I looked at the genealogy chart, but it only listed the Dzornens I already knew about, Benjamin, Ilse, the three children they’d had together, along with ancestors in what today is the Czech Republic. A handful had made it through the war, but most had died in 1942 or ’43. The chart didn’t mention Kitty Binder or her family. I went quickly through the folders in the family history box, but they all related to Dzornen’s life before Martina became part of it.
A staff member took those papers from me and handed me the folder that contained Ada Byron’s letter, which was in a sleeve about halfway through the folder. The typed name “Ada Byron” appeared in the upper left corner without a return address and there was no address beyond “Benjamin Dzornen, The Enrico Fermi Institute,” in the middle of the envelope.
I carefully removed the envelope from the plastic sleeve and took out the letter that was folded inside. It was written on the onionskin paper that I remembered from my childhood when my mother wrote to Italian friends. The text was typed on an old manual by someone not very expert with the keys—a lot of letters had double strikes through them as the writer went back to correct herself. It began without a salutation.
I was sorry to read about your illness. I think of it as part of the long disease of our century, filled as it has been with suffering and death. There is much I would write you, but I do not know if you will ever see this page; I don’t know who is guarding you from your correspondents. And anyway, what point is there to rehashing those old quarrels, the ones in public or in private? I’m sorry you felt I did not keep my word, but you were the finest scientist of my time and I couldn’t bear to see you abase yourself to those so far beneath you.
Now, though, all I wish for you is peace, so please know that when you are gone, I will keep your name alive in a green and kind way, remembering you from the days of my youth, when ideas poured so quickly and thickly it was as if I could reach out a hand to touch them. Yours were always the most exhilarating, forcing all of us to see the world in a new and different way. That is how I shall remember you.
I know that you have always shared my lack of interest in
The letter ended abruptly there. I looked in the envelope, wondering if there was a second sheet, but didn’t see one. Lack of interest in what? Religion? Politics? Children?
I put the letter back in its folder and placed it to one side for photocopying. As I closed the folder, I saw that the header on it noted a two-page letter. I took the envelope out again and inspected it. There was nothing else inside.
I looked through the other documents on the table, to see if it had slipped into another folder, but didn’t see it. I took the folder to the front desk and showed the letter to Rachel Turley. She shook her head, frowning in worry. “You’re sure it didn’t get slipped into other papers on your desk? It’s flimsy paper, after all.”
“I don’t think so, but you can send someone to look through them in case I missed it.”
She got up herself and went through the folders on my table one page at a time. I even let her look in my briefcase. I turned out my pockets, but the only paper in them was the FOIA letter about Gertrud Memler that I’d taken from Martin’s room the other night.
“This is not good,” Turley said. “If we’ve misplaced it, we’re unbearably negligent, but if someone stole it—I guess that makes me negligent as well.”
She hurried out the door to the reference area, where I saw her in agitated conference with the other librarian. The two disappeared into a back room.
In a movie, the detective would rub a pencil over the back of the first page and the second would appear, with Ada Byron’s address. In real life, the detective felt like chewing the folder in frustration.
I stared into the near distance. Someone writing as Ada Byron had known Dzornen a long time, known him as the preeminent scientist of her youth. She hadn’t written under her own name, because she didn’t want Dzornen’s wife or his secretary to throw the letter out unread.
The conciliatory first paragraph suggested that Ada was really Gertrud Memler. She had attacked Dzornen in public for his support of the H-bomb and his opposition to the 1963 Limited Test Ban Treaty. Who knew what had happened between them in private?
Dzornen had slept with Martina Saginor; that probably hadn’t been his only affair with a student. Memler had also been a student at the Radium Institute in Vienna, after all. She became a Nazi, running a nuclear research installation, which meant she was an ambitious and politically savvy Nazi. And on some road to Damascus, the scales had fallen from her eyes and she’d become a pacifist.