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you say why not bomb them tomorrow, I say, why not today? If you say at five o'clock, I say why not one o'clock?” 11 This view sounds incredibly heartless and immoral today, but it shouldbe judged in the context of the times: “It was widely held, especially by liberal intellectuals, that the French and British governments had behaved in a cowardly and immoral fashion when they failed to march into Germany in 1936 to stop Hitler from remilitarizing the Rhineland…To them, the idea of forestalling a terrible catastrophe by a bold preventive action was neither insane nor criminal.” 12
     
    Not long after my arrival, as Europe was descending into chaos, my parents' marriage also began to fall apart. Although he genuinely adored my mother, my father's first love in life was thinking, a pursuit that occupied most of his waking hours, and, like many geniuses, he tended to be oblivious to the emotional needs of those around him. My mother, accustomed to being the center of attention, didn't like playing second fiddle to anyone or anything, even when the competition was her spouse's supercreative mind. She began to pay more and more attention to a graduate student in physics who was a regular at the von Neumann soirees. His name was James Brown Horner Kuper, as befitted the scion of a well-to-do New York family of solid Dutch ancestry and impeccable social credentials. But she whimsically called him Desmond, after a favorite china dog, and the name stuck with him for the rest of his life.
     
    The cracks began to show in the summer of 1936, when Mariette extended her visit with her parents in Budapest and Johnny returned to Princeton without her. In 1937 she spent much of a six-week Nevada residency, required for a divorce there, on horseback at The Ranch at Pyramid Lake, some thirty-five miles through the desert from Reno. The surprisingly intimate letters she wrote from the Riverside Hotel in that city to my father back in Princeton are remarkable partly for the vehemence of her negative reaction to the Reno of the 1930s: “I believe that hell is certainly very similar to this place. It is indescribable, everyone is constantly drunken and they lose their money like mad 5–6 hundred dollars a day, the roulette table stands in the hall just as a spittoon some other place.”
     
    Aside from the availability of horses, the Ranch was apparently no better: “The place itself is terribly primitive…There is no telephone or telegraph,…mail once a day…[I]t is entirely crazy here…I believe I won't survive. I live in the midst of an Indian reservation there is a beautiful lake and the country is so divine that it is difficult to imagine.But these horrible females it is impossible that there are so many kinds of women in the world…Riding is very beautiful but the evenings are deadly, imagine dinner at six and night goes until ten o'clock.”
     
    Even more revealing is the fact that she addresses the husband she is in the process of divorcing as “Johnny Sweetheart,” and entreats him, “[D]o you love me a bit” and “If you have time love me a bit.” She ends one letter with “I have the howling blues” and signs the other “Million kisses.” 13
     
    The ambivalence reflected in these letters persisted throughout Johnny and Mariette's lives, creating puzzlement and pain for the spouses they subsequently married. Desmond pretended not to notice, but my father's second wife, Klari, was haunted by the lively ghost of a legally terminated relationship. In her unpublished autobiography, she wrote, “This [a meeting of the two couples at a party] was definitely a crisis—a crisis which was followed by many other similar ones for many, many years. Gradually I did get used to them and learned how to handle the situation, but Johnny and Marietta never ceased playing the game of detached attachment or vice versa, which ever fit best.” 14
     
    I don't believe my father ever really understood why my mother left him for an