WE LEARNED TO accept their distracted air, their unwillingness to tell us more about their research, their ignorance of what we did all day or what we gave up to be here.
SOME OF OUR husbands sounded important and acted important and we treated them as if they were important to the project, but we would find out later that they were not very important at all. Or they were important but they never suggested they were. Some of us thought it wouldn’t end for years, that we would live here until we died; others believed we would go home any day now. A few of our husbands would confirm or deny our hunches. We did not know how much our husbands knew or were keeping from us. They were physicists, this we did know, and therefore we had our own suspicions. Arthur, a single male scientist, got a beagle and named him Gadget and said he was our mascot and there was something illicit in the way he said the dog’s name at first, as if he knew he was being mischievous.
ONE OLDER SCIENTIST spoke only in a whisper, and then only when spoken to directly, and never made eye contact. We called him Mr. Baker, and if we knew him from before Los Alamos, back at Chicago, say, or in New York, we called him Uncle Nick, because though it was strictly forbidden to say aloud that he was the infamous, talented physicist Neils Bohr, we just could not bring ourselves to call him Mr. Baker. We admired how he played a comb covered in tissue paper. Our husbands regarded him with deference and held their tongues the moment his lips parted.
WE TOOK TO reading war history books we checked out from the tiny library Helen ran. We asked ourselves, again and again, what were the options with the Army involved? We thought chemical weapons, maybe an expansion of mustard gas. We thought—we hoped—our husbands were working on code breaking, but our husbands were physicists and we had to consider what they might be able to build using their skills. We considered a weapon. We learned more than we wanted to about mustard gas—large blisters filled with yellow fluid, burning skin, blinding until death. Though we wanted the war to end, and we wanted to go home, and we generally were not skeptical, and we thought maybe it was a good war, we did not respond well to the individual stories of other people suffering from these weapons. We sometimes hoped our husbands would fail.