Martian's Daughter: A Memoir Read Free Page B

and winter residences was less than five miles, but each family made an annual hegira between them, with maids covering the city furniture with dustcloths and packing huge trunks and wardrobes for the trip.
     
    My father's upbringing was singular, though, because his extraordinary precocity was recognized very early and his education was tailored to make sure that it was fully developed. His instruction at one of Budapest's three best-regarded secondary schools, the Lutheran Gymnasium, which also produced the Nobel Prize—winning physicist Eugene Wigner, was supplemented, beginning at age eleven, by private tutoring from prominent mathematicians at Budapest University. His first published paper was written jointly with one of those tutors when Johnny was seventeen. The paper, on a very abstruse theorem in geometry, already reflected a key characteristic of all his contributions to pure mathematics: his ability “to transform problems in all areas of mathematics into problems of [pure] logic.” 1
     
    But my father's intellectual appetite was by no means narrowly confined to mathematics, and his passion for learning lasted all his life. He was multilingual at an early age; and until his final days, he could quote from memory Goethe in German, Voltaire in French, and Thucydides in Greek. His knowledge of Byzantine history, acquired entirely through recreational reading, equaled that of many academic specialists. My mother used to say, only half jokingly, that one of the reasons she divorced him was his penchant for spending hours reading one of the tomes of an enormous German encyclopedia in the bathroom. Because his banker father felt that he needed to bolster his study of mathematics with more practical training, Johnny completed a degree in chemical engineering at the Eidgennossische Technische Hochschule (ETH) in Zurich, at the same time that he received a PhD in mathematics from the University of Budapest, both at age twenty-two.
     
    While my father was growing up in a family environment that involved structured discussions of philosophy, politics, banking, science, literature, music, and just about any subject on earth around the family dinner table—discussions in which Johnny and his two younger brothers,Michael and Nicholas, were encouraged to participate—my mother, Mariette Kövesi, was experiencing a very different sort of childhood. She was an only child, six years Johnny's junior (he was born in 1903, she in 1909). Her father was a highly regarded internist and professor of medicine at the University of Budapest, also with a wide range of intellectual interests, centered on music. But he was extremely busy, rather domineering, and reputed to be a chronic womanizer. He was also, for a considerable period of his adult life, addicted to drugs he first took for relief of postoperative pain; as a physician, he had easy access to supplies. My grandmother's response to boredom and neglect was to become a first-class hypochondriac; her immediate reaction to any family conflict was to take to her bed.
     
    However difficult her parents' relationship with each other was during Mariette's girlhood, there was one matter on which they were in complete agreement: the importance of building a protective wall around their beloved, headstrong only child. She was not allowed to go to school until she reached high school age. Her father's fear of childhood infectious diseases, stemming from his experience as a physician in the days before vaccines or antibiotics, had been exacerbated by a near fatal bout of diphtheria Mariette had suffered as a small child. But Géza Kövesi also believed that classroom schooling would not allow enough time for other pursuits he regarded as important: languages, music, and above all sports. And Mariette did indeed become a first-class tennis player in her teens and, she proudly reminded her children, the first woman in Hungary to earn a diploma in dressage from the famed Spanish Riding School