Uncle Anton's Atomic Bomb

by Ian Woollen

A brief silence came from the Rokeby end of the line, while Anthony and Duncan exchanged glances, mutually noting that, with two kids now out of the house, Mom and Dad seemed a bit edgier.

  “I don’t remember any problems on my first day,” Ward rejoined, “but that was another life.”

  “Who acts the girl parts?” Rob asked. “Where do you find actresses at an all-boys school?”

  “Townies, that’s where. Local girls,” Duncan answered. “It’s another plus about the Theater Department.”

  Crowbar Gus did not care much about acting. The acting in his plays would be forgotten, but not his sets. Photographs of his famous sets adorned the auditorium lobby, floor to ceiling. For the last forty years his stage productions could best be described as costumed readings. Mostly Shakespeare. Nothing fancy, no modern dress. “When you mess with Shakespeare, he messes back,” Crowbar Gus instructed his drama students.

  He firmly believed that the best medicine for a homesick, quarrelsome kid was to put a tool in his hands. For Duncan, his afternoons in the workshop at the back of the auditorium reminded him of building weaponry with Rob and Vincent and Kayla.

  The nickname ‘Crowbar’ also had a metaphorical level. It referred to his ability to ‘pry out’ information from students. He used a legally sanctioned truth serum, coffee. Most of the students had not yet started drinking coffee when they arrived at Rokeby. Crowbar Gus kept a pot of strong brew always fresh in the green room. “Make it like you hate me,” he said.

  Crowbar capitalized on the boys’ desire for rites of passage into adulthood. Year after year, the boys gagged down the awful potion, because it made them feel grown up. And the caffeine rush in their young brains opened them up to Crowbar’s inquiries on the comfy green room couches.

  “How are you feeling today, pal?”

  “Any letters from that girl at Miss Porter’s?”

  “What do you hear from home lately?”

  “Do you have any idea what’s going on with Oliver?” (Or whatever student or student event Crowbar was curious about that week.)

  Such that he became both Father Confessor and the best informed member of the faculty about what was really happening on campus. Duncan talked to him about Geneva and even read her letters aloud. He boasted about their Junior Ranger exploits and exaggerated some of the island romantic material to make himself sound like a Romeo, in contrast to his egghead older brother, who didn’t even attend the Fall Dance.

  In the quest to distinguish himself from his brother, Duncan sold off their mother’s shipments of Special K-bars for fifty cents a square. He also signed up for the Computer Club. In the hushed aura of the computer room’s giant mainframe, he found a different kind of haven. Everyone talked in whispers and waited reverently for the big machine to chug through their calculations. They ogled the NASA paraphernalia, donated by the faculty supervisor, Kip Melton, a former astronaut.

  Master Melton was a new teacher. Very cool. Especially because he had a security clearance. No one knew what that meant exactly. It sounded classy to Duncan. Master Melton required everyone to wear lab coats and prefixed all his students’ names with ‘Doctor.’ He reverently instructed them in the mysteries of Fortran punched cards, as if they were deciphering the language of the Rosetta Stone. All while the giant, white mainframe emitted a soothing hum.

  Teddy von Kelp joined too. As their first-day fight wounds congealed into a begrudging bond, Duncan and Teddy hatched a plan to become co-presidents of the Computer Club. It was a student position more powerful than all of Anthony’s keys combined, because the Computer Club president was paid to program the entire school’s course schedule each year. Duncan and Teddy figured out that the position could bring additional remuneration from a lucrative shakedown of students who would pay to ensure that their courses were not scheduled at 8 a.m. on Saturdays.

  Chapter 38

  The Weekend Pass

  Weekends could be particularly lonely for boarders from far away. Campus emptied out, as the New York and Greenwich and Boston kids hurried home for 48 hours. House party invitations were prized among the stranded. The Big E required these invitations to come in the form of written parent-to-parent letters.

  Twice a year, sometimes more often, Mary Wangert received a letter inviting Anthony to spend a weekend at the home of Breezy Merritt’s sister, Lana Chapman. She and her husband, Randolph, and adopted daughter, Kathryn, lived beside the Hudson River in a house with a name: Swanset.

