偷吃禁果 (4)

[ Here below is version in English! I hope anyone love to translate is more than welcome to continue the translation! I feel my translation speed is too slow to satisfy readers!]

Chapter 6: Restless Energy

Not long after the construction was completed in 1938, Loomis fell hopelessly in love with Hobart's twenty-nine-year-old wife, Manette. The Glass House, originally intended as guest quarters for visiting scientists, became their secret hideaway. Over time, it became Loomis' home away from home. Ironically, the house with translucent walls proved ideal for private rendezvous. Tucked away behind the laboratory on a secluded bluff overlooking Tuxedo Lake, and shielded on the other side by tall pines, it was protected from the prying eyes of neighbors. More than one of the lab's eminent guests was known to bring a mistress there for a "naughty weekend," according to Kistiakowsky's second wife, Elaine. "It became quite the place for wild parties, and it was not uncommon for people to bring out their girlfriends and have quite a good time without their wives being any the wiser for it. They were all young, and quite good-looking, and they worked hard and played hard. And I gather they drank like fish."

Apart from visitors, Loomis allowed only trusted members of his laboratory staff access to the house and instructed his own wife that it was off limits both to her and to her legions of servants. "He left strict orders that no one was ever to go in there to tidy up, supposedly because of all the special equipment that was lying about," said Evans. "I don't know if Ellen knew what was going on or not, but she always hated that house."

Loomis went to great lengths to ensure he and Manette were not discovered, even developing a signaling system that he used to communicate with her from the windows of their respective homes. The Hobarts lived on the opposite side of Tuxedo Lake, and Lescaze had situated the house perfectly on the cliff so that its windows faced the water and offered a fine vista of the mansions on the other side, including the Tower House, rising from the top of the highest hill in the park. Loomis taught Manette how to manipulate a small mirror to catch the light and worked out a series of simple signals they used to alert each other at the appointed hour that the coast was clear. No matter how many times she heard the story, Loomis' granddaughter Jacqueline Quillen was always struck by the image of the two lovers secretly flashing messages to each other across the lake. "It was a very passionate love affair," she said, adding, "and despite all the trouble it caused, it remained that way to the end."

Manette was the daughter of R. W. (Billy) Seeldrayers, a prominent Belgian lawyer and sports promoter, who became head of the Belgian Olympic Committee. She grew up in a world of jocular athletes and, by her own account, learned at an early age "to enjoy male company far more than women's." Her father pushed her to excel at a wide variety of sports, and she received instruction in everything from tennis, golf, and field hockey to soccer and even a little cricket. She became an accomplished tennis player and figure skater and briefly competed at the amateur level before giving it up to study music and art. Her family had lost most of their savings during the First World War, and her mother, ambitious for her only child to make a good marriage, tried to introduce her to "better society."

Manette met Katherine Grey Hobart in Brussels while the latter was on a European jaunt, and when the granddaughter of a distinguished American vice president invited her to return home with her, Manette's mother packed her bags. The Hobarts were exceedingly wealthy and divided their time between Carroll Hall, their elegant city residence in Paterson, New Jersey, and Ailsa Farms, the family's 250-acre country estate in Haledon. The Hobarts employed an army of servants, and the household staff alone included a cook, a kitchen maid, a parlor maid, a houseman, a butler, a laundress, an assistant laundress, two chauffeurs, and several chambermaids. They hosted "fancy dress" parties year-round at their stately forty-room mansion, and their table sparkled with Venetian glass and precious Fabergé Russian enamelware that had been designed for the czar. For twenty-two-year-old Manette, who had grown up in war-deprived Belgium and could still bitterly recall having a winter coat cut from the green felt cover of a billiard table, it must have seemed positively idyllic. In the space of a year, her betrothal to the Hobart's only son and heir was duly accomplished. They were married in Brussels in 1931 and divided their time between Ailsa Farms and Schenectady, before settling permanently in Tuxedo Park.

Never were two people more ill suited than the taciturn Hobart and his bright, athletic, puckish young bride. Garret Hobart was "pathologically shy," according to family members, and led a quiet, almost cloistered existence. He was quite content in his own little world, and the couple never entertained and had virtually no life outside the laboratory. While his neighbors considered him a bit queer but harmless, they steered clear of his "foreign" wife. Tuxedo Park was very provincial in those days, and anyone with an accent was seen as suspect. Manette's English was less than perfect, and she retained a thick Belgian accent that lent her a decidedly exotic air that the wives in the young smart set found most offputting. As a result, she had few friends and spent much of her time on her own. A talented artist, she spent her days working on her painting and sculptures, but it could not have been easy. "It was all very new to her, and she didn't really know a soul or how to get on," said Paulie Loomis. "I think the early years of her marriage must have been very lonely."

