The Wives of Los Alamos (21 page)
O
UR HUSBANDS CAME
home from the Tech Area for the last time and invited us to be their guests at Chez Mess Hall. We said,
What a fancy place! Are you sure we can afford it?
Or,
I’ll have to curl my hair first.
We stepped into the warm crowd of the mess hall, stood behind GIs and other families, and picked up a thin metal tray dented around the edges from use. It was our last dinner. Down the line we walked, greeting San Ildefonso men and women or WACs who scooped hot meat, green beans, rehydrated potatoes, and ash-colored gravy into each of the four compartments on our metal tray. The narrow compartments made our more soupy items swim into other things: a slight tilt of the tray or our hand and we were soon eating ice cream topped with pork gravy. And to think some people—the GIs, the single men—put up with this meal three times a day for three years.
I
N LINE BEHIND
us was our obstetrician, Dr. Kashavarez, and his family, and in front of us was Margaret, who was five months pregnant and who had been chastised earlier that day by Dr. K for gaining twenty-five pounds. His wife was a rail, her eyes gaunt, set far back, with dark semicircles beneath them. Margaret declined the potatoes and we continued down the line, both gazing longingly at the sundaes. One of us said,
We lost our baby weight last time so who cares?
It was our last day here and after tomorrow we’d never see Dr. K again. We let the hot fudge drop long and slow atop our vanilla scoops but avoided eye contact with him through dinner.
T
HE DAYS BECAME
caravans of departing Studebakers and Cadillacs. Some of us were going back to England. Or we were staying in New Mexico and buying abandoned cattle ranches, or haciendas, or fishing cabins. A few of us were staying, unfortunately, in our plain green houses. We were designing Western homes made of stone, or adobe, or logs. We were planning brick homes in the Midwest with concrete frames and finished basements.
A
ND WE FELT
the deflation that comes when one gets what one has wanted: it was not quite what it seemed it would be. We thought of the time when we first arrived, when only a stack of pine boards were all that existed of the houses, when garbage cans overflowed. How dust rose in great clouds beyond the set of older buildings. How we arrived and thought it was not beautiful, though we complimented the mountains to one another.
W
E LEFT WITH
more children than we came with and less wedding china. We left with black bowls, bright rugs, needles, thread, and muddy boots on our feet. We looked back on the time of our arrival to Los Alamos, how we felt very young. Some of us thought it was much better then, earlier, before we understood anything, though in our futures there was much more to learn.
A
ND IF WE
wanted a sentimental good-bye, instead of going directly down the Hill to Santa Fe we drove past Valle Grande—the crater of a volcano, the high mountain roads, the rare dark clouds gathering and the wildflowers blooming in the caldera.
W
E LEFT AND
the Director would be taken to trial on accusations of disloyalty. Though he was trusted to orchestrate the creation of the atomic bomb, he was now deemed a security risk. Had he consorted with Communists? Was he a spy? We were asked to speak against him and we refused, as did our husbands.
T
HE DIRECTOR DID
not encourage the creation of a hydrogen bomb, something even more destructive than the atomic bomb. He doubted it was feasible and said it would be too destructive to use in war, even if it would be, he said,
technically sweet
. Helen’s husband wanted to make this bomb and he wanted to be in charge of it. Her husband spoke against the former Director and told the Senate Committee:
One would be wiser not to grant security clearance to Oppenheimer
. We thought her husband was bitter for not being chosen for the lab leader way back when, and many of us, including our husbands, said if they were ever alone with him they would give him what for.
W
E FELT BAD
for Helen—who somehow had to put up with the bravado, late night piano playing, and ignorance of him. To be the wife of a man that spoke out against the Director, who worked to get the Director’s security clearance revoked, to be the wife of the man who became the father of the superbomb. Her husband was on record, in court, saying:
In a great number of cases I have seen Dr. Oppenheimer act—I understood that Dr. Oppenheimer acted—in a way which for me was exceedingly hard to understand. I would personally feel more secure if public matters would rest in other hands.
A
ND BECAUSE ALL
of Oppenheimer’s business was in the news and for many years he was followed by the FBI, we learned that while he was Director, and married to Kitty, he had flown to California and stayed the night at his former girlfriend’s home. She was a psychologist, a colleague’s daughter, and a Communist. Soon after his visit, she was found dead, and the death was considered a suicide. Her last note said:
I wanted to live, but I got paralyzed somehow
. This was fascinating and horrifying information, and some of us were not surprised, but what did it all mean?
T
HE DIRECTOR’S SECURITY
clearance was revoked by the Atomic Energy Commission in 1954 and his office at the White House was terminated. But nine years later, he was given a $50,000 award by the Atomic Energy Commission, an award named after one of our husbands, for
his outstanding contributions to theoretical physics and his scientific and administrative leadership
. He died, before many, but not all, of our husbands, from cancer, in 1967. The trouble with Oppenheimer, the famous but uninvolved scientist Einstein remarked, was that he loved a woman who did not love him back: the U.S. government.
O
UR CHILDREN LEFT
Los Alamos thinking they were a part of something important, and they adopted the language of their fathers and us, or the opposite. They said, during high school debates,
It needed to be done!
Or,
We had no choice!
Or,
They would have surrendered if we just told them what we could do.
