The Wives of Los Alamos

by TaraShea Nesbit

  IN LINE BEHIND us was our obstetrician, Dr. Kashavarez, and his family, and in front of us was Margaret, who was five months pregnant and who had been chastised earlier that day by Dr. K for gaining twenty-five pounds. His wife was a rail, her eyes gaunt, set far back, with dark semicircles beneath them. Margaret declined the potatoes and we continued down the line, both gazing longingly at the sundaes. One of us said, We lost our baby weight last time so who cares? It was our last day here and after tomorrow we’d never see Dr. K again. We let the hot fudge drop long and slow atop our vanilla scoops but avoided eye contact with him through dinner.

  THE DAYS BECAME caravans of departing Studebakers and Cadillacs. Some of us were going back to England. Or we were staying in New Mexico and buying abandoned cattle ranches, or haciendas, or fishing cabins. A few of us were staying, unfortunately, in our plain green houses. We were designing Western homes made of stone, or adobe, or logs. We were planning brick homes in the Midwest with concrete frames and finished basements.

  AND WE FELT the deflation that comes when one gets what one has wanted: it was not quite what it seemed it would be. We thought of the time when we first arrived, when only a stack of pine boards were all that existed of the houses, when garbage cans overflowed. How dust rose in great clouds beyond the set of older buildings. How we arrived and thought it was not beautiful, though we complimented the mountains to one another.

  WE LEFT WITH more children than we came with and less wedding china. We left with black bowls, bright rugs, needles, thread, and muddy boots on our feet. We looked back on the time of our arrival to Los Alamos, how we felt very young. Some of us thought it was much better then, earlier, before we understood anything, though in our futures there was much more to learn.

  AND IF WE wanted a sentimental good-bye, instead of going directly down the Hill to Santa Fe we drove past Valle Grande—the crater of a volcano, the high mountain roads, the rare dark clouds gathering and the wildflowers blooming in the caldera.

  The Director

  WE LEFT AND the Director would be taken to trial on accusations of disloyalty. Though he was trusted to orchestrate the creation of the atomic bomb, he was now deemed a security risk. Had he consorted with Communists? Was he a spy? We were asked to speak against him and we refused, as did our husbands.

  THE DIRECTOR DID not encourage the creation of a hydrogen bomb, something even more destructive than the atomic bomb. He doubted it was feasible and said it would be too destructive to use in war, even if it would be, he said, technically sweet. Helen’s husband wanted to make this bomb and he wanted to be in charge of it. Her husband spoke against the former Director and told the Senate Committee: One would be wiser not to grant security clearance to Oppenheimer. We thought her husband was bitter for not being chosen for the lab leader way back when, and many of us, including our husbands, said if they were ever alone with him they would give him what for.

  WE FELT BAD for Helen—who somehow had to put up with the bravado, late night piano playing, and ignorance of him. To be the wife of a man that spoke out against the Director, who worked to get the Director’s security clearance revoked, to be the wife of the man who became the father of the superbomb. Her husband was on record, in court, saying: In a great number of cases I have seen Dr. Oppenheimer act—I understood that Dr. Oppenheimer acted—in a way which for me was exceedingly hard to understand. I would personally feel more secure if public matters would rest in other hands.

  AND BECAUSE ALL of Oppenheimer’s business was in the news and for many years he was followed by the FBI, we learned that while he was Director, and married to Kitty, he had flown to California and stayed the night at his former girlfriend’s home. She was a psychologist, a colleague’s daughter, and a Communist. Soon after his visit, she was found dead, and the death was considered a suicide. Her last note said: I wanted to live, but I got paralyzed somehow. This was fascinating and horrifying information, and some of us were not surprised, but what did it all mean?

  THE DIRECTOR’S SECURITY clearance was revoked by the Atomic Energy Commission in 1954 and his office at the White House was terminated. But nine years later, he was given a $50,000 award by the Atomic Energy Commission, an award named after one of our husbands, for his outstanding contributions to theoretical physics and his scientific and administrative leadership. He died, before many, but not all, of our husbands, from cancer, in 1967. The trouble with Oppenheimer, the famous but uninvolved scientist Einstein remarked, was that he loved a woman who did not love him back: the U.S. government.

  Our Children

  OUR CHILDREN LEFT Los Alamos thinking they were a part of something important, and they adopted the language of their fathers and us, or the opposite. They said, during high school debates, It needed to be done! Or, We had no choice! Or, They would have surrendered if we just told them what we could do.

  SOME OF OUR children saved cereal box tops and sent away for atomic bomb rings. They received a plastic ring with a secret compartment so that they could look at flashes caused by atoms splitting like crazy in the sealed warhead chamber. By this time, some of our children had seen the real thing by watching tests in Nevada, and this ring seemed quite inexact. Our daughters wore two-piece bathing suits called bikinis, after Bikini Island, one of the Marshall Islands where several nuclear explosions cratered and irradiated land and sea.