As her husband had no interest in sports, Manette took to playing tennis and golf with the young research scientists at Tower House, and more than a few became quite smitten with her, including Bill Richards. Very petite and slender, she had a superb figure that she displayed to full advantage. Although she was only passingly pretty, her emphatic sexuality made her captivating to the opposite sex. "Oh, she had a real way about her," recalled Evans, speaking with the authority of a southern belle who turned plenty of heads in her day. "She had wonderful legs, and always showed them off in little tennis skirts and golf shorts. She knew what she was doing. She was a real flirt."

Manette had a talent for making men fall in love with her, as her marriage to the unlikely Hobart attested, and she was not above using her sexuality to attract the fifty-year-old Loomis. "She absolutely seduced him," said Quillen. "I think it was about great sex, which would have been a scarce commodity in his first marriage. I think for Alfred it was an incredible, all-encompassing discovery. She gave him such enormous pleasure, and he absolutely adored her."

It is impossible to say exactly when the affair began. Both Manette and her husband were an integral part of the Loomis household and remained that way long after their relationship began. After Alfred made Garret Hobart his assistant, Ellen Loomis had taken his young wife under her wing and regarded her almost as a daughter. The two men worked together by day, dined together with their wives on a regular basis, and frequently took their families on holiday together. The Hobarts' first child, Garret Augustus Hobart IV, was born in 1935, followed by another boy, who was born in August 1937. Manette named her second son Alfred Loomis Hobart, after his beloved godfather.

According to Paulie Loomis, both Alfred and Manette were deeply unhappy for years before they became involved. "I know she was mad about him for a long time," she said. "Alfred was a wonderful-looking man, and very courtly and gentle. He could be hard to talk to unless he liked you. But once you got to know him, he was fascinating. He could explain the most complicated things and make them simple and understandable. He could unlock the secrets of the world, and it was magical. Manette was nobody's fool. Here she was married to poor Hobart, who was really an odd duck, and quite pathetic. She knew Alfred had no one, because his wife had taken to her sickbed long before that. And she knew he was the kind of man who just had to be with somebody. So she became his mistress, and she stayed married to Hobart. That was the cover-up, and I think it went on that way for a long time."

There is a striking black-and-white photograph of Manette and Loomis in a canoe that was taken in the summer of 1938 or 1939. She is happily reclining in the middle of the boat behind Loomis, who is rowing. The photo has been crudely cropped with scissors, cutting out the other oarsman, but in all likelihood it was Garret Hobart. The picture was taken at the Hobart family compound in Rangeley, Maine, the last time they were all on holiday together. "I am only guessing, but I don't think, at the time, my dad had a clue what was going on," said Al Hobart. Ellen Loomis' letters during this period reveal that she was lately "so hampered by illness" that she was not able to get out much or see friends, and it is possible she was unaware of the romance or simply chose to turn a blind eye to it. However, her condition became quite perilous again the following winter, which may have been her way of coping with the competition. As she wrote to Stimson in February 1939: "All my fever seems over now, and I know Alfred has given you the news. There is no cause for worry about me, as you always understood..."

Garret Hobart never talked about the affair between his wife and revered mentor that eventually broke up his marriage. Only once, many years later, in a moment of frustration, did he betray a hint of the anger or bitterness he must have felt. "We were in Maine, and we were getting ready to go fishing, when he said, out of the blue, 'Alfred Loomis broke the tip off my fly rod,'" recalled Al Hobart, who was seven years old when his mother finally left his father to run off with Loomis in 1944. "That was it. Just that one outburst. But I caught the whiff then of a fairly strong resentment."

In his roman à clef, Richards, who was a good friend of Hobart's, caricatured Manette as the "brazen hussy" Leone Allison:

Her wide-set brown eyes and amiable expression were photogenic. The sun had bleached her hair until it was almost white and had turned her skin, most of which was visible, to a rich brown. She wore a rudimentary halter of robin's egg blue, tiny shorts of the same color, and rope-soled sandals. A wire-haired fox terrier with a handsome moustache and an aristocratic vacant expression trotted past her into the room. Every one turned as she halted in the doorway...
Not only was her informality of dress "deeply shocking," her sexual frankness, for a woman of her day, was so surprising that it made grown men blush and left them "sputtering incoherently." She enjoyed playing "cat and mouse" games with various prey, but occasionally those she toyed with ended up falling in love with her, only to have their hearts broken. Throughout the novel, she boasts of having had affairs and admits to having an ill-considered fling with Bill Roberts, Richards' fictional alter ego, whom she "slept with...a couple of times." Roberts, she explained, had moved back to Boston and was unhappy and "drinking." But he could be very charming and persuasive, and she fell for him: "I was the only person he'd ever cared for, he said, and not having me was wrecking his life." After he had bedded her, however, it turned out he was not in love at all but had wanted only to add her to "his collection," and the two had a bitter parting of the ways.

