The marionette on the bench who was torturing Charlie’s legacy finally reached the end of the Widor. He extended the final C-major chord, holding it twice as long as the score required. I wanted to yell “Let it go,” but at last he did, and while I sat back with relief, the place went mad with applause.
Oh, but he was changing music books already. Dear heaven, he was going to play another. I felt claustrophobic at the idea of it. Until I heard the first notes.
It was Buxtehude’s Prelude in C Major, a true classic, composed by the man who taught the organ to Bach. An opening of melody played across several octaves, with rests that let the room ring, a sequence of chords to announce that everything so far had been mere introduction, a passage of light notes, as if to prove the composer was capable of being cheery, and then the full thrall of the instrument.
At once it became clear: This silly man at the console had been toying with us. He was excellent. His attacks were bright as trumpet blasts. His figures were robust and certain. His filigree was spotless.
And when the mighty passages came, the power and the glory, he knew exactly what kind of machine he was driving. All of us, every person in that room, had the bone-shaking, heart-quaking experience of a Charles Fish organ at the height of its might, 4,488 pipes in complete command.
I could feel Charlie, too, his integrity and patience, his humility and genius, as if he were sitting beside me. We had spent four decades together, I knew his steadfastness like no one else. I could hear it in that instrument.
When the piece ended I was the first on my feet. But in seconds everyone was giving the man a standing ovation. He took his annoyingly excessive bows, the university organist said something about a reception, and people began filing out. I sat to catch my breath, winded, as if I’d run a race. Which in some ways I suppose I had.
Anna reappeared, followed by a boy her age who had long black hair and the thinly grown beard exclusive to undergraduates. I was tempted to suggest he wait a decade and try again, but I noticed the camera on a strap around his neck.
“Would you mind terribly?” she said. “Maybe you could sit at the organ?”
“That I do not mind in the least.”
Up close, the console was gorgeous. With care, it could still be so in three hundred years. Charlie had used his innovation of reversing the keyboard colors: instead of the natural keys being white and the accidentals black, as on pianos, this organ had dark keys for naturals and white for the accidentals. It looked opulent.
I slid onto the bench. A brass lamp illuminated the music stand. It matched the brass fish inlaid in the wood, Charlie’s signature. Just behind stood the thirty-two-foot reed pipe, first of its kind, nearly touching the ceiling. This was one of the good ones.
“Turn this way,” the photo boy said, and I obeyed. “Chin up,” he commanded, and I did as I was told.
“Now let’s get one of the performer . . . ,” Anna said, leading him away. “Thank you,” she called back with a wave. Then I slid around on the seat to face the instrument. The stops surrounded me, the pipes towered over me. My husband’s final deed.
When Charlie was dying—his liver a mess of problems the doctors attributed to childhood diet, but we knew it was a result of radiation—one night he said, “Do you know what the smartest thing I ever did was?”
“Tell me, love.”
He wrinkled his nose, which by then was as close as he could manage to a smile. “Married a girl way out of my league.”
“No,” I told him. “You married beneath you. She just rose to your level.”
His tongue ran over dry lips. “You never got to attend the conservatory.”
I held a cup with a straw for him, he took a good suck of water, then I set it aside. “You and me, Charlie. That was my greatest performance.”
He relaxed then, surrendered to his deep fatigue, and I knew it would not be long.
Something about that memory made me shift on the bench, and my elbow nudged a key. It sounded. Only a fraction of a second, but now I knew: Mr. Elaborate-Bow had neglected to turn the instrument off.
Oh, didn’t I sit up straight? And open the trumpet stops? And put my worn hands to a shape so familiar, they might as well have been caressing Charlie’s brow? In one gesture, both hands, both feet, I came down on a single unabashed chord. The one Charlie played in the Dubie’s Music showroom in the fall of 1943: a great G major.
I let it sound, then released, then listened as it dwindled for the count of five. Such a room. Such expert voicing. The chord lived for five full seconds.
What came to mind then, of all things, was the charge Reverend Morris gave us at the end of our wedding blessing: make a joyful noise. Which is exactly what Charlie and I spent a lifetime doing, so why stop now? No question about what piece of music it should be either. My one and only performance of it. “Toccata” means touch.
Already I could hear men rushing down the aisle, to protect the instrument, I suppose. To stop me. But they were forty-one years too late. After checking my posture, I began, the opening notes like the peal of a trumpet. Which meant that no one dared interrupt—if not because I was the organ builder’s wife, then because it was Bach, king of this instrument, calling on us all to pay attention.
