American Prometheus by Kai Bird Read Free Book Online Page B

vivid: “. . . he combined incredibly good wit and gaiety and high spirits. . . . he had this lovely social quality that permitted him to enter into the moment very strongly, wherever it was and whenever it was.”
    From Albuquerque, Smith took Robert—and his two friends Paul and Francis—twenty-five miles northeast of Santa Fe to a dude ranch called Los Pinos, run by a twenty-eight-year-old Katherine Chaves Page. This charming and yet imperious young woman would become a lifelong friend. But first there was an infatuation—Robert was intensely attracted to Katherine, who was then newly married. The previous year she had been desperately ill and, seemingly on her deathbed, she had married an Anglo, Winthrop Page, a man her father’s age. And then she hadn’t died. Page, a businessman in Chicago, rarely spent any time in the Pecos.
    The Chaveses were an aristocratic hidalgo family with deep roots in the Spanish Southwest. Katherine’s father, Don Amado Chaves, had built the handsome ranch house near the village of Cowles with a majestic view of the Pecos River looking north to the snowcapped Sangre de Cristo mountain range. Katherine was the “reigning princess” of this realm, and, to his delight, Robert found himself to be her “favorite” courtier. She became, according to Fergusson, “his very good friend. . . . He would bring her flowers all the time and he would flatter her to death whenever he saw her.”
    That summer, Katherine taught Robert horseback-riding and soon had him exploring the surrounding pristine wilderness on rides that sometimes lasted five or six days. Smith was astonished by the boy’s stamina and gritty resilience on horseback. Despite his lingering ill-health and fragile appearance, Robert clearly relished the physical challenges of horseback-riding as much as he had enjoyed skirting the edge of danger in his sailboat. One day they were riding back from Colorado and Robert insisted he wanted to take a snow-laden trail over the highest pass in the mountains. Smith was certain that trail could easily expose them to death by freezing—but Robert was dead set on going anyway. Smith proposed they toss a coin to decide the issue. “Thank God I won,” Smith recalled. “I don’t know how I’d have got out of it if I hadn’t.” He thought such foolhardiness on Robert’s part bordered on the suicidal. In all his dealings with Robert, Smith sensed that this was a boy who wouldn’t allow the prospect of death to “keep him from doing something he much wanted to do.”
    Smith had known Robert since he was fourteen, and the boy had always been physically delicate and somehow emotionally vulnerable. But now, seeing him in the rugged mountains, camping out in spartan conditions, Smith began to wonder whether Robert’s persistent colitis might be psychosomatic. It occurred to him that these episodes invariably came on when Robert heard someone making “disparaging” remarks about Jews. Smith thought he had developed the habit of “kicking an intolerable fact under the rug.” It was a psychological mechanism, Smith thought, that “when it was carried to its most dangerous, got him into trouble.”
    Smith was also well caught up on the latest Freudian theories of child development, and he concluded from Robert’s relaxed campfire conversations that the boy had pronounced oedipal issues. “I never heard a murmur of criticism on Robert’s part of [his] mother,” Smith recalled. “He was certainly critical enough of [his] father.”
    As an adult, Robert clearly loved his father, deferred to him and indeed, until his father’s death, went to extraordinary lengths to accommodate him, introduce him to his friends and generally make room for him in his life. But Smith sensed that as a particularly shy and sensitive child, Robert was profoundly mortified by his father’s sometimes maladroit affability. Robert told Smith one night around the campfire about the icehouse incident at Camp