36 Arguments for the Existence of God by Rebecca Goldstein Read Free Book Online Page A

aggressive intellectual style had always been off-putting to him, and most especially after the
Newsweek
article had appeared. Lucinda hadn’t even tried to pretend to be embarrassed by the hype. If she could have had that damn article shrunk down and laminated to wear around her tyrannical throat, then she would have. So, while Cuthbert had encouraged her to press her demands and to threaten to leave if Princeton failed to match Frankfurter’s offer, he had also gone to the dean and told him that, “between the two of us, Bill, I wouldn’t be sorry to see her go. Her demands are infinite. I spend more time trying to keep her happy than I do the rest of my department put together. If I’m going to run this department, I have to assume that no one is indispensable.”
    The Goddess of Game Theory had been knocked off her game, and it had been a chastening experience. She had spent the summer doing what someone like Cass might have called searching her soul. The depth of the animosity against her—she had learned of Cuthbert’s treachery— astounded and wounded her. He apparently resented her so much that he was willing to act against the interests of his department just to damage her, for surely it couldn’t be good for Princeton to lose her to Frankfurter.
    She had only tried to game the system, and now here she was, within retching distance of the stink of failure, packing up her office in Green Hall and nobody stopping by to help her or offer her even a token word of insincere regret. She didn’t doubt for a moment why this punishment was being inflicted on her. It was the combination of her mother’s beauty with her father’s brains, which he had used to become an extremely successfuldoctor-lawyer specializing in malpractice. Caught in the summer’s swampy misery, she almost felt aggrieved with her parents for bequeathing her the singular genetic sum.
    Perhaps the nagging sense that her parents had somehow done her wrong explained why she ended up sticking out the summer in Princeton instead of returning to the home in the Philadelphia Main Line that the Mandelbaums had bought from the estate of the late Eugene Ormandy the conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra. That summer made her hate New Jersey so much that she wondered how she could have lasted in Princeton for the three years she’d been there. Nevertheless, she stayed the summer, though there was no place she would rather have placed herself than supine on a chaise lounge, Tanqueray and tonic in hand, in the middle of the rose garden that lay just outside the french doors of the room that the Mandelbaums called “the conservatory.” Philippa, her mother, had planted the rose garden herself and did much of the tending with her own delicate hands, although Hy Hua, their Vietnamese gardener of twenty years (he’d been a boat person), did the heavy lifting.
    Philippa had once used the beloved rose garden as the setting to try to draw her little daughter into a fantasy of the sort that Philippa herself had loved when she was a child of seven. Standing under a folly smothered with Rambling Rector, Paprika, and a few other climbers, she had smiled at her little towheaded daughter in her corduroy Oshkosh and said:
    “Someday, you’re going to stand here in your flowing white dress and your white tulle veil, with some strong, good, handsome man beside you, and he’ll be thinking that, of all the beautiful roses in this garden, he has picked the loveliest one of all.”
    “Which one did he pick? The Alchymist?”
    This was their favorite rose, not only because of its beauty—it changes shade day by day, deepening from cream into orange—but also because Philippa had been able to grow it herself from division, a fascinating process which little Lucinda had avidly followed.
    “No, you silly! You! You’ll be the rose he picks.”
    “I’m not a flower. And, anyway, picking flowers only makes them wilt,even if you put sugar in the water to give them