“Ready? And—”
I started again, this time without him. When I reached the third measure, though, he came in singing the part of the left hand. My voice in the upper register, his in the lower, we played that fugue with our voices. We’d made an organ of ourselves.
We sang about ten measures before I couldn’t help it and burst out laughing. Charlie laughed with me. “We’ll teach that toccata who’s boss. Try once more?”
Oh, Charlie. What was this euphoria? This high delight? “Yes please,” I said. “From the top.”
The next day at breakfast, Reverend Morris announced that Charlie and I were welcome to use the Hudson again, from time to time.
“Provided you leave at least a quarter tank of gas,” he said, “in case I need to visit a member of the congregation unexpectedly.”
“Excuse me,” Mrs. Morris said, “but just who is going to pay for the gasoline?”
“You could take it from my salary,” I volunteered.
“Well.” She rose to head for the kitchen. “As long as you return it in impeccable condition.” Which I translated to mean we should not have sex in the car.
“That is incredibly generous of you,” I said, as sincere as any newly married girl would be, when her means of deliverance has arrived.
“No reason you two should be cooped up around here,” the reverend said. “New Mexico is a beautiful place.”
Charlie and I began to learn that very thing, every chance we got. We were sightseers with a mission. He would find a potential spot, and pull over. Or I would spy something promising, ask him to stop, and say, “I want you to come with me.”
He always did. East of Taos, among the sweet-smelling ponderosa. Beside the Cimarron River, in the whispering grass. Standing up, in a cleft of boulders near Albuquerque, not fifty feet from a busy road. In a vast empty expanse somewhere to the south, writhing in the dirt under a roasting sun till we sweated like thoroughbreds. Oh, that one is with me still. We yowled like cats, and finished with skin painted red by the clay. We tried to wipe it off each other, which only made the mess worse. So we stood naked, laughing, so revealed and intimate. I adored it.
I figured something else out too. Remembering when Lizzie asked how I would feel if someone took my music away, one Sunday I invited Mrs. Morris to play the closing hymn. Reverend Morris would be in the middle of worship and unable to object.
“Really?” she said, her face lighting up. “Honestly?”
Which was how I helped her more than I’d realized. She remained stern as ever, but it became not her only mood. One night climbing the stairs I heard something from the main house, and stopped to listen. Yes, she was laughing. The next Sunday I asked Mrs. Morris to play two pieces.
Meanwhile Charlie and I explored as much of New Mexico as that gas tank allowed: pueblos and Indian dwellings, cliff towns from centuries ago, deep dry gulches—where if it rained for as little as five minutes, they could flash-fill and flood and sweep us away. Always I asked the same way: “I want you to come with me.” And he would.
Then we found the falls of Nambe. Way up in the hills, far from prying eyes, where the water was cool and tumbling, and the sand as soft as cotton sheets. We were gentle that day, my body unusually welcoming, and Charlie moved with a kind of certainty I hadn’t felt before. Afterward we swam, in no hurry to dress, Adam and Eve in a season of war, trying to make our own Eden.
I’d brought a blanket and we cuddled on the riverbank.
“What are you thinking about?” I asked him.
After a pause, he answered: “Japanese children.”
“I’m sorry, what?”
“Tell me this,” Charlie said, shifting his hips, changing the subject to my favorite topic. “From our lovemaking so far, what do you like best?”
My first impulse was to describe a particular position, or maybe a place and moment that had brought special release. But I thought before answering.
“I like trust best,” I said eventually. “How safe I feel with you, how I can count on you to be a good guy, and how that allows me to let myself go. I enjoy not being afraid.”
Charlie was smiling. “Great answer.”
“What about you? What do you like best?”
His smile faded. Charlie stared into the distance. He kissed my forehead absently.
“What?” I said.
“Well, the thing I like best with you is how the world goes away. My work, the war, everything becomes small and distant. All I can think about is you, and what we are doing, and how fantastic it feels. It’s like we’re on an island.”
