I.Asimov: A Memoir Read online

  As I found out eventually, Goldberger’s girlfriend, Lee, was trying to decide whether to marry him or not and she wanted to introduce him to her best friend in order to get an independent opinion. She therefore suggested to that best friend, whose name was Gertrude Blugerman, that she go on this blind date, if only to survey Goldberger. Reluctantly, Gertrude obliged. I was described to her as a mustachioed Russian and heaven only knows what kind of exotic personality she imagined. The date was set for February 14, 1942. The fact that it was Valentine’s Day did not enter into any of our consciousnesses, I’m sure; certainly not into mine.

  I had been wearing a mustache for a year now, but it was a very ugly one, and a classmate had bet me a dollar against my mustache that I would qualify for a Ph.D. When I did on February 13,1 shaved off my mustache, and met Gertrude bare-faced.

  She took one horrified look at me and (I think) tried to back out of the date with a sudden splitting headache, but Lee wouldn’t let her. It’s only for a few hours, she said, and I want you to help me decide about Joe.

  It was quite otherwise with me. I had seen Captain Blood, which introduced Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland, and although I’m not one of those who fall in love with movie stars, I do admire some more than others. Olivia de Havilland struck me, at that time, as the epitome of feminine beauty. Gertrude, to my dazzled eyes, was the complete image of Olivia de Havilland. She was actually an extraordinarily

  beautiful girl.

  My reaction was inevitable, but I was now three years older than I was when I fell in love in the chem lab. I had no intention of ever going through heartbreak again. I therefore reacted cautiously, working it through by stages.

  But I was determined. Such was my address and firmness, such my insistence on further dates, such my calm certainty that we would be married, that she gave in. She certainly did not find me an object of romantic adulation (who on earth would?), but I managed to talk her into such a daze that she agreed to take a chance on me. (Of course, she admired my cleverness. That helped.) On July 26, 1942, less than half a year after we had met, we were married.

  It was not an easy marriage. After all, she was not in love with me, I’m pretty sure. We were both virginal (even though she was two years older than I was) and sex didn’t work out too well, with neither of us possessing experience. There were other incompatibilities too that developed and that would be hard to describe. I don’t even intend to try.

  There was one incompatibility, however, that I ignored during my courtship (for the simple reason that I had not the slightest idea it was vital) and that served in the end to raise enormous difficulties in the marriage.

  Gertrude smoked!

  Let me go back now and discuss tobacco. One of the large components of the candy store’s sales was tobacco. We carried cigarettes by the pack and by the carton, cigars by the single and by the box, and pipe tobacco of various kinds. I don’t remember whether we, at any time, had pipes for sale, but I do remember a vertical dispenser of round containers of Copenhagen snuff. I don’t think we ever sold chewing tobacco.

  Pipes and cigars were rather exotic, but the smoking of cigarettes was almost universal. Individual packs of twenty cigarettes of the leading brands were thirteen cents each, and some lesser brands were ten cents each. What’s more, we kept one pack of each of the leading brands open so that people could buy single cigarettes for a penny. Many of the teenagers who patronized the store and who were my contemporaries would buy single cigarettes in this fashion, light up, and go off puffing.

  The cigarettes were obviously available to me. I had but to take one from an open pack. However, my father had laid down strict rules. The goods in the store were to sell, not to consume.

  This was a hardship on me where the candy was concerned. We had boxes and boxes of candies, all open and on display in the counter, and youngsters came in with their pennies and nickels and selected what they wanted and I gave it to them. I was never allowed to take a piece of candy for myself, however.

  No, I was not starved for them. I could always ask my father or (much better) my mother, “Mama, may I have a Hershey bar?” Sometimes, but by no means always, the answer was yes, and I would be happy. What went for all the delightful succulences in the store also went for cigarettes. I would have to say, “Pappa, may I have a cigarette?”

