“You hardly led them off the track. You told them about Lorraine Hansberry’s party. About my relationships with Phyllis and Stella. What exactly didn’t you tell them?”
Dorothy stood and walked into the kitchen. When she returned, she had the bottle of gin. “Refill?” Apparently she intended to pour right from the bottle, no vermouth, no ice, no olive.
“No. I’m leaving.”
“We haven’t had dinner.”
“I’m not hungry.”
She poured gin into her own glass and sat down, this time right beside Lucybelle. “Don’t worry. You’re safe now. We’re safe.”
A deep shudder rocked Lucybelle from her esophagus to her kidneys. To think she’d slept with this woman.
Dorothy put a hand on her forearm. “I want you to understand. That’s why I’m telling you all of this. I was protecting you. I was trying to keep you safe.”
“You went to Stella and Wanda’s house. You asked Stella about Camp Century.”
“Aha! So you had told her. I suspected as much. You’re naïve, Lucy. You’re so trusting. Thank god I intervened.”
Lucybelle found no words to answer the enormity of what she was hearing. She felt as if Dorothy’s revelations were vaporizing her. Her entire being puffing into a gas, disappearing into the atmosphere. She couldn’t feel her legs enough to stand.
“I know my nature,” Dorothy said, her voice deepening with feeling. “I know you think I don’t. But I do. And here we are, in the boonies. Alone. We single girls need to stick together.” Dorothy leaned forward and put her mouth on Lucybelle’s. The press of her lips aroused a kind of terror, and for the briefest moment Lucybelle kissed her back, the warp of shame gravitational in its attraction.
Then, like a visitation from a god she didn’t even believe in, sensations of salvation came to her rescue. The camera capturing light and defying fear. The reverberating voice of Reverend King: no lie can live forever. The messages in Bader’s falling snowflakes.
She stood abruptly, their mouths sliding apart, grabbed her coat, and ran.
Monday, March 29, 1965
On Monday morning, Lucybelle received a sealed envelope via the internal CRREL mail system. Inside, on a piece of lined notebook paper, were ten words: “Seriously. Think about it. You and me. It would work.”
Monday, October 18, 1965
A package addressed with the familiar blocky lettering, and bearing no information about the sender, arrived in her 9 Placid Square Street home mailbox. Inside was a new novel, Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing, by a May Sarton.
A note taped to the front of the book read, “You’re right to have left that night. And to have ignored my note the following Monday. And to have steered clear of me ever since. Absolutely right. Please accept my full apologies.”
Of course she hadn’t signed the note.
It had been six months since Dorothy’s divulgence, and still Lucybelle felt dizzy with the disorientation of deception. They’d shared so much laughter. Pocahontas and her mother. That night of joyous, yes it had been joyous, sex. Sure, they’d drifted apart; Dorothy’s newfound piety had slid like an avalanche between them; and yet somehow Lucybelle had trusted, had believed in Dorothy’s basic goodness. She still did. Despite the betrayal. The woman was doing ever so much more damage to herself than to anyone else. Every time Lucybelle wondered if she ought to tell Bader, she realized that there would be no point. He would probably just laugh; he’d had no idea who’d fed the goons their information. She thought of telling Phyllis and Ruthie too, but why upset them? Dorothy had been a mere cog, and now she was a discarded one.
Lucybelle dropped both the book and the note into her metal wastepaper bin. She set the bin on the kitchen floor and lit a match. She dropped the match into the bin. Flames leapt up the sides of the cylinder, as if the contents were especially incendiary. But she couldn’t bear to burn a book. In fact, she wanted the book; what she didn’t want was a gift from Dorothy. She reached in and pulled out the novel. She put it on the floor and stomped on the page edges that were already alight, putting out the fire. Her thumb, she realized, was badly burned.
Winter 1965–66
Lucybelle and Vera could talk about anything. Willa Cather and Greenland, the ice cores and infrared imaging, the homophile rights movements burgeoning in New York and San Francisco, their families and religious upbringings.