In the novel, which Richards populated with cardboard cutouts of the famous scientists who frequented the laboratory, Leone Allison's husband, Charles Allison, the laboratory director (Garret Hobart) was portrayed as a weak-kneed, tremulous nerd who married a woman many times out of his league. As Leone (Manette) confesses in the book, her husband was aware of her infidelities, but there was nothing he could really do to stop her: "When I married Charlie I told him he wasn't the first, and he wasn't going to be the last." Nevertheless, she felt sorry for him and tried to protect him. "He thinks he just has to suffer if he doesn't like something. Why, even when he's making love, poor kid, he's sort of shy and all by himself." The only man who was truly her match, she admitted in a moment of candor, was her husband's boss -- the wealthy owner of the laboratory. "Nobody else around here appeals to me...I've always been goofy about him, but he's happily married."

Even if Richards had lived long enough to insist that his novel was not intended to "represent persons living or dead," as he wrote in his author's note, his thumbnail sketch of Manette was entirely too vivid not to be instantly recognizable to the denizens of Tower House. By all accounts, it was dead on. "Oh, it was her all right," said Evans. "As soon as you read about her parading around in short shorts, you knew." When the novel was published in the spring of 1940, Loomis was appalled at the way Manette was depicted and outraged that Richards had dared suggest in print that there was anything between them. Beginning with the laboratory setting (using a private research facility housed in a mansion as the site of the murder and a vehicle for an in-depth look at the science of brain waves) to the catalog of familiar characters and painfully personal details, Loomis knew Richards had hardly invented a single element of his story. "Alfred hated that book," said Evans. "He absolutely hated it. He wished that it had never been published."

Exactly when Loomis became aware of the book is not clear, but Richards' stunning suicide just weeks before its publication apparently cut short any legal action Loomis might have contemplated taking to quash the inflammatory novel. Although Richards' family worried that Loomis might still sue for libel, it seems unlikely, as it would surely have attracted further publicity, which was the last thing he wanted. Besides, Richards had disguised the Loomis Laboratory well enough, and nothing was ever written in the newspapers about the fictional story's surprising similarity to his Tuxedo Park establishment or the important brain wave research being done there. As far as Loomis was concerned, the best thing to do was to bury the book along with its author. He never spoke of either again. There was a rumor at the time, according to Richards' nephew Ted Conant, that Loomis bought up every copy of the novel available in New York bookstores, just to make sure that as few friends and acquaintances saw it as possible. But as the deeply chagrined Richards family also wished the book would disappear, no one would have stopped the powerful Wall Street financier from doing as he saw fit.

In all fairness, Richards' suicide must have been deeply shocking to Loomis and his family. He had been a close friend and colleague. He was among the very first of the young scientists Loomis had recruited to work with him at Tower House, and their association had lasted over fourteen years. He was still working for Loomis on a part-time basis at the time of his death, and they must have been in regular contact. Certainly, Richards had suffered bouts of depression, had occasionally drunk to excess, and had often been physically unwell, but none of those things had made him decidedly more peculiar than any of the others in Loomis' company.

Kistiakowsky, who was at Harvard by then, had been very close to Richards since their Princeton days and had known more about his "mental troubles" than anyone. Richards had confided to him in intimate detail about his tempestuous personal life. He had had a series of failed love affairs, including one with Christiana Morgan, the beautiful but volatile daughter of a Boston society family. Morgan had become a protégé of Carl Jung, and Richards, who was very taken with her, had followed her to Zurich and had even consulted Jung about his sexual problems, which he blamed on his repressive Puritan background. When Richards quit his teaching post at Princeton, he had told Kistiakowsky that his emotional state was worse and he was moving to New York to undergo intensive psychotherapy. (It is probable that Richards was manic-depressive: his father, the Harvard Nobel laureate, had suffered from myriad phobias and "nervous attacks" and had died at the age of sixty after being laid low by chronic respiratory problems and a prolonged depression; years later, Bill Richards' brother, Thayer, a prominent Virginia architect, would also commit suicide, lying down on the railroad tracks near his home.) On the last page of his novel, Richards has a character ask one of the doctors at the laboratory, "You have all heard the expression 'Genius is close to insanity.' Do you believe, as a psychiatrist, that this is essentially a representation of fact?"

After Richards' suicide in January 1940, Kistiakowsky could not duck the guilt he felt over the role he played in his friend's increasing dependency on booze. "He was an excellent conversationalist, well-versed in cultural and artistic matters, a gay companion in all the drinking parties we used to have," Kistiakowsky later recalled in his memoir. "Meanwhile he became an alcoholic. I fear that our joint drinking of bootleg alcohol that we used to doctor up into 'gin' was a critical stage on that road..."

It is doubtful Loomis ever suffered any such misgivings about Richards' death. He had already moved on. The past was done with, and all that mattered was the future. By then, he had met his new protégé, Ernest Lawrence, and was impatient to see what they could accomplish together. Paulie Loomis always admired her father-in-law's relentless quest for scientific truths but could never completely ignore its ruthless quality. "Physicists are single-minded in the pursuit of what interests them," she observed. "As people go, they can be pretty cold."

[END]

I hope I can make some friends here who love to read English novels and fictions both in English and Chinese. I also like to know anyone who have interest to translation.