Authors: Jennet Conant
Miss Warner was a special case, and one of the few exceptions to Groves’ maximum security laws. Officially, she was not supposed to know anything about the project, but she was far too canny a woman not to come to her own conclusions. As she wrote in one of her annual Christmas letters after the war, “I had not known what was being done up there, though in the beginning I had suspected atomic research.” She never took part in their discussions before or after dinner, or inquired about the secret city on the Hill. She regarded feeding the “hungry scientists” as her duty, though some of her guests knew that such a peaceful woman would deplore weapons research and sensed an unspoken reproach. “It would have been easy for you to reject our problem,” Phil Morrison, one of the physicists who frequented her “candlelit table,” wrote her in gratitude in 1945. “You could have drawn away from the Hill people and their concerns and remained in the compact life of the valley. But you did not.”
Morrison’s letter is a hymn to the small teahouse at the quiet Otowi crossing and the woman who helped make their time on the Hill, a time made of “long night hours and of critical discussions, of busy desert days and patient waiting in the laboratory,” both more bearable and memorable:
We lived in a community. We grew to know each other. But that was hardly novel; most of us had been friends long before Los Alamos. What was new was the life around us we began to share. We learned to watch the snow on the Sangres and to look for deer in Water canyon. We found that on the mesas and in the valley there was an old and strange culture; there were our neighbors, the people of the pueblos, and there were the caves in Otowi to remind us that other men had sought water in this dry land. Not the smallest part of the life we came to lead, Miss Warner, was you. Evenings in your place by the river, by the table so neatly set, before the fireplace so carefully contrived, gave us a little of your reassurance, allowed us to belong, took us from the green temporary houses and the bulldozed roads. We shall not forget….
In the midst of everything that summer, Oppenheimer shared with his staff a letter from President Roosevelt that further lifted their spirits. In early July, Roosevelt had written asking that Oppie assure the scientists on the project that their efforts in the face of considerable danger and personal sacrifice counted and that the country was grateful. “I am sure we can rely on their continued wholehearted and unselfish labors,” wrote the president. “Whatever the enemy may be planning, American science will be equal to the challenge. With this thought in mind, I send this note of confidence and appreciation.” Oppenheimer read the letter out loud at the weekly staff colloquium held in the theater each Tuesday evening. When Dorothy heard the president’s words, it was one of the proudest days of her life.
By autumn, everyone was distracted by all the mesa romances. As they were more or less living in each other’s pockets, it was common knowledge that Priscilla Greene had fallen in love with the quiet young chemist named Robert Duffield, known to everyone as “Duff” because there were too many Roberts at Los Alamos. She had first met him back in Berkeley when he came into the office because his employment form had the wrong middle name—his was Brokaw, apparently quite a distinguished moniker in the part of New Jersey he came from—and they had argued. It was not a good start, but when they met again on the Hill a few months later, they hit it off. They began spending quite a lot of time together, playing tennis and going to the movies on Sundays. In July, when Dorothy called to say she had found Priscilla a puppy, an English bulldog named Truchas, Duff offered to accompany Priscilla into town to pick it up. They had lunch with Dorothy in the outdoor café La Placita, at La Fonda, and little Truchas slept in a planter that held one of the patio’s shady trees. Not long after that, Priscilla ran down the hall of the T building telling everyone that she was getting married.
At first, Oppenheimer did not approve of the union and tried to talk Priscilla out of it. He worried about “shipboard romances” like theirs, brought on by close proximity and the pressures of war. He also argued that Duff was too junior, though Priscilla suspected that was just because Oppenheimer had someone else in mind for her, a scientist whom he thought of as a more suitable match. When a last-minute meeting with security officers called by Groves in Cheyenne, Wyoming, meant he would have to miss the ceremony, Oppenheimer insisted Priscilla drive with him to Santa Fe so he could give her the benefit of some fatherly advice. “I can remember sitting in the Buick with him waiting for Groves,” recalled Greene. “I had the feeling he thought I was marrying the wrong man, and that our courtship had been too quick. But then we did everything quickly in those days.”
