Mark Dunn - American Decameron

We were building a submarine.

Who said that my husband doesn’t have a sense of humor?

Let me tell you about Betty. Sit back, Betty. I’m going to embarrass you. My wife was a regular dynamo. She looked after our two boys and worked part time in the Tech area as a secretary. She even put in a few hours every week at the high school and the hospital. The older kids in town were near delinquents and needed taming, and the hospital was forever filled with newborns, all of our fertile young wives dropping litters like estral she-dogs.

Dear, that was absolutely disgusting. You’ll make them think that all we did up on this mesa was build bombs and make babies .

I recall that we also did a little skiing and played some cards. But you have to admit that there was a hell of a lot of baby-making going on.

Once a month my husband would reward me for all my hard work by letting me drive down to Santa Fe and stuff the trunk of our car with everything I couldn’t find in our little hamlet on the hill, which was a very long list, if you want the truth of it .

Of course there was a definite ulterior motive behind my wife’s monthly shopping spree: Betty’s four o’clock gin Rickey at the La Fonda hotel — always in the company of several other similarly shopping-sapped expatriates from the land of government-imposed deprivation.

While you and Oppenheimer and Fermi and Teller nudged your neutrons and accelerated all your cyclotronic particles, it was Peg and Kitty and Mici and all the rest of us “significant others” who were required to keep the home fires burning, or in the case of those damned furnaces from hell, keep those ultra-efficient monsters from turning every Quonset hut and apartment house on the mesa into Finnish saunas. And it was we who stood up at the community meetings and bewailed the non-functioning Black Beauty stoves that converted all of our kitchens into various versions of the Museum of Ma Kettle, and vegetables that arrived at the commissary so spoiled or wilted that even the Three Little Pigs wouldn’t have taken them for slop. With your head in the clouds of vaulted scientific theory and your hands doing the hard work of practical experimentation, you never seemed to notice the wind and the sand and dust of spring and early summer, or the mud of the late summer “monsoon.” You took Oppie’s word that this was going to be our very own Southwestern Shangri-La, when it was Oppenheimer himself who left the grid off the plat, and all of our houses and duplexes and apartment buildings — each the same lovely, unvarying shade of army green — being scattered without rhyme or topographical reason. And God help the husband who sought his own home in the dark night after he’d tied on one too many .

I was well aware of everything you just itemized. Didn’t I try my damnedest to get you a house on Bathtub Row?

You did, dear. And I’m grateful for the effort, futile though it ultimately was. When we thought we might have a chance to move into one of those lovely old boys’ camp homes, I dreamed of jasmine-scented bubble baths for several nights in a row. And then, alas, the bubble burst and it was back to the showers. But I do credit you for trying, and for getting me an Indian maid for three half-days a week, and you always spent time with the boys on the weekends, and didn’t embarrass me at any of the parties or chase after any of the other wives .

I was quite satisfied, as it turned out, with the wife I had.

Thank you for that, dear .

It was a strange time.

And 1944 was the strangest year of all. It was the year that we settled in and looked all around us and the utter surreality of that place would sometimes stop me dead in my tracks .

You say you knew. How did you know?

I’d like to say, dear, that I overheard you talking in your sleep, but you never did. Although, one night I could swear you were sing-mumbling “Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate the Positive.”

Some of the guys had been singing it in the lab — the obvious protonic reference, of course — and it was locked inside my head.

Some of us girls were singing it in the commissary too when the milk delivery didn’t arrive and we had to stay ourselves from riot. Darling, I figured out that you were here to build a great big bomb through process of elimination and through all the hundreds of hints that were dropped in front of those of us who were kept out of Oppie’s Inner Sanctum. Why else would you have dragged Tommy and Philip Junior and me up here? You were worried that Hitler’s scientists would get the jump on us. You boys had to come up with it first. And if all your theories found the practical application you were hoping for, the U.S. Army was going to drop that bomb and change the world forever .

You never spoke of any of this.

And why should I? Why should I give my poor overworked husband something else to fret over? I remember the grave look you used to carry on your face. I noticed the looks of serious purpose on the faces of all of the men who worked with Oppenheimer. General Groves couldn’t be bothered with our petty grievances about wilted lettuce and paper-thin walls that afforded us all so little privacy, and electricity that seemed to come and go willy-nilly. He couldn’t be bothered, darling, because he was overseeing something that would turn the page in the book of humanity. Never before had man been capable of creating a weapon of such exponentially superior destructive power. The door was opening now on that possibility. You and the other scientists were prying it open not quite knowing what you would find on the other side. My doors, dear — my doors were inconsequential. They had hinges with missing screws. They had pencil marks on them from charting the growth of our boys. My world, my darling, was domestic, plain, and quotidian. But it was that world which you and Oppenheimer and the others were trying to save .

And that next year the sky lit up over southern New Mexico and all those little things that you boys had been blowing up on and off the mesa gave way to one big, blinding explosion that took the shape of a giant Alice in Wonderland mushroom. And then three weeks later, hell on earth was visited upon the residents of those two unfortunate Japanese cities .

And with parched lips and dirty faces, because the water still hadn’t been restored upon the mesa, we packed our bags and moved back to California, our job here done, my job as helpmate to one of the men who built “the bomb” having come to an end .

I detect ambivalence in your feelings — about why we came to Los Alamos and what was accomplished there.

Haven’t you the same ambivalence, darling? You’ve seen the newsreels. Pandora’s box now has no lid .

I try to eliminate the negative and latch on to the affirmative. My wife is still here at my side and my two sons are safe and grown to sturdy manhood. It was a murderous madman in Germany who brought this horror upon the world, and generals in Asia who kept the Pacific in flames. I did what was asked of me with every good intention.

I hope we’ve told you what you wanted to know. We’ve got to get to our grandson’s Little League game .

Did you know? They play baseball in Japan now.

“I heard it was one hundred thou the Cubs paid for him.”

“My aunt’s ass. No team in baseball’s got that kind of dough to throw around.”

“You don’t think he’s worth it? He’s ten and five this season, and if they hadn’t cancelled the All-Star game this month, you know he would’ve been back on the mound for the American League.”

“So why you think the Yankees agreed to cut him loose?”