| |
Mrs. Oppenheimer impressed me as a strong woman with strong convictions. It requires a very strong person to be a real Communist.
—John Lansdale, head of Manhattan Project security
“No. Damn it, no. Not again. I won’t go.”
Kitty Oppenheimer stood framed in the Manhattan hotel suite’s master-bedroom doorway. While Oppie had been meeting with Rabi—and unexpectedly with Einstein—Kitty and the children had been enjoying a Christmas holiday. Today, though, Kitty’s mother, who had come in by train from Pennsylvania, was off with the children seeing the dinosaurs at the American Museum of Natural History. Kitty’s legs were spread to give her balance but she still swayed. Oppie had hoped when they’d descended from the mesa, dropping 7,000 feet, that booze wouldn’t have continued to hit his wife quite so hard. Oh, she could handle it—she could handle just about anything—but life would have been easier for them both if she were just a little less tipsy most of the time.
Unlike many others, she hadn’t minded the climate at Los Alamos—they’d vacationed for years in nearby Perro Caliente, after all. But Olden Manor at the I.A.S. would be a big step up from Bathtub Row, or even from their villa with the red-tiled roof and whitewashed walls back on Eagle Hill in Berkeley.
Kitty’s tone was fierce. “I’m a scientist, too, damn it.”
Oppie held his tongue. She’d been becoming a scientist, true, and had been a lab assistant for a biology professor before the war, but she still had no Ph.D. Of course, the years they’d spent at Los Alamos had afforded no opportunity for her to continue work toward that degree. But her science was ...
“Botany,” Robert said.
“Yes, damn it. Botany. It’s as much a science as physics—more, actually, if you count the unsolved mysteries. How life began—plants came before animals, remember. How genetic information is encoded and passed from one generation to the next. Precisely how plants turn sunlight into food. I wish botany could be reduced to a handful of particles and a few laws.”
“All right,” said Oppie. “Point taken. But the I.A.S. has no department devoted to any sort of natural history.”
“I don’t care. I suffered through Los Alamos without knowing what the fuck was going on. If we’re moving to this vaunted Institute of yours—if we’re going down this goddamn road again—then I demand to be in the know. You tell me everything, and I have an active role. Back on the mesa, you made Charlotte Serber a group leader, for Christ’s sake.”
That was true. Charlotte had been the only female one, by virtue of her position as site librarian. She’d had no special qualification for that job; Oppie could have as easily given it to Kitty, but he’d wanted Kitty to take the—to him—even more important public role of director’s wife.
“I spent three damn years on that hilltop,” Kitty continued. Oppie’s first thought was that it had only been thirty-one months. His second was that out of those, she’d disappeared for three months after Toni had been born, meaning, for her, it was closer to two years than three. But he said nothing. There weren’t going to be any more babies—they’d agreed on that and, unlike before their marriage, were now taking precautions—so hopefully depression would never hit her so hard again.
He thought once more of Casablanca. They’d sat together at that screening in the Los Alamos camp theater, holding hands after they’d finished the slightly burnt popcorn. She was part of his work, the thing that kept him going. And, unlike Rick and Ilsa, where he was going she could follow—and what he had to do she could be part of.
“All right,” he said. “All right. I’ll tell you all of it; everything.”
Her mica-dark eyes went wide as if she hadn’t expected to win this fight. “Well, then,” she said, moving over to the hotel-room’s couch and sitting with arms crossed in front of her chest, “go ahead.”
Oppie nodded. “Give me a minute. I’m going to need a drink, too.”
Three martinis later, she knew everything he did. He’d paced and smoked while telling her; she’d been on the couch the whole time, letting him refill glasses as necessary.
“And this is what you want to devote years to?” she asked. “Some fool’s errand? How can you possibly succeed?”
Oppie finally sat down on the sofa, but there was a distance between them. “I don’t know. I have no idea. But it’s a sweet problem, isn’t it? If there were a straightforward solution, it ...”
He stopped himself, realizing he was echoing what Edward Teller had said back in the summer of ’42 at that first meeting of the Luminaries: “An atomic-fission bomb,” he’d announced, “is straightforward; your grad students could make one. But a bomb based on nuclear fusion? That is a challenge worthy of us.”
But no. Building a fusion bomb wasn’t worthy then and it wasn’t now. But this—this!—was. Rabi had said years ago that he didn’t want the culmination of three centuries of physics to be a bomb. But outwitting the sun, outwitting nature, outwitting God himself, surely that was fitting. He lifted his shoulders slightly. “I’m going to do this.”
“But why?”
“‘O Arjuna, perform your duty with equipoise. The sacrifice made as a matter of duty by those who desire no reward is of the nature of goodness.’”
“The fucking Gita, again? Robert, we’re talking about your—our—future.”
He looked up. “Yes. Yes, we are. And our son’s, and our daughter’s, and their children’s, too.”
Kitty seemed to consider this and, when she spoke again, her voice was calmer. “True. And ... and maybe I ...”
She said nothing more, but Oppie could read it in her face: Maybe I do owe them something. She couldn’t give Peter or Toni love or affection—neither could he, really—but she could help give them a future. “All right,” she said. “I’m in.”
Oppie was surprised at how good this felt. “Excellent. And, I promise, you will fully participate.”
Kitty took a sip of her drink and stared out the hotel room’s window at a chiaroscuro Manhattan. But when she turned her eyes back to Oppie she startled him; she’d obviously been recalling the same night at the movies he’d been thinking about a while ago. “Louie,” she said, “I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”