“She’s fine. Just scared.” Lucybelle lifted Georgia to her feet and helped check her for cuts.
“She must have pulled the chair over on her own,” Dorothy said. “To get to the figurines. I’m so sorry. It’s my fault.”
Ruthie clasped a hand at her throat, rasping for air.
“It most certainly is not your fault. This is the most undisciplined child I’ve ever met.” Beverly’s mouth pruned tight and a hot red flushed up her chest and neck, highlighting the pocks on her face.
“For Christ’s sake,” Phyllis nearly shouted. “I can’t believe you don’t have that thing secured to the wall.”
Ruthie dropped into the big leather chair, hunched over, coughing.
“Where’s her inhaler?” Lucybelle asked.
Ruthie gasped, her throat making high choking sounds, as if she couldn’t get any oxygen at all.
“Too late,” Beverly said. She yanked their coats out of the closet, threaded Ruthie’s arms into hers, and moved her out the door.
Georgia’s chubby legs were wrapped around her mother’s waist, her face pressed into her neck, and she was still sobbing. Phyllis sat on the couch and soothed her daughter while the others righted the smashed breakfront and picked up the figurines.
“Only a few are broken,” Dorothy said.
“The breakfront, though.”
“We’ll pay for it all,” Lucybelle said.
“Why don’t the three of you go on home. Geneviève and I’ll wait for them to get back from the hospital.”
“I don’t want to leave you . . .”
“Please,” Dorothy said, and Lucybelle nodded. The sooner she cleared Phyllis and Georgia out of there, the better. She retrieved their coats, handed Phyllis hers, and gave her a little shove toward the door.
But Phyllis circled back into the room and kissed Geneviève on the cheek. “‘Hell is empty and all the devils are here.’” She winked at Dorothy and said, “Shakespeare.”
Dorothy said, “Would you just leave?”
Phyllis drew herself up, as if she were about to deliver a soliloquy, lifted her chin, tilted her head, and like magic, made herself gorgeous. “It was so nice to meet you at last. Good night.”
“It’s five in the afternoon,” Dorothy said.
Lucybelle lifted Georgia and pushed Phyllis out the door.
“That went well,” Phyllis said climbing into the front seat of the Bel Air and settling Georgia in her lap. “I like the professor. Vassar, you say?”
Friday, March 17, 1961
When Lucybelle got home from work, she found two green leprechaun hats, each with a black hatband, on the floor of the front room. One of the hats was smashed in, as if someone had stomped on it. The doors to both her typewriter room and her bedroom were closed. She quietly opened the typewriter room door and found Georgia sound asleep in her crib. She shut the door again and stood in the living room, listening.
She heard hissing whispers. The sound of a belt buckle clanging to the floor. Legs sliding into the fabric of trousers. The bedcovers getting yanked and smoothed.
Phyllis emerged first. “You’re home early.” Then, as if the bedroom door were a stage curtain, she threw it open and said, “This is Tom.”
A man stepped forward still buttoning his shirt, his suit jacket tucked under his arm. “Good day,” he said.
“Out.” Lucybelle jerked her head toward the front door.
“Who’s the bitch?” the man asked.
“Tom!” Phyllis said. “How dare you speak to my sister like that.” Though she hadn’t attempted any steps, she stumbled anyway and fell against the doorjamb.
“Where’s your purse?” Lucybelle asked. “Do you have your purse?”
“How dare you imply that I’m a thief,” the man said.
“My purse . . .” Phyllis gestured at the couch and Lucybelle quickly located her wallet within.
Then she said, “Get out of my apartment.”
“It’s her apartment too. She invited me. You can’t make me leave.”
“Actually,” Phyllis slurred. She slumped to the floor and purposely banged her head against the doorjamb. “It’s hers. Not mine.”
“Suit yourselves. I’m done here.”
Lucybelle locked the door behind Tom and then turned on Phyllis. She felt such disgust that she couldn’t even speak directly to her. She went to the kitchen and drank two big glasses of water, as if she could wash the scene from her system, and then went back into the living room. “I’m taking Georgia to the movies. You’ll clean yourself up. Change my sheets. When you’re sober, we’ll talk about where you’re going.”
