109 East Palace (42 page)

The laboratory work continued around the clock, and the men pulled double shifts and returned to their experiments at all hours. The lights burned in the Tech Area all night, and the intermittent power outages that had plagued the community from the beginning became more frequent, the lights often blinking off and on during the busy dinnertime hours. A supplementary power line was run from the post to Albuquerque to help alleviate the problem. Ironically, it resulted in one of the worst security breaches by inadvertently carrying back Los Alamos’s closed-circuit radio broadcast to civilization. Dorothy, who often brought morsels of news from town, reported that several friends from Albuquerque who had been visiting her were “simply agog” at what they were picking up on this mysterious station. “They can’t imagine where the broadcasts come from or why none of the entertainers have last names,” Dorothy told them. “Children’s stories are read by Betty, newscasts compiled by Bob, and Mozart’s piano Sonatas played by Otto have them guessing.”

They all laughed because it was too serious not to. “We laughed all the time, and at everything, or else we would have lost our minds,” said Marguerite Schreiber, who was married to the physicist Raemer Schreiber, “because really, the atmosphere was icy. There was very little conversation between husbands and wives. It was a very cold, lonely and difficult time. We simply put one foot in front of the other, minded our p’s and q’s, and tried to get through it. We didn’t look ahead because we didn’t know how long it would last.” Marge Bradner never asked her husband what was going on, even when he went off to the distant operation sites for days at a time. “I had no idea what my husband was doing,” she said. “I didn’t know, and I didn’t speculate because I didn’t want to know.”

Even for those who knew about the “gadget,” there were still too many unknowns not to lie in bed awake worrying into the night. Would the bomb work? Would it blow apart New Mexico and them with it? Or the world? Would it finally end the war? Would everything be all right? For many of the refugee scientists, who had already been through terrible times, the future was fraught with terrifying questions that haunted their sleep. What had happened to their families? Would they be able to find them after the war? Where would they go? When they left Los Alamos, they would be without savings, homes, jobs, or even countries to call their own anymore. Many of them had left everything behind when they fled Europe, and they knew it was doubtful that their property or possessions could be reclaimed. When one distraught wife discovered she was pregnant and told her husband, after a long, anguished discussion, they decided they could not afford a baby at that time. Moreover, they did not see how they could bring a child into such an uncertain world. The unhappy woman went to Dorothy with their problem. Dorothy did not presume to judge them, nor did she try to convince the woman to change her mind. She simply promised to help. After making discreet inquiries in town, she located a reputable woman doctor in Santa Fe, who in turn provided the name of another physician in the neighboring town of Espanola who was not frequented by the scientific community. The clandestine arrangements were necessary not simply because of the desire to avoid scandal, but because abortions were illegal at the time.

The mounting tension manifested itself in different ways all over town and exacerbated some long-standing problems on the overcrowded mesa. The spread of Quonset huts and trailers had grown to slumlike proportions, and the sanitary conditions were beyond belief. A group of Hill wives made a study of the Spanish American quarter and reported to the army administration that the lack of latrines and adequate facilities could lead to the spread of disease. A new influx of rowdy machinists was also creating havoc. Rumor had it they had been offered inducement wages to leave their families and work on the isolated site, but Dorothy, relaying complaints from local Santa Feans, was concerned that their hell-raising behavior was “giving the Hill a terrible reputation.” For certain, it was keeping security busy both on the post and in town.

Groves had brought in yet another new commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Gerald Tyler, to try to get a grip on the situation before it spiraled out of control. Tyler, much to everyone’s amazement, took it upon himself to actually try to improve the quality of life on the mesa for both the civilians and the troops. He risked the generals wrath by asking the higher authorities in Washington for more money and oversaw the construction of a new cafeteria, additional barracks for the WACs, and a recreation hall for the soldiers. The food at the new cafeteria was positively gourmet compared to the mystery meat and gray vegetables that congealed on their trays in the mess hall, and even the most work-obsessed physicists began turning up for steak night once a week.

