Atomic Love

by Jennie Fields

  Zeke should know. Back when Weaver left Rosalind, the shock that he no longer loved her settled in her bones like lead. After that ridiculous night of drinking, instead of the hangover Frank predicted, she simply couldn’t get out of bed. Her father’s death in June had left her raw. After the bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August, she’d experienced a deep, scalding sadness. Now with the loss of Weaver, she was paralyzed.

  Maybe it wouldn’t have happened if all three things hadn’t occurred within a year. There was plenty of warning that Dr. Joe had been failing. He’d started making no sense, couldn’t end sentences. Admitted that he “lost time” sometimes. “I don’t know what I did today,” he told them at dinner one night.

  “You mean you didn’t do much?” Louisa asked.

  “No, I mean I can’t . . .” His face looked pinched, grew gray. “I simply can’t tell you what I did.” He actually cried then. Their father, who detested tears, wept in front of them.

  Her father’s physician said Dr. Joe had “hardening of the arteries.” Rosalind imagined a snarl of sharp, impassable bramble in his brain, a briar patch of vessels where thoughts could no longer flow. Though he complained and argued about it, Louisa moved him into her house, to the room that had once been Rosalind’s. The walls were still papered with pink ballerinas. Dr. Joe muttered, “Too many damn dancers.” It was one of the more cogent things he uttered in those last few weeks before a final stroke felled him.

  One morning, Louisa looked in on him and he’d turned a peaceful gray-blue. “Like the color of the sky before a rain,” she told Rosalind. Rosalind could see that her sister was relieved. She’d been overwhelmed by the futility of nursing a dying man while trying to keep up with a five-year-old. “He never liked crying,” Louisa said at his funeral. “So I have no intention of spoiling his funeral with unnecessary tears.”

  Rosalind, on the other hand, was taken aback to find herself devastated. Though Dr. Joe was her biological father, he’d been hardly more than a distant, critical grandfather. And like Louisa, he seemed uncomfortable with the idea of his daughter breaking down the walls of a woman’s place. “Your mother would have stopped you had she been alive. You can bet on that,” he once declared. But it was because their relationship hadn’t been as close as she wished it could be that his death made her feel surprisingly cheated and sad. He’d consciously chosen to stay out of her life—her own father—and it made her feel unlovable. She once heard that the bereaved mourn more for people with whom things were left unsettled. And Rosalind saw it was true.

  Two months later, when the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, she was still feeling tender and in mourning. Now there were 150,000 more souls to grieve for. The way she saw it, she’d murdered at least a hundred thousand people in seconds. And sent fifty thousand more to their deaths via injury. At first, she wept and railed. All those years working on the Manhattan Project, she and many of the scientists she worked with had foolishly convinced themselves that the bombs they created were only going to be used as a threat, as leverage. Instead, their invention laid waste to lands and life—life for which she would be forever responsible.

  So losing Weaver just six months after that should have been the least of her woes. And yet, his leaving—so abrupt and hateful—was loss on top of loss. The pain for her was physical: volts of electricity boring through her brain, acid burning through every artery. Zeke called again and again. She lay in bed, in the dark, not able to answer. The morning after the drinking, she’d called him to say Weaver had broken it off. But after that, she forgot about work, about eating. About bathing. About life.

  She opened her eyes and Zeke was standing over her bed, his crew cut an orange corona in the lights seeping up from Lake Shore Drive.

  “Bunny girl,” he whispered. “Are you alive?” His eyes glistened with worry. Zeke was the one who had her key, who watered her plants when she was away and had promised to burn Weaver’s letters if she should be hit by a bus.

  She tried to speak. No words came out. Stroking her face cautiously, he whispered, “Are you paralyzed or something? Did you take pills? You wouldn’t do that, would you?” She managed to shake her head just enough for him to see. Her mind was roiling with pain, hatred, despair.

  “I swear to God, I’m going to kill that man,” he said. He stood with his legs spread, his fists balled, like a gun-toting cowboy ready for a showdown. “Do you have the key to Weaver’s apartment? I’m going to knife him in his sleep.”

