A Beautiful Mind (41 page)

Nash always found the people who could give him what he needed. Forrester was the kind of smart, verbal, quick-witted man Nash was frequently attracted to. Forrester was also emotionally available. Under his eccentric, sometimes brash and loud exterior, Forrester was an exceptionally sweet man. “Kind and gentle, much loved by his students,” was the description given by Albert Nijenhuis, another of Forrester’s colleagues.
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Forrester also had an unusual capacity for connecting with troubled individuals. When Vaught, who, as a student, had endured repeated hospitalizations for episodes of mania and depression, first came to Seattle, Forrester was amazingly kind. Vaught recalled: “He was a
very
fine man. I was a manic-depressive long before lithium came along. He was very helpful to me. Amasa encouraged me to find a psychiatrist in Seattle. I could talk to him.”
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In his first year at Seattle, Forrester “adopted” a mentally ill graduate student — a computer genius who had suffered some kind of psychotic breakdown — and tried to care for him, recalled John Walter, a mathematician at the University of Illinois who shared the house with Vaught and Forrester. “It was one of his projects.”
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It would have been obvious to Forrester that Nash, arrogant and aloof as he might appear, would respond to his sympathetic interest. “Amasa was pretty sharp. He would have seen through the veil,” said Walter.
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Nash and Forrester hardly had much time to spend together; Nash was in Seattle only a month. Although Nash referred to Forrester, either by name or simply by the letter
F,
in letters until the early 1970s, there is no evidence to suggest that
Nash and Forrester corresponded regularly or saw much of each other in subsequent years. Forrester stayed very much on Nash’s mind, however. Eleven years later, on a pilgrimage that took him to Los Angeles and San Francisco, Nash spent nearly a month in Seattle.
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Forrester was still living in his houseboat with dozens of cats for company and was by then almost entirely cut off from his former mathematical friends.
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He had never lived up to his early promise, had been denied tenure, and had left the University of Washington in 1961. He worked briefly at Boeing and later at the giant Atomic Energy Commission plant in Hanford, Washington, before dropping out of the mathematical community in the mid-1970s. Later, he made his living tutoring and, on one occasion, acting as a live-in tutor for some children on a ranch. Nijenhuis, who ran into him a final time at a mathematics congress in Vancouver, British Columbia, in 1974, recalled that Forrester had told him that he’d worked as a goatherd. For years he would drop by the mathematics and physics library, looking progressively more seedy and disheveled. He died in 1991. This once-promising mathematician did not even merit an obituary in the
Seattle Times.
If, for Nash, Forrester’s was the road not taken, one would have to argue that Nash, on this occasion, was perceptive about human beings.

Nash knew immediately that something was wrong when someone fetched him from the dormitory. The Nashes communicated exclusively by letter and postcard. A long-distance telephone call indicated that something was amiss.
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John Sr. was on the line. He sounded unnaturally grave. Nash’s first thought was that he was calling with some bad news about his mother or sister, but he heard anger rather than sorrow or anxiety in his father’s voice.

Eleanor Stier had contacted them and revealed the existence of their grandson, John Sr. said. The shock was enormous.

“Don’t come home,” John Sr. told him sternly. “Go right to Boston and make this right. Marry the girl.”

Nash was too stunned to argue. The secret he was so anxious to keep from his parents was out. There was nothing to be done now. He agreed not to come to Roanoke. In a postcard dated July 12, he wrote his parents that he was “thinking of going back to BeanTown.”
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Nash did go back to Boston in mid-July and stayed for two weeks. He spent most of his time either with Bricker or working in his office late nights.
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He turned to Bricker for advice on what to do about Eleanor. She had hired a lawyer. She wanted regular child support payments. The attorney, Nash found out, was threatening to go to the university. Nash, as Bricker recalled in 1997, was inclined to refuse to pay.

