“I bet it was.”
He opens the icebox, filled with glass bowls of leftovers. He sees the stuffed cabbages, fat babies snuggled in a row. A single cabbage roll per man might have helped protect him and his friends from beriberi during the war. Now it’s just one choice among many. The rolls will be eaten the day after tomorrow. Peggy runs a neat, frugal household. She learned it all from their mother, who never wasted a grape in her life. He finds a Hamm’s and pops off its top on the bottle capper attached to the wall. Charlie pulls out a chair and sits across from Peggy.
He closes his eyes when he drinks down that first cold slug—the best he’s felt all day. It’s as though his soul has been balled up and the beer loosens it at the edges. He sighs, with pleasure more than anything. He’s home. He’s safe. His sister prays for him, even if he won’t pray for himself.
“You okay, kid?” she asks.
“Sure. Why wouldn’t I be okay?”
“I don’t know. You work like a madman. Can’t remember the last time I saw you smile.”
He shrugs. “Yeah? When was the last time you even saw me?”
She laughs. “Stevie asked me the other day, ‘Does Uncle Charlie still live here?’ I said, ‘Last I heard.’”
“Sorry.”
“Even on Sundays, we come back from church and you’re gone. Where do you go?”
“I don’t know. Square dancing? Toastmasters? Knitting circle?”
She shakes her head at him. “When did you become a comedian? Is work good? You still hunting Commies?”
“Best I can.”
“Is it true what that Senator McCarthy says, that there’s a whole list of spies in the State Department?”
He shakes his head. “No. He’s a kook. There may be one. Even two. We have no proof.”
“I’m relieved. I’d look lousy in a babushka.”
He laughs. “You’d make it stylish.”
Her face turns serious. “I can’t help worrying. Imagine raising kids in a Communist world. Whispering the truth while the government yells lies. Not enough food. Sharing our house with two other families . . .”
“It’s not going to happen, Peg. Not here. Not now.”
“It happened in Poland.”
“It won’t happen here. I promise.”
She leans over and kisses his cheek. “Thanks to guys like you. I’m proud of you, kid. Listen.” She grabs his shoulder, abruptly changing tone. “I’ve been thinking about setting you up with Sherry Nowak. She’s Laura Mlynarski’s little sister. Very pretty girl. Blond and petite . . . and a perfect nose. An absolutely perfect nose.”
“I’m not interested in Sherry Nowak’s nose.”
“How about the rest of her?”
“Not right now.”
She squints her eyes, presses her lips together with annoyance.
“You know Linda doesn’t deserve your loyalty,” Peg says. “Never did.”
“It’s not about Linda.”
“I wonder,” Peg says, shaking her head in a worried, scolding way. The curlers bob. “You’ve been back almost four years, Charlie.”
“I know how long I’ve been back.”
“So what are you waiting for? Ma would have been pushing you to find someone if she were alive.”
“Well, Ma isn’t here.”
“Yeah. More’s the pity.” When Charlie looks at Peggy these days, he sees their mother when she was young. Confident. Kind. The same blue eyes. There wasn’t a person in the neighborhood who didn’t count on Lidia Szydlo, didn’t come to her for advice. She knew the right herb to soothe your cough, the right prayer to ease your heart, the right thing to say when no one else understood.
She died of pneumonia in April of ’45, just months before the end of the war and Charlie’s release. Peggy said St. Mary’s was so crowded for her funeral that people were standing in the vestibule. His father, who passed away a year after Charlie got home, told his son it broke his mother’s heart that she was the one who’d insisted he sign up early for the army, before the draft. She considered it her fault that Charlie ended up in the Philippines and might never come home.
“It killed her. Plain and simple.”
“You’re saying she died because of me?” he asked his father, not sure he could bear the weight and pain of another lost life. His own mother.
“I’m going to bed,” he tells Peggy now, setting his bottle in the empties bin for return to the store.
Peggy gets up and reaches out for him.
“Come here, kid,” she says.
