109 East Palace (23 page)

The scientists were hardly alone in feeling the pressure. The physicists’ families also lived with it, lived with the feeling that the work took precedence over everything, that the work had to get done. “It was always hurry, hurry, hurry!” wrote Elsie McMillan. “Work this morning, work this afternoon, work until 4:00
A.M.
Work, work, work.” To most of the physicists’ wives, it seemed as if the men disappeared into the Tech Area each morning as if into the belly of the beast, leaving them to fend for themselves. “The Tech Area was a great pit which swallowed our scientist husbands out of sight, almost out of our lives,” recalled Ruth Marshak, the wife of Robert Marshak, the deputy head of the Theoretical Division. Lonely, confused, and anxious, many of the women felt alienated from their husbands as never before. Physicists who for years had come home and bored their wives with endless hours of shop talk now never spoke of their work, which consumed their days, and sometimes their nights and weekends. They sat through family dinners in an exhausted stupor, staring at the ceiling, or persevered in making polite small talk, mentioning the leaky faucet or latest mesa traffic accident, which sounded unnatural and forced. They would suddenly disappear for days at a time, working around the clock on their experiments, only to return looking gray and worried. Cautioned not to share their burden, they let the silence build walls between them and their spouses. “Secrecy becomes a habit,” said Rose Bethe, who had known about the bomb project from its inception and had once engaged in long ethical arguments about it with her husband. “Hans stopped talking about his work. We just stopped talking.”

Los Alamos was a community of walls within walls. To Ruth Marshak, the fence penning the compound “had a real and tangible effect on the psychology of the people behind it. It was a tangible barrier,” she said, “a symbol of our isolated lives. Within it lay the most secret part of the atomic bomb project.” The Tech Area, with its ominous third security fence segregating the scientists from their wives, represented an even more profound emotional and physical divide. This was the forbidden zone. It was impossible to enter the Tech Area without a badge: a white badge indicated the senior cadre of scientific personnel with full clearance and granted access to all Tech Area buildings; blue provided limited access, specific to one work station; orange was for the support staff—the secretaries, clerks, and typists—composed of scientists’ wives with skills and time and willingness to work.

Inevitably, the badges came to connote a certain social status. Los Alamos was not a casteless society any more than the laboratory was. Social lines were drawn according to the importance of one’s position in the Tech Area hierarchy, with special distinction accorded to the handpicked crew who were first to arrive on the mesa with Oppie, facetiously referred to as “the Mayflower crowd.” Women who had badges were in the know, and they enjoyed a shared sense of excitement and purpose with the project leaders that some of the men’s own wives did not. Charlotte Serber, whom Oppie had made head of the Tech Area library and classified document room, had the honor of being the sole female group leader. Charlotte was privy to most of the work that was going on, as was Oppie’s assistant, Priscilla Greene. “They were major-domos, no doubt about it,” said Harold Agnew. “They more or less ran the place.” More important in the pecking order of Los Alamos, they were invited to the Oppenheimers’ home for dinner parties, where they traded stories about the latest Feynman safecracking incident and cryptic office gossip that made the other women present feel left out.

Only a few physicists dared to violate Groves’ admonitions and confide in their wives the exact nature of what they were doing in the Tech Area. Some couples were so nervous that the army might be eavesdropping on their conversations, they would save private talks for long hikes or rides into the open countryside. Despite their suspicions and all too many slips of the tongue, most of the wives at Los Alamos existed in a peculiar state of deliberate ignorance. Many took the view that it was easier not to know, because that way they had no secrets to guard, though Elsie McMillan was glad when she finally learned the truth. “In a way I was fortunate to know what they were actually doing,” she recalled, “a fact I discovered from a high-up leak.” (Her sister, Mary, was married to Ernest Lawrence, the director of the top-secret Hanford site, which was producing the plutonium for the bomb.) “Ed nearly fell out of bed the night I admitted I knew,” Elsie said, “but it was a relief to be able to talk to each other freely in private. A relief that few other wives shared.”

