OR WHEN WE asked our husband what he had seen one husband said he could not tell us objectively, because though he saw the light, he heard nothing. He had been completely absorbed in something else. This was not surprising to hear. All of his attention had been focused on tearing up little pieces of paper and watching them fall, in order to calculate something. What something? we asked, but he replied, ever mysteriously, Nothing. Though he added, a bit bragging, really, that his calculations were nearly as accurate as precision instruments. And though this method could have seemed far too simple, we were used to our husbands finding plain ways to calculate difficult things, so of course their complete focus on little scraps of paper blowing back in the wind produced correct measurements. They shared what they were proud of, although it was usually too obscurely described to guess at.
ON MONDAY WE read the Santa Fe New Mexican. Amid news of cattle sales, a small mining disaster, and a horse thief on the loose we saw this: On early Sunday morning an accidental explosion at a munitions storage facility in the Alamogordo Bombing Range caused residents nearby to experience shockwaves. Because we were at least partially inside a secret, because our husbands were involved, we had the privilege of knowing this story was a lie. The girls came to clean Monday morning and told us their relatives’ homes farther south had broken windows. Some asked us if we knew what really happened. We were angry that the information we had was not the information the general public had. Or we thought it was best to maintain these kinds of secrets.
We Cheered, We Shuddered
A WEEK WENT by before Beatrice came back. Beatrice! we called, in unison, from our front lawns. She told the General her father had had a miraculous recovery! She told us that before she left her husband had given her a code phrase. And when he wrote a letter to her that included the line, The cat cried all night when you left, she knew it was safe for her to return to Los Alamos. And here she was.
WE RECEIVED LETTERS from our brothers saying they were leaving next week for the Pacific. We hoped our husbands—and whatever they were testing—would hurry up. We told one another it would all be over soon, but of course, none of us were certain.
AND ONE AUGUST morning while we were checking on our flowers, Eleanor peeked her head out the front door. Her hair was still up in curlers and covered with a silk scarf colored with purple lilies. She called from across the street, Turn the news on, Barbara—it’s amazing. Maybe it’s all over, maybe we will all go home, and shut the door.
OR GENEVIEVE TAPPED on our window at ten thirty a.m. She shouted, though we were right in front of her: Our stuff was dropped on Japan. Truman just announced it. Just came over the paging system in the Tech Area. That’s what they must have exploded last month. That’s what she said, Our stuff. Any other word, like bomb, was more than we were ready to admit to; or any other word, like bomb, still felt illicit. We could say it, but we could not say it, either.
WE TURNED ON the radio and heard the newscaster, Kaltenborn—a commentator we appreciated for his consistently more detached and objective perspective—say: The first atomic bomb . . . equal to twenty thousand tons of TNT. A population of three hundred fifty thousand people killed by one bomb. A radius of one mile vaporized. We could hear Kaltenborn’s voice quiver—it never did this—and part of us was sure we were dreaming. This can’t be real, we said, more to ourselves than anyone else.
OUR HUSBANDS WHO could not repair a clogged shower drain. Our husbands who miscalculated the heat loss of old windows versus the cost of new storm windows and left us cold all winter. Our husbands who could not swim or drive a car, who refused to kill the moths that swarmed into our bedrooms.
FOR SOME OF us, our first thought was, It’s over! Our husbands rushed home to listen to the radio while we made lunch. Our children came out from their bedrooms and asked, What is an atomic bomb? We did not know for certain so we looked at our husbands and said almost as a question, That’s what your father made? and our husbands looked at us from across the lunch table and said, It is.
WE CHEERED. WE shuddered. We waited. The Japanese had not surrendered.
AT LUNCHTIME A few days later, we heard a second bomb was dropped, this time over the city of Nagasaki. How many bombs would it take until Japan gave up?