Friday, May 26, 1961
“Luceee! You’ve got some ’splainin’ to do.”
She took her time moseying into Bader’s office. “The Ricky Ricardo thing is old. I thought you’d dropped it.”
“Have a drink with me.”
“I can’t.” She’d promised to have drinks with the girls tonight. They’d all been civil with one another but had avoided socializing since Thanksgiving. Lucybelle was glad for the opportunity to make friendly amends. Still, when Ruthie poked her head in her office this morning and said, “I don’t think I need to say it, but sans Phyllis, okay?” it had angered her. As if Beverly and Ruthie’s rigid lifestyle or Dorothy’s poetry-spewing companion and bedridden mother were all that more palatable than her shipwrecked ex with child. God knew what they’d say if she told them about the Tom episode. Obviously she needed to find a solution to the problem, but she couldn’t exactly put a woman with a young child on the street.
“Yes, you can,” Bader said. “It’s an order.”
“I’ll try. Where’re you meeting?” The truth was, she’d love a jolly night out with the scientists.
“Here. Now.” Bader pulled a bottle of whiskey and two tumblers from his bottom drawer, poured a couple of fingers into each. He pushed hers across the desk. She didn’t like whiskey and liked even less what the early afternoon drink portended.
“Look,” he said. “I’m not going to New Hampshire.” Bader feigned a shudder, as if the mere mention of the rural state gave him anxiety tremors.
She nodded. She’d heard. The new management was even less interested in Bader’s ice cores than the previous one. He’d become increasingly outspoken about his impatience with the military uses of his work, the disproportionate piece of the pie that went to preparing for the Russians. He loved joking about Daley’s air-raid sirens after the White Sox pennant win, how so many Chicagoans thought the Russians had attacked. He made fun of these fears, right in the faces of the top brass, and the result was that his passion about climate research was losing, rather than gaining, ground in his employer’s imagination. “There’s a difference,” she’d heard the new director say, right out loud, standing in the foyer, in front of Beverly and Ruthie’s desks, “between science and obsession. If a scientist crosses the line from dispassionate observer to advocating ideologue, then he is no longer a scientist.”
Lucybelle was relieved that he’d brought up the topic of his departure. She scooted to the edge of her chair, took a swig of the whiskey, and said, “I’ve been meaning to talk to you.”
He held up a hand to quiet her. “I’ve convinced them to keep me on contract.”
This was news.
“Despite their inability to recognize the importance of our work, they’ve poured far too much money into it to let it go now. So I’ll be up to Hanover now and then. But I simply can’t live in the boondocks.”
That he wasn’t actually leaving the work, the ice cores, wavered her own decision. But she braced herself against her resolve. “I fully understand. Neither can I.”
“To the contrary. I think you can. You were raised in the boondocks.”
“Exactly. I’m not going back.”
He started as he caught her meaning. He stood up, planted his hands on the desk, and leaned toward her, anger darkening his eyes. “I need you to stay with the lab. I need you to go to Hanover.�
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“I’ve made my decision. I’m sorry.”
He sat again and ran his fingers through his goatee. He kept his eyes on her as he calmed himself, calculated. “I think it’d be the best move for you. I have some motivators too. Some deal sweeteners.”
“Why do you care? You’re not going.” She’d given this so much thought. Moving to Chicago, or at least a short train ride from Chicago, was one thing. Rural New England was quite another. Without Bader, without the fuel of his passion for the ice cores, there was nothing holding her to this job. His leaving had made her decision to leave a lot easier.
“That’s why I need you to go. Some consistency. Someone I can count on. Management is going haywire. It changes every five minutes. I can’t talk to those guys. My ice cores . . .” He closed his eyes, and if she didn’t know him so well, she’d think he was praying.
She reached for her boldest voice and said, “I want to have a life.”