Anything except the impending move to Washington, D.C.
Lucybelle tried. “What about your pond?”
“I’m never here anyway.”
She couldn’t bring herself to ask, again, “What about me?”
A tangled paradox rooted their very relationship. They’d fallen in love with each other’s intelligence and independence, so that the harder they loved—love being an irrational expression that involved driving into snow-banks, talking all night when one should be working, crying out in physical ecstasy—the more it weakened their bond. They were both women who’d chosen lives of the mind, who’d always believed that they could not have both intellectual and emotional fulfillment. If Vera’s life of the mind was taking her to Washington, then by the very terms of their personal identities and even relationship, that meant the end.
In the meantime, whenever Vera was out of town, which was often, Lucybelle missed her acutely. She dreaded the day when CRREL would announce that they were ready to move the Photographic Interpretation Research Division. The authorities hadn’t yet named a date. Maybe, the colonel said, next fall.
So they had time. A few months. Maybe even a year. They proceeded as if that were their allotment, all they would get, as if the time were a surprising gift, but not something they should count on.
Sometimes the future looked like a bleak white place. A blank.
Still, they immersed themselves in work and each other, and the months slid by in days of revelatory euphoria followed, sometimes, by painful distances. They didn’t bother much with arguing after the first year. What was the point? They loved each other too much to separate until they had to separate.
At times the problem seemed almost mathematical. Lucybelle thought there ought be a formula she could use to work it out. Once, quite spontaneously, she confessed her love for Vera to the most unlikely person in the lab, Russell Woo, maybe because of his extraordinary understanding of the laws of the universe. He accepted the news with a nod, as he might accept a new finding in the lab. She told Vera she’d told him, that she hadn’t known why she had done so, and Vera smiled and said, “I like Russell.”
Lucybelle tried looking for answers in other couples. Beverly and Ruthie managed, having recovered from the State Department scandal, but they persevered like alpine trees, twisted and stunted as they survived the rarified air and lack of nutrients. Stella and Wanda, though, they were living out in front of the line. Lucybelle wished she could call Stella, ask her how they did it. Courage, certainly. But there had to be other ingredients, a set of helpful instructions. There had to be a way.
The best Lucybelle could come up with was a nearly hallucinatory fantasy. She and Vera would go up in an airplane and disappear forever, like Amelia Earhart, crash-landing on a tropical island where they’d drink coconut milk and spear fish, swim in the warm surf and build a cabin of driftwood.
She made the mistake of telling this fantasy to Vera, she who hewed to the strictest interpretation of reality.
“Lovely,” Vera sniped. “Has Dr. Leary fed you some psilocybin?”
Saturday–Sunday, March 19–20, 1966
Then Lucybelle had an epiphany. Perhaps the mention of Dr. Leary’s psilocybin did trigger a shift in her worldview. Or maybe it was just the lemons.
Vera had received a shipment of lemons from her friends in California that week. The day was cold and gray, and so she made drinks of whiskey, honey, lemon, and hot water. They sat outside, sharing one Adirondack chair, Lucybelle in Vera’s lap, both wrapped in a wool blanket.
Lucybelle took a sip of the lemony tonic and spoke
the idea the second it came into her mind. “We can grow our own lemon tree.”
“I can barely grow lettuce here. You need lots of sun for lemons.”
“I mean, let’s move to California.”
Vera hugged her harder. Sweet, daft Lucy.
“No, I mean it.”
The idea was so good, so obvious and simple, that it was irrefutable. She felt lit up; her epiphany had to be contagious. “You’d be so happy. There are so many mountains out there,” she said. “Bigger ones. Bears. Forests.”
“I’m thinking,” Vera said, “that when you sell your novel, you can move to D.C.”
It was the first time she’d ever indicated that she too was trying to work out their lives together. Lucybelle kissed her. “I love you. And I couldn’t bear D.C. Neither could you.”
Vera sighed and Lucybelle knew she’d won a huge point.
“You could teach in California. I could get a job editing something.”
“Teach where?”
Another point! “Berkeley. UCLA. Mills College. Pomona. There are endless excellent universities. They’d beg to hire you.”
“I don’t know.”
It was the same thing she’d said, a year and a half ago, at the start of their relationship, right there in that very chair. Lucybelle said, “Yes, you do,” just as she’d said then.
Vera looked scared, shook her head, but didn’t speak. This was where Lucybelle wanted her, in the place before language. No words, no logic. So they made love, in the violet dusk, right in the Adirondack chair.
Then, in the morning, she backpedaled. Lucybelle knew it was coming because Vera hadn’t spoken a word since she awoke. She showered and dressed silently, a slight scowl on her face. Lucybelle held her tongue, waited for whatever form the withdrawal would come in. If she gave Vera room, she usually got the most direct response, and that was the case that morning.
“My pond doesn’t fail me. Nor do the veeries.”
“If you go to Washington, you’ll be leaving your pond anyway. And the veeries.” Lucybelle let that sink in, but Vera just scowled harder, and so she spoke more directly to the point. “I can’t promise to not fail you.”
Vera turned her back to pour another cup of coffee.
“Listen to me.”
But Vera wouldn’t, not yet. Lucybelle put her forehead against the windowpane and looked out at the silvery skin of the pond, beyond to the fluffy treetops, and up to the blue sky that looked, even this hard morning, like the essence of hope. Her grouchy scientist lover be damned. Love has no mass or density; it’s immeasurable. It might even be illusory. It’s the purest risk.
She turned around quickly and caught Vera looking at her. Lucybelle said, “On our way to California, we could go to the Grand Canyon. And to New Mexico. No, first we’ll fly to Paris!”
“Ha!” she cried a moment later because Vera was smiling. More! She was laughing with involuntary acquiescence.
Thursday, July 28, 1966
“It’s Dr. Bader,” Vivian told her. “He says he’s calling from Greenland. Do you want me to put him through?”
“Yes! Thank you.”
“Sugar!”
“How’s it going?”
“We did it.” Were those tears thickening his voice? “Bedrock.”
“Henri.” Deeply moved, she set down her pencil and pushed back her chair.
“The entire ice core. 1,387 meters.”
“The new drill worked!”
“Yeah,” he said, still husky. “Yeah. You’re my first call. You know the whole story better than anyone, sugar. The boys, their eyeballs are so pinned to their microscopes, even they don’t get the significance of this core, the big picture, the epic we’re about to reveal.”
She knew this wasn’t exactly true. It had been her job to write, translate, interpret, edit, sometimes advocate, and always make accessible the years of science leading to this moment. But the real reason Bader called her first was because she would listen, because with her he could be the little boy making an extraordinary discovery. Later, when he talked to the scientists and all the managers, he’d have to curtail his enthusiasm, his well-earned feelings of glory, his full-blooded emotional response.
“Congratulations.”
“That’s it? Congratulations?”
She felt sorry for Adele. No one would ever be a fraction of what this man needed. There weren’t words or actions big enough to meet him.
“I need you to do a hell of a lot better than that. I need you to articulate what this means.” He was nearly shouting. “Starting right now. As soon as I make the call to the fellows, I need you to be as clear as the proverbial fucking bell: we have just revealed 120,000 years of earth’s climate history. The implications are unprecedented, stupendous.”
“I’m on it, boss.” Never mind that technically she was no longer in his line of command.
For the next few seconds she heard only heavy breathing, as if he were waiting for her to begin composing, out loud, on the telephone right then. She looked at the white walls of her office and projected onto them the glowing translucence of Greenland’s ice.
From that massive depth, they’d extracted a complete core, just over nine centimeters in diameter, from the surface down to the rock.
It was ten years ago that Bader had ambushed her in Morningside Park, promised her an editorial team of her own, announced his hopes for the International Geophysical Year, threatened her with personal exposure. Since then she’d loved and left Phyllis, loved and left Stella, weathered the friendships of Beverly, Ruthie, and Dorothy. She’d written her novel. She’d found Vera.
Now this: Bader’s vision realized.
She knew the ice core was already on its way, via refrigerated airplanes and trucks, to the Hanover lab. Where the language of ice would be deciphered. Where the reading of the ice core’s stories would begin. Where she herself would write the first drafts of those stories.
As was his custom, Bader hung up without saying good-bye.
Tuesday, August 9, 1966
A week and a half later, he appeared in her doorjamb at CRREL.
“Have Hauser and Woo given you the data yet?”
You’d think he would have gotten a haircut and a shave for this auspicious moment, especially given his hanging-by-a-thread relationship with CRREL and their lack of commitment to his research. She thought about suggesting it, maybe even a sports jacket and new shirt.
“When do you meet with the colonel?” she asked. “And by the way, hello, it’s nice to see you. Long time.”
“You’re looking lovely, sugar. But this is no time for niceties. What have you got so far?”
“Nothing. I haven’t received any raw copy.”
“What the fuck is holding them up? Prepare yourself. Your workload is going to be huge in the next few months. I have a shitload of data I need you to write up.”
“It’s good to see you,” she tried again. “How are you holding up?”
“This place makes me feel claustrophobic. The overabundance of greenery alone, it could choke a man. Then there’re all these Army guys running around with their severe faces. A goddamn cultural desert. I mean—”
“Your excitement about the ice core is making you a bit dramatic. Also, you’re contradicting yourself. Overabundant greenery or severe desert, which is it?”
They grinned at each other.
“That’s your job,” Bader said. “Prune my purple prose and fix my contradictions. Party on Friday afternoon. Two o’clock in the field across the street. Everyone gets the afternoon off.”
“Did the colonel sign off on that?” Surely he hadn’t.
“Which means I want the first press release finished by then. How hard can that be? How long is a press release? Three pages?”
She nodded and pushed the papers in the center of her desk to the edges, hoping to calm him down by showing him she was on it. Chances were he’d redline the entire first draft, so she might as well get the ball rolling. A moment
later she heard his voice down the hall, too loud, becoming vituperative.
She walked over to the lab and found Peter Hauser hunched over a microscope.
“Give me everything you have on the Camp Century ice core,” she said.
“Okay. How about Thursday afternoon?”
“Bader’s here.”
“He’s here? In Hanover?”
“In the lab.”
“Shit.”
“We need to just do this.”
“We have weeks of work to do before we’re ready to publish.”
“Just a press release. That we’ve reached bedrock.”
Hauser sighed. He’d been with Bader from the start and wouldn’t let him down. Still standing next to the microscope but staring up at the ceiling, he began while Lucybelle scribbled. “On July—Jesus, I don’t even know the exact date. Ask Bader. Anyway, on July something, 1966, a team of glaciologists pulled a complete ice core from the surface of the earth. Be sure you say all the way down to bedrock. A total 1,387 meters. Got that? One thousand, three hundred, eighty-seven meters.”
Lucybelle nodded. “What’s it tell us?”
“What’s it tell us? Are you crazy? It’s the most amazing—”
“Of course. I know. But I need to write this in a way that helps the public understand the significance.”
Peter took another excited gulp of air and continued. “This gives us data from well before the last ice age, the Wisconsin, and into the pre-Wisconsin interglacial warm period known as the Eemian—”
“For the public, Peter. For the public.”
“The isotope values will give us the first continuous record of earth’s climate going back more than 100,000 years.”
“Better. What else?”
Lucybelle neglected to ask Bader where he was staying but found him in the second motel she called. She drove the press release over and stood by while he scribbled corrections and scratched out entire sentences. She folded the draft into her purse.
“I need that tonight.”
“You said by Friday.”
“The party is Friday.” Word at CRREL was that the colonel had nixed the party idea, but she didn’t contradict Bader. “I want the press release in the hands of the media by then.”
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