Louisa Hall - Trinity

Then Alice looked at me and said, “Let’s build a house here,” and I don’t think I’ve ever been quite so sure of having arrived at the place I was meant to.

AFTER WE FINISHED THE TOUR, CHESTER TOOK US OUT TO THE EDGEof the water and pointed out constellations: the huntress, and the warrior, and the warrior’s dogs. Behind him, we could see the lights in the mangrove trees, people dancing on the beach, the orange tips of cigarettes.

It looked as if we’d arrived on the shore of Never Never Land. Chester led us back to the party. They were serving lobster and champagne, and Alice and I sat at a round table with Chester and Kitty. Alice held my hand. She even had a sip of champagne, but then she pressed the glass away and put her head on my shoulder.

After a while, Ivan showed up, holding a turtle he’d caught. He was laughing, and holding it up, saying he planned to eat it for dinner.

I happened to be looking at Chester. His face looked awful. Then he took a big swig of champagne. And finally, in that quiet voice, he said that after the test, they’d gone back to check on the site and found thousands of turtles belly up on the sand, burned to death inside their shells.

For a moment, everyone else at the party was quiet. The band had taken a break, so you could hear the sound of the water washing up on the beach. Then the girl—their daughter—got up from her chair and headed out toward the water. I hadn’t even realized she was there at the party.

In silence, we all watched her move over the beach: a girl in a white dress. Then Ivan made a joke about how Chester had granted the turtle a pardon. We all laughed, even Chester, and Ivan carved his initials in the turtle’s soft shell. Then he released it onto the sand, and we watched it trundle off toward the water.

After that, the music started playing again. The girl came back to the party. She slipped in so quietly it was almost as if she were her own shadow.

Later, Alice danced a calypso with Chester. She was so beautiful, in her silver dress, with her blond hair falling over her shoulders.

For a while, Kitty watched them. Then, for the first time in months, I remembered those transcripts. I felt for her, I really did. But Alice never liked sleeping with men, and when she came back to me she slipped her fingers through mine and leaned her heavy head on my shoulder.

AFTER WE RANG IN THE NEW YEAR, IVAN TOLD THE BAND TO TAKE Abreak. Then he stood out in the sand, under the stars, and started singing.

He’d been a premier Bolshoi tenor before he escaped Russia. He’d surrendered to German forces during the war. When he got out of prison in Berlin, he went to America. From there, he and Doris found their way to the island, and when they got off the ferry, Ivan said, “Here we stay.”

By then his singing career was long over. But on that New Year’s Eve, ringing in the new decade, we sat at that round table and listened while he sang so beautifully I remembered when I was a little girl and my father took me to the opera in Rio.

I was sitting there with my eyes closed, holding Alice’s hand, remembering my childhood and listening while Ivan sang, and then suddenly we all heard a stirring in the mangrove trees. I opened my eyes in time to see Bob storm out with a pistol.

“Too much noise!” he was shouting, waving his pistol around. “There’s too much damn noise on this island!”

Then he started firing into the sky.

I looked at Chester, and for the first time since I’d met him, I saw him look angry. Then I remembered what Nancy said—It’s him who’s the devil—because when he stood, and started moving toward Bob, his eyes were darker than blackness.

For a moment, I thought that maybe, after all, I knew nothing about him. I’d never even spoken with him about those bombs, or the security hearings, or that woman he’d loved, and whom he’d come so close to marrying, who killed herself in 1944.

Did he blame himself for that death? I wondered for the first time. Did he blame himself for the others?

Or were those deaths in other lives, lives that had slipped beyond the horizon, leaving behind only this one: this single life on this beach, the lights strung up in the mangroves, the turtle saved, the girl in the white dress returned to the table.

As soon as Chester started approaching with that black look on his face, Bob stopped shooting.

For a moment, he stood there with his mouth nervously twitching. Still pointing that pistol up into the mangroves.

Then Chester pulled himself up to his fullest height. “Get off my property,” he said.

Bob ran off into the trees. Then Chester sat down.

Kitty watched the whole thing with her big, fathomless eyes, and, after a short pause, during which the ocean sounded quite loud, Ivan Jadan kept singing.

In the absence of a conclusive account, some biographers have suggested that, in naming the test, Oppenheimer must have been thinking of Jean, who—according to Oppenheimer’s own descriptions of their relationship—nearly married him at several points, and influenced him a great deal, and introduced him to the Donne poems he quoted, and killed herself a year and a half before he scheduled the test.

But Oppenheimer never said, at least in any public accounts, that it was Jean he was thinking of. And other biographers have concluded that in fact it wasn’t Donne he had in mind, but instead the Hindu Trimurti.

In the end, however, they can’t say they’re certain. They’ve made their best guesses, based on evidence they’ve assembled. They’ve tried to piece together a motive, as we often do, when we’re faced with a violence we didn’t foresee and find that we can’t quite comprehend fully.

In such dangerous times, when the order of the world seems to shift, it becomes essential to understand people’s motives. We gather our facts: the books he read, the lovers he took, the answers he gave to questions asked later. We arrange them into reliable orders.

But two decades after the test, in his public accounts, not even Oppenheimer seems to understand fully.

Why I chose the name is not clear, he wrote to Groves. Beyond this, I have no clues whatever . And in the absence of any clarity on what he might have been thinking, all I can say for certain is that at 3:30 A.M. on July 16, the date scheduled for the Trinity Test, Oppenheimer is waiting inside South Shelter, ten thousand yards away from the tower.

IT WAS MY SENIOR YEAR, LATE IN THE SPRING OF 1963, WHEN HE CAMEto Sudbury to speak. He must have been invited as part of the political rehabilitation his friends and allies undertook when Kennedy was elected.

To prepare for his coming, we spent a few weeks in Mr. Rosenberg’s history class learning about his security hearings. By then, the McCarthy era had come to be seen as a shameful episode. Mr. Rosenberg told us how, during the hearings, they’d turned his life inside out.

But still, Mr. Rosenberg said, despite their defamations, he carried himself with dignity.

He refused to resign. He stood up and faced each of the charges.

By then, it was spring, and Mr. Rosenberg sometimes held classes outside. The elms were in full leaf. The new grass on the lawns was that color of green that defied all attempts at description.

I always loved the grass on those lawns: its neatness, and its health. Out of respect for the care the groundskeepers so obviously took, I was always conscientious about using the walkways on my way between buildings. I never cut corners, as some of the other boys did, especially when they were running late for their classes.