Atomic Love

by Jennie Fields

  This was the story Rosalind heard long before she understood its meaning. (Why was the housekeeper on the floor? What’s a flask?) When she was old enough to discover more, she questioned Louisa, her father, and Henry. Each had his or her own way of telling the rest.

  From her father she learned that after the housekeeper was sent away, the doctor’s neighbor, Estelle, “lent” them her maid while she was in Michigan for the summer. But a full-time babysitter needed to be found, and fast. The doctor rejected one candidate after another. He was fifty-six years old and an important man: he’d given up his private practice to become Coroner’s Physician for Cook County. Organized crime was on the upswing. Hardly a week passed that “Dr. Joe” wasn’t pictured in the Tribune standing by a blowfish-swollen cadaver raised from the depths of the Chicago River. Dr. Joe was a city treasure! Front-page headlines read, DR. JOE TESTIFIES O’FLAHERTY WAS SHOT FROM THE OPEN WINDOW WITH A TOMMY GUN!

  “I was an important man. How could I care for a baby, and a girl at that?” her father explained. “I had come to think some nice family who’d had trouble conceiving could give you a better life.”

  “You wanted to give me away?”

  “Well, it was for your own good—and mine, of course.” She doesn’t think she’s ever gotten over that sentence.

  Louisa says she told their father, “If you give the baby away, Mother will roll in her grave.”

  “Then, what am I to do?” he asked. “Estelle’s housekeeper walks around with a Theosophical Mysticism pamphlet in her apron pocket. Raised by the hired help, your sister will grow up feral, or worse, a Democrat! I’m not meant to take on the responsibility of a baby. I’m a man!”

  A man. Men did important work. Women were scaffolding. That’s what their mother had taught Louisa. Which meant her excellent high school grades signified she’d be good at making the grocery money come out even at the end of the month. She might, in her free moments, read a book for pleasure. College was never even considered.

  At twenty-one Louisa had achieved what her mother had once deemed a woman’s greatest success: acquiring a good husband. She and Henry lived a few blocks from her father in a brand-new bungalow. They were looking forward to some unencumbered months of romance and breakfast in bed before a family came along. It was the end of 1920. The war was over. Women could vote, were showing off their ankles. She and Henry planned a bicycle trip in Wisconsin. They even talked about taking the train to New York City and then a steamship to Paris. “We were in love. We wanted to be a couple first. Not a family. I wanted to be a pretty girl with a man on my arm,” Louisa told Rosalind years later, still bitter, it seemed.

  But rather than leave her baby sister to the Theosophists, Louisa and Henry brought home Rosalind’s crib and high chair and prepared themselves for sleepless nights. Like all abandoned babies, Rosalind was needy. “You dug your fingers into my arm whenever I tried to put you down. Like a baby monkey,” Louisa told her.

  This description still makes Rosalind cringe.

  Henry’s point of view has always been kinder. “You were something! What a gift! You spoke at nine months. Counted to one hundred by the time you were a year and a half. And your first word was ‘why.’ ‘Why take my spoon away?’ ‘Why must I go to sleep now?’ ‘Why?’ At two and a half, when milk spilled and dripped off the tray of your high chair onto the floor one day, you asked, ‘Why circle?’”

  She loved hearing Henry’s stories about her, but this one especially. Henry told her that he stood up from the breakfast table to look where she was pointing and saw that each drop made a perfect radiating ring in the already pooled milk.

  “Good question,” he told her. “Well, I’d say that each drop of milk is round. So when it hits the already spilled milk it makes a round impression. A circle.”

  Henry went on to explain what he knew about surface tension. About how molecules clung together from all directions to make each drop a sphere. He even drew her a diagram.

  “This is asinine. She can’t possibly comprehend,” Louisa complained.

  But later, he’s often told Rosalind, after he tucked her into her crib, he was pulling down the window shade when she pointed to the full moon. “Why moon a circle? Moon is molecules?”

  “The moon?” he asked. “Yes.”