He waved a hand through the air: a life, how trifling. As if she were a petulant child asking for a cookie. “I need you in Hanover. I need you to keep an eye on the ice cores, and on everything else. These fools will use Camp Century to launch a missile at Russia, if you let them.”
“I’m a science editor. I can hardly prevent that.”
Bader threw back his drink and poured another, topping off Lucybelle’s too. “Yes, you can prevent that. You know I hate handing out compliments. I expect ace work every single moment you’re in my department. But the fact of the matter is, you’re the best editor I’ve ever worked with. You actually manage to convince those fools of things they don’t even know they’re being convinced of. You, your reports and funding proposals, make them value what we’re doing. I cannot afford to lose that. I just can’t. We’re this close”—he held up his thumb and forefinger, leaving a space of one centimeter between them—“from getting the technology we need to reach bedrock. Saving us from whatever the Russians want to do tomorrow is nothing compared to the information we’ll get about this planet, saving all of us.
“I’m a terrible advocate for my own goals. I know that. I just piss everyone off. But you’re quiet and steady and brilliant. Words, Lucy, your words: that’s what is going to convince them to keep their eyes on the prize. The real prize.”
He might be a bona fide megalomaniac. His work, her words, saving the planet, mankind. She opened her mouth to say as much, but he interrupted.
“You don’t know men, sugar. They love pushing buttons. They love explosions. But what if we could distract them with the story the ice cores tell? What if we convinced them that the knowledge we’ll gain from our work is more important to our survival than any weapons can ever be?”
“The ice cores,” Lucybelle said, “will tell us the history of the planet’s climate. They won’t stop the Russians or our government from launching anything.”
Bader shook his head. “Nice. A very succinct statement of how everyone else views me: hyperbolic, outsized ego, crazy. But not you, sugar. You can pretend you don’t understand, but you do. I see it in your eyes, in the way you’re holding your mouth this very moment, tight as if you don’t want my medicine. But you do want my medicine. You know it’s the truth. You’re fighting me because it’s a monster responsibility, what we’re doing, convincing the world of its importance. Vital”—he pounded the desktop with his fist—“importance. Who the hell wants to move to Hanover? I understand. You think I don’t, but I do. Of course I do. All I’m asking is that you give it a year or two. Until we get the cores.”
“If it’s so vital, why aren’t you going?”
“I would. Actually, I would. Despite my loathing of small-town America. But the truth of the matter is, I’ve not been ‘invited.’ On contract is the only way they’ll allow me to continue my work. God knows I’d endure even Hanover, if I had to, if it would help me get to bedrock. Don’t you see? This is why I need you there.”
For all his bravado, he drooped for a moment, done in by his own exuberance. He sat with his rumpled shirt and uncombed thick, black hair, staring at her, waiting for her to acquiesce. His chin may have even briefly trembled.
But of course while Lucybelle was softening, while she considered his rare flash of vulnerability, he used the pause to reload.
He straightened his spine and asked, “Have you heard of a woman named Rachel Carson?”
“Of course.”
“She’s working on an extraordinary new book about the ways that man is poisoning the planet. The planet today. Our work is like the control study for hers. The ice cores will be the first ever pure evidence of what exactly the atmosphere was like, a hundred, two hundred, a thousand years ago. I need you to interpret this evidence. I need you to be on the team with me and Rachel Carson.”
She laughed at his reach. “Rachel Carson is not on your team.”
“Our team.” He knew Lucybelle well enough to know that Carson’s name, her brilliance and passion, would be a powerful magnet.
She took a swallow of the whiskey. It burned going down her throat. She’d seen photographs of Rachel Carson. The writer was as slim and as plain as she was. But dogged. Those serious sad eyes on the future, that patient persistence. The only difference between Carson and Bader was their contrasting prim and indecorous demeanors.
Bader saw his opening and smiled. “Do you care about the ice cores?”
She practically felt the hemp of the net falling loosely over her head and shoulders.
“Do you?”
“You know I do.” She looked at her watch, as if the schedule of one day could save her.
“We’ve got all afternoon,” he said. “Relax.”
“I hate men who tell me to relax.”
