Martian's Daughter: A Memoir by Marina von Neumann Whitman Page A
Authors: Marina von Neumann Whitman
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of her playing that role in flowing hostess pyjamas—a new and rather daring style at the time, and one that emphasized both her vivid persona and her graceful femininity. I was proud of having such a glamorous mother and yet discomfited by the certainty that I would never, even as an adult, acquire her aura of drop-dead elegance, her ability to turn heads in any room she entered.
I regarded baby Gorky as an interesting curiosity; it was not until he became the golden-haired darling of a succession of maids and nannies that I became fiendishly jealous. The contrast was particularly painful once I, five and a half years older, had turned from a Shirley Temple look-alike—I was occasionally mistaken for her in Hungary—into a plump, pigtailed, bespectacled little egghead, always at the top of her class in school but notably lacking in social graces.
My ambivalent emotions regarding this baby, who quickly developed into a boy of irresistible appeal, were reflected in a piece I wrote for a school assignment when I was a teenager: “His most endearing yet often most annoying quality is his charm, which makes women of any age love him at first sight. After being a little hellion all day, he can go down to a party and, with one smile, captivate everyone in the room. ‘Isn't he an angel?’ they all say. It is then that I feel a desire to wring his angelic little neck!…Gorky's thoughtful, unselfish nature makes me love him with all my might, but he's enough of a little boy to make me think sometimes he should be caged.”
At about the time of Gorky's birth, the pleasant rhythm of my family environment was unsettled by the question of what role Desmond, a physicist whose specialty was studying the effects of various types of radiation on human health and designing instruments to measure it, would play in the fast-approaching war. The US Congress had authorizedcompulsory military service, even though we were not yet officially at war; at about the same time, the Radiation Laboratory, or RadLab, was established at MIT as a joint Anglo-American project for the further development and production of radar, which had recently been invented in England. After several months of cat and mouse between the highly placed scientists assembling a RadLab team and Desmond's local draft board, the civilians won, and we moved from Washington to an old but spacious rented house in Cambridge.
My mother wasted no time setting up her household and establishing our home as the social center for the group of scientists and their spouses who were rapidly being assembled in Cambridge from all over the country. But it soon became clear that the role of well-off housewife was not going to be enough for her quick brain or her boundless energy and dominant personality. As a European whose parents had just lost their home, their belongings, and their country, she was passionate about the importance of an American victory in World War II and felt an increasing urge to play a more direct role. She was egged on by her husband's half-teasing insistence that keeping household servants in wartime was downright unpatriotic; either the maids would have to go or she would have to justify their existence by going to work herself. And now that her parents and aunt were totally dependent on her for their financial support, she felt an obligation to earn much of their keep herself.
The question of what kind of job she should apply for was a real one, since nothing in her education or experience had equipped her for the world of paid work. So she joined the army of Rosie the Riveters who made up an increasing part of the civilian work force as their husbands and brothers went off to war. Risking her long, elegantly manicured fingernails, she started out assembling radar sets at the Harvey Radio Laboratories in Cambridge. “You're just another socialite who'll quit as soon as you're bored,” was the response she recounted to a reporter who
I regarded baby Gorky as an interesting curiosity; it was not until he became the golden-haired darling of a succession of maids and nannies that I became fiendishly jealous. The contrast was particularly painful once I, five and a half years older, had turned from a Shirley Temple look-alike—I was occasionally mistaken for her in Hungary—into a plump, pigtailed, bespectacled little egghead, always at the top of her class in school but notably lacking in social graces.
My ambivalent emotions regarding this baby, who quickly developed into a boy of irresistible appeal, were reflected in a piece I wrote for a school assignment when I was a teenager: “His most endearing yet often most annoying quality is his charm, which makes women of any age love him at first sight. After being a little hellion all day, he can go down to a party and, with one smile, captivate everyone in the room. ‘Isn't he an angel?’ they all say. It is then that I feel a desire to wring his angelic little neck!…Gorky's thoughtful, unselfish nature makes me love him with all my might, but he's enough of a little boy to make me think sometimes he should be caged.”
At about the time of Gorky's birth, the pleasant rhythm of my family environment was unsettled by the question of what role Desmond, a physicist whose specialty was studying the effects of various types of radiation on human health and designing instruments to measure it, would play in the fast-approaching war. The US Congress had authorizedcompulsory military service, even though we were not yet officially at war; at about the same time, the Radiation Laboratory, or RadLab, was established at MIT as a joint Anglo-American project for the further development and production of radar, which had recently been invented in England. After several months of cat and mouse between the highly placed scientists assembling a RadLab team and Desmond's local draft board, the civilians won, and we moved from Washington to an old but spacious rented house in Cambridge.
My mother wasted no time setting up her household and establishing our home as the social center for the group of scientists and their spouses who were rapidly being assembled in Cambridge from all over the country. But it soon became clear that the role of well-off housewife was not going to be enough for her quick brain or her boundless energy and dominant personality. As a European whose parents had just lost their home, their belongings, and their country, she was passionate about the importance of an American victory in World War II and felt an increasing urge to play a more direct role. She was egged on by her husband's half-teasing insistence that keeping household servants in wartime was downright unpatriotic; either the maids would have to go or she would have to justify their existence by going to work herself. And now that her parents and aunt were totally dependent on her for their financial support, she felt an obligation to earn much of their keep herself.
The question of what kind of job she should apply for was a real one, since nothing in her education or experience had equipped her for the world of paid work. So she joined the army of Rosie the Riveters who made up an increasing part of the civilian work force as their husbands and brothers went off to war. Risking her long, elegantly manicured fingernails, she started out assembling radar sets at the Harvey Radio Laboratories in Cambridge. “You're just another socialite who'll quit as soon as you're bored,” was the response she recounted to a reporter who
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