A Beautiful Mind (6 page)

When the newlyweds returned from their honeymoon, the couple lived at the Tazewell Street house with Virginia’s mother and sisters. John Sr. went back to his
job at the Appalachian, which in those years consisted largely of driving all over the state inspecting remote power lines. Virginia did not return to teaching. Like most school districts around the country during the 1920s, the Mercer County school system had a marriage bar. Female teachers lost their jobs as soon as they married.
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But, quite apart from her forced resignation, her new husband had a strong feeling that he ought to provide for his wife and protect her from what he regarded as the shame of having to work, another legacy of his own upbringing.

Bluefield, named for the fields of “azure chicory” in surrounding valleys that grows along every street and alleyway even today, owes its existence to the rolling hills full of coal — “the wildest, most rugged and romantic country to be found in the mountains of Virginia or West Virginia” — that surround the remote little city.
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Norfolk & Western, in a spirit of “mean force and ignorance,” built a line in the 1890s that stretched from Roanoke to Bluefield, which lies in the Appalachians on the easternmost edge of the great Pocahontas coal seam. For a long time, Bluefield was a rough and ready outpost where Jewish merchants, African-American construction workers, and Tazewell County farmers struggled to make a living and where millionaire coal operators, most of whom lived ten miles away in Bramwell, battled Italian, Hungarian, and Polish immigrant laborers, and John L. Lewis and the UMW sat down with the coal operators to negotiate contracts, negotiations that often led to the bloody strikes and lockouts documented in John Sayles’s film
Mate wan.

By the 1920s, when the Nashes married, however, Bluefield’s character was already changing. Directly on the line between Chicago and Norfolk, the town was becoming an important rail hub and had attracted a prosperous white-collar class of middle managers, lawyers, small businessmen, ministers, and teachers.
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A real downtown of granite office buildings and stores had sprung up. Handsome churches had also gone up all over town. Snug frame houses with pretty little gardens edged by Rose of Sharon dotted the hills. The town had acquired a daily newspaper, a hospital, and a home for the elderly. Educational institutions, from private kindergartens and dancing schools to two small colleges, one black, one white, were thriving. The radio, telegraph, and telephone, as well as the railroads and, increasingly, the automobile, eased the sense of isolation.

Bluefield was not “a community of scholars,” as John Nash later said with more than a hint of irony.
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Its bustling commercialism, Protestant respectability, and small-town snobbery couldn’t have been further removed from the atmosphere of the intellectual hothouses of Budapest and Cambridge which produced John von Neumann and Norbert Wiener. Yet while John Nash was growing up, the town had a sizable group of men with scientific interests and engineering talent, men like John Sr. who were attracted by the railroad, the utility, and the mining companies.
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Some of those who came to work for the companies wound up as science teachers in the high school or one of the two local colleges. In his autobiographical essay, Nash described “having to learn from the world’s knowledge
rather than the knowledge of the immediate community” as “a challenge.”
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But, in fact, Bluefield offered a good deal of stimulation — admittedly, of a down-to-earth variety — for an inquiring mind; John Nash’s subsequent career as a multi-faceted mathematician, not to mention a certain pragmatism of character, would seem to owe something to his Bluefield years.

More than anything, the newly married Nashes were strivers. Solid members of America’s new, upwardly mobile professional middle class, they formed a tight alliance and devoted themselves to achieving financial security and a respectable place for themselves in the town’s social pyramid.
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They became Episcopalians, like many of Bluefield’s more prosperous citizens, rather than continuing in the fundamentalist churches of their youth. Unlike most of Virginia’s family, they also became staunch Republicans, though (so as to be able to vote for a Democratic cousin in the primaries) not registered party members. They socialized a good deal. They joined Bluefield’s new country club, which was displacing the Protestant churches as the center of Bluefield’s social life. Virginia belonged to various women’s book, bridge, and gardening clubs. John Sr. was a member of the Rotary and a number of engineering societies. Later on, the only middle-class practice that they deliberately avoided was sending their son to prep school. Virginia, as her daughter explained, was “a public-school thinker.”

