An Atomic Love Story

by Shirley Streshinsky

  SAN FRANCISCO, JANUARY 1944:

  The coroner's report read: Body is that of a well developed, well nourished 29-year-old female. Rigor mortis pronounced. Height: 5 foot 6 inches. Weight: 117. Eyes: Hazel. Hair: brown. Heart: 240 grams and measures 13x7x6 centimeters. There is female external genitalia, the ovaries and fallopian tubes are normal. Uterus normal. Death had occurred 12 hours earlier.

  Stomach contained considerable recently ingested, semi-solid food. Toxicological: 4 barbituric acid derivatives, derivative of saliacylic acid, faint trace of chloral hydrate (uncorroborated). Conclusion: Cause of death: Acute edema of the lungs with pulmonary congestion.300 Death by drowning.

  Death was pronounced at 5:30 P.M. January 4, a Tuesday. On Wednesday, January 5, about 1:00 P.M., body found by father, Professor John S. P. Tatlock, of the University of California, Berkeley. Identification confirmed by Dr. Siegfried Bernfeld, her colleague at Mt. Zion Hospital and her therapist. The distinguished scholar of medieval literature and the esteemed psychotherapist, favorite student of Freud, stood together in the San Francisco Coroner's Office that rain-drenched Wednesday night, identifying the dead, still beautiful body of Jean Tatlock.

  A front-page headline of the San Francisco Examiner called out the news: "Dr. Jean Tatlock is found dead; note hints suicide."301 The story explained that the body was discovered resting on a pile of pillows next to a bathtub, head and shoulders underwater. A scrawled yet unsigned note seemed to try to explain: "To those who loved me and helped me, all love and courage. I think I would have been a liability all my life. I wanted to live and to give and I got paralyzed somehow. I tried like hell to understand and couldn't. . . . At least I could take away the burden of a paralyzed soul from a fighting world . . ." The words had trailed off the page.

  BEFORE SHE KNEW ROBERT, BEFORE her soul became paralyzed and when poetry was the only language in which Jean could reveal herself, she had written:

  This kneeling to you

  In the dark dawn

  With their bareness

  And their grayness

  Dissolved to melting silver

  And your love,

  Is even this

  Not enough to appease your awful pain

  You gaunt terrible bleeding Jesus

  Fils de Dieu?302

  BY THURSDAY, THE SHOCK OF Jean's death rattled over the telephone lines. To Mary Ellen Washburn in Berkeley, to Jean's brother Hugh, and Winifred Smith and Elizabeth Whitney, the Tolmans—Edward in Berkeley and Richard and Ruth in Washington—to the Sartons and May, to Steve Nelson and Haakon Chevalier and Hannah Peters and Edith Jenkins. The news reached those Jean Tatlock called her "heavenly friends," and others whom she did not.

  As happens after a young and vibrant woman takes her own life, friends and relatives—even those who had rarely seen her in the past decade—felt compelled to look for signs, for signals missed, for any possible reason that could explain and ameliorate their sense of loss. Hugh was told that psychoanalysis had been hard on Jean, that records showed she had called her analyst fifteen times in November. Letty Field's mother surmised that Jean had been obsessed with death ever since Letty died. May, who had scarcely seen Jean after high school and knew only that she was rumored to be having an affair with a college professor, decided that Jean "drugged and drowned" herself because of lesbian tendencies. A Tatlock family friend who had met Jean only once, on holiday with Jean's sister-in-law Anne, and Aunt Jessie, remembered that she was "quite withdrawn—purposely withdrawn and quiet."303 Only a few knew that Jean's battle was within; that she had looked to science for a cure, and that it had escaped her.

  J. EDGAR HOOVER WAS INFORMED of Jean's death by teletype from the local FBI field officer: "Informant" it began, had indicated she was a Communist party member, and added that "she was very loose morally." Then he suggested that direct action might create some bad publicity, but "Direct inquiries will be made discreetly."304

  One day Robert would defend her, declaring, "She was a person of deep religious feeling. . . . She loved this country, its people and its life."305

  Her physician brother would question the coroner's report. Chloral hydrate? Uncorroborated. Death by drowning? It made no sense to him. Not Jean. Never Jean. His sister, the one person in the room, he would say, that you would always remember. Always.

