At the appointed hour, which she allowed to slip past until she was fashionably late, she walked up the driveway toward Olden Manor, the opulent neo-Victorian mansion whose twenty or more rooms had been the prerogative of the IAS director since 1939. It was in that house that Robert Oppenheimer’s children, among others, had grown up. As a child, Anna had explored its every nook and cranny, but she hadn’t set foot inside for years. Its heavy freight of memories added to her anxiety. She was on the point of turning and walking away when the door opened onto the beaming face of Ernestine.
Of Creole stock, Ernestine had been working for the Adamses for almost twenty years. She was part of the furniture, as were the flamboyantly colored blouses she invariably wore. Despite Virginia Adams’s best efforts, Ernestine stayed true to her tropical tastes and refused to adopt the sober uniform of a traditional nanny, more in keeping with the family’s social position. Indeed, with the passage of time, Ernestine’s plumage had grown bigger and brasher. She had never conceded on a single point, including her unsettling habit of sprinkling her speech with obscure French expressions.
“Anna, mon bel oiseau, my beautiful bird! I’m so happy to see you!” She straightaway kissed the young woman on both cheeks. Anna recognized her particular smelclass="underline" vanilla and yeast.
“You haven’t changed, Tine.”
“Taratata, je suis une vraie baleine, I’m an absolute whale! But look at you, you’re pretty as a picture.” She pinched her waist. “If you were eating my food, there’d be more flesh around those bones. Good God. Young women today!”
Anna handed her a small package. Both of them gave a sudden start at the sound of a hysterical summons from the second floor. Ernestine sighed, her hands pressed into the small of her back. Calvin Adams appeared in the hall. He had chosen to dress casually in a warm-toned flannel shirt over a white turtleneck sweater. Anna suspected him of hiding an incipient goiter behind his dandyish affectation. “You look lovely in your new haircut, Anna.” This time, she managed not to touch her hair. She wouldn’t be caught out again by easy compliments. Calvin’s always had the effect of a sweaty palm placed on her breasts. Luckily he didn’t dwell on the subject but asked Ernestine to go upstairs and give Mrs. Adams a hand.
Virginia Adams materialized in a thick cloud of heady perfume, a glass in one hand, a cigarette in the other. This was how Anna had always known her.
“You’re early. Nothing is ready yet.”
Anna let it pass. She had been inoculated against Virginia Adams’s venom during childhood. She wondered how long it would take her hostess to spoil her perfect makeup with one of the theatrical crying jags she was prone to. Virginia still knew how to make herself stunning, although age had forced her to increase the dose of artifice. She was a spectacular grenade, pin pulled and ready for launch, whose explosion her husband had been trying for years to retard.
Anna stood there with her arms full until her hosts condescended to take her things from her. Mrs. Adams put her through the customary inspection. She fingered the red dress without letting go of her cigarette. Anna prayed that the lighted tip wouldn’t set fire to the delicate fabric. She had never bought herself such a costly rag before. Still, she fell a long way short of the luxury exhibited by Virginia, who was draped in a silk caftan.
“It will never stand up to being cleaned. Still, that red does make a statement.” Virginia was one of those people whose every pronouncement had to be read in the contrary sense: her enthusiasm as an insult, and a vague reproach as a hidden compliment. The young woman handed her hostess a bottle of Orvieto, an Italian white she had enjoyed a little too much during her stay in Umbria with Gianni. Virginia accepted the humble offering without interest. Calvin, a practiced diplomat, invited his employee to take a seat in the living room. “This house is your home. As you well know.”
Anna chose a remote spot in the depths of one of the overstuffed sofas by the fireplace with her back to the library. The smell of leather was somehow reassuring. She had good memories of this room. As a schoolgirl, she had done her homework here with Leo while Ernestine made them waffles in the kitchen. Before she could compose herself, Leonard walked into her field of vision and collapsed on the couch across from her.
“Elegant as ever, Leo.”
“I did make an effort. Did you notice the necktie?”
“You look awful. Your shirt is all wrinkled.”
She straightened his necktie, thinking of all the times she had tied his shoelaces, rounded up his schoolbooks, and rescued him from punishment with an apt lie. He drained his glass in one gulp, his eyes studiously avoiding the library. The same memories must have been flooding through his mind. Anna kicked herself for having gone back so quickly to maternal gestures. Under his sloppy clothes, she recognized the tight-lipped boy who was either too shy to show his teeth or too clever to let his self-satisfaction show. His nose, which was extraordinarily large for such a narrow face, had given Leo quite a complex at puberty. Without his dark, laughing eyes, he could have been ugly. Embarrassed at being examined so closely, he waggled his eyebrows like a dime-store crooner.
“Did anyone offer you a drink?”
“I need to keep a clear head. I’ve been pressed into service as an interpreter for the French mathematician.”
“Totally unnecessary. His English is excellent. My father played the same trick on me. He’s hoping I’ll cozy up to Richardson III. Or is it IV? A goldbrick of the first water.”
Anna felt caught in a trap. So it wasn’t Leonard who had contrived their meeting. The door to the library had been closed for a long time. She said yes to the drink. Her friend slouched over to the bar. His formal shirt looked wrong on him. Anna had grown used to his inevitable T-shirts with their obscure taglines. His extreme sloppiness could easily fool an unwary observer. The younger Adams hid his crystalline mental rigor under the trappings of a two-bit rebel. He was nonetheless a pure analytic machine, like the computers that he had discovered at a young age and that had sealed his fate. His determined nonconformism had been partly responsible for his father’s thinning hair and his mother’s alcoholism, though it may also have been their natural consequence.
He returned with two glasses the size of soup tureens. Judging from the quantity of scotch in his glass and the sparsity of hair on his forehead, Leo had inherited from both his parents. Calvin Adams poked his head into the room and waved at them: the guests were arriving. His son responded with a blink. Anna wondered at his unusual docility. She remembered a night when he had walked out of the house barefoot, slamming the door behind him. He hadn’t managed to run very far. His parents sent Tine down to the police station to pick him up. Leo had refused to speak to his progenitors for more than three weeks. He had just turned ten.
“I hear that your father married one of his grad students. That must have given Rachel fits.”
“Ancient history. Since then she’s found herself a tanned anthropologist from Berkeley. Some catch!”
“Don’t complain. It could have been the other way around.”
She smiled, imagining her white-maned and patrician father in his gold-buttoned blazer on the arm of a wiry con man in khaki fatigues. Her mother with a pretty young minx was less hard to imagine.
Leonard lit a cigarette. Anna had stopped smoking on her return from Europe, not without difficulty. She stifled the impulse. Over the past several days, her hunger for cigarettes had sharply revived. Everyone in the world smoked except her.
“Why did you come back to Princeton, Anna?”
She finished her scotch in a single long swallow. The question was too direct to elicit a considered answer. Leo lacked nuance. As he had often said to her, “There are ten different kinds of people: those who understand binary numbers, and then everyone else.” His world was peopled with 1s and 0s, in black and white, while Anna’s harbored every gradation of gray. He was discrete, she continuous. They had never managed to define a border between them that was both simple and permeable yet also watertight enough that neither would dissolve in the other. Unlike in mathematics, Leo’s infinity seemed more voracious than Anna’s.