  “All-together molecules? In all dee-rections?” She moved her hands to demonstrate. He looked up at the orb in the sky with a smile. “And that was the moment, kid, I knew you’d be a scientist.”

  * * *

  “I’ve been thinking of trying to find a science job again,” Rosalind ventures quietly now, looking at everyone at the table, but mostly addressing Henry. This is a fearful thing: her love of science, which has betrayed her.

  “Good for you,” Henry says. “Good for you.”

  “I miss it,” she says.

  “I’ve wondered.”

  “I try to go to lectures. I still get the Journal of Applied Physics and the American Journal of Physics. I try to read what I can.”

  Louisa’s nostrils flare. “With all the GIs back, do you really think a science position would be open to a woman?”

  Rosalind opens her mouth, then closes it.

  “You’re special,” Henry says. “You can do it just like you did before.”

  “You can, Rozzie!” Ava says. But Rosalind realizes Louisa’s right: Who will hire her, especially after Weaver’s report?

  Henry reaches across the table and squeezes her hand. “This is what you’re meant to do. You just need to believe it again.”

  While Ava eats her Wiener schnitzel with enthusiasm and Louisa rants about their horrible new neighbors and her fear of creeping Communism, Rosalind frowns, shakes her head, then glances about, wishing to distract herself from the sick feeling that roils inside—the feeling that she’ll never be happy again. The Berghoff is jammed with families. Lovers. Everyone else seems to be having a fine time. Except, at a table by the wall near the bar, Roz spots a man. Even seated, he’s taller than everyone around him. She takes in his flattop haircut, his even features, the fact that his table is set for one. Why is this handsome man dining out alone? And then, even with the bar half blocking her view, she notes the way he presses his wrist against his ribs. Her mouth goes dry. It’s him. She’s sure of it. The man who followed her home yesterday. He glances up and their eyes lock. She can tell his are blue from halfway across the room. The most extraordinary, electric blue. She loses the thread of her sister’s conversation. What is he? An admirer or a madman? She experiences a chill.

  “Have you gone deaf, Roz?” Louisa asks. “I just asked which suburb did Jane Ann move to?”

  “Oh . . . sorry . . . Glenview.”

  “Right. Glenview. That’s the one I want to check out for us.”

  “We are not moving to the suburbs,” Henry says. “You okay, Roz? You’ve gone all pale.”

  “No. It’s nothing. Sorry. My mind wandered.” Lots of men were injured during the war. It’s probably not the same one at all. Still, her heart is slamming. She slips her arm around Ava’s shoulders.

  “So how much fun was that Wiener schnitzel?” she asks, pushing the words through the tightness in her throat.

  “So fun! It’s my favorite now.” Rosalind glances up and watches the man’s azure eyes leave her face with the suddenness of fingers being snatched from a burning stove.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The following week, Rosalind spots him running in the rain to catch her bus at the next stop. Dripping wet, he steps onto the vehicle without acknowledging her gaze. Later, she feels him watching her and it makes her prickle. What does he want? She notices him two days later at Janice’s perfume display, just when the store’s about to close. He pushes bottles from side to side as though evaluating them. But when Janice asks if she can help, he shakes his head and leaves. Rosalind feels increasingly scared. Why is this man always there, a
flicker in the corner of her eye? She considers calling the police, but he hasn’t done anything wrong. If he comes near her on the street, she imagines that she will scream. A siren in the din of human movement.

  Zeke, the one friend who loves her no matter what she reveals about herself, has begun calling him “Shadowman.” Inseparable since adolescence, she and Zeke are each other’s cheering section and speak often. The fact that he can never love her as a man loves a woman is a sad truth that somehow binds them closer. “I want a painfully accurate description of this fellow, Bunny. Every. Single. Detail,” Zeke says.

  “Well, he’s attractive in a brooding sort of way. Weirdly tall. Intense blue eyes. His hair is short, blond. He moves like an athlete. Why would he follow me?”