S
OME OF OUR
children saved cereal box tops and sent away for atomic bomb rings. They received a plastic ring with a secret compartment so that they could
look at flashes caused by atoms splitting like crazy in the sealed warhead chamber
. By this time, some of our children had seen the real thing by watching tests in Nevada, and this ring seemed quite inexact. Our daughters wore two-piece bathing suits called bikinis, after Bikini Island, one of the Marshall Islands where several nuclear explosions cratered and irradiated land and sea.
W
E LEFT AND
our Davids and Emilys and Marys and Michaels went to college. Our Bills grew their hair past their shoulders. And they came home and said they would not eat food in our house because it was the
fruits of war
. They said they were purging themselves through anti-nuclear-proliferation protests. We said,
Don’t be silly, Mary
, and we said,
For heaven’s sakes, Michael!
but some of us understood their feelings, and some of us said nothing.
O
UR CHILDREN ACCUSED
us of only caring about money; they said we forgot about how the rest of the world struggled because we no longer struggled ourselves, if we ever did. They blamed us for New Mexico’s economic reliance on the nuclear industry. They asked their fathers,
Don’t you feel guilty? How could you go through with it?
And we cringed and we knew what they meant and we wondered that ourselves, or we felt angry and protective and we said,
Don’t speak like that to your father.
Our husbands answered, saying,
No, I don’t feel guilty. It needed to be done
.
If it wasn’t them it would’ve been us.
Or they said,
Yes
, and quoted the Director:
The deep things in science are not found because they are useful, they are found because it was possible to find them
.
W
E PONDERED WHAT
it would be like to be our daughters, to be living as a woman in another generation, and we felt a bit jealous. We thought our daughters had many more freedoms than we did in choosing a career—they did not have to be schoolteachers or secretaries—in traveling alone—they could just pick up and move across the country—in taking oneself to a movie in the middle of a Sunday afternoon. Or we could see how so many options might render decisions more difficult to make. And when they said,
The only way to improve the world is to protest war
, we thought them unreasonably idealistic, or we thought them more of what the world needed.
O
UR CHILDREN SAID
they would go to jail rather than be drafted. And some of us worried we had spoiled them somehow. Our children said they did not tell their friends what their fathers did because their fathers worked for
the man
, but we thought that keeping quiet about Los Alamos and the violence or triumph of what our husbands did was not because they felt a sense of responsibility to a collective; rather, they felt the shame of the individual: they were worried about their own reputations. Or all that secret keeping had deeply affected them. The outside world seemed very nosy.
P
ERHAPS SOME OF
our children did care about their country in the ways some of us understood, and they volunteered for the Vietnam War rather than protesting it, and they came back changed, as we knew they would, though the particulars of those changes were mysterious. Edward was much more tidy and pensive after his return, and married Anne, who worked as a cashier at
Dot’s Market
and brought us embroidered napkins. They went on to have four children, and experience the shifts and swings of marriages, but nothing too serious. David appeared more cynical, went back to school to study philosophy, and called himself a poet. Tim moved back in with us, nailed quilts to his bedroom wall to cover the windows, slept during the day, and woke with nightmares. Bobby married, though his wife appeared more and more tired over the years, and he brought a twelve-pack to every family gathering, even Sunday brunch, and we sensed something was not right, but any interference was met with anger. Our children carried concealed weapons, had gun collections, refused to sit with their backs to any window. Or they came home from Vietnam and they were quiet about their time there and we could not tell what effect the war had on them at all, except they seemed more grateful for our macaroni loaf.
T
HEY HAD KNOWN
war differently than us and our husbands. They had seen death more immediately: the eyes of people whom we called our enemy.
S
OME OF US
did not mind that our children no longer went to church or synagogue, some of us thought the fact that our children were gay might make life complicated, or maybe not, and we accepted that our children supported abortion rights. When they brought home brownies they were the best brownies we had ever tasted and after two brownies we felt the tickling of the wind on our cheeks and we just wanted to watch the clouds pass overhead and tell our children how much we loved and admired them. We felt very calm, perhaps even happy.
O
UR CHILDREN GREW
up; they became engineers, peace activists, grade school teachers, housewives, photographers, writers, bums. They became landscape painters, vice presidents of banks, psychologists; they became the children we outlived; they became the children who died of lung cancer; they became botanists, directors of physics labs, park rangers, geologists, lawyers, and environmental activists.
T
HEY FINISHED COLLEGE
and did not see any reason to rush into getting a job or marrying and instead they sold all of their possessions and joined what they called a commune and what we called a cult.
O
UR CHILDREN CLAIMED
to be conscientious objectors, they said they were going to
bum around Europe
with their girlfriends and boyfriends after college, and we objected,
You are ruining your life!
Or we thought they would not actually do it, so we just raised an eyebrow, but they did just that, they went.
A
ND THEY WERE
young and we thought they would grow out of it. Or we could see their point, but we did not know of alternatives, or we joined our children in protests. Or to really protest the war our children thought they needed to know more about history and so instead of sit-ins they went to graduate school. Some dropped out, got married, and went back to study biology. And no one was hiring in biology, but Los Alamos was hiring scientists for their computer skills, and we knew people, and our husbands knew people, and so our children moved back to Los Alamos and worked at the lab their fathers worked at, partly, they said, so their own three children could live as close to nature as they had, or to live close to us, their grandparents.