The pilot could not, did not tell his wife why they were in the desert. She complained about his silence, not so much that he withheld the nature of his work, but that he withheld himself. To one man he admitted that he preferred to be among his men or in the air. He seldom spoke with his children. At Christmas he picked up presents at the last minute from the base supply depot. He gave each child a model plane. In many small ways he communicated his distance.
This man and my stepfather were alike in another way too. When he was just a boy my stepfather’s father took him to pool halls. He must have been very small because to practice his first shots he had to stand on a box. But this friendship between father and son was soon interrupted by violence. Again and again for small infractions, or no reason at all, my stepfather’s father beat his son. His mother could not protect him. But she gave him a special tenderness for what he suffered. And he loved her.
This must have been like the love Paul Tibbetts felt for his mother. Enola Gay had given her son a special tenderness to make up for his father’s severity. On the night before he flew over Hiroshima, the pilot remembered that once his mother told him that everything he did would turn out all right, and that was why he named his plane after her.
He was worried that night. There were fears he could tell no one. The crew was trained to fly away from the bomb as fast as possible. In practice sessions they had been able to fly seven miles from the bomb before it was calculated to explode. But the scientists could not promise that at this distance the plane would be safe. While they were trained, the men who were to fly with Paul Tibbetts knew nothing of this fear, nor of the weapon they would carry. But they sensed a danger from the fact that their mission was extraordinary.
Men going into warfare are always going into danger and, knowing this, they enter a realm of recklessness, where many truths—the laws of gravity or the laws of mortality—are suspended as if by this very choice to move toward rather than away from death. There are soldiers’ uniforms on which a figure of death is emblazoned with pride. There are soldiers who wear shrunken heads and ears around their necks, as if embracing death. And, at the same time, as if standing between life and death, soldiers preparing to go for battle will reach out for what they call life as if life were a substance that could be devoured once and for all time.
The battalion of men who readied themselves to drop the bomb over Hiroshima were known as “hell-raisers.” They drank. Claude Eatherly, who flew the weather plane, was famous for his gambling. On his airplane, which he named the Straight Flush, he had drawn a cartoon of a Japanese man immersed in a toilet. Tom Ferebee, the bombardier, was known as a ladies’ man. Near the base at Wendover, many of the men got into trouble in the town, going after other men’s wives, or daughters, or prostitutes.
A man—perhaps he is a soldier, and nearly ready to go into battle—goes to see a prostitute. He goes first to a bar, or to two or three or many bars, and drinks among men. Then when he is tight enough, but still able to walk, still able to feel himself in his sex, he searches, in the last bar, or the neighborhood surrounding it. What is he looking for—a color of hair, the shape of a face, a way of moving, large breasts, or a lean body, light or dark skin—none of this matters. Some bit of her, her laugh, the way she looks, will reach him and eat into his imagination until he is drawn. Not knowing this woman, he is drawn inevitably toward that which he remembers, or that which he has always dreamed of and learned in some way to associate with the turn of a head, the purely physical inflection of a voice. He follows as a force that seems to be hers takes him closer and closer. Who is she? He learns very little. Whatever she tells him she invents. In the darkened rooms where they meet he is not able to tell that she has taken drugs, enough to take the edge away from her awareness, or more, to make her nearly insensible. He will not have to remember her name. She only pretends to learn his name. He may ask to be beaten or to beat her. He may want to caress her, to pull her to him roughly and quickly. Perhaps he asks her to put his sex in her mouth. He may want to swear at her or give her orders. As the sex comes into him a certain sharpness enters his mind, like windows, doors opening. There is a place in him, between his chest and thighs, inside and through and in his belly, his penis, his testicles, that starts to unwind as he grows larger, as if space itself became larger, even infinite, and inside him, like someone dying, images enter his mind unbidden; he is more drunken than drunk, perhaps he cries out, or shouts, he thinks of his own death, he puts his sex, large with wanting, inside her, and despite himself, his body sighs sinking into pleasure and then into more desire as he moves in her, wanting, his skin intense with feeling; he senses death, something in him almost breaking, he may shout again, and then it is warm, it breaks, it is sweet, it is gone. He rolls away from her, surviving. He has vanquished this small death. And now he hardly notices her. His mind is racing back to where he came from. Feeling cold, saying nothing of what he has seen, what he has felt, he stands and puts on his clothes. He will give her money now and quickly make his way back to the street where he can be among the other men again.
The story of atomic warfare began in silence. While scientists designed a nameless weapon, and a battalion of men trained for an unknown mission, a whole city was built in Tennessee whose purpose was hidden.
Is it possible that a mind can break from the weight of what is known and yet unknown? Those who worked in the factories at Oak Ridge were not told that they were making the fissionable material to be used in atomic weapons. Almost none of the military men assigned to this project knew its purpose. But wherever a secret is kept it will make its way, like an object lighter than water and meant to float, to the surface. A navy ensign posted to Oak Ridge suffers a mental breakdown. Is he the repository for the unspoken fears of others? He begins to rave about a terrible weapon that will soon bring about the end of the world. Because his ravings are close to the truth, the navy builds a special wing of the hospital at Oak Ridge for him, staffed with psychiatrists, physicians, orderlies and janitors, each chosen especially for this work, judged trustworthy and able to keep secrets. The ensign is given continual sedation. Whenever he begins to speak, he receives another injection. His family is told that he is on a long mission at sea.
