleagues dabbling in politics. The Tolmans were different; Jean had studied under Edward at Berkeley and Robert would have wanted her to know his great friends Richard and Ruth.
Much about Jean would have pleased Robert: Her Vassar/Harvard connections and New England pedigree; that she was fluent in French and a quick and critical thinker; that she was comfortable in academia and yet not in awe of it. She had a brother who was soon graduating from medical school at Harvard. Her formidable and kind mother balanced the too-distant father. Jean also moved easily in the wider world outside academia, the world Robert was just beginning to explore. She loved poetry, and was fascinated with the promise of psychotherapy. Looking forward, Jean was young enough to get her medical degree before they need think about a family; he was of an age to think of a family of his own. That year, though, their future was obscured by the gathering war clouds.
Robert was convinced that Frank had not thought about consequences when he had announced, in 1936, that he planned to marry Jacquenette Quann, a Berkeley student who was working as a waitress. Seven years older than Frank, Robert had relished his role as something between a father and an older brother. Now he objected strenuously to Frank's choice, told his brother he was being "infantile," pointed out that he was already twenty-five and hadn't yet finished his doctorate. But it was Jackie—he called her "that waitress"—to whom he objected. It wasn't so much her waitressing he disliked as it was her seeing it as a badge of honor, and for dismissing him and most academics as "highbrows."193 Frank married her anyway, and Robert had to make a choice. He loved his brother too much to give him up, so he accepted Jackie with all her rough edges. Robert's rejection understandably offended her, but she loved her husband enough to join the brothers at Perro Caliente for a few weeks that summer. Jean may have had something to do with the détente; she was friends with both Jackie and Frank, all but Robert were members of the Communist Party USA. Yet none could have had any idea of the enormous repercussions their act of joining the Party was to have on the Oppenheimer brothers.
As 1936 wound to an end, Marjorie Tatlock knew that she was seriously ill. This was probably why her husband accepted a teaching position at Columbia, in New York City, for a single term beginning in January. Marjorie could be seen at New York Cancer Hospital for treatment for lymphoma. John Tatlock wasn't going to give her up without a fight. Hugh was in Boston and had another reason for wanting his mother to come East. He had proposed to Anne Fisher, and he wanted his mother to get to know her and to be at their wedding.
Marjorie must have worried about leaving Jean just as she was beginning medical school, as well as a serious romance. What if her daughter was waylaid by one of the depressions that overwhelmed her? Jean, as it happens, had found someone who could understand her depression even better than her mother. Robert knew what it was like to balance on the thin edge of sanity; his fascination with psychiatry was rooted in his own terrifying experiences in Cambridge. He had helped himself, he believed he could help her find a way to overcome them, as he had.
Before Jean entered Vassar, she had written May Sarton to admit she was glad they had never "laid hands on each other" in Paris, and asked, "Doesn't it seem to you a sad and futile thing to let beauty pain and weaken you instead of absorbing and growing with it into impersonality and vitality. The former is what I do. I observe it and compare it with the commonplace, and am hurt by the immensity and transiency and unattainability. Why is this? Paradoxes come over me as answers. Sometimes I think it is because I know too much of the mechanical working of myself, sometimes too little. Everything seems conscious and exposed to me, yet not taut enough to make these mean anything."194 What Jean sought was consummation both emotional and physical. One without the other would not be enough. And, possibly, that need intensified her depressions.
She loved Robert Oppenheimer at the same time that she hurt at "the immensity and transiency and unattainability" of the beauty she longed for which, for lack of another name, was love. Robert loved her enough, he felt confident, to vanquish her hurt, and he began his campaign to convince her. But there was an issue other than depression that may have troubled Jean; even though as a teenager she had decided she was not a lesbian, she was still uncertain about her sexuality. That too Robert could understand.
THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR WAS on everyone's mind. In Pasadena, Ruth and Frank—she at the piano and he on the flute—rented a hall and gave a benefit concert in support of the Spanish Republicans. In Berkeley, John Tatlock, Robert Oppenheimer, Haakon Chevalier and a few others donated $1,500 to buy an ambulance for Spanish refugees. At Stanford, Jean introduced Robert to Dr. Thomas Addis, a professor of medicine who became both her mentor and friend. A cultivated Scotsman, Addis was both an acclaimed s
cientist—a pioneer in the treatment of kidney disease—and a renowned humanitarian. He was also sympathetic to the Communist Party and chairman of the United American Spanish Aid Committee, and recruited Jean and Robert to the cause. Robert gave generously, and together he and Jean sponsored benefits to raise money. Initially Robert took the attitude that while he supported the "underdog," he would have to settle for remaining on the periphery of political struggles. Jean responded: "Oh, for God's sake, don't settle for anything."195 After that, he didn't.
