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from "Boom Town"

 

The first year that the Manhattan Project occupied Los Alamos, eighty babies were born there. During the next year, the birth rate escalated. In the still of the siesta hour, late afternoons, a polyphonic squall could be heard throughout the town. Again then, late at night, a chorus of infants wailing for milk agitated the atoms in the lab. Huddles of new mothers and their babies soon were formalized into play groups.

The upsurge in population maddened General Groves. “What do these people think this is? A laboratory school?”

Oppie was amused, especially since his own Kitty was expecting. “You know, Leslie, there’s not a lot to do in this town. So we try to work with what we’ve got, which means—“

Groves trampled over the reference to sex that was soon to come. “We’ve got to stop it. Or at least slow it down.”

“How many troops do you think that’ll take?”

Groves ignored the question and managed not to ignite. “If you recall, we \were originally projecting a town of six hundred or so. Instead we’ve ended up with thousands. I’m not prepared to expand the place—build more or bigger houses—just to accommodate this overrun of babies. Can’t we schedule more dances, maybe some late-night church services?”

“Still, Leslie, at the end of the night, everyone ends up at home…in bed.” Except some of the scientists, he almost added, who end up back at work.

“But if we tire them out. Make it so they’re out as soon as their heads hit the pillows.”

“Wouldn’t it be easier to dose the food with saltpeter?”

No more jokes, Oppie told himself, ready to apply his administrative skills to the problem at hand, which was, curiously, an inversion of the plutonium problem--how to speed up production of the necessary bomb ingredient--a problem that had dominated the project so far, along with its companion problem: exactly how much plutonium would they need? The process of wracking his brain felt to Oppie as if he were sorting through dusty mason jars in a grandmother’s attic. A lid missing here, a bent wire-clamp there. Oppie knew he’d do better to ask around; his strength as Director was that he was a great synthesizer of other people’s ideas.

But as soon as Groves was out of the office, the idea of trying to enforce a lower birth rate seemed ridiculous to Oppie. He wasn’t going to embarrass himself by polling his people about how they thought this could best be achieved. The general couldn’t be cured of the delusion that military decree was the ultimate authority. His plan for reducing the number of births in town would include bedroom wiretaps and round-the-clock surveillance with the spy-eyes of cameras.

Just how big a problem was the outbreak of babies? That afternoon, Oppie left the Tech Area and strolled towards the hospital, drawing in the spicy autumn air along with each drag of his cigarette. When he was still a block away, he thought he heard the bleating of newborns. The closer Oppie came to the hospital, the louder the crying and the more babies he imagined in the crate-like cradles built according to Army specs by the same work crew that had positioned the studs in place and faced them with plywood.

At least a dozen mothers walking their babies in buggies passed him before he reached the entrance to the hospital. Perhaps if General Groves hadn’t made such an issue of the birth rate, Oppie wouldn’t have noticed what was now beginning to seem so visible to him: the overflow of babies (many of them firstborns), newborns, infants, their puling cries, the everywhere smell of souring milk, clouds of baby powder, the narrowing of aisles in the hospital nursery. The nurse overseeing the litter that day was too flustered to spare Oppie much time.

“I could use another two of me,” she told him, circulating from one bed to the next. “And pretty soon we’re going to have to put these sweet things in bunk-cribs, though I don’t know how I’ll reach those on top.”

Oppie scanned the rows of lookalike babies. Then he noticed, in the window, a cluster of fathers’ faces looking in. When Oppie left the hospital, he went around back and saw that these men were elevated by wooden boxes so they could see in through the window.

Hysterectomies? Vasectomies? Mandated by military decree? What a rebellion such control would inspire! Oppie could probably be more effective by reasoning with the laboratory staff. These practical men would appreciate the burden placed on the town by a burgeoning population, the thinning out of rations, the insufficiency of housing. And he was not oblivious to the powerful influence he had. Not only now, at the lab, among the scientists, but since the start of his career when his dark, wiry hair had spiked up from his scalp like a desert cactus. And yet the women had liked him; they’d been slain by his smarts and by knowing the Oppie wasn’t just straight lines and sharp angles. He had the poet’s heart and eyes.

