by Mark Dunn
Of course it wasn’t good news. Because it was Billie who delivered it. It was Billie Smaha of the Western Union Company who had rung her bell.
Billie watched as the woman’s two young children crept with cautious curiosity into the room. “Your daddy is dead,” Mrs. Simpson said softly to them. Only this.
“Is there anything I can do?” asked Billie. The sincere request was often made, but seldom did it elicit an answer in the affirmative. What, in truth, could Billie do? He was the messenger. He had delivered his message. He had done his job.
Mrs. Simpson shook her head. She continued to shake her head just as some of those who mourn will rock back and forth, the grief made palpable in the throbbing motion.
No one shut his door against the boy. All met his or her own darkest fears bravely, with painful resignation.
There were over one hundred telegrams in all. So many doors to be knocked upon, so many doorbells to be rung. Sometimes the recipients of the telegrams weren’t home. Billie had to go and look for them.
He tracked down gray-haired Martin Jentoft at the Burlington Station. Martin was an engineer on the Hamburg-Red Oak run. His boy Tom was dead, the yellow piece of paper said. The young man was killed just off the Gilbert Islands.
No one was home at the Doggetts’ house on Eastern Avenue, either. Billie went instead to the Red Oak Creamery, where he was told Mrs. Doggett could be found doing her marketing. Mrs. Doggett’s son, Clair, had died in the Battle for Cassino in Italy. She read the wire that Billie had given her, read it without emotion and then set it down. “Clair is with his God,” she said evenly. Like Billie, Clair had been a delivery boy. Instead of telegrams, he had delivered newspapers—issues of the Red Oak Express.
Billie knew Clair. He knew his story. He knew many of their stories. Clair had wanted to be a football player, but he had a small build. Billie flashed on the night the high school football coach had put him in as a substitute. Clair had run the ball for sixty yards before being tackled, and tackled hard. Clair had broken his leg, but he’d gotten his moment of glory. Another moment of glory—his last—had come several years later and many miles away.
Theresa Tinkham was eating breakfast alone when Billie came. She was thinking of her husband Darl. Through the window she watched Billie ride up. The morning sun was shining brightly. The sky promised a beautiful day. Billie’s arrival turned the page of her life. She entered a new chapter on that bright morning—the morning that was to become the darkest of her life.
Billie decided that he wanted to study psychology when he went away to college. He had watched the wives, the mothers and fathers, the sisters and brothers who were left behind. He had studied them—not unfeelingly—and yet it was hard not to quantify, to clinically categorize the different reactions that his news elicited. There were those like Mrs. Simpson who had no time for shock—who donned sorrow in that instant as if it were a cloak hanging conveniently nearby, simply waiting to be worn. Others, like Mrs. Johnson, were not ready yet for grief. Because the unreality of it pushed everything to the side: losing her first son when his B-29 crashed on maneuvers, and then a second son in Belgium—two sons, in defiance of the odds, sacrificed to this hungry war.
Once, Billie had to read a wire to one of his classmates. It told of the death of the boy’s father. Billie didn’t know what to say. It is difficult to bring news of death to one much older than yourself. It is harder still to tell it to someone your own age, someone you josh around with, someone whose own life has just gotten started.
“I never get used to it,” Billie told his mother one night when she had sought the reason for his pensive withdrawal to his room. She found her son sitting at his window, gazing up at the clear, star-stippled sky. The radio in Billie’s room was turned down low, the voice of the man who was giving news of the war both distant and ever present. “But I feel like—well, it’s like it’s something I’m supposed to do. Everybody’s got some lousy job in this war, Ma. I guess this is mine.”
One morning in December of 1944, Billie was handed a telegram that seemed different from all the others he had delivered. It was directed to the town’s mayor. There was another one that got put into Billie’s hand, this one going to the editor of the Express. When all was said and done, Billie walked out of the offices of the Western Union company with several separate wires to be delivered, each destined for a different elder in the community and each carrying news that for one bright and happy morning in this town which had for its size given more of its blood and sinew to the fight against fascism and for liberty and for American ideals and for everything else that Kate Smith sang about on the radio—that for one bright and happy morning there would be no death, no hometown casualty of war, no miserable imprisonment to be conveyed through the clipped, economically worded language of telegraphy. What was being conveyed was this: a ship had been commissioned, a ship that had been launched on November 9. It was given the name Red Oak Victory, in honor of the town’s extreme sacrifice: its young men—both those who would come home crippled and scarred and forever changed by the war, and those whom the Secretary of War—through the good offices of Western Union—reported would not be coming home at all.
There are Red Oak boys buried all over the world.
It was a nice change for Billie—the chance to deliver telegrams that put smiles of joy and pride on the faces of their recipients. And upon his own face as well. But such a smile doesn’t have a very long shelf life. The next day would come yet another yellow envelope, followed by another, and then another. Each would bear the requisite three stars, and each would need Billie Smaha to make sure that the proper person received it. Billie was a conscientious boy who never shirked his duty.
Stop.
