“Tell me one,” I said, settling into the rocker. “Tell me the story of how she met and married Leonard Novak.”
With that, she began to speak, and her words began to weave a spell.
CHAPTER 14
Once upon a time, Bill, Oak Ridge blazed with brilliance and vitality, and Leonard Novak and I burned at the heart of the flame.
It wasn’t just the work; in fact, for most of us, the work was the dull, dreary part; the hours were long and the work was backbreaking or mind-numbing. It seems exciting and glamorous now, but back then, only a handful of people knew our place in the grand scheme of things. The top military leaders, like General Groves and Colonel Nichols, saw the big picture; so did the senior scientists, like Oppenheimer and Fermi and Lawrence, although those three never lived here; they just descended on Oak Ridge now and again, like visiting heads of state. Of the hundreds of scientists in Oak Ridge, Novak was one of the very few who grasped what this vast, desperate endeavor was all about.
The other eighty thousand of us were grunts; we saw only our own tiny little speck of work, and we had no idea what it meant. So I spent eight hours a day, six days a week, staring at needles and twisting knobs. Other people spent fifty or sixty hours a week pouring concrete or bulldozing mud or fitting pipe or welding. When we weren’t working, we spent a lot of time standing in lines. Lines to clock in, lines to clock out. Lines to buy groceries — groceries that sometimes ran out before the line did. Lines to buy cigarettes. People would see a line and queue up, sometimes not even knowing what the line was for, because if other people were in line, there must be something worth lining up for. It was like something out of a Charlie Chaplin film, the one where Chaplin is reduced to a human cog in a huge assembly line.
You’d think we’d have been exhausted, ready to tumble into bed after so much drudgery, but we weren’t. For me, staring at those two dials all day, every day created a pent-up energy, like static electricity. The tedium was exhausting, but at the end of my shift, something in me would wake up, and I’d be ready to stay up half the night. And thousands of other pent-up young people were happy to stay up with me.
The Central Rec Hall was near the middle of what was called Townsite — Jackson Square now, a couple of blocks below Chapel on the Hill. There must have been a dozen or so dormitories within a few blocks of the rec hall, and each dorm housed hundreds of young men and women, most of them single. So the rec hall was jammed every night, all night. Right around midnight, about the time the day-shift workers would start running out of steam, the people who worked evening shift would clock out and come pouring into the rec hall and stay till dawn, and just as they were staggering off to catch some sleep, the graveyard-shift workers would come in. On weekends, the dance floor would be so crowded you could barely move.
One night in the spring of 1944, my roommate Roxanne and I walked in figuring we’d do a little jitterbugging to Glenn Miller records, but instead, there was a guy singing and playing the piano. He looked sophisticated and older — twenty-five, maybe all of thirty; can you believe that? These days Oak Ridge is full of fossils like me, but back then, nearly everybody here was under thirty. Construction workers had to be young and strong to do the manual labor, and scientists had to be young and mentally agile to do the mental gymnastics. I was twenty; most of the girls I worked with had just graduated from high school.
Roxanne and I worked our way up to the front of the room, but it took a while, because we had to wiggle between scores of men to get up there, and the men didn’t want to make it too easy for us to get past them. Oak Ridge in the early forties was like a Gold Rush boomtown back in the 1800s; there were fifteen or twenty men to every woman in Oak Ridge during the war, so it was always easy to get dates — some gals would double-or triple-book, starting one date at eight, another at ten, and another at midnight. But the sad truth was, what Oak Ridge had in quantity, it lacked in quality. Lots of the men were just dumb louts — fine if you wanted to dig a foundation, bulldoze a road, or tangle in a darkened doorway, but if you were looking for more, the wheat-to-chaff ratio was about as low as the ratio of U-235 to U-238.
Up close the guy at the piano looked kind of fancy. He was wearing a coat and tie, he had round, horn-rimmed glasses and wavy, combed-back hair. He looked brainy and the music he was playing went along with the look — Cole Porter. Porter’s lyrics are clever and suggestive, and you could tell by the singer’s inflections and eyebrow wiggles that he knew what all the double-entendres meant. But underneath the glitter, Porter was deeply cynical — like a cocktail party that sounds fun until you really listen, and then you start to hear the anger and desperation lurking beneath the laughter and clinking ice cubes. After half a dozen songs of sparkling, witty cynicism I was beginning to lose interest, but then he launched into something soft and mournful. The crowd’s chatter had gotten a little louder as the set stretched on, and the first few bars of the piano were drowned out, but pretty soon everybody shut up. I’m not exaggerating, you could hear people near the back of the room shushing folks behind them so they could hear the song, a wistful number about romantic disillusionment called “Love for Sale.”
I looked at Roxanne, and the look in her eyes was the same bittersweet look I felt in mine as he sang it. I looked back at the singer, and suddenly his gaze locked on me, another pair of eyes that had already seen a lifetime worth of loss. “Old love, new love, every love but true love.” By the time he got to the end he was almost whispering, and he finished the song with a soft piano flourish that drifted up into the rafters like cigarette smoke. Before the notes had completely died away, he’d risen from the bench, stepped out of the circle of light, and disappeared into the mass of bodies.
The room was silent for a moment, then the crowd cheered and whistled and called for more. He did not reappear, and after several moments the PA system offered us consolation in the melodious form of the Andrews Sisters. A strapping young man in a corporal’s uniform asked me to dance, and I obliged. He leered at me, to make sure I knew that he — like the Andrews Sisters — was in the mood. “Man, those gals sure can sing it,” he said.
“They’re fine,” I said, “but that guy at the piano — he was really something. I wonder if he’s on a USO tour.”
“Him?” The corporal looked at me like I was an idiot. “Nah, that guy works here. He’s one of the eggheads. Chemist or something.”
Just then — at least, this is the way I like to remember the timing — I saw a long finger tap the corporal on the shoulder. “Mind if I cut in?” It was him: the singer; he was talking to the soldier, but he was smiling at me. The corporal looked annoyed but also embarrassed, as if he thought the guy had heard himself called an egghead, or as if the corporal had called down this punishment on himself by being an unappreciative listener.
We danced just that one dance, then he asked if he could walk me back to my dorm. The walk was only two blocks, but that was enough to decide things for me. The corporal was right about one thing, Novak was a scientst. But he was wrong about the other — Novak wasn’t an egghead; he was funny and self-deprecating, and an odd mixture of confidence and humility. He was a prodigy, with Ph.D.’s in both chemistry and physics, but he was surprisingly humble. I thought I had hit the jackpot, Bill.