by BRIAN HALL
“But not on parsonages,” Vernon told her. “Not even Presbyterian ones.”
Oddly enough, Imogen reproached him for mocking his mother. His principal method was to tune her out, which he’d decided long ago was merely respecting her wishes, since she interlarded her fanciful voyages to the continent of Catastrophia with statements like, “But I’m just a foolish old woman,” or even (the key to the kingdom), “Just ignore me.” Imogen seemed to think that was unfilial, so she allowed herself to be drawn in (“We’re not even in the flight path to the airport, Mother”), then complained to Vernon when they were alone together that he left it all up to her.
“She’ll talk you into the ground,” he said.
“She’s just lonely.”
“She’s been impossible all her life. She’s like that woman in Flannery O’Connor. ‘She’d be all right if somebody just shot her in the head once a day.’”
Imogen laughed. They’d discovered long ago that they shared a sense of humor.
* * *
• • •
After Vernon’s mother went home their expenses ballooned, because they had to pay the minister’s wife to watch Susan during the day. They ate less meat and stopped going to the movies. During this time, Imogen felt overburdened with her job and the baby, just when Vernon was deep in his dissertation research on neutron transport in breeder reactors. “Eighteen more months,” he promised her, when she complained.
“Only a year now.”
“Almost there.”
It didn’t help that Susan was one of those caterwauling babies you read about in stories of tenement life. He and Imogen had about half an hour of peace and quiet after she’d woken up before she would start fussing. Nights were a torment. But they survived. Didn’t they? He earned his PhD and they moved to California. Imogen no longer needed to work. They settled into the routine both of them had planned all along. Another year of happiness ensued.
That’s his memory, anyway. Imogen said years later that maybe he was happy, but not her. Had he missed something? “Of course you didn’t notice it, you were too wrapped up in yourself.” Was that true? Or was she reinterpreting the past, to make it all black and white, the way she likes to look at things? He doesn’t want her to take away that year, or the later years in Lexington, when she was raising the kids and he was working at Hanscom Field, and he came straight home every day, stayed home every weekend, fixed everything that needed fixing, paid the bills, always on time, not a late payment his entire life, and never a debt except the mortgage. He took care of them, as his father had done, only better—money for a second car, for summer camps, for college. He was what, he thought, every husband and father should be: a stable provider. He held up his end, she held up hers, and they still shared a bed, and of course they argued sometimes, but all couples did that.
“Tell me what I did wrong.”
“There’s no point.”
“Why won’t you just tell me?”
“You don’t really want to know, you just want to win another argument.”
Dark thoughts. (Sick, sitting in his study alone, Mark living in another state, Susan long gone.)
He and Imogen once shared a sense of humor, they shared a worldview. Sure, as far as the worldview went, it was a matter of him coming over to where she was already standing, but he felt at the time, and he’s never thought differently, that she was standing in the place he wanted to be anyway: her dim view of religion, her distrust of authority, her leftist politics. She saw everything in black and white, and it often made her wrong about little things, but on the big things she was usually right. She took that small-town Baptist bumpkin and slapped him a few times. Maybe there was nothing wrong with him that getting slapped once a day wouldn’t cure.
* * *
• • •
In his second year at RAND he modeled atmospheric forces for the final designs of the Atlas missile. Looking back, he wonders if it was perhaps significant that he had already taken one step away from work on the bomb itself.
Looking back, he wonders a lot of things.
It is hard to untangle, this many years later, what he began to suspect then and what he became more sure of later. What he noticed, or would eventually have noticed, on his own, and what Imogen slapped him into seeing. And to what extent her own unhappiness with him (she would have him believe now) strengthened her jaundiced view of the RAND culture, which she then passed on to him, and which he misread as criticism of them and support for him, and so more readily adopted.