  Mascara-laden Lana was also a Vassar alumna. Technically, she had not graduated, having left college after her junior year to marry. Like many almost-graduates, she ended up identifying even more strongly with her almost-alma mater. Pink Vassar china, coffee cups, Vassar towels and napkins filled her shelves. Lana remembered Mary Stark as a freshman selling sandwiches door-to-door in the dorms at night, a story she repeated to Anthony on every visit. Lana was not as driven as her journalist sister. She taught a few piano lessons in her cavernous house. She had once performed Beethoven’s Fifth Piano Concerto—the “Emperor”—with the Poughkeepsie Community Orchestra. She was devoted to Beethoven’s Fifth Piano Concerto. She collected all the recordings of it. Whenever she approached the hi-fi console in the living room, her husband and daughter yelled, “No, please, NOT the Emperor.”

  Randolph Chapman’s political acumen and august comb-over impressed Anthony. Randolph came from a long line of Hudson Valley agitators. Among them was John Jay Chapman, foe of Tammany Hall, about whom rival Theodore Roosevelt coined the phrase, ‘lunatic fringe.’ Randolph, inspired by his great-uncle, gave up a career tending Swanset’s topiary hedges to become a local political provocateur. He dedicated his waking hours to raising awareness about pollution in the Hudson River and demonstrating against the construction of a nuclear power plant.

  In Anthony he found a willing acolyte, especially on the nuclear issue. Anthony, imbued with statistics and theory, was ripe for Randolph’s on-the-ground activism. Randolph introduced him to the New Journalism and provided him with many opportunities to practice first-person reportage. They dressed up as dead fish and demonstrated on the town landing. They festooned the local square with evacuation signs depicting a reactor meltdown. Anthony much preferred these activities to nibbling Triscuits and playing cribbage with Lana, while Kathryn, an aspiring opera singer, practiced her arias.

  However, when Duncan came on the scene, he gravitated to Kathryn like a moth to flame. At the dinner table on his first visit, a bejeweled Lana inquired of Duncan, “Now, tell me, please, how it is that your family from Indiana—‘Hoosiers’, isn’t that what you’re called?—how it is that you Hoosiers end up spending so much time in coastal Maine? Two very different cultures, wouldn’t you say?”

  Duncan replied, “Not necessarily. Indianapolis has the 500 mile car race and Great Tusk Island has the lobster boat race.”

  “Excuse me, I don’t understand,” Lana said, dabbing her mouth with her napkin.

  “Each year, the one big event in Indy is the 500 mile car race, and each year the one big event in Maine is the lobster boat race.”

  “Cars and lobster boats?” Lana said, “What are you getting at?”

  Kathryn giggled at her mother’s obtuseness and kicked Duncan under the table.

  “And both in Indy and Great Tusk, the Hoosiers and Mainiacs get drunk and yell about putting the pedal to the metal,” Duncan explained.

  “Indy? What’s Indy?” Lana asked Randolph.

  Randolph harrumphed and said, “I think what he’s trying to state, dear, is that people everywhere like having a good time.”

  Kathryn giggled again and stroked her foot along Duncan’s shin.

  She was his age, his height, his kind of impetuous. Gangly Geneva and her 45 RPM records were quickly forgotten in the exotic glow of Kathryn’s giggles and soaring crescendos, both musically and sexually. Near the end of Duncan’s first weekend at Swanset, while Randolph and Anthony were off leafleting commuters at the train station, Kathryn ushered Duncan
up to the attic, promising to show off her costumes. She stepped behind a dressing screen and reemerged in her birthday suit.

  Here was the moment, feared by all parents, when their adolescent child encountered a first worldly siren-song. For Kathryn, it was an internal siren-song and it was especially feared by Lana and Randolph, and a string of child psychiatrists, who tried to inoculate the adopted Kathryn to her imagination’s pied-piper renderings of her biological origins, unknown and thus darkly mythical.

  Goose pimples covered her skin. She signaled for Duncan to strip. He quickly complied, though as a matter of conscience and befitting a Rokeby man, he said for the record, “Uh, what about birth control?”

  Kathryn answered, “I’m on the pill. But just so you don’t think I’m some kind of slut, this is my first time.”

