Mike dealt with the real estate market every day. I left it to her to find a houses to consider or land if a house couldn’t be found. Mike and I looked at several houses that were nice enough but which we rejected for various reasons. But it still took Mike less than a month to find a suitable property. She found a six-bedroom house in Encino. It had a four-car garage with a caretaker’s residence above and a three-room guest cottage. It had belonged to a Warner Brothers executive and had been built to maintain the executive’s privacy. The house came with almost six acres surrounded by a brick wall with two gated entrances. When Gwen, Mike, and I did a walk-through together, the ladies fell in love with it. I made an offer that afternoon.
It took much of the summer to get the new house ready for us and hire a caretaker for the property. We moved in mid-August and quickly got comfortable. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do about the old house. Eventually, I offered it to one of the new PhD candidates that already had a family. Though I didn’t need the money, I collected the same rent, including utilities they’d have paid for one of the much smaller apartments they considered.
It soon became clear that my father had misread the Pentagon’s intention to pressure me into signing on to their project. Paulette was deported in late July. It wasn’t pretty. I spent a small fortune on legal fees fighting the deportation order to no avail. At most, the lawyer delayed it a week. Paulette had never violated the terms of her visa, but it didn’t matter. The twins cried and held onto her tightly the morning she said goodbye. Gwen and I had to pry them off her so she could leave when the immigration officer picked her up. I made sure to get her parents address so I could reach out to her in the future.
Since I’d received no responses to any of my inquiries about post-doctoral work, I insisted that I could take on care of the twins until we found someone to take Paulette’s place. While I had spent considerable time caring for the twins, I was still nervous about it. I did my best to hide it, but I sensed Gwen worried, too.
It turned out that Gwen needn’t have worried about how capably I’d care for our children. A week before the fall semester began, Gwen got a call from her department head. Apparently, there was some sudden concern within the administration that Gwen would be unable to manage her studies and care for our children. She was suspended from her program until such time as she could prove her children would not be a distraction. She got no guidance about how she could prove it. Her appeal was denied, with a comment to the effect that a mother belonged at home with her young children, not in a lab.
I was livid. I had been negotiating with the school to endow a chair in the Physics Department. I instructed my attorney to break off negotiations. I hung up if someone from Tech called. The Physics Department chair, the Chemistry Department chair, and the president showed up at the house late one afternoon, unannounced. I asked if they were there to reinstate Gwen. They looked at each other for a moment, then asked if they could come in and talk. I pointedly told them there was nothing to talk about unless Gwen’s suspension was lifted. After their visit, I began keeping the gate closed.