• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 2286 0

platonic friendship, but I don’t suppose he will want it like that …”) and yet there were always hints of the domestic future Feynman so craved now—she was caring for “a beautiful baby now, I wish I could have one exactly like him.” A new friend, Engelbert, was buying skis for her; meanwhile she could now cook pheasant, chicken, goose, and hare with the appropriate sauces (“I’m improving, am I not?”). Feynman kept hearing from the other woman, too. She was telling her husband everything; they had left California for the East Coast. She wanted more money. She felt used. He let her know how angry he was. She told him, “altho’ you are clever at your own special work, you are very dim at human relationships.” She assured him that his Einstein Award medal was “safe”; also his copy of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, with drawings that had been carefully colored, so long ago, by Arline.

He begged her to come see him again. “I only mentioned my inner feelings for revenge, etc. to explain why it would be hard to guarantee you something that you asked,” he wrote. He still wanted to marry her.

I know where the right is—but emotions, like anger and hate and vengeance etc. are like a bunch of snakes in a barrel—with reason and good heart as a lid… . it is frightening and uncertain. Worth a good try tho.

She refused, despite the warm memories that now came back to her: building a sandcastle at the beach, surrounded by a mob of small boys; camping under the stars at Joshua Tree National Monument, where Feynman had tinkered delightedly with his gleaming green Coleman stove. On a wet Sunday night he had shown her a battered suitcase with all of Arline’s letters and photographs. Once in a flash of anger he had called her a prostitute—a cruel rhetorical weapon he had used before. “And,” she wrote, “I did enjoy my boss & my work.”

Her husband’s memories were not so warm. At a party he listened to someone telling a story about Feynman and blurted out that he knew a better one—but stopped. A few days later he wrote Feynman a formal letter demanding compensation. “You have taken callous & unscrupulous advantage of your position & salary to seduce an impressionable girl away from her husband,” he wrote. Could Feynman not remember the harder times of his own first marriage? “You alienated my wife’s affections. You flattered her with your attentions and your gifts. You made clandestine plans for exciting vacations… . I think you should pay for indulging your selfish pleasure.” He demanded $1,250. Feynman refused.

Gweneth Howarth was reporting that Engelbert had brought cognac and chocolate to celebrate her twenty-fifth birthday; she decided to improve her shorthand and typing (“You do need someone to look after you, don’t you?”). Feynman sent the consulate in Zurich an affidavit vouching for her (“she is an intelligent girl with a fine personality and is an excellent cook and domestic servant”) and guaranteeing to undertake her financial support if necessary. Gweneth thanked him, mentioning that she had now met an Arab boy, beautifully polite, but he had started to make love to her. She had to avoid Engelbert because she could not hide a love bite on her neck. She was making her way through the immigration paperwork: pages of questions designed to ensure that she was not a Communist and then—infuriating her—questions about whether she was a woman of good character where sex was concerned. From what moral high ground—and with what bureaucratic logic—did the American authorities require her to swear that she was neither a prostitute nor an adulterer?

Feynman, meanwhile, tried to placate his former lover’s husband: “… forgive her and make her happy… . your love will be deeper for the forgiveness and greater because you each know how you have suffered.”

“Good thought,” the husband retorted, “but why don’t you apply it to yourself since you have enjoyed her for so long… . Don’t give me the story of your parents’ teachings, society etc. for I don’t go for that.” He engaged attorneys, who sent threatening letters on his behalf. But Feynman’s attorneys