How strange it is that some lives become emblematic of our times. What is it that makes us recognize madness in another? I imagine the speech of this man. He utters only fragments, broken phrases, that do not make sense. Perhaps he repeats the word Terrible over and over, punctuating his speech only occasionally with the word weapon or death. Perhaps he uses the phrase end of the world but surrounded in a labyrinth of personal associations, a childhood name for a brother, a fearful memory from a nightmare, a word known only to him but meant as a key to unlock his private suffering, the experience that sometime in his past broke him. Not only what he says, but also his broken mind evokes a story that is true—neutrons released from atoms fracture other atoms until the circumference does not hold and there is one vast breaking.
Oak Ridge was a closed city. Its occupants had to carry identification badges. They would enter and leave through an armed guardhouse. Regular buses would take wives into Knoxville so that they could carry back the small necessities of life; groceries, a pair of socks, electric light bulbs. Otherwise what they needed was provided for them inside the city walls—schools, churches, movies, dances. The gates stayed closed for three years after the war. When they were opened a parade was arranged down the main street. Marie (“The Body”) McDonald rode in an open car through the gates. She was followed by a brass band. And speeches. At Elza Gate a circle of children cowered into the arms of their parents as they watched a magnesium flare produce a miniature mushroom cloud.
A photograph of this occasion was published in a book celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of Oak Ridge. I was given this book by a woman I met in Oak Ridge last winter. I met her through Lee’s lover, Iris, whose mother she is. I sat in her living room with her and her daughter as she told me the story of
her life. I will call her Edna.
She was born in North Carolina. Both her parents worked in the cotton mills. Her mother started when she was just nine years old. Edna’s grandparents had owned a small farm. Because they had depended on the labor of slaves to work this land, after the Civil War it became useless to them. In 1900 they moved to town. Edna’s grandfather started a small truck farm there, and all the children, including Edna’s mother, were sent to work. Edna’s mother and father met in the mill just before World War I. She was born in 1914.
Her father was a sample weaver. He wove the sample patterns drawn for him by designers. On several occasions he brought home cloth for the family. He wove the cloth for Edna’s first prom dress. It was damask, she told me, with a pattern of white flowers embossed on it. Edna’s father had been orphaned young. His father died when he was six, and his mother when he was twelve. After that he began to wander all over the country. Somewhere, Edna told me, someone must have started him learning. He had no formal education but he was always reading. The range of his interest was wide. Physics. The Apocrypha, or what she called the forgotten books of the Bible. Edna always wanted to know where it was that he had gone as a young man.
My father had little education, and he spoke in the grammar of workingmen, but he had the same hunger to know, a curiosity, and an openness. We would speak of many subjects together, arguing dispassionately, never with rancor. He often agreed with my perceptions, which gave me a confidence rare in a girl.
Edna took after her father, reading and thinking. Her brother Jack was like him too. Edna’s father adored this son. In 1941, against his father’s wishes, Jack enlisted. Later that year, after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, America entered the war. When he heard the news of this attack, Edna’s father had a stroke. And that Christmas Eve he died. Edna believed her father chose to die so that he would not have to suffer the death of his own son. Jack died on D-Day in Normandy. The young man who came to tell Edna’s mother of this death could say nothing. He just sat and cried, as did Edna when she told me of these two deaths. I had asked her what she thought when she learned of the atomic bomb. I didn’t think, she said. I was just glad the war was over.
Edna met her husband before this war, when she was just sixteen. She was already graduated from high school and had gone to work in the hosiery mill. She made the seams of the stockings that eventually were carried by soldiers going overseas. She married at seventeen. Her husband worked in the cotton mill. Bill drank and one night he got into serious trouble. By then they had two children and one more on the way. He said he was forced to do what he did by the two men who gave him a lift. She never knew whether or not he was telling her the truth. The charge was serious because a gun was used. But he was young, so he was sent to reform school, and that was where he learned to be a machinist.
Jobs were hard to find. And then he was offered a job with very good pay. The management paid for the whole family to visit Oak Ridge. They were put up in a hotel, and a limousine came to drive them to the plant. Edna understood almost nothing of what she saw as they passed through the plant. Over the years, her husband told her little. She picked up a bit of information here and there. That uranium is a soft metal when it is machined. That the doctors found high levels of mercury in Bill’s blood. He had dropped a beaker of it and had been tracking it home on the bottoms of his shoes. It was on the carpet where the children played.
He was told to keep the work he did a secret from everyone, even his family. But, like Paul Tibbetts, he was a habitually silent man who seldom talked to his family anyway about what he did or felt. He took after his father, who was an overseer in the cotton mill, and who used to tell his mother, Just so you don’t bother me, that’s all I want.