  ON A REMOTE PLATEAU DEEP in the Jemez Mountains of New Mexico, Robert would receive the message that first week of the New Year in his office, delivered by the Los Alamos head of security. He sat at his desk, silent, and wept. Then he walked out into the winter woods, head bent. His guards hung back, offering him as much privacy as they dared.

  Ten long years later, he would be forced to explain to people who had not known her: "I met her at a time when I had suddenly become vulnerable to falling in love. She was a lyrical, uplifting, sensitive, yearning creature."306

  They had, in those first lyrical months, read poetry together, and almost certainly the sonnet by John Donne that begins, "Batter my heart, three-person'd God."

  And before even he knew her, Robert wrote a poem that would seem prophetic:

  But for us, who are not angels, for us

  You, whom the angels inhabit, are so precious

  That we learn to cherish equally

  The red angel of joy, and the pale angel of misery.307

  VI

  THE ATOMIC BOMB

  21

  PROFESSOR TATLOCK STRUGGLES WITH THE "HIDEOUS GASH" IN HIS LANDSCAPE, RUTH BECOMES INVOLVED IN THE NEW WORLD OF SPYCRAFT, AND KITTY IS PREGNANT AGAIN

  It had rained in San Francisco those first few days of January 1944. Heavy showers and gusty winds assailed the northern coast of California. The temperature dipped into the chilly 40s, as it does during the rainy season when the winds blow south out of Alaska. In Jean's top floor apartment on Telegraph Hill, the rain splashed silver against the windowpane, obliterating a view of the docks below and erasing the East Bay hills in the distance.

  At Mt. Zion, all psychiatric residents spent six months in child psychiatry; the hospital was the center for analytic practice in California. Jean's hours had been long; holidays were a difficult time for her patients, and for Jean as well. The only family she had on the West Coast was her father. They had never been close, she did not confide in him, in fact she resented him. He maintained a proper distance, having convinced himself that he should not encroach on her private life. John Tatlock was stoic; he believed that humans could endure profound troubles, if they set their minds to it. "Nothing," he had written, "marks a well-educated man . . . more than clear thinking, discrimination."308 But as Elizabeth Whitney had discovered, this particular well-educated man could not be without a woman—"friend, daughter, wife"—and the only woman in his life at the moment was Jean.

  New Year's Day was a Saturday. It was Monday before Jean drove over the Bay Bridge to visit her father. She might have stopped to see Mary Ellen. There had been rumors about Jean and Mary Ellen, that they were lovers.309 There were always rumors about women like Jean who didn't marry.

  Her father had no idea how disgusted she was with herself for being neurotic, for having to work so hard to stay emotionally intact, for feeling like a burden in a time when their whole world was in a death struggle. That Monday he could see that she was in one of her despondent moods. When she left, he was worried enough to ask her to call him the next day. She said she would. Tuesday passed with no call. Instead, Jean telephoned Mary Ellen to ask if she would drive over to be with her. Mary Ellen declined.310 It was raining and blustery and dark, difficult to drive at night in the blackouts, with all the talk about Japanese subs along the coast. Jean understood it was too much to ask. She had dinner alone.

  Sometime during the tortured hours of that long night she filled the bathtub and piled pillows on the floor next to it. She emptied some powder from an envelope into a glass of water, drank it and waited for the relief. As she felt the numbing begin, she fumbled for a scrap of pencil to scrawl a message on the bac
k of an envelope: "To those who loved me and helped me, all love and courage . . ."

  The next morning, a Tuesday, John dialed his daughter's number—Sutter 0169—and when she did not answer, he phoned the hospital to see if she was at work. The dread began. At about noon he pulled on his raincoat and drove across the bridge, made his way through the downtown financial district on Montgomery Street and drove to the north end, just below Coit Tower. He parked and walked to number 1409. It was not yet one o'clock when he rang the doorbell. No answer. Alarmed now, he pushed through the wet foliage, climbed a back stairwell, and lifted a window to crawl into the silent apartment.

