2002—Memoirs: Carl (concluded)
and the meeting with prayer. “I want somebody to pray for my husband’s soul,” said she, “and if you don’t do it, nobody’s going to.”

So there I stood, addressing a wildly mixed group including Carl’s family members, fellow Mormons with whom he’d recently closed various circles, and numbers (if not hosts) of our hosts from the MIT physics faculty. Including elderly incarnations of some of my teachers who had been young and struggling when we had last met and, in some cases, struggled. With an assignment to lead in prayer an assembly whose individual positions on religion ranged, to my certain knowledge, about as widely as one could possibly imagine.

Those who spoke talked a lot about Carl’s patience with students, his quirky sense of humor, his total lack of swagger, his perceptiveness in one-on-one interactions, and his lively problem-solving intellect. I don’t think the word “alcohol” was uttered, but it overhung everything. More than one speaker said, in one oblique way or another, that it was a puzzle and a sorrow that Carl, who tilted so successfully against the intellectual dragons in his chosen field of research, was somehow unable to conquer his own devouring worm. One expects to encounter regret and a sense of loss in a memorial service; this one shaded strongly, although never really explicitly, into a lot of “if only.” Everybody missed Carl; nobody blamed him out loud. Nobody said anything about blaming Manhattan, either, even though some spoke whose post-Manhattan antinuclear credentials were well known.

Carl’s and Katie’s youngest daughter Laurel had come from New York for the occasion and was the penultimate speaker. She remembered her dad, very gracefully and lovingly, through passages from “Prufrock.” Musing on Carl’s last days in Florida, Laurel lingered on Eliot’s line about beaches and white flannel trousers. As it turned out, I’d also built my prepared comments around a favorite T.S.Eliot poem. I cited “Preludes”:
I am moved by fancies that are curled/Around these images, and cling:
The notion of some infinitely gentle/Infinitely suffering thing.
At the end of my remarks, I looked out over the group, swallowed hard, and said, “Katie has asked me to end this meeting with a prayer. I’ll do so in the manner of the Latter-day Saints, since that will reflect the traditions of Carl’s childhood and mine. And probably not yours. So I’ll count on your good will for whatever simultaneous translation you may require.”

After the service, we repaired to the neighboring Student Center’s 20 Chimneys Room for refreshments and subdued chat. Professor David Frisch, another Manhattan alumnus, approached me and volunteered some kindly comments on the way I had handled the prayer. Frisch and I had been slightly acquainted in the late Fifties, during my undergraduate days, as I recalled and he didn’t. Not too surprising: he’d then only recently become a full professor, and Course VIII was bulging with young physics enthusiasts like me, reflecting America’s shut-the-barn-door reaction to Sputnik.

Frisch said that the service reminded him of a wonderful deathbed comment of Heinrich Heine. A friend is supposed to have said in German to the dying poet and preeminent anticlerical humorist, “Well, Heinrich, you’ve had a lot of hard things to say about der Alte over the years. And now you’re about to face Him. Tell me: do you think He can forgive you?”

Heine is said to have turned the conversation from German to French, replying, “Mais bien sûr, c’est Son métier!”(“Of course: that’s His job!”).

Some months later, I opened my copy of Technology Review and found, in the alumni section, a nice photo of Carl, much younger than I’d known him, heading his faculty obituary. The whole occupied most of the right-hand half of a right-hand page. On the other half appeared a similar picture of David Frisch, with his obituary. He had died on May 23.
Cambridge, 4 December 2002
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