John Sr.’s job with the Appalachian remained secure right through the Depression of the 1930s. The young family fared considerably better in this period than many of their neighbors and fellow churchgoers, especially the small businessmen. John Sr.’s paycheck, while hardly munificent, was steady, and frugality did the rest. All decisions involving the expenditure of money, no matter how modest, were carefully considered; very often the decision was to avoid, put off, or reduce. There were no mortgages to be had in those days, no pensions either, even for a rising young middle manager in one of the nation’s largest utilities. Virginia Nash used to accuse her husband, when they’d had an argument — which they rarely did within earshot of the children — of being quite likely, in the event that she died before him, to marry a younger woman and let her squander all the money she, Virginia, had scraped so hard to save. (Their savings, it turned out, were considerable, however. Even though John Sr. died some thirteen years before Virginia, and even with the high cost of hospitalizations for John Jr., Virginia barely dipped into her capital and was able to pass along a trust fund to her children.)

Though they began life as parents in a rental house owned by Emma Martin, the Nashes were soon able to move to their own modest but comfortable three-bedroom home in one of the best parts of town, Country Club Hill. Built partly of cinder blocks that John Sr. was able to buy for a song from a nearby Appalachian coal-processing plant, the house bore little resemblance to the imposing homes of the coal families scattered around the hill. But it was within a few hundred yards of the crest where the club was located, was built to order by a local architect, and contained all the comforts and conveniences that a small-town, middle-class family
at that time could aspire to: a living room where Virginia’s bridge club could be entertained in style, with a fireplace, built-in bookshelves, and graceful wooden trim at the tops of all the doorways, a neat little kitchen with a breakfast nook, a dining room where Sunday dinners of chicken and waffles were served, a real basement that might one day be fitted out with a maid’s room, should live-in help be one day possible, and a separate bedroom for each of the two children.

However much they were forced to economize, the Nashes were able to keep up appearances. Virginia had nice clothes, most of which she sewed herself, and allowed herself the weekly luxury of going to a beauty parlor. By the time they moved to their own house, she had a cleaning woman who came once a week. Virginia always had a car to drive, typically a Dodge, which was hardly the norm even among middle-class families at the time. John Sr., of course, had a company car, usually a Buick. The Nashes were a loyal couple, like-minded.

John Forbes Nash, Jr., was born almost exactly four years after his parents’ marriage, on June 13, 1928. He first saw the light of day not at home, but in the Bluefield Sanitarium, a small hospital on Ramsey Street that has long since been converted to other uses. Other than that single fact, again suggestive of the Nashes’ comfortable circumstances, nothing is now known.of his coming into the world. Did Virginia catch influenza during her winter pregnancy? Were there any other complications? Were forceps needed during the delivery? While viral exposure in utero or a subtle birth injury might have played a role in his later mental illness, there is no available record or memory to suggest any such trauma. No anesthesia was required during the delivery, Virginia later told her daughter. The seven-pound baby boy was, as far as anyone still living remembers, apparently healthy, and was soon baptized in the Episcopal Church directly opposite the Martin house on Tazewell Street and given his father’s full name. Everyone, however, called him Johnny.

He was a singular little boy, solitary and introverted.
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The once-dominant view of the origins of the schizoid temperament was that abuse, neglect, or abandonment caused the child to give up the possibility of gratification from human relationships at a very early age.
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Johnny Nash certainly did not fit this now-discredited paradigm. His parents, especially his mother, were actively loving. In general, one can imagine, on evidence from biographies of many brilliant men who were peculiar and isolated as children, that an inward-looking child might react to intrusive adults by withdrawing further into his own private world or that efforts to make him conform might be met by firm resolve to do things his own way — or perhaps that unsympathetic taunting peers might have a similar effect. But the facts of Nash’s childhood, in many ways so typical of the educated classes in small American towns of that era, suggest that his temperament may well have been one that he was born with.

