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By Root 2170 0

invisible to the colleagues who saw his aggressively carefree self. He would sit in a group and look at someone—even at Fuchs—and think, how easy it is to hide my thoughts from others. A third springtime was coming to Los Alamos, and Feynman knew it would be the last. For a moment he thought he felt a break in the tension. He found a way to get the computation group running smoothly enough to allow him a few hours more sleep. He took a shower. For a half hour he read a book before falling asleep. It seemed, just for a moment, that the worst might be over. He wrote Arline:

You are a strong and beautiful woman. You are not always as strong as other times but it rises & falls like the flow of a mountain stream. I feel I am a resevoir for your strength—without you I would be empty and weak … I find it much harder these days to write these things to you.

He never wrote without saying I love you or I’m still loving you or I have a serious affliction: loving you forever. The pace quickened again, and Feynman sometimes thought about long days he had worked for twenty dollars a week waiting on tables and helping in the kitchen of his aunt’s summer hotel, the Arnold, on the beach at Far Rockaway. Wherever he went, his drumming could be heard through the walls, nervous or jaunty, a rapping that his staff had to enjoy or endure. It was not music. Feynman himself could barely endure the more standard tunes of his friend Julius Ashkin’s recorder, “an infernally popular wooden tube,” he called it, “for making noises bearing a one-one correspondence to black dots on a piece of paper—in imitation to music.”

Stresses were tightening, too, between the security staff and the scientists, and Feynman had lost his eager spirit of cooperation. A colleague had been interrogated for more than an hour in a smoky room, questions fired by men sitting in the dark, as in a melodramatic movie. “Don’t get scared tho,” Feynman wrote Arline, “they haven’t found out that I am a relativist yet.” Fear sometimes clutched Feynman now. His intestines suffered chronically. He had a chest X ray: clear. Names rushed through his head: maybe Donald; if a girl, maybe Matilda. Putzie wasn’t drinking enough milk—how could he help her build her strength at this distance? They were spending $200 a month on the room and oxygen and $300 more on nurses, and $300 was the shortfall between income and expenditures. His salary as a Manhattan Project group leader: $380 a month. If they spent Arline’s savings, $3,300 plus a piano and a ring, they could cover ten more months. Arline seemed to be wasting away.

Letters went back and forth almost daily. They wrote like a boy and a girl without experience at the art of love letters. They catalogued the everyday—how much sleep, how much money. Macy’s sent Arline an unexpected mail-order refund of forty-four cents: I feel like a millionaire … I.O.U. 22¢. His sporadic bad digestion or swollen eyelid; her waning or waxing strength, her coughed-up blood and her access to oxygen. They used matching stationery. It was a mail-order project of Arline’s—soon most of her relatives and many of Richard’s friends on the hill had the same green or brown block letterhead from the Dollar Stationery Company. For herself she ordered both formal (Mrs. Richard P. Feynman) and informal, with the same legend she had once caught Richard slicing from her pencils:

RICHARD DARLING,

I LOVE YOU

PUTZIE

She decorated the envelopes with red hearts and silver stars. The army decorated them with tape: OPENED BY U. S. ARMY EXAMINER.

They called each other “Dope” and then worried about whether they had given offense. You’re never that—just silly & cute & lots of fun—you know what I mean, don’t you coach? Alone in her cramped sanatorium room, decorated with a few pictures and knickknacks received as wedding gifts, Arline worried about Richard and other women. He was a popular dancer at Los Alamos parties; he flirted intently with nurses, wives, and a secretary of Oppenheimer’s. All it took to set Arline’s mind racing was an offhand mention of the wife of a colleague.