I worked, anesthetically, that much harder on my books. There was not only the Ginn science series (yes, it was continuing) and The Land of Canaan and my jokebook, but I was also revising The Universe and working on the television special, “The Unseen World.”

  20

  On February 12, I drove to New York, for I was going to do a segment on “The Dick Cavett Show” the next day.

  It worked very well. Seated next to me was a truly beautiful English actress who seemed perfectly natural, and quite unaware she was gorgeous. Her presence buoyed my spirits and I was more nearly myself than I had ever been on television. This had its disadvantages, for I was sitting next to this gorgeous woman, with whom, of course, I was my usual suave self—quite forgetting that millions of people, and my own family, were watching.

  At one point, Dick Cavett said, in response to something I had said, “You’re quite a romantic, Isaac.” He was using the word in its proper meaning, opposing it to “realistic.”

  I, however, took it up in the popular meaning and leaning toward my fair neighbor, said, “Yes, I am, and talking of romantic, dear, what are you doing tonight after the show?”

  Dick said, “Come, come, Isaac, don’t get horny on my time.”

  Everyone laughed.

  After the show there was, of course, no romantic interlude involving myself and the actress. I did, however, try to express my appreciation of her beauty and she said, “I think you should meet my mother.”

  I took that to mean that I ought to tackle women my own age (and, of course, I was undoubtedly older than her mother was). She, however, seeing my face fall and the eager light die in my eyes, realized how I had interpreted her remark.

  She threw her arms about me, hugged me tightly, and said, “No, no, I just meant that my mother is more beautiful than I am—even now.”

  It was easy to forgive her, for she was undoubtedly the nicest raving beauty I had ever met.

  21

  After the taping was over and I had cooled down a bit, it occurred to me that some of my statements on the show might easily be misinterpreted. The show had been only taped, but it would be shown a few hours later that same night. I therefore called Gertrude to try to explain, in advance, what had happened on the show and to assure her that I had just been euphoric.

  It didn’t help.

  After 1969, which had seemed to consist, in retrospect, of one long slide toward divorce, there had been an upturn, a kind of pleasant Indian summer, a glimmering twilight that had lasted six weeks and included my fiftieth birthday.

  But then, with that unfortunate Cavett show, everything went to pieces again and the downward slide was reinstated.185

  On February 18, I had lunch with Stanley, who was in the city on business, and I discussed my marital problems with him. He was a tower of sympathetic strength, though carefully refraining from taking sides. Since then I have frequently called him when, for one reason or another, I am down in the dumps. He never fails me. He’s a good man.

  22

  February 19, 1970, was Robyn’s fifteenth birthday. I had the feeling it might well be the last she would spend with an intact family, and in an agony of guilt I tried to make it a good one for her. I took her into town, where we ate at a fancy restaurant called “The Top of the Hub” at the top of the Prudential skyscraper. We then took in a wax museum and made a tour of various jewelry stores to try to repair an opal ring she had.

  On that occasion I gave my last name to a jeweler, who spelled it A S I M O F . I said impatiently, “The last letter is a V, a V.”

  He changed the last letter, looked at the name, and said, “I see. You spell it the way the writer does.”

  23

  On February 21, Gertrude decided to visit her mother, coming to that decision on rather short notice. I took her to the air terminal and she gave me the impression she might not return. During her absence I worked on my various projects and began What Makes the Sun Shine? for Atlantic Monthly Press.

  On the twenty-fourth, when she hadn’t returned, I assumed she must be serious and would not. I visited a lawyer and asked him to write her a letter, making the first tentative move toward a divorce. Gertrude, shocked and angered by the letter, returned on the twenty-eighth, but this time I held firm. The downhill slide intensified.

  24

  I had a lesson in the generation gap on March 1. I took Robyn to see the play Hair.

  I hated it. It was incredibly noisy and poorly organized, and the small bit of nudity onstage was clearly intended to make up for its deficiencies.

  Robyn, however, loved it, seemed not to mind the noise and, at the end of the play, moved up on the stage (along with some other members of the audience) to dance to the tune of “Let the Sunshine in.”

  25

  On March 5, I went to Philadelphia to give a talk at Chestnut Hill College. It was not till after I got there and found myself inundated in nuns that I discovered it was a Catholic girls’ school.

  “Oh my goodness,” I said blankly.

  “What’s the matter?” said an elderly nun. “Don’t you like Catholic girls?”

  “I love Catholic girls,” I said, “including nuns, but I was all set to give a talk on population. What do I do now?”

  “You give it,” said the nun, firmly. “We can use it.”

  I took her at her word, and gave a rousing talk on the dangers of overpopulation and on the necessity of lowering the birth rate. It was to an overflow crowd (with some people sitting on the stage because there was no other room), and the talk was enthusiastically received.

  26

  I was putting in most of my work on the jokebook now, which was to be called Isaac Asimov’s Treasury of Humor. It meant being funny and lighthearted at the typewriter while my personal life was steadily darkening, but this is not as inappropriate as it sounds. It was the escape to the typewriter that made life bearable.

