Trinity, p.14
Trinity, page 14
He was so caught up in Washington business that he didn’t seem able to see me, and for a while, in the early days of my new position, I wasn’t sure whether it was Robert or Stan who was more unaware of my existence.
It was as if I were disappearing, dwindling away, my whole life becoming as fine and bright and pointed as the thin line of light the sun makes when it’s almost slipped beyond the horizon.
It was such a pleasure. At night, I’d sit across from my husband, who ate his meatloaf and didn’t see me. And the next morning, I’d report for my duties at the institute, and there was Robert, looking right past me, asking me to follow him to the station while he dictated an important new memo.
Then I was down to ninety-nine pounds, and really, I was getting so happy.
SOMETIMES MY MIND RACED, I WAS SO HAPPY. THEN, IF I COULDN’T sleep, I went to the kitchen to call home to my mother.
She, too, was often awake. For hours, we talked to each other in whispers. I twirled the phone cord around my pointer finger. I twirled the cord around my neck.
She called me her baby girl. I asked about the club. I asked about the tennis court. I told her how much I missed her.
Then I hung up, and climbed back into bed with my husband.
SOMETIMES, EVEN THEN, I COULDN’T SLEEP. SOMETIMES I COULDN’T bear to be alone in the darkness.
Then I’d wake Stan up and put his cock in my mouth, because I felt I had to do something to justify waking him from his peaceful slumber.
So I’d put his cock in my mouth, and often it made me less hungry.
By then, that kind of thing was the only intimacy between us. I was down to ninety-five pounds, and something had changed so it hurt to have sex. It was like sandpaper when he was inside me. So then I just put his cock in my mouth, and after a while I started to like it, like sucking a little stone when you’re hungry.
LISTEN, I’M SORRY IF THIS STORY DISGUSTS YOU.
It disgusts me as well, but I know I won’t say it again, and I want to finish, now that I’ve started.
That summer and the following fall, when I was working for Robert, I kept losing weight. Sometimes I fainted. But if this worried Stan, he didn’t say so. It’s possible he believed that all women fainted.
At the end of the day, despite all the fainting, Stan seemed basically pleased and content to have a thin wife who cooked him dinner and worked to support his graduate studies.
I liked it, too. There was something very fine about fainting. I particularly liked coming to, after that long moment of darkness.
Then I’d look up and see Stan kneeling above me. There he was, saying my name, and at first his lips were moving in silence, and then I heard what he was saying, and I realized that in Stan’s mind, I was still gone.
For him, I was still lost in that darkness.
So for a few minutes, all on my own, I could watch him from somewhere else.
I could watch him full of the perfectly luxurious knowledge that he couldn’t have me. I was entirely my own for a moment.
But after a while, I’d start to feel bad about leaving him there in the lurch. Then we’d go through the whole post-faint routine. Where am I, I’d ask. Who are you. What happened.
Needless to say, I already knew. But still, I let him tell me. I allowed him to give me my position again. And then I let him carry me into the bedroom, and tuck me in, and put me to sleep, and throughout that year, I often had a bruise on the back of my head, and also I was basically happy.
By then I was ninety-two pounds. I’d surrendered myself absolutely, and I walked around with such a calm, blissful look on my face that everyone thought I was in love with my husband.
IN ADDITION TO WEIGHT LOSS, ANOTHER POSITIVE DEVELOPMENT OF that year was that I managed to strengthen my focus.
During my years of eating too much, I’d been inefficient. I was exhausted and weighed down by the effort.
Once I gave that up, I became clear-eyed and quick. Robert was like that as well. I should mention that he was losing weight also.
During those months, when he was attempting to redeem the crimes he felt he’d committed, by regaining his influence on the committee, his eyes also burned like a saint’s eyes. He also seemed to grow lighter. He’d always been thin, but now he walked around in a portion of his former substance.
