I snatched the envelope and bolted upstairs, practically tearing it open on the way. In my room I closed the door and sat on the bed.
“Dear Brenda, How are you?”
I have always hated letters with questions in them, even if they are asked purely for manners’ sake. Don’t people realize there is no way to answer? I scanned down Charlie’s scrawl, looking for where the meat of it began.
“I live in a . . .” and after that it was blacked out.
“I’ve made a new friend, a chemist named . . .” and the same censoring.
“Our work is like alchemy. Each day we . . .” and blacked out again.
The back side was worse. By the time I finished page two, and reached Charlie’s sign-off—“Take care, and please say hello to your mom”—all I knew was that he was working hard, the food was decent, and the weather was great. The weather.
I trudged down the stairs like I’d experienced some kind of defeat.
“How’s Charlie?” my mother asked, standing at the sink with her back turned, as if that would prevent me from knowing how crazy curious she was.
“He says hi,” I answered, and like a perfectly cruel daughter, I said no more.
Dear Charlie: I’m fine, but don’t bother asking in the future, okay? Because I could have yellow fever and pneumonia put together, and get over them both before your next letter reached me. Also what do all the blacked-out parts mean? Are you giving away military secrets as a hobby?
All these years later, I sit in a rocking chair on the terrace of my assisted-living facility, and debate which is a greater wonder: That I thought this opening was somehow funny? That in my mind it conveyed to Charlie how desperately I wanted to know everything about his life in Santa Fe? That I thought the tone contained enough familiarity for him to sense my deep affection? Or that he saved it, actually kept it in his papers like something important—though reading it later caused me pangs, to see how prickly I could be, while he was alone and so far away?
What he was actually doing, I still had no idea, and that ate at me. Why the secrecy? How could a math and soldering guy possibly be involved in something that required such high security? I could not begin to imagine.
I sealed my reply in the morning, news about the slow sales and the loud accordion guy, trying to make him sound comical. It may have come out mean. I left it in anyhow.
When I asked my mother for a stamp, she gave me five. “It’s good of you to write back so promptly.”
“What are the extras for?”
“You have lots more free time than Charlie. You don’t have to take turns. You might want to write him again before you receive his next letter to you.”
“Oh, I might?” I scoffed. “We’ll see.”
“No harm in a suggestion,” she said. “Proud girl.”
I flounced out to the mailbox, dropped the envelope in, and headed to work. It was a sunny spring day, birds and flowers and a dog that writhed on its back in the grass of a little park. For some reason, that dog about floored me. By the time I reached the store, it had sunk in: this was going to be my life for the foreseeable future. Not movies, but mail. Not soft kisses, but licking envelopes.
As I unlocked the front door, I felt the blues come over me like never before. Charlie was gone. Till who knows when. And I, who still had home and family and friends, had mailed him a letter full of trite and bratty things. I would have to send a better one right away. As soon as I got home that evening.
I wandered around the store, switching on the church model, which had seen so little use there was dust on the console. As it warmed up I wiped the organ with a chamois cloth, so lightly the keys did not play. My mother declared that random notes were the opposite of professionalism: never touch a key until you mean to. But as I settled onto the bench, my elbow hit a B-flat—a quick bleat, and I swear it pulled at me.
I opened a few stops, wanting a reed sound, and played that B-flat again, this time on purpose. Why did the note seem so different? So poignant? I had played B-flats in pieces since I was four years old, no weightier than any other note. One of my standard audition pieces was in the key of B-flat. Yet this time it meant something more.
My left hand played an octave lower, another B-flat, and then arpeggiated the major chord: B-flat, D, F. It sounded plaintive. Sincere. Without any plan, my left hand moved on to spell out a G-minor: B-flat, D, G. The chords had two of their three notes in common, the difference between them was small. But I went back and forth—slowly, in a solemn procession—B-flat to G-minor, and it was like the organ knew how I felt.
I was the kind of musician who did not compose, who disliked improvisation. The risk of hitting a wrong note was too great. But those two chords expressed my emotions better than words. While my left hand alternated between them, my right hand played, five times, a slow, quarter-note D, followed by rest.
Simple, obvious, but it worked. The music said what I wanted to say. B-flat, G-minor, and the high, ringing D that linked them. It was like a march. I was the drummer boy and the fife player, both, and the wounded soldier limping home too—all made possible by the unique power of the organ. With strings, there’s a moment when the bow reaches its end and has to change direction. With horns and woodwinds, sooner or later the player has to breathe. But an organ note can simply continue, tirelessly, while two chords pass feelings back and forth: yearning, longing; affection, sorrow.
When my mother came bustling in, I switched the organ off. She paused at the door, aware that she had interrupted something. Then she continued into the office, where she did paperwork for the rest of the morning. And the chords continued playing in my heart.
The afternoon was quiet as the week before, spring advancing, but this year without graduation-present customers and wedding-gift parents. My first anniversary at Dubie’s Music approached, and a job I’d been loving had turned to mud.
Where was Charlie? What was he doing? Why had I sent such a trivial reply?
On the way home, I saw a couple kissing against a building. Some kids chased each other around a tree. A pigeon trotted along with its head bobbing, staying in my path without flying away for a full block. But nothing could make the sun come out.
