Genius_ The Life and Science of Richard Feynman - James Gleick [37]
Walking into the parlor floor of the Bay State Road chapter house of Phi Beta Delta, a student could linger in the front room with its big bay windows overlooking the street or head directly for the dining room, where Feynman ate most of his meals for four years. The members wore jackets and ties to dinner. They gathered in the anteroom fifteen minutes before and waited for the bell that announced the meal. White-painted pilasters rose toward the high ceilings. A stairway bent gracefully up four flights. Fraternity members often leaned over the carved railing to shout down to those below, gathered around the wooden radio console in one corner or waiting to use the pay telephone on an alcove wall. The telephone provided an upperclassman with one of his many opportunities to harass freshmen: they were obliged to carry nickels for making change. They also carried individual black notebooks for keeping a record of their failures, among other things, to carry nickels. Feynman developed a trick of catching a freshman nickel-less, making a mark in his black book, and then punishing the same freshman all over again a few minutes later. The second and third floors were given over entirely to study rooms, where students worked in twos and threes. Only the top floor was for sleeping, in double-decker bunks crowded together.
Compulsory Tea notwithstanding, some members argued vehemently that other members lacked essential graces, among them the ability to dance and the ability to invite women to accompany them to a dance. For a while this complaint dominated the daily counsel of the thirty-odd members of Phi Beta Delta. A generation later the ease of postwar life made a place for words like “wonk” and “nerd” in the collegiate vocabulary. In more class-bound and less puritanical cultures the concept flowered even earlier. Britain had its boffins, working researchers subject to the derision of intellectual gentlemen. At MIT in the thirties the nerd did not exist; a penholder worn in the shirt pocket represented no particular gaucherie; a boy could not become a figure of fun merely by studying. This was fortunate for Feynman and others like him, socially inept, athletically feeble, miserable in any but a science course, risking laughter every time he pronounced an unfamiliar name, so worried about the other sex that he trembled when he had to take the mail out past girls sitting on the stoop. America’s future scientists and engineers, many of them rising from the working class, valued studiousness without question. How could it be otherwise, in the knots that gathered almost around the clock in fraternity study rooms, filling dappled cardboard notebooks with course notes to be handed down to generations? Even so, Phi Beta Delta perceived a problem. There did seem to be a connection between hard studying and failure to dance. The fraternity made a cooperative project of enlivening the potential dull boys. Attendance at dances became mandatory for everyone in Phi Beta Delta. For those who could not find dates, the older boys arranged dates. In return, stronger students tutored the weak. Dick felt he got a good bargain. Eventually he astonished even the most sociable of his friends by spending long hours at the Raymore-Playmore Ballroom, a huge dance hall near Boston’s Symphony Hall with a mirrored ball rotating from the ceiling.
The best help for his social confidence, however, came from Arline Greenbaum. She was still one of the most beautiful girls he knew, with dimples in her round, ruddy face, and she was becoming a distinct presence in his life, though mostly from a distance. On Saturdays she would visit his family in Far Rockaway and give Joan piano lessons. She was the kind of young woman that people called “talented”—musical and artistic in a well-rounded way. She danced and sang in the Lawrence High School revue, “America on Her Way.” The Feynmans let her paint a parrot on the inside door of the coat closet downstairs. Joan started to think of her as an especially benign older sister. Often after their piano lesson they went for