American Prometheus by Kai Bird Read Free Book Online

following year, when I would then take chemistry. We must have spent five days a week together; once in a while we would even go off on a mineral hunting junket as a reward.” He began to experiment with electrolytes and conduction. “I loved chemistry so deeply. . . . Compared to physics, it starts right in the heart of things and very soon you have that connection between what you see and a really very sweeping set of ideas which could exist in physics but is very much less likely to be accessible.” Robert would always feel indebted to Klock for having set him on the road to science. “He loved the bumpy contingent nature of the way in which you actually find out something, and he loved the excitement that he could stir up in young people.”
    Even fifty years later, Jane Didisheim’s memories of Robert were particularly vivid. “He blushed extraordinarily easily,” she recalled. He seemed “very frail, very pink-cheeked, very shy, and very brilliant of course. Very quickly everybody admitted that he was different from all the others and superior. As far as studies were concerned he was good in everything. . . .”
    The sheltered atmosphere of the Ethical Culture School was ideal for an unusually awkward adolescent polymath. It allowed Robert to shine when and where he wished—and protected him from those social challenges with which he was not yet prepared to cope. And yet, this same cocoon of security offered by the school may help to explain his prolonged adolescence. He was permitted to remain a child, and allowed to grow gradually out of his immaturity rather than being wrenched abruptly from it. At sixteen or seventeen he had only one real friend, Francis Fergusson, a scholarship boy from New Mexico who became his classmate during their senior year. By the time Fergusson met him in the fall of 1919, Robert was just coasting. “He was just sort of playing around and trying to find something to keep himself occupied,” recalled Fergusson. In addition to courses in history, English literature, math and physics, Robert enrolled in Greek, Latin, French and German. “He still took straight A’s.” He would graduate as the valedictorian of his class.
    Besides hiking and rock-collecting, Robert’s chief physical activity was sailing. By all accounts, he was an audacious, expert sailor who pushed his boat to the edge. As a young boy he had honed his skills on several smaller boats, but when he turned sixteen, Julius bought him a twenty-eight-foot sloop. He christened it the Trimethy, a name derived from the chemical compound trimethylene dioxide. He loved sailing in summer storms, racing the boat against the tides through the inlet at Fire Island and straight out into the Atlantic. With his younger brother, Frank, hunkered down in the cockpit, Robert would stand with the tiller between his legs, screaming gleefully into the wind as he tacked the boat back into Long Island’s Great South Bay. His parents could not reconcile such impetuous behavior with the Robert they knew as a shy introvert. Invariably, Ella found herself standing at the window of their Bay Shore home, searching for a trace of the Trimethy on the skyline. More than once, Julius felt compelled to chase the Trimethy back to port in a motor launch, reprimanding Robert for the risks he was taking with his own and others’ lives. “Roberty, Roberty . . . ,” he would say, shaking his head. Robert, however, was unabashed; indeed, he never failed to display absolute confidence in his mastery over wind and sea. He knew the full measure of his skill and saw no reason to cheat himself of what was clearly an emotionally liberating experience. Still, if not foolhardy, his behavior in stormy seas struck some friends as an example of Robert’s deeply ingrained arrogance, or perhaps a not very surprising extension of his inner resiliency. He had an irresistible urge to flirt with danger.
    Fergusson would never forget the first time he sailed with Robert.