Stuck in the fucking house all day with Susan while he was off enjoying himself at work (it is not inconceivable that she uttered those words to him at some point), Imogen found a babysitter for six hours a week and signed up for German classes at a nearby community college. For the record, he supported her decision. She’d taken German at Mount Holyoke and wanted to brush up. He had also learned German at Chicago, since any good physicist needs to be able to read German scientific papers, so he proofread the essay she wrote for her class at the end of the semester. It could have been about anything; the assignment was merely to practice grammar and vocabulary. Imogen wrote about the shitty construction of their house on Dimmick Ave. This widened into a description of the cookie-cutter shitboxes on either side and in the surrounding streets. Then came an eloquent diatribe—her German was better than his—against California land speculation, despoliation of nature, corrupt profiteering, collusion of government, and the inherently predatory and destructive essence of capitalism. As usual, though her ferocity startled him, he agreed with her basic viewpoint.
From the distance of years, he thinks he can see now her essay’s deeper theme: males building unlivable worlds, then leaving females to live in them. Presumably he sensed a smidgen of this at the time, and it must have had its influence. He doubts it’s coincidental that his ultimate view of the typical RAND scientist was of an intelligent male (needless to say, they were all male) ingeniously building in his head a world he imagined was the real one, populated principally by phenomena that proved his own intelligence.
Ed Paxson and Edward Quade, for example, were very smart men. “Do you know about the Paxson-Quade fighter-bomber study?” Vernon would ask his lunchmates in one of the courtyards. Vernon had seen Ed Paxson at briefings, gleefully shooting down his colleagues’ ideas. He was a systems analyst, so he liked constructing mathematical equations to determine the best way of doing anything, supposedly taking all the relevant factors into account. In 1949, he and Quade devised a mathematical model to evaluate optimum strategies in a fighter-bomber duel. Their math decreed that, in a certain determined best configuration, the fighter ought to be able to shoot down the bomber 60 percent of the time. When they compared that figure with actual data from World War II, they discovered that the real percentage of successful bomber kills in that configuration was 2 percent.
“Real fighter pilots pull away too early,” Vernon would say at the lunch table. “They don’t care about Paxson’s calculations, they care about not dying.”
Paxson was a mathematician. In Vernon’s experience, it’s the engineers who have the healthiest attitude toward numbers. They make the math just good enough to accomplish the task at hand. Physicists are more rigorous, but most of them would agree that beautiful mathematical constructs do not necessarily have manifestations in physical reality. The two sorts of scientists who let numbers make them foolish are soft scientists, like sociologists, who dress their work in spurious equations to convince themselves their science is hard, and mathematicians, who think numbers are the deepest reality, and if the physical world doesn’t live up to their equations, well then, too bad for the physical world. World War II fighter pilots ought to have shot down bombers 60 percent of the time, and that’s what counts.
Thinking about Paxson’s error fed Vernon’s general unease about RAND. Could it be that this imposing modern building, these briefings so oste
ntatiously featuring “vigorous debate” and “a hard look,” this blizzard of working papers stamped Confidential, the red-eye flights to Washington to brief Air Force chiefs—could it be that the subconscious intent of it all was to blind RAND men to the fact that they were doing nothing useful? The Copernican Principle, as applied to psychology: one should be skeptical of any theory that has the side effect of elevating the importance of the theorist.
Vernon remembered seeing something in a newspaper shortly after the war ended. A delicatessen owner in Manhattan had put photographs of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki moonscapes in his store window, to raise awareness among his customers about the need to avoid nuclear war. As he explained to the reporter, “If somebody starts dropping these bombs, there won’t even be any delicatessens.”
Vernon started saying to his lunchmates, “We have to work all night, because if there’s an all-out nuclear exchange, there won’t even be a RAND.”
* * *
• • •
One of the watchwords at RAND was “vulnerability.” Sure, we had enough bombs to destroy every city, midsized town, and lonely crossroad in the Soviet Union—but maybe our bombs were vulnerable to surprise attack, after which we might not retain enough to retaliate. How could we address this problem? Should we disperse our bases, harden our bases, harden our communications, bury our missiles, increase our missiles’ power, increase their accuracy, increase their number?