The pressures were immense, and insidious. “No wonder the inhabitants became touchy and restless,” observed Segrè, who had more perspective than most as he enjoyed the rare luxury of commuting back and forth between Los Alamos and Berkeley for the first few months of the project:

Often they resented petty things to which they would never have paid attention under normal circumstances. Rank, housing assignments, the part of town in which one lived, social invitations, administrative assignments, everything became important, occasionally in a childish way. The fact that one willy-nilly always saw the same people added to the difficulties. The wives, displaced from their usual surroundings, only added to the problems. Without the absorbing technical work of the husbands, and unavoidably in the dark about what went on in the laboratories, they became depressed, quarrelsome and gossipy.

There was no question that life at Los Alamos was hardest on the young mothers. “They turned to Henry, who had broad shoulders and dispensed as much wisdom as he could,” said Shirley Barnett. “Pediatricians fall into the category of confidante, and he was very tuned in to their psychological problems.” Henry Barnett, just out of medical school, had braced himself for wartime emergencies, but instead found himself dealing with an extremely high-strung group of women and children suffering from a host of stress-related problems, from headaches, insomnia, and fatigue to acute anxiety and depression. He and his colleagues diagnosed some of the problems as “Los Alamositis,” the result of so many people from so many different parts of the world coming together on the mesa and pooling their germs. It was not long before “Doc” Barnett realized that much of the dizziness, exhaustion, and nausea he was seeing was due to morning sickness, as one young wife after another turned up pregnant. Because medical care at Los Alamos was completely free and very good, many of the young couples felt encouraged to get a start on their families. The hospital was soon busy delivering so many babies, it was dubbed RFD, for “rural free delivery.”

For most women on the mesa, the chief indignity was the expectation that they would raise their families next to one of the world’s most advanced laboratories, while at the same time putting up with conditions straight out of the pioneer days. They complained to Dorothy about everything: it was a constant struggle to obtain fresh milk for babies, eggs were rotten on arrival, and what little fruit and produce the Commissary carried was shriveled and almost inedible after the long haul from Texas. There was never enough water—memos alerting them that “the water situation in this camp is critical” were frequent—and what little came sputtering out of the faucet was often accompanied by algae, sediment, and, on a bad day, worms. At other times, the water was so overchlorinated, it dissolved their precious hosiery, which was almost impossible to replace in Santa Fe. “The water went off when one had soaped for a shower but not entered it yet,” recalled Dorothy, reciting from a long list of grievances. “The power went off regularly at 5:30, just at dinner cooking time.” Tech Area experiments routinely drained all the juice from town, rendering hot plates and electric ovens useless. There were periods when the electricity stayed off for hours, making it necessary to eat by candlelight. If the meal was not ready, families often skipped dinner altogether. Bread never rose, cakes fell, and nerves frayed. The contrast between the latest accelerator in the laboratory and the hand-operated mangle in the posts laundry room was almost more than the women could bear.

“In the mountains of New Mexico,” Jane Wilson wrote, “the women aged”:

We aged day to day. Our electric power was uncertain. Our water supply ran out. Crisis succeeded crisis. Everything went wrong. We had few of the conveniences which most of us had taken for granted in the past. No mailman, no milkman, no laundryman, no paper boy knocked at our doors. There were no telephones in our homes. We shared unique difficulties of living with our husbands without sharing the recompensing thrill or sometimes even the knowledge of the great scientific experiment which was in progress.