  The pill being a magical new invention, Kathryn’s announcement only added to her allure in Duncan’s eyes.

  “You’re so … gosh,” he stammered.

  “Is that what boys say to girls in Indianapolis?” She smiled.

  “This is my first time too,” Duncan confessed.

  Kathryn struck a pose and said, “Let’s make it so that years from now, when you’re married to some Midwestern farm girl and I’m off having affairs with conductors in Europe, we’ll always remember my attic in Swanset.”

  “Wait a minute,” Duncan said. “How do you know I won’t be the one off in Europe? My mother lived in Moscow after she got out of college.”

  Kathryn replied, “Okay, and I could end up studying voice at the Indiana University Music School. It’s supposed to be very good.”

  “The men in my church choir all came from there,” Duncan said. “Bloomington is only fifty miles south of Indy. They have a really good basketball team too.”

  “You’re talking too much,” Kathryn whispered.

  She added a few costuming flourishes to their nakedness and led Duncan over to a lumpy chaise longue. What followed, Duncan realized much later, was a scenario that Kathryn must have enacted a thousand times in her buffo mind. He just happened to be the male stagehand that happened to wander too far out from behind the curtain.

  Chapter 39

  Exile in Naptown

  Of course, Duncan had to boast to Rob and Vincent about losing his virginity. It made Rob feel even more depressed about his lonely exile with boring parents and elderly grandparents (Constance now in a nursing home) and no one around with a clue about how to use a lacrosse stick. Teenage angst fell upon him. Hunched shoulders, a clomping, shuffle step. He loitered outside record stores and spent his allowance on duckpin bowling in Fountain Square.

  Vincent (‘Vince’ never took) and Kayla were deep into it too. They fed off each other’s grand moroseness. Kayla gave up on her aspirations to become an astronaut. She stomped around in army boots and planted a cigarette behind each ear, sticking out from under her Red Cross nurse’s hat. She tried to impress Rob with grown-up acts of delinquency, such as setting fire to a bag of dog poop in the parking lot of Elbert’s former employer, Dow Chemical. Their moods were influenced by common agreement during this period that Indianapolis sucked.

  Rob carried his lacrosse stick everywhere, as a symbol of solidarity with his boarding school brother. Acquiring the basic skills of lacrosse was much harder than expected. Rob spent hours hurling the hard rubber ball—special ordered from a catalog—inexpertly against the garage door, until his mother, exasperated by the constant thuds, ran out screaming for him to stop.

  And to make matters worse, his voice fully changed. Rob Wangert, age 14, was given an honorable discharge from the treble section of the church choir. Among transitions from childhood into the limbo of male adolescence, the boy chorister’s loss of his chords is one of the hardest. The grief of being kicked off the cupid pedestal, by his own body to boot, overwhelmed any interest in his voice’s new capabilities.

  Rob briefly considered losing his virginity with his childhood playmate, Kayla. She didn’t look like a child anymore, thanks to large amounts of shoplifted makeup. She was known for turning northside boys into northside men. Rob devised a plan that involved ditching Vincent at Broad Ripple Park and the backseat of a neighbor’s unlocked car, but he couldn’t go through with it. She was still the Kayla he’d known in the sandbox, and he couldn’t look at her without seeing the closest thing he had to a sister. Vincent, meanwhile, was still hampered by extreme shyness with the opposite sex. He became a loud advocate for masturbation. He specialized in ‘waxing the bishop.’

  Rob’s version of the weekend pass came about thanks to Elbert Jones. He reappeared with a toupee and a Pontiac GTO. He wanted visitation with his children. Rusalka suspected that the visitation demand was instigated by Elbert’s latest girlfriend, Roxy. She didn’t have any children of her own and couldn’t because of a botched operation that had at least resulted in a successful malpractice suit which she liked to discuss blow-by-blow with anybody who would listen.

  Vincent and Kayla pleaded with Rob to accompany them on their awkward sojourns to see Elbert and Roxy. They lived an hour and a half southwest of Naptown in a double-wide on five acres near the Greene Naval Weapons Base.

