Atomic Love

by Jennie Fields

  * * *

  That night, there was a party at the Fermis’. It had been planned for weeks, long before anyone knew the project would move fast enough to make this evening the perfect time to celebrate. Rosalind sipped ginger ale. Weaver sat next to her on the sofa, nursing a Scotch. She tasted his—having never tasted whiskey before—and told him she could see where the word “butterscotch” might have derived from. That made him laugh. “Butterscotch? Dear girl, you astonish me.” He began to question her about why she’d been drawn to science. He asked about her family, about growing up without a mother, about being the only girl in her classes, in her major, in her field.

  “It’s like being the first foreigner in an isolated country,” she told him. “My power is that I know the language. I find pleasure in shocking the natives by speaking fluently.”

  He looked at her admiringly. “You speak it more fluently than the rest of us.” The heat she felt silenced her for a moment. But soon they were in a lively discussion about why actinide isotopes need odd neutron numbers to be fissile. She noted Laura Fermi watching the two of them with an approving smile. As soon as Weaver left her to refresh their drinks, Laura moved in. “He is a handsome fellow, is he not?”

  “Yes.”

  “If I were younger, I would make him sweet eyes. He likes you. A blind man could see.” Rosalind felt herself blushing.

  “I’m only getting to know him.”

  “Like all men, he’s too sure. That is what women are for, yes? To put men back in their little presents?” Laura’s English was far better than her husband’s, though sometimes her colloquial expressions became hilariously jumbled. “But you could do that, Rosalind. You have the smartness. And he would be a surprise.”

  “A surprise?”

  “A prize, I mean. A prize.”

  Rosalind smiled. “Yes, a prize.”

  “Now, tell me,” Laura said, moving closer. “You’re the only one I can ask: Why is everyone congratulating Enrico tonight? What’s happened?”

  Heat rose up Rosalind’s neck. “You don’t know?” she whispered. “He didn’t tell you?”

  “I ask Enrico and he says, go take care of the guests!”

  If Fermi hadn’t told Laura, how could Roz break the silence, the youngest member of the team, the only woman?

  “If you tell me, I won’t say I know. It is a big thing, this?”

  “Yes . . . very big.”

  “A big thing such as . . .” Laura gazed at her with chocolate eyes.

  “Laura . . . please.”

  “Tell me anything. The very tiniest thing is more than I have.”

  “Well.” Rosalind ground the toe of her shoe into the carpet, searching for words. “It’s as important as . . . as if he’d sunk a Japanese admiral.”

  Laura squinted with disbelief. Everyone knew the situation in the Pacific was dire. The American fleet was virtually wiped out and there was fear that Hawaii would soon be captured.

  “You are joking at me, yes?” Laura asked.

  “I’m not saying he actually sunk an admiral. I just meant it’s a big thing. A very big thing.”

  “I trust you to tell me, Rosalind. I need to know what has happened.”

  “Mrs. Fermi,” Weaver interrupted, passing Rosalind a glass of Scotch. “Butterscotch for you, Duchess,” he said, then turned to Laura and set his hand on her shoulder. “We don’t want to make our Rosalind spill the beans, do we? Signor Fermi will send her right to the doghouse.”

  “Spill beans? Doghouse?”

  “Both are charming American expressions,” said Weaver, flashing all his teeth. “Spill the beans means telling what you shouldn’t. And being sent to the doghouse is what happens when you do something very, very bad. Like a naughty dog. Fermi will never forgive her.”

  Laura’s lower lip pushed out into a pout and she turned to Rosalind once more. “But it is a very, very big thing, yes?”

  “Yes. You would be proud,” Rosalind said. “Maybe when we’ve all left tonight, he’ll tell you. He’s the one who must tell you.” Fermi was watching them from the corner of the room. He lifted his glass in a toast. His eyes flashed like stars in a night sky.

  * * *

  At the time Rosalind was living with five other girls, mostly university secretaries, not far from campus. When the party was winding down past midnight, Weaver established that his apartment wasn’t far from hers and insisted on walking her home. He hadn’t come by car because they’d begun to ration gas.