One of RAND’s gurus of vulnerability was Albert Wohlstetter, a mathematical logician in the Economics division. He came from a wealthy New York family and favored suspenders and patent-leather shoes. His silvering hair was swept back from his forehead as though blown there by the force of his thoughts. Early in his tenure, he had made a name for himself by showing where Ed Paxson’s analyses went wrong. (Make way for the new alpha dog.) He compiled a huge logistical study of overseas US nuclear bomber bases that supposedly showed how easy it would be for the Soviet Union to destroy up to 85 percent of American bombers in a surprise attack. In talks to generals and cabinet secretaries in the early 1950s, he’d argued that this was tantamount to inviting an attack. He was currently working on a RAND paper called “The Delicate Balance of Terror.”
Wohlstetter and his wife, Roberta, lived in Laurel Canyon, in a house designed by a well-known modernist architect. When it was finished, Wohlstetter induced a Los Angeles paper to write an admiring article titled “The House in the Sky,” with photographs of the heavenly abode and its enviable inhabitants. Maybe realizing that too few of his colleagues could be counted on to have seen it, Wohlstetter got into the habit of hosting large parties, where admiration could be performed mouth-to-mouth.
Vernon would happily never have attended another party between any particular present moment and the day of his death, but Imogen now and then liked to get out of the shitbox, so one evening early in the summer of ’58 they hired a babysitter and drove in their recently acquired ’52 Chevy toward Hollywood, then up the winding roads of the canyon. The sun was still well up, the weather (of course) beautiful, and as the car gained height, glimpses of the Pacific sparkled in the crooks of the golden hills.
There were already two or three dozen people in attendance when they arrived, which made it easy for Vernon to wander off on his own. He grabbed a martini off a passing tray and filled a plate with canapés from a buffet table. He had long ago perfected the art of moving through a crowd of acquaintances with a smile and a regretful gesture onward, signaling that he would love to chat if only he wasn’t already committed somewhere else in the room. In this way he could just keep circulating, exploring every nook, leaving one plate here and picking up another there. Now and then someone he knew better might rope him into conversation, but that’s what jokes are for. He would tell one, and laughter works like applause—you can exit on it.
The house certainly was beautiful, if you liked living in a yacht: rooms so long they made the standard ceilings seem low, polished steel window frames, tube-steel banisters. The walls consisted predominantly of sliding glass doors. On the second-floor balcony you could look out over the hillside and imagine you were in the captain’s wheelhouse, with a commanding view of the calm seas of your prosperous voyage. Maybe that was the Navy man in Vernon. Whereas the engineer noted the cork walls, the acoustic-tile ceilings, and inferred that sounds carried all too well through the open floor plan. The weekend suburbanite judged the abstract lozenges of lawn to be awkward to mow, while the wet blanket rejected the built-in pool entirely as a nightmare of upkeep.
The only thing Vernon envied was Wohlstetter’s classical record collection, some thirty times the size of his own. He lingered by Imogen now and then, in case she was in an argument for which she would otherwise later say she’d looked in vain for his agreement. She was drinking gin and tonics and each time he circled back she was pinker in the face and pointier in the nose. She knew to be on good behavior with his colleagues, but after ninety minutes had gone by, he judged that pretty soon she would tell someone—who would richly deserve it, but still—that he had his head up his ass. Fortunately it was not unreasonable to plead the time, given the likelihood that Susan with every passing minute was back-talking herself out of a repeat visit from the babysitter, so he managed to get Imogen out the door and down the drive toward the gate.
In the deepening darkness the house blazed, a parallelepiped of light. “The House That Terror Built,” Imogen said. “No wonder he feels vulnerable. If the Big One gets dropped on LA, he’ll have a front row seat.”
“For a thousandth of a second.”
“Before the x-ray flash chars his silver hair.”
“I think the car’s this way.”
“I remember we drove past the gate.”
“Yes, but we were coming from the other direction.”
