Genius_ The Life and Science of Richard Feynman - James Gleick [127]
The next morning he washed as well as he could in the public bathroom, checked in at the physics department, and made his way to a campus housing office in Willard Straight Hall, near the center of the sloping campus. There a clerk told him haughtily that the housing situation was so bad that last night a professor had had to sleep in the lobby. “Look, buddy,” Feynman snapped back, “I’m that professor. Now do something for me.” He was unpleasantly startled to realize that in a town Ithaca’s size he could set off a rumor and circle back into its wake within a matter of hours. He also began to realize that he was going to have to readjust his internal clock. The war had left him with a sense of urgency about appointments and deadlines. Even as ten thousand undergraduates arrived, Cornell seemed slack. He was surprised to discover that the administration had scheduled a full week with nothing for him to do but explore the campus and prepare for classes. Speech patterns struck him as slow, with none of the beep-beep-beep nervousness he had got used to. People took time to talk about the weather.
His first months were lonely. None of his close colleagues had been in such a hurry to begin postwar life. Even Bethe did not leave Los Alamos for Cornell until December. The school year began late and stayed unsettled. Space ran short. Workers subdivided rooms in Rockefeller Hall. Closets became offices. Outside, three tennis courts gave way to hasty wooden barracks. Feynman soon shared his dingy Rockefeller office with a colleague from Los Alamos, Philip Morrison, who had carried the atomic bomb’s plutonium core to Alamogordo in the back seat of an army sedan. Morrison had been lured by the sweet, serious Bethe, so full of integrity—and also by Feynman, though it now seemed, surprisingly, that Feynman was depressed and lonely. Bethe sensed this, too, but few others noticed. Later Bethe noted dryly, “Feynman depressed is just a little more cheerful than any other person when he is exuberant.”
He spent time in the library reading the mildly bawdy Arabian Nights and staring hopefully at women. Unlike most of the Ivy League universities, Cornell had accepted women as undergraduates since its founding, after the Civil War, though they automatically matriculated in the College of Home Economics. He went to freshman dances and ate in the student cafeteria. He looked younger than his twenty-seven years, and he did not stand out amid all the returning servicemen. His dance partners looked askance at what sounded like a line—that he was a physicist just back from building the atomic bomb. He missed Arline. Even before leaving Los Alamos he had begun dating other women—especially beautiful women, in what some of his friends saw as a frenetic, razor-edge denial of grief.
A gulf had opened between Feynman and his mother. Lucille, after so adamantly opposing Richard’s marriage, had written painfully on Arline’s death:
… now I want you to know that I’m proud and glad you married her & did what you could to make her short life happy. She worshipped you. Forgive me for not seeing things your way. I was frightened for you—for what you would have to bear. But you bore it so well. Now try to face life without her …
Begging him to come home, she promised him piles of rice and sugar buns and gave her word that no one would tell him to comb his hair. He did come, briefly, for a few days in July. Then, in August, the news of the atomic bomb broke over the household like a lightning storm. Friends