Emily Hoenikker

Emily Hoenikker (died c. 1939) was the wife of Dr. Felix Hoenikker and mother of Angela, Frank, and Newt. It was rumored in her hometown of Ilium that during her marriage she was lovers with her former fiance and Felix’s co-worker, Dr. Asa Breed, who was the real biological father of her three children.

Biography

Her father owned the Ilium Music Store and she could play "every musical instrument there was." At Ilium High School she was co-chairman of the Class Colors Committee with Marvin Breed, who said her beauty was such that "[t]here wasn't a man in Ilium County who wasn't in love with her." The two dated for a while, he giving up football to learn the violin, until his big brother Asa came home for spring vacation at M.I.T. and ultimately got engaged to her. She would later leave him to marry Hoenikker. She said that as a scientist "his mind was tuned to the biggest music there was, the music of the stars." Her former boyfriend Marvin, however, felt that Hoenikker "couldn't even bother to do anything when... his own wife, was dying for lack of love and understanding." For example, after preparing breakfast for her husband on the day they left for Sweden to collect his Nobel Prize, she found that he had left her a tip as if she were a waitress.

Once when Felix abandoned his large Marmon automobile in the middle of traffic, Emily retrieved it. However, not being used to driving it, she got into a bad accident on her way home which damaged her pelvis. This resulted in her death while giving birth to her final child, Newt. A year after her death, her children bought her grave a monument, "an alabaster phallus twenty feet high and three feet thick," from Avram Breed and Sons with money from their father's Nobel Prize. It featured poems written by her two older children and the three children would visit it several times a year to leave flowers. Her youngest son, Newt, who never knew her, as a child treasured her "reticule," a small handbag of finely-woven gold mesh, which felt like nothing else he'd ever touched.