Free Genius by James Gleick Page B

audience. “I believe that Minneapolis is a real city and not simply a city of my dreams.” What Einstein had (or had not) said about relativity was truer of quantum mechanics: a bare handful of people had the mathematics needed to understand it.

    Richard and Julian
    Summer brought a salty heat to Far Rockaway, the wind rising across the beaches. The asphalt shimmered with refractive air. In winter, snow fell early from low, gray clouds; then dazzlingly white hours would pass, the sky too bright to see clearly. Free and impudent times—Richard lost himself in his notebooks, or roamed to the drugstore, where he would play a mean-spirited optical-hydrodynamical trick on the waitress by inverting a glass of water over a one-penny tip on the smooth tabletop.

    On the beach some days he watched a particular girl. She had warm, deep blue eyes and long hair that she wore deftly knotted up in a braid. After swimming she would comb it out, and boys Richard knew from school would flock around her. Her name was Arline (for a long time Richard thought it was spelled the usual way, “Arlene”) Greenbaum, and she lived in Cedarhurst, Long Island, just across the city line. He dreamed about her. He thought she was wonderful and beautiful, but getting to know girls seemed hopeless enough, and Arline, he discovered, already had a boyfriend. Even so, he followed her into an after-school social league sponsored by the synagogue. Arline joined an art class, so Richard joined the art class, overlooking a lack of aptitude. Shortly he found himself lying on the floor and breathing through a straw, while another student made a plaster cast of his face.
    If Arline noticed Richard, she did not let on. But one evening she arrived at a boy-girl party in the middle of a kissing session. An older boy was teaching couples the correct lip angles and nose positions, and in this instructional context a certain amount of practice was under way. Richard himself was practicing, with a girl he hardly knew. When Arline came in, there was a little commotion. Almost everyone got up to greet her—everyone, it seemed to her, but one horribly rude boy, off in the corner, who ostentatiously kept on kissing.
    Occasionally Richard went on dates with other girls. He could never rid himself of a sense that he was a stranger engaging in a ritual the rules to which he did not know. His mother taught him some basic manners. Even so, the waiting in a girl’s parlor with her parents, the procedures for cutting in at dances, the stock phrases (“Thank you for a lovely evening”) all left him feeling inept, as if he could not quite decipher a code everyone else had mastered.

    He stayed not quite conscious of the hopes his parents had for him. He was not quite aware of the void left by the death of his infant brother—his mother still thought of the baby often—or of his mother’s social descent to the lower middle class, in increasingly tight circumstances. With the coming of the Depression the Feynmans had to give up the house and yard on New Broadway and move to a small apartment, where they used a dining room and a breakfast room as bedrooms. Melville was often on the road now, selling. When he was home, he would read the National Geographic magazines that he collected secondhand. On Sundays he would go outdoors and paint woodland scenery or flowers. Or he and Richard would take Joan into the city to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. They went to the Egyptian section, first studying glyphs in the encyclopedia so that they could stand and decode bits of the chiseled artifacts, a sight that made people stare.
    Richard still had some tinkering and probing to do. The Depression broadened the market for inexpensive radio repair, and Richard found himself in demand. In just over a decade of full-scale commercial production, the radio had penetrated nearly half of American households. By 1932 the average price of a new set had fallen to $48, barely a third of the price just