Back at Berkeley, back when many of the men at the lab had been graduate students absorbing the wisdom of their elders, Oppenheimer had been a campus celebrity. His classes filled at once, sometimes with repeat students, many of them young women who went as far as hunger strikes if denied enrollment in a course taught by this superstar of science. Serber, for one, was accustomed to following his former professor’s directions exactly. If Oppie told him, “No babies,” Serber would no doubt comply.

But instead of issuing an order, Oppie found Serber in the lab and asked him to lunch. The menu at the mess hall changed every day; still, it was as predictable as any restaurant menu. That was fine with Serber, who would order Sloppy Joes every time he ate there, whatever the other choices. Meat was scarce, but scraps were easier to come by.

Serber chewed as slowly as he spoke, allowing Oppie ample time to formulate his question. A juicy stream of tomato sauce dribbled down from the corner of Serber’s mouth and off the edge of his jaw.

“So the question is how do I make my case without seeming to stick my nose where it doesn’t belong—in other people’s bedrooms?”

Serber silly-giggled, still chewing. If such an oblique reference to intimacies between husband and wife embarrassed Serber so, perhaps he wasn’t the right man to ask. Oppie couldn’t imagine his lunch companion taking off his pants and slipping under the covers with Charlotte, an assertive and to-the-point kind of woman.

So Serber surprised him when he said, “If FDR can approve condoms to keep the military clean, why can’t he sanction them as a method of birth control? At least for us here at work on this military project.”

Not a bad idea. Condoms, diaphragms, they were all illegal, but exceptions could be made at the executive level. Oppie would have to take the matter up with Groves. He stood up, patted Serber on the shoulder, and walked out of Fuller Lodge without a word, leaving his colleague to eat alone. Oppie hadn’t ordered any lunch, Serber realized. No wonder he was thin.

Not a bad idea. Still, Oppie would solicit another suggestion or two. He noticed Phil Morrison walking away from the Tech Area. A different boss might have lambasted his underling for taking off from his job in the middle of the day. But Morrison appeared weary, wrinkled and unshaven. He’d probably been camped out at the lab for at least two days straight, and after a while, even the finest of minds just shut down.

“Morrison!”

By nature, Oppie wasn’t much of a shouter. The distinction between when he was speaking and when he was thinking was not so clear to him. Sometimes he waited for answers to questions he’d only thought, not actually spoken out loud. And when he did talk, his voice was sketchy, like bad radio reception.

So he had to call after Morrison five times before the sleepy scientist heard him and stopped so Oppie could rush over to him.

Oppie waved his hands in front of the fixed eyes of the young physicist. “Are y’there, Phil?”

Morrison grinned. “I’m here, Docco. But I’m dreaming on my feet.”

Oppie reached around him and rested his arm across Morrison’s shoulders. “I like that in a man.” They began to walk in step, Oppie in the role of guide though they were heading towards Morrison’s destination.

“I got one for you.” This is how he always introduced mathematical puzzlers to Morrison. These puzzlers were a tradition shared by the two men dating back to Morrison’s days as a grad student at Berkeley.

“If I can solve it with half a brain, I will.”

Oppie looked down at the muddy ground as the two men continued to walk. “This here’s a little different. Goes like this: how do we slow down the birth rate in this town?”

“You’re not thinking of forced sterilization or abortions, are you?” Morrison asked, aghast as he envisioned his wife, Emily, laid out on an operating table.

“No, but I’m sure that Groves is.”

Oppie could talk frankly about this with Morrison, once his student, in a way he couldn’t with Fermi. Or Bethe. Both imported thinkers. Acknowledged international brains. Perhaps, Oppie thought, as Morrison gave only a blank reply, he should broach the topic with someone more objective. One of the single men.

During the next weeks, he and the general continued to bicker back and forth about how to influence the ever-rising birth rate. When the two next met again, Groves proposed reducing the supply of milk and diapers as a deterrent to future pregnancies.

“What? That’s got to be a violation of basic human rights,” Oppie said with disgust. Careful not to speak the words aloud, he inwardly chanted a verse that had lately become popular around town:

The General’s in a stew

He trusted you and you

He thought you’d be scientific

Instead you’re just prolific

And what is he to do?