I have paid attention, and learned one thing in this life: Whatever you love, no matter how fiercely, you will lose it one day. That is the only certainty. Therefore be as kind as you can. Don’t fear your mistakes, as long as you learn humility from them. There is no such thing as perfect pitch.
As I continued playing, the organ came alive under my hands: pipes singing, bellows pumping to fill them. I could feel Charlie breathing through the instrument, so I did not fear the difficult passages ahead. I leaned into every note.
And that is how I was able to touch him one more time.
Acknowledgments
“Seldom, if ever, has a war ended leaving the victors with such a sense of uncertainty and fear, with such a realization that the future is obscure and that survival is not assured.”
—Edward R. Murrow, August 1945
I must immediately confess two things.
The first is that this novel was inspired by an actual person. Charles Brenton Fisk, born in 1925, was a student at Harvard University who worked during World War II at the University of Chicago Metallurgy Department. Later, Charles served on the detonator team at the Manhattan Project laboratory in Los Alamos, New Mexico. After the war he attended Stanford University’s graduate program in physics. He dropped out after less than a semester to work for a small organ company in Redwood City, California. Subsequently he educated himself in the organ, in classes at Stanford and by studying instruments across the United States and Europe. In 1972, he formed the C.B. Fisk Company in Gloucester, Massachusetts, which makes premium quality organs to this day.
I learned about this man from a brilliant essay in The Georgia Review, by Laura Sewell Matter of Albuquerque, New Mexico. But I need to be clear: The real Charles Fisk—who married twice and had two children—provided only the skeleton on which I sought to build a fully fleshed fiction. The Charlie Fish of this novel, therefore, is entirely imagined.
The second revelation is that this book, by engaging with the staggering complexity of atomic weapons and the byzantine intricacy of tracker-style pipe organs, commits many acts of egregious oversimplification. In many instances I blurred or minimized technical details. In reality, it was all far more complicated.
That is not to say that this novel disregards history. It follows the available record closely: holes in the Los Alamos security fence; a man ordered to guard the Trinity test bomb during the thunderstorm; accordion music during square dance breaks; and animals changing color due to radiation. The army really did pile mattresses under the Gadget as it was hoisted to the platform. The submarine strikes—including ship names and number killed—actually happened. All newspaper headlines and quotations came directly from those publications, verbatim.
Most crucially,
dissent among people working on the Manhattan Project—the debates in Fuller Lodge, resignations after the fall of the Third Reich, the Bard letter, Szilard Petition, and Franck Report—was real. Quotations from those documents are also verbatim.
What liberties I took were few, and for specific narrative reasons: Charlie’s train to New Mexico left from Union Station (though it actually embarked from Dearborn Station), because I wanted a departure setting that would make him think of organs. The physicist Robert Serber delivered his explanatory lectures in 1943, but Charlie had not arrived at the Hill yet, so I moved the lectures later and had them delivered by the fictional Robert Sebring. Newsreels about submarine warfare did not generally appear until early 1945, but I allowed Brenda to see one on her date with Chris in 1944. Monroe did a few things the physicist Richard Feynman actually had done, David Horn was modeled after Donald Hornig, and Igor Bronsky substituted for the Russian demolition team leader, George Kistiakowsky (who lacked a deep Russian accent and was a devoted poker player). John Simmons was a fictional stand-in for the actual director of Chicago’s metallurgy project, Professor Joyce Stearns—who was the real Charles Fisk’s uncle. According to several accounts, the milk at Los Alamos really was always sour.
This book draws on a wealth of literature; rather than being exhaustive, I’ll mention highlights. Richard Rhodes wrote the definitive history, The Making of the Atomic Bomb. Life on the Hill became vivid through Inside Box 1663 by Eleanor Jette, whose husband Bill worked on the Manhattan Project, and whose own science background enabled her to guess what was happening long before the facts became available. Tales of Los Alamos: Life on the Mesa 1943–1945 by Bernice Brode revealed the daily challenges that families and spouses faced. Los Alamos 1944–1947, a photobook edited by Toni Michnovicz Gibson and Jon Michnovicz, provided a visual history. The Manhattan Project, edited by Cynthia C. Kelly of the Atomic Heritage Foundation, gathered an excellent oral history from 1938 to 2006. The incident of a man swallowing plutonium has been widely documented; I relied on the account by Eileen Welsome in her book The Plutonium Files. I learned that early atomic bombs were powered by a car battery in Eric Schlosser’s terrifying masterpiece, Command and Control.