  I never did. Not once. I knew the answer would be no. The result is that I have never smoked. You can see, then, that I am a nonsmoker by circumstance. A small change in my father’s attitude and I might well have become a heavy smoker.

  My sister and brother have never smoked either, and my mother never did. Stanley tells me that for a period of time (but only for a period) my father smoked heavily and I hear this with the utmost astonishment. My brother swears to it, and I cannot doubt him, for he is an upright man, but try as I might I cannot recall my father with a cigarette in his hand.

  It may be that such is my retrospective detestation of smoking that I have simply blocked out all memories of my father doing so.

  In 1942, however, although I did not smoke myself, I had no objection to smoking. People smoked in the candy store and that suited us, for tobacco sales made up a large part of our small revenue. So I was accustomed to the effluvium and thought nothing of it. The fact that Gertrude smoked, therefore, did not strike me as an item I ought to weigh in my developing plan to marry her, and that was a disaster.

  If I had felt then as I feel now, or as I felt a few years after I had married her, nothing could possibly have persuaded me to marry a woman who smoked. Dates, yes. Sexual adventure, yes. But to pin myself permanently inside closed quarters with a smoker? Never.

  Never. Never. Beauty wouldn’t count, sweetness wouldn’t count, suitability in every other respect wouldn’t count.

  But I didn’t know. I had never actually lived in a house or apartment that was always filled with smoke and with the reek of dead ashtray contents. When I found that living with Gertrude meant that and that there was no escape, our relationship withered.

  I must say that Gertrude was, in many, many respects, a very good wife. Aside from remaining beautiful, she was a careful housekeeper, a good cook, absolutely loyal to me, and strict with the household accounts.

  These are big things and yet little things can ruin it. There is the story of the man who was planning a divorce from a wife whom all his friends considered ideal. They argued with him, praising her qualities and virtues, and he listened as long as he could. Then he pulled off his shoe, held it out to the others, and said, “Can any one of you tell me where this shoe pinches my foot?”

  And remember, it was not merely the reek of tobacco. I began to be aware of the health problems involved in tobacco. There was early talk of respiratory problems and lung cancer, and I failed to see the differ ence in inhaling the smoke into the lungs freshly or only after it had emerged from someone else’s lungs.

  I therefore began a campaign to get Gertrude to stop smoking, or failing that, to cut down, or failing that, never to smoke in the bed room or in the automobile or when we were eating. Unfortunately, none of this succeeded. As the years passed, the issue was like a sore that rubbed and chafed itself into blisters that grew more and more painful.

  I endured it longer than I might have for three reasons. First, I knew she smoked when I married her and it seemed unfair to penalize her for something I had accepted at the start.

  Second, I was always aware that I had talked her into marrying me and that she had been most unwilling to do so. It seemed I ought to endure the situation, therefore.

  Third, by the time I was secretly considering divorce, I had two small children. I could divorce Gertrude, given what seemed adequate

  reasons, but there was no way in which I could abandon my children.

  I had to wait till they grew up.

  It may seem odd to let a simple thing like smoking break up a long-

  term marriage that was suitable in so many ways, but, of course, it was

 
; more than a simple thing. Besides, there were other irreconcilabilities less easy to talk about. For one thing, I don’t think that Gertrude ever liked me much and that hurt my self-esteem. After about twelve years, I grew tired of being in love all by myself and fell out of love, though the marriage continued for many more years through simple inertia.

  I’ll give Gertrude credit, however. She may not have liked me much but she never denigrated my intelligence. (That would really have been too much to bear.)

  In the army, for instance, I took a sort of intelligence test, called the AGCT, which stood for something I have forgotten. I scored 160, which none of the army people running the test had ever seen before. It must have been very nearly the maximum possible. I phoned Gertrude to tell her this.

  At my next furlough, she told me indignantly that she had told a friend I had scored 160. “You must mean 116,” said the friend. “No,” said Gertrude, “160.”

  Her friend said, “How do you know?”