“Yes,” I said. “A universe of two.”
But then. As I snuggled closer against him, and the river gossiped at our feet, I had the smallest, most subtle and secret feeling that there might be something else in that universe. Who can say where the idea came from? Of course it was impossible, we’d only just finished making love. There was no way my body could be aware of anything that quickly. Yet I genuinely had a sense of being changed. Something inside me had begun. Without understanding how, I felt myself enter an entirely new kind of knowing. We had become more.
44.
Giles spotted Charlie on the bench outside the mess tent, and tottered over with a grin. “I have something unexpected to show you.”
“This is the place where I was introduced to David Horn,” Charlie replied. “Back when we didn’t know how to detonate.”
“I submit that you two solved that problem rather well,” Giles said.
“Does that make Horn a hero, therefore? Or a villain?”
“Both, of course.” Giles held his arms wide, as if to indicate the mess tent, the technicians passing by, the truck traffic below. “Like all of us.”
Charlie mused a moment. “What do you know about the guillotine?”
“They used it in the French Revolution to decapitate aristocrats. Why do you ask?”
“I read up on it in the Santa Fe library.”
Giles sat beside him, a palm on each knee. “Educate me.”
“France had many forms of execution—hanging, burning at the stake. Punishment was based not on the crime but on the condemned person’s economic status. In the 1700s, the government decided capital punishment should be egalitarian, regardless of the criminal’s class.”
“A rather brutal form of equality, by the sound of it.”
“They also decided to separate torture from execution. Killing by the state might be just, but should not be inhumane. The courts hired Tobias Schmidt, a German whose trade was building harpsichords, to make a machine that killed people without pain.”
“Fascinating. And this has been an item of interest for you why?”
“Because Schmidt failed. The execution itself probably didn’t hurt, but there was plenty of suffering.” Charlie counted down on his fingers. “In knowing that certain death was coming. In walking out to the scaffold.” His voice accelerated. “In placing your head in the groove. Perhaps you smell the blood of those beheaded before you. Perhaps the crowd jeers, mocking your terror. Perhaps it’s raining. Perhaps you shit yourself.”
Giles turned in his seat. “Charlie, are you all right?”
“But the agony, you see,” and he formed a circle with his thumb and forefinger, as if holding a paintbrush to make a fine point. “The pain is all in the anticipation.”
“Ah.” Giles sat back. “Now I understand you.”
“I have been nervous countless times in my life. I’m afraid twenty times a day. But never before have I lived in such a complete state of dread.”
Giles put an arm over Charlie’s shoulder. “You are speaking for all of us here.”
“Whatever happened to Oppie’s idea of a demonstration?”
“He was speaking as a scientist,” Giles replied. “But the actual masters of this project are military, and the only language they speak is victory.”
“Victory without annihilation might be possible.”
“Perhaps. But we will never know.”
&n
bsp; Charlie rubbed his neck. “So we place our heads in the groove, waiting for the blade to fall.”
“My friend, that is a dark thought. But look.” Giles pointed. “An amusement.”
Down the slope, Mather had ducked his head out of the tent. He spied them and strode in their direction, a bounce in his step.
“Gentlemen,” Mather hailed them. “And I use the term loosely.”
“Hello, Mather,” Giles said. “What brings you over from Theoretical? Desire to rub elbows with the rabble?”
“An appetite for intellectual consensus. The elusive idea that by now, all of us might find agreement about where we are and what presumably will happen next.”
Instead of answering, Charlie began to pick at the paint on the bench. Giles scratched himself under the arm. “Elusive would be an understatement.”
“What dissent can there be? We’ve seen the power of our creation. Are we now to toss it on the junk heap? A footnote in the physics textbooks of tomorrow? ‘Oh yes, there was this minor invention in ’45, but we moved past that.’ And so on.”
“Perhaps we don’t merit mention at all,” Giles said.
