Free Martian's Daughter: A Memoir by Marina von Neumann Whitman Page A

networker that she was, managed through friends to ensconce us, in return for paying the annual tax bill, in the unoccupied brownstone mansion of an oil millionaire.
     
    The house, fully furnished, reeked of the grandeur of a vanished age. The kitchen and dining room were just below ground level; the front steps led up to a first floor fully occupied by a reception room and a grand ballroom complete with crystal chandeliers and Louis XVI furniture. The master bedroom, sitting room, and bath were just above; then there were two more floors, each with two bedrooms and a bath, with the degree of luxury declining as one ascended successive flights of stairs. There was no elevator, but a small rope-and-pulley dumbwaiter was available for delivering necessities from the kitchen. The house stood on the corner of 70th Street and Fifth Avenue, directly across from the Frick Museum, and was an ideal vantage point for viewing the many colorful parades that passed beneath our windows.
     
    Just as we were settling down to life in the big city and my mother and Desmond into their new jobs, my mother's reputation as a hostess, facilitator, networker, and people motivator led to a truly extraordinary job offer. A group of eminent physicists, led by I. I. Rabi of Columbia, had conceived the idea of a government-funded laboratory to do peacetime research in a variety of areas of physics and the nuclear sciences. The new entity would be managed by a consortium of universities and have as its core a nuclear reactor to be built in an as yet unspecified location near New York City.
     
    The scientists and science administrators representing the nine participating universities quickly set out on a search for their first employee, a jack-of-all-trades (or a jill) who “would have to do everything: secretarial work, serving as liaison with [General] Groves and top-ranking scientists, investigating Columbia's government contract to see what costs it covered, and setting up the machinery to run the IUG [Initiatory University Group] accordingly.” 6 It didn't take them long to find Mariette Kövesi von Neumann Kuper. Her dense network of friends and acquaintances in the world of physics, her I-can-do-anything self-confidence, and her irresistible charm, fortified by her exotic Hungarian accent—throughout her life, thick and thin became sick and sin on her tongue—made her the ideal choice.
     
    My mother's first task in the challenging job she had accepted with alacrity was to figure out how to get herself officially on the employment rolls, obtain security clearance, and generate a paycheck. That done, she launched herself on a career as senior administrator, confidante, housemother, and chief of protocol of the as yet unnamed laboratory, a career that would end only with her health-enforced retirement twenty-eight years later. Shortly after taking the job, she set out with a subcommittee of the IUG to find a site for the new venture.
     
    Nuclear reactors do not sit well with neighbors, so a location with lots of empty space around it was essential. Various possibilities were eliminated, one by one, until only Camp Upton, an army base located in Yaphank, Long Island, some sixty miles from New York City, remained. When my mother and the new venture's only other employee went to look at Camp Upton, most recently a prisoner of war camp, they found that “Their future business address was a muddy army camp in the middle of rural Long Island, with pitched tents, temporary wood shacks, and drafty barracks with broken windows.” 7 It required a stout heart and a vivid imagination not to be discouraged.
     
    Nothing could dampen my mother's enthusiasm for her new job, though. In a radio interview she gave shortly after the new enterprise was under way, she described her response to the job offer: “I broke into what could best be described as a new type of Indian Victory Dance…Who wouldn't be exuberant when privileged to be in on the birth of a new