WE REPORTED THE incident to the Army and told everyone what happened; as far as we know he was never caught. And though we talked of who might be a spy, the real spy among us was someone we never suspected. He did not come up in our conversations, except to say he was quiet. Instead, we dined together on Sunday evenings; he seemed to enjoy playing murder mystery games and charades like the rest of us; he did not talk too much and he listened to us well beyond the limits of our husbands’ patience. We thought he was just shy. He babysat our children while we went to dinner at the Director’s house; he gave us new records for Christmas because we had complained we did not have enough to dance to. Our husbands described him as bright in the Lab. We had liked him very much, except for Marge who had said, He sits in the corner at parties and doesn’t laugh but has that high-pitched giggle. Gives me the chills.
Our Older Children
MANY OF US had no children when we arrived, or toddlers, but some of us were older, and when we arrived our children were nine and now they were eleven. Or we arrived and they were one of the few thirteen-year-olds and now they were fifteen. It was terrifying.
OUR NELLS PLAYED basketball in the gymnasium; our Timothys told the Army private who was also their Phys Ed teacher, when reprimanded for throwing stones, Do you know who my dad is? We hoped he said he didn’t care. Our Jims built tree houses and hid ham radios from the guards in the woods.
WE WANTED OUR children’s school to have everything: piano, horseback riding, French, physics, tennis. Or we thought they would be overindulged and we were relieved that they were learning side by side with children of carpenters, technicians, and truck drivers, and we were happy they were learning how to cut wood, make fires, and make do with one pair of boots.
OUR MICHAELS AND Lindas put Limburger cheese in the desk drawers of teachers they did not like. Our Janets refused to march as the WACs demanded. Our Betties and Jo Anns square-danced in gingham dresses across Fuller Lodge. On Friday nights they loved to go to the mess hall for steak dinners because on steak dinner nights our husbands, their fathers, who were less often coming home for dinner, would be there.
OUR TEENAGE DAUGHTERS had left behind their friends and their boyfriends, our teenage daughters smiled too long at the soldiers and we warned the officers to keep an eye on their men and we warned our daughters we were watching them. Our teenage daughters read magazines that taught them how to look from under their lashes. Our teenage daughters skipped classes to kiss the soldiers, who were more protective of them than we would have imagined, and our teenage daughters felt guilty in ways we hoped they would. Our daughters knew they could not bring these soldiers home. And though they necked with the young single scientists, too, the young scientists did not take them seriously the way the soldiers did. Our daughters with their bodies in the shapes ours once were, with their defiance, with their hunger, with their longing. We took away their passes off the Hill.
OUR CHILDREN WERE mad at their fathers for telling them nothing, for disappearing into the Tech Area, and they spoke unkindly to their fathers, saying, Hi, or, Nice to see ya, without looking up, and under their breath they added, finally. And sometimes our husbands slammed their fists hard on the table, which shook the mashed potatoes.
OUR TEENAGERS WERE better than us at outfoxing the guards. They bribed the military police with beer and stole Army jeeps and some boys rolled them off the steep edges of the canyons. And even though we thought we were smart, holding on to our daughters’ identification so they could not sneak off the Hill at night, we did not know that some of our teenage daughters just hid in the trunk of someone else’s car and quickly they were off to Santa Fe, to Española, to someplace in the desert where they could do exactly what they wanted until daybreak.
The Hush
THE COOLNESS OF spring turned into the sweat-beading heat of summer, and we felt the climax coming but we did not know what it would be or when it would happen. We had been here a year, some of us two, and our brothers, nephews, or cousins had been in the war four years. In April, Hitler committed suicide in a bunker beneath the rubble of Berlin. And when Germany surrendered a few days later, we were a town of parades and cowbells and cheering. Wouldn’t the end of the European theater stop the work at Los Alamos?
IT WAS QUICKLY apparent that no, the work here was not done, and our husbands were gone for even longer hours. The anxiety we had about the war in Europe was transferred to the Pacific. We refocused our attention to the fits and starts of progress against Japan. It was all the same news practically—a little forward, a little behind. Our first nieces and nephews were born without us and our parents wrote asking if we could visit for a short vacation. The answer was always, sadly, No.
WE FELT OUR husbands’ agitation in how they closed doors or walked across the living room. The sighs they made while opening the refrigerator, the curses they gave to the shower handles. There was nothing we could do to comfort them, and their abrupt movements caused our own necks to tighten. We had no outside network—friends from another town, family members, ladies from a watercolor class—to diffuse the growing stiffness in our bodies, so we relied on one another, the other wives.
IN THE AFTERNOONS the temperature rose to a hundred. We became testy. It was Hurry! Hurry! Hurry! from the WACs in the checkout lane, at the post office, in the school yard. We all moved at a faster pace as we walked and therefore we dropped things—a breakfast plate slid from our hands and grazed our toes. Our vocabulary of curse words expanded.
ONE WIFE, BEATRICE, left to visit her parents in Kansas because her husband told the General her father was dying. She told us her husband was sending her away but she did not know why—she said her father was in fine health.