By then he knew his phones were tapped, and he suspected they’d planted moles in the office. It was hard for him to keep still. In his office, or while we waited outside an auditorium, or as we walked to the train station, I noticed that sometimes, in his agitation, his hands started to tremble.
There were times when he couldn’t even light his own cigarettes.
Then, avoiding the phones, he communicated largely through letters. He’d go to Washington all the time, to testify before different committees, and when he came back, his eyes burned brighter than ever.
He felt responsible, he said, for the bad state of affairs.
He’d made those bombs in the first place.
He hadn’t seen how bad it would become, and now, having arrived at the knowledge too late, he felt that the only way to redeem what he’d done was to maintain what waning influence he had left. Nevertheless, however, he felt his pursuers approaching.
In those days, he made every new person he met read that Henry James story, “The Beast in the Jungle,” presumably to make them know how he felt. That is to say, that he was a beast in the jungle, pursued by some as-yet-unknowable hunter.
Needless to say, he was misreading that story, which, as I learned at Rosemont, and as Henry James makes very clear in the numbingly didactic ending, is really about a man who misses the one love of his life because he’s so preoccupied with an imaginary pursuer. If you read that story with your eyes open at all, you’d know right away that it’s about a man who’s made blind by his fear, but by then Robert wasn’t reading things clearly.
He was agitated to the point of excessive quickness in everything he attempted. His positions shifted each day. One day, for instance, he’d be on one of his tears about setting himself free, turning his back on Washington, returning full time to his teaching.
The next day, however, he’d be back at work plotting strategies to regain the influence that he’d lost, because he didn’t really want to be free.
He wanted to be forgiven the sins he’d committed.
ONE DAY, A CREW CAME TO FILM HIM FOR A DOCUMENTARY THEY were making, and in preparation he asked me to run back to his house and pick up his copy of the Bhagavad Gita.
So I went running off to Olden Manor, the director of the institute’s house, which was lodged among all the finest houses in Princeton, stately brick manors with white columns and long plantation porches.
They reminded me of the houses in the neighborhood I grew up in, and of houses in movies about the old South, haunted by the ghosts of the slaves who were once whipped there. All those ghosts: women with scars on their bodies, men with no faces. They called to me in whispers among the stately old sycamore trees that lined the well-maintained sidewalks.
I went as quickly as I could, following the directions Robert gave me, and when I finally did find Olden Manor, I saw a dead mallard at the end of the driveway.
It was lying there at the side of the road, its green head gleaming, its neck doubled back in a U, and its one open black eye staring straight at me.
WHEN SHE CAME TO THE DOOR, KITTY WASN’T HAPPY TO SEE ME. SHE was wearing blue jeans and she seemed unsteady. She glared at me in the doorway while I explained why I’d come. Then she went inside to find the Bhagavad Gita.
While she was gone, I thought about those insinuations that had been made, about the girlfriend in San Francisco and the trip Robert was meant to have taken. But before I had time to come to any conclusions, Kitty came back with the Bhagavad Gita. It was a small, battered pink book with a creased spine, held together with Scotch tape. Somehow it made me sad just to see it.
But I took it, nevertheless, then ran back out past the dead mallard and all the plantation houses and found Robert with the film crew. I gave him the book, and he started flipping through the worn pages, looking for some line he’d forgotten.
And then, a few minutes later, when they sat him before the lights and the boom and asked him what he was thinking when the Trinity Test first went off, he looked straight at the camera with that dark, beseeching expression and said:
“I was thinking of that line from the Bhagavad Gita: ‘Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.’”
Watching him deliver that line, it struck me that he probably wasn’t thinking that when the bomb really went off, or he wouldn’t have needed to send me home for the book, so that he could look the line up.
But that wasn’t the point. The point was that for Robert, there was no language short of myth to describe his bad situation.
That was something I understood.
By then, I realized, he felt he could summon no words of his own to explain what he was thinking and how he was feeling.
All he could do by way of language was send me running back through the plantations to pick up his Bhagavad Gita.
