The Florence caper two years earlier had cut off their debate. One morning the doorbell rang in the distance in Gianni’s vast palazzo. He was asleep. He slept like a log, and the activities of the previous night gave him little reason to rise from his torpor. Anna had crawled out of bed, grabbed a man’s shirt off the floor, and yelled in Italian at the jerk who had the gall to come knocking at that hour to be patient. She’d opened the door to discover Leonard. He had a duffel bag in one hand and an indecipherable smile on his face. “Surprise!” was all he said in explanation. And surprised he had been to see a half-naked Gianni appear behind Anna. Leo had turned and walked away without a word. She hadn’t seen him since.
Gianni hadn’t made a scene of any kind, hadn’t asked her to “choose.” She’d had no choice to make. Everything was already ruined. He had let her go with only one reproach: “I wish you had told me about it first, Anna. It’s never pleasant to realize that you’re a stand-in. Especially when, like me, you spend your life tracking down forgers.” But he didn’t accept her apologies.
Leo punched her on the shoulder. He hated it when she drifted away from him.
“What happened to the Italian guy?”
“I guess it didn’t work out.”
Virginia Adams was waving her veils to draw them toward the table.
“Save me a place next to you.”
“So glad to be your all-purpose stopgap.”
“Same here.”
42. 1954: Alice in Atomicland
If you drink much from a bottle marked “poison,”
it is almost certain to disagree with you, sooner or later.
— Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland
“The L fifty-one is available in two colors. The baby blue is particularly popular.”
“I don’t trust the Prescot line. The L eighteen had definite safety issues. Were they able to fix the Freon leak?”
“I don’t know, Mr. Gödel. No one has ever complained about it. Except you.”
Our prosperous appliance salesman shifted his weight from one leg to the other, all the while admiring his nails. With his rabbit’s teeth and a smile that promised heaven on the installment plan, Smith looked like a Mickey Rooney gone to seed. He endured my husband’s interrogation with a lack of interest that bordered on insult. In his defense, this was only the latest of numerous sessions in which his patience had been tested.
“You don’t carry any European models?”
“Why not Russian while you are at it? Your husband sure is a card, Mrs. Gödel!”
Kurt dodged a manly punch on the arm. Smith had to recover his balance by making an awkward lunge.
“There is a whole world between the USA and the USSR. Are you unaware of it?”
“They’re all commies! What we sell here, Mr. Gödel, is good old U.S. technology.”
“Smith! You can’t suspect an appliance of being Communist, now, can you?”
“I know what I know, ma’am. And I’ll give you a $25 rebate on the Golden Automatic because you’re such good clients.”
“It costs $400, Kurt! We can’t afford to buy ourselves a refrigerator at that price every year!”
Ignoring my distrust, Smith polished a dazzling, chrome-appointed Admiral Fridge, priced at $299. He tried to clinch the sale with a series of unanswerable arguments: the model had an extra freezer compartment and the door opened either to the right or to the left. I hadn’t suffered the conversation of the greatest visionaries of the century to take the oily condescension of a local hardware man lying down. I dragged my husband outside.
“Adele, we need a new refrigerator! Ours is a hazard. We’re liable to get gassed by it.”
“We’ll have one sent to us from New York. Smith is too certain that we’ll buy from him. He’s stopped making any effort. He’s robbing us.”
“You’re wrong, Adele.”
“It’s fascinating, Kurt. You see plots everywhere except where they really exist!”
I pushed Kurt ahead of me down the sidewalk, the salesman’s sardonic grin boring into my back.
“Try to understand that our wanting to change refrigerators as often as we do makes people take us — if we’re lucky! — for thorough lunatics. And right now, it’s best to keep a low profile.”
“It’s such a shame that Herr Einstein never marketed his patent!”38
“He has plenty of other projects to occupy him. If you keep on with him about your fridge, he’s going to lock you up inside it! Get a move on. You’re late for your appointment with Albert, and I’m late for mine with the hairdresser.”
Rose had set my hair and was preparing to take the rollers out. From the shampoo onward, I had sensed that she had a juicy bit of gossip that she couldn’t wait to pass along. Knowing the likely subject, I played deaf to her hints. Finally she couldn’t wait any longer: restraint was just too painful for this professional gossip.
“So, did he or didn’t he? All of Princeton is buzzing about it. Your husband’s director is supposed to have sold the bomb to the Russians. It was in the papers this morning.”
“If you believe everything the papers say, Rose, I can’t help you.”
She roughly unrolled a lock of hair.
“But the Oppenheimers are your friends.”
I hesitated to say anything. In Princeton, a harmless lie could come back at you like a meteorite after orbiting the town three times.
“I trust them completely.”
“Mrs. Oppenheimer does seem to think she’s better than everyone. Don’t you think?”
“Rose, just because you lost her as a client doesn’t give you the right to accuse her of horrible crimes!”
She removed the last roller with a yank.
“Selling our secrets to the Communists. All the same. If the Russians have the bomb, it’s surely because one of ours who knows something gave it to them!”
“You don’t think they could have made one all on their own? You don’t think that they have their own quota of mad scientists?”
Rose’s comb stopped in midmotion. The idea had never occurred to her.
“The Oppenheimers are not members of the Communist Party, Rose. I’m sure of it.”
She looked at me in the mirror. “You don’t understand, Mrs. Gödel. The most important figures in the Communist Party aren’t actually members, because it would restrict their activities. I read it in the newspaper.”
“You should stick to Harper’s Bazaar!”
I felt like walking out right then, even with my hair a mess. But run away from stupidity? Bad idea. It always outruns you and catches up in the end. Maybe you could ignore it. But never again would I run from it.
“Please hurry, Rose. I am expected at Professor Einstein’s.”
She digested the information. Albert was still widely admired by the public. To punish me for boasting, she sprayed me with an extra coat of lacquer.
I arrived at Albert’s house at teatime. I stank of cheap lacquer and the rancid sweat of perpetual anxiety. I hated this period of my life in America. It reminded me too much of prewar Vienna. And the rotten political climate was having a terrible effect on Kurt. The permanent suspicion, now falling on the scientific community itself, fueled his anxiety. He was brewing his usual unhealthy stew by appropriating the very real problems of others to himself — those of Robert Oppenheimer, for instance, who was suspected of espionage. My husband saw enemies everywhere. The milkman changed the schedule of his rounds: he was spying on us. A student tried to reach Kurt to discuss his thesis: my husband locked and bolted the door and stopped answering the telephone. Someone contradicted him during a meeting: he accused the entire IAS of being in league against him. Our apartment was bugged, our mail was being read, we were being followed, they wanted to poison him. Only his closest friends were willing to listen to him and not scream with boredom. Of course a scientist of his kind would advance in his career with suspicious slowness. Where did the fault lie if not in his lack of political savvy? He attributed the unflattering rumors and comments supposedly aimed at him to professional jealousy. His colleagues, particularly those with no reason to indulge him, found his quirks more fascinating than his scientific work. Kurt saw this as an incipient plot, while I recognized it as a defensive reflex: what they really wanted to know was whether he was going to snap like a twig right in front of them. The upshot was that Kurt wouldn’t eat, or only a very little. I reassumed the role of official taster. But he managed to go on working, as though there were a watertight compartment in his mind, a space that resisted submersion when the rising flood-waters drowned everything else.