  WE LEFT AND our Davids and Emilys and Marys and Michaels went to college. Our Bills grew their hair past their shoulders. And they came home and said they would not eat food in our house because it was the fruits of war. They said they were purging themselves through anti-nuclear-proliferation protests. We said, Don’t be silly, Mary, and we said, For heaven’s sakes, Michael! but some of us understood their feelings, and some of us said nothing.

  OUR CHILDREN ACCUSED us of only caring about money; they said we forgot about how the rest of the world struggled because we no longer struggled ourselves, if we ever did. They blamed us for New Mexico’s economic reliance on the nuclear industry. They asked their fathers, Don’t you feel guilty? How could you go through with it? And we cringed and we knew what they meant and we wondered that ourselves, or we felt angry and protective and we said, Don’t speak like that to your father. Our husbands answered, saying, No, I don’t feel guilty. It needed to be done. If it wasn’t them it would’ve been us. Or they said, Yes, and quoted the Director: The deep things in science are not found because they are useful, they are found because it was possible to find them.

  WE PONDERED WHAT it would be like to be our daughters, to be living as a woman in another generation, and we felt a bit jealous. We thought our daughters had many more freedoms than we did in choosing a career—they did not have to be schoolteachers or secretaries—in traveling alone—they could just pick up and move across the country—in taking oneself to a movie in the middle of a Sunday afternoon. Or we could see how so many options might render decisions more difficult to make. And when they said, The only way to improve the world is to protest war, we thought them unreasonably idealistic, or we thought them more of what the world needed.

  OUR CHILDREN SAID they would go to jail rather than be drafted. And some of us worried we had spoiled them somehow. Our children said they did not tell their friends what their fathers did because their fathers worked for the man, but we thought that keeping quiet about Los Alamos and the violence or triumph of what our husbands did was not because they felt a sense of responsibility to a collective; rather, they felt the shame of the individual: they were worried about their own reputations. Or all that secret keeping had deeply affected them. The outside world seemed very nosy.

  PERHAPS SOME OF our children did care about their country in the ways some of us understood, and they volunteered for the Vietnam War rather than protesting it, and they came back changed, as we knew they would, though the particulars of those changes were mysterious. Edward was much more tidy and pensive after his return, and married Anne, who worked as a cashier at Dot’s Market and brought us embroide
red napkins. They went on to have four children, and experience the shifts and swings of marriages, but nothing too serious. David appeared more cynical, went back to school to study philosophy, and called himself a poet. Tim moved back in with us, nailed quilts to his bedroom wall to cover the windows, slept during the day, and woke with nightmares. Bobby married, though his wife appeared more and more tired over the years, and he brought a twelve-pack to every family gathering, even Sunday brunch, and we sensed something was not right, but any interference was met with anger. Our children carried concealed weapons, had gun collections, refused to sit with their backs to any window. Or they came home from Vietnam and they were quiet about their time there and we could not tell what effect the war had on them at all, except they seemed more grateful for our macaroni loaf.

  THEY HAD KNOWN war differently than us and our husbands. They had seen death more immediately: the eyes of people whom we called our enemy.

  SOME OF US did not mind that our children no longer went to church or synagogue, some of us thought the fact that our children were gay might make life complicated, or maybe not, and we accepted that our children supported abortion rights. When they brought home brownies they were the best brownies we had ever tasted and after two brownies we felt the tickling of the wind on our cheeks and we just wanted to watch the clouds pass overhead and tell our children how much we loved and admired them. We felt very calm, perhaps even happy.

  OUR CHILDREN GREW up; they became engineers, peace activists, grade school teachers, housewives, photographers, writers, bums. They became landscape painters, vice presidents of banks, psychologists; they became the children we outlived; they became the children who died of lung cancer; they became botanists, directors of physics labs, park rangers, geologists, lawyers, and environmental activists.

  THEY FINISHED COLLEGE and did not see any reason to rush into getting a job or marrying and instead they sold all of their possessions and joined what they called a commune and what we called a cult.

  OUR CHILDREN CLAIMED to be conscientious objectors, they said they were going to bum around Europe with their girlfriends and boyfriends after college, and we objected, You are ruining your life! Or we thought they would not actually do it, so we just raised an eyebrow, but they did just that, they went.

  AND THEY WERE young and we thought they would grow out of it. Or we could see their point, but we did not know of alternatives, or we joined our children in protests. Or to really protest the war our children thought they needed to know more about history and so instead of sit-ins they went to graduate school. Some dropped out, got married, and went back to study biology. And no one was hiring in biology, but Los Alamos was hiring scientists for their computer skills, and we knew people, and our husbands knew people, and so our children moved back to Los Alamos and worked at the lab their fathers worked at, partly, they said, so their own three children could live as close to nature as they had, or to live close to us, their grandparents.

  OUR CHILDREN DID not directly work on bombs, but they built computer programs to assist with bomb making, and they said they felt conflicted, and they said, If I had a perfect freedom of choice I wouldn’t do it, and they said, I just have to put up with some stuff I’m not comfortable with in order to give my kids a good home, and they said, I have to sacrifice some of my conscience for some other benefits.

