Genius_ The Life and Science of Richard Feynman - James Gleick [15]
Early death also came to her new household. In the winter Richard was five, she gave birth to a second son, named Henry Phillips Feynman, after her father, who had died a year before. Four weeks later the baby came down with a fever. A fingernail had been bleeding and never quite healed. Within days the baby was dead, probably from spinal meningitis. The grief, the quick turning of happiness into despair—and surely for Richard the fear as well—darkened their home for a long time. He had waited for a brother. Now he had a lesson in human precariousness, in the cruelty of nature’s untamed accidents. Later he almost never spoke of the harsh death that dominated this year. He had no brother or sister again until finally, when he was nine, Joan was born. Henry’s presence remained a shadow in the household. Richard knew—even Joan knew—that their mother always kept a birth certificate and a hat that had once belonged to a boy whose remains now lay in the vault of the family mausoleum five miles away, behind a stone plate inscribed, “HENRY PHILLIPS FEYNMAN JANUARY 24, 1924–FEBRUARY 25, 1924.”
The Feynmans moved several times, leaving Manhattan for the small towns straddling the city border: first to Far Rockaway; then from Far Rockaway to Baldwin, Long Island; then to Cedarhurst, when Richard was about ten, and then back to Far Rockaway. Lucille’s father owned a house there, and they moved in—a two-story house of stucco the color of sand, on a small lot at 14 New Broadway. There were front and rear yards and a double driveway. They shared the house with Lucille’s sister Pearl and her family—her husband, Ralph Lewine, a boy, Robert, just older than Richard, and a girl, Frances, just younger. A rail of white wood ringed the porch. The ground floor held two living rooms, one for show and one for general use, with gas logs in a fireplace for cold days. The bedrooms were small, but there were eight of them. Richard’s, on the second floor, overlooked the back yard, with its forsythia and peach tree. Some evenings the adults would come home to find his cousin, Frances, shivering at the upstairs landing, unable to sleep because Richard, as chief baby-sitter, had told ghost stories drawing their mood from the old Gothic panels that lined the stairs.
The household had two other members during those pre-Depression years, a German immigrant couple, Ludwig and Marie, easing their passage into the United States by working as household servants for room and board. Marie cooked; Ludwig said wryly that he was gardener, chauffeur, and butler, serving meals in a formal white coat. They also arranged some serious and inventive play. With Ludwig’s help the north window of the garage became the North Fenster Bank. Everyone took turns playing teller and customer. As Ludwig and Marie learned English they taught the children other routines: the protocols of gardening and formal table manners. If Feynman acquired such skills, he carefully shed them later.
To Joan, the youngest of all the children, it seemed like a well-run household where things happened when they were supposed to happen. Late one night, however, when she was three or four, her brother shook her awake in violation of the routine. He said he had permission to show her something rare and wonderful. They walked, holding hands, onto Far Rockaway’s small golf course, away from the illuminated streets. “Look up,” Richard said. There, far above them, the streaky wine-green curtains of the