At home I went straight to my room, fishing out the stationery that I saved for thank-you notes and special occasions. I parked myself at the little desk and began.
Dear Charlie,
Please forgive my last letter. It was terrible and petty. This is all new to me. As it is to you, too, of course. So I will make dumb mistakes until I learn better.
Since you left Chicago, the music is gone. No one pops into the store. There’s no you to learn new pieces for. Spring is happening all around me but I do not feel it. In your letter you used the word “alchemy” and I do not know what it means. This is a secret I have kept from you: Sometimes you use words I don’t understand. I do not want to pretend anymore.
I sat back, astonished. Every sentence contained a confession. Reading this note after the last one, and thinking I had gone stark crazy. I slid the paper into a drawer, and went downstairs.
My mother was in the kitchen. Feeling like I’d be terrible company, I went to the living room—where the piano sat with the cover open like an invitation. I slid onto the bench, fiddled with classical pieces, started a ragtime tune that made me feel like an imposter, and finally gave in to what I wanted to play.
Two chords from my left hand, while that mournful D wafted high above. Back and forth, that one note as my mooring, I let myself drift.
Maybe I had never really felt anything before. I didn’t remember being upset when Frank and my father went away, though I sure missed them now. Charlie seemed to have opened a door in my heart, and behind it was a room full of melancholy.
I cannot say how long I sat there, repeating myself on those keys. As evening came on, the room grew dark and eventually the reverie broke. When I stopped playing, the immediate sensation was not of relief or catharsis, but embarrassment: my mother h
ad been in the next room that whole time, listening to me carry on with my two chords.
I marched into the kitchen, ready to say I don’t know what. She was sitting at the table, the newspaper crumpled in her lap, tears streaming down her face.
It stopped me like a crossing guard with his hand up. “Are you all right?”
She shook her head. “No. I’m not all right, and neither are you.”
“What do you mean?”
She wiped her face roughly on her sleeve. “Little girl, we need to change some things around here. Both of us. We can’t keep on like this.”
20.
Every day began with Midnight kneading Charlie’s stomach. Other fellows in the barracks fed her scraps, or poured her basins of milk. A few found catnip somehow, and left a little pile for her to squirm against. But each night, she chose Charlie’s bed.
Midnight’s rounds were famous all over The Hill. No fence could contain her, nor guard control her. She spent daytimes wandering around the technical area, immune to speeding trucks, and passed her nighttimes prowling—which worried the boys more, because the canyons were yowling with coyotes. Every ten days or so she limped in with a wound in her side or scratches on her face, the cause unknown.
Once the barracks fell quiet, and light spilled in the windows from a bare bulb outside the entry, Midnight would make her way inside. After visiting several bunks in the long room she would reach Charlie’s, two-thirds of the way down on the left, onto which she would jump soundlessly, tongue-wash her paws of the day’s dust, snuggle herself against the small of his back or the bend of his knees, and become tiny in sleep until the sky pinked and the first risers stirred. Then she would stretch fore and aft, yawning wide with her small teeth showing.
Next she would climb on top of Charlie, and with alternating paws she would knead his stomach, knead and knead, as he woke and stretched and stroked her ears until the ebony animal narrowed her green eyes and purred. Why she chose Charlie, no one knew but many envied.
That morning he scratched under her chin. “Detonation day, kitty. Maybe today I’ll have my first one.” The cat responded by leaning into his fingers.
Giles passed on his way to the latrine, pausing to release a magnificent fart. “Blasphemy,” he said.
“You are a pig.” Charlie put a pillow over his face.
“In honor of detonation day,” Giles said, bowing. “And may I observe that this cat is training you nicely for your girlfriend. What a touch you’ll have when the war is over.”
Charlie blushed. Giles knew how often he was lovesick about Brenda. But he’d never yet put a finger on her, and the very idea of it made him squirm.
Then again, to Charlie any sentence that contained the phrase “when the war is over” was entirely fantasy. The war would never be over. Not with Hitler beating back the Russians and firing rockets at Britain. Not with Japan apparently willing to spill the blood of every citizen capable of carrying a rifle, rather than accept defeat. The newspapers had made much of the Battle of Eniwetok, for example: Of the three thousand five hundred Japanese soldiers defending that little island, all but one hundred had died. And those survivors were considered a national disgrace.
The Hill was supposed to solve these problems, though after six months Charlie still did not understand how. Giles promised to explain, but free time was rare, and usually devoted either to festivities at Fuller Lodge, or bonfires behind the barracks where the boys gulped beer and rum like Prohibition was returning in the morning. Charlie’s days brimmed with work, too, and tasks of crushing complexity. Who had room for the big picture?
“Compartmentalization,” Giles called it, a word he labored to pronounce that night by the bonfire. Rum made him more thoughtful, but less articulate. “Know what I mean?”
“I don’t,” Charlie said, himself half a dozen drinks behind.
Giles speared a stick into the coals, spiraling sparks skyward. “A man cannot be a security risk if he knows only his job, and remains ignorant of the larger enterprise.”
