“You and that hateful policeman?”
“No,” I said, “just me. I’m hoping you can tell me another story.”
“I see,” she said. “You’re keeping me around for the entertainment value. Like that Persian king What’s-his-name.”
“Which king?”
“King What’s-his-name. I don’t remember his name. Nobody remembers his name. It’s the storyteller we remember. Scheherazade.”
“Oh right,” I said. “The Thousand and One Nights. She kept herself from becoming a one-night stand by spinning stories that never ended.”
“It wasn’t just that they never ended,” she said. “They wove together to make a tapestry, stories threaded within other stories. Like life, Bill, but without the boring parts. She was the queen of the cliffhanger, Scheherazade. Every dawn, just as he was about to lop her head off, she’d leave him in suspense.”
“I’m feeling some pretty strong suspense about something myself,” I said.
She was silent. “I could probably dredge up another chapter,” she finally said. “How soon should I expect you?”
“I could be there in thirty minutes, but I’ll wait a while, if you’d rather.”
“No need to wait. Tempus fugit, Bill. Sic transit gloria mundi.”
“What?”
“Time flies; so passes the glory of this world. I’ll have the door open and my vodka in hand.”
“Beatrice, it’s only nine A.M.”
“It’s five P.M. somewhere. It’s a big world, Bill. Don’t draw your boundaries small.”
* * *
This early in the day, the walkway to her front door was deeply shadowed by the roof overhang and the evergreens. Through the windows, though, the redwood paneling glowed warmly in morning sun that streamed through windows. I rang the bell, mostly to hear the high, clear tone that pealed forth when I tugged the clapper. Then I let myself in as usual, calling out, “Beatrice? It’s Bill.”
She didn’t answer, so I headed for the living room. She was sitting in her wingback chair, and as I entered the room, she raised a tumbler of vodka to me in a toast.
She waved me toward my chair, and I sat down and began to rock. A steaming cup of tea sat on the end table; I took the mug and cradled it in my hands, glad of its warmth, for I felt cold inside.
She studied me through watery eyes. “What sort of story would you like to hear today?”
“I’d like to hear a true one,” I said, meeting her gaze. “A true one about the death of Jonah Jamison.”
“How do you mean?”
“I realized something today,” I said. “Or heard something. It was as if Jonah’s bones whispered a secret to me; as if he, too, had a story to tell.”
“And what was the story? What did he whisper?”
“He whispered that he didn’t shoot himself.”
She leaned forward and cocked her head slightly — probably the very same posture she’d seen me assume for hours over the past two weeks. Then she frowned and shook her head. “Back up,” she commanded. “You’ve jumped straight to the ending. Begin at the beginning.”
I was confused. “Which beginning?”
“The beginning of the story Jonah’s bones told you. ‘It was a dark and stormy night in the anthropology lab…’ or whatever. Set the scene; let it unfold. Have I taught you nothing?”
“Ah,” I said. “Now who’s being kept around just for the entertainment value? I’m not as good a storyteller as you.”
“No one’s as good as I am.” She smiled. “But you have to keep trying. It’s the only way to get any better.”
I thought for a moment, then drew a breath and began again. “The neighbor’s dog woke me up before dawn today,” I said. “Not because he was barking loudly — it was only one little yip — but because I was half awake already. Sleeping badly. Fretting about something. I didn’t even know what it was, but I knew where it was. It was on my desk under the stadium. Down in that labyrinth whose windows look like they haven’t been washed since the Manhattan Project.”
She gave me a nod of approval. “Much better,” she said. “Go on.”
“Whenever I think I’m overlooking something in a case, what I do is put the bones on my desk where I can see them. Every now and then I’ll stop whatever I’m doing — grading papers or reading a journal article or eating a sandwich — and look at the bones. I try to keep my mind as empty as I can make it, and just look, hoping something new will catch me by surprise. Present itself to me. Speak to me. It’s like I’m trying to sneak up on something I already know, somewhere deep down, but can’t quite get ahold of.”