  “You’d be afraid of my driving anyway,” he said as they stepped outside. “I learned to drive on the other side, and I keep thinking it’s the lot of you who are driving like maniacs.” His voice echoed in the night air. Snow squeaked beneath their feet. It was so cold, her nostrils stuck together. She could barely smell the scent of wood smoke that rose from someone’s chimney. The majority of houses were dark, the streetlights too far apart. Again, he reached for her hand.

  “Be careful,” he said. “There lies treachery.” He pointed to ice that was hiding on the walkway between white patches, black and ominous.

  Despite their gloves, his touch sent an effervescence through her veins. The extent of her “experience” with men was kissing two different soldiers at the same USO dance. They ended up getting into a fistfight with each other. Now handsome Thomas Weaver was clutching her hand. She had no idea what to make of it. Why on earth would he choose her?

  All her life, she’d been the “smart” girl. That line “Men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses” wasn’t about spectacles. What man wanted to be with a bookish girl? Louisa tried to intervene. When Rosalind entered high school, Louisa insisted she get a haircut, spent time teaching her how to pluck her eyebrows. She bought her new clothes. A girl, Louisa explained, needed to look attractive and please men in order to fulfill her primary job in life: to find a mate, procreate, and make a home. “It’s the natural order,” she explained. Maybe it was the hollowness in her voice that made Rosalind bristle. If it was the natural order, why was Lou always so miserable? And why did she often sound like she was reading from a script? Still, after Louisa gussied her up, Roz did feel more special. And boys did seem to notice.

  Then, when the Superintendent of Schools, basing his insistence on test scores and teacher raves, plucked her from Hyde Park High to begin at the University of Chicago at the age of sixteen, it didn’t endear her to the boys. Adeptness at math and science didn’t win her a university lothario either. Her friend Zeke warned her that she simply had to make an effort to hide that she knew more than every man she met. This moment with Weaver was utterly new: a man who seemed to appreciate her for her brains. She felt totally off-balance.

  “I think Rosalind is a splendid name,” he said.

  She shook her head. “It’s too old-fashioned. I don’t know what my parents were thinking.”

  “It’s Shakespearean. Don’t argue.”

  She laughed.

  “Truth is . . .” His voice faltered. He turned and smiled nervously. “Do you notice at the lab that I’m always staring at you?”

  She had no idea what to say. She had never presumed this handsome man could be romantically interested in her. They were colleagues who argued about the merits of powdered beryllium.

  “Listen, I . . . I’ve tried not to feel anything for you, but I can’t make a go of it . . . I know I should.” His mouth was trembling. Realizing that under the thunder of his swagger was something defenseless, her heart fishtailed, swishing between desire and fear.

  He brushed his gloved thumb over her lips.

  “If I kiss these lips, I won’t want to stop,” he said. “Roz, come home with me,” he whispered. “Please . . . My apartment isn’t far.”

  Her father had taught her that men were predators, and he’d just spoken the very words the evil ones spoke to lead innocents down the path of no return. A
light snapped off inside her.

  “I need to get home,” she insisted.

  “Please?” he whispered again.

  “I’m not the girl you think I am. Good night, Weaver.” She started walking toward her house. Brisk enough to escape him. Not brisk enough to slip and kill herself. He easily caught up.

  “I’ll walk you home, then, shall I?” he asked, all British gallantry.

  “Yes,” she said. “I’d appreciate that.” He reached for her hand and tucked it into his elbow, the protective squire now.

  “I do think you are quite beautiful,” he said. “I also think you don’t know it.”

  * * *

  After that, he courted her with flowers, dinners, long walks. Winter grew into a wet spring. It felt like the sun would never shine. After days of no sun, she found it hard to get out of bed. But Weaver seemed even more affected. His ever-changing eyes dulled to a sad, faded blue. He smoked insistently, as though he were trying to draw any tidbit of happiness he could find out of each cigarette.