  Elbert, in his own way, tried to make the visits bearable. He wanted to impress the kids with his swinging car and new job. At Roxy’s urging (perhaps trying to eradicate the Russian taint of their mother), Elbert set up a shooting range. It featured poster-size heads of the Soviet Politburo attached to stakes at a hundred yards. The kids blazed away with decommissioned M1 Garands that Elbert brought home from the base. Deadeye Kayla always won the prize.

  Elbert drove them down to the border to load up on M-80s, cherry bombs, and roman candles at Nervous Ed’s Fireworks Bonanza. He boasted about his laser beam project. He claimed that cold fusion with lasers was just a funding cycle away. Elbert carried a thick wad of cash that he doled out on frequent roadside stops. He was on a first-name basis with the staff at Snack Shack and Dinky’s Amish Auction Barn.

  Every Friday night they went to Dinky’s. The parking lot filled with horses and buggies and antique dealers’ vehicles from three surrounding states. Roxy loved collecting snow globes at auctions. She also bid on stuff for the kids to blow up with their fireworks. Birdbaths. They blew up a lot of birdbaths.

  The bigger draw was Elbert’s workplace, the Greene Naval Weapons Base. Roxy worked in the officer’s mess. It was a little world unto itself. The base contained a lake where Roxy taught the kids to water-ski, and a campground where Elbert showed them how to kill a copperhead with a shovel, and a stand of tall oak trees called ‘Constitution Grove.’ Elbert explained that these oaks were used to replace the planking on Old Ironsides, still afloat in Boston harbor.

  As a researcher on a nerve gas project, Elbert rated a Grade 7 pass, which brought access to some highly restricted areas. During each visit, the kids pressed Elbert to show them torpedoes and depth charges inside the grassy bunkers that could be reached via tunnels from his office in the research facility. While her brother and father debated mega-tonnage in his office, Kayla spouted, “Oh, you two are just a brag-a-thon. You’re all talk.”

  Rob chimed in with something about the Fat Man and Little Boy replicas in the lobby of the Wangert Building.

  Elbert countered with, “Those old clunkers are nothing now. You want a see what a new A-bomb looks like?”

  “I thought they were all out in Utah,” Vincent said.

  “That’s what they want you to think,” Elbert said. “We’ve got one here for a few months, while they work on a new casing design.”

  “Show us! Show us!” Kayla yelled, bouncing up and down.

  Rob was a bit leery. He assumed Elbert was trying to impress them by showing off a regular warhead and claiming it was a nuke. But he went along with the gag.

  Chapter 40

  The Dark Star

  He Who Remains Classified reacted angrily to this report. He yanked his Venetian blinds open and closed, as if sending urgent signals to an imagined
executioner. On the horizon, a line of thunderheads massed and mutated. Although he had no problem with shooting heads off the Soviet Politburo, he steamed with righteous indignation at the possibility that a government employee was exposing nuclear armaments to children. Or rather, the other way around. Perhaps he could use this in a speech. An incipient warning of something amiss at America’s core.

  Outside, erratic gusts rerouted a passing flock of starlings. One bird flew smack into his window. He hoped Rob Wangert had called it correctly, that the nuke display was just a charade.

  He poured two fingers of Scotch. It brought some reassurance. In case of a congressional audit, this intelligence report at least proved the value of his Wangert snooping. Threat identified and contained. He Who Remains Classified took prompt action. Through back channels, he made sure that Elbert Jones was severely reprimanded and demoted to a Level 2 clearance. The bastard wouldn’t know what hit him.

  Chapter 41

  Poor Geneva

  Kathryn Chapman’s name and hot-stuff attributes cropped up frequently in the Wangert family phone calls. After Duncan’s fourth or fifth mention of her, Rob began worrying about Geneva. When Anthony noted that Duncan was urging Kathryn to audition for the spring play at Rokeby, Rob jumped in from his station on the basement line, “What about Geneva?”

  “Yes, what about poor Geneva?” Mary echoed.

  Rob added, “You’d been talking about visiting her on the island.”

  With a snickering, playboy tone, Duncan responded, “She’s a nice kid, but hey, what’s wrong with playing the field? I’ll see her next summer.”

  Mary grumbled, “My worst fears about male boarding school.”

  Ward muttered something about “being a gentleman” from the upstairs line.

  “That sounds just like the Big E,” Duncan said.