“Suit yourself,” she said, as though that were the point at issue. They walked down the dark road to where he knew the car was with 100 percent certainty.
Vernon drove. Imogen smoked and stared out the windshield. “Your colleagues trail after Wohlstetter like high school girls with a crush on the queen bee.”
“Some of them have started wearing suspenders.”
They descended into West Hollywood. Vernon was thinking about Bertrand Russell. Whenever Russell climbed up on his hobby horse about world government, he complained that people were so illogical, and if they would only listen to the reasoning force of his titanic mind, all these unnecessary political problems would vanish. Russell somehow failed to understand that if people were illogical, only fools made logical appeals to them.
“We only ever see ourselves,” Vernon mused.
“What?”
Vernon remembered a sketch he saw in Life magazine a few weeks after the end of the last war. It accompanied an article speculating about what the next war would be like. It showed men in radiation suits with Geiger counters on the steps of the New York Public Library. The lions were still there, but the building was rubble, the city beyond flattened, with only here and there a twisted steel structure half standing. It looked uncannily like photos of Hiroshima.
“Only seeing ourselves,” Vernon repeated. “Like Walt Kelly says, ‘We have met the enemy and he is us.’ I’ve wondered lately if Americans, more than other nationalities, fear nuclear attack because we’re the only ones to have dropped the bomb on anybody.”
“I don’t think Americans are capable of guilt.”
“I’m talking about projection.”
The neon lights of Santa Monica went by. So bright, this coastline in the dark, so clear the skies. The houses so lightly built. “Speaking of Japan,” Vernon went on. “One of our bibles at work is a study called Meeting the Threat of Surprise Attack. Or course it’s about the Soviets. But if you look at Russia’s behavior in World War II, it was all defensive. The surprise attack that strategists like Wohlstetter fear most is the enemy managing to destroy our bombers on the gro
und. They’re thinking of Pearl Harbor.”
“So instead of worrying about Russia, maybe we should just nuke Japan for good. That would really be a surprise attack.”
“The funny thing is, do you know what Wohlstetter’s wife is famous for?”
“No.”
“She wrote the definitive study of Pearl Harbor.”
They laughed together until Vernon got wheezy.
Vernon turned onto their bungalow’s concrete parking pad. Susan’s bedroom window was dark. “Thank God,” they said simultaneously.
What Vernon couldn’t say to Imogen, because it was classified, was that even if Wohlstetter’s unlikely scenario came true, and 85 percent of the US bomber fleet was taken out during a surprise Soviet attack, the United States could still respond by hitting them with six hundred nuclear weapons. He couldn’t say, because it was classified, that the Navy was working on Polaris, which would enable the US to launch ICBMs from submarines, undetectable mobile platforms that were therefore invulnerable. If real Soviet leaders in the real world during a real crisis were likely to avoid behavior that might conceivably lead to just one H-bomb landing on Moscow—a hypothesis Vernon considered so plausible as to be axiomatic—then the US could put fifty Polaris missiles on five subs and everybody else—SAC, RAND, the bomber crews, the Atlas and Titan teams, the launch pad crews, the weapons labs—could collect their final paychecks and go home.
And maybe what bothered him most of all was just that—that he couldn’t say these things to Imogen. The secrecy shit, she called it. He and she were scientists, for God’s sake. Vernon had had a physics teacher at Wake Forest who one day plowed through a long string of calculations on the blackboard to arrive at one of Maxwell’s equations. He turned toward the class and jabbed the chalk against the board behind him. “This is true.” The students sat in a midafternoon doze. He tried to wake them: “Ninety-nine point nine nine percent of whatever any of you have ever said, or will ever say in your lives, is either unproven, unprovable, or false. This”—jab—“is”—jab—“true,” and on the final word he broke the chalk against the board, fragments falling to the floor in arcs determined by their initial direction and velocity, the force of gravity, and air resistance. There had always been, would always be, too little knowledge in the world, and a scientist’s role was to enlarge it. Which meant sharing it.
