Oh Pure and Radiant Heart - Lydia Millet (ebook reader online TXT) 📗

smiled at each other quickly when they saw Ann curled on the couch. She had fallen asleep with a coffee table book on her lap, in the dim glow of a lamp.

Fermi slipped off his shoes and went quietly down the hall to his room while Ben lifted the book off her lap and picked her up gently to carry her to bed.

In actual fact so-called conventional warfare had already devolved into total war, that is to say, war waged against civilians on a sweeping scale. Both the Allies and the Axis military had been guilty of this. The American firebombings of Tokyo, for instance, killed one hundred thousand citizens in two days, who died mostly by burning alive. The Japanese rape of Nanking left more than two hundred thousand civilians dead and involved the rape and mutilation of tens of thousands of women and girls. The English bombing of Dresden killed one-hundred and thirty thousand. All in all, the Soviet Union saw seventeen million civilians killed in the war, China nine million, Poland six million, Germany four million. England suffered only sixty-two thousand, and the United States almost none.

The sheets needed to be washed. Even the coverlet, the down comforter, all of them smelled faintly of skin and sweat instead of detergent because she had forgotten routine in the past weeks, forgotten the care she always took and how it had both framed the day and hung itself on the day’s frame. Herself she liked these smells of sleeping but her mother had lectured her often on the hygiene of linens, how they should bear the fragrance of soap instead of humans.

—So listen, said Ben.

This was where most of their negotiations were conducted now, where most new information was disclosed since the advent of the scientists, which had made public space of the rest of the house.

—Yes? she murmured, though she had actually departed already, even as she decided the sheets were dirty and she didn’t mind. She had emerged into an airport, onto a long automatic sidewalk, where blocking the sidewalk ahead of her was a kangaroo in an overstuffed chair, reminding her of Szilard.

Then she remembered: he and Fermi had been out late. She had waited for them. She was jarred awake.

—What took you so long? she asked plaintively.

—Listen, whispered Ben. —I’m going with you to Japan.

She lifted herself up, alert, noticing now his crow’s feet, the bags under his eyes. He seemed older to her in the half-light, lying down, the back of his hand against his forehead, palm up and fingers curled, a gesture he made only when he was very tired.

—Really? she asked. —You can leave work for two weeks?

She settled against his cool naked side, adjusting herself so that her cheek did not lie against the sharp lines of the ribs. Once a lung had collapsed, and there was a scar beneath his arm, across the side of the ribcage. When a lung collapsed, he had told her, air continued to be inhaled into the body but could not be exhaled again, and so the body swelled and rounded, ballooning till finally the heart stopped. He had warned her the lung could easily collapse again. If they were alone in a place with no telephones or ambulances she would have to make the incision herself. She would have to remove the ink cartridge from a ballpoint pen, he said, and stick the hollow pen into the hole to let out the air.

—Lynn wasn’t happy about it, he said. —But I convinced her. I told her the sub was taking a break from doing Joni Mitchell.

Oppenheimer and Szilard had begun to discuss their colleagues of an evening, their former colleagues from life. Szilard had tracked down various biographies and for light reading after dinner he and Oppenheimer would read from these. They read about themselves privately, with advance psychological preparation, but they were always jarred when they found references to themselves in books they were reading about others.

Ann liked to listen to them and Ben liked to sit with his arm around her shoulders. Two nights after his walk on the mountain, Fermi even joined them.

—Uh, Bob Serber—, said Szilard, putting down the book from which he was reading aloud. It was one of several autobiographical tomes by the physicist Richard Feynman, rich in frolicsome anecdotes and reports of clever practical jokes Feynman had played on his fellow academics.

—What about him? asked Oppenheimer from the open window where he was standing, arm and cigarette outside. His mind had been wandering, Ann could tell.

Szilard appeared to reconsider speaking further. He fumbled with the Feynman a bit nervously, flipping through it as though searching.

But now Oppenheimer was interested.

—Biographers seem to believe he had an, um, special relationship with Kitty, is what Dr. Szilard was probably going to say, said Ann. —He’s going to learn it sooner or later, she went on, turning to Szilard. —He might as well hear it now.

—They may have been just friends, said Szilard quickly. —Like me and Trude.

—You married Trude, said Ann.

—The other guy did that, not me, said Szilard. —She probably begged him to. I wouldn’t have done it personally. But it wasn’t his fault anyway. He put up a good fight. It took her twenty years to convince him.

—Bob Serber, said Oppenheimer slowly. —With my wife?

—You were already dead, said Szilard. —Don’t worry.

—I hadn’t read that, said Oppenheimer. —I wonder how I missed it.

—They were mourning you, put in Ann, anxious to mitigate. —They spent a lot of time together after your death. Kitty was lonely.

—Kitty never liked to be on her own, said Oppenheimer. —I wouldn’t expect her to.

—Anyway, Oppie, said Szilard, —you were dead.

—No one acted out of turn, said Ann.

—But how about Bob’s wife? Charlotte?

—She died too, said Szilard. —She died young.

—Dear Charlotte. That poor girl. She was our librarian! Just like you, said Oppenheimer with sudden tenderness, turning to Ann.

Ann felt flustered and went on talking to cover her confusion. Oppenheimer was rarely affectionate.

—Serber remarried