“That’s a good skill to cultivate,” she said. “You’ll need it more and more as you get older and start to lose track of things — names and faces and where you left your reading glasses and why you walked into the living room.”
I had the feeling she was trying to stretch my story out, and I couldn’t blame her. “I’ve been looking at Jonah Jamison’s skull that way for a week now,” I resumed, “but it hasn’t been working. Nothing new. Today, having dragged myself to work at six A.M., I found myself getting mad whenever I glanced at that damn skull. Almost as if he were being deliberately uncooperative. Too watchful for me to sneak up on, or something.”
“Well, he died during wartime in a top secret city,” she said. “You can’t really blame him for being vigilant, can you?”
“But I did,” I said. “I finally got so irritated I picked up the skull and put it in the box and closed the lid.”
“I guess you showed him,” she said.
“And that’s when I saw it,” I said.
“Saw what?”
“His left arm.”
“His left arm? What about it?”
“It was strong.”
She frowned, studying on this. “He was young. He was a soldier. Of course he was strong.”
“What I mean,” I said, “is that his left arm was stronger than his right arm.”
“But how can you possibly know which arm was stronger? The muscle was long gone, wasn’t it?”
“Yes. But the muscle left its story behind on the bone.” She looked puzzled, so I tapped on the surface of the small pine table between us. “You see these two knots in this wood?” She nodded. “Two branches grew out of the tree trunk in those places, right?” She nodded. “Which of those two branches was bigger and stronger?” She tapped the knot closer to her, which was as big as the face on my watch — twice the diameter of the other knot. “The places where muscles fasten to bones are called muscle attachments; not a very imaginative name, but it’s easy for students to remember.” I flexed my left arm and made my bicep as big as I could, which wasn’t all that big. Then I pressed the tip of my right index finger against the inside of my elbow and wiggled the finger. “The tendon from the bicep muscle attaches to the bones of the forearm right here, so that when you tighten your bicep, it pulls your forearm up.” She set her glass down and copied what I was doing.
“Feels like twigs and thread,” she said. “Nobody would ever mistake this for a strong arm.”
“Well, maybe not,” I conceded. “But you’re right-handed, so the twigs and thread are a little thicker and stronger in your right arm than in your left. So the muscle attachments in your right arm are a little sturdier than in your left. Now, UT football players — or Arnold Schwarzennegger, or anybody else with really big biceps — will have big, sturdy muscle attachment points, like knobs or ridges, where the bone is reinforced to carry the load.”
“So just like a nation or a generation,” she said, “bone is tested and strengthened if you challenge it.”
“Exactly,” I said. “And what I realized today is that Jonah Jamison consistently — day in, day out, thirty years — challenged his left arm more than his right. That tells he was left-handed. So does the wristwatch, which he wore on his right wrist. His handedness: that’s how I can tell he was murdered.”
She dropped both hands in her lap and looked down at
them. “Handedness,” she said. “What a small detail for a story to turn on.”
“Yes,” I said. “Crucial, but small. So small a man wouldn’t give it an instant’s thought if he were about to blow his brains out. He’d be preoccupied with bigger things — wondering how it came to this, wondering if he’ll feel the bullet, wondering if he really has enough courage or enough despair to pull the trigger. It would never occur to him to wonder which hand to hold the gun in. He’d automatically, instinctively pick it up in his preferred hand. If he were Jonah Jamison, he’d pick it up with his left hand and press it to his left temple. Not his right temple.”
“Yes, that has the ring of truth to it,” she said.
“So the story I’m asking for,” I said, “is the story of Jonah Jamison’s murder. And don’t circle back and claim that Novak shot him, because Jonah was already listed as AWOL by the time Novak got back from Hanford.”
She sat perfectly still for a long time. The only sound in the room was the hollow ticking of a wall clock. The slow, steady ticking of background time. “All right,” she finally said. “One last story.”
CHAPTER 40
I came to Tennessee on a train from New York in the fall of 1943; that much of what I told you before was true. But I wasn’t just coming home to Tennessee. I was sent here.
