TaraShea Nesbit - The Wives of Los Alamos

OUR HUSBANDS CAME home from the Tech Area for the last time and invited us to be their guests at Chez Mess Hall. We said, What a fancy place! Are you sure we can afford it? Or, I’ll have to curl my hair first. We stepped into the warm crowd of the mess hall, stood behind GIs and other families, and picked up a thin metal tray dented around the edges from use. It was our last dinner. Down the line we walked, greeting San Ildefonso men and women or WACs who scooped hot meat, green beans, rehydrated potatoes, and ash-colored gravy into each of the four compartments on our metal tray. The narrow compartments made our more soupy items swim into other things: a slight tilt of the tray or our hand and we were soon eating ice cream topped with pork gravy. And to think some people—the GIs, the single men—put up with this meal three times a day for three years.

IN LINE BEHIND us was our obstetrician, Dr. Kashavarez, and his family, and in front of us was Margaret, who was five months pregnant and who had been chastised earlier that day by Dr. K for gaining twenty-five pounds. His wife was a rail, her eyes gaunt, set far back, with dark semicircles beneath them. Margaret declined the potatoes and we continued down the line, both gazing longingly at the sundaes. One of us said, We lost our baby weight last time so who cares? It was our last day here and after tomorrow we’d never see Dr. K again. We let the hot fudge drop long and slow atop our vanilla scoops but avoided eye contact with him through dinner.

THE DAYS BECAME caravans of departing Studebakers and Cadillacs. Some of us were going back to England. Or we were staying in New Mexico and buying abandoned cattle ranches, or haciendas, or fishing cabins. A few of us were staying, unfortunately, in our plain green houses. We were designing Western homes made of stone, or adobe, or logs. We were planning brick homes in the Midwest with concrete frames and finished basements.

AND WE FELT the deflation that comes when one gets what one has wanted: it was not quite what it seemed it would be. We thought of the time when we first arrived, when only a stack of pine boards were all that existed of the houses, when garbage cans overflowed. How dust rose in great clouds beyond the set of older buildings. How we arrived and thought it was not beautiful, though we complimented the mountains to one another.

WE LEFT WITH more children than we came with and less wedding china. We left with black bowls, bright rugs, needles, thread, and muddy boots on our feet. We looked back on the time of our arrival to Los Alamos, how we felt very young. Some of us thought it was much better then, earlier, before we understood anything, though in our futures there was much more to learn.

AND IF WE wanted a sentimental good-bye, instead of going directly down the Hill to Santa Fe we drove past Valle Grande—the crater of a volcano, the high mountain roads, the rare dark clouds gathering and the wildflowers blooming in the caldera.

WE LEFT AND the Director would be taken to trial on accusations of disloyalty. Though he was trusted to orchestrate the creation of the atomic bomb, he was now deemed a security risk. Had he consorted with Communists? Was he a spy? We were asked to speak against him and we refused, as did our husbands.

THE DIRECTOR DID not encourage the creation of a hydrogen bomb, something even more destructive than the atomic bomb. He doubted it was feasible and said it would be too destructive to use in war, even if it would be, he said, technically sweet . Helen’s husband wanted to make this bomb and he wanted to be in charge of it. Her husband spoke against the former Director and told the Senate Committee: One would be wiser not to grant security clearance to Oppenheimer . We thought her husband was bitter for not being chosen for the lab leader way back when, and many of us, including our husbands, said if they were ever alone with him they would give him what for.

WE FELT BAD for Helen—who somehow had to put up with the bravado, late night piano playing, and ignorance of him. To be the wife of a man that spoke out against the Director, who worked to get the Director’s security clearance revoked, to be the wife of the man who became the father of the superbomb. Her husband was on record, in court, saying: In a great number of cases I have seen Dr. Oppenheimer act—I understood that Dr. Oppenheimer acted—in a way which for me was exceedingly hard to understand. I would personally feel more secure if public matters would rest in other hands.

AND BECAUSE ALL of Oppenheimer’s business was in the news and for many years he was followed by the FBI, we learned that while he was Director, and married to Kitty, he had flown to California and stayed the night at his former girlfriend’s home. She was a psychologist, a colleague’s daughter, and a Communist. Soon after his visit, she was found dead, and the death was considered a suicide. Her last note said: I wanted to live, but I got paralyzed somehow . This was fascinating and horrifying information, and some of us were not surprised, but what did it all mean?

THE DIRECTOR’S SECURITY clearance was revoked by the Atomic Energy Commission in 1954 and his office at the White House was terminated. But nine years later, he was given a $50,000 award by the Atomic Energy Commission, an award named after one of our husbands, for his outstanding contributions to theoretical physics and his scientific and administrative leadership . He died, before many, but not all, of our husbands, from cancer, in 1967. The trouble with Oppenheimer, the famous but uninvolved scientist Einstein remarked, was that he loved a woman who did not love him back: the U.S. government.

OUR CHILDREN LEFT Los Alamos thinking they were a part of something important, and they adopted the language of their fathers and us, or the opposite. They said, during high school debates, It needed to be done! Or, We had no choice! Or, They would have surrendered if we just told them what we could do.

SOME OF OUR children saved cereal box tops and sent away for atomic bomb rings. They received a plastic ring with a secret compartment so that they could look at flashes caused by atoms splitting like crazy in the sealed warhead chamber . By this time, some of our children had seen the real thing by watching tests in Nevada, and this ring seemed quite inexact. Our daughters wore two-piece bathing suits called bikinis, after Bikini Island, one of the Marshall Islands where several nuclear explosions cratered and irradiated land and sea.

WE LEFT AND our Davids and Emilys and Marys and Michaels went to college. Our Bills grew their hair past their shoulders. And they came home and said they would not eat food in our house because it was the fruits of war . They said they were purging themselves through anti-nuclear-proliferation protests. We said, Don’t be silly, Mary , and we said, For heaven’s sakes, Michael! but some of us understood their feelings, and some of us said nothing.

OUR CHILDREN ACCUSED us of only caring about money; they said we forgot about how the rest of the world struggled because we no longer struggled ourselves, if we ever did. They blamed us for New Mexico’s economic reliance on the nuclear industry. They asked their fathers, Don’t you feel guilty? How could you go through with it? And we cringed and we knew what they meant and we wondered that ourselves, or we felt angry and protective and we said, Don’t speak like that to your father. Our husbands answered, saying, No, I don’t feel guilty. It needed to be done . If it wasn’t them it would’ve been us. Or they said, Yes , and quoted the Director: The deep things in science are not found because they are useful, they are found because it was possible to find them .