As the vivid memory of his grandmother’s piano-playing suggests, Johnny Nash’s infancy was spent a good deal in the company not only of his adoring mother, but also of his grandmother, aunts, and young cousins.
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The Highland
Street house to which the Nashes had moved shortly after his birth was within walking distance of Tazewell Street and Virginia continued to spend a great deal of time there, even after the birth of Johnny’s younger sister Martha in 1930. But by the time Johnny was seven or eight, his aunts had come to consider him bookish and slightly odd. While Martha and her cousins rode stick horses, cut paper dolls out of old pattern books, and played house and hide-and-seek in the “almost scary but nice” attic, Johnny could always be found in the parlor with his nose buried in a book or magazine. At home, despite his mother’s urgings, he ignored the neighborhood children, preferring to stay indoors alone. His sister spent most of her free time at the pool or playing football and kick ball or taking part in crabapple battles with long, flimsy sticks. But Johnny played by himself with toy airplanes and cars.

Although he was no prodigy, Johnny was a bright and curious child. His mother, with whom he was always closest, responded by making his education a principal focus of her considerable energy. “Mother was a natural teacher,” Martha observes. “She liked to read, she liked to teach. She wasn’t just a housewife.” Virginia, who became actively involved in the PTA, taught Johnny to read by age four, sent him to a private kindergarten, saw to it that he skipped half a grade early in elementary school, tutored him at home and, later on, in high school, had him enroll at Bluefield College to take courses in English, science, and math. John Sr.’s hand in his son’s education was less visible. More distant than Virginia, he nonetheless shared his interests with his children — taking Johnny and Martha on Sunday drives to inspect power lines, for example — and, more important, supplied answers to his son’s incessant questions about electricity, geology, weather, astronomy, and other technological subjects and the natural world. A neighbor remembers that John Sr. always spoke to his children as if they were adults: “He never gave Johnny a coloring book. He gave him science books.”
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At school, Johnny’s immaturity and social awkwardness were initially more apparent than any special intellectual gifts. His teachers labeled him an under-achiever. He daydreamed or talked incessantly and had trouble following directions, a source of some conflict between him and his mother. His fourth-grade report card, in which music and mathematics were his lowest marks, contained a note to the effect that Johnny needed “improvement in effort, study habits and respect for the rules.” He gripped his pencil like a stick, his handwriting was atrocious, and he was somewhat inclined to use his left hand. John Sr. insisted he write only with his right hand. Virginia eventually made him enroll in a penmanship course at a local secretarial college, where he learned a certain style of printing and also how to type. A newspaper clipping from Virginia’s scrapbook shows him sitting in a classroom with rows and rows of teenage girls, his eyes rolled up in his head, looking stupefyingly bored. Complaints about his writing, his talking out of turn or even “monopolizing the class discussion,” and his sloppiness dogged him right through the end of high school.
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His best friends were books, and he was always happiest learning on his own. Nash alludes to his preference obliquely in his autobiographical essay:

My parents provided an encyclopedia,
Comptons Pictured Encyclopedia,
that I learned a lot from by reading it as a child. And also there were other books available from either our house or the house of the grandparents that were of educational value.
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And the best time of day was after dinner every evening when John Sr. would sit at his desk in the small family room off the living room, the size of a sleeping porch, and John Jr. could sprawl in front of the radio, listening to classical music or news reports, or reading either the encyclopedia or the family’s stacks of well-worn
Life
and
Time
magazines, and ask his father questions.

His great passion was experimenting. By the time he was twelve or so, he had turned his room into a laboratory. He tinkered with radios, fooled around with electrical gadgets, and did chemistry experiments.
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A neighbor recalls Johnny rigging the Nash telephone to ring with the receiver off.
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