The Atomic Weight of Love (10 page)

We slipped into 1945, and Alden’s letters became increasingly sparse—his work was frantic, the pressures great. I continued to write to him, although at times it felt as if I were sending letters like fragile paper airplanes out across some abyss. We weren’t communicating—not really. My letters to him were more like journal entries or lists of what I’d done in any given week.

I began to feel as if I weren’t truly married, not in the sense of any marriage I’d ever seen. I told myself that other women lived alone while their husbands were fighting overseas, and I suspected they didn’t receive regular letters, either. Still, no matter how much I rationalized the situation, tried to talk myself out of a funk over Alden’s relative silence or berated myself for being selfish, the truth was that I felt sorry for myself. Poor, poor Meri.

In January I applied to graduate schools, and that brought me back into a sense of a life with potential, a future. Professor Matthews kept his gentle, guiding hand at my back, reviewed my applications, and wrote the most beautiful, laudatory letters of recommendation. I couldn’t wait to see Alden’s face when I revealed acceptances to him, to share my happiness with him, to make him proud.

JERRY CAME BACK,
OUTWARDLY
unscathed, and returned to his pre-med studies. We exchanged awkward waves but otherwise made every effort to avoid each other. He seemed subdued, less the bon vivant. And then, within a few months of returning, he ran his car into a telephone pole and was killed. I don’t know if it was an accident; no one knows. Maybe at that point even Jerry didn’t know an accident from a purposeful release.

Then, by May 8, 1945, Hitler was dead, and Germany had surrendered.
Soon
, we all thought.
Soon
.

ALDEN DID NOT ATTEND
my graduation ceremony. He said his work had now reached a fever pitch, that in the early summer of 1945 he could not be spared. Instead, Professor Matthews and his wife gave me a small party in their backyard. Mrs. Hudson brought a spice cake with precious wartime raisins and just the right amount of cream-cheese frosting. Red and Kitty came with potato salad in hand. Mother, who had been given guest accommodations by the Matthewses, was blessedly silent on the topic of Alden’s absence. She loved the Matthewses and could not stop talking about their kindness, how highly they must think of me to go to such trouble on my behalf.

Before we took our seats at a lopsided wooden table set beneath an enormous, spreading oak tree, Mrs. Matthews led me and Mother on a botanical tour of her gardens. We extolled the beauties of her abundant peonies.

“They attract so many ants,” my mother said.

“Oh, we spray for them.”

“They come over from my neighbors’. I can’t do a thing about them.” Mother, unlike me, was tall, broad with strength and physical labor. She stepped carefully on the rough paving stones that bordered the Matthewses’ flower beds.

“Mother, what neighbors?”

“The Kowalskis. You know how awful their yard is.” My mother reached to scratch her ankle.

“I don’t remember.”

“Because you haven’t been home.”

I took a deep breath, let the jab go unanswered.

“Let me show you my bleeding heart,” Mrs. Matthews said, taking Mother’s arm and leading her off. She turned her head and winked at me over her shoulder.

We sat until it was dark and the fireflies came out.

“There are no fireflies in New Mexico. And not nearly so many mosquitoes,” I said, scratching my forearm.

“Tell us about it,” said Mrs. Matthews. “Give us the pros and cons.”

“Pros: your stockings dry in seconds, since there’s no humidity.” I took a sip of lemonade. “I like that there are fewer people, less hustle-bustle.” I paused. “And it has my husband.”

No one knew how to respond, and I felt a need to reassure them. “But maybe soon I’ll have him back again.”

“Let’s hope so.” Mother put a flat hand between my shoulder blades and rubbed a circle. “She’s our wee brown sparrow, you know. Daddy would be so proud, honey. So proud.”

In the dusk of that night, I looked at her—really looked at my mother for the first time in a long while. Her dear, clunky black pumps, thick support hose wrinkled about her ankles, her homemade cotton dress. She’d sent me an apron that winter, made of remnants of the same material she’d used to make the dress she was wearing. White, jagged rickrack trimmed the pockets and waistband of a garment I had yet to wear due to the absence of any kitchen in my life.

