Louisa Hall - Trinity

For a moment, I was transported back to that time again. I was running back to chapel, in search of my blazer, choosing between the grass and inevitable lateness.

Then I shook my head. I remembered that four years had passed since that afternoon. It must have been a scent in the air, I thought to myself, that caught me and plunged me back to that time. Then, out of curiosity, I looked around for the bloom that had caused it.

For a few minutes, like a lunatic, I walked in circles, smelling various flowers and bushes, and only when I’d given up hope and was heading off toward the main building did I happen to look up and see bees moving between the greenish-gold blossoms of the tree overhead, which wasn’t an elm, in fact, but a linden.

LATER, I LEARNED FROM MR. ROSENBERG THAT THE ELMS FOR WHICHSudbury was famous—and under which Oppenheimer and I had crossed paths four years before—had been struck down one by one, until every last elm on that campus had rotted.

They were victims, Mr. Rosenberg told me, of Dutch elm disease, a fungus native to Asia. It was introduced to America in 1928, when beetles carrying the disease arrived on a shipment of logs. Sanitation and quarantine measures were taken, and they contained the disease until 1941, at which time wartime demands meant that those initial measures were abandoned.

At that point, from New York, the disease spread to New England, and since I’d been at Sudbury last, more than half of the seventy-seven million elms in North America had been destroyed, and all the elms on Sudbury’s campus had quickly rotted and succumbed to the fungus.

By the time I returned, the elms had been replaced by other trees, such as that linden, whose shadows I moved through, imagining they were the same shadows that danced over the grass on that other, earlier afternoon, when Dr. Oppenheimer walked off alone, heading out of the frame of a moment that would never be summoned again, changed as it was by what followed, so that the original almost seemed to have been dreamed: those still-healthy trees, that indescribable grass, those dappled shadows, and the man I only saw at a distance, when he was already moving away, heading off into the afternoon sunlight.

WATCHING HIM GO, I FELT A CERTAIN STRANGE SORROW GROWINGwithin me. Over my head, the leaves of the elms were rustling in the wind, as if whispering some revelation I couldn’t quite comprehend, and as soon as he stepped out from under the branches, the light—which I remember as having that softened, gold quality of late afternoons on our campus—enveloped his body.

It slipped around him, blurring his edges, so for a moment, he almost seemed to be disappearing before me, and I felt a strange, inexplicable desire to run after him and detain him. To ask him what I’d missed. What the elms were trying to say. What I hadn’t yet quite comprehended.

An hour goes by. The weather holds. By 4:30 A.M., the winds have slowed down. In the new still of the desert spreading out from the tower, the scrap wood and metal rest where they were dropped in the snakeweed. The corpses of the white mice remain tied to the electrical wires. The only sound outside the shelter is the pleated croaking of toads, and by 4:45, it’s clear to everyone that the test will proceed at 5:30.

At 5:10, a voice from the loudspeaker outside announces zero minus twenty minutes.

At 5:20, zero minus ten minutes.

A siren wails, and Oppenheimer goes outside with the others. They lie facedown in a trench, to protect their eyes from the bomb flash, and at some point, according to a witness standing farther away, a herd of antelope begins crossing the desert several hundred yards from the tower.

But Oppenheimer himself doesn’t see it. He’s lying facedown in the trench, along with his brother, Frank, and a handful of officers and technicians, all of them waiting with their heads down for something they’ve never seen, an impact the force of which they can’t predict, a violence that’s never been known on this planet.

The minutes tick past. According to a witness nearby, Oppenheimer grows more and more tense. At the announcement of zero minus two minutes, he mutters, “Lord, these affairs are hard on the heart.”

At zero minus one minute, he scarcely breathes.

As the last seconds tick by, in a still more awful than any sea, he’s lying facedown in the dirt, and the antelope are still crossing.

THE LAST TIME I SAW OPPENHEIMER WAS DECEMBER OF 1966.

By then he was dying. He’d suffered the trauma of his security hearings. He’d weathered the fanfare of his symbolic rehabilitation, which occurred just before he fell ill. When I saw him in Princeton, he was only sixty-two, but he had inoperable cancer. He was frail and defeated and perhaps I should have been more sympathetic.

I startled him when I knocked on the door. When he rose to come forward and greet me, he was as courteous as I’d remembered him, from that time he and Kitty came to my parents’ house. He kissed me on the cheek. Then he sat at his desk. I pulled out my tape recorder, and while I untangled the cords, he watched me with his gray eyes, and I thought that his face seemed like a dog’s face.

Maybe it was because of his eyebrows, which had always been heavy. But it was also his wary expression when he watched me set the tape recorder down on the oddly bare desk in his new office. It was as if he knew I’d come there with the intention to harm him.

SINCE THAT DAY, I’VE SOMETIMES WONDERED WHY I COULDN’T JUSTlet him be. But as soon as I crossed the threshold and moved into his office, I knew I’d make myself his enemy.

I felt he should have to tell the whole story. After the violence he’d unleashed and failed to control, after the guilt that he’d involved us in, after all the lies that he’d told: I felt that he should make himself clear, and he watched me with those dog’s eyes as if he knew my intentions.

As if he accepted the fact that I’d come to force him to reveal the secrets he’d previously kept. As if he knew that I’d insist on the whole truth and nothing but, and that he would refuse, but that in his desire to remain courteous, in his awareness of the responsibilities that came with his position, he would stop short of sending me out of his office, and that therefore the interrogation would continue, and the arrangement would only become more and more brutal, until it seemed that only one of us could emerge alive from that office.

And still, he allowed me to come in. In fact, he invited me.

FROM THE BEGINNING, I’D DISLIKED THE ASSIGNMENT: A FINAL PROFILEon Oppenheimer, looking back on the course of his life.

It seemed to me somewhat brutal, since he hadn’t died yet. But still, I accepted, mostly because I needed the work. Over the course of the last two or three years, I’d become a less reliable writer. The stream of work I’d once taken for granted had steadily slowed. When my editor called to offer me the Oppenheimer profile, I hadn’t heard from him for over a year.

So I accepted, but it was with none of the enthusiasm I used to feel for the project of interviewing a subject.

Though I was only thirty-two at the time, it seemed to me that decades had passed since my early days as a journalist, when I still believed in my own special talent for interviewing a subject. In place of that old confidence, there was a dreadful, dull blankness, like a single empty room in an otherwise well-furnished house.

Still, I needed the work, so I accepted the assignment. That afternoon, I called Oppenheimer to schedule an interview. I explained the profile, and mentioned that, when I was a girl, my family had lived down the street from Olden Manor. When they first moved to Princeton from California, he and Kitty had come to a Christmas party at my parents’ house. Kitty wore a lovely mink coat.