WE KEPT THE radio on during dinner and one night as we ate pork chops we heard President Truman read the Japanese surrender. Emperor Hirohito told his subjects: The enemy has begun to employ a new and most cruel bomb, the power of which to do damage is, indeed, incalculable, taking the toll of many innocent lives. Should we continue to fight, not only would it result in an ultimate collapse and obliteration of the Japanese nation, but also it would lead to the total extinction of human civilization.
WE JUMPED UP and hugged one another and knocked over our children’s glasses of milk. Instead of scraping the plates into the garbage and washing them, we opened the back door and flung them out into the dark night, and they were flying saucers crashing against the shed. A group shouted over the PA system: The War Is Over! We cheered too, but some of us thought privately quite the opposite. Perhaps this was a new scale of human cruelty.
WILLIE HIGGENBOTHAM TOOK out his accordion and began playing, and he led the way through the unmarked, muddy streets. We made a line behind him, and people joined in, and we became a crowd of men and women and children smashing garbage cans and hooting, Hooray!
THE CHEMISTS AMONG us made fireworks to celebrate our victory. We had never seen our whole town so unified, so drunk, so elated, and so loud.
WE WENT FROM house to house until six a.m., we drank and danced, and as day broke we returned home still glowing with the achievements of our husbands and said affections by way of insult: You can build a bomb but you cannot fix a leaky faucet!
THE NEXT DAY we gathered outside the commissary and waited our turn to read the Santa Fe New Mexican. The pages became rumpled and misshapen from all of the readers, and each woman’s fingertips were blotted with ink, which made smudges on our cheeks. Headlines called the bomb a Tool to End All Wars.
FROM THESE ARTICLES we learned information about our town we did not even know ourselves, like how many families were here exactly. Six hundred and twenty, which made the total population in the thousands, and the ratio of civilians to military personnel three to one. How did they know this, one day after the second bomb was dropped, when we, who had lived here three years, did not even know these things?
WE WERE IDENTIFIED on countrywide broadcasts: At Los Alamos, high in the mountains north of Santa Fe, scientists worked to build this bomb. And they named our husbands: Oppenheimer, Segre, Fermi, Bohr, Bradbury, and several others. These were our names, too. How did they know it all so quickly? Where did they get our names? How could they describe the Hill so exactly while reporting from the coast? We went from being concealed to exposed overnight.
AT A TOWN meeting, the Director stood on a wooden platform and looked out into the crowd, a group that had grown from a handful of families to over a thousand people. His pressed suit hung off the sharp edges of his shoulders, his head looked small beneath his wide-brimmed hat, and it was disarming to see him without a cigarette. He was bony, even thinner than before, though we did not think that was possible. He was as slender as a Weimaraner, but he seemed calm.
HE LEANED IN to the microphone, and we heard his voice through the tinny speakers. He began: I don’t have anything to say that will be of an immense encouragement. The thing we made really arrived in the world with such a shattering reality and suddenness that there was no opportunity for the edges to be worn off. If you are a scientist you believe that it is good to find out how the world works; that it is good to find out what the realities are; that it is good to turn over to mankind at large the greatest possible power to control the world and to deal with it according to its lights and its values.
WE FELT ASHAMED, we felt proud, we felt confused. He said, One always has to worry that what people say of their motives is not adequate. We cannot forget our dependenc
e on our fellow men. And he said, finally, A day may come when men and women will curse the name Los Alamos.
HE WAS NOT booed off the stage. We looked around to the faces near us and saw, by who nodded, who smiled, who looked away, who had their arms over their chest, just who shared our feelings.
THE PHARMACY WAS out of medicine for headache, sleeping, and nausea. We were pregnant and wanted something for morning sickness but the nurse said, Sorry, Mrs. Smith, you’ll have to come back next week when we get a new shipment. We slept little and argued more with our husbands. Or we slept little because we stayed up late in bed with our husbands.
OUR FRIENDS BEGAN leaving; we threw good-bye parties each week and wondered when it would be our turn. We thought the dry air and frequent sun had aged us and we worried what we would look like to our friends and family when went back to civilian life, to the college towns and cities we came from.
