Uncle Anton's Atomic Bomb

by Ian Woollen

  After two drinks Ward conscientiously said his goodbyes. He knew that alcohol at first suppressed his cassette-tape fears, then brought them on stronger. The fears played in his head like their own kind of tape loop: “She doesn’t need you anymore. You are a pawn of the unseen. She doesn’t need you anymore. Your biological function is to reproduce and raise your young and now that is done, you are done. She doesn’t need you anymore ….”

  The Little Church on the Circle beckoned next door to the Columbia Club. Ward often paused in the Wangert pew near the front of the dark sanctuary. He missed his friend, the ex-Reverend Paul Tyler, who had renounced his collar after being fired and moved to Mexico to work with runaway children. Ward stared up at the tall, gothic, stained-glass windows, illuminated by the exterior streetlights. Piecing together the biblical narratives in the richly hued mosaics, the same as he’d done as a child, and understanding them as much or as little as before, Ward felt like a medieval nobody. He felt sore afraid. He remembered a conversation with Paul Tyler about the fear of God. Ever the hair-splitting existentialist, Paul explained fear as ‘awe.’ “Those terrified shepherds in the stained glass windows are really just awestruck,” he claimed. For Ward his Fear of the Cassettes was plain old fear, nothing awestruck about it.

  It was fueled by his mother’s reaction to him dressed in the old suits during his visits to her nursing home. “Husband, fetch me more hot chocolate!” she ordered.

  Already tilting into senility, Constance mistakenly thought she was being visited by Ward Sr. She launched into dementia-induced monologues, speaking to her imagined husband about their surviving child. “Be careful now about allowing Wardy to play on those swings! We don’t want to lose him too!”

  Constance’s harangues against clumsy nursemaids and servants made Wardy sound like a brat in knee socks and also revealed that his glorious future was the only reason his parents stayed together. Ward began to wonder if his motivation for wedding a pregnant Mary Stark was more an unconscious perpetuation of his parents’ self-imposed ‘for the sake of the child’ shackles. And instead of asking why his widowed mother never remarried, why not ask why he and Mary were still living in his parents’ house twenty years after his father’s death?

  Ward attempted to expunge his fear by telling himself that it was too late for anything to change, that it was all predestined anyway. His two-drink memory repeatedly coughed up a scene from a bright, spring morning in 1950, before his fateful train ride with Mary, on the porch of a rental house near the Yale campus in New Haven. The lease belonged to He Who Remains Classified. It was a dance weekend. Four Yale boys and four Smithies ended up spending the night together, sprawled on couches and sideways on the beds, and in the morning, despite hangovers, or perhaps aided by their blurry smiles and uninhibited haziness, the party continued. They reveled in a tender dishabille. Lounging in pajamas and borrowed bathrobes, the girls perching on the boys’ laps, they drank pot after pot of coffee, and every drowsy utterance was funny and smart and important. Eventually they spilled out onto the porch, into a crisp, young Atomic Age morning. He Who Remains Classified raised a glass and proposed, “Let’s all live here together forever!” Everyone cheered and toasted.

  On the evenings after his Columbia Club drinks and his prayerful sits in the Wangert pew, Ward wandered back to his office to phone Mary and tell her that he’d be home late. Then he dialed the number of the payphone at the end of the hallway in one of his sons’ dorms. Ward took to placing his own calls anytime during the week and chatting with anyone who answered the phone. He knew the residents on all the dorm floors. He spoke regularly with Anthony’s good friend, Telford Ames, a general’s son from Georgia with rather effeminate, charming, southern phone manners who always had time to chat about rainy day puddles on the floor of the subterranean Yale Station Post Office.

  If Ward had been able to eavesdrop on his wife’s therapy sessions, he would have been shocked to hear that his new penchant for discussing Ivy League football standings with anyone who answered the dorm hall phone was a grave embarrassment to his sons. They each contacted Mary separately to complain about Dad’s annoying habit.

  Mary grappled with how to bring it up to Ward. She discussed it in therapy. Regina Auer advised Mary not to be triangulated and to encourage the boys to deal with their father directly. Mary agreed that it could be an opportunity for them to cooperate as brothers.