It was painfully clear that some of the young wives had not taken well to being transplanted onto a military post, particularly when they were also deprived of many of the basic resources they were accustomed to, and the strain was beginning to show. In a rare concession to the opposite sex the army had installed a beauty parlor when the town first got going, but that did not compensate for the lack of a reliable dry cleaners or laundry service. With dirty diapers piling up, and typhoid endemic to the area, more than one desperate new mother came close to burning down the house while boiling diapers on the stove. The problems got to be so serious, according to Segrè, that Oppenheimer consulted a psychiatrist on how to cope with them. The doctor advised him to “find work to keep the women busy and to pay them so that they would have a tangible proof of their usefulness.” By then, the women had already come to much the same conclusion and were taking steps to remedy the situation themselves. Women who had never held jobs before, and had little or no training, went to work either full-time or part-time in the Tech Area as “human computers,” or adding machine operators, working on long, complicated sums. They were given a three-month crash course in computing by Joseph Hirschfelder, a balding chemist and ballistics expert, and then put to work in the Theoretical wing. Just to make things more complicated, most of the Tech Area jobs were for three-eighths-time work—not half-time or even three-quarters-time positions—as though a solid grounding in fractions were requisite. Those who could not stomach the pressure or factorylike grind took jobs in the community as teachers, administrators, and medical technicians.

After putting up with as much as they could, the women waged their own private war with Groves. The general, who ruled the outpost from the relative comfort of Washington, had dictated that they make do with absurdly backward conditions. Tired of feeling powerless, and determined to improve their living standards, they rebelled. They deluged Oppenheimer with complaints, laid siege to the post commander, and organized meetings in which they articulated their demands, If for no other reason than to restore peace and to stop them wasting so much of Oppenheimer’s time, Groves gave in on a number of issues. After that, Dorothy observed that things at Los Alamos began to change for the better, as the scientists and their wives “pitched in and started schools, churches and a library.”

The wives arranged for church services in one of the project’s two theaters, importing priests and ministers from Santa Fe and rising at dawn to clear the floor of cigarette butts and bottles left over from the Saturday night dances. Although Groves once remarked that he thought physicists were a “godless bunch,” they strove to achieve a pious frame of mind in their makeshift house of worship, though the odor of stale beer made that almost impossible. The same theaters with their rows of hard wooden benches were used to stage amateur orchestra performances, choral recitals, and theatricals, all part of the wives’ desperate attempts to civilize life on the dreary army post they were forced to call home. They organized community laundries and instructed the Commissary that better vegetables could be had locally in the villages. They started a mesa paper, the
Daily Bulletin
, a mimeographed sheet that covered all the community events the army saw fit to print. It bore the admonition, “This paper is for the site—keep it here.”

The scientists and their wives also created a community radio station, KRS, which was accomplished by hijacking the public address system the military used to communicate with the town residents in the absence of telephones. The control room was on the ground floor of the Big House, and the post’s power lines doubled as an antenna. A capacitor cut off the signal, which limited the broadcast to within a five-mile radius. Volunteers manning the station played jazz and classical records culled from the residents’ own collections. Occasionally, one of the more talented in their number would give a “live” concert. The announcement that Edward [Teller] was playing the piano almost always signaled a moody selection from Wagner. When they achieved a public address system in the technical buildings, some prankster decided to have some fun with the new toy: for two days the operator, by request, paged “Werner Heisenberg, Werner Heisenberg” over and over again in dulcet tones. Finally, a kindly physicist told her she was being had, and that Herr Heisenberg was in Berlin running the Nazi bomb project.

They also talked Groves into starting Los Alamos’s four-room school, which was built on the slope west of the water tower. Initially, Groves had refused to allow a high school on the post and had only yielded to the argument that several essential physicists with older children would refuse to come to Los Alamos unless college preparation was available. They hired a principal and induced the wives who had graduate degrees to serve as instructors to the sixty students in the combined junior and senior high school. Alice Smith, who had a Ph.D. in English history, was talked into teaching social studies; Jane Wilson volunteered to teach English; David Inglis’ wife, Betty, agreed to teach math; and a young chemist named Barbara Long arranged to take time out from her job in the Tech Area to teach science. To make it easier for the wives with small children to devote their days to community jobs, a nursery school was established. Such was their enthusiasm and idealism at the time, the organizers assumed the offspring of so many Nobel Prize winners would naturally be addicted to study, so they extended the academic year to eleven months, with only a brief respite in August. As it turned out, the children in Los Alamos were like children everywhere else, and after enduring their howling protests all that first summer, the school authorities adopted a normal schedule.