  He found his daughter in the bathroom, kneeling on the pillows, her head and shoulders submerged in the cold water.

  His heart would have pounded, his eyes and mind unable to grasp the reality of what Jean had done. He waited, weak. Somehow, the sixty-seven-year-old managed to lift her and then lower her carefully on the sofa in her living room, her dark hair and sweater wet. He began to search her apartment, grief swelling, tinged with anger. He found a cache of letters and photographs and went through them methodically, the same way he researched the details of other lives, from other centuries. And all the while Jean there beside him, on the couch, beyond reproach.

  He sorted out some of the letters and photographs and put them in the fireplace. What did he not want other eyes to see? Possibly Jean had kept the letters that May Sarton had written when they were young and struggling with sexual identity. Or there may have been letters from Robert that should not be exposed. Tatlock was sympathetic to his daughter's political views. (He and Robert and Haakon Chevalier had purchased an ambulance to send to Spain during the Civil War.) But he was also aware of how, in the current political atmosphere, his daughter's Communist ties might cause damage to others. Other letters might have revealed a continuing sexual ambiguity. He attempted to protect her memory, which was all that was left.

  In his pain was a protective flare of anger: How could she have done this? Didn't she think about the pain she would cause him? And after that: I am not to blame for this. Why wouldn't she grow up?

  WHOM SHOULD HE CALL? NOT the hospital, she was dead. Finally he found the phone book, and dialed the Halsted Funeral Home. (The FBI tap on Jean's telephone recorded the call, which prompted the teletype to J. Edgar Hoover.) After listening to the grieving father's confused explanation, someone at the funeral home phoned the police. Then he set fire to the letters and photos in the fireplace, watched as the fire caught, flamed, and burned bright. When the police and a deputy coroner arrived at 5:30, the winter light gone, the fire was still smoldering. By then, Tatlock had been alone with his dead daughter for more than four hours.

  He watched as the attendants wrapped her body and carried her away to the city morgue. He was told to follow, to make an official identification, and that he needed another person as well. He called Siegfried Bernfeld. Among the things Tatlock had found in Jean's papers was a bill for $760 from Bernfeld. It was the amount she owed for the psychotherapy she was undergoing as part of her training. The newspapers would report the item, inferring that she had sought psychiatric help.

  Hugh wanted to come home, but his father said no, he did not want him to, much to his son's regret.311 The coroner's report raised questions that, as a medical doctor, Hugh could not accept. It made no sense to him. He wrote to request notes from Bernfeld, who replied that he couldn't find them. Hugh would try later to explain: "We never found enough details to satisfy either of us or know what happened. I lost her as a sister. We went to different places. I never really knew her after college age . . . we were good friends but it was pure chance that we were separated." He had been at Harvard, she at Stanford. He didn't want to believe that she was a Communist.312 But he loved her, she was his astonishing, remarkable sister and he could not believe she would kill herself. He felt there had to be more than the depressions. Her death shocked the people she worked with, who were with her every day. Hugh knew his father was being protective; he refused to talk about Jean.

  Hugh did not know about Boris Pash, or that Jean's phone had been tapped, or that J. Edgar's agents had been tracking his sister.

  WHAT DID KITTY FEEL WHEN she learned about Jean's death? Probably that it was such a waste, all that fine education, Vassar and Stanford, a medical degree and a residency in psychiatry, and only 29. (Kitty had once blithely dismissed the popular Dorothy McKibbin for having done nothing with her fine Smith College diploma, even though Dorothy had all but singlehandedly run the Los Alamos office in Santa Fe, a prodigious feat.) But in the case of Jean, what Kitty would have felt most acutely was that she was no longer a threat. Kitty had her Joe, now Robert had his Jean.

  The winter wore on, the longest and coldest in living memory on the Pajarito Plateau, temperatures plunging below zero. On the weekend, the boys' school ski run was rigged up, the ice on the pond scraped for skating, and if the weather calmed and the skies were bright blue, the families went hiking and exploring. In the evenings, they partied and danced and drank too much. Sometimes Robert and Kitty joined them, Robert dancing in an old-fashioned style he probably learned at dancing school.