*               *               *
 

from "Forced Labor"

Margaret Hurley had trained her receptionist to treat each patient like a royal guest. That training had included the cultivation of a hushed voice that evoked associations of lullabies, a peaceful nursery, and a dream mother, all at once. “Oh, isn’t he splendid?” she said of napping Jasper. Peg wheeled the stroller forward and back a few times and then ushered me to the scale, where she doubled as a quasi medical assistant, weighing me and measuring my blood pressure. “Wonderful,” she sang in a voice so sublimely soothing that I believed she might be an angel in human form.

Peg kept an eye on Jasper while I submitted to a routine exam inside one of the floral, rock-a-bye rooms. “You’re getting big,” Margaret said, a rather obvious observation, I thought, for someone in her profession. I may have fallen asleep during the two minutes when she was manually examining me inside and out, but I instantly came awake when Margaret, armed with a stethoscope, said matter-of-factly, “I’m not getting a heartbeat,” and my own, I’m sure, stopped too.

Margaret rolled out the ultrasound machine and deftly unveiled my body, lubricated the sensor, and began voyaging across the expanse of my distended womb, watching the underground on the screen. She nodded, pressed down on a button, and then I heard the amplification of a rapid lifebeat.

“There it is,” she declared, the first tinge of emotion in her voice. Margaret’s evenness in the pit of this little crisis had probably kept me from panicking, I realized now.

“What was that about?” I wanted to know.

She shrugged. “Hard to say. Looks like your baby’s cuddling pretty close to herself. And maybe she turned.” A previous ultrasound had revealed that my baby was a girl. Clifford would have rather we not know in advance the gender of our child, but I wanted to add some specificity to my fantasies.

Then, rather casually, Margaret told me that the baby was small and that I’d have to be monitored more closely. “I’d like you in here every week,” she said.

At each appointment, as I left whichever of the flowery rooms I’d been in, I belatedly wondered at the scent of flowers, which couldn’t have been coming from the wallpaper. But from where, then? Margaret herself? She seemed as elemental as the blue sky and the rain and the ancient dirt. I would have liked to deliver the baby right there, in one of those rooms. I’d even thought of giving birth at home, an improvement over the institutional setting that had dominated Jasper’s birth. Margaret had cautioned me, though, that any emergencies that came up would have to be handled at the hospital; in fact, at the least indication of extraordinary leanings, she would call for an ambulance and have me moved to Brigham and Women’s, where every conceivable piece of medical apparatus would be a reach away.

As I rolled Jasper in his stroller homeward to the promise of snack food and, eventually, more TV, I imagined that we’d switched places and that my growing boy was pushing me, compressed into the seat of the stroller, up the hill.

“Mama, do I have to give my food with my sister?” Jasper asked me one day soon after.

“You mean share?”

He nodded.

I was slouched in an armchair in the living room, too inert to stand up and go turn on the window fan. Although Clifford and I had informed Jasper again and again that I would be having a baby, that he could see how it was getting big inside me, that it was a girl, none of our explanations seemed to approach reality for him. He absorbed these fantastic prophesies as if they were part of a tale being read to him at bedtime. But now, finally, he was starting to understand, and his first reaction was a fear of having to give up some of his ravioli and frozen peas.

“No, of course not, dear boy. We’ll have enough food for everyone.” Was my son aware, as I was, that we were really talking about love, and only secondarily about food? He seemed satisfied with my answer, and in fact slowed his hand-to-mouth intake of crackers, assured that he didn’t need to stock up for a famine ahead.

The bold, warrior summer seemed to be everywhere at once: inside my lungs, clogging up my breathing, close against my skin and beyond, insistently infinite, so there was nowhere left to go, nowhere to imagine. Sometimes Jasper, unbothered by the scorching summer, would pound on my belly, trying to activate me but only receiving my wrath. The television was on constantly, assaulting us with random programming at a volume that irritated me but seemed to boost Jasper’s energy.

“Nap time,” I’d announce just two hours into the morning. I was more than ready for a nap. Jasper was not.