  She said, “Isaac told me.”

  Her friend laughed and said, “He lied,” and sent Gertrude into a paroxysm of fury. I said to Gertrude, curiously, “How do you know I didn’t lie?” I wanted her to tell me the simple fact that I never lied, but she

  didn’t. Instead, she said, “For you 160 is just normal. Why should you have to lie?”

  Then, too, about twenty years later, Lee, the girl who had arranged the original double date, came to visit. (I think by that time she had married and divorced Joe Goldberger.) She said to Gertrude, “Did you ever dream when you first met Isaac that he would become what he is today?”

  “Certainly,” said Gertrude, “I expected it.”

  “Why should you have expected it?”

  “Well, he told me at the start that it would happen.”

  There is a similar story I have to tell about Fred Pohl. When we were both out of the army, he said to me, “My AGCT score was 156. What was yours?”

  I hesitated, then said, reluctantly, “I’m sorry, Fred. It was 160.”

  He said, “Oh .”

  But he didn’t question my word. He knew that I was incapable of lying just to score him off, and I loved him all the more for that.

  dependent on her and incapable of forming true bonds outside the family.

  I think it was Gertrude’s attachment to her mother (not, in my

  In-Laws

  Getting married meant I had another family, the Blugermans. I was to see more of them than my own folks during my marriage. We returned to New York periodically after I had moved out of town and we always stayed at the Blugermans’, for that’s where Gertrude wanted to stay. Nor did I blame her. My family, witii its candy store, could offer far less in the way of hospitality.

  Gertrude’s father, Henry Blugerman, was a very quiet, very sweet, very gentle person, beloved by all, even by his son-in-law. To me, he resembled Edward G. Robinson in looks. (Considering that Gertrude’s father and mother were quite plain, I marveled that they could give birth to someone as beautiful as Gertrude, or as handsome as their son.)

  Henry was the traditional passive Jewish father. My joke, never spoken in Gertrude’s hearing, was that at the age of fourteen she asked her mother, “Who is that man who always eats with us?”

  In later years, I heard the story of a would-be actor who came home excitedly saying that he had finally landed a part. “What kind of a part?” asked a friend. Said the actor, “I’m playing a Jewish father.” To which the friend replied, “What’s the matter? Couldn’t you get a speaking part?”

  That was Henry.

  It was Gertrude’s mother, Mary, who utterly dominated the family. She was just about five feet tall and, to my eyes, just about five feet wide. She was obese. She was also the center about which the little family revolved. She ran everything with a loud voice, corrected everything, insisted on her own way in everything, and, in my opinion, broke the spirit of her children and managed to make them utterly opinion, a healthy one) that made it impossible for her to commit herself to me entirely. It is significant, I think, that after the marriage, as we were leaving for our honeymoon, her mother called out in a loud voice, right there in the street, “Remember, Gittel, if it doesn’t work out, you can always come home to me.” You can imagine the self-confidence with which that filled me.

  Mary was forty-seven when I met her and was in bad health. At least she said she was in bad health and this helped keep die rest of the family in line. At crucial moments, she would manage to deteriorate rapidly, to the vast alarm of her family.

  Gertrude was convinced that her mother (I repeat—forty-seven years old) was an old, old woman, incapable of taking care of herself. In fact, on a number of occasions in the first year of our marriage, she wished to go back to New York to take care of her poor superannuated parent. “She’s an old woman,” she would say indignantiy when I suggested her place was witli me. However, Gertrude never actually carried out her threat to go to New York to serve as her mother’s round-the-clock nurse.

  Many years later, when Gertrude had passed her fiftietli birthday, I asked if she remembered how she had wanted to go home to her old, old modier and take care of her. Incautiously, Gertrude remembered, and I said (with a touch of malice, I’m ashamed to say), “Well, she was four years younger then than you are now.”