Dorothy approved of Duff because he was from Princeton, and she insisted the couple get married at her home. She told them how to go about getting a license, found a trustworthy local judge to do the honors, and made all the arrangements. Because of the secrecy surrounding project employees, she could not tell the presiding judge the surnames of the couple, so the ceremony had a rather informal air, as everyone was obliged to be on a first-name basis. She and Priscilla went into the mountains and collected armfuls of glorious yellow aspen, and filled the house with flowers. The rosebushes were in bloom, and the garden looked beautiful. The wedding took place on September 5, on a Sunday morning, and all their friends from the Hill came, including the Serbers, Wilsons, Manleys, Williamses, Agnews, and, of course, Kitty. The ceremony was held in the farmhouse’s living room, and the judge and prospective groom stood nervously before the pueblo-style fireplace while Priscilla and her bridesmaid made what Dorothy described as “quite a dramatic entrance” through one of the large windows. No family could attend for security reasons, but Priscilla’s brother DeMotte, who was already working on the Hill, was on hand to give her away. Dorothy’s son, Kevin, popped the champagne and balanced glasses of bubbly on the back of his huge pet tortoise, which crawled slowly around the courtyard transporting drinks to the guests.
It was the Fiesta weekend, and after Priscilla and Duff drove off for their three-day honeymoon in Taos, the rest of the wedding party joined the traditional local celebration already in progress and carried on well into the night. “We were the first people to get married at Los Alamos, and we had a marvelous wedding,” Greene recalled. “Actually, getting married in Los Alamos was a much less tense thing than getting married anywhere else because you only had your friends. You didn’t have any family who had to be appeased or worried about.”
Three weeks later, the festivities were repeated when Priscilla’s bridesmaid, a young secretary from Berkeley named Marjorie Hall, married Hugh Bradner, the young Berkeley physicist who was one of the first to arrive on the mesa with Oppie. Dorothy had played matchmaker, turning to them after lunch at La Fonda one day and observing pointedly that her house was “a lovely place for a wedding.” Bradner took the hint and proposed a few days later. “We were in love, and she saw it,” said Marge. “Hugh was the first person I met when I came through. I walked into her Santa Fe office, and this good-looking guy said, ‘Come in,’ and I fell for him. She knew it. She didn’t miss a thing.” As usual, Dorothy saw to everything. This time, Priscilla served as matron of honor, and Henry Barnett as the best man. Oppenheimer stood in as father of the bride, and his armed guards stood watch at the end of Dorothy’s drive, much to the consternation of her neighbors.
After that, several more weddings at Dorothy’s house followed in quick succession, and people began jokingly referring to her living room as “the little chapel around the corner.” Oppenheimer came whenever he could, standing in for missing family and, on more than one occasion, giving the bride away. That Oppenheimer took an active interest in their lives, and cared enough to share in their anxieties and problems as well as in the joys of another wedding or a new baby, instilled in people a feeling that they were pulling together, and renewed their faith and dedication.
In September, when tragedy struck the mesa with the sudden death of Barbara Long, the popular science teacher and wife of a group leader, Oppenheimer’s calm direction helped steady their nerves. Long’s mysterious illness touched off a widespread panic that the unidentified form of paralysis that felled her might be polio, and she had been quickly transferred from the post infirmary to Bruns Hospital in Santa Fe. To avoid a widespread outbreak, the post’s doctors were forced to lock down the site under almost complete quarantine. Laboratory personnel were not allowed to come and go from Santa Fe. The post school was closed for a week, and parents were ordered to keep their children inside. Henry Barnett kept a close eye on any toddlers who showed symptoms of fever. Jittery staffers huddled in small groups to exchange scraps of information and news. When word of Long’s death came a few days later, Alice Smith observed that for the shocked and frightened community, held captive behind the barbed-wire fence, it was “reassuring to know that Oppenheimer himself had been the first to visit the bereaved husband.”
“For those who never saw Oppenheimer at work inside the Tech Area fence,” wrote Smith, “the mystique of his leadership included an element of his personal concern”:
He seemed to understand the uprooted feeling that afflicted newcomers, many of whom had left homes as pleasant as the Oppenheimers’ own house in Berkeley. Dismayed by lack of privacy and recurrent milk, water, and power shortages, they were somewhat appeased by the knowledge that it was Oppenheimer who had included fireplaces and large closets in the original house plans. He no longer came to dinner bearing bouquets of flowers, the gesture for which he was famous among Berkeley hostesses, but he gave both employed and nonworking wives a sense that their presence and participation in the collective enterprise was important.
