Removing her apron, Ernestine enumerated all her age-related aches. Anna protested as a matter of form. Tine had complained of being old even when she was still the buxom nurse who terrified visiting schoolkids.
“Have you opened my present?”
“Don’t be daft! I haven’t had a minute to myself all evening.”
She fished the package from a drawer and her reading glasses from another. She unwrapped the present carefully; in one of her treasure cabinets she kept a supply of neatly folded paper. She caressed the leather-bound volume: Anthologie de la poésie française. Anna had always known how to please her.
“Comment vas-tu, mon bel oiseau? How are you, my pretty bird? You look pale.”
There was no need for Anna to embark on a long confession, as Tine had followed every move in the war of nerves between Anna and Leonard, her two adopted children.
“Have you spoken to Leo?”
“Spoken about what?”
“There you go again! Why make it simple when you can complicate it? Si c’est pas malheureux, vous deux! The two of you are hopeless! I never understood what you saw in that idiot from New York. What was his name anyway?”
“William. He got married last year.”
Leonard burst into the kitchen.
“This is a private conversation, young man. What brings you poking around here?”
“I refuse to hold a tin cup under Richardson’s nose.”
Tine tried to smooth Leo’s hair with the flat of her hand; he skipped out of reach, too tall for her now. A last pencil mark on the doorjamb attested to it. Ernestine had had to bully the painters to keep the measurements from being erased.
The French mathematician poked his Roman nose into the kitchen, looking for seconds on dessert. Ernestine simpered at his compliments; twenty years earlier she would have eaten him alive for an afternoon snack. Though she had always been discreet, the neighborhood buzzed with rumors about her appetites. Virginia Adams, despite her suspicions, had never caught Tine red-handed. And she was less concerned about her husband’s infidelities than she was about losing a gem of Ernestine’s caliber. For his part, Calvin was too concerned with his reputation to embark on an adventure of this kind; he made do with hotel bars in the wake of conferences.
Tine bustled around to prepare a plate and open a bottle for her new admirer. Anna pulled out a chair for him. Leo could barely contain his irritation. By monopolizing the interest of the two women, the Frenchman was invading his territory. Leo Adams had been at the center of everything in this house, claiming even the little attention that hadn’t already been given him by his mischief. He wanted to stay in the center, and he addressed Anna.
“So, you’ve been assigned to recover Gödel’s papers? His widow must be at least three hundred years old. A survivor of Princeton’s heroic postwar years!”
Pierre Sicozzi watched the young woman through his ruby-colored glass, while she, embarrassed, fingered the book of poetry.
“Ah, yes, Calvin mentioned that to me. She must be an extraordinary character to have lived with such an unusual man.”
“She’s not always easy company, but she is generous with her stories.”
“You’re a research librarian who stands very close to History.”
“She’s resisting turning over the archive to us. She has a grudge against the academic establishment. She’s never been thought well of. Yet Adele is a very engaging person.”
As always, Leo had an opinion on the subject.
“Gödel is an icon at MIT. We use his portrait as a target when we play darts. We even organized a ‘Gödel versus Turing’ festival.”
“Who won?”
“Scoreless game. An undecidable proposition, Professor Sicozzi.”
“If such a battle ever took place, Gödel won it a long time ago.”
“Turing’s consolation prize was being the father of modern computer science. Gödel pushed formal logic to its extremes. The Englishman gave logic reality by developing a technology for it.”
The Frenchman attacked his plate vigorously. Leo watched him briefly before continuing.
“Another tragic mathematical fate. Brilliance and decline. One of them died mad, while the other made a theatrical exit. He killed himself by biting an apple laced with arsenic. Poisoned like Snow White.”
Anna decided not to correct him, although she knew the story of the English logician perfectly well. He had not committed suicide over mathematics: he had been persecuted by the British government for his homosexuality and forced to take a barbaric hormonal treatment. Yet it was thanks to him that Enigma, the German ciphering machine, had been cracked. Without Turing, the Allies would not have won the intelligence battle during World War II.
Leonard would allow no one to contradict him in his own field of expertise. Unsurprisingly, he went on to tell the story of the Turing machine, the precursor of the modern computer. At the end of the 1930s, the British mathematician had devised a theoretical system for executing simple algorithms. He had gone from there to the idea of a metamachine that could combine all these operations infinitely. Anna had helped mount an exhibition on von Neumann and ENIAC, another great leap forward in the history of computers. She could therefore have told Leo a thing or two on the subject, but the chance to hear Leo wax enthusiastic was so rare that she swallowed her pride. She was within an ace of exclaiming, “You’re so strong!” He wouldn’t have appreciated the joke, and he didn’t need anyone to tell him what he already knew. As to trying out Adele’s theorem on a Fields medalist, she would never have dared.
“Pushing his concept to the limit, Turing realized that his machine could only supply an answer that already existed. It wasn’t capable of deciding whether certain questions were decidable. Which is to say, deciding within a finite time whether a proposition was true or false.”
“The incompleteness theorem is unavoidable, even to a machine.”
“You, Anna Roth, are interested in mathematics?”
“I’m not sure I understood the whole thing, but Adele did speak to me about the fact that they met.”
Ernestine gave her a quiet smile before going back to banging cabinet doors; she, too, knew the technique.
“You should write a book about it, Anna. The heroic fate of the pioneers of the computer age. Gödel, Turing, von Neumann …”
The young woman blushed when Pierre brushed her glass with his own.
“Leo’s idea strikes me as excellent. You’re at the source of History, with access to an intimate perspective.”
“Adele is not a scientist. She has an emotional view of events.”
“Life is not an exact science. A human being is more than the sum of his acts. More than a simple chronology.”
“I’m a research librarian. I collect objective facts.”
“Trust your intuition.”
“If I did that, it would be fiction.”
“Why wouldn’t it be one truth among others? Truth does not exist or … not all truths are provable.”
He gave a small, embarrassed smile.
“That lyrical extension of the incompleteness theorem would have made our defunct genius shudder.”