Today, they won’t let you have an X-ray in the doctor’s office if you’re pregnant. Back then, though, there were thousands of young women of childbearing age working in areas filled with radiation sources. It amazes me there wasn’t a whole herd of babies with birth defects born in Oak Ridge in 1944 and 1945.
But the reason I needed an abortion wasn’t because I was worried about birth defects. The reason I needed an abortion was because the baby wasn’t Novak’s. After twelve months of marriage, we’d still never consummated it. Leonard Novak was many things — smart, funny, a brilliant scientist, a great jazz pianist — but heterosexual wasn’t one of them. At least not with me.
I had done my best to seduce my husband. At bedtime, I would undress in front of him. Sometimes I’d brush my hair out, a hundred strokes, sitting in my slip in front of the mirror. I’d get him drunk, hoping that would lower his inhibitions. Once the lights were out and we were under the covers, I would press myself against him. None of it worked, ever.
Do you have any idea what it’s like to be a woman whose husband shows absolutely no desire for her? Never makes any move to touch her? I knew enough by this point to know that I liked sex. Needed it, too. Maybe it was because my father died and my mother abandoned me when I was still young. Whatever the reason, I craved affection. Or maybe I just wanted sex because I was a healthy, fertile young woman surrounded by healthy, virile young soldiers and construction workers.
Within a week of marrying Novak, I knew I’d made a mistake, and within six months, I was getting restless and flirting with other men. Around noon every day, while Novak was off making plutonium at the Graphite Reactor, I’d walk down the hill to the recreation hall and strike up a conversation with some guy at the soda fountain. Sometimes we’d just talk for a while and then I’d catch the bus out to Y-12 for my evening shift at the calutron; sometimes the guy, whoever he was, would take me to a dorm room or a car or a trailer. It felt furtive and dirty, but it took away some of the loneliness. It gave me something to look forward to — and something to remember — during those long afternoon hours in a factory filled with vacuum pumps and invisible atoms and magnetic fields that pulled the bobby pins out of my hair. And it gave me something to cling to in the long, empty hours at night, when my husband gave me a peck on the cheek and rolled to the far side of the mattress.
Novak had to know I was being unfaithful to him. He was a smart man, after all; how could he not notice that the woman who’s been throwing herself at him, night after night, suddenly isn’t anymore? Did his relief that I was letting him off the hook make it easy for him to keep quiet about whatever he was noticing or wondering or suspecting? I can only guess that it must have. And I chose to interpret his silence as tacit approval, in some way.
But a baby: I knew a baby would change everything. A baby would have forced us to confront the issue, if you’ll pardon the pun. I couldn’t do it. And so it was I found myself one Saturday night — a night when I was pregnant and Novak was away — on the bus into Colored Town.
I wasn’t alone. I was riding with a young black woman from Y-12. Mary Alice was a cleaning woman in my building. That was the only sort of job they gave black people during the war — manual labor or janitorial work. I’d gotