by Aaron Tucker
As they dance now, the song’s drums quieting and the notes longer, slower, softer, he understands her expression and the way she dismissed Charles so briskly, and inches his hand further around her, pulling her closer, ‘I love you’ into her dark hair, thinking of Baudelaire
Un port retentissant où mon âme peut boire
À grands flots le parfum, le son et la couleur
and reliving that night in August of 1939 when she had walked in with her husband, Richard Harrison, came into the California evening, and was given a drink as he smoked and gestured in conversation some feet away, his glance repeated back to the constant movements of her hands, the shift of her weight and small body from one foot to the other. Her movements would blur any photograph, he thought then, would make smudges and smears of her, obscured and imperfect attempts at replication.
Kitty leans closer into their dance and he thinks of the drive up to Los Alamos, the day they moved there from Berkeley, grinding up the incline against the distant New Mexico summits, the sun already at midday, motioning with her head when, after pulling through the guard’s stations, they finally arrived at their new home, a detached cabin set back from the intersection, a petit chalet shaded by thick trunks and leaves; it was the former Ranch School’s headmaster’s home, its own peak above the front door a sharpened contrast to the low flat roofs of the other buildings at Los Alamos, and the crabapple tree, even thinned of its blossoms, partially blocked the front windows in privacy. Kitty exited the car and walked up, the soft petals underfoot, paused at the door frame and beckoned him in, her weight against him as soon as he was through the doorway. Soon after moving in they would host parties where, when it grew too busy, the bodies poured outside, leaked down the small path up to the door, and he would ask, his hands politely interlaced in front of him, if the soldiers might declare the yard secure so that the people, underneath the branches of the front yard, could talk freely if need be while the notes of the physicist Otto Frisch’s piano playing, Chopin or Bach, swelled out the windows.
The song finishes then and he directs Kitty off the dance floor, back to its edges, looking first at her, then toward the kitchen, to refill his glass. Kitty follows him and there is a rupture of laughter from the living room as they leave, seismic ripples echoed by another eruption, then shouts, from outside.
‘Quite the gathering.’ Enrico Fermi sweeps his arm out in front of him at the group diluted through Opje’s home.
‘How was the trip? How’s Chicago?’
Before he can answer, two young men, arms slung around each other, cut across, grabbing for the bottles of beer on the counter. They quickly grow quiet when they see who they have interrupted, scurry, mouthing his name and Fermi’s as they leave; Kitty follows the young men, rejoins the living room and the music without looking back. As he looks at his friend for a response, he can see his slack face, too weary to hold an expression.
‘It’s like summer camp,’ Fermi replies, his mouth in minimal effort.
He has had a number of conversations like this about the American scientists’ burbling exuberance, their almost joyful disbelief, at the Gadget. Now Los Alamos is sprawling and unstoppable, its military nature fended off at all times by the young and rowdy men who have come to populate the plateau. He sometimes goes to the square-dancing club, the commissary’s butcher, calling out the steps over the accordion, and he hears word trickle to him about the young engineers and scientists undertaking ‘moonlight requisitions’ of alcohol and hosting drunken singalongs in the barracks or at the Service Club with its jukebox and fried-egg grease, or enticing all comers with the homemade liquor that war rations have made necessary. These are often Saturday nights because he told General Groves everyone must get Sundays off, to recuperate and refresh, and so, when he can get the time, he leads groups of people on horseback tours, follows the tracks of the deer in the red dirt against the greening backdrop, the brush in bunches and up the sides of the hills capped with large layered boulders, down the valley and along the river, Kitty pointing out the desert primrose, the coral-shaped bee balm that jabs outward in multitudes.
As he looks at his friend Fermi, he is reminded that he is constantly battling the contradictions around him, and this party has crystallized the contrast between the humanity of those under his authority at Los Alamos and the military authority inflicting itself upon him. He is reminded of the afternoon, less than a year ago, when he first looked at Groves’s proposed plans for the plateau; he saw that the man had marked the largest house for Kitty and himself and their family. The scientists would work at the southern part of Ashley Pond, the Technical Area, ‘T,’ and in the sketch that Groves slid over to him, he saw the long buildings isolated further by circles of soldiers’ posts and fences, non-descript and repetitive like the barracks and dormitories, west, and made an adjustment so that those buildings faced the Jemez mountains, so, he imagined, the scientists and soldiers would at least be given the startling view every morning, could watch it fade into night every evening.
‘We’ll be converting the garage into a fire station, adding some school rooms, a post office, and a library. I tell you, this would be a lot easier if we didn’t have civilians living here. We could just slap down a simple grid of buildings,’ Groves laughed.
So when Sunday ends and a new week begins, Groves has sirens mark the work hours at Los Alamos, the looping cycle of the 7:00 a.m. and 5 p.m. bells that shove themselves across the plateau, the bells the echo of the military infrastructure that is ultimately the main contributor to the boredom that has slung itself over the scientists in off-hours. In reaction, he has tried to place barriers around their work as best he can; however, they are rarely allowed to leave the compound and so the evening space is often filled with loose gatherings and hard alcohol, in quieter moments beer and wine. Soon, there is pregnancy after pregnancy – even in those first few months, a number of babies have been announced, numbers that will only increase as more and more join the project, grow restless with the isolation, the long vistas of wilderness marred by barbed-wire fences and sprouting guard towers, the tension of a massive war and the daily dead, and they turn to each other for physical comfort, the untangling of limbs from too-skinny single beds in morning sunlight.
He can see how, to Fermi, the enthusiasm of the young men who populate his labs is polar and potentially naive in relation to the transplanted Europeans who have moved to New Mexico to work with them, bringing the images of soldiers, arms missing, and blood, their own, others’, across their boots, carrying the sound that a building makes when a city is in blackout and its walls are on the edge of collapse, bringing the stomp of large units of men marching across farmlands, the crops repurposed then disappeared, the churches made military and the homes empty, abandoned. Those men do not stay long at parties, are more partial to visiting each other’s homes, Edith’s meals at Otowi Bridge or Dorothy McKibbon’s on the Old Santa Fe Trail, but here, in this kitchen, halfway between the dance floor and the armed guards patrolling, he aligns the labs and the Pecos with the mid-battlefield pause and chasm that Arjuna and Krishna occupy, between two destructive yet mortal forces. The labs at Los Alamos are a geography between the massive violence and destruction of Europe and the domestic war machine unmarred by immediate smoke and propellers and treads of combat; his labs are a delicate limbo between the crackle of presidential radio addresses in peaceful living rooms and the sand under the fingernails of the men aiming down gunsights at a too-close enemy.
He hears the undulating wall of words from the next room, the music and dancing, and he grips Fermi on the shoulder. ‘Weren’t we like that once?’
Fermi finally smiles at him. ‘I’m not sure I can stay much longer. But happy birthday, Oppie.’
‘Yes, yes, yes, I understand. Thank you.’
He stays in the kitchen after Fermi leaves, leaning against the door frame and observing, Kitty across the room with her back to him now, Barbara still dancing in the centre of the room, the moment oddly familiar, a cros
s-sectioned and stable state, momentarily static, and he nods to no one in particular but at the group that has flooded into his home, reclaimed it as a protective shell, at least for the evening. Answering his own question to Fermi, Yes, he thinks, I was like them, willing to wall off sections of the outside world in order to simply study, to theorize and plunge into the physicists he admired, to sink into his own mind.
He was only thirty-two, he remembers, when he and Jean first met, at a party his landlords, the Washburns, were hosting; the living room was overheated and the ice water and alcohol had no cooling effect, the guests fanning themselves with their hands and huddling around the draft of windows. He was just one among many academics there, and their initial introduction was dismissive and brief: he was mid-conversation, hand floating in gesture, lit cigarette wrapping his face in smoke, when she and Mary-Ellen Washburn slid beside him. He told Jean he was at Caltech and she returned that she was near being accepted to medical school at Stanford. They shook hands and he catalogued the tiny dip of her left eye, the only break in the perfect symmetry of her face, before she was guided away to the next group.
Jean would tell him her version of that first exchange months later when they were walking back from their first date. She began with his suit, clothing that fit him so smartly, and then the colour of his shirt an extension of his eyes, described the way he gave her his entire gaze, but all the while she insisted that she thought him incredibly intelligent but ignorant, perhaps wilfully. The swell he felt from her initial portrait of him deflated as she continued to explain to him the extreme dangers of fascism, its poisonous roots burrowing in Germany and Italy, with Franco in Spain, to say nothing of the dusty poverty of a slowly recovering America; she preached about the potential of Communism in its most refined form, and that he needed to be not only aware but active, in fact it was his duty. Yes, he could talk with her about her father’s study of The Canterbury Tales, she told him, their arms intertwined, but she dared him to clarify what he knew of real people, how actual people lived in the world, and when he considered these words, his thoughts turned to entirely new ideas, ones that had never crossed the boundaries of his mind. He turned to her, admitted how little he knew, and asked her to teach him. She reached up and combed her fingers through his tall bushel of black hair: ‘The next time we see each other. I promise.’
She kept her promise, and near the end of their next date, to give his account, he raised his glass, and teased her with the end to Baudelaire’s ‘Hymne à la Beauté,’ translating spontaneously from the French:
‘Who cares if you’re a blessing or a curse,
So long as you bring light, my dark-eyed queen,
To the dead hours of this grim universe?’
To which she countered with the ending lyrics to Gibbon’s ‘The Silver Swan’:
‘Farewell, all joys! O Death, come close mine eyes!
More Geese than Swans now live, more Fools than Wise.’
‘Then I suppose you’re the dark-eyed queen of the swans, the last of her lineage. And I’m one of the fools.’
He is shaken away from their words by the song in his living room changing over, a brief pause wherein all of the party contracts in mutual silence; this sudden change shifts him away from Jean, but not before he remembers a letter to him, quoting Donne,
If yet I have not all thy love,
Dear, I shall never have it all;
pleading for him to come visit her, and he promises himself that he will the next time he is in California, that he must, and that perhaps she will greet him at the train station and they can have dinner and he will remind her that the end of Donne’s poem foretells of a spiritual unity beyond mortal realms, so we shall be one, and one another’s all, and afterwards he can ask her if he should tell Groves about Chevalier.
He knows what Kitty would say: when he was named Director in 1942, Groves made it clear that a number of officials had balked at his appointment, his German ancestry, at the fact that he had given money to Communist causes in Spain, that his brother was a known Communist, that he had a number of Communist friends he still bound very close to him, most obviously his ex-lover Jean, and of course his wife. Kitty would insist that retelling the story of Chevalier and Eltenton and their suggested treason, and accounting for the delay in its reporting, would only deepen suspicions. Groves had ultimately convinced everyone involved that he was not only a patriot but the only man capable of leading the Manhattan Project in a time of extreme urgency; in having to do so, he pictured Groves swelling to the roof of the room, a massive towering monument erected from a uniform and wondered how anyone could oppose anything when a man grows to that size. Still, Kitty saw the fear that the Soviets and Stalin still created, even as allies, and would advise him toward secrecy.
But what might Jean say? he wondered, especially given the recent murmurings about the slowness of the work at the labs. The scientists work six days a week, picking the locks on the laboratories’ doors and staying later into the evenings each night; however, their work bears steadily forward without the breakthrough that will burn away the haze around the Gadget. Nearly all the science and engineering taking place is uncharted: they are the ones building the frameworks of reaction and structure from nothing, tasked with making the theoretical physically real, and that takes time. Still, this must be seen as failure. Is this failure because of my leadership? Do people think I’m purposely slowing the project?
There is the sound of a plate falling to the ground and the party startles over to the dining table to examine the damage, a brief lapse in the noise, and he can see a woman bending to pick up the larger pieces, her eyes apologetically low along the floor. He drunkenly squints at the scene and when he pulls his gaze back from the woman, all the other guests have turned toward him and, in that communal action, incredibly briefly, each person’s eyes and mouths rim with malice and skepticism; the group, a pack, threatens to surge forward and run over him, pin him beneath their weight while they tear at his clothes and face, crush the breath from him and steal the air from his lungs. Mercifully, they rotate away and return to chatter, the music, their dancing, and the party continues.
The sun is curling out and down and searing off the night’s shadows, last night’s dishes are in the sink still, the glasses cradling drops of vodka and vermouth, the plates rinsed clean of crumbs, and the kettle is boiling, Kitty is sleeping, Peter is sleeping, nearly everyone is sleeping except the soldiers lagging through the end of their overnight watches, and he raises one hand from his side to his coarse hair, feels the starched crinkle of his uniform pinch at his elbow, ribs, and thinks again about the work, about the old mysteries he’s swapped for new ones, and about the radiating outward that his role in the labs has insisted upon him, those demands that pull his skin tighter to his bones: Kitty commented last night on the weight that had disintegrated from his already gaunt frame.
He begins to read the letter from Groves.
Dear Dr. Oppenheimer:
In view of the nature of the work on which you are engaged
He stops mid-sentence and puts the letter back on the table, looking out the window at the mountainscape, and thinks of one specific night just after the start of the war, September 1939. He could hear his brother down the path in the dark blending with their horses’ snuffling. He heard his brother’s fly come down, the metallic swish of the zipper, then his stream against the underbrush. They had driven the horses alongside one of the large cirques that made up the eastern side of the mountains, the amphitheatre shape carved by the unhurried erosion of ice and rock, a valley glacier begun high and dragged down the steep sides in tumbles, gathering into moraines. They arrived at Lake Katherine and sat along its shallow shores, the stick of peanut butter on their gums washed away by a bottle of whisky, talked about his teaching posts at Caltech and Berkeley briefly, about Crisis and the other horses, Dixie and Io, about Perro Caliente and who might be able to come visit the next summer. They rode back and had just arrived at thei
r cabin when Frank had suggested they eat a late dinner soon, and then call on Katy the next day. Then he disappeared down the path and toward the trees, just beyond Opje’s eyesight.
In that quiet and still, seated on the cabin’s porch, he looked at the sky, the stars, picked one specific dot and projected his mind toward it, envisioned its life, the radiating plasma held in equilibrium by its gravity, the fusion of its core bursting out into helium, neutrons packing into neutrons, into energy that pulses out, further, further, until it would reach his eyes on earth. He blinked and then began the exercise again, picking one finite speck, propelling toward it, only this time he imagined its death, its mass growing so dense that the energy being released would tip past its unique and delicate balance, its core reversing and falling inward, light inverted. It was precisely this vision that he has been working consistently on over the past half-decade, his and George Volkoff’s work on the theoretical cycles of stars, ‘by first investigating the physical nature of the equilibrium of a given mass of material in which no energy is generated’ along the careful plotting of interlocking equations. This limit to mass is, of course, impossible to definitively prove; neutron stars cannot be observed and documented, but that speculation led to a paper co-written with his student Hartland Snyder titled ‘On Continued Gravitational Contraction,’ which began with an exhausted star beyond balance and ended with a singularly contracted point of complete blackness; where it once emitted clearly across thousands of thousands of miles, after its collapse its presence would be known only by the remnants of its gravitational field. Though the paper had been submitted in July, it wasn’t actually published until the first of September 1939 – the same day, Germany invaded Poland.
He remembers taking a sip of the water he had beside him, his fingertips nicotine-yellow and wrapped sturdily around the glass, and wondering whether that trip would be his last to New Mexico that year; it would be winter soon and the cold and the snow would grow too deep. He had to return to California, back to his teaching and his students and his apartment, with its large fireplace that conquered the central room but lit only sporadically when he invited some of his students over for dinner, where he would make them eggs mixed with chilies, a fast and easy meal that was balanced out with wine or a martini strung with honey and lime juice. The students would ask about the rugs he brought back from New Mexico, and the large silver belt buckle he wore, and he would describe the vistas for them, often intercutting with descriptions of Katy, of Crisis, and once they had left he would pull one of the lighter blankets out onto the porch, breathe in the backyard pine and acacia, and fall asleep lulled by his memories of his strong legs climbing, the summits of the Pecos Valley always tantalizingly close.