  After a brotherly convocation at Swanset selected Anthony as spokesperson, a direct-line phone call came into Ward’s office bright and early the next day.

  “Dad, do you have a minute?” Anthony intoned. “There’s a little something I think we need to discuss.”

  “What would that be?” Ward asked, nervously.

  Anthony brought Ward’s attention directly to their concerns. “Your dorm calls are a bit much, old boy!”

  Ward choked and coughed and said, “What? I didn’t hear you.”

  Anthony firmly repeated his statement, adding the request that he limit his dorm calls to once a month.

  Ward put a self-deprecating slant on the story and tried to turn it into a joke with his Columbia Club buddies. It fed the fires of Cassette Fear and brought him closer than he’d ever been to lifting a tape from Mary’s closet.

  What finally pushed him to commit that sin was a different kind of blow to his middle-aged ego. An excited Mary Stark Wangert arrived home from Regina’s office after a year of therapy and ordered up a martini. Ward shook the drink for her and asked about the session. Mary giddily explained that the session itself had been rather slow. In the middle of it she’d had an awakening. “I was half-listening to another of Regina’s unconditional positive regard speeches and I thought, ‘I could do this’—which is a not-uncommon moment for many psychotherapy patients—but I have decided to act on it.” Raising her glass, she announced, “Mary Stark has figured out what she’s doing with the rest of her life. She is going to be a psychotherapist.”

  In her tone Ward heard a fresh start, youthful determination. He wanted some of it too. Without realizing the irony, he stole a green cassette tape from the back of her closet. He listened to it alone at his office. As fate would have it, the green cassette was the one that would cause him the most trouble. He picked the He Who Remains Classified tape. Painful from the start, he could not turn it off.

  Head in hands, Ward suffered through an hour of hearing Mary—her voice trembling, regretful, yet tinged with nostalgia—describing her affair with the arch-spook. It started with him taking her to a movie premiere, the New York opening of The Day the Earth Stood Still. The movie’s passionate stance on averting nuclear doomsday set the stage for Mary’s recruitment into the Great Issue of the Day, establishing the U.S. as the world’s nuclear policeman. She was smitten. The portrait she painted of her handsome date as a brilliant, global warrior infuriated Ward. It was torture for him to hear the details of Mary’s seduction into the Moscow teaching job. Yet, as consumed as Mary became with him, after arriving in Moscow, she gradually began to have doubts. He acted differently in Moscow. With a raw laugh, Mary confessed to Regina on the tape that she even questioned if perhaps he was a double-agent, a thought sparked by him telling Mary in advance that someone might approach her in the Nordovsky Square.

  This was a shocker for Ward, the kind of burrowing, nefarious, what-if idea, unable to be revealed or repressed, infesting his nethermost being in a toxic way that, according to one emerging medical perspective, could contribute to the etiology of disease. If indeed He Who Remains Classified was a double agent back in the day, that would make him an extremely high-placed threat now. An absurd idea that put Ward in an absurd bind. If he dared mention it to Mary, much less in public, he risked exposing his own treachery.

  Chapter 50

  The Dark Star

  He Who Remains Classified clandestinely obtained a copy of Mary’s latest psychotherapy records, with no one the wiser. As with Ward, the content caused anguish and resentment. At least she had not reve
aled any names—the ungrateful, self-serving cunt!

  He Who Remains Classified spat on the Wangert file folder. He destroyed the snapshot in his wallet. How he could have been so dense? Her accusation that he was a double agent was preposterous, of course, and that piece of fantasy could be shrugged off as typical civilian idiocy.

  He banged his forehead against the office window, scaring away the birds from his feeder. What irked him most was her lopsided description of their affair, making him out to be some kind of predatory animal, as if he had taken advantage of an innocent fawn. Nothing could be further from the vixenish truth. He resented her betrayal more deeply than any of the departmental backstabbing or coup attempts he’d survived. How could she not acknowledge the reality of his passion?