  “No,” she managed to utter. “It’s not his fault.”

  “Not his fault? How do you figure? How dare he do this to you!”

  “It was me,” she said.

  “What did you do?”

  “I loved him too much.”

  “Oh Jesus. So he leaves you?”

  “I didn’t deserve him.”

  “Stop it. You need to be angry. You need to want to squash him, maim him, eviscerate him!”

  His cheering for her anger hurt. She squeezed her eyes shut. What feelings might rise in her if she let them?

  “When was the last time you got out of bed?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Or eaten?”

  “No food.”

  “Do you plan to die in this bed?”

  “I hope so.”

  He telephoned her sister.

  Louisa and Henry came over and packed a bag of her clothes, then, with some effort—she wouldn’t dress, so they had to wrap a blanket around her to get her out the door—took her to their house, back to her childhood room, where Dr. Joe had died. “I’m in the exit room,” she whispered to herself. “Soon I’ll disappear too.” Her sister telephoned Rosalind’s office, now called the Institute for Nuclear Studies, and told them Rosalind had been diagnosed with pneumonia and was in the hospital. Zeke came at least every other night to visit. Sometimes he lay down in bed with Rosalind and held her in his arms. “I love you so,” he told her. “Little Mommy’s right. I’m afraid I’ll never love a man as much as I love you.”

  But she no longer loved herself. Her father hadn’t wanted her. Her passion for science had led her to take part in creating the ultimate destruction. Her lover had left her for someone surely better. Every time she stumbled into the bathroom—the only time she got up—she saw no one in the mirror.

  Louisa persuaded their regular doctor, Dr. Stiegel, an old friend of their father’s, to come over and talk to her. Stiegel was concerned. He contacted a well-known psychiatrist named Knaumann, who agreed to see her.

  Rosalind fought Louisa when she made her dress for the appointment.

  “I don’t want to see anyone,” she cried. Louisa buttoned her buttons, pulled a brush through her hair.

  “You can’t stay in bed the rest of your life,” she said. “This man will help.”

  Rosalind remembers that Knaumann’s office was coldly beautiful, very modern, and smelled richly of pipe smoke. He offered her fruit candies and a glass of water. He talked to her for an hour.

  “And are you angry that your mother died?” he asked her. “Do you dream of suckling on her breast?”

  “Of what?” She deemed the man seriously mad.

  He asked intrusive questions about her sex life with Weaver.

  “Do you feel shame for having given yourself to a man before marriage?” he asked.

  “Do you feel shame for pretending to be a psychiatrist?” Roz countered. He didn’t seem to know how to answer that.

  “I think you’re an unusually angry young lady,” he declared.

  “I’m angry at myself,” she said.

  “And yet you take it out on me.” Knaumann wrote furiously on his yellow pad.

  He recommended Louisa commit Rosalind to a sanatorium for a few months or even longer. But to Louisa, a sanatorium was a place of no return. She feared her sister would be warehoused and never get better. So she p
ersuaded him to prescribe a gentle sedative and took Roz home.

  Ever since she was in high school, Rosalind and Louisa had been at all-out war. Not only had Rosalind turned her back on the domestic training Louisa had been trying to force down her throat for years—she was hilariously bad at ironing and cooking and womanly chores—but when Rosalind began winning every academic prize, when she was encouraged to graduate high school two years early and start at the University of Chicago as the youngest girl to ever attend, Louisa was not encouraging.

  Henry cheered her on. Zeke said he was proud to know such an egghead. But Louisa said, “Don’t get all puffed up, missy. In the end, you’ll be alone.”

  “I’m pursuing what interests me. I’m trying to be the best I can be.”

  “Maybe in college you’ll find a husband,” Louisa offered.

  “That’s not what I want!” Roz cried.

  Henry instructed Roz to ignore it.

  “That’s not why I’m going to college,” she insisted.

