Arline Greenbaum

Arline Greenbaum was dying in a hospital in Albuquerque while her husband worked on the atomic bomb two hundred kilometres away. She and Richard Feynman met as teenagers in Far Rockaway, and were engaged for six years while he went through MIT and Princeton. She was diagnosed with tuberculosis of the lymph nodes, then incurable, and he married her in 1942 on the way to a sanatorium, in a ceremony at a city office on Staten Island with two strangers as witnesses - against the advice of his family and of the university, which had rules about married graduate students. He could not kiss her on the mouth. When Los Alamos began he had her moved to a sanatorium in Albuquerque and hitchhiked down at weekends. The letters between them had to pass the censor, and she took to writing in code and cutting them into jigsaw pieces to annoy him, which became a running battle with the security office that he enjoyed enormously. She died in June 1945, a month before the Trinity test, and he noted that the clock in the room had stopped at the moment of death - and then worked out that he had shaken it earlier that day. He did not cry until weeks later, passing a shop window with a dress in it. The letter he wrote her sixteen months after her death, ending with an apology for not posting it because he did not know the new address, was found sealed among his papers after his own death in 1988. She is also the source of the phrase he used for the rest of his life when other people's opinions were the obstacle - what do you care what other people think - which she said to him when he was worrying about how their marriage looked.

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