Trinity Fields (24 page)

Posters on walls and bulletin boards were by 1965 becoming ubiquitous on campus and off. The riots of '68 were already in the air; faint, perhaps, in light of what was to come, but
there
. Meetings were open to students, faculty, anyone who wanted to come. The gatherings at first were small and we began to know each other in stuffy basement classrooms under the dry humming white light of fluorescents or out under the plane trees off to the side of Low Library. We got together at noon at the sundial in the center of the quad, maybe just a few dozen of us, some members of the SDS, others just undergraduates interested in helping to organize, to build support. The talk was of war, deceit, the patterns of the military industrial complex, of pigs, genocide, and imperialism. Our demonstrations were small at first, but soon would grow.

Epstein had become one of the student leaders by then. I can still hear his voice, ardent and clear, —If they're going to act like demons and traitors, it's up to us to be the demons' traitors.

—Right on, we cried, and our words echoed off the smooth facades of Dodge and Low and Hamilton and John Jay and the library, reminding me of the drum that echoed back at San Ildefonso when the Indians performed their corn dance. It had a holy quality.

—Demons' traitors are demonstrators.

—That's right, we shouted.

He must have been about twenty, a year younger than I, though he looked much older, commanded more and more respect from those of us who were working in the movement. He had been arrested, it was said, a dozen times, which was a considerable record for those days, was one of the protesters with whom any personal association meant you were added to a secret list in Washington, became the subject of a closed file. He wielded real moral authority, to my eye. I admired his guerilla instincts and directness of approach, and even if he could be overbearing at times, Epstein was a likable, decent guy. He appeared to have no life distinct from the stratagems involved in bringing the war overseas to an end and condemning the establishment that deceived its people into fighting it. He spoke of little else, and managed to get enough work done to stay in school, but was often absent from class; the sole exception was that he was devoted to the university basketball team and sat in the bleachers with the SDS contingent—we radicals adopted the basketball team back then, and of all the jocks on campus the basketballers seemed to get along with us best. He wore the same tired jeans and black sweatshirt to every gathering and game. His deeply sunken and dark eyes bespoke the insomnia of an obsessive or a saint. When he found out that I'd grown up in Los Alamos his mind moved quickly to an idea.

—Is the place as spooky as it's supposed to be? he asked me one afternoon.

—What place?

—You know, Los Alamos.

It is and isn't, but I knew better than to say no. —Spooky enough, I said.

—A lot of that shit started here, you know. It was called the Manhattan Project because Fermi conducted his fission experiments right over there.

—I know, I said.

—You ever been in Pupin?

I hadn't, and it was meaningful I hadn't, since Pupin Hall was where my father must have spent most of his time back in the forties when he went to school here, when he first met Emilio Segrè, and saw his first cyclotron, which they used to generate high-energy protons. It was here his interest in chemical engineering was coupled with a fascination of physics, the combination of which would get him the job offer to go to the Hill.

—You got a minute?

We walked up from the quadrangle, along the brick pavement and to the north end of campus, where the physics building stood.

—Come on, he said, and I followed him through the front doors and down a flight of stairs and then another until we were in the basement, which was a long hallway with rows of parallel ducts and conduits hung precariously from the ceiling and with discarded desks and chairs, antiquated electronic equipment and other ditched junk in the corridor. The lights blinked and hummed as I followed Epstein down toward one end. —Look at this, Brice, he said, pointing to a small sticker on the metal door, yellow and black,
DANGER, RADIOACTIVE MATERIALS
, it read. —Did you know that Fermi once looked out his window on the seventh floor and said, “Imagine, a little bomb like that would make all this disappear”?

I said I did, but I didn't. Not really.

We walked upstairs and found his old office, the door locked.

—You know what I think we ought to do someday?

—What?

—I think we ought to blow this place up.

—You're kidding, I said.

He slapped my back and said, —Maybe so.