WHEN JOE ARRIVED ON THE Queen Mary, he and Kitty embraced, happy to be together after a full year apart, and excited to be a part of a movement of such magnitude. Traveling with Joe was his good friend Steve Nelson, an organizer for the American Communist Party. The three boarded a train for Paris. Most of their conversation centered on how Kitty could join them in Spain, Joe railing against a Party rule that allowed neither wives nor girlfriends. Kitty said she wanted desperately to go, and Joe vowed to find a way.
She found a small hotel for them and, as she reported in a letter to Joe's mother, Hilda: "Joe and I had a lovely five days in Paris. We didn't do much, danced one night, went to a meeting another, but mostly just walked, sat, and talked; ate quantities of oysters and snails, drank Vermouth and enjoyed each other. And Joe bought me a Camellia and some Violets. In return, more prosaic, I made sure he had warm socks, gloves, shirts, and shoes."196
When Steve rounded up the group of some twenty-five volunteers waiting in Paris, Joe rejoined him and the group headed south, all "conspicuously trying to be inconspicuous," where a French fishing boat was to be waiting to smuggle them into Spain. The boat, however, was late; it didn't appear until the first light of dawn. Just when the coast of Spain was in sight, a fast-moving French police boat approached, and the officers arrested everyone.197 Although the French often turned a blind eye to volunteers going to Spain, this time they decided to uphold the nonintervention agreement.
Even before she returned to Surrey, Kitty began a correspondence with Hilda that was a marvel of equivocation: "I know there is no use in my saying anything to you about what Joe is doing," she wrote. "It was as great a shock to me as it will be to you, when Joe told me where he is going. I can offer you no help, nor you me, except perhaps that we know there are two of us who feel more or less the same way about it. It's a superbly great, and preposterous, thing—to think that each one who goes there feels that he is making the world the place it should be. In that respect what you and I feel doesn't matter." Then she added, "When Joe gets back we are going to take a holiday someplace, perhaps in England or on the Continent, or in the Soviet Union. Then we shall both come home and settle down, and I shall try to persuade Joe to try to live in New York. I am sure he will come back, Hilda, I don't know why, but I'm convinced of it."198 She added that her address was on the back of the envelope, in case Hilda wanted to write.
A few days later, Kitty wrote Hilda again to report she had heard from Joe, that he was in jail in the town of Perpignon in the south of France, not far from the Spanish border. "He says there is nothing to worry about, which is quite true (at least they can't get shot while they're in jail)."199
IN LOS ANGELES, RUTH SPENT a good part of 1937 working on her dissertation, using her connection as a psychologist to arrange interviews with the young men in the Adult Division of the County Probation Department. She wanted to determine if it was possible to predict which men would become recidivists, and perhaps offer some new insights into criminal behavior itself. Her approach was not going to depend on what she described as the "highly technical methods of psychoanalysis," nor was it limited to the broader sociological view that connected poor work habits and damaged family relationships with criminal behavior.200 Ruth had enough experience with prisoners to believe it reasonable to listen to what the inmate had to say about the forces that affect his life.
All that year she sat across from a succession of sometimes-angry white men, asking them extremely personal questions. What kind of relationship did they have with their mothers and with their fathers? How were they punished? How about nagging, spoiling, affection, their own fears? Most of the men were down on their luck and suspicious; they had seldom confided in anyone, much less an attractive, self-assured woman in a position of authority. Yet she gave them time, gained their confidence. And slowly they told her of problems with their marriages and their children, their grievances.
Nat, being back in California for the summer and, as usual at loose ends, was staying with Ruth while Richard was away. She sat at the dining room table in Pasadena typing Ruth's report from her interviews. The work would serve as a basis for Ruth's doctoral thesis. She received the degree of Doctor of Philosophy from Berkeley in 1937. The following year the Genetic Psychology Monograph series published a full report on Ruth's doctoral study; the year after, so did The Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology at Northwestern University.