Bricker, as usual, found himself in the middle. Eleanor had been calling him regularly. She was devastated by Nash’s abandonment and bitter over his refusal to
support their son. Bricker remonstrated with Nash. “He didn’t want to pay child support. I told him, This is terrible. This is your son. If nothing else, do it for your own future. If the university got wind of this it’ll ruin your career. You owe it to her.”
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Nash, to Bricker’s surprise, agreed to pay.

29
Death and Marriage
1956-57

A
LTHOUGH
N
ASH WAS TO SPEND
the year at the Institute for Advanced Study, he decided to live in New York instead of Princeton.
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Within a day or two of coming to the city in late August, he found an unfurnished apartment on Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village just south of Washington Square Park, a street lined with jazz clubs, Italian cafés, and secondhand book shops. The apartment was a typical railroad flat, small, dingy, and suffused with smells of his neighbors’ cooking. Nash bought a few pieces of used furniture from a local junk dealer and sent his parents a postcard proclaiming a sentiment that they would be sure to approve, namely, that he’d rather save money than live luxuriously.
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But his reasons for choosing a five-story walk-up in downtown New York over a spartan flat on Einstein Drive in quasirural Princeton were more romantic than practical. The towering scale of the city, with its frenetic rhythms, ever-present crowds, and round-the-clock activity — “the wild electric beauty of New York”
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— seemed wonderful to him, always had, from the first time Shapley and Shubik had invited him, when all three were living in the Graduate College at Princeton, to come up for a weekend. After he’d moved to Boston, he had seized every opportunity to return, sometimes staying with the Minskys,
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just to reexperience that sensation of simultaneous connectedness and anonymity. The bohemian enclave around Washington Square had long been a magnet for those who were sexually and spiritually unconventional, and Nash too was attracted to its crooked streets, Old World charm, and implied promise of freedom.

If the decision to move to Bleecker Street meant that Nash was toying with adopting a different sort of life from the one he had hitherto imagined for himself, it was not to be. John Sr. and Virginia announced that they too were coming to New York.
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John Sr. had some business to transact for the Appalachian. Nash feared that they would confront him again on the subject of Eleanor. But the Nashes were even more preoccupied with the precarious state of John Sr.’s health at that moment. When Nash met them at the McAlpin Hotel, a few blocks from Penn Station, he tried to demonstrate that he was a loyal son by urging his father, several times in
the course of the evening, to consult a specialist in New York. He told his father he ought to consider an operation.
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It was the last time Nash saw his father.

In early September, John Sr. suffered a massive heart attack.
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Virginia had a difficult time reaching Nash, who had no telephone. By the time she got a message to him, his father was already dead. Thereafter, he would think of fall as a season of “misfortunes.”
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John Sr., who was sixty-four at the time of his death, had been ill on and off all year. That Easter Sunday he had been feeling too unwell to go to Martha and Charlie’s house for dinner (Martha had married in the spring of 1954). And in late summer when he and Virginia were in New York, he suffered from a spell of weakness and nausea in the hotel.
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The news of his father’s death shocked Nash. He couldn’t fathom its suddenness, its finality. He was convinced that the death had not been inevitable, might have been prevented if only John Sr. had gotten better medical care, if only …
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Nash rushed to Bluefield to attend the funeral, which was held at Christ Episcopal Church on September 14, two days after John Sr. died.
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There was no outpouring of grief, no sign that Nash’s unnatural calm was shaken.
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But the death of his father produced another fissure in the foundation of Nash’s “perfect little world.” The loss of a parent before one has really stepped fully into one’s own adult life in the same role is a one-two punch — losing the father and having to step into the father’s shoes.

There was, for starters, a newfound sense of responsibility for Virginia’s welfare. It may not have signified much in practical terms, given that Martha lived in Roanoke and, as the female offspring, would have been expected to look after Virginia, but emotionally Nash was now in the hot seat. Suddenly, his mother’s wishes regarding him, in particular her intense desire that he adopt what she regarded as a “normal” life — that is, that he marry — weighed more heavily on him than at any time since he had left home for college.