Pupin Hall did become his prey for a while after that, though. We rallied in front of its doors, hassled students entering and leaving, told them to wake up, urged them to cut class and join us. Epstein was eloquent about the nuclear deterrence charade, the world sitting on a bona fide time bomb, how there was no such thing as conventional war anymore because of what had happened up at Los Alamos, how we were headed on a direct course to Armageddon in Indochina because we weren't going to win and when the hard-liners down in Washington finally saw that a ground war wasn't going to bring us victory they would have to trundle out the bomb. —They threatened to use it in Korea, didn't they? Hanoi is the future Ground Zero, he said, and went on to say how Hanoi would be the third and last city we were ever going to get to take out, because after that every intercontinental ballistic missile in every Soviet silo was going to light up in retaliation, and we would have to put all our birds in the air, too. —Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Hanoi, he said. —Those'd be the three cities kids would read about in their history books, the three cities America burned down clean with the bomb, except that there won't be any history books and there won't be any kids to read them, because it's not 1945 anymore, it's 1965 and we're not the only bastards on the block with a mean streak and an inflated sense of self-worth. To quote from the SDS position paper, the “Port Huron statement” of three years ago, “Our work is guided by the sense that we may be the last generation in the experiment with living.” We can wish that this weren't the situation, but it is. And if you and you and you and I can't change it, then nobody will. That's our challenge, and this is our time.

We had not been to the barricades together yet, the thousand police it would take to quell us several years hence were not even imaginable. Our major initiatives were still ahead of us, up there in our future, our soon-to-be past. I was untried, and potentially untrue, but I was willing and able. One could feel the sides becoming more entrenched even though Vietnam was, in the wake of Johnson's continued expansion of the war effort, still a relatively unheralded adventure. Informants had begun to abound on and around the campus. An atmosphere of ferocity tempered by paranoia settled in upon all of us. Epstein, whom we naturally followed during his season (others would rise and disappear, some jailed, others disaffected), was as ascetic a guru as I would meet during those months; ascetic and potentially violent. He was bright and alive, and made those around him live more vividly or else move on. It is this aspect of the antiwar movement I remember as well as the occupation of buildings, the riots. The soldiers had their comradeship, we had ours. When all was said and done, I wondered whether we activists weren't closer in spirit to the soldiers off in the field than those same soldiers were to the politicians who conspired to send them to Vietnam in the first place.

My life developed into a duplicity. Or rather, a triplicity. There was my new life among fellow activists. There was my life led at the edge of Kip and Jessica's romance. And then there was the life I led with myself, by myself, often at odds with myself.

Brice—me, myself, and I—Brice living his own life was a person who wrote from time to time letters to his mother, letters that may have distorted the truth about what he was doing in New York and at school but did so only in order to insure her happiness. This is what he told himself. “Dear Mom,” this Brice would write, “things are going so well here, I can hardly tell you, learning so much each day, Kip doing all right too, both of us have made some interesting new friends, I think you would approve. Of course I miss you and I miss our beautiful mountains and the clean air, which I'd trade any day for these gray skyscrapers and brick canyons and the putrid stench that sometimes settles in on the island, but it is good to be here, and many are the times I walk down the streets and think of you and Dad here, back before I was born, and it makes me happy to think of that. I love you and send you hugs, Brice.”

Maybe my letters weren't quite that maudlin and stilted, maybe they were somewhat more cunning—Mother probably still has them in a shoe box somewhere if I ever wanted to know for sure—but the mistruths they attempted to convey were at least this venial. Sometimes, when I wrote her, I would reread what I'd written and then, nauseated by my shallowness and insincerity, crumple the paper into a tight ball and bury it deep in the garbage, down under tea leaves and cantaloupe rinds, both out of a sense of personal disgust and in the hope that Kip would never find it. Travesties, I would scold myself, nasty horrid vain pathetic travesties. Most of the time, though I knew she deserved better, I went ahead and sent them anyway. Surely she didn't believe half the words I wrote, but her return letters were equally cheerful and more cheering since less artificial. And her hand, that of a schoolteacher's, gave me great comfort to look at. She represented home at its best.

Indeed, the only times I could read the words
Los Alamos
and not feel my stomach begin to sour were when they were part of the return address on the envelope of her letters.