I felt my love go out to her, stretch across the universe of the tablecloth to where she sat, solid, immutable, the only steady fixture in my life. My mother, who loved sticky buns and used words like “smearcase” and “davenport” and “goosebumps,” who made me root beer and ginger ale in the damp of the cellar, and who commandeered my services on laundry day. I remembered one spring day in particular, helping her to move the laundry tub from the cellar to the backyard, filling it with the hose, feeling a frisson of fear when she repeatedly warned me to keep my fingers far from what she called “the mangler,” where the pressure of the rollers squeezed nearly every drop of moisture from the clothes. The wooden clothespins that could be made into dolls with tiny painted faces, my straining to reach high enough to pin things to the clothesline. Black dots of flies come to drink moisture on the white sheets where they hung listless in the air, yearning for a breeze. A tiger swallowtail dancing scallops across the backyard. The taste of heavily sugared iced tea sipped while rocking gently in the porch swing,
Jane Eyre
in my lap. The smell of her Pears soap, her mint-green bedspread. Her stable bosom, her amplitude of figure, of love.

Her
home, though. My mother’s home, no longer my home. I felt acutely the fact that I had no home, had not had a home for years. And then I realized that I had begun to need a home, that transience would no longer do.

To: From:

Meridian Whetstone Alden Whetstone

1225 Waverly Ave. PO Box 1663

Chicago, Ill. Santa Fe, N. Mex.

July 17, 1945

Dear Meri,

I know it’s been too long since my last letter. Weeks—maybe as much as a month? I’m sorry, Meri. One day, you will understand.
Yesterday
was a huge, successful step toward that “some day” but for now I must leave things at that.

We need to talk about your plans for graduate school. Please wait before committing to anything final in terms of acceptance of offers or plans for moving. Admittedly, we should have talked about this sooner, but this is all out of my hands—our hands. Please don’t worry or be angry, just give me time.

One more “I’m sorry” and then I’ll sign off, as it’s 2 a.m. and I am worn to the core. I’m sorry I was not at your graduation ceremony. Again, one day you’ll understand, and you’ll know that I really had no choice. My love for you was outweighed by other matters—matters that one day will recede and let my love for you take precedence.

Still and always,

Alden

I’d not revealed my pursuit of graduate schools to Alden, but he must have guessed I would be applying, given academic calendars and deadlines. Too, I’d never found what felt like the right time in our sporadic, terse correspondence. I’d already said “yes” to Cornell. I’d tell Alden later, when I could see and touch him. It would be a surprise.

ON AUGUST 6, 1945,
the
Enola Gay
dropped Little Boy on Hiroshima, and the entire world changed in a single day. President Truman talked about the “greatest scientific gamble in history,” paid homage to the “achievement of scientific brains,” and mentioned “an installation near Santa Fe, New Mexico.” I knew my mother, the Matthewses, Kitty and Mrs. Hudson—everyone who had doubted Alden, who had failed to understand our necessary separation, would hear those words. I felt a swell of pride when the President characterized what Alden and the others had accomplished as “the greatest achievement of organized science in history.”

There were newspaper descriptions of the first test of the bomb in New Mexico on July 16, and I realized that was why Alden couldn’t see me graduate in June, why his letters had dried up for a time, and why in his letter written the day after the test, he had told me our being together was coming soon. The newspaper accounts described the vaporization of a huge steel tower on the test site and said that the blast had the power of more than 20,000 tons of TNT. I could not fathom it. Nothing was immediately known about what had happened in Hiroshima, although we knew there were over 300,000 people living there, that it was a port city and a manufacturing center for the tools of war. I could not imagine what must have happened to the city, its inhabitants.

But I suspect Alden could imagine what had happened. Finally, I understood Alden’s misgivings and terribly opposing emotions: a desire to put an end to a war that was hemorrhaging untold lives every day versus the incomprehensible destruction of an atomic blast, the unknowable impact of the release of atomic energy on all of our futures.

Later, we learned that in an instant, birds in the sky over Hiroshima ignited in midair.