Bill himself did not know the whole truth, and he accepted this. But his mind worked all the time, even so. He was an intelligent man. He had constructed a valve essential for the manufacture of uranium into fissionable material. He never knew what the valve was for but he pieced together an idea from incidents and rumors. A boy shut out by his father’s silence learns not to ask questions but to find his answers in other ways. One day a man dropped a block of ice while he was delivering it. It fell with a loud crashing sound and the scientists he worked with panicked, running in all directions. From what he gathered to be the truth, he made his own decision. He moved his wife Edna and their children back to Carolina until the war was over. He did not tell her why.
After the war, Edna’s husband returned briefly to Carolina, but he could find no work. Edna stopped working in the mills after her fourth child. The family moved back to Oak Ridge. Now, six of her ten children work there, some as scientists and engineers, tutored by their mother’s love of knowledge. Edna’s husband is retired now with a lung disease the plant doctors tell him came from smoking. A few years ago Edna discovered the stream in back of their house, where the children played and caught fish, was polluted with chemicals and radiation. She and her husband lead separate lives, rarely speaking, except for practical reasons.
I was born in 1943, the year Edna came to Oak Ridge. My mother and father were troubled in their marriage and I was conceived to hold them together. In marrying my mother, my father drew into his life all the hidden sorrows of his childhood and made for me the same circumstances he had suffered. Long before I was born my mother began to have a problem with drinking. This problem grew worse. We shared a house with my mother’s parents. Just as my great-grandmother had dominated her family, so my mother’s mother ruled our household, according to strict ideas of propriety. In an attempt to be free, my parents moved away, but once in their freedom, my mother fell in love with another man. This was scarcely mentioned except in whispers. But it was part of the cause and reason for my sister and me to be separated, as was my father, from our mother. I was six.
For years I lived with my grandmother. My father would come to visit me on weekends. He was often late. And I was often waiting for him. Since his death I have had many dreams in which he returns to me. He comes with many faces, but he is always dead. When he died I had the feeling that he had never really lived, and left the earth, unfinished. We spent many hours together and had many conversations but never once did he speak to me of the pain that I could see at times in his eyes. Repeatedly I asked him to tell me about his childhood. He told me about pranks he pulled, or the day he stole a melon from a neighbor’s garden and was caught, but never once did he say the name of the island where he was born, or speak of his mother. He had a loneliness as of a man who seems in solitary confinement even when among others. Was he a vague presence even to himself, a fragment leaving only traces on the face of this earth, trailing unclaimed ghosts?
One of his ghosts inhabits me. In our hours together I breathed in the irresolution of his unspoken feelings. Like my father, I have committed small suicides daily. Not going to the heart of all I feel, I have erased my real presence, sexuality, intelligence from language and expression.
Perhaps it was because there was so much unspoken between my father and me that we loved to go to the movies. We would go to Grauman’s Chinese, the famous theater where the stars had molded their hands into unsettled concrete. I would fit my smaller hand into these depressions. And then go with my father into the dark theater, where we waited to see the screen light up with color, motion and momentous feeling.
To say one of their names was to evoke a world of feeling. Alan Ladd. We watched them all. Katharine Hepburn. Cary Grant. Brilliant and luminous. They were our icons. Rita Hayworth.
Tilted back away from the camera, so that you can see the line of where her breasts meet, caressed and framed by lace, one shoulder, one thin eyebrow raised, smile of knowing on her face, reddened lips, she rests on the unmade sheets of a bed. The love goddess. Posed for this photograph on a prop bed, wearing a negligee from the wardrobe department, from birth she was groomed to be a film star.
We can all trace the shapes of our lives back to our families. She was as much shaped b
y her father as I was by mine. Eduardo Cansino was a professional dancer. He taught his daughter Margarita all that he knew. Then, at the age of thirteen, she began to dance as his partner. No one in the audience knew she was a child. She was dressed seductively. Onstage they performed a romantic duet, dancing in lockstep, ending faces in profile, kissing. Offstage Eduardo locked her in her dressing room, while he would go to drink and gamble. For years he managed her career, introducing her to men who made films. When she was first married, it was to a man her father’s age, who controlled her in the way her father had done before.
But there was more, another more violent aspect of her education. The duet pictured on the stage had a grim reality, a secret both dancers kept. Throughout those years of her childhood, Rita Hayworth’s father had been raping her.
What is it like for a girl to be forced to keep such a secret? The shame of it invades her. She feels she is the cause of her own suffering, a suffering for which she must make amends in the world, complying ever after with whatever the world asks of her. And she is caught by this shame in a terrible paradox. At the heart of what makes her wrong is her sexuality, but it is this the world demands of her.
I remember the night my father discovered I had made love with a boy. I never saw him so angry with me. He shouted at me. Slapped me. Then, when he tucked me into bed, he put his lips over my ear and blew softly. Who was I to him at this moment? This was the only sexual gesture he ever made toward me. But still, we did our own lockstep. I felt guilty toward him, at his death, as if somehow I had caused it, even, somewhere in an unstated region of my mind, believing that the intensity of my youthful passion, which I could not separate from the intensity of my being, had mortally endangered him.
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