Even for Dorothy, whose life in Santa Fe was not nearly as contained and stifling as that of the Hill dwellers, Oppenheimer had become a beacon, a source of strength and inspiration, and the central focus of her life. She had been lonelier after her husband’s death than she dared acknowledge, and had buried those feelings deep inside her, afraid that they would betray a certain weakness. All consumptives were schooled in determination and denial, and Dorothy had held fast to those hard tenets of survival. She had never given in to bitterness and had more than contented herself with her health, her son, and their simple life in Santa Fe. But now she found herself caught up in a vital and thrilling society, and for reasons she could not begin to explain, she felt unaccountably at home, as if she had finally found a place where she belonged. Not since Sunmount had she felt a part of something larger than herself, and the intense commonality of effort was seductive. Oppie had brought her in and made her not only a part of the project, but a part of his intimate circle. Their friendship, forged in the wake of innumerable dramas and intrigues, meant everything to her.
She was deeply touched when, worried by the solitary nature of her assignment in Santa Fe, Oppenheimer again suggested she move up to the Hill with the rest of them. Had she been on her own, Dorothy would have accepted in a second. All the excitement was on the Hill and in the mysterious production going on in the Tech Area, whatever it was. “I was really tempted to get in on the action,” she admitted years later. But after giving it some serious thought, she declined his offer. “Kevin had his pigs, goats, a pony, even a jalopy,” she reasoned. “If we moved, it would mean two rooms and no yard.” Penelope, the McKibbin pig, was a particular problem. She was always escaping the fenced-in garden and raising a hue and cry with the neighbors. She shuddered to think of the havoc the pig would wreck in the close quarters of Los Alamos. Besides, the scientists all counted on her as their anchor in the real world and on her house as a safe haven, a “place to relax, to spend the night, to have weddings.” Oppenheimer would renew the offer again and again in the months to come, but each time she would turn him down. She knew she was more valuable to the project, and to Oppie, on the outside. It filled her with pride that she was in a position to help him, to be his eyes and ears in town, and no one, not even Oppie himself, could convince her otherwise.
Yet, being with Oppenheimer—the precious few hours she spent in his company—was irresistible to Dorothy She looked forward all week to Saturday, when she would steal away from town and drive the winding dirt road up to the post to buy huge chocolate bars for Kevin at the PX and attend a party given by her new friends. As time went on, she sometimes took Kevin along, and they would stay overnight with anyone who had a room to spare. Since Oppie had mandated that Sundays be devoted to outdoor recreation and relaxation, her days off were taken up with exploring the area with her industrious new companions. Just a few miles east of Los Alamos, the scientists discovered the ruins of Tsankawi and visited the ruins of Otowi, and Navawi, in Mortandad Canyon, and to the north, the ancient cliff city of Puye. They hunted for arrowheads and collected samples of all the minerals, finding amethyst, quartz, malachite, microlite, calcite, lepidolite, silver, fluorite, mica, and turquoise. Some even caught the fever of the Old West and took up mining with a passion, filling empty soup cans with chunks of copper. It entertained her no end to see such great minds gulping dust as they dry-panned for tiny grains of gold. “It seemed to me,” she wrote, “that the Los Alamos people found out more about the mineralogy, geology, rare metals and stones, streams and camping possibilities of this country than we had ever known in the many years of living here.”
Like the Indians who shared the Pajarito Plateau with the scientists, Oppenheimer believed it was still an enchanted land, and despite all the hardships and confusion, Dorothy could see that he had succeeded in converting almost everyone to his way of thinking. From their vantage point at Los Alamos, raised high above the world, even something as simple as the sunset behind the Jemez peaks became terrifyingly beautiful in its great sweep of color and sky. When they considered the scale of the towering dark mountains and limitless heavens, all their problems were reduced in importance to that of any of the earth’s tiny creatures. Perhaps Oppie, who had known what a perilous journey awaited them, had hoped they would look down with wonder at the world and feel uplifted and inspired even in their darkest hour. Perhaps that was what drew him back to the mountains time and again. If it was not quite paradise lost, Los Alamos had become for Dorothy a magical place, a mystical place, and to remind herself of how lucky she was, she needed only to see the extraordinary man she was working for, or to look out at the vast desert broken only by majestic palisades where, as D. H. Lawrence wrote, “only the tawny eagle could really sail out into the splendour of it all.”