THE BRITISH THREW a final party—we ate pork pie and peach trifle, we drank red wine and giggled as everyone toasted the Queen. Though it occupied our thoughts, many of our husbands did not talk to us about the ethics or morality of what they had done.
OUR HUSBANDS SLEPT late and stayed in bed reading. We came into the bedroom at noon and told them we had bought apples, potatoes, chicken, and it was hailing. They looked up and said, Okay, and looked back down at the paper.
OR WE REMAINED in bed with them, talking through the night to make up for the time when we could barely speak. We learned there was a great argument about the bomb: many of our husbands had not wanted to release it where there were people, or had wanted to pretend they could not make it at all, especially after Germany surrendered. Should we try not to succeed? an organizing husband asked, saying there was enough time for them to join hands in asserting that the bomb was not possible to build. Another husband replied, Just drop it on Home Island to show Russia what we can do. Were there murmurs in the crowd? Was there a pause? The Director spoke: Let’s just finish it and give it to the UN. Leave science to scientists and politics to politicians.
WHEN TALKING TO our husbands we cried, yelled, kissed, and apologized. Or we did not, because we had grown accustomed to the new silence between us, and we no longer knew how to speak to each other candidly. Our husbands said, The world knowing the bomb exists is the best hope for peace. We felt personally responsible and lost our appetite. Or we could finally eat.
Us
SOME OF US felt more distant from the group; there were those of us who felt far away from the cheering and there were those of us who were happy to be a part of it. Because we disagreed with one another, over coffee, over tea, when in line at the commissary we would whisper to ourselves, There’s Esther, and recall her saying, Our husbands lied to us, or, There’s Laura, and think of her saying, We didn’t start the war, we finished it.
WE LEARNED tube alloy was the code name for plutonium. On the way to Santa Fe we shouted Plutonium! Uranium fission! and all the other words we had not been able to say until now. Our children sang Atomic Bomb, Atomic Bomb to the tune of O Christmas Tree though it was only September. September and the Japanese had signed the final Instrument of Surrender aboard the battleship USS Missouri. We felt a part of something, and the guard shining the flashlight in the backseat of the car, which was once an annoyance, or a fear, had now become a comforting indication that we were home.
IN THE NEWSPAPER, next to the story that Mrs. Giyon was robbed of the money hidden under her pillow as she slept last Friday night and an announcement that tomato juice was taken off the ration list, were tales about our own town: Their babies are born in a P.O. Box! They throw wild parties with lab alcohol! We saw our own lives from an outsider’s perspective, with embellishments meant to fascinate and horrify: wild parties, lots of babies, you know what that means! Likely due to the rush to get the stories out, there were several misspellings, even in the headlines, such as: Now the Stoories of the Hill Can Be Told.
WE ARGUED OVER what should happen next to the Hill. Some of us said, Peace research is the only way to atone. Some of us said, Nuclear research is the only way to ensure peace. And some of us said, Nothing, absolutely nothing, should happen here. We should leave those jeeps to rust.
WE THOUGHT OF each window we had once hated, breaking. We thought of the weeds growing up and consuming the barbed wire fences. We should leave as quickly as possible, the Director told us, and some of us agreed. Let each home sink deep into the mud, Katherine said. Then, when nature has consumed the buildings, let tour guides take over.
SOME OF US no longer thought our little town was an escape from a harsh modern world. Some of us no longer thought of this place as Shangri-La.
