Genius_ The Life and Science of Richard Feynman - James Gleick [132]
The interment took place at Bayside Cemetery nearby in Queens, a vast rolling field of gravestones and monuments as far as the eye could see. Lucille’s father had built a mausoleum there, a stone hut like a small bomb shelter. Midway through the ceremony Rabbi Cahn asked Richard, as eldest son, to say the Kaddish with him. Joan watched in anguish as her brother’s face froze. He wanted no part of a mourners’ prayer in praise of God.
He told the rabbi he did not understand the Hebrew. Cahn merely switched to English. Richard listened to the words and refused to repeat them. He did not believe in God; he knew that his father had not believed in God; and the hypocrisy seemed unbearable. His disbelief had nothing of indifference in it. It was a determined, coolly rational disbelief, a conviction that the myths of religion cheated knowledge. He stood there surrounded by stone and grass near the undersized sepulchral vaults, assembled one atop another, that held the bones of his grandparents. One shelf, too, held the remains of his infant brother, Henry, memorialized now for twenty-two years after his life of one month. On Feynman’s face was a look of tension and determination and also, it seemed to Joan at that moment, utter isolation. Leaving his father’s coffin, he exploded in a rage. Their mother broke down and wept.
At Cornell the next week he seemed unchanged. Just as at Los Alamos—it had been barely a year before—if he grieved, he showed no one. He was proudly rational as ever—“realistic,” he told himself. Classes began. Cornell’s 1946 fall-term enrollment was its largest ever, nearly double prewar levels. Feynman was already a draw for young physicists, and he lectured with absolute confidence. Then, a few nights into the term—it was October 17—he took a pen and paper, let realism slip away, and wrote one last letter to the only person who could help him now:
D’Arline,
I adore you, sweetheart.
I know how much you like to hear that—but I don’t only write it because you like it—I write it because it makes me warm all over inside to write it to you.
It is such a terribly long time since I last wrote to you—almost two years but I know you’ll excuse me because you understand how I am, stubborn and realistic; & I thought there was no sense to writing.
But now I know my darling wife that it is right to do what I have delayed in doing, and that I have done so much in the past. I want to tell you I love you. I want to love you. I always will love you.
I find it hard to understand in my mind what it means to love you after you are dead—but I still want to comfort and take care of you—and I want you to love me and care for me. I want to have problems to discuss with you—I want to do little projects with you. I never thought until just now that we can do that together. What should we do. We started to learn to make clothes together—or learn Chinese—or getting a movie projector. Can’t I do something now. No. I am alone without you and you were the “idea-woman” and general instigator of all our wild adventures.
When you were sick you worried because you could not give me something that you wanted to & thought I needed. You needn’t have worried. Just as I told you then there was no real need because I loved you in so many ways so much. And now it is clearly even more true—you can give me nothing now yet I love you so that you stand in my way of loving anyone else—but I want you to stand there. You, dead, are so much better than anyone else alive.
I know you will assure me that I am foolish & that you want me to have full happiness & don’t want to be in my way. I’ll bet you are suprised that I don’t even have a girl friend (except you, sweetheart) after two years. But you can’t help it, darling,