I am thinking about her as I walk. The town has changed and grown. And she has grown old and changed with it, though towns don't grow old as fast as the souls that build them. I am here in Los Alamos, I think. Here I am in Los Alamos, poplar hill.

The Hill, I think.

“The fucking Hill,” I say.

No one hears me and I walk on.

“The motherfucking Hill.”

No one there, no one responds.

What am I doing? Chants, chanter, chants is what you are up to. You're trying to incite your own little riot. But it isn't happening, you aren't able to multiply yourself into many selves, like Vishnu, and then storm the barricades. You're just Brice. Just one William Brice, eldest son of Mr. and Mrs. McCarthy, brother of Bonnie Jean, once best friend of Kip Calder, husband of Jessica Rankin and father to Ariel Rankin, daughter who carries her mother's name rather than that of her father because that is the way things go in this world where everything is physics and physics proclaims everything to be nonlinear, of fractals and fuzzy logic and chaos, and chaos theory proposes that the universe is subject to a dynamic known as the butterfly effect—if a butterfly flutters its wings today in Tokyo, it will affect the weather next month in New York. All is elastic as warm taffy, all is connected, nothing is independent. They have people up here working on this stuff day and night. Chaos management. I can almost hear the computers humming under my feet, because they're there, tunnels and subterranean laboratories with sleek equipment—nothing medieval or Frankensteinian—rather postmodern, values and numbers conversing among themselves across the placid faces of microchips. Nine hundred million dollars a year put in here still. There's a reason the streets are so clean and the sidewalks so tidy, why the businesses are bustling. Los Alamos seems as friendly and normal a town as you'd ever want to visit, and in so many ways it is. With street names like Peach and Nectar, Iris and Myrtle, how could one expect it to be otherwise?

Her cottage is just that, a cottage. An adobe box is what it is, with flat roof and copper spouts to drain rainwater at either corner. The windows are armored with decorative black grilles. The small yard is fenced and its grass is patchy. The adobe is in need of fresh whitewash, though I thought I had paid a bill just last year to have that job done. On the porch, in a wooden trough-box, not geraniums and dusty millers, but a phalanx of golden chrysanthemums. Something new. The latch on the gate is locked, and so I walk around to the side, but neighbors' chainlink fences do not permit me access to the back so I brace my hand on the lintel of one of her fence posts, which comes to above the hip, and leap over into her yard, feeling altogether the intruder that I am.

Bonnie Jean might have been right. Probably I should have let her phone ahead, given Mom the opportunity of not being shocked by my sudden, unannounced arrival.

I needn't have worried. She opens the door before I make it halfway across the hard lawn, and says, “Brice, how nice of you to come over.”

“Hello, Mom,” I say.

She smells of pipe tobacco, which gives me a sort of comfort. Her rooms are small and tidy. Maybe Bonnie hasn't replicated her mother with such slavish perfection as I'd thought. Mother is frailer, and her eyes have that milky glaze of incipient cataracts. But she is a strong old lady who gives me a hug. My fear that she would not recognize me was time wasted. I also notice the fresh lipstick and powdered nose and realize my sister had done as she pleased. For a moment I'm angry, then think, This is their world, their rules apply here. And the anger is gone.

“Let's have a drink,” she says.

Her bottle of Tanqueray stands on the table next to a glass, and her clay pipe is beside it in an ashtray. There is her Bible, opened to the First Epistle of Paul to the Corinthians. Her flowers out front may have changed but little else has, it would appear. For the next several hours I will act as audience to a rambling, provocative, even inspired discourse on the history and nature of the Pauline epistles. From aspects of Aphrodite worship in Greece to the escape from Damascus, from the troubles with heathenism and Greek asceticism to Paul's thought about the role of women in the church—I listen to my brilliant, balmy mother range her fields of interest. The gin flows and the room fills with smoke. She pauses from time to time to ask about Ariel (“Does the poor girl ever see the inside of a church?”) and then picks up where she left off, sometimes stopping to ask me what did I think about
that
—what did I think about the theory that Saint Paul suffered from epilepsy, for instance? When I tell her that I haven't given the matter much thought, she tells me I ought to read the Bible more often.