“Less than two and a half years from the birth of this project to the test three weeks ago?” Mather chuckled. “I believe future generations will judge our achievement to be the fastest transformation of human power in history.”
“Then why am I filled with dread?” Charlie asked, continuing to pick at the paint.
“Because you are not a warrior,” Mather said. “The rest of us, in a moment of doubt, would march to the library and read old newspapers. In two minutes, you can find editions from the second week of December, three years ago. The photos alone will persuade you: burning ships, sinking in the harbor, hundreds of men trapped inside. A more intelligent person might find an inner resolve.”
“Like Szilard?” Charlie said. “And the seventy others who signed his letter?”
Mather made a sour frown. “The test frightened them, that’s all. Had they waited ten days before all of this clucking and squawking, they’d have returned to reason.”
“What about the Franck Report, then? Other men who lack resolve?”
“Exceptions to the rule, Fish. One hundred thousand people across the country work on the Manhattan Project. Any group that large will have dissenters. Among any random hundred thousand Americans, five hundred will refuse to say the sky is blue.”
“Ha,” Giles said, though it was not at all a laugh. He peered up, a perfect noontime in early August. “The sky is not blue.”
Mather pulled his chin back at the affront. “Fine. Plead ignorance if you like. But you are as culpable as all the rest of us.”
“I know,” Giles said. “I feel it.”
“You’re even more responsible, Fish.” Mather nodded in Charlie’s direction. “If Giles here accomplished nothing in Electronics, dozens of others could do the job. If I made no progress in Theoretical, it would not matter.” He turned, idling away down the hill. “Only one of us is Trigger.”
Charlie jumped to his feet, but Giles grabbed his arm.
“I should have decked him back in Chicago,” Charlie fumed.
“It would only give him pleasure. That’s how confused that boy is.”
“Damn it, though.” Charlie sat back down.
Giles waited half a minute, letting the situation cool, before he spoke. “Now may I show you the thing I mentioned?”
Charlie smiled at his friend. “Anything to change the subject.”
Giles unbuttoned his cuff, rolling up the sleeve. “Drumroll, please.”
He paused as a young soldier jogged past them, into the mess tent. Aside from seeing that his shirt was dark with sweat, they took little notice. Then Giles raised the sleeve, to reveal a blue tattoo on the inside: a hardy stem, with thick flowerets at the top.
“Broccoli?” Charlie asked.
Giles laughed. “Cauliflower, actually.”
“I don’t understand.”
He turned his wrist so the inking was right side up. “Remind you of anything?”
Charlie squinted, then made his surprised expression. “The Gadget?”
Giles laughed. “It was the only design close to what we saw. The detonation.”
“I thought you hated tattoos. You told Monroe it was graffiti on the body.”
“I do. And the banality of this vegetable makes it all the more hideous. But now that I know what we’ve accomplished, I want to be marred. We should all be marred.”
The soldier came running out of the mess tent, spotted them, and dashed up to the bench. “Is one of you Charles Fish, detonator division?”
“That’s me,” Charlie said.
The soldier bent at the waist, panting. “I’ve been all over, sir, looking for you. The tech area, the barracks.”
“Now you’ve found me.” He sat up. “What can I do for you?”
“You’re wanted in the division director’s office, sir. It’s an emergency.”
“No satisfying that man,” Charlie said to Giles as he stood. “What does Bronsky want now?”
“It’s about your wife, sir.”
“Your wife?” Giles interjected. “Since when do you have a wife?”
“What about her?” Charlie asked.
“Well, sir.” The soldier gulped. “Apparently she’s dying.”
45.
At first I thought it was a heavy period. Some months are like that, who knows why. Then it persisted, grew heavier—what my mother called “the curse” was making me light-headed. One night at bedtime I mentioned it to Lizzie.
“Sorry, kid.” She gave my arm a bump. “I’ve had one myself. You’ll bounce back.”