Clifford called to check in now and then during the day. I always felt as though he was calling from halfway around the world, from a culture as different from mine as it could possibly be. My single two-year-old seemed equivalent in disruptive potential to Clifford’s entire school building full of early adolescents.

“Why don’t you take Jasper to the park?’ he suggested on a day so humid that my vision was bleared with sweat collecting along the rims of my eyes.

“Because I’m tired, and it’s hot. Plus I’ve had this pain in my side all morning.”

“What kind of pain?”

“The kind that hurts.”

“No, really, Pauline, don’t you think you should phone Margaret?”

Clifford’s alarm prompted me to call Margaret’s office as soon as I’d hung up with him. When Peg said, “She’s with a patient. Is this an emergency?” I instantly answered “No,” convincing myself that I had no cause to worry. But once I explained why I was calling, Peg asked me to hold and soon returned to the phone, saying, “Can you come in now, dear?” She added, “Don’t drive yourself, though.”

I groaned in answer to her question and acknowledgement of her advice. Only twice in my life had I taken a cab, once as a child with my mother on a shopping excursion, and once when I was stranded late at night somewhere near West Philly. My memories were of a smell not quite like smoke, of seats not quite leather, of furtive drivers remote and menacing at the same time. I chose one of the dozen or so companies listed and was told, when I explained that I needed to get to a medical office right away, “We’ll do our best, but this ain’t no ambulance service.”

The cab driver sounded exactly like the dispatcher, making me wonder if this were a one-man operation. Not until I’d pressed through the clinging air into the strange space of the backseat did I remember Jasper’s car seat. But I was frightened and in a rush and knew that this driver wasn’t going to enforce the car-seat law. In fact, he acted as if conveying a dilapidated pregnant woman and a hyper-verbal boy recapping hours of TV shows was pretty normal for him. “Please forgive me,” I mouthed to an anonymous deity or legislator as I bound myself, my son, and my unborn baby all within the safety of my arms.

I overtipped the driver, incapable of waiting in the heat for my change. I’m sure that if he’d known in advance I’d be such a generous donor, he would have behaved a little more kindly to me, perhaps opened the door and helped me up onto the curb, or remarked on how cute my son was.

Margaret and Peg nearly jumped me as I entered the waiting room, where one placid woman stared ahead, a magazine in her lap. They hurried me into an exam room, and then Peg spirited Jasper away with her cultish voice. “Let’s take a look,” Margaret said, standing by attentively as I took off my underpants. First she applied her stethoscope to different places on my body and listened to my inner murmurings. Next her latex fingers probed inside of me, her face, meanwhile, betraying nothing of her findings. Finally Margaret rolled out the ultrasound machine and positioned it, I noticed, so the screen faced away from me. What irregularity did she expect to discover?

“Having some cramping, you said?”

“Cramping? No, I wouldn’t call it that. It feels more like a gas pain. I just figured…” But I hadn’t really thought it out.

Margaret breathed in enough air to supply her with oxygen for at least five minutes. She switched off the ultrasound machine and said, “I want to transfer you to the hospital.”

“The hospital?” My due date was three weeks into the future, and though I knew that such predictions were far from exact, I didn’t think that this change of plans was based on a miscalculation.

Margaret leaned out into the reception area and instructed Peg to call an ambulance.

“An ambulance?” I struggled against my front-end bulk to sit up. My heart was a bird I’d swallowed, its wings beating futilely inside my throat. .

“Pauline, your baby isn’t getting enough oxygen. We have to get in there.”

“You mean—“

“We’ve got to deliver her right away.”

Jasper incongruously laughed. He crouched just beyond the doorway, dangling a cloth clown by one arm. “This clown is so so happy,” he squealed.

“What about Jasper?” I asked in a small voice coming from my most powerless self.

“He can ride along with you in the ambulance. I’ll meet you at the hospital.”

“Clifford!” I suddenly remembered.

“Peg will get a hold of him.”

In a strobed sequence of movements, Margaret shut down the ultrasound and slid it away. I waited for her to switch the lights back on but then realized that they’d been on all along in the dreary cave that the room had become.

*                 *                *