  “You know I love riddles.” He clears his throat. “Okay, two possibilities: He finds you attractive, or you’re on his hit list.”

  “Would a man follow a woman so assiduously if he just liked her?” she asks.

  “You’re a pretty girl,” Zeke says.

  “He can’t be following me for a good reason.”

  “Maybe the poor fellow’s found love and is too shy to approach. Even handsome men can be shy.”

  She sighs. “I’d say there’s a twelve percent chance of that, and an eighty-eight percent chance there’s something nefarious going on. Thanks for trying to make me feel better, though.”

  Later, alone, thinking of the man, she starts to shake and has to pour herself a slug of Chianti from a half-drunk bottle Zeke brought her more than a year ago. After she lost her job in ’47, she started drinking a little, then a lot, trying to combat the loneliness, the pain of not knowing where her life was going. It wasn’t just the loss of Weaver; it was losing herself as a scientist that wounded most. One minute she and her fellow physicists were crossing a virgin space together. No one had ever reached the other side, and they could see it, practically touch it. Her ideas were making it easier for them to reach the infinite. Then nothing. She was barred from the party. Shunned. No Weaver. No science. The oblivion of alcohol seemed a necessary recourse.

  But oblivion is a wounding place. She was waking up groggy. Her memory—which Fermi once called photographic—was compromised. She could no longer multiply complex numbers in her head or recall the thousand details of ordinary moments as she usually did. Once, she woke up on the floor. Just like her father’s infamous flask-toting housekeeper.

  So she employed science. She calculated how long it would take to completely excrete the alcohol. She studied how alcohol is metabolized, its effect on the liver. Its long-term effects. The mathematics of sobriety, she told herself. She stopped cold turkey. Each night she tried to multiply larger and larger numbers in her head. She glanced at photographs and tested how many objects she could remember. She calculated. She kept charts. And she held on to Zeke’s bottle of Chianti to remind herself she had power over her own desire to hide from pain. She should have thrown it out, she thinks now. It’s been a long while since she’s drunk a sip of alcohol. And this wine has surely turned. Black residue sinks to the bottom of her glass. But envisioning the tall man with the blue eyes, his interest in her suddenly overwhelming, she swallows it down, sediment and all.

  * * *

  Friday, as she’s stepping out of the dentist’s office building, she spots her pursuer at the bus stop across the street, reading a newspaper with a frown. It’s time to put a stop to this. Her heart dancing against her throat, her hands clenched tight, she approaches. He looks up with a start.

  “Why are you following me?” she asks. There are hundreds of people around. Still, her heart’s slamming.

  Sun lines splay around his brilliant cornflower eyes. Long blond lashes and the sudden rosiness of his cheeks lend him a certain vulnerability. She tries to focus on that.

  “Look. Miss Porter, can I buy you a cup of coffee?” Dear God. He knows her name.

  “I need to get back to work.”

  “If you’d had your tooth pulled, you’d have been delayed.” He points to the building from where she’s just come. “Your supervisor won’t guess.”

  “How do you know where I was? Who are you?”

  “Over coffee.” He’s glancing at the neon sign across the street. WINDY CITY DONUTS. There are plenty of people inside, despite the off-hour.

  “What makes you think I’d have coffee with you? I want you to stop following me. Do I have to call the police?”

  He takes a breath and, with a pained smile, reaches into his jacket. Pulling out a worn wallet, he reveals a brass badge and an ID.

  “My name is Charles Szydlo.” His voice is soft and careful. “FBI.”

  She’s so surprised, it takes her a moment to say, “You’re joking.”

  He shakes his head.

  “What could you possibly want with me?”

  “Come sit for a few minutes,” he says, glancing again across the street. “I’ll explain.”

  She takes a deep breath, hesitates, and then nods. An FBI agent. The improbability of it hits her. As they cross at the corner, she tries to get a sense of him. Erect, isolated. A soldier once, for certain. Before the war, she imagines he was a different man. The spray of lines around his eyes tells her that at one time he smiled a great deal. Now he doesn’t smile at all. He points through the bakery window to a pan of crullers with chocolate glaze. “I’m getting one of those. You?”

  She shrugs. “Sure.”

  Inside, he approaches the counter and pays for their treats, managing his wallet and pulling out the bills with one hand. His fingers are long and graceful. His other hand, Rosalind observes, is withered, covered in a spiderweb of scars and thickened skin. She can’t help feeling sorry for his injury. She has an urge to reach out and explore the raised welts.

  The hostess shows them to a table near the front window.

  “Miss Porter.” He gestures to the opposite banquette, suggesting she sit first. It chills her, hearing her name again. Is he here to accuse her of something? She’s aware of her own breathing and the ticking of her heart in her ears.

  Sliding into the booth across from her, he removes his hat, sets it beside him. “So you’re waiting for an explanation . . .”

  A waitress comes before he can say more, plunks down two thick white mugs, and starts pouring a cup for Rosalind.

  “No coffee for me,” she says.

  “Surely you want something to drink?” he asks. “Tea maybe?”

  She nods.

  “Please bring the lady tea.”

  “You want the joe I poured?” the waitress asks him.

  He silently slides the mug toward himself. He unrolls the bag of doughnuts with one hand, then plucks a paper napkin from the silver holder and sets a cruller in front of Rosalind.

  “I’m actually not much of a coffee drinker myself. Just thought it might be good with doughnuts.” He takes a bite of his cruller. “These are good. You should try yours.” She can see the man is making an effort to be friendly, nonchalant.

  “Why am I here?” she asks.

  He leans forward, stares at her for a moment before he speaks. “You worked with Fermi on the Manhattan Project, didn’t you?”

  For years she was instructed never to reveal a thing about her work. To say only that she had a job at the Metallurgical Laboratory. As for the trips to Oak Ridge and Hanford and Los Alamos, oh God, those endless desert nights in bed with Weaver—she told her family they were pleasure trips with girlfriends. Sitting with Mr. FBI now, she doesn’t say a word. She observes how he so carefully hides his hand. No matter how long it’s been since she lost her job, she still protects the project in the same way.

  He stares at her with those water-hued eyes.

  “Tell me about your relationship with Thomas Weaver,” he says.

  “Weaver?” she asks. “Why?”

  “He interests us.”

&n
bsp; “Well, he doesn’t interest me anymore. I want nothing to do with him. I certainly don’t want to discuss our ‘relationship,’ as you call it.”

  Szydlo merely sits back and shakes his head.

  “You’re a pistol,” he says.

  “I’m glad I amuse you.”

  He takes a sip from his mug. “I bet you intimidate a lot of guys. A nuclear physicist.”

  “Not anymore.” She frowns at him. “I sell jewelry.” Even after three and a half years, speaking the words aloud sends a ripple of irony through her.

  “Were you surprised when Weaver started calling you again?”

  “How . . . how do you know he’s been calling?”

  “I know you’ve said no. You haven’t seen him anyway?”

  “I don’t want anything to do with him. I told him to leave me alone.”

  “Actually, you told him . . .” He pulls a little notebook out of his breast pocket. “‘Stay out of my life.’” He glances up meaningfully.

  “I . . . How . . . ?”

  “We’ve been tapping your telephone.”

  It takes a moment for her to swallow this indigestible pit. The day before yesterday, she’d complained to her friend Marie about her monthly cramps. Heat crawls up the back of her neck.

  “I’m sorry we had to compromise your privacy,” he says. “Of course, we had a court order.”

  “I haven’t done anything wrong.”

  “It’s not you we’re after.”

  “But it’s me you’re following. You’re not very good at it. I’ve spotted you more times than I can count.”

  “What did your friend call me? Shadowman? Like a radio character. It’s hard to tail someone when you’re six foot seven.”

  Remembering that she’d told Zeke that Shadowman was menacing but attractive, Rosalind experiences a chill that makes her scalp tingle. She’d described him in detail. Those eyes!