IN THE MIDDLE OF APRIL 1937, while visiting Winifred at Vassar, Marjorie became so ill that she had to be admitted to Memorial Hospital in Poughkeepsie. Winifred saw her every day. Marjorie wrote to Priscilla from the hospital in a faltering hand, "I have this one piece of paper and a tiny bit of energy," and she wrote the important news: "We shall be staying around here longer than we had expected to help Hugh get married the 18th of June. He has picked out a fine person," she went on, adding that Anne was twenty, lovely to look at, an artist as well and that she was especially fond of painting horses as her models. Marjorie reported what she wanted Pris to know, that Jean was prospering at Stanford. She did not mention Robert, or even hint at the seriousness of her own illness, but said only that Jean was coming East to be a bridesmaid at the wedding, and added. "She will hate it, but she'll do it!"201
The wedding took place not on the 18th as planned, but almost two weeks earlier, on the 5th of June, probably because Marjorie was failing. It was a small, family affair in a chapel at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City, some eighty miles from Poughkeepsie.202 Jean was there, and becoming increasingly upset with what she saw as unreasonable demands being made on her mother, especially by her father. Marjorie clearly was not well enough to go home to Berkeley, so they returned to Winifred's house in Poughkeepsie. Jean was with her mother when she died on June 20.
FROM HIS LETTERS, IT SEEMED that Joe was having a fine time in Perpignon prison. The arrest of the twenty-five Americans was front-page news in France. "We saw beautiful snow capped mountains and lovely flowering fruit trees in the alleys below during our tour of Southern France," Joe wrote to Kitty, "Some day you and I must travel this land together and hire us a small sailing boat and sail along the coast." His next letter described going to a hearing at the court, finding a piano in a room, and sitting down to play Chopin to a group of gendarmes, lawyers and prosecutors. "Kitty darling, there's lots of personal things I'd like to say, but the censorship, the lack of privacy . . . forbid. Besides, you know everything."203
Their trial was held on April 16, with Joe translating for the Americans. The group was sentenced to twenty days, most of which they had already served, and suddenly they were free, sitting in cafes and being feted by the Young Communist Leaguers. They couldn't walk the streets without a crowd gathering, according to Joe. Kitty had been sending him snapshots, which he had been proudly showing off to his French comrades who "fell in love with your pictures and insisted that when all is over you must come here with me for a real visit. They add that we won't have to sleep in straw but in the best feather bed in town."204
He told her there was some talk about him remaining in France to do some work for the Party. "That'd be a heluva place to be at a time like this. The one redeeming feature would be that we could be together. But as much as that would mean to me, I'm obviously against it."205 Joe loved Kitty, but nothing was going to keep him away from the fight. Steve Nelson had been the first to leave for Spain; now a guide had appeared to lead seven others over the Pyrenees.
BY JULY 11, JEAN HAD returne
d to the house in Berkeley, and was writing courtesy notes to those who had sent letters of sympathy, in which she said such things as: "It is pretty bad that such a person as my mother should be no more on earth— so very much of life she was. There are things she said in the last months and even things that happened that make it not exactly a bitter thing."206 Jean would have confided to Robert, the man she had come to love and trust, what her mother had said.
Robert understood the grief Jean felt. But the recent years with his widowed father had been a salve for that ache. He had made Julius part of his life and the affection between them had grown. Jean was not inclined to embrace her father; she was angry with him for what she felt was his stubborn and selfish refusal to accept the inevitability of her mother's death, and for not allowing her a peaceful last few months. The one "unmitigated blessing," as she wrote Priscilla, was that her mother had died in Winifred's house.207
But the summer's sorrow was not done; in September Julius died of a heart attack, just two days before his sister Hedwig and her family arrived from Germany.
14
JOE GOES TO WAR, JEAN MEETS SIEGFRIED BERNFELD, ROBERT RESCUES GERMAN JEWS AND IS WARNED THAT HE IS "TOO GOOD A PHYSICIST TO GET MIXED UP IN POLITICS OR CAUSES"
From Spain Joe wrote to Kitty that the guides took them up and down narrow goat paths and dry creeks. "The Pyrenees," he wrote, "are magnificent, and cruel. . . . Some have crossed in such darkness you had to hold the coat of the man ahead." Joe had to help carry one of the men the last part of the way. Still, he had time to notice the stars, how the moon glistened on the snowcapped peaks and the lovely pattern the lights of the French villages made far below. When finally they were in Republican territory, he shouted for joy and said if she had been there he would have crushed the breath out of her.208
An Atomic Love Story Page 13