To everyone’s relief, the army finally modified the regulations restricting their movements. By late 1944, even their hard-driving general recognized that the isolation and stress were becoming too much for the mesa’s inhabitants. They were jumpy and restless. The scientists and their families had been cooped up for too long and were badly in need of a break, and Groves determined that “the improvement in morale would outweigh the increased security risks.” Short, one-week vacations were encouraged, as long as the usual precautions were observed. The men needed to get away from the constant pressure of hurrying to finish the bomb, hurrying to end the horror and killing once and for all. They bottled it all up inside, recalled Elsie McMillan, and going to a party or two or taking a Sunday off was not enough. “We were tired,” she wrote. “We were deathly tired. We had parties, yes, once in a while, and I’ve never drunk so much as there at the few parties, because you had to let off steam, you had to let off this feeling eating your soul, oh God are we doing right?”

Some couples took advantage of the new rules to take a winter sojourn to Denver or Colorado Springs, while others made a quick trip home to see ailing parents who were full of questions and recriminations and could not understand why visits had been barred for so long. Oppenheimer was far too busy to get away, but Kitty began escaping the confines of the post as often as possible. “She would go off on a shopping trip for days to Albuquerque or even to the West Coast and leave the children in the hands of a maid,” recalled Jackie Oppenheimer, who had recently moved to the Hill with Frank, who had been working at the Oak Ridge plant before Groves transferred him to Los Alamos. Assigned to Bainbridges safety crew, Frank was often away at the Trinity site, and the two sisters-in-law were thrown together. The close proximity did not improve their relationship, however, and Jackie was appalled by Kitty’s behavior:

When we went up to Los Alamos, Kitty made a dead set at me. It was known that we didn’t get on together and she seemed determined that we should be seen together. On one occasion she asked me to cocktails—this was four o’clock in the afternoon. When I arrived, there was Kitty and just four or five other women—drinking companions—and we just sat there with very little conversation—drinking. It was awful and I never went again.

Many of the young Hill wives found Kitty disconcerting and kept their distance. She in turn avoided most of their clubs and societies. Kitty had “no friends at Los Alamos,” according to Priscilla Greene, and the few she did have were generally men. She was increasingly rude and impossible, and the mesa buzzed with stories about her erratic behavior. “She was really rotten to Jackie,” said Shirley Barnett. “She made a point of it, and it did not go unnoticed.”

Kitty had brought her own troubles to the mesa, and she reacted to the stress of that bleak winter by becoming even more melancholy and withdrawn. Barnett, who sometimes went to visit, remembered thinking the atmosphere of the bungalow was infused with gloom. After the birth of her second child, Kitty seemed to go into a depression, often going days without leaving the house. “She was often ill, and took various drugs to quiet her nerves,” recalled Barnett, who spent many hours listening to her while she chain-smoked cigarettes. “She spent a lot of afternoons [lying] on the couch with the curtains closed, ‘suffering from the vapors,’ Really, I think it was nothing more than she had overindulged. I don’t know what Oppie thought. He wasn’t in great shape himself at that point, and he had so much to do he couldn’t fret too much about it.”

It is not clear why Oppie wanted Frank and Jackie at Los Alamos, except perhaps that having his brother by his side was a comfort. They were close, and Frank was someone he could talk to and consult about things that were weighing on his mind. For Frank, however, being at Los Alamos was fraught with problems. For one thing, he was painfully aware of how wretched Kitty was to his wife. While he himself was warmly received on the Hill, people were forever commenting on his striking resemblance to his older brother and their shared mannerisms—they could often be seen in the Tech Area talking and walking in circles, and rubbing their palms together in identical fashion—and the comparisons could be trying. Frank tried to fit in, but he was a late arrival in the mesa’s tribal society. “I think it wasn’t easy being Oppie’s little brother at Los Alamos,” observed Barnett. “He had chosen to follow in his footsteps, but he ended up being so overshadowed. I think Frank had a hard time dealing with the fact that his brother had become such an important man.”