I told you my father died before my mother abandoned me in New York; that’s also true. What I didn’t tell you is that he was a union organizer, and he was beaten to death for helping organize a strike at a Chattanooga steel mill in 1933. He worked for the Industrial Workers of the World, a union that tended to attract socialists and communist-leaning workers.
I was only ten when he was killed, but I remember hearing him say that if Jesus had been born in our lifetime, he’d have preached the gospel of communism. He loved the Bible story where Jesus fed the multitude by passing around communal baskets of loaves and fishes, and every time he told that story, he’d finish by saying, “Clearly Jesus was a Fellow Traveler.” Not the sort of thing that’s likely to win friends in the Deep South.
Most people today think the notion of an atomic bomb was completely unknown during World War II, except to a handful of brilliant physicists, but that’s not true. The lid of secrecy clamped down after the Manhattan Project began, but beforehand, any physics graduate student who was paying attention knew it might be possible. In the spring of 1939, the American Physical Society had an open meeting in Washington, D.C., where nuclear fission and atomic bombs were hot topics of discussion. The meeting was written up in the New York Times, which reported, among other things, that it might be fairly easy to create an atomic explosion that could destroy Manhattan completely. Even decades before that — all the way back in 1914—H. G. Wells predicted that whole cities would be destroyed by atomic bombs. Oddly enough, Wells was a major influence on Leo Szilard, the physicist who persuaded Albert Einstein to write FDR that famous letter. So Szilard actually helped bring the prophecy of H. G. Wells to pass. And the prophecy of John Hendrix, for that matter.
A few years after my mother abandoned me, I started looking for my father — not literally, but spiritually and intellectually — and I seemed to find him when I started spending time with labor organizers and socialists and communists. The summer I worked in the airplane factory, one of my socialist friends introduced me to a Russian man named Alexander, who seemed very interested in my work. That was in 1939, when it was becoming clear that the Soviet Union would bear the brunt of the war against Germany. Alexander talked about how hopeless the air battle would be with the Soviets’ primitive aircraft. By the middle of the summer, I was filching parts for him. By the end of the summer, he gave me a little camera, and I took pictures of engineering drawings. Alexander made me feel important and clever and brave — things I’d never felt before. “You are a citizen of the world,” he told me, and I believed it. Or I pretended to, at least, because I liked how special I felt when I did things for Alexander.
In the summer of 1943, Alexander introduced me to two physicists who were going to Los Alamos. They told me that a lot of work on uranium separation was being done in Tennessee. The three of them encouraged me to go to Knoxville, get a job, and learn whatever I could about the processes. I agreed, and Alexander arranged a contact for me in Knoxville.
When I got off the train in Knoxville I asked around for work, saying I’d heard there were defense plants in the area that needed help. I was practically snatched off the sidewalk and put on a bus for Oak Ridge. I had a ten-minute job interview, which was just about long enough to tell how I’d been orphaned in New York and how my uncle in Tennessee said I might find a job here. I figured they’d be too busy to check on me closely, and I was right.
It was my wits that got me a job operating a calutron in the heart of the Y-12 Plant. But it was luck that steered me to Leonard Novak the night he played and sang. You asked how I could not have known Leonard was gay. I did know. I also knew Leonard was marrying me to deflect suspicions about his homosexuality. But Leonard never knew I was marrying him to get information about his work. I didn’t get much; maybe his lips were looser with whatever lovers he took.
But I hit the mother lode with Jonah, who was tagging along with the photographer, Westcott, the day I became the calutron poster girl. If not for Jonah, I might have had nothing to show for two years of work but dial readings and the story about Lawrence blowing up the calutron. As luck would have it, though, while Westcott was setting up the camera and lights for the calutron shoot, Jonah was flirting and bragging about how he had a bird’s-eye view of the bustle and brilliance. That’s when I realized he could be my eyes all over Oak Ridge. That’s when I realized I had to make Jonah fall in love with me.
