Trinity, p.5
Trinity, page 5
But nobody comes. The desert appears to be empty.
With his hat pulled low over his forehead, Oppenheimer turns and climbs back down the tower. The steel rungs press his arches until his feet hit solid land once again. He drives the jeep back into base camp, where he chats with the metallurgists packing their gear.
According to one, interviewed later, he talks about family. He discusses life at the Los Alamos camp. Then he looks up at the sky. It’s blackening over the Oscura Range. “Funny,” he says, “how the mountains always inspire our work.” He keeps his face turned toward the range, and the clouds keep rolling over the ridges.
Testimonial 2
Grace Goodman
Los Alamos, 1945
OF COURSE I DID. HOW COULD I HAVE MISSED HIM? HE WAS THE mayor of our little Shangri-la on the mesa. No matter which way you turned, you’d see him getting driven around in his jeep, wearing that porkpie hat and an old pair of blue jeans.
He was everywhere you looked. Or at least that’s how it seemed. He had his spoon in every pot. He even started a women’s committee, and he donated part of his record collection to the mesa radio station. After that, if you were lying awake in your dorm room, listening to Bach to calm down because every time you opened your eyes you saw mice running over the ceiling, it was Oppie you had to thank for the music.
Sometimes, he came to the square dances we organized at Fuller Lodge. Then we’d all go green with envy while he danced with some lucky girl. Or Kitty might take a break from drinking in her living room, and she and Oppie would dance, gazing into each other’s eyes like they’d only ever been in love with each other.
Once, he played the part of a corpse in the theater production of Arsenic and Old Lace. He let them carry him in with flour all over his face, and out in the audience we almost died laughing.
But that was the kind of thing Oppie would do. He didn’t hold himself too high above us. When the wives complained about working jobs on the mesa and still getting left to do all the cleaning at home, he organized a maid service. After that, there were Indian girls who walked up from San Ildefonso, wearing leather slippers and emerging out of the mist that came up with them from the river.
It was Oppie who arranged that, just like he spearheaded the effort to improve the hospital where the women gave birth. He was always trying to help, even with the trivial things. Even though he was the head of the project.
Once, you know, he even invited me to his house. Sometimes I can’t believe I was there, but it’s true: once I went to a party at Oppie’s house on Bathtub Row, and Jack was there, too, standing in the living room, talking with Johnny von Neumann and Oppie.
They saw me when I walked in, with that bruise under my eye and my new boyfriend. All three of them were holding martinis, and standing in front of a bookcase. And usually I would have felt cowed by their importance, what with my own relatively insignificant status, but I walked into that party with a real sense of my strengths.
It was the bruise that made it possible, not the fact that I had a new boyfriend. He’d only come in recently, after all, with the latest round of explosives, and he wasn’t even all that important.
No. It wasn’t him. It was the bruise that gave me such substance when I walked into that party. As soon as Jack saw it, he changed. I smote him with that bruise, I really did, even though I was only a WAC, and I only got to come to that party because Oppie invited the new round of explosives. And even though Jack was standing there with von Neumann and Oppie himself, and they were all tan from their recent trip into the desert, for some secret reason having to do with the secret weapon we all knew they were building.
There they were, assembled in front of a bookcase crowded with Oppie’s big books and his expensive Native American tchotchkes. Jack was standing as he always did, with one hand in his pants’ pocket and the other leg jutting out slightly, like a Boy Scout who’s climbed to the top of a summit. And even so, when I came in, the mere sight of me smote him.
SEEING MY EFFECT ON HIM, I DELIVERED MY MOST GLANCING, CASUAL smile. Then I scanned the room like I was looking for somebody else. I held my head so he’d see the better side of my face, and meanwhile, in a great stroke of luck, my new boyfriend chose just the right moment to help me out of my raincoat.
There I stood, unmoving, while the coat slid off my bare shoulders.
I even let my hand rest on my new boyfriend’s arm like it was the banister of a grand marble staircase, and I was in an evening gown about to descend it.