For Nash this dilemma — and it was a dilemma, as his father’s shoes were not exactly the ones that he felt prepared to step into — was compounded by the particular circumstances of the summer. Nash’s misbehavior with regard to Eleanor and John David lay between him and Virginia. The thought that he had hastened his father’s death must have occurred to him. Or, if it didn’t — and this is certainly possible given Nash’s inability to imagine how his actions affected other people — the thought surely occurred to Virginia, who may have communicated it, indirectly or directly, to Nash. Virginia was not just grief-stricken but deeply angry. She wrote Eleanor a letter accusing her of causing her husband’s death. It is quite possible that she said something similar to her son, or implied as much.
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Such guilt would be a heavy burden to bear. More likely, it was not just the feeling of guilt, but also the more potent threat of losing his mother’s love on the
heels of the actual loss of his father, that would have placed tremendous pressure on Nash to act. Virginia felt that Nash was duty bound to legitimize his relationship to his son. John Sr. had an abhorrence of scandal and a strong belief in doing one’s duty. Whether, by the time of her husband’s death, Virginia still persisted in the demand that Nash marry Eleanor isn’t clear. It may be that her contact with Eleanor — including the evidence of Eleanor’s lower-class origins, her lack of education, or her threats to make trouble for Nash — convinced her that even a temporary marriage was out of the question. She may have feared that Eleanor would never agree to a divorce. Or simply, she may have realized that she had no way of forcing Nash to do something that he did not wish to do.

If Virginia reacted so to Nash’s mistress and- illegitimate son, how might she react to the far more disturbing facts of Nash’s liaisons with other men? As a practical matter, the likelihood of her ever finding out about the arrest seemed negligible. Yet that too must have crossed Nash’s mind. His confidence that he could keep his secret lives completely separate and keep his parents in the dark as well was jolted by Eleanor’s betrayal. He must have felt on his neck the hot breath of other potential discoveries.

In addition to commuting to the Institute in Princeton, Nash was spending a good deal of time at New York University, whose campus began a block north of Bleecker Street, at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences. One afternoon, very soon after his father’s funeral, Nash stopped at the desk of the beautiful Natasha Artin, the wife of Emil Artin and one of Richard Courant’s assistants. A famously gorgeous creature, Natasha had a doctorate from the University of Berlin, where she’d been a student of Artin’s before they married. Everyone knew that she was the latest object of Courant’s infatuation. Nash liked to chat with her on his way up to tea.

“I wonder how easy it is to get a divorce in New Jersey,” he said out of the blue one day to her.
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Natasha immediately took this for a declaration that he intended to get married. She found it quite typical of Nash to investigate the exit doors even as he was hovering near the entrance.

On another occasion, Nash gave a lecture at Chicago and had dinner afterward with Leo Goodman, a mathematician he knew from the graduate-school days in Princeton. He told Goodman that he thought Alicia would make a fine wife. Why? Because she watched so much television. That meant, he felt, that she wouldn’t require much attention from him.
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The exchange brings to mind Eleanor’s oft-repeated remark about Nash: “he always wanted something for nothing.”

Alicia has insisted that she cannot remember when Nash proposed or whether he did so in person or by letter.
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They simply had an understanding, she said. But
Alicia’s actions that fall belie her later account. After Nash had left Cambridge in June, Alicia stayed on, desperately unhappy. All this suggests the opposite of any “understanding.”

Alicia’s letter to Joyce Davis on October 23, 1956, does not mention Nash at all. Presumably, if they’d gotten formally engaged by that date, Alicia would have announced the fact to Joyce.

As you might know I’ve been looking for a job in New York and had applied to several places. At first I was afraid things might prove difficult but so far I’ve already had offers from Brookhaven, as a junior physicist with the reactor group, and from the Nuclear Development Corporation of America also in the reactor field. I’m accepting the latter at $450 per month. I’m told I might get $500 some other place but I think N.D.C. offers good experience and I’ve always wanted to do nuclear physics specifically.
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