  Gertrude had a brother, John, who was nineteen at the time of my marriage. I never understood him. He was a little taller than I, had a good body, and was extremely handsome. To my eyes, he looked as much like Cary Grant as his sister looked like Olivia de Havilland.

  John was quite intelligent and apparently took pleasure in puncturing the boyfriends that Gertrude would occasionally bring home. It was apparently one of my few good points in Gertrude’s eyes that John could not succeed in puncturing me. (I wasn’t even aware he was trying to.)

  The peculiar thing about John was that he was a deeply depressed person with no reason that I could see for the depression. It was obvious to me that, despite his looks and his intelligence, he suffered from a feeling of lack of self-worth. So, in fact, did Gertrude.

  I have theories concerning this. I believe that John was pushed by his wildly adoring mother to a point where he was past his level of competence. He felt himself quite unable to gain the goals expected of him, or to reconcile himself to alternate and lesser goals. He failed to get into medical school and went to dental school, so that eventually he became, in his mother’s words, a “doctor of dental surgery.” However, he never opened an office of his own.

  He grew interested in Jungian psychiatry and went to Switzerland to become a lay analyst, but he returned after a lengthy period without completing the course. And he never got married.

  Gertrude was six years older than John (she was born on May 16, 1917) and was made much of by her mother till John was born. John was a boy. Gertrude dropped to second-class citizenship at once and the shock to the little girl was severe. Furthermore, Gertrude told me that her mother consistently told her she was not beautiful to keep her from getting swell-headed. No wonder poor Gertrude suffered from a lack of self-worth.

  Once, I remember, during an argument between me and Gertrude when I complained of her needlessly depressed attitude toward life, she said, “Anyone married to you would be depressed.”

  Whereupon I said, “But your brother, John, is even more depressed than you are and he’s not married to me. Is there anything that you two share in common?”

  Gertrude saw my point. She must have, for she grew furious.

  My mother-in-law and I did not get along. She could not dominate me. I wouldn’t allow it for a moment. I suppose my clear antagonism to her counted as a black mark against me.

  It also bothered her that my gathering success seemed to cast a shadow on her beloved son, whom she always referred to as “Sonny” in what seemed to me a deliberate attempt to keep him infantilized. Once she said to me, quite loftily, “My Sonny is an artist, not a businessman like you.”

  To which I replied, �
�I’m a college professor and a novelist. Isn’t that artistic enough for you?” (It was; chalk up another black mark.)

  Mary’s business advice to Henry, who passively followed that advice, was disastrous. He quit his job after World War II, at her insistence, and opened an ill-fated business of his own, which soon failed. Nevertheless, Mary always insisted on avoiding all responsibility and placed the blame squarely on the head of poor, innocent Henry.

  I was the only member of the family who objected and tried to put the responsibility for disaster where it belonged, and that was still another black mark against me.

  But let me give the devil her due. I don’t know that there was ever a better cook than Mary Blugerman. When I ate her roast stuffed chicken, or her noodle pudding with bits of liver, or her strudel, I was ready to forgive her anything. It also meant that Gertrude, having learned from her mother, was also a good cook, though not quite as good.

  NAES

  Robert Heinlein, in the spring of 1942, tried to recruit me to work at the Naval Air Experimental Station in Philadelphia, along with him and Sprague de Camp. It put me into a real quandary, for there were strong arguments in my mind for both talcing and rejecting the offer.

  Against going to Philadelphia was the fact that I didn’t want to go anywhere. I wanted to stay at home. Although I was now twenty-two years old, I still feared the task of taking care of myself.

  Second, I wanted to continue toward my Ph.D. I didn’t want to interrupt it for an indefinite period, perhaps forever.

  The arguments for going to Philadelphia were, however, much stronger. I wasn’t sure that I would be allowed to complete my Ph.D. work in any case. The first few months after Pearl Harbor had not been good for the United States and, although in Europe the Soviet Union had rallied and was holding the German army, that might be the last Soviet stand.