Читать книгу The Starship and the Canoe - Kenneth Brower - Страница 14

No nova appeared over the Cornell physics department to mark George’s arrival. His intellect did not from infancy light up the night. One would not have guessed from his school grades that his parents had met as colleagues of Einstein. George was bright enough, but indifferent to formal learning. He showed no glimmer of genius in mathematics or music. In George, the Dyson thread, strung of quarter notes and equations, becomes difficult to trace. “When I was little I played with boats more than anything,” he says. “I remember in Maine I spent a whole summer building and sailing models. I made really fast catamarans. I painted them blue. I’d let them go, and that’s the last you’d ever see of them.”

George’s earliest memory is of a bad dream.

“It’s the first memory I have. Or one of the first. It’s back in those memories where you can’t tell which is first. I remember being woken up by Freeman in the middle of the night. I used to go to him when I had nightmares, but this time he came to me. He said he needed to talk to me. He had just had a dream where an airliner crashed. The plane was in flames. People were standing around outside, and some of them were running into the flames to rescue passengers. Freeman couldn’t move. He was rooted to the spot. He told me it wouldn’t mean anything to me now, but later it would. He told me that a father, though he seems powerful, is just a man, with weaknesses. He wanted me to remember, so that if I was ever in that situation, I would be able to move.”

Katrina remembers her little brother as a boy so shy he never removed his shirt, even on the hottest days of summer. His shirts were always white. He insisted on that color. She remembers parsley: “Wherever we moved—Ithaca, Princeton, Berkeley—George would plant parsley. That was his territorial mark.”

Freeman remembers his son’s crying fits. “He would cry and cry, and sometimes I thought he would have to crack. I couldn’t get him to stop.” There was instability in both family lines, and the crying fits worried Freeman deeply. The fits were not the sort of problem for which he could work out a formula.

Verena remembers her boy’s imagination. “He always had a lot of it. He was always building things with blocks. The boatbuilding started very early. He whittled models out of scraps of wood.

“I don’t know how it began. He went to sea very early—that may have helped. In 1956, when George was three, I took the children to Switzerland and Austria on the Holland-America Line. It was when things were beginning to go bad with Freeman and me. Freeman was making his first trip west to General Atomic, and he put us on the boat. The evening after waving good-bye to him, I was feeling a bit blue. I took the kids on deck to watch the sunset. It was a beautiful sunset over the Atlantic. Clear. Afterward, down below, George said, ‘Mom, do you know what I saw? I saw a mermaid. I saw a blue smile without a face.’”

“It happened on consecutive nights. He saw her again. He found out her name—Misty. Later on, she got mixed up in Carnegie Lake in Princeton. That winter, when the lake froze, he began to lose interest in her—she was locked up under the ice. After a while he no longer talked about her.

“George has this romantic streak, this poetic view of things. Everything he does turns out to be an adventure.

“His first expedition was in a rubber dinghy in Maine. It was after the divorce. George spent the summers with me, then, and I was teaching at Bowdoin. George saw this island in a little lake and he decided to visit it. He was always very methodical. He spent three days getting his food and provisions together. I dropped them off at the lakeshore—George and a friend, who was named Tom, I think—and they paddled in the dinghy over to the little island. They were going to spend three days.

“A terrific storm came up. After the second night I got a call from George, who was in a phone booth. They had paddled ashore. It wasn’t the storm, it turned out; it was that George couldn’t stand the guy. Tom was a compulsive marshmallow eater. George couldn’t stand to watch him eat marshmallows. George had clammed up. He had that pale, drawn look he gets when he doesn’t like someone.

“He wasn’t a procrastinator about his expeditions, but he was so pedantic. Everything had to be wrapped right. It took him a long time, and he was always late. Once it was dusk before he got into the woods, and in the morning he found he was on a traffic island.

“He even had adventures when he took the subway. When I was in New York, teaching on Long Island, George would come to see me on the subway. He was eleven. He was good at finding his way, but one day he was an hour late. He came in worn and exhausted. He had opened the gate for somebody at Penn Station, and people started pouring through. He was so polite. He stood there holding the door. He couldn’t shut it on anybody.”

After the divorce, Freeman remarried, and most of the year George lived in Princeton with his father and stepmother.

Around the Institute for Advanced Studies was a margin of woodland, the institute’s fief, and George rambled there with his friends. The small gang of institute children collected snakes from the woods and turtles from the river. (“This one guy, he really had guts. He’d catch cottonmouths. Bring them to class.”) Black kids from beyond the pale hunted the same river for turtles, but the two tribes never mixed. The black kids snared turtles not for their collections, George thinks, but for the soup pot. George took violin lessons. His tutor, addicted to baseball, listened to George’s violin with a radio earplug in place. It was not the screech of George’s missed notes that caused the maestro to rise in his seat; it was the lift of distant home runs. On George’s birthdays, his grandfather sent him messages in music from England. Freeman would pick out the notes on the piano. Sir George never sent recordings of his birthday messages. “My grandfather believed phonographs were the invention of the Devil,” George says. “He fixed it with copyrights so no one could play his music on machinery. It was monotonous music—hymns and stuff.” George fooled around with fireworks, disassembling a lot of small ones to make big bombs.

Ulli Steltzer, a photographer who then lived in Princeton and now lives in Vancouver, remembers George as a boy. Her fondness for him was in direct proportion to her dislike for the institute. (“A terrible place. A prettypretty place. It doesn’t know it is in New Jersey. It’s the mountain, and all the prophets are coming.”) She first met George at a wine-and-cheese party at the Dysons’. “There were all sorts of notables there,” she says. “George and I stayed away from everybody else. He was twelve, and tall for his age. Quiet, shy, and skinny. George was skinny no matter what he wore. He was like a bird—big nose and big eyes coming out of clothes that were invariably hanging from him. He was a little evasive. He disappeared as soon as I photographed him. He was very odd and charming.”

The winter in Princeton when he was twelve, George and his best friend, Robert Fish, decided to camp out one night. “It was January,” Freeman recalls. “It happened to be the coldest night of the year. Around zero. I didn’t think it was a good idea, but I thought he should be allowed to learn from his own mistakes. I drove them there, to their spot deep in the woods. It looked to me like a pretty hopeless situation.”

Remembering, Freeman laughs his odd, shy, silent laugh. His shoulders shake, but no sound comes out.

“I didn’t sleep much all that night. Very early, when it got light, I drove back. They were fine, of course. They had a fire and were having a fine time in their tent. George had organized it very carefully.”