Groves had repeatedly brought Frank to Los Alamos in hopes that he would have a soothing effect on Oppenheimer, who, as usual, looked at death’s door. Oppie was sleeping only a few hours a night, his weight had dropped to 114 pounds, and he appeared to be living on nervous energy. Groves was genuinely concerned that his poor body might not be able to take much more abuse and wanted to surround him with people who would help sustain him during the nerve-wracking run-up to the test. “Frank turned into one of the prime worriers of all time, that was how he tried to keep Robert well,” recalled Rabi, then director of the Radiation Laboratory at MIT, whom Groves brought in a few weeks later for much the same reason. “As for me, I was invited just because Robert liked me. He’d asked me to join his project as experimental physics director and I’d refused because of my radar work. Now he was under tremendous strain and I was supposed to watch him and look after him.”

Dorothy saw little of Oppenheimer during that period. He was always on the move, running back and forth between the Tech Area and the top-secret desert location to the south. But she was always available at a moment’s notice if he needed her. When a bad case of chicken pox confined him to his bed, she fussed over him as she would over a sick child, berating his staff and shooing people out of the room so he could get some rest. “She was absolutely devoted to him,” said Barnett. “She was someone he could talk to, someone he knew he could trust.” For Oppenheimer, her warm embrace must have been wonderfully reassuring in an agonizing time. “She loved him,” said Marge Schreiber. “She tried to take care of him. She mothered him, and he needed it, God knows. He was carrying such an awful burden. He needed all the help he could get, and she was there, and she was up to it.”

To complicate matters, his faithful assistant, Priscilla Greene, was getting bigger and bigger by the week and wanted to stop working. Oppenheimer kept putting her off. No matter how many people she suggested as her replacement, he found a reason to disqualify them. But the office was busier than ever with the test preparations, and neither Shirley nor Dorothy could cope with all the responsibility. Finding Oppie a new secretary became so imperative even Groves got involved. He trolled the War Department for names and came back with a list of suitable candidates, all of whom Oppie vetoed. Exasperated, Groves demanded, “Do you have ideas?” Oppenheimer replied, “Yes. I’d like to have Anne Wilson come here,” referring to the lively, doe-eyed admirals daughter who was a member of the generals small staff. Surprised, Groves called Wilson into his office and asked her if she wanted to go. When she immediately replied, “Yes,” he sighed and said, “You deserve each other.”

Before Wilson left for Los Alamos, they had a little send-off for her at the War Department office, complete with a cake in honor of her twenty-first birthday. Everyone gave her packs of cigarettes as gifts because they were so hard to come by. At one point, Groves took her aside and warned her that the scientists on the Hill might not welcome her with open arms. “They’ll just think I’m sending in one of my spies,” he told her, and then he proceeded to make it clear that nothing could be further from the case. By choosing the Los Alamos assignment she needed to understand that this part of her life was over and she was starting something completely new.

Not everyone in the War Department wanted her to make such a clean break. On one of her last days at work, John Lansdale sauntered over and asked casually, “How would you like to make an extra $100 a week?” When she asked what she would have to do for that kind of money, he replied, “Just send me a little three-page report once in a while and tell me how they are doing.” Wilson was flabbergasted. “I was really outraged,” she said. “I told him I couldn’t believe he thought I would do such a thing.” She understood perfectly that he was attempting to enlist her to spy on one of their own. The more she thought about it, the angrier she got. She had listened in on and transcribed hundreds of the general’s telephone conversations with Oppenheimer and the other Manhattan Project leaders, and he had never once expressed disapproval of Los Alamos’s director. “Groves always trusted Oppenheimer,” she said. “He had picked him and he didn’t second guess himself. He couldn’t. There he was all by himself, running this huge project. He had complete confidence in himself and his judgment—otherwise he couldn’t have done what he did.”

When Wilson arrived at 109 East Palace, it was still very cold, and as she headed up the steep, winding road to the laboratory, it started to snow. As soon as she arrived, she was told at the gate to go straight to Oppenheimer’s house on Bathtub Row, as he had organized a party so she could meet everybody. When Oppie opened the door, she was shocked at his appearance. He was still recovering from the chicken pox, and a week’s growth of dark beard covered a mottled red face that was still too tender to shave. He had suffered from fevers of 104 degrees and looked emaciated. She remembered thinking, he was the skinniest man she had ever seen in her life and she wondered how he managed to keep chain-smoking cigarettes in his condition.