I also gained information from the Los Alamos Historical Society, the Bradbury Science Museum in Los Alamos, and the Atomic Heritage Foundation. An off-the-record scientist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory was generous with his time. His recovery research report taught me the geography of The Hill, indicating what happened where. John Canaday, in his book of poems Critical Assembly, offered a compass for navigating the personalities of The Hill. In an interview subsequent to her essay, Laura Sewall Matter expanded on Fisk’s life in ways that were hugely helpful. Miranda Fisk, the real Charles’s daughter, was kind enough to share stories of her childhood and memories of her father.
In September 2018, I had the honor of hearing in person the stories of two Hibakusha (survivors of the atomic bomb): Shigeko Sasamori, who was thirteen years old when she saw a bomber drop a large white object over Hiroshima, and Yasuaki Yamashita, who experienced the bombing of Nagasaki when he was six. The definitive account in English, meanwhile, remains Hiroshima by John Hersey.
Then there was the musical part. The novelist and screenwriter John Fusco convinced me (partly in conversation and partly while jamming) of the glory and delight of Hammond organs. Emory Fanning, Middlebury College music professor emeritus, introduced me to the pipe organ with patience and humor. There is nothing quite like standing amid several thousand pipes when Emory opens the swell division, and the volume rises tenfold. David Neiweem, music professor at the University of Vermont, was generous in explaining and demonstrating the C.B. Fisk Company instrument in that school’s Redstone Recital Hall. Dr. Edward Elwyn Jones, University Organist and Choirmaster at Harvard University, introduced me to the Fisk organ in Memorial Chapel—and treated me to a masterful performance in which I was the entire audience. I referred to essays by Jones and others collected in The Organ in the Academy, edited by Thomas Forrest Kelly & Lesley Bannatyne. I also benefited from The Organ by William Leslie Sumner, Making Music on the Organ by Peter Hurford, and especially the delightful history All the Stops by Craig R. Whitney. Courtney Douglas, 2018 student editor of The Stanford Daily, was kind enough to send me articles from that newspaper about the Fisk organ. Details about the instrument came courtesy of Stanford University Organist Dr. Robert Huw Morgan, who also made excellent suggestions for this book’s repertoire of organ pieces.
Workers at C.B. Fisk Company—especially the patient and understated Dana Sigall—convinced me that tracker organ building requires countless forms of craft and artistry. Although we never met, I am indebted to the late Hannes Kastner for his recording of Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, a performance I listened to often while writing this book.
With so much for me to learn, this novel had a rocky start. But the searing intelligence and endless generosity of my friend Chris Bohjalian helped enormously. My trusted agent, Ellen Levine, helped hone and focus the early going, especially when I delivered an absurdly long first draft. My editor, Jennifer Brehl, who deserves gold stars for patience and insight, also helped shave needless pages, and gave excellent suggestions literally from the first sentences forward. Paula McLain and Jana Seter Nuland offered generous prior help for which I remain grateful. Thanks to Hadley Bunting and Rev. Will Burhans for conversations about the nature of conscience. K.K. Roeder provided moral support, uplifting company during some creepy research, and a warm place to stay in New Mexico.
Early draft readers helped as dependably as ever: John Killacky (who wisely told me to turn down the violins), and Kate Seaver (who suggested that Brenda should not go upstairs to help her mother with the dishes, but instead should sit on the cellar steps and keep Charlie company). That idea opened a thousand narrative doors. Special thanks to my friend and go-to brainstormer, Dawn Tripp.
How many names is that? I’ve lost count, and probably have forgotten some deserving people, for which I apologize. This project depended on the help of multitudes. My gratitude to them is immense.
About the Author
STEPHEN P. KIERNAN is a graduate of Middlebury College, Johns Hopkins University, and the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He spent more than twenty years as a journalist, winning numerous awards before turning to fiction writing. Universe of Two is his fourth novel. He lives in Vermont.
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Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. References to real people, events, establishments, organizations, or locales are intended only to provide a sense of authenticity, and are used fictitiously. All other characters, and all incidents and dialogue, are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real.
universe of two. Copyright © 2020 by Stephen P. Kiernan. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Text from The Odyssey by Homer translated by Emily Wilson. Copyright © 2018 by Emily Wilson. Used by permission of W. W. Norton and Company, Inc.
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Cover design by Mumtaz Mustafa
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Digital Edition MAY 2020 ISBN: 978-0-06-287846-5
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-287844-1
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