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By Root 2418 0

Or worse: the scientists were in an uproar over the appearance of M.P.’s around a women’s dormitory (the army had discovered an active prostitution trade there), and for some reason Richard had been chosen to lead the protest. He reassured her continually. Everything is under control—& I love you only. She explained and reexplained the facts of their love like an incantation: he is tall, gentle, kind, strong; he supports her, but once in a while can lean on her, too; he must confide everything in her, as she has slowly learned to confide in him; we have to think in terms of us, always; she loves the way he stretches casually to open a high window beyond her reach, and she loves the way he talks babytalk with her.

Not until the beginning of this grim year did they make love. Their gingerly discussions had led nowhere. He was afraid of taking advantage, or afraid of harming her, or just afraid. Arline grasped ever more tightly her sense of romantic love. She read Lady Chatterley’s Lover (“No!” she said. “Love me! Love me, and say you’ll keep me. Say you’ll keep me! Say you’ll never let me go, to the world nor to anybody!”) and a popular 1943 book, Love in America. “I do not know—although there are those who profess to know with mathematical accuracy—whether sex is all-important in the life of a man or a woman,” the author wrote provocatively. Americans lag Europeans in such matters. “We have developed no concepts of love as an art or a rite… . We do not seem to realize that woman’s love is not prompted by good deeds on a man’s part or by Boy Scout conduct; that neither gratitude nor pity are love; that loving lies in demanding as well as in giving; that the woman who loves yearns to give and give again.”

Arline herself finally made the decision and set aside a Sunday when she would allow no other visitors. She missed him spiritually and physically, she told him.

Darling I’m beginning to think that perhaps this restlessness I feel within myself is due to pent up emotions—I really think we’d both feel happier and better dear if we released our desires.

She wrote Richard a few days before to tell him it was time. She could not sleep. She clipped a phrase from a newspaper advertisement: “OUR MARRIAGE COMES FIRST.” She reminded him of the future that waited for them: just a few more years in bed for her; then he would be a renowned professor (physicist still did not denote a profession with stature) and she a mother. She apologized, as she so often did, for being moody, for being difficult, for saying hurtful things, and for having to lean on him without respite. Her thoughts rambled.

… We have to fight hard—every inch of the way—we can’t slip ever—a slip costs too much… . I’ll be all a women would be to you—I’ll always be your sweetheart & first love—besides a devoted wife—we’ll be proud parents too—we’ll fight to make Donald real—I want him to be like you… . I am proud of you always Richard—your a good husband, and lover, & well, coach, I’ll show you what I mean Sunday.

Your Putzie

False Hopes

Her health continued to fail. “Drink some milk!” Richard wrote in May. Her weight had fallen to eighty-four pounds. She looked like a woman starving.

You are a nice girl. Every time I think about you, I feel good. It must be love. It sounds like a definition of love. It is love. I love you.

I’ll see you in two days.

R. P. F.

More and more they talked of medical tests. They needed optimism. He was near despair. Time passes fast. Maybe we should start looking for another doctor… . Why don’t you drink an extra bottle of milk right now while you are thinking of it.

The scientific knowledge that empowered the physicists seemed to mean nothing on the soft soil of medicine. With the final desperation of the dying, Richard and Arline reached out for slender possibilities. He had heard about a new drug, sulf-something—he was not sure—and had written to researchers in the East, who told him apologetically that studies of sulfabenamide were in the most preliminary stage. The discovery that substances of the sulfonamide