It was a good moment, it really was, until my new boyfriend leaned in to see what I wanted. “What’s that?” he said. “Please, Grace, you have to speak up.”
He had tinnitus from all the explosions. It was something I found hard to handle, and I almost said something impatient, but then I remembered the bruise. It helped me regain my composure. I remembered how, earlier in the evening, I’d inspected it while I took out my curlers and discovered that, though its outer ring was yellow and sickly, the center was black as the night.
It was a powerful bruise, it really was. I felt it deeply. In some ways, I felt I’d gone to that party not with my new boyfriend but with that magnificent bruise, so even when my new boyfriend leaned in and annoyed me, I was able to remember it and smile up at him sweetly, then hand him my purse, and excuse myself to go to the bathroom.
I COULD FEEL HIM WATCHING ME AS I WENT. NOT MY NEW BOYFRIEND, but Jack. It was Jack whose eyes I could feel, so warm and almost wet on the back of my head that for a second I wondered if I’d started bleeding. It was all I could do not to reach my hand up to check, but instead I kept my composure all the way to the bathroom, and only once I’d closed the door did I allow myself to feel nervous and overexcited, and sit there on the lid of the toilet counting from one to ten Mississippi, hoping my heart would stop uncontrollably racing.
I HADN’T BEEN SURE HE’D BE AT THAT PARTY. THERE WERE MOMENTS, of course, when I suspected he might be. But I’d also heard rumors that he was out scouting locations.
So I’d curled my hair and worn the red lipstick he once told me he liked, but I hadn’t prepared myself absolutely, and I definitely wasn’t prepared for him to be standing there when I walked in through the door, as if he’d positioned himself by the entrance to greet me.
Even so, my bruise and I had impressed him. He’d watched me all the way down the hallway, and by the time I was sitting there on the toilet, I knew that it was possible that he was waiting for me in the darkness outside, and that soon, perhaps, if I gave up my hiding place, we’d be standing together alone, as we’d once been alone in other dark places.
Knowing that, it was hard to calm down. When I got up to wash my hands, my fingertips were trembling. But then I looked at the bruise in the mirror and the very sight of it calmed me. My face with that bruise: It was young and alluring. It wasn’t at all the haggard old visage that sometimes showed up in my mirror in the WAC dorm.
There, again, set off by the bruise, was the good line of my nose, and there was the delicate bow of my lip. Then I smiled to myself in the mirror, as I planned to smile at Jack, because by then, of course, I knew he’d be out there. I knew he’d be waiting for me in the hallway, and that as soon as I stepped out he’d reach forward and touch me.
“PLEASE, GRACE,” HE SAID, WHEN HE DID. HE HAD HIS THUMB UNDER my chin, tilting it up, so he could look down sadly upon me.
“Please what?” I said.
“Please,” he said. “I can’t sit back and watch this.”
“Watch what?” I said. And I smiled my jauntiest debutante smile, and gave him one last look at the bruise, then threw my shoulders back and sailed into the party.
IT WAS A TRIUMPH, IT REALLY WAS, ESPECIALLY AFTER THAT OTHER occasion.
Of course, by the time I showed up to that other party, I’d been awake for over twenty-four hours. We’d all gone to June Steenberger’s house because Germany had surrendered, and she had a projector in her big green McKee house, which she got because her husband was in the theoretical group.
So we all sat around, drinking colas and watching the newsreel, and June was ostentatiously pregnant. She was wedged on the couch, knitting a little pink blanket, and smiling like a dumb cow through the whole program as if Hitler’s suicide and Germany’s surrender and the opening of those camps were all nothing more than the background of her own personal nativity set.
At every new development they reported about General Eisenhower and the unconditional terms of surrender, she picked up her knitting again and murmured some sweet wifely comment, like “I guess we can go home now,” or “What a relief it will be to have my own stove back.”
There I sat on the floor, surrounded by wives with stoves to go home to, and in my state of despair I kept my eyes on the next newsreel and the horrible shadows that kept sliding over the screen, those skeletons emerging out of the camps, blinking vulnerably in the new sunlight.
And then I remembered how thin my mother got in the last weeks, when she was dying, and I slept in the big bed alongside her.
I thought of the bones in her shoulders, and meanwhile June kept knitting that blanket and talking about going home with her husband, and in order to survive how vindictive I felt, I had to take a deep breath and have pity because once, when we went to the lake, June wore a bathing suit and her thighs were pure cottage cheese.
And later, when I went off by myself to pick berries, I felt her husband watching me, with my nice legs and my tan and the little white shorts I was wearing that summer.
And usually that scene would have calmed me, but as soon as I remembered them—the berries that grew near the lake, and the thorns that grabbed at my hair when I lay down among them—the pity I felt was for myself. It was rising up to my throat, rising so high I was sure it would drown me. Because then I remembered the edge of the lake, licking the sand with its silver tongue, and that rock that jutted out into the water, parting it, causing it to subside, because of course that was the rock where Jack taught me to swim, back when the two of us were a couple.
There I was again, up on that rock, shivering wet in my little suit, trying to get the nerve to jump in.
And there was the sunlight, braided into the ripples, and Jack down below, his hand over his eyes when he grinned up and laughed, urging me to jump into the water.
And meanwhile, at June’s house, the newsreel kept trumpeting on about Victory and a Great War, and June and Charlotte and Kay were conspiring about what they’d cook first when they’d gone home to Princeton, and it was miserable, but I wouldn’t leave.
Out of stubbornness, I stayed a long time, celebrating the end of the war while I drowned in my own personal sorrow, and it wasn’t until two or three in the morning that I finally got back to the WAC dorm.
When I opened the door, the lamp wasn’t on, so it was dark when I saw my cot, and the GI chair in the corner, and the stack of big books I kept on my nightstand in case Jack happened to stop by and see them. Then I forced myself to look back at the GI chair, and confronted the nest of young rats that had somehow ended up there.
They were wriggling and squirming, blindly nestling in toward their mother, and I had to blink at them for a while before I realized they were actually socks. I’d knotted them up after doing my laundry, but there hadn’t been time to put them away before I headed to June’s house.
So there they were, a nest of baby rats, and by the time I’d figured it out, my heart was racing, so then I got into my cot to calm down.
But of course the harder I tried to lie still, the harder my heart insisted on beating, so there I lay in a panic until at some point the next day Charlotte and Freddy stopped by the dorm and invited me along to that other party.
THAT, AS IT TURNED OUT, WAS A VERY BIG PARTY.
At that point, of course, most people thought we’d go home. Most people thought we were up on that mesa to build our secret weapon before Germany could do the same thing.
We didn’t know, for example, that a memo had already been sent to the general in charge of firebombing Japan, telling him to spare Hiroshima so that we could be the ones to destroy it. We weren’t even supposed to know it was a weapon we were working on.
But I knew. Jack told me, when we were together. He didn’t give me too many details, but I knew, and so did most of the other women, and we all thought we were racing the Germans.
So in May, when Germany surrendered and Hitler killed himself with that secret girlfriend he married just before handing over the cyanide tablet, most of us went along to that party thinking it might be the last party, and even from outside the lab, Charlotte and Freddy and I could hear people singing. Mike Michnovicz was playing the accordion, and it was clear that we’d gotten there late, because in the hall someone was throwing up in a trash can, and inside the lab it was already too crowded.
Someone had rolled in two GI cans from the barracks and filled them to the brim with Shangri-la punch. Then they’d built a tower of crushed grapefruit juice cans and empty lab alcohol bottles, and they’d chilled the punch with steaming blocks of dry ice. A little clutch of GIs had draped themselves around Mike, who was playing some kind of mournful Sinatra, and I stood there with Charlotte and Freddy and tried to arrange my face to look pleasant.
Then someone gave me a beaker of punch. Later, I lost track of Charlotte. For a while, I listened to some excited little GI telling me about how before he came up to the mesa, he’d been in Utah developing a new incendiary that couldn’t even be doused out by water. He told me they’d built a miniature replica of Tokyo, down to the books on the shelves and the mats on the floor, and how when they dropped those bombs on the actual city the thing went up like it was built out of matchsticks.
He said they didn’t even camouflage the bellies of the planes anymore, because they flew beyond the range of Japanese defenses.
He said not only Tokyo but Nagoya, Yokohama, Osaka, Kobe, and Kawasaki were basically gone at this point, and then I excused myself and went somewhere else, and a scientist with thick glasses regaled me with a story about how he’d got his hair cut at the barber chair by the cyclotron.
It was a story I’d heard ten thousand times. But I nodded and smiled as if I cared very much, and someone else who was listening in said if only the whole world ran as smoothly as our little Shangri-la on the mesa, where haircuts are free, no one is poor, and everyone has such excellent health care.
And meanwhile, I scanned the room and realized Jack wasn’t coming.
He’d never show up, I thought to myself. It wasn’t a party for people like him. It was just a bunch of GIs and WACs and unimportant scientists, and for a while I felt safe and lost and a little bit dead, but then I saw Oppie’s hat over the crowd.
Then I knew Jack was coming. Knowing that, I came to life and felt nervous. Then I went to the GI cans to refill my beaker, and that’s where I was standing when I saw him walking in behind Oppie.
He was wearing a work shirt with his blue jeans, which is what most of the scientists wore, unless of course they’d come from Europe, in which case they wore formal clothes, as if they’d come out west from a funeral.
But Jack was from Princeton, and he’d gotten that tan, and he looked like a hero out of a Western when he crossed that party to shake hands with a group of admiring GIs. Then, suddenly, I was so flooded with such confusing and unreasonable terror that I drank all my punch and passed back my beaker.
And even then, after that extra beaker of punch, that weird unreasonable terror was still tingling in the roots of my stomach. I had to take a deep breath and remember that this was only another lab party, and that was just Jack. But of course my heart had been beating too fast since I saw those baby rats in the armchair, and now, drinking my punch, watching Jack stride through the crowd, everyone else in the room lost their features.
Slowly, the walls started to melt. Then the lab equipment began to float off, and the only thing I could see was Jack’s face, his tormented and unhappy expression, while he nodded earnestly, talking in the corner with a pretty young blond girl.
I could see her as well. She was wearing one of those dumb peasant blouses and a long braid over her shoulder, like she thought she’d taken the train straight from Vassar into the pages of Little House on the Prairie. There she was, with her shoulders bare, smiling at Jack and touching her braid, and even though they were standing on the other side of the room, and the walls were slowly melting around me, I could see his face exquisitely clearly.
I realized how haunted he looked, with his dark eyes and the shadow of a beard on his face, listening to that dumb little girl so intently.
And then I remembered the Dostoyevsky novel he’d assigned me to read, back when the two of us were together. I remembered how on the front page there was an ink drawing of a haunted student-murderer with eyes just like Jack had in that moment. I stood there by the cans of Shangri-la punch and gazed into Jack’s regretful student-murderer eyes, and for a moment, I allowed myself to forget that he might be unhappy because of the weapon we were up on that mesa to build.
I forgot that completely. Instead, leaning on the centrifuge, I thought: It hit him hard, also.
I thought he, too, must have stayed up all night. And maybe he reached for the copy of Crime and Punishment that he’d lent me, which I’d left on his nightstand, with my dog-ears and the passages I so carefully noted.
And maybe it was the aching accordion music, but I managed to stir up a great deal of pity for him, and how much he must have missed me, or how much he must have missed that careful and obedient girl I was in the days when I read beside him. By then the room was swimming in a not entirely unpleasant way, and Charlotte and Freddy had gone off forever, and time slid nicely by until Jack came over and found me.
Then we were together, leaning on the centrifuge, laughing at my clever jokes, alone with each other again, along with a burly new man from explosives.