  One late afternoon, as he walked her home from campus, their umbrellas clashing, he said, “I have to tell you something.”

  “Okay.”

  “In England, I was married.”

  Her stomach dropped as it had once on a giant roller coaster. “Married?”

  “It didn’t end well,” he said.

  That could mean any number of things, and so Rosalind said nothing, hoping he’d say more. But for a long time he just smoked in that forehead-wrinkling way that was his alone.

  “You’re not going to tell me what happened?” she asked.

  He flicked his cigarette onto the ground and it sizzled as it hit a puddle. He tugged on the brim of his hat. “She died in an air raid.”

  “Oh . . . oh God. I’m sorry. In London or . . .”

  “We lived in Cambridge but she took the train in to sign some papers. She had a friend who had a little house in Forest Hill. The woman’s husband was a soldier, off fighting, and she was all alone in her house, lonely, so my wife spent the night. It was during the Blitz. During a war, one tries to act as normally as possible. To live a regular life. I didn’t stop her from going into the city. I should have. I don’t know why she and her friend didn’t head for the shelter. The sirens went off as usual. Maybe they were laughing and drinking and thought, What the hell. Leave it to fate.”

  “How long ago . . . when?”

  “The end of October 1940.” His face was impassive as he told the story. He might have been conveying a piece of history from a book. He wouldn’t look at Rosalind at all. The muscles in his cheek twitched and worked. It meant he was either nervous, unhappy, or angry.

  “What was her name?” Rosalind asked. He’d had a wife. She was dead. His joking, full-of-himself quality had never betrayed any of this.

  “Her name was Victoire.”

  “Victoire?” Rosalind said.

  “She was from the South of France, from Marseille, and older than me. Quite a bit older . . . Look, Roz, it wasn’t a happy marriage. I guess I need to say that. I don’t want your sympathy. We were struggling. Maybe I wanted her to go off to London . . . There were days I couldn’t bear the sight of her.”

  “Don’t say that, Weaver.”

  He shrugged. As she thought about it, it seemed to her that his honesty boded well. He wasn’t looking for undue sympathy or playing up his loss. Maybe he didn’t even love his wife. A young man’s bad choice. “You came to America to get away from the sadness?” Rosalind asked.

  “I got out of England running. There was so much pressure for Britons to join up, even though I was doing important war work that most couldn’t. Healthy men were supposed to don uniforms and beat the Nazis. I’d have made a lousy soldier. I’d be dead by now. When I joined the Manhattan Project, it was an opportunity to lose myself in something important. To be somewhere safer. To breathe again. I didn’t much like New York, but I felt safe. Then I moved to Chicago and found you. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about Victoire. I haven’t said anything to anyone.” He wasn’t crying or filled with misery, but at that moment she felt deeply moved. The rain beat on their umbrellas as she brought her hand to his face, caressing his cheek with her thumb, her fingers aroused by the prickle of his beard.

  “Weaver,” she said. “I think . . . I’d like you to take me home. Your home . . .”

  His lips parted with surprise. “Are you sure?” he asked, breathless.

  She merely smiled.

  That night, they became lovers. Damn her father’s warnings. This was what she wanted more than anything: to feel close to another human, heart, breath, and mind. To give. To get. To feel alive in a way she’d never known possible. She soon discovered she wasn’t the dull, brainy woman she’d pegged herself to be, but a body alive and sensual, moving like seaweed in a rising tide. Insatiable. Unshameable.

  * * *

  Yet amid the joy, there was always something closed off in Weaver. Even when they slept together side by side and ate toast across the table from each other, she could still never get through the murkiness to discover the black heart of his misery. Was it a moment in his past that quietly tortured him? A dirty secret he couldn’t share? Or Victoire, whom he proclaimed he never really loved? Maybe he’d lied about that. It made itself known as a silence in the middle of a conversation, a dull distance in his eyes. A certainty that he would never be entirely Rosalind’s. There were even times he went out and wouldn’t tell her where he’d been. “A man has to keep some things to himself,” he’d say. And then, after a trip to England, he brought her the little necklace with the word “Patience” stuck inside.