WE WERE DAZED BY
reports of the atomic bomb. It was truly incomprehensible. Still, I felt the bomb had accomplished a great deal in building the morale of the country, and now Russia joined us in fighting against Japan.
It can’t last much longer
—that’s what I thought, and I know I was not alone in my fervent hope. We dropped a second bomb—code-named Fat Man—on Nagasaki on August 9, and on August 15, Japan accepted the terms of an unconditional surrender. When a two-day holiday was declared, we piled into the streets, shouted “Peace!” and drank, danced. There were no strangers—only fellow Americans, people who felt unadulterated release in the wake of so many years of deprivation and loss. The next day, the government called off ration points for all canned foods and gasoline, and we had even more reason to celebrate.

At a newsstand near campus, I bought a copy of the August 20, 1945 issue of
LIFE
magazine, which featured before and after photos of Hiroshima. The article included a fairly extensive description of the role played by Oak Ridge, Tennessee, but there was next to no discussion of Los Alamos—only a tidbit about the first bomb test at the Trinity site. Los Alamos remained largely in the shadows, still a secret.

I sat in Mrs. Hudson’s dust-free parlor where a fan whirred noisily, and I turned the magazine pages. A bead of sweat eased its way down my back beneath the wilted cotton of my slip. On a page next to an artist’s rendition of the Trinity explosion, there was an advertisement for Poll-Parrot and Star brand shoes, with animated, freckle-faced children touting the virtues of the shoes and a reminder for customers to
BUY AND KEEP WAR BONDS
. In another ad a man carried a woman in a red and white print summer dress across a stream while she held their two bottles of Schlitz beer. The pairing of the surreal with the mundane, the quotidian and the miraculous.

About a week after the second bomb, when the hoopla began to wane, I at last heard from Alden, who sent me precious hothouse gardenias with the simple message: “Triumph!” The fragrant flowers were beautiful, and to celebrate Alden’s contribution to the war’s end, I pinned them to my navy blue suit collar and treated Kitty and myself to tea at the Jubilee Tea Room. Afterwards, we went shopping. I bought a new purse for $2.98 and a plain, very smart Stetson hat for $7.98.

As for my future, I did as Alden asked. I put off Cornell, deferring admission until the spring term. Alden had said we’d resolve things by the new year, and so I stayed on with Professor Matthews, who found a stipend to pay me. I read the studies and texts he suggested, outlined my graduate studies, and began to refine the list of possible hypotheses for my master’s thesis. Still feeling as if I were caught at sea, becalmed without even the most minuscule breeze to fill my sails, I waited for Alden.

“YOU HAVE A NUMBER
of choices, Meri.” Alden was in Chicago for the Christmas holidays, and the two of us were seated in Mrs. Hudson’s parlor. I’d lived in her boarding house for going on four years. This week we had four inches of new snow on the ground, and I actually longed for the New Mexico heat, the intense, relentless, summer sun. I remembered the bottoms of my bare feet burning as I ran across a flagstone patio to meet Alden as he pulled up in front of my rooms on Walter Street.

Alden was flipping through a red-covered booklet,
This Week in Chicago
. He held it up for me to see: “Danny Thomas is at the Chez Paree. Ted Weems and his orchestra are performing ‘Sun Fun’ in the Boulevard Room.” He showed me the advertisement. “At the Tropics, there’s Sam Bari and His Men of Rhythm and Red Duncan, billed as a ‘famous blind pianist.’ ”

I was thinking about the startling red clay cliffs of the Jemez Valley.

“I’m assuming you’re going to veto ‘Scan-Dolls of ’46’ at the Playhouse.” This ad showed a drawing of a woman in nothing but heels and a swathe of material strategically placed across her lap. “And you’re going to pooh-pooh ‘O-le-o-lay deeeeeee’ at the Heidelberger Fass, right?”

“No lederhosen, you’re right about that,” I said, snatching the booklet and reading. “You didn’t mention Devi-Dja and her Bali-Java Dancers at the Sarong Room.”

“No use wasting my breath.”

“But you never know. I might want to expand my cultural horizons.”

“All right, then. It’s settled.” He took back the booklet. “Oh, joy to the world! We’ll see their ‘Mystic Balinese Temple Ceremonies’ and hear the ‘Primitive Jungle and Tribal Rhythms’—all while sipping cocktails. Good choice, Meri.” He chucked me under the chin, and I could feel a bubble of happiness surfacing.