So you see, we were both in the same bind. We were both living in myth. We were fighting archetypical battles. We’d taken up roles that had been handed down to us from above: good and bad, sinner and saint. Both of us had blood on our hands. We went around Princeton carrying tablets. We were delivering speeches we hauled down from the top of the mountain, trying to redeem the damage we’d caused, heading for the underworld, looking for 129,000 lost people, or a single lost girl, hoping either to bring her back up or to stay down there in the underworld with her.
BY THEN IT WAS AUTUMN, I WAS DOWN TO EIGHTY-NINE POUNDS, and my pity for Robert was growing.
At night, lying awake, I thought about his suffering. I searched my brain for ways I could relieve it.
At some point in the fall, I began bringing him presents.
One day, for instance, I brought him one of Stan’s records. It was a recording of The Goldberg Variations, because I knew Robert liked Bach. Another day, I brought him a book of Renaissance sonnets that I’d read at Rosemont.
When he took it, he let it open at random, and when he looked down at the page, it seemed for a moment as if he might start crying.
Then he looked up, and he saw me.
From then on, I think, he really saw me. I’d called him Dr. Oppenheimer up to that point, but then he asked me if I’d call him Robert, and from then on, I felt as if he really saw me.
Moving around campus, as that fall became winter, we were two figures in a Renaissance painting. Everyone else was driving their cars and eating their hamburgers, listening to Patti Page and Perry Como, and Robert and I wandered around in our robes and our oils, surrounded by serpents and sylphs, and pomegranates and chariots and dogs with multiple heads, all of them roiling blackly around us, invisible to everyone else we passed on that campus.
By then, McCarthy had come to the peak of his power. Washington was caught in the worst grips of the Red Scare. That fall and that winter, hundreds of civil servants were fired on the flimsiest possible pretexts. Everyone, even the president, cowered in fear. And even so, McCarthy still delivered that speech charging Eisenhower’s administration with appeasing the liberals. And Eisenhower was so scared of losing the votes of McCarthy’s allies in the Senate that he didn’t respond, so really it was McCarthy he was appeasing, and Robert’s file—as he well knew—was worse than those of most of the bureaucrats who’d been fired or even imprisoned.
By then, he was really alone. His Washington friends wouldn’t touch him, and his Berkeley friends had long since turned against him. They started turning when his testimony against Bernard Peters was leaked to the papers. Then they’d turned even further when he didn’t stand up in Joe Weinberg’s defense, or plead the Fifth, as David Bohm did, which was why Bohm was blacklisted and imprisoned.
But Robert chose to testify. He admitted that Weinberg had been close with several members of the CP.
And then, of course, in addition, he’d advocated the deployment of those tactical nuclear weapons at the borders of Communist states, so whichever friends he had left from Berkeley had all turned against him. He was alone that winter in Princeton, except for Kitty, maybe, and me, and maybe that’s why he started to see me.
THAT WINTER, WE WERE NEVER INSIDE. WE SPENT MOST OF THE DAY walking around campus. He smoked cigarette after cigarette, and sometimes he asked me for my opinions.
When I gave them, he’d reflect upon them quietly, then answer in a serious voice.
By then, he’d grown somewhat gaunt. His porkpie hat was becoming comedic, like a hat on a dancing skeleton.
I, too, had grown thinner. That winter my hair had begun to fall out.
So we were together, at least in that sense. We were sliding down the same hill, our cheekbones leaping out of our skin, our eyes lit up by invisible fires, licking the rims of invisible ruins.
In December, just before Christmas, I walked with him to the station.
He and Kitty were heading down to Washington to meet with their lawyer. When we arrived, Kitty was waiting. She was wearing a cream-colored wool coat, black pumps, and a black dress with a cinched belt. Her hair was freshly coiffed, and on her face, while she watched us approach, there was an expression of fury.
Then I remembered that mallard, and I was sure that she’d killed it.