  Her fraudulence added insult to another fresh injury—the discovery of his son’s homosexuality. The reports on Anthony’s political activism had been hard enough. Homosexuality was the last straw. The Wangert family was providing him with an education, all right—a crash course in all that was wrong with the pansy, privileged elite. Maybe James Jesus Angleton was right—may the old sot rest in peace—a Mole of Decay was burrowing deeper into this country than anyone suspected.

  * * *

  PART VII

  * * *

  Chapter 51

  Mary and Ward’s Nighttime Tale

  Mary and Ward flipped the mattress and switched sides in the bed. As insomnia became more frequent and memory less reliable, they’d wake each other at any hour to share fresh material, along with taking a nip or two from the antique silver flask parked in the drawer of Ward’s night table:

  Mikel went to Father Vlod for confession. Usually, it was the other way around. Brother Vlod at the Happy Owl, leaning over the bar, whispering into Mikel’s ear of his weakness for the patrons with parasols. The noise from the cicadas in the trees outside the monastery chapel sounded like sleigh bells. Mikel wanted advice from Father Vlod on how to help Lubya with her too-smart-for-his-own-good son.

  Mikel held the priesthood in high regard. He admired the beards. Brother Vlod’s in particular—red, long, and cropped square at the end.

  Mikel believed he knew the identity of Peter’s father, a traveling knife and tool sharpener who showed up on the estate twice a year and stayed for a couple of rollicking days at the tavern. It was time for Peter to meet his nomadic progenitor.

  Mikel nervously brought up the subject with Lubya. They were gathering gooseberries by the pond. Mikel made the mistake of presenting his idea as coming from Father Vlod, to give it more authority.

  Lubya cried and shook her head and claimed that Peter was a child of God in a way that Mikel would never understand. The next time Master Peter came home from Moscow sporting a thick, adolescent red beard, Mikel realized the truth.

  Mikel waited at night behind the refectory shed, where the monks took turns emptying their garbage. Eventually, it was Father Vlod’s turn. Mikel kicked the bowl of turnip greens out of his hand. He attacked methodically and pummeled each part of the monk’s body. The noise of the cicadas muffled Vlod’s groans. Mikel made no attempt at disguise, so that Father Vlod would get the message.

  After a slow recovery, Brother Vlod began performing gruesome self-flagellations in public. He delivered a series of sermons on divine retribution, and predicted the invention of an awe-inspiring weapon, a gift from God that would expand mankind’s free will, a weapon to cleanse this World of Sin.

  Chapter 52

  Attachment Phenomena

  As long as Rob still resided in Indianapolis, the other two Wangert brothers could pretend to be totally independent. Officially still connected to family and home, Anthony and Duncan unofficially fancied themselves as Citizens of the World. Anthony grew a beard and moved off the Yale campus to an apartment near Wooster Square. Sixty miles away, Duncan, with his sideburns and a newly pierced ear, strutted across the Rokeby campus. They comfortably ignored each other.

  When Rob moved east, the situation changed. Each brother wanted independence, as evidenced by their joint action against Ward’s tipsy dorm phone calls, but they also wanted confirmation from each other of their shared heritage. This took the form of family-lore confabs that allowed them to maintain dual identities as young men of the east and as Indianapolis Wangerts.

  Anthony, in the indestructible Dodge Dart (inherited from his grandparents), drove up to Rokeby once or twice a semester, and sometimes taxied his brothers down for a weekend in New Haven, or over to Kathryn’s house on the Hudson River. Their meetings became a kind of confessional sport. Who could stump the other with family trivia questions?

  These discussions were aided and abetted by Kathryn. She phoned Mary for data to bring up at the next meeting, and having made a pilgrimage to Indianapolis, actively promoted her sister-status in the Wangert clan.

  After dinner, they flopped in lounge chairs amid the hanging vines of Swanset’s solarium. Grateful to see their only-child thus engaged, Lana and Randolph Chapman aided and abetted the proceedings with desserts and liqueurs.

  Exaggerations abounded. Anthony, to everyone’s surprise, mustered impersonations of Rusalka and Elbert. The Vincent Report became a regular feature.

