Genius_ The Life and Science of Richard Feynman - James Gleick [81]
Feynman was back in the library at Princeton, reading everything he could find. One standard book listed the possibilities. First was local infection. This was out of the question because the swellings were traveling too far. Second was lymphatic tuberculosis. This was easy to diagnose, the book said. Then came the cancers, and these, he read to his horror, were almost invariably fatal. For a moment he mocked himself for jumping to the most morbid possibility. Everyone who reads such catalogues must start thinking about death, he thought. He went off to the Fine Hall tea, where the conversation seemed unnaturally normal.
Those months in 1941 were a blur of visits to hospitals, symptoms appearing and fading, consultations with more and more doctors. He hovered on the outside, hearing most news secondhand through Arline’s parents. He and Arline promised each other that they would face whatever came, bravely and honestly. Arline insisted, as she had when less was at stake, that honesty was the bedrock of their love and that what she treasured in Richard was his eagerness to confront the truth, his unwillingness to be embarrassed or evasive. She said she did not want euphemisms or pretense about her illness. Few patients did, but the weight of medical practice opposed forthrightness in the face of terminal illness. Honest bad news was considered antitherapeutic. Richard faced a dilemma, because the doctors were finally settling on a grim diagnosis of Hodgkin’s disease. There would be periods of remission, they said, but the course of the illness could not be reversed.
For Arline’s benefit they proposed a camouflage diagnosis of “glandular fever.” Richard refused to go along with it. He explained that he and Arline had a pact—no lies, not even white ones. How would he be able to face her with this biggest lie of all?
His parents, Arline’s parents, and the doctors all urged him not to be so cruel as to tell a young woman she was dying. His sister, Joan, sobbing, told him he was stubborn and heartless. He broke down and bowed to tradition. In her room at Farmingdale Hospital, with her parents at her side, he confirmed that she had glandular fever. Meanwhile, he started carrying around a letter—a “goodbye love letter,” as he called it—that he planned to give her when she discovered the truth. He was sure she would never forgive the unforgivable lie.
He did not have long to wait. Soon after Arline returned home from the hospital she crept to the top of the stairs and overheard her mother weeping with a neighbor down in the kitchen. When she confronted Richard—his letter snug in his pocket—he told her the truth, handed her the letter, and asked her to marry him.
Marriage was not so simple. It had not occurred to universities like Princeton to leave such matters to their students’ discretion. The financial and emotional responsibilities were considered grave in the best of circumstances. He was supporting himself as a graduate student with fellowships—he was the Queen Junior Fellow and then the Charlotte Elizabeth Proctor Fellow, entitling him to earn two hundred dollars a year as a research assistant. When he told a university dean that his fiancée was dying and that he wanted to marry her, the dean refused to permit it and warned him that his fellowship would be revoked. There would be no compromise. He was dismayed at the response. He considered leaving graduate school for a while to find work. Before he made his decision, more news came from the hospital.
A test had found tuberculosis in Arline’s lymph glands. She did not have Hodgkin’s disease after all. Tuberculosis was not treatable—or rather it was treatable by any of dozens of equally ineffectual methods—but its onslaught was neither swift nor certain. Relief came over Richard in a flood. To his surprise the first note he heard in Arline’s voice was disappointment. Now they would have no reason to marry immediately.
Preparing for War
As the spring of 1941 turned to summer, the prospect of war was everywhere. For scientists it seemed especially real. The fabric