1944
SEQUESTERED IN NEW MEXICO
Trust is an important thing in a marriage, and it was especially important in ours. I uprooted her from her parents and from her sister and from all of our friends in Berkeley and flumped her and the boys down upon this windswept mesa in one of the remotest reaches of northern New Mexico. And then I said—not to put too fine a point on it—“I can’t tell you why.”
He thinks I didn’t know. Not until the Trinity test in July of ’45. That’s what’s so funny. And the wind and the dust and the mud and all the daily inconveniences were a true test, I’ll grant you that. But there were also consolations in the unearthly beauty of the place—the gorgeous strata of color in our sunset skies: the orange and lavender and scarlet, the shimmer and glow of cottonwood and aspen gold in autumn—even the exquisite native pottery that fills our house to this day. I remember, as well, all the lasting friendships we made there. It was a special place and a special time, and I felt privileged to be a part of it. In theory. Though what came from it has always troubled me.
It had to be done.
My husband’s right. Somebody had to do it. Philip was a physicist—one of the best. He was young and talented and the war had to be won. He didn’t tell me, but I knew.
You say you knew. You always say you knew, and yet I never mentioned any of it to you. I was careful in everything I said.
And yet. And yet. Philip, dear, please give me credit for being a halfway intelligent woman. I have a master’s degree. I was well aware that it wasn’t a submarine you men were building up there, though you got some mileage out of that nutty canard. And then there was that disastrous attempt at putting forth that bit of fiction about some kind of electricity-powered rocket. As if Flash Gordon had suddenly taken up residency in Los Alamos and we were all girding ourselves to fight the axis of Hitler and General Tojo and Ming the Merciless!
Whatever you knew or didn’t know, you were a trooper and a trump through it all, and I loved you for it.
Did I have a choice? Oppie asked you to come and you came. And you brought your wife and your two boys with you, and what a time we had.We were certainly in the thick of it by 1944, weren’t we? Everything good about that place had revealed itself and everything bad, exceptin
g the water crisis the following year—
Our water tower failed us. The pipes froze. Things got pretty grimy.
Well, my point is that by and large we were tested and we passed the test with surprising resilience and ingenuity.
But with some complaint.
Of course I complained. We all complained. We were civilians and that’s what American civilians do. We came here out of patriotic duty to assist the United States Army in winning the war for the Allies. And here in this secret, isolated community of soldiers and scientists—lovingly deemed by General Groves “the finest collection of crackpots the world has ever seen”—we made a life for ourselves and our families. It was a life unlike any that had ever been or probably ever would be.
In Washington we were called “Manhattan District,” in Santa Fe, “Site Y.” To anyone who ever wanted to write to us (and you will remember this, honey: all those letters you could never reciprocate without the censor breathing down your neck), we were known simply by our post office address—one address shared by all: P.O. Box 1663.
There upon the mesa we referred to our home as “Los Alamos,” which is Spanish for cottonwood trees. Although I would have believed you if you’d told me the words also meant “Phantom Town.” We were all spooks and spirits, weren’t we, dear? Occupants of a shadow world. Officially, we weren’t there, yet our neighbors over in Santa Fe and the men and women who came up from the pueblos to clean our homes and sweep the grit from our porches and do all those jobs that the Army couldn’t or wouldn’t do—they obviously knew we were there. We were flesh and bone to them. And though they didn’t know why we’d come, they had to have suspected that it was for some vitally important purpose.
We were building a submarine.
Who said that my husband doesn’t have a sense of humor?
Let me tell you about Betty. Sit back, Betty. I’m going to embarrass you. My wife was a regular dynamo. She looked after our two boys and worked part time in the Tech area as a secretary. She even put in a few hours every week at the high school and the hospital. The older kids in town were near delinquents and needed taming, and the hospital was forever filled with newborns, all of our fertile young wives dropping litters like estral she-dogs.
Dear, that was absolutely disgusting. You’ll make them think that all we did up on this mesa was build bombs and make babies.
I recall that we also did a little skiing and played some cards. But you have to admit that there was a hell of a lot of baby-making going on.
Once a month my husband would reward me for all my hard work by letting me drive down to Santa Fe and stuff the trunk of our car with everything I couldn’t find in our little hamlet on the hill, which was a very long list, if you want the truth of it.
Of course there was a definite ulterior motive behind my wife’s monthly shopping spree: Betty’s four o’clock gin Rickey at the La Fonda hotel—always in the company of several other similarly shopping-sapped expatriates from the land of government-imposed deprivation.
While you and Oppenheimer and Fermi and Teller nudged your neutrons and accelerated all your cyclotronic particles, it was Peg and Kitty and Mici and all the rest of us “significant others” who were required to keep the home fires burning, or in the case of those damned furnaces from hell, keep those ultra-efficient monsters from turning every Quonset hut and apartment house on the mesa into Finnish saunas. And it was we who stood up at the community meetings and bewailed the non-functioning Black Beauty stoves that converted all of our kitchens into various versions of the Museum of Ma Kettle, and vegetables that arrived at the commissary so spoiled or wilted that even the Three Little Pigs wouldn’t have taken them for slop. With your head in the clouds of vaulted scientific theory and your hands doing the hard work of practical experimentation, you never seemed to notice the wind and the sand and dust of spring and early summer, or the mud of the late summer “monsoon.” You took Oppie’s word that this was going to be our very own Southwestern Shangri-La, when it was Oppenheimer himself who left the grid off the plat, and all of our houses and duplexes and apartment buildings—each the same lovely, unvarying shade of army green—being scattered without rhyme or topographical reason. And God help the husband who sought his own home in the dark night after he’d tied on one too many.