  When Kitty had had too much to drink, she would divulge extremely personal details about her sex life to the woman she happened to be befriending at the time. She confessed that Robert did not bother with foreplay, had no sense of fun, no playfulness at all. She had to teach him, she said. Because, she continued, she believed sex should be fun,313 not necessarily a religious experience. If Jean had been looking for ecstasy, Kitty wanted playfulness and pleasure. At Los Alamos she wasn't getting much of either. It might have been because her husband was working all day and many nights, the pressure so intense he was losing weight (his six-foot frame would go down to 104 pounds) and the belt with the big silver buckle had been drawn in several notches. Exhaustion might have explained his lack of energy for sex; so might a wife who was often drunk. Or it may have been Jean's death that made him less than responsive to the wife who thought sex should not be taken so seriously.

  That Kitty was a very sexy dame, as one of the women at Los Alamos called her, was a given. Men responded to her, she was adept at flirting, a tease when she needed to be. Sex was how she had assured her marriage to Robert.

  There was enough sex on the Hill to provide what would become a bumper crop of babies. RFD, they called it: Rural Free Delivery, just like the mail. Since the Army was paying the bills, and the young couples were stuck on this mountaintop, many of them figured they might as well take advantage of the time and the price, and produce their families. General Groves didn't like it, but there wasn't much he could do about it, since his director's wife would be adding to the RFDs before the year was out.

  BY THE END OF JANUARY 1944, the 872-day siege of Leningrad was over. The brutal cost was the deaths of a million people. In the spring when the snow finally melted, corpses were exposed in the streets. The Allies made their first daylight raid on Berlin and two months later they entered Rome. On June 6, the long-awaited Allied invasion of Normandy began. In the Pacific, the U.S. Marines had landed on Guam, and the painful task of extricating the Japanese from island strongholds across the Pacific was underway. For years to come, the names of the islands would echo in the collective American memory: Saipan, Iwo Jima, Guadalcanal. In the high desert mountains of New Mexico, far from the battlefields, the scientists followed the news and intensified their already-long hours. Work on the atomic bomb was now at fever pitch; time for making a difference was running out.

  ALMOST FROM THE BEGINNING IN Washington, Ruth moved quickly from planning studies on public opinions and attitudes, to conducting interviews and interpreting psychological experiments, then designing research methods that would validate or disprove data. By mid-1944, her reputation for excellent judgment brought her to the attention of the Office of Strategic Services—OSS—the national agency responsible for intelligence gathering, espionage, subversion and psychological warfare, and the foreru
nner of the CIA.

  Hastily organized in June of 1942, the OSS was headed by William J. Donovan—known for good reason as "Wild Bill"—who convinced his close friend President Roosevelt that the country needed an intelligence service based on the British system. Sent into the field to work as spies, clandestine radio operators and saboteurs, a significant number of OSS agents broke under the stress, often at the cost of their lives. The British and Germans used psychologists to assess the emotional strength of their spies. Donovan decided the Americans should do the same.

  In July of 1944, the OSS requested Dr. Ruth Tolman "on loan" from her current assignment at the War Production Board. She would interview potential candidates to assess who would be most likely to perform well under stress. Ruth worked in OSS Station W, located in a townhouse in the District. Her brother-in-law, Edward, was working with OSS at its secret "S" station in nearby Fairfax, Virginia. Officially, Ruth was to instruct the staff of what was euphemistically called the "Evaluation School for Overseas Personnel." Three "assessment centers" had been established to administer the tests and questionnaires that Ruth had helped develop. The aspiring spies would move on to trials that would determine their tolerance for frustration, verbal resourcefulness and emotional stability. After that, the number of agents who experienced "neuropsychiatric breakdowns" decreased dramatically from that reported before the training.314 The job gave Ruth a preview of what to expect when the war was over and many young combatants came home suffering from psychological traumas.

  Both Tolmans were caught up in webs of secrecy. Ruth, though, was secure in Washington while Richard was flying across the Atlantic in drafty Army planes, or rattling across country on trains packed with soldiers.