  How unsettling it all was. Why couldn’t people be equations? Mathematics and hard science were based on certainty. Weaver was right. There was none when it came to humans. On those rare occasions when she found the courage to ask what troubled him, he changed the subject. Even on their best days, at any time a cloud could slip soundlessly over their sun.

  Later, she reflected, perhaps this was part of his appeal. She might have been a scientist, but she’d read what most girls read. She’d encountered Heathcliff. Mr. Rochester. Mr. Darcy. Max de Winter. Wasn’t landing a dark, secretive man the ultimate goal in romance? And after all, he’d chosen her, an unsophisticated, science-minded girl. Not the sort men usually loved, as Louisa so often pointed out.

  * * *

  And then in late February of ’46, more than three years after their love affair began, he dropped her. From the top of the Palmolive Building to the concrete. It was after work. He met her as she was coming out of the building. He wasn’t around as much in those days. Traveling off to Los Alamos. Oak Ridge. Washington, DC. She’d been deeply depressed since Hiroshima and Nagasaki, pushing him away, angry at everyone. Her job had changed, too, and not in a satisfying way: She was teaching Fermi’s classes while he was away.

  “Listen, we’ve got to talk,” he said.

  “I’ve got a headache,” she said. “Never had a bite of lunch. Sorry. If it’s something important, let me at least go grab a cup of tea and a sandwich at Hartwick’s.”

  “No. Look, I can’t . . . I can’t see you anymore.”

  “What?”

  “It wasn’t meant to be—you and me.” He spoke so quickly, so distractedly, she wasn’t sure she understood.

  “What are you telling me?” she asked.

  “I’m sorry. We’ve got to end this.”

  “End what?”

  “End this . . . this romance.” His hands were balled into fists. His face was white.

  Romance? Even through her depression over the bombs, even despite distraction and distances, she saw their love as flexible enough to absorb disappointment, anger, truth.

  “What have I done?” she asked. “Was it being sad all the time? I know I’ve been hard on you since the bomb, but I’ll do better. I swear it.” It had
to be her fault, to have made him draw away so inexplicably. “I know it’s been lousy to be with me.”

  “No. It just wasn’t meant to be. It’s not worth discussing.”

  “Not worth discussing!” She said it too loudly. Colleagues flowed out of the building all around them. He hadn’t even had the courtesy to take her somewhere private, to try to explain.

  “I can’t talk about it anymore,” he said. And he turned to leave. She felt she might be sick. Or faint. The sidewalk moved beneath her and the sky wavered overhead.

  “Don’t go. You’ve got to explain this to me. I love you, Weaver. No matter what I’ve done. You know I love you.”

  He turned back, his eyes nearly black. He hissed, “There’s someone else. That’s all you need to know.” Then he walked away.

  She opened her mouth to call him, but nothing came out. As though wading through water, she groped her way to a bench under a tree, facing away from the street. There was a paper coffee cup on it, which she slapped aside. It bounced on the ground; then the wind picked it up and rolled it noisily down the block. It was cold, not the sort of weather when anyone should sit outside. Still, she sat, huddled into her coat, too dumbfounded to weep. She didn’t move for so long, she could barely feel her feet when she finally stood and headed for a bar, where no amount of drink made the pain go away.

  * * *

  With a Scotch in hand, Weaver seems right at home now in her apartment. He asks her about her life, then looks alarmed when she says she’s selling jewelry at Field’s.

  “Dear God, couldn’t you teach physics or something?”

  She takes in his newly lean face and notes the concern pressing down on the edges of his eyes.

  “Science and I have parted company,” she says.

  “I don’t believe it. Why?”

  “You know why.”

  Weaver peers into his glass. “But you love science,” he says softly. “You once said . . . you lived for its mystery and . . . what was it?”