WHEN OUR HUSBANDS came home their eyes would meet ours but be someplace far, far away. Their voices were stern and they said, Make me another drink, or, What did you do that for? And they no longer—if we are to be honest—they no longer made love to us. We slipped off our clothes before turning off the lights, we glanced back at them over our shoulders, we pressed our breasts against their turned backs and many of them said nothing, did not even move. Or they said, Not tonight. We lay on our backs in the dark, embarrassed, counting our breaths, not falling asleep, worrying that they had taken a lover.
WE THOUGHT ABOUT the female scientist who played the clarinet and could not sit still and whose girdle was too tight. We did not have access to hair color and we were now growing gray, but we thought it might do us good to cut back on sweets. We did not talk to our girlfriends about this. We thought of Jane, who was perpetually pregnant, who did not seem to have this problem, who arrived at our doors glowing in the morning saying, So sorry I’m late!
WE THOUGHT OF one another. Margaret with the best décolletage. Starla who had the most charm, who could make even Harold—Harold with the constant scowl—appear comfortable and happy in her company.
OR IT COULD just be the war.
WE GATHERED AT one another’s houses in the morning. We said, Sit down, do tell. Louise passed the sugar and said, without looking up, Frank’s been inoculated for island diseases. We all knew the U.S. troops were in Okinawa, still fighting, somewhat unsuccessfully. We did not want our husbands to go there.
WE LEANED IN, touched her arm, and her eyes filled with tears. We had taken to calling one another Chiquita following bad news, which we learned from our maids. He’s leaving tomorrow? we said, frowning. I don’t envy you, Chiquita. We knew something was coming. We conspired to find out what it was.
TO DISCOVER WHO else was leaving we got close to everyone’s husbands, made our voice a whisper, as if to tell these men a good story, and instead of telling them anything, we squeezed their biceps. The ones that were not going to the Pacific thought we were flirting with them and said, Hey there! and pinched us back. Maybe we were flirting. We told them they were strong. The husbands that were going to the Pacific winced where they were still healing from the shots. We reported this news back to the others.
UNKNOWN THINGS WERE happening. Explosions increased on the Pajarita Plateau, men were going south for three days a week, to who knows where, and some were leaving for overseas.
THE MILITARY POLICE began stopping us at night, shining flashlights into our eyes again as if it was the first day we arrived here, and not two and a half years later, as if they did not know us. Halt! Who goes there? they demanded. It’s just us, Willard, we replied. They did not like us calling them by their first names just as much as we did not like them nosing around in our business, insisting on knowing our whereabouts. And as the military became stricter with us, and we complained, Ruth commented, They are just bored babies. None of them will ever become a hero here.
ONE NIGHT WHEN when we returned home from a PTA meeting our husbands told us Japan was withdrawing from China, and this must mean Japan was weakening, and we thought, He might not go to the Pacific after all. The wind made melancholy sounds through the tall pines and some of our husbands left anyway.
BY JUNE WE heard the Japanese Army had given the Okinawans hand grenades and directed them to blow themselves up. Could you imagine? we asked one another. We heard of parents holding their children’s hands and jumping off cliffs. As U.S. troops got closer, the suicides by Japanese soldiers and Okinawans increased. Within a few weeks the U.S. completely occupied the island.
A Night Passing
ON THE FIRST weekend in July our husbands announced they were leaving us for a couple of days. They said, I need a thermos of coffee and a bag lunch. Be home on Sunday. When we presented them with a thermos and a turkey sandwich, instead of saying thanks and rushing out the door they stopped and looked at us. They looked us in the eyes. They raised their hand to our cheek and we felt it was damp, or it was chilled. They said, I love you. We scanned their faces, we asked, What’s going on? Our question was met not with an answer, but a kiss. Their faces became blurred before us. Why were we crying? We knew somehow that they were afraid. They were walking out the door with a thermos and a bag lunch, and we did not know where they were going.
BUT NOT ALL of our husbands left us that weekend. A few of us, the pregnant ones, the ones, perhaps, with more sensitive or more nervous husbands, were told to pack for a camping trip. We said good-bye to Margaret and Ingrid, a bit confused about why some people were going away for the weekend and some were not. People who had left months prior for academic work returned with their families, saying they were just in town for the weekend.
A COUPLE OF our husbands took us to a spot along the river in the Sangre de Cristos to camp. We would have slept well but our husbands slept little, and in the middle of the night they sat up, as if startled, which startled us, though there was nothing startling happening outside our tent. What is it? we asked. And they said something, more to themselves than to us, and we could not make out the words. We said, What are you saying, Jack?
IN THE MORNING our husbands pulled the sleeping bag over their heads and did not want to get out of the tent until midday, until the sun trapped the heat inside the tent, and they emerged with deep sleep lines on their cheeks and sweat dripping down their chins.
WE DROVE BACK to Los Alamos, eager to find out what we had missed.
THOUGH MOST OF our husbands left for the weekend without giving us any clues, one husband, Bernard, told his wife, as he held the front door open for a final good-bye, holding his brown bag with two ham sandwiches: You might see something if you stay up all night.