  “Of course it’s not,” Henry agreed. “But you won’t get anywhere arguing with Louisa.” She and her sister became more estranged than ever. And after Ava was born and Louisa told Roz that she was the curse, there’d been little love lost.

  But when Weaver left and Roz collapsed, tectonic plates shifted. Despite the fact that Louisa had a six-year-old at home, she took in her heartbroken sister and focused on her in a way she hadn’t for years. With kindness, with sympathy. “It’s time for Louisa’s rest cure,” she whispered.

  Louisa drenched her little sister in a sweetness that Roz desperately craved, hugging her ten times a day, making all her favorite dishes, and spending hours talking to her not just about happy things, which most people would have done, but about sad things too. She asked about the horror Roz felt when the bombs dropped on Japan. She asked about what Weaver’s betrayal meant to her. They talked about their father, both of them scoffing about how he hadn’t really been loving or interested. Everything had to be focused on him, his career, his fame. These conversations were incredibly healing. Rosalind realizes now with some shame that never once during that time did she ask about Louisa. Or wonder about her needs. She could blame it on her raw, desperate state. But now, years later, she wishes she’d reciprocated, at least a little, at that very moment, when they were the closest.

  In any case, Louisa could not have been a more intuitive healer. There were days she encouraged Roz’s baser, angrier emotions. “Let’s both curse at Father and the bomb and Weaver,” she said one afternoon. They screamed. They called names. It was ludicrous. It was wonderful. Her sister understood her. Her sister loved her. She had never been sure. Miraculously, in time, Rosalind’s grief began to lift.

  Away from work for more than five weeks, Roz came back still shaky, alarmed at continuing to work on the dark side of atomic power, terrified of having to see Weaver. But she came back. And it was all thanks to Louisa. Louisa loved her after all. Even if a quiet seed was planted: Louisa loves me best when I’ve failed.

  * * *

  Still, she wasn’t as sturdy as she needed to be. One afternoon in the hall, Roz ran into Weaver. He stopped in his tracks and his breath hitched. His lips paled visibly. “Roz,” he whispered, giving off a cloud of unexpected despair. He still loves me! she thought. He regrets leaving me! She was certain. No one else was around and she stepped toward him.

  “Weaver,” she whispered. And then, in a way that sent ice through her veins, he turned away from her.

  “Please,” he said. “Don’t speak to me. Don’t ever speak to me again.” He went back the way he’d come, sending her into a torrent of weeping in the ladies’ room. And that wasn’t even the worst moment. There was the day she encountered the woman he left her for.

  * * *

  It was an afternoon a few weeks later. She was stepping out to catch her bus when she glimpsed Weaver by the side of the building, standing with a striking lady. High-heeled and statuesque, the woman was urbane and exotic. Her dark hair was parted in the middle and pulled back to either side. Her eyes were as black and impenetrable as obsidian—birds’ eyes. She was an olive-skinned, glamorous Wallis Simpson, the woman whom King Edward VIII had abdicated his crown for. (How many times had movies in her teen years begun with newsreels of the American woman for whom the king had given up his crown?) This woman, too, was icy and imperious. She was also older than Roz had expected. In her midforties. Maybe even fifty. Her lids were lined like an Egyptian’s and she smoked a cigarette in a long green holder. This was the woman he’d chosen over her. How pale a bookish little scientist must have seemed in comparison.

  The deflation was dizzying. Rosalind spun like a pricked balloon. She let the bus go without her, hid herself behind the edge of the building, close enough to register every detail of her elegant rival. The pearl button earrings, the tripled gold chain around the sinewy neck, which disappeared into her shirt in a louche, inviting way. The woman grabbed Weaver’s arm with bloodred fingernails. “We must go, Thomas,” she said in an accent. A French accent. He’d fallen for a woman who must have reminded him of his late wife. Weaver went off like a man on a leash. Rosalind had never had that sort of purchase over him. Later, a colleague told her they’d married. Her name was Clemence. A name as smooth as cream sherry on one’s tongue.