Once he did, it wasn’t hard to plant the idea in his head that we’d have more time together if he’d dictate his history of the project and let me type it up.
I didn’t dare make carbon copies; instead I took photos of Jonah’s manuscript pages, just as I’d done with the engineering drawings at the aircraft plant. My film drop was in the cemetery of First Presbyterian Church in downtown Knoxville, a block behind the bars on Gay Street. I could get a ride into Knoxville just about any weekend — Leonard was working eighty hours a week, and as long as I didn’t get into trouble, he felt guilty enough to let me do as I pleased. Everybody makes a big deal about how Oak Ridge was the city behind a fence, but the security guards were mainly searching guys for guns or hooch. Carloads of cute young women, out for a night on the town? The guards eyed us pretty closely, but they weren’t looking for film.
By the summer of 1945, the gaseous-diffusion cascades at K-25 were finally turning out significant amounts of slightly enriched uranium, and the calutrons at Y-12 were doing a good job of turning that into bomb-grade material. Leonard’s chemists at the Graphite Reactor had worked out how to create and extract plutonium, and the giant reactors out at Hanford were starting to crank that out steadily. In the two years since I’d gotten off the train, everything had come together. Groves pulled together all these theory-minded physicists and chemists, created immense factories around their ideas, and damned if it all didn’t work just like they said it would.
And Jonah Jamison wrote it all down, the epic saga of Oak Ridge. He was a good storyteller; much better than I’ve ever been. I read every word he wrote, and took pictures of them all.
Until the day he caught me, just as we were nearing the end of the story.
Leonard was on a trip to Hanford — as you know — so Jonah and I had gotten careless. He’d brought the typewriter over to the house, because his metal trailer was like a solar oven. He’d told me he’d be gone all morning, so I’d laid out some pages of typescript on the kitchen table, where the light was good, and I was shooting copies with my little Minox camera. I guess I’d forgotten to lock the door, because all of a sudden it opened, and there stood Jonah, the light pouring in around him, staring at me, staring at the pages on the table, staring at the tiny camera in my hands. We stoo
d like that for what seemed like several minutes, just looking at each other, then he stepped inside, closed the door, and grabbed my wrist with his left hand. By the way, Bill, you’re right — his left arm and his grip were very strong. He bent my wrist back until I thought it would snap, and with his other hand he took the camera from me.
It was a hot day — early August, in a house with no air-conditioning. I wasn’t wearing much — just a short-sleeved shirt of Leonard’s, and it wasn’t even buttoned. When Jonah twisted my wrist back, the shirt came open, and Jonah looked down at my body. And even though he knew I was betraying him — knew I was betraying everything he was writing about — I saw that he still desired me, at least in that moment. When I saw the hunger, that’s when I knew I had a chance. Maybe he saw hunger in my eyes, too, mixed with my fear and desperation.
So we’re standing there, my wrist still bent back in his left hand, my shirt wide open, and Jonah takes the camera from me and sets it on the table, then he slides his hand down my throat and down my body. I’m trembling, and I can see that he likes that. He’s got his teeth clenched, and his nostrils are flaring, and his breath is getting ragged, and he’s starting to tremble, too, and then he starts fumbling with the buttons of the army coveralls he wore all the time.
“The bed,” I say. “Please. The bed.”
He picks me up and carries me into the bedroom and drops me onto the bed. He yanks down his coveralls, and he’s on top of me and pushing into me, biting my neck, clutching my hair. I can tell it isn’t going to take him long, so I arch my back and put my arms over my head and reach under the pillow for the pistol that I know Leonard keeps there. And just as Jonah groans, the gun fires, and then everything falls silent.
Leonard got home the next day. I met him at the door with a drink and told him something terrible had happened. Then I told him I’d been unfaithful — that wasn’t a surprise — and that Jonah had begged me to get a divorce so I could marry him. When I turned him down, Jonah had threatened me, I said. I pulled out the gun for protection, but Jonah grabbed it from me and shot himself.
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