  On March 14, I drove to New York to attend the SFWA awards dinner, but that turned out badly, too. The dinner was terrible, and the service was worse. Carl Sagan, who was guest of honor, found that the slide projector would not work, and that made it impossible for him to give his talk effectively. Nor was my own talk particularly good.

  27

  I was inundated with speaking engagements that spring. On two successive days, March 17 and 18, 1970, I gave talks in the Providence/Fall River area. I took David with me each time (he was home on vacation), and he enjoyed them both.

  I had worked out a variation of my talk on population and tried it out for the first time on the seventeenth, when I spoke at Brown University. It was received so well that I thought I would try it again the next night at Bristol Community College to see if I could polish it further.

  During the dinner that preceded that second talk, I noticed that David was talking animatedly with the people on either side. This was gratifying, for he tended to be withdrawn, and I found it pleasant to have him participating in the social whirl. I listened to find out what it was that had fired his interest so, and discovered that he was giving everyone within earshot a play-by-play account of the talk he had heard me give the night before. Naturally, it had never occurred to me to tell him I was giving the same talk on this night as well.

  28

  The Boskone was held on March 28, and it was my first opportunity to see Lester del Rey since Evelyn’s death. He was clearly not quite himself yet, but Judy-Lynn hovered about him to make sure things were as comfortable for him as possible.

  On the twenty-ninth there was an eight-inch snowfall, which broke up the convention and scattered everyone into a panicky homeward journey. Lester and Judy-Lynn were driving to New York together and I was under considerable tension when I couldn’t reach them in New York that evening. The weather, however, had forced them to stay on the road overnight and they didn’t get back (quite safely, though) till the next day.

  29

  I drove to New York on April 8 and took the manuscript for Where Do We Go From Here? to Doubleday. I also brought in a new F & SF essay collection, the eighth, called The Stars in Their Courses.

  I was part of a panel arranged by Diane Cleaver of Doubleday. The idea of the panel was to work out some standardized future background around which a number of writers could do stories. I didn’t see how it could possibly work, but I was willing to collaborate on the chance that I was wrong.

  On the morning of the ninth, when we got together to begin the day’s work, it turned out that one of the panelists, at the last minute, could not come, having stayed up all night with a sick child.

  Poor Diane was in tears and, racking my brain, I said, “Let me call Bob Silverberg, Diane.”

  I called him, explained the emergency, and he got ready at once and came down from his home in the Bronx. He was a tower of strength and the best panelist by far. The panel didn’t accomplish anything but at least Diane was happy.

  One of the panelists, by the way, was Kurt Vonnegut, whom I now met for the first time. Over a glass of beer that evening (I had ginger ale) he said to me, “How does it feel to know everything?”

  I said, “I only know how it feels to have the reputation of knowing everything. Uneasy.”

  30

  On April 14, I lectured at Salem State College and finally managed to get a payment larger than the check I had once received from Smith, Kline & French. My fee on this occasion was $1,275, and I had grown blasé enough to pocket it without a qualm.186

  On April 19, I gave my population talk to World Federalists in Wilmington, Delaware. I took time out to visit some world-renowned gardens not many miles away, and even though a very light rain started falling, I enjoyed them.

  Natural wonders do not usually appeal to me, but I remembered Janet Jeppson’s pleasure in such things in New England the previous August, and the beauty of lawns, trees, and flowers had a soothing effect on me, at this time when life at home was so hard.

  The next day, I drove to Pennsylvania State University, where I was to give a talk to help celebrate “Earth Day.” Phil Klass, who was a professor at the school, introduced me. He spoke for fifteen minutes and was very funny indeed—to my alarm. How would I match him? And he was speaking for nothing, while I was charging four figures. As his talk went on, my spirits grew lower and lower.

  Finally he ended with a peroration that went something like this: “But don’t let me give you the idea that Isaac Asimov is a Renaissance man who has done everything. There are many things he has not done. For instance, he has never sung Rigoletto at the Metropolitan Opera.”

  I cheered up at once. I walked on to the stage to a polite patter of applause that clearly indicated me to be an anticlimax. I faced the audience and, without warning, sang “Bella Figlia del’amore . . . ,” launching into the Quartette from Rigoletto in as dulcet a tenor as I could manage. With that I got a bigger laugh than any Phil had had—one that he had unwittingly planted for me, of course—and I was home safe.

  The next day I gave my third talk of the trip, at Drexel University in Philadelphia, and there I met, once again, Hartley Bowen of Navy Yard days, along with his grown son.

  31

  The IBM house magazine Think wanted me to write a science-fiction story for them. They even had the gimmick. They gave me a J. B. Priestley quote that went, “Between midnight and dawn, when sleep will not come and all the old wounds begin to ache, I often have a nightmare vision of a future world in which there are billions of people, all numbered and registered, with not a gleam of genius anywhere, not an original mind, a rich personality, on the whole packed globe.”