“What are you talking about?” I asked. We were standing in the hallway, she in one of her husband’s long shirts and me in a light summer nightgown.
“Miscarriages. They can make a gal awful blue, too, so keep an eye out. But you two shouldn’t worry.” She laughed. “You’ll probably make sixteen babies before you’re done.”
“Yeah.” I chuckled feebly. “We’ll have to keep trying.”
Lizzie winked. “Practice makes perfect.”
I wandered back into my room. So we did conceive that day at Nambe Falls. Only the baby didn’t survive. It would feel so different to realize these things, I thought, if my husband were there to share them. I lay on the bed and hugged my stomach.
But the bleeding kept up, day after day. Sometimes I felt a sharp pain too. Once I was better, I would send Charlie a note letting him know what had happened.
Wednesday during choir practice, we had finished warm-ups when I raised both my arms to signal the call to attention—the moment everyone breathes in for the first note. I felt stabbing pain in my shoulder. My knees buckled, the room went dim.
Next thing I knew I was in an unfamiliar bed, sore like someone had run a sword into my belly. A hospital, I knew by the bleachy smell. Bandages ran across my abdomen. I wanted water but there was no one to ask. And it was too much work to raise my voice.
I dipped in and out of consciousness with no sense of time. I remember Lizzie coming to see me, straight from her shift and still in her nursing uniform, trying to look tough. But she held a wad of tissues and I watched her twist them into a knot. The Morrises came, too, several times. I stirred to half-awake one night and they were both at the bedside. They were kneeling, heads bent, and I wondered: What did I ever do to deserve being prayed for? Then I was out again.
Eventually I could speak, but only in a whisper because more than that hurt too much. Another time when I woke it was Reverend Morris by himself, standing at the bedside and sobbing, tears pouring down his face.
I blinked, he was gone, and I wondered whether it had actually happened.
One afternoon I opened my eyes and who should be standing there but Charlie Fish. His face was creased with worry. It made him look so adorable. I raised one hand, which I admit took some effort. He took it and kissed my knuckles. That was when I felt
like I really began to sleep.
Every time after that, Charlie was there. If he left my bedside, it was only when I was way down deep. Because anytime my eyes opened, day or night, they saw him.
Once it was early morning, not light yet, and Charlie was asleep in the hard hospital chair, looking about ten years old. I was so glad to see him, I cried a little. A nurse came in, all bustle and business, checking my pulse and temperature, while Charlie woke and peered around with a confused expression.
The next time I woke, Charlie stood on one side, caressing my hand, and when I turned to see who was holding my other, well. My mother. All the way from Chicago.
She leaned down to kiss my jaw, under the ear, and she whispered. “Baby girl, you are going to be all right. You rest now.”
As if I had any choice. And yet, each day I did grow stronger. I ate a few bites of bread. I sipped water through a straw. A doctor came in, a handsome man with gray in his sideburns, but he had a terrible limp. That was the war for you, I thought: Two good legs and he’d be preparing for the invasion of Japan like Lizzie’s Tim. Maybe that bum leg had saved his life. Or maybe he’d hurt it in the war already. He stood at the foot of the bed, clipboard in hand, and spoke to it rather than to us.
“Ectopic pregnancy. The embryo did not attach to the uterus as it should. Instead it attached to the right fallopian tube. Why these things occur is a mystery. This failure caused a rupture, leading to internal bleeding that persisted until the patient collapsed.”
“Failure?” I said. I had failed in some way?
“In emergency surgery,” he was reading from the clipboard now, “we sectioned the damaged area to prevent further bleeding, and removed compromised tissue.” He lowered the clipboard to his hip. “The patient has lost one side of her reproductive system. Obviously the fetus did not survive. Internal bleeding was advanced, requiring six units of transfusion. The left side reproductive tissue remains intact, so the patient remains able to conceive. Questions?”
If there were any, I was too fuzzy to participate. “Failure.” That was the word that accompanied me back to sleep.
Universe of Two Page 37