  THEY SAID THEY didn’t really appreciate what their fathers did until they returned to the Lab to work there themselves. They said their work was of a secret nature but if atomic weapons were used on a new war over oil they would quit their jobs at Los Alamos, they really would.

  OR OUR CHILDREN went to the Marshall Islands as Peace Corps members because though the Marshallese had been evacuated from Bikini Island, they were moved to nearby islands, close enough to atomic testing to birth dead babies, or living babies that they called jellyfish babies for their half-formed limbs. Scientists wondered, What are the effects of nuclear fallout on pregnant women and their fetuses? Now there was evidence. Our children saw that a curtain had been drawn back.

  OUR CHILDREN RETURNED to New Mexico as they always thought they would and we went back to visit them. We went back and we saw a fast food restaurant erected where a lab once was. The guard gate was taken down. We saw many more concrete block lab buildings painted white.

  WHILE OUR CHILDREN were at work we made tea in their sky-lighted houses, fetched the paper from the front steps, and read the New Mexican Reporter with interest. Some residents claimed there was a significant increase in brain cancer in one particular neighborhood close to the canyon, a beloved canyon of ours now disgraced with the nickname Acid Canyon, and some of us thought that was where materials had been dumped, and we did not know what to make of it. We heard that the golf course we had made was given a nice facelift, and that the social groups we started had grown by the hundreds, and we were delighted to be asked for an interview by the Los Alamos Historical Society. On a Friday afternoon we took the public bus, Atomic City Transit, to that lodge we slept in the first day we arrived at Los Alamos in 1943.

  ON OUR BUS ride we passed the visitor center, which was in a strip mall, and we stopped at the science museum. We read about the fused sand, the proliferation of honey pot ants as natural miners of the area; we saw photos of the female scientists enlarged and framed on the walls, images of these women then, during the war years, and now, on their front porches, without their husbands. For goodness’ sake, we said, to no one in particular.

  DURING OUR INTERVIEW we were asked, What was it like? And we answered questions about what it was like then, and we felt a mix of emotions recalling that time: sadness for what was now in the past, but happiness about the recollection. We were pleased to visit the two museums in town and read our own family stories on the walls, to see a copy of a letter we wrote our mother in 1944, how Bobby was doing fine, how we really needed long johns. Inside one museum we saw Nancy’s birth certificate framed with the birth location listed as Post Office Box 1663. And we thought of what was in the letter that we did not say, how we made our voices sound lighter than we felt when writing to our mothers.

  THOUGH NO CAMERAS were allowed at Los Alamos back when we arrived during the war, a few of us brought two cameras and only gave the Army one. And after the war we had these images developed—our children as toddlers, in a row of four, with their shirts off, splashing in the mud; our husbands standing at the top of a mesa with a walking stick they picked up on a hike, our husbands with their strong thighs and goofy smiles; and us, on the horses, our heads tilted back in laughter.

  We Left

  WHO WERE BEFORE the war was still who we were during, and after. Somewhere inside we were still twenty-five, still feisty, emboldened, a riot.

  BUT WE WERE changed.

  WE LEFT AND lectured on atomic energy. We left and wrote autobiographies about life on the Hill. In our memoirs we reported that at Los Alamos there were no unemployed people, no in-laws, no invalids, no poor, and no sidewalks. Our memoirs suggested we knew nothing about what our husbands were building and we were accused of exaggerating how little we knew. But if other wives knew something, they did not tell those secrets to the rest of us, mostly.

  WE LEFT AND many things turned atomic: there was talk of nuclear power generators to replace coal and oil, and that we could sanitize our vegetables by irradiating them. Home furnishings became atomic, too—we bought clocks with rays and spheres showing the path of electrons around the nuclei of atoms.

  WE LEFT AND founded organizations that opposed nuclear weapons. We continued atomic research, we become social workers, we became grandmothers, we became blacklisted. From an essay Robert published in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists many years later we learned what had happened that Christmas Eve we saw him leaving in a rush: when it became clear that the Germans had abandoned their bomb project, and after overhearing the General say the bomb was being built to show Russia what the U.S. could do, Robert asked permission to leave and return to Britain. He be
came the only scientist to leave the project for reasons of conscience. Robert asked in his essay, as we also wondered: Why did others not leave, too?

  OUR HUSBANDS WERE curious. They wanted to know if their theoretical predictions could become a physical reality. They thought thousands of lives would be saved by a quick end to the war. Or perhaps they did not want to take a position because they feared how it might negatively affect their careers. Robert left and used his knowledge of physics to research the biological effects of radiation. He left and argued that all scientific research should be for the benefit for humanity, and that scientists cannot keep scientific curiosity and moral implications separate no matter how difficult it might be to predict how such discoveries might later be used.

  OUR HUSBANDS FLEW to the Marshall Islands and we called them the Bikini scientists. A navy official told Chief Juda, We are testing these bombs for the good of mankind, and to end all world wars. Juda understood the word, mankind, from the Bible and replied, If it is in the name of God, I am willing to let my people go. Marshallese were told they would be able to return after the bombs were dropped but their homes, bicycles, and bathtubs became radioactive. Though they could not return, the radioactivity was fodder for scientific research.