AND AGNES WAS not afraid and she called a meeting. We gathered our clues. We compared notes about when our husbands came and went, pulled out the map, and tried to guess how far they had traveled and where they had gone. It seemed that all the important people had left for the weekend except us. We developed a plan: we would watch whatever it was from the porches of our houses. Whatever it was, we would experience it together.
WE LOOKED TOWARD the Jemez Mountains in the late afternoon and again in the evening. The sky was made of watercolors: pretty, but nothing unordinary. We cooked dinner, the sun descended, we put our children to bed. We sneaked over to Agnes’s, hoping our children would not wake.
OR INSTEAD WE fell asleep on our children’s beds with The Brothers Grimm in our hands. Or we were not invited over by Agnes because she did not like us, which we had considered, though we did not know what we had done wrong. Others of us did not even realize there was something to watch.
MANY OF US convened at midnight on Agnes’s porch. The air was cold, although it was July, and this was a fact about the desert we had finally gotten used to. We huddled into one another and thought about our husbands standing hundreds of miles away, probably, with the other scientists, maybe feeling expectant, or maybe feeling scared.
IT WAS A new moon, and as our eyes grew accustomed to the dark, the surroundings became less and less invisible. There was a chance, given the grave way they’d said good-bye to us that morning, that our husbands would never come home. We did not say this aloud. Instead, we smoked cigarettes and passed a flask, or declined one. We told jokes, we complained, we talked as if it were any day. We asked Katherine, How do you always look so put together? And she told us a needle, thread, cleaning fluid, a clothing brush and a good iron were her secrets. Virginia talked about her love for Ireland. Mildred made sure the whiskey went around. Evelyn wore that purple felt swagger brim hat, which was gorgeous, if a little overdressed for the occasion, and we gave her a crosswise look we hoped she could not see but later we noticed she withdrew from conversation.
MIDNIGHT, ONE A.M., two a.m., three a.m., four. Nothing unusual was happening in the dark sky. The wind ceased. The desert was still. Some of us found this noiselessness unsettling and filled the space with nervous laughter or commentary that stated the obvious—It’s cold out here or It’s so quiet. And some of us found it calming and wished Katherine would stop being so chatty; others did not pay any mind to the quiet, or the talking, and felt at ease.
AT DAWN, INGRID pointed and whispered Look! Far off, we could see the trees on the hillside, though the sun had not risen. It looked like a flickering bulb behind the hills. Would it stop? The cloud our husbands had made reached the natural clouds in the dawning sky. How far could it go? The explosion came to our eyes but not to our ears. Those asleep near us had no idea what was happening. The land was dark before, and now it was light and we knew: our town had made something as strong and bright as the sun.
WE STOOD HOLDING one another. We took deep breaths. We held our breath. We yelled. We thought it was awful, or triumphant, or beautiful, or all of the above. On this place formed millions of years ago by a huge eruption, our husbands had just made their own. We could not see what you can, our husbands jittery in welding glasses, pacing, saying, Now we’re all sons of bitches.
WE CELEBRATED BY toasting our men who were not there, toasting ourselves, toasting a hopeful end to the war. And we went back home and fell asleep in our beds, without our husbands.
ON SUNDAY THEY came home blind in one eye, or red-faced, as if they had stood in the sun all day. We thought they would finally tell us something but before we could ask any questions our sons or daughters interrupted by coming into the kitchen and saying, Can I have my peanut butter sandwich now, please?
AND WHEN WE gave them their sandwich and they walked outside with it we said to our husbands, What is it? And our husbands said, Let me get some rest. Then we can talk. Or our husbands came back smiling and gave us a V for victory sign. What have you heard? they asked us. We told them what we suspected. They mocked our ideas but told us to keep them to ourselves, so we knew we were on to something. Or our husbands ate chicken soup and went to bed. Or our husbands came home filthy and went straight to the shower. And while they were in the shower we gathered at Harriet’s. Can’t stay long, he’ll want to go right to bed when he gets out, but let’s have a drink in the meantime.
WE HEARD THAT the General told security officers to keep the explosion quiet from the wives. How little he knew. Harriet handed out glasses and we said w
hat we would do when we returned home. We began to let ourselves, finally, feel the deep sorrow we had been fighting back, once we knew there was a good chance it would all be over soon. We still did not share our greatest secret, experienced by many but said to no one: how sometimes we felt deeply alone.
CAL ARRIVED AT Harriet’s door and we poured him a drink and pounded him with questions. He was a son of a missionary and grew up in Japan, and he told us what the multicolored explosion looked like up close, and he told us of the heat: A fiery eyeball . . . it grew arms, like a giant jellyfish rising from the desert. It was purple and went up and up. Made a rumbling whirl and all the mountains rumbled with it. My face was hot.
WE ASKED HIM, How will they use it? He said he could not say, which suggested both that he knew and that he did not know. He told us little that was useful, really, but we all still speculated about the end of the war. We went back home and nudged our husbands from sleep, and they said, Just be patient. You’ll know soon.
The Wives of Los Alamos Page 11