A FEW OF our husbands returned from Japan with pictures of what had happened. We sat on the gymnasium floor or on the hay bales and watched the slides projected on the screen. The images were of barely discernible bodies. Our husbands described the people they photographed as if they were not people, but specimens: Those that did not die instantly, if they were close enough to ground zero, did so within a few days. Here is a child’s arm in the rubble. Notice the effect of radiation. We saw permanent flat shadows where a man once sat on the steps of the Sumitomo Bank, waiting for his shift to begin. We saw skin bubbled up where a face once was. Survivors in the streets, thirsting for water, opened their mouths. The now radioactive rain streamed black down their necks. A man standing by a river cupped his left eyeball in his hand. Warblers had ignited in midflight miles away. A rose pattern burned out of a schoolgirl’s blouse and made a floral tattoo on her shoulder. Had the world gone mad? We went home and held our children.
After
WE NEVER IN a million years thought we would find ourselves talking about a governmental report as if it was book club reading. But sure enough, within a week, we were perusing Atomic Energy for Military Purposes: The Official Report on the Development of the Atomic Bomb Under the Auspices of the United States Government, 1940–1945, written by Henry Smyth, chairman of the physics department at Columbia, and just released to the public. We opened it up and our eyes caught on this sentence: The ultimate responsibility for our nation’s policy rests on its citizens and they can discharge such responsibilities wisely only if they are informed. We continued reading, although it was a very technical document that lacked the emotional stories some of us preferred, so we stopped, or we kept at it, because in there were our husbands, and what, exactly, they had done.
HOW COULD WE not have known? How could we not have fully known? In retrospect, there were maybe more hints than we cared to let ourselves consider: back in Chicago, our husband’s colleague told us, Don’t be afraid of becoming a widow, if your husband blows up you will, too. We remembered the excitement in 1939 surrounding the news that a chain reaction was possible—a bottle of Chianti was passed around and signed by all of the scientists involved. Did we turn away from the clues because our questions would be met with silence? Or because in some deep way we did not want to know?
OR PERHAPS WE knew this might happen all along, but we never wanted to admit it.
WE ARGUED SMYTH’S points as well as one another’s. When we read, This weapon has been created not by the devilish inspiration of some warped genius but by the arduous labor of thousands of men and women working for the safety of their country, many of us agreed and some of us thought of ourselves, of the work we did—in the Tech Area, in the home, in the community—and we thought, Well, yes, everyday men and women built this thing, but we had no idea what we were building. Like many who sacrifice something, we felt loyalty toward the outcome. We know how it can sound: how awful that we did not think of the repercussions. But we were not living in hindsight. What many of us saw, and what our husbands saw, was this: what they had been working on for three or more years had worked. It was a relief.
SOME SAID THE report shared too much about how the bombs were made, but many of us appreciated that the military had had the foresight to have so much information ready to share as soon as the bombs were us
ed. The report ended with a call to consider the weight of the situation.
OUR HUSBANDS CROWDED and compressed metals until the close proximity created a surplus of energy, and that energy made grand explosions. From the splitting—fission—of uranium they created Little Boy, and from the separating of a new element, plutonium, they made Fat Man.
A FEW OF our husbands went to Washington to tell congressmen how the bomb they made should be handled, saying that it should be given to the United Nations. They were ignored and our husbands returned, deflated or determined, and said, The U.S. government is a bunch of idiots.
WE READ NEWSPAPER articles to one another that described the areas of large cities that would be destroyed if the U.S. were to be attacked by a nuclear bomb. We said, I’m worried for our children, and we said, I’m worried about what we’ve done, and we said, I’m worried about peace.
THERE WERE BUSHELS of letters for us now—congratulatory letters from our friends and family—sent as soon as they heard the news that we were building bombs. Letters arrived from old friends whose husbands were doing their own covert activities, too, at different locations and in different capacities—Helen’s husband Max was working on something related to that work outside of Richland, Washington, and Joan’s husband Ely was doing something in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. It had not occurred to us that we weren’t the only ones in secret towns doing secret work. How silly our cryptic letters seemed now. We received cards from strangers and even one signed by the President thanking us for our contribution to the war effort. Our children took to calling the new weapon Dad’s Bomb and bragged to one another about how they knew all along what was going to happen, how they were great secret-keepers.
The Wives of Los Alamos Page 12