I was well aware of everything you just itemized. Didn’t I try my damnedest to get you a house on Bathtub Row?
You did, dear. And I’m grateful for the effort, futile though it ultimately was. When we thought we might have a chance to move into one of those lovely old boys’ camp homes, I dreamed of jasmine-scented bubble baths for several nights in a row. And then, alas, the bubble burst and it was back to the showers. But I do credit you for trying, and for getting me an Indian maid for three half-days a week, and you always spent time with the boys on the weekends, and didn’t embarrass me at any of the parties or chase after any of the other wives.
I was quite satisfied, as it turned out, with the wife I had.
Thank you for that, dear.
It was a strange time.
And 1944 was the strangest year of all. It was the year that we settled in and looked all around us and the utter surreality of that place would sometimes stop me dead in my tracks.
You say you knew. How did you know?
I’d like to say, dear, that I overheard you talking in your sleep, but you never did. Although, one night I could swear you were sing-mumbling “Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate the Positive.”
Some of the guys had been singing it in the lab—the obvious protonic reference, of course—and it was locked inside my head.
Some of us girls were singing it in the commissary too when the milk delivery didn’t arrive and we had to stay ourselves from riot. Darling, I figured out that you were here to build a great big bomb through process of elimination and through all the hundreds of hints that were dropped in front of those of us who were kept out of Oppie’s Inner Sanctum. Why else would you have dragged Tommy and Philip Junior and me up here? You were worried that Hitler’s scientists would get the jump on us. You boys had to come up with it first. And if all your theories found the practical application you were hoping for, the U.S. Army was going to drop that bomb and change the world forever.
You never spoke of any of this.
And why should I? Why should I give my poor overworked husband something else to fret over? I remember the grave look you used to carry on your face. I noticed the looks of serious purpose on the faces of all of the men who worked with Oppenheimer. General Groves couldn’t be bothered with our petty grievances about wilted lettuce and paper-thin walls that afforded us all so little privacy, and electricity that seemed to come and go willy-nilly. He couldn’t be bothered, darling, because he was overseeing something that would turn the page in the book of humanity. Never before had man been capable of creating a weapon of such exponentially superior destructive power. The door was opening now on that possibility. You and the other scientists were prying it open not quite knowing what you would find on the other side. My doors, dear—my doors were inconsequential. They had hinges with missing screws. They had pencil marks on them from charting the growth of our boys. My world, my darling, was domestic, plain, and quotidian. But it was that world which you and Oppenheimer and the others were trying to save.
And that next year the sky lit up over southern New Mexico and all those little things that you boys had been blowing up on and off the mesa gave way to one big, blinding explosion that took the shape of a giant Alice in Wonderland mushroom. And then three weeks later, hell on earth was visited upon the residents of those two unfortunate Japanese cities.
And with parched lips and dirty faces, because the water still hadn’t been restored upon the mesa, we packed our bags and moved back to California, our job here done, my job as helpmate to one of the men who built “the bomb” having come to an end.
I detect ambivalence in your feelings—about why we came to Los Alamos and what was accomplished there.
Hav
en’t you the same ambivalence, darling? You’ve seen the newsreels. Pandora’s box now has no lid.
I try to eliminate the negative and latch on to the affirmative. My wife is still here at my side and my two sons are safe and grown to sturdy manhood. It was a murderous madman in Germany who brought this horror upon the world, and generals in Asia who kept the Pacific in flames. I did what was asked of me with every good intention.
I hope we’ve told you what you wanted to know. We’ve got to get to our grandson’s Little League game.
Did you know? They play baseball in Japan now.
1945
HYPERNATREMIC IN THE PACIFIC OCEAN
“I heard it was one hundred thou the Cubs paid for him.”
“My aunt’s ass. No team in baseball’s got that kind of dough to throw around.”
“You don’t think he’s worth it? He’s ten and five this season, and if they hadn’t cancelled the All-Star game this month, you know he would’ve been back on the mound for the American League.”
“So why you think the Yankees agreed to cut him loose?”
“Beats me. Beats me why these big league owners do any of the things they do.”
“How’d Borowy get his draft deferment? He’s what, twenty-eight, twenty-nine?”
“They say there’s some kind of important off-season work he’s doing at one of the war plants. Sounds a little fishy to me. Sounds like the important work he’s doing might have less to do with putting bombs together and more to do with a certain high-pitch fast ball.”
“I wonder about some of these guys—you know, the ones who get to stoke the home fires while the rest of us Joes rally ’round the flag. Take the ‘Voice’ for instance. What’s kept that bony boy crooner in permanent civvies?”
“Something wrong with his eardrum when he was born—got punctured or something.”
“This sun’s killing me.”
“Huh?”
“The sun. The heat. I’ll take the cold. Just make that goddamned sun go down, Hillard.”