I knew in my heart that she’d snapped its neck with her bare hands and left it to die at the end of the driveway.
WHEN THE TRAIN PULLED IN, ROBERT HELPED HER UP THE STEPS. AT the top, she turned one last time to give me a furious look. I wondered, for the first time, if she thought there was something between me and her husband.
And there was something between us. But it was never romantic. Or it was romantic, in the sense of an old story about pages and knights, warriors battling against the dark forces.
But there was nothing sexual.
By then there was nothing sexual about me at all. Maybe there had been, back in those days when I ate sodden cereal and wrote novels at night and watched the leaves changing on the side of the highway.
But by the fall of 1953, those days were over.
I was eighty-eight pounds and my forearms were knotted with veins. My limbs were like a very large insect’s, and sex wasn’t an issue. It was too painful. My body simply couldn’t accept it.
IT WAS ON THAT TRIP TO WASHINGTON THAT STRAUSS MET WITH Robert and informed him that a new review of his background and policy recommendations had resulted in his security clearance getting temporarily revoked.
Strauss delivered a letter that had been prepared by the AEC. It detailed the charges against Robert.
I can’t remember how many there were, but the list went on for pages. There were political accusations, and personal accusations as well: everything from his advocacy against testing the H-bomb to a night he spent in San Francisco with that former girlfriend, when he was married, and privy to the highest-level nuclear secrets.
Having delivered the charges, Strauss told him that he could resign right away, or that he could choose to contest, but that if he chose to contest, there would be a hearing, and personal information might come to light.
I KNOW ALL THIS BECAUSE ROBERT’S FRIEND TOLD ME, THAT LAWYER whose name I’ve forgotten, a tall man in a suit with a bow tie.
He summoned me to Olden Manor two days before Christmas, when Robert and Kitty had just returned from that trip to DC.
Stan and I were meant to leave in the morning to go stay with his parents for Christmas. I was meant to have the day off.
But that lawyer called in the morning, and asked if I could come up to the house, so I put on my camel-hair coat.
I looked at myself in the mirror by the door. That coat was getting old. It was even tattered, which in the old days would never have been allowed by my parents.
But things were different now. The coat had grown tattered, and it was too late to fix it before running off through the streets lined with sycamores, past those plantation houses, and up the driveway where that mallard had been lying with its wrung neck.
When I rang the bell, nobody came. Then I pushed the door open. Then I stepped into the chaos. There were women coming and going from the kitchen, and men walking purposefully between rooms, everyone ignoring my presence until finally that lawyer stepped into the foyer and saw me.
He shook my hand and thanked me for coming. Robert, apparently, was resting upstairs. The lawyer led me into the living room and sat me down on the white brocade sofa.
In the dining room, three men I didn’t know were bent over a tall stack of papers. And in the living room, by the kitchen door, two women were conferring quietly in the corner, smoking oddly long cigarettes, standing so still with their long, elegant necks that I thought to myself that they were like two potted plants.
Kitty, however, kept coming and going, storming around with her fury. She was still wearing the same black dress with a cinched belt at the waist.
Then the lawyer sat down beside me and told me that Robert had been given only two days to respond to the charges against him. He was, the lawyer told me, in a very bad state. The previous night, when he came back from his meeting with Strauss, he’d been very agitated, so he’d taken one of Kitty’s pills. Then he’d collapsed in the bathroom. The next morning, he’d woken, and written a letter back to the commission, letting them know that he contested the charges.
He refused, he said, to resign. He didn’t care what information came out. He had always been loyal to his native country.
And so, the lawyer told me, the hearings had been scheduled for April. Robert wanted to write another letter responding individually to each of the charges, some of which were patently false, and others of which might have been true but still had no bearing on his loyalty to his country.
While the lawyer explained that he’d tried to discourage Robert from contesting the charges, and gave me a summary of the contents of that letter, I watched Kitty storming around, bringing empty glasses back into the kitchen.