“But that’s the opposite of how science works,” Charlie said. “Advances happen when people collaborate, and challenge one another’s ideas.”
“Spoken like the fanatical communist you obviously are.” Giles laughed. “My advice—”
“Stick to my knitting, yes.” Charlie worked an invisible set of needles in the air. “I’m finishing a scarf right now.”
“Fish, my fine friend.” Giles drew the stick from the fire, blowing on its glowing tip. “You may be an innocent, but you are still capable of learning.”
Now Charlie watched him waddle in his boxers down the center of the barracks to the latrine. Sitting up, he deposited Midnight at the foot of the bunk. “Good kitty.” From his locker, he dug out soap, razor, and toothbrush—then checked in the mirror and put the razor back. As he shuffled away, the cat nestled into his pillow.
The barracks were made to hold sixty boys in two long rows, with room between bunks for a locker and chair. Instead the administration had shoehorned ninety boys inside. There was no privacy, no air circulation—yet some at Los Alamos maintained that these fellows were lucky. Others had to raise families in cardboard houses with unsafe furnaces. Or they lived in trailers with walls as thin as a tin can: ovens in summer, iceboxes in winter.
Everyone on The Hill, within days of arriving, knew the story: A remote plateau that four years earlier had housed no more than a boys’ school was now home to six thousand people. There were daily power outages and frequent water shortages. Yet new workers, many green with nausea from the trip, stepped off the bus from Santa Fe every day. Some of the more senior scientists had taken to sleeping beneath their desks.
Charlie might have tried that himself had he been assigned a regular place of work. But his tasks alternated between lab and field. Today was a field day, detonation day, which he tried not to think about too much. Either he would have his first turn, or he would not. Meanwhile his next rotation for a shower was not until Sunday, which meant that tonight he would sleep on sheets gritty with sand.
“Maybe that’s the definition of being in a war,” he said to Giles the last time he’d gone to bed unwashed. “You’re away from your people, and you wake up dirty.”
Giles shook his head. “There is only one definition of being in a war. Someone is trying to kill you.”
Charlie reached the line for the sinks, counting heads to realize that his turn would put him at the one on the far wall. Thanks to a plumbing error, that sink had no cold water—both spigots ran scalding hot. Fine for shaving, misery for brushing teeth.
Later, back at his bunk, Midnight having embarked on her rounds, Charlie made the bed before jogging to the mess hall. The food was bland but plentiful, and he ate a heaping plate of scrambled eggs. He also poured himself some milk, but after one sip he pushed the glass away.
“I was surprised you tried it,” the boy across from him said.
“Ever an optimist, I guess.”
“I don’t know how they do it.” The boy grimaced. “The milk has been sour every damn day since I got here. Do you think they do it on purpose?”
Charlie tucked in to his meal. Around him the room crackled with energy, boys late for duty or returning from working all night. The room was loud, his chair bumped by workers hurrying past. Finally Charlie took his coffee outside to drink in the shade.
Project Y had become a hive of activity. Trucks roared past, jeeps ferried officers between duties, boys poured in and out of the fenced tech area. A pickup idled through, its bed crowded with dark-skinned women in colorful garb. Locals all, the cleaning staff.
Some midteen boys ran past pell-mell, and Charlie knew they were headed to the equipment dump, where faulty gear and old machines went to die. Those kids had wreaked havoc a few weeks back, when they found an old searchlight in the heap. Being the children of scientists, they repaired it with found parts, taught themselves Morse code, and one night had themselves a fine time flashing obscene messages in
to the sky—until a transport plane misread the signal and nearly crashed into the canyon.
Chastised and punished, the boys also became famous on The Hill. Mischief was to be expected. The school was disorganized, its teachers mostly spouses of lab workers. Enrollment might grow by ten in a single day, and teenaged boys were not likely to sit attentively in class when perfectly good junk piles beckoned. As they dashed past, Charlie had half a mind to join them.
His daydream was interrupted by a battered old power wagon rattling up, its horn honking needlessly. A bald young man leered out the window. “All ashore them’s going ashore.”
Charlie squinted at him. “Monroe, I’m not sure that’s what you actually mean.”
Monroe, a troublemaker’s glint in his eyes, gave an infectious laugh. “It means I have commandeered this here truck, we’re running late as molasses in January, and today is detonation day.”
“One minute.” Charlie grabbed the tailgate, swinging up into the truck’s back. A dozen other boys made room, while two lay across a bed frame. “What’s that for?”
One fellow shrugged. “Brunder lost a bet.”
Charlie did not know who Brunder was, or what wager would cost a man his bunk. But as Monroe hit the gas and the truck careened away, Charlie grabbed the nearest bedpost and held tight.
The road climbed to Fuller Lodge and Bathtub Row—where Oppenheimer and the other brass lived—and skirted the busy tech area. They paused at a security fence, every boy raising his pass for the guards to check, the soldiers as humorless as tombstones. Monroe opened it up again, spinning gravel.
In minutes they reached Tech Area 6, a rutted dirt road that forced Monroe to slow. Nonetheless, on reaching the staging area, he slammed on the brakes. All four wheels locked, and the truck skidded sideways to a halt.
Universe of Two Page 13