“You hate when men tell you to relax. You don’t hate the men who do it, because I just did and you rather like me.” He smiled again.
“I’ve got work to do.” She stood up. No one could force her to keep a job, to move anywhere at all. She had a right to—
“Were you really dating a communist sapphist?”
“Now you’re threatening me?”
“Answer the question.”
“I thought you said socialist.”
“Answer the question.”
“You forget. I’m a grief-struck widow.”
“Admit it: going to New Hampshire could solve a few of your problems.”
“I don’t have any secrets.”
He raised his eyebrows. “I didn’t say ‘secrets.’ I said ‘problems.’”
“Are you finished?”
“Here’s the deal. You move to Hanover, we up your pay grade. I’ve already gotten this approved. You get two assistants. And—” He held up a finger and grinned. “Here’s the part you’re going to like. You’re to learn Russian, on paid time.”
“Russian! In preparation for my transfer to Siberia?”
The wolf smile. “If you’re good, we’ll keep you stateside. I’ve already engaged a tutor. His name is Boris.”
“His name is not Boris.”
“It is.”
They both laughed.
“It’s an easy language. You’ll pick it right up.”
“Why?”
“Because I won’t be up there and they need someone to read the studies the Russians are publishing. I’ve convinced them that you’re the perfect choice. Anyway, it’ll clear your record.”
“I don’t have a record.”
“Really? You forget the letters.”
“Letters, plural?”
He nodded.
“From the goon.”
“Yes. Him.” He continued on as cheerfully as if they were discussing breakfast cereal. “If you’re learning Russian, you’ll look like a spy. For us, not them.”
“I’m sorry. But I’m staying in Chicago.”
“You’re forcing me to play hardball.”
“Why can’t you understand the word no?”
“I’ll just say two names. Stella Robinson. Phyllis Dove.”
He
r brain cells did the jitterbug. He was going for a psychological lobotomy.
Bader leaned back in his chair and shrugged. “I think I can help you.”
“You’re trying to blackmail me.”
“I wouldn’t call it blackmail. Maybe adding a bit of incentive to the deal, but seriously, this is as much for you as it is for me. You don’t need that drunken actress in your apartment. As for the taxicab driver, she’s already got a girlfriend.”
“Who are the goons feeding you this garbage?”
“Garbage? That’s what you call your life?”
“Go to hell.”
He shook his head. “Lashing out at me is pointless. You’re the one who’s made a mess of your life. Take the job. At least until you have a clear idea about your next move.”
“You mean at least until we reach bedrock.”
“Exactly. I like how you track.”
Saturday, May 27, 1961
Lucybelle skipped drinks with the girls and went straight home after her little tête-à-tête with Bader. Phyllis and Georgia were out, and if this were like other Friday nights, they’d be gone for hours, if not a couple of days. Lucybelle sat down at her typewriter and began writing.
She wrote against the goons, to keep their tentacles from reaching inside her, to ward off the killer paranoia. They thought they knew her story. She wrote against Whisper Their Love and Odd Girl Out too. Those books didn’t describe her world. She wanted to write a story that did.
The stupid informant didn’t seem to even know that she hadn’t seen Stella in well over a year. Ironically, his outdated intelligence brought back the heartache. Lucybelle missed Stella. She missed having a companion who wasn’t afraid, who explored her own mind and aesthetic, who understood the complexity of lust.
By four thirty in the morning, Lucybelle had written what might be the first chapter of her novel. L’Forte sat on his short haunches, next to her feet, crying. She hadn’t taken him out all night. She stood up, stiff and exhausted, but deeply satisfied.
She and her dog walked in the dark to the lake. A cool breeze blew off the water. She stood on the shore, watching the dim morning light begin to polish the surface of the lake, and smiled thinking of Bader’s hard sell. A life of the mind meant writing her novel. It meant seeing the ice cores through, all the way down to bedrock. Those translucent columns would be like lenses, ones that looked deep into our history, and just as Bader had said, help humanity see its future.
A Thin Bright Line Page 24