  * * *

  In a few weeks, Rosalind’s job was gone. A report had been written that suggested she was emotionally unstable. An unbalanced person should not have top secret clearance, should not be working with nuclear materials, it stated, or know anything about the government’s intentions or resources. They didn’t say who wrote the report, but Weaver was the only person at the lab who was aware she was undone by her involvement with the bomb and suffered from bouts of darkness. He was the only one who could have guessed why she “got sick” the day after he broke her heart. Fermi had taken his family to Los Alamos and was no longer there to speak up for his student. All in a matter of weeks, she lost not only the man she loved, but her career too.

  * * *

  How she should despise Weaver. Yet, since Saturday, she’s incessantly replayed that moment in the Chinese restaurant with rain streaking the window, tea steaming in her cup, Weaver animated and joking, and Ava laughing. That moment of crystalline joy has hooked itself into her heart. Tuesday night, she’s agreed to meet him at the Bon Ton on State Street, their favorite restaurant during the war. He’s promised this time he’ll tell her something that will change her mind.

  I’m doing this for the FBI, she reminds herself again and again as she walks to the Bon Ton. Still, when Weaver arrives and smiles at her across the room, she is racked by a jolt of feeling. Sitting across the table from each other, they’re quiet. He takes her hand, looks at her as though trying to find meaning in her face. How nervous she feels. Her stomach tight, a light ache moving up the sides of her forehead. She’s relieved when he orders them both a Scotch.

  After a few sips, she says, “Did you see the headlines today—Korea?”

  He nods and pulls the Tribune from the outside pocket of his briefcase. Together they stare at the oxymoronic words.

  Yanks to Raid North Korea. Truman: We’re Not at War.

  “The most absurd part is here.” Rosalind points to a note at the bottom of the page. “Full-Page War Map of Korea in Color.”

  He laughs. “Yes, it should read, ‘Full-Page Not-at-War Map.’”

  “I can’t bear another war,” she says.

  “Who can?”

  “They won’t drop our bomb, will they?”

  “I hope not, love. I hope they never drop that damn bomb again.” It’s the first time he’s ever said anything like this to her. “Besides,” he says, “the Russians have their own bomb now. Maybe because of that, no A-bombs will drop. Perhaps it’s best, this balance.” Is it because of Weaver that “this balance” exists? The concept makes her shiver.

  “I keep
asking myself, how did they learn to build their bomb?” She watches him.

  “I don’t know,” he says. “They have good scientists.” He doesn’t look uncomfortable. Yet his eyes grow imperceptibly distant.

  “It had to be one of us who shared the information, though, don’t you think?”

  He shakes his head, takes a swig of his Scotch. Is it studied nonchalance she notes? “Impossible to know.” He shrugs. “But if so, it could have been anyone. Fermi or Zinn, or the janitor who cleaned up after us in Los Alamos.” He scratches his ear. “Still, is it really a bad thing?”

  “Of course it is!”

  “You think that because you read propaganda against the Russians.”

  “It’s because they’re heartless. Venal!”

  “Are they? Maybe so. But once, they fought Hitler just like we did. And not so long ago. I recall sitting right here talking about the Russians as our hope on the eastern front.”

  Looking around, she remembers the meals she and Weaver shared at the Bon Ton during the war. The old Hungarian violinist with a violent green kerchief around his neck who played mournful tunes. The debates, the longing. Chicken paprikash, Hungarian pastry even when food was being rationed. Life during the war felt fragile, and love was its only antidote. It hardly feels less tenuous now.

  “I don’t think I ever told you this, but I was a Communist once,” Weaver says softly now. “Back at Cambridge. It’s funny, but when the Brits were vetting me, it never came up . . .”

  She glances up sharply. “You were a Communist?”

  “A lot of us were. I was young and idealistic and believed that wealth should be shared.”

  “But to never own anything of your own. Even your job is controlled by the state. People lack freedom.”

  He laughs. “More propaganda.”

  “I hear the Russian people are scrambling to find decent food. And if you disagree with the government, you might be killed. What about freedom?”