  Rob, more than anyone else, stayed in touch with their Indianapolis friends. The Vincent Report was a cautionary tale on delinquents mired in Naptown. It claimed first spot on the agenda. As self-appointed mistress of ceremonies, Kathryn nudged Rob. “And now, ladies and gentlemen, the latest on Vincent the Wanker.”

  “Vincent is getting more into explosives,” Rob said. “He blew up a dumpster last week. He thinks if he can become an expert in explosives that will win his dad’s respect. Vincent says it will soon be possible to build a nuclear bomb from scratch.”

  “Can’t happen!” Duncan laughed.

  “Yes and no,” Anthony shrugged. “There is a small cult out there who think it can be done from scratch. What the government is most concerned about is something called a ‘dirty bomb,’ meaning not a huge explosion, but lots of toxic radiation.”

  “And that’s the latest, folks! Vincent the Wanker wipes Indianapolis off the map!” Kathryn said.

  The Kayla Report was less prominent, because Kayla actually seemed to be maturing. Ruby found her a job filing X-rays at a doctor’s office, and Rob reported that she’d started in vocational school to become an X-ray tech.

  On the weekends in New Haven, Anthony’s friend, Telford ‘Trip’ Ames, joined the fray. The Yale campus, architecturally a fantastic mishmash of building styles, provided a labyrinth of unexpected nooks and crannies that students individually adopted as their own. Anthony and Telford met by accident. It turned out they adopted the same cranny, an inset stone bench tucked away in the Law Library. Telford used it on Tuesdays between classes to read his mail and newspapers, and Anthony used it for similar purposes on Thursdays, except for the one Tuesday when they collided after lunch. Literally. Telford stumbled and dropped all his books.

  Son of a military socialite and hostess, Telford Ames called on his southern manners to transform this showdown into a bond. He noticed the three newspapers under Anthony’s arm and started a conversation about syndicated columnists. Telford instinctively ‘got’ Anthony Wangert. He loosened him up, often with unplanned pratfalls. Anthony nicknamed him ‘Trip-on-Dirt.’

  An aspiring journalist, Trip had turned the Yale Daily’s dating column into a popular Kinsey-style study. He enjoyed needling the sentimental Wangert brothers at their New Haven meetings: “And now Anthony will tell us about bathing in the crick each morning before walking five miles to his one-room schoolhouse ….”

  “And now Mr. Rob Wangert will relate his adventures in whittling ….”

  “And here is Duncan to describe all the topless action from the infield at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway ….”

  Impervious to the smirks of Trip and Kathryn, the Wangert brothers draped themselves around the second-hand couches in Anthony’s apartment and took this prodding as license to e
xpand their tribal narratives to past generations.

  A percussive rain blew against the windows of Anthony’s Wooster Street apartment, conveniently located near the famous pizzerias. They listened to the tapping, as sharp as gravel, coming in off Long Island Sound.

  “Is that someone knocking at the door?” Duncan asked.

  A long, draughty hallway separated the living room from the front door. Flow charts for Anthony’s latest project—tracking the RAND Corporation’s development of the neutron bomb—covered the walls. Sometimes it took a while to notice the bell or a knock at the door. Trip turned down the music.

  “Did you order a pie?” Rob asked.

  Relying on strength in numbers, they rose en masse and slid down the bare hallway floor in socks. Anthony gazed into the door’s peephole. He stepped back and shrugged quizzically. Trip took a turn with the same result. Rob leaned in, scrunched one eye to the peephole, and quickly undid the chain and the locks.

  A wet, wide-eyed goon with a backpack said, “Uh, hi, man.”

  “Vincent!” Rob exclaimed.

  “I didn’t recognize you,” Anthony said.

  Trip extended a hand and introduced himself. “Good gracious, in the flesh. I’ve heard a lot about you.”

  “I’m running away,” Vincent explained, “and I didn’t know where to run away to, so I figured that was the kind of thing you guys would know. That’s why I came here, you know, to ask where I should run away to.”