  Think asked me to use that quotation as the basis for a story and, on April 26, I finally got around to writing a story I called “2430 a.d.”

  I used that date because I had calculated that at the present rate of population growth, the world would by that year (assuming no disaster) be one globe-girdling Manhattan, stretching its skyscrapers-without-end over land and sea alike.

  To my surprise, Think sent the story back, explaining that they had meant me to refute the quotation, not support it. They had never said so, however. Ordinarily, I would have written a stiff letter and told them to go to Hades, but times were too hard for me now to work up emotional intensity in new directions. I told them I would try, but I couldn’t get to it right away.

  32

  On May 18, I gave a talk to a group of people meeting at a new posh motel that had been built only about a mile from our house. The master of ceremonies asked if he might read from our correspondence in introducing me. I shrugged and said he might. I didn’t have the faintest memory of what was in the correspondence, but assumed it contained nothing disgraceful.

  Well, it did, in a way. The man in charge of the lecture arrangements had written me saying that the fee I asked for was twice what they usually paid, and I had answered that I was twice as good as anyone else they could get—so they agreed to the fee.

  Now I sat there, while my introducer read all this and I could watch the audience turn grim as they realized they were being soaked to pay for some joker who chimed to be twice as good as the next guy.

  I had then to get up and prove my contention to what was now a hostile audience. I quickly switched to my Mendel speech, which had never failed me, and gave it as rousingly as I could. It was quite obvious by the time I was through that it had not failed me this time either, and that I had proved my point.

  33

  On May 31, 1970, I gave my second commencement address; this one at Bridgewater State College in Bridgewater, Massachusetts. On this occasion I received my first honorary degree, that of Doctor of Science.

  Part IV

  –

  Breakup and Rebirth

  31

  Back to New York

  1

  Divorce had come close enough to make it seem advisable to me to find an apartment for myself, one small enough for me to handle and yet large enough to hold my library.

  I found such an apartment in Wellesley, in the same development in which Jim Ashley of Ginn & Company lived. Not only did the apartment seem right, but also Jim would be around to serve as a friend and companion in the hard period of adjustment—and as a guide to bachelor living. Furthermore, I would be no more than five miles from the house, so that I could see the kids and be available for emergencies.

  On June 8, however, the lawyers met and it became clear that Gertrude would allow only a separation and that on hard terms. I had to change my plans about the Wellesley apartment and consider a more drastic move.

  I could not get a divorce in Massachusetts against Gertrude’s opposition without a messy court trial in which I alleged cruel and inhuman treatment—and I wouldn’t do that.

  I would have to go to another state where no-fault proceedings could be instituted and where I could set up a legitimate residency. California and New York were the only two possibilities and, of the two, I chose New York. New York would be closer to my children; it was the place I was brought up; it was where all my major publishers (except Houghton Mifflin) were based.

  I began making plans for the move and called the various people I knew in New York for suggestions as to where I might live. Among them, I called Janet Jeppson. Janet, with her usual efficiency, tackled the problem promptly and sent me a list of suggestions.

  On June 12, I drove to New York to look at the various possibilities, and of them, the Oliver Cromwell Hotel on West Seventy-second Street seemed best. It was rather decayed, but was still quite presentable, and it had a coffee shop where I could have light meals. They offered me two possible apartments, one on the twenty-second floor, and one on the third. The third floor seemed preferable to me, since it was the darker of the two and I like to work under artificial light.

  There were two rooms so that I could keep the arrangement as in my attic, and an air conditioner could be installed in one of them. There were, in addition, a bathroom, a kitchenette, and ample closet space for a bachelor. I put down a month’s deposit to begin on July 1, then drove home. On June 13, I finished Isaac Asimov’s Treasury of Humor.

  2

  Things went rapidly thereafter. At 8:30 a.m. on July 3, 1970, the movers came and took out my bookcases, my books, my desk, and my filing cabinets, and by 2:00 p.m. they drove off. I put my typewriters, my manuscripts in progress, and a variety of other materials that I either would not trust to the movers or wanted available for immediate use, into my car.

  Then I waited. Gertrude was off shopping and I did not want to sneak away in her absence and have her come back to an empty house. She returned and I said good-bye. I had already said good-bye to Robyn (and assured her that the separation did not include her, and that I would stay her father my whole life), and I even managed to find Satan and say good-bye to him. As for David, he had been visiting us, and I was taking him back to the school en route to New York.

  And so I left, twenty-eight years and four months after I had met Gertrude and just twenty-five days short of our twenty-eighth anniversary.

  I dropped David off at his school and then drove on to New York. I was going to be a New Yorker again after twenty-one years in Boston and its suburbs.

  3

  I pulled up at the Cromwell Hotel and found Janet waiting for me. She helped me unload and I found that she had, of her own accord, filled my kitchenette with cutlery, some pots and pans, and some staples such as coffee and canned goods.