He comes over with a shrug and she throws her arms around his waist, which is as high as she can reach. He hears the clock ticking above the door, crickets out on the grass. The gunk she squirts on her curlers smells like maple syrup.
“I love you, you know that, right?” she asks.
“Sure,” he says. “I know, Peg.”
“I just want you to be happy, that’s all.”
“I am happy,” he says.
She shakes her head. “Never lie to your sister. It’s bad policy.”
“Okay, boss.” He kisses her once on each cheek, then trudges down the stairs, lightened by the beer, darkened by his sister’s disappointment in him. Maybe she’s right: He can’t help feeling bleak as he looks around at the concrete floor, the low ceiling. When he came back from the war, he often thought of suicide. He could taste the poisonous tang of the gun oil, feel the cool metal of his service revolver slipped between his lips. Now he’s thirty-one years old and living in a basement. A different kind of suicide. Not one piece of furniture down here hasn’t been hard used and discarded—just like him. Stripping off his clothes, he lies in his bed, stiff, uneasy, and alone.
CHAPTER FIVE
Rosalind scouts the closet for a dress, curls her lashes, reapplies her lipstick. Watching herself primp for Weaver makes her feel ashamed. But it’s been four years since they’ve seen each other, and she wants him to find her irresistible. She wants him to explain and apologize until he bleeds. And then she plans to detonate his heart as he did hers.
By the time the buzzer sounds, it’s twenty past eight. Arrogant people are always late. She lifts the intercom receiver. Frank, the doorman, his voice high and uncomfortable, says, “It’s . . . Mr. Weaver. You . . . uh . . . Miss Porter, you want I should let him up?” Frank’s been guarding this building as long as she’s lived here. He used to see Weaver come home with her nearly every night. Frank and Weaver had roaring discussions about the Cubs and the White Sox—Weaver’s newfound American passion. “You marry him soon, you hear?” Frank said. “A girl like you should be married.” And then the bombs were dropped on Japan.
She knew she was supposed to hate the Japanese. She’d heard their soldiers were cruel. And that the country was ruthless and power hungry. Still, the Manhattan Project’s darling vaporized nursing mothers, little girls cradling dolls, old women pouring tea, men too ancient to fight. It sucked their houses into winds of flame, shattered their hospitals and schools. It dropped an entire town into the sun and the Americans laughed while it burned. And then they chose another town and did the same. More than one hundred thousand dreams burned in a conflagration too hot to yield smoke. Fifty thousand died later of injuries. That’s when, consumed with guilt, she shut Weaver out.
“This will pass,” he told her when she flinched at his touch.
“Will it?”
“I’m here. And I plan to wait until you feel better.” His words touched her. And in time, she did feel herself healing, easing closer to him, rediscovering their passion. Then, one evening after work, on the sidewalk outside Eckhart Hall, Weaver told her that he was breaking it off. It was over. There was someone else. No lead-up. No explanation. Frank had to help her up to her apartment that night after she’d sleepwalked to a bar and come home too drunk to walk straight.
“The man’s a rat,” F
rank told her. “You’re better off without him. But drinking won’t make it better, Miss Porter.” She doesn’t remember much about that night. But she does remember Frank taking her up in the elevator, settling her on the sofa, filling a glass with water, and instructing her, “Drink the whole thing down or you’ll have a screeching headache in the morning.”
Now the doorman asks again in a whisper, “You sure you want to see him, miss?”
“Let him up, Frank.”
“Okay . . .” She can almost hear him shrugging.
Peering into the mirror by the door, she worries how Weaver will view her. But when she opens the door, she’s the one who’s moved. The man standing in front of her has aged radically. Nine years older than she is, he’s thinner and his hair is turning silver about the ears. It gives him a wolflike quality. In the past, he exuded calm. Now there’s a surprising nervous energy. Yet, in his presence, God help her, she feels twice as alive.
“Hi, Duchess.”
“Weaver.”
“You look beautiful. I mean, extraordinarily beautiful. You’ve no idea how happy I am to see you.” He’s never been this effusive before. He always acted so reticent . . . so British.
“I bought the corniest one I could find,” he says, presenting her with a box of chocolates spiked all around with gold paper lace, the words “I Love You” impressed on top in red foil.
“Well, well,” she says dryly. Where did he find these four months after Valentine’s Day?
“I made sure there were maple creams.” Weaver is particularly wild about maple, something he’d never encountered until he reached America. She introduced him to maple syrup, maple sugar candy, maple creams . . . “Oh, and in here”—he holds up a brown bag—“cherries. I know you buy them every June.”
“I don’t want gifts,” she says.
Setting the cherries on the hall table, he comes to her. “Don’t push me away. You’ve no idea how I’ve missed you.” He reaches out to embrace her, but she ducks.
“Let me get you a drink,” she says. “Scotch and soda neat?”
“You remember.”
“There are a lot of things I remember.” She doesn’t say this in a friendly way.
Relieved to have a task, she wills herself not to look at him. Lifting the bottle of Scotch out of the bar cabinet, she realizes how precious it is: bottled prewar, dust coating its shoulders. Ancient history. While he was gone, Scotch reminded her too much of what she’d lost. She hasn’t tasted it since their last night together.
“I always liked this place,” he says. “In the morning especially when we’d wake to the sun coming up over the lake . . .”
His words make her throat ache, remind her of all those years they were so intimate they may as well have been married. They broke every rule she was raised by, and it never felt wrong. Sharing the sunrise, spending every day together in the lab, sitting across from each other at dinner, eating takeout. Sometimes they stopped just to hold hands. They made love on the bed, the floor, the sofa, in the bathtub, against the wall in the kitchen. After he left, she wondered again and again whether it was deeper than desire. It had been for her. But how could he have left so heedlessly? She pours a glass of Scotch for herself and forgoes the soda. God knows she needs it to face him. She takes two deep swigs before she comes to join him on the sofa.
* * *
She’d just turned twenty-two when she met Weaver and was utterly innocent. You could blame it on her father. While Rosalind was growing up, he joined them for dinner at Louisa’s every Sunday. It was the only time she saw him. A lively discussion of Chicago politics or women voters over the entrée inevitably led to a lecture on the dangers of the male population by dessert. Dr. Joe had seen terrible things in his job as Coroner’s Physician. Women who’d chosen violent men, had tried to end unwelcome pregnancies and inadvertently ended themselves, or had fallen into lives of prostitution and met the wrong customer. In each case the moral of the story was death. Rosalind heard these warnings so often she conflated love with danger. She grew up fearful of the opposite sex while longing to embrace the threat they radiated. Dr. Joe was none too pleased when Henry announced that Professor Fermi had recruited Rosalind to work on a top secret project. “Working with all those men, Roz,” Father said. “It can’t end well.”
But Rosalind wasn’t going to let anyone keep her from what she considered her best chance to make a difference. People laughed when she said that fossil fuels would run out someday, leaving mankind stranded. She believed if they could harness nuclear energy, it would prove itself an endless source to power the world. And because Fermi applauded her involvement, there was nothing she wouldn’t do to make him proud. She trekked by bus to a lumberyard to secure and negotiate a price for the endless amounts of wood they needed to build the pile. She talked long-distance to the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company about the dimensions and shape and security of the seams of the square balloon needed to house the reaction.
The thing she did that made Fermi most proud was designing a boron trifluoride counter that worked like a Geiger counter, ticking off neutrons to help gauge the burgeoning reaction. Others had attempted to make just such a tool, but Rosalind spent days experimenting until she learned to enrich the boron to 96 percent boron-10 in order to create consistency. The giddiness she felt when she succeeded was a sensation not unlike falling in love. The day she unveiled it, Fermi, Anderson, and she went swimming off the breakwater rocks at the Fifty-Fifth Street promontory. It had become something of a ritual after work in the summertime. But that day, Fermi unrolled his towel to reveal a bottle of champagne. How had he acquired such a precious commodity during wartime? “A gift from an admirer,” he said, presenting it like a trophy. “And now I use it to admire you, Rosalinda.” He popped the cork. They passed the bottle around laughing, sipping from its cold glass lips. She’d never drunk champagne before and was shocked and pleased by its sour effervescence. Nothing had ever felt as decadent as the three of them sitting on those rocks, their feet in the cool water, celebrating her success.
Despite the tasks she excelled at, she tried hard not to be the team’s mascot. Fifty men and Rosalind. Other than Fermi, her colleagues treated her like a little sister. They teased. They played tricks. Tucking a fake mouse under her purse. Dropping red dye into her Coca-Cola so that she had a circle of red on her lips for two days. It was hard to believe such brilliant men could amuse themselves with idiotic jokes. “Thanks, fellas. My tube of Victory Red is almost gone. And now I don’t need it!”
But when Fermi wasn’t there and a serious issue arose, they rarely included Rosalind in the discussions. If she overheard, she moved closer, spoke anyway. Men, she discovered, often overlooked the obvious. Or worked too hard to come up with a new idea that would reflect well on them rather than turning to the past for answers. Her ideas usually surprised them.
She quickly learned that speaking in a woman’s octave rendered her thoughts inaudible. If she wanted to be heeded, she had to lower the pitch of her voice. And she discovered that speaking more slowly, with air between her phrases, made the men stop and listen. Within a year, people were including Rosalind more. They were turning to her. But because she didn’t want to stand out, she took pains to credit everyone. She always tried to make the men think her ideas had been inspired by theirs.
Then Thomas Weaver swaggered in from New York. He had sailed over from Cambridge to Columbia to work on fission before the war, and it took a letter from FDR to keep him from being sent back to England to fight. In his early thirties, single, lightning smart, he wasn’t afraid to stand out. In fact, he demanded it.
She heard a few of her fellow scientists muttering, “Who the hell does he think he is?”
On his third day at the lab, he approached her. “We haven’t really met,” he said, holding out a hand. “I’d say Fermi knew what he was doing when he put you in a lab coat. You’re not just some girl.
” He looked at her admiringly. “I’ve met your counter. Pure genius.”
“Thank you.”
“In fact, I take off my hat to you.” He removed an imaginary hat and swept down into a ridiculous bow. She laughed. Rosalind was one of the first people in the Met Lab to get past Weaver’s bravado and learn to like him.
Not long after, in December, on a below-zero day, all the Met Lab scientists stood around shivering in scarves and knit caps on the viewing platform above the bitterly cold underground squash court where they’d built the pile, watching their first attempt at a sustained reaction. It was her neutron counter’s beating that let them know the reaction was live. It clicked and clacked until all they heard was a roar. A heart in danger of bursting.
When her counter could no longer handle the speed and intensity, it was switched off and the chart recorder switched on. All went silent—a suspended breath that throbbed in their ears. There wasn’t a scientist on that cold balcony who wasn’t leaning forward. Weaver, standing beside her, reached for her gloved hand and squeezed it. In that charged atmosphere, Fermi, like the greatest of conductors, raised his arm, a salute to the universe and its magic.
“The pile has gone critical,” he declared. And then everyone held their breath as Fermi allowed the pile to run. The minutes ticked off, one, two, three, four! Far longer than anyone expected. If the rate went unchecked, the entire city of Chicago would blow up, Rosalind’s own atoms spinning among the wreckage. No, she told herself. The zip rod could be lowered. The control rods pushed in. Still, not a person in that room could be certain if humans were fast enough to halt a disaster. As a backup, three men stood nervously, one foot forward, one foot back, clutching buckets of cadmium sulfate to toss into the pile if necessary. By the time Fermi at last motioned for the zip rod to be lowered, there was a collective release of breath. The men set down the buckets. Fermi shook his head in wonder and smiled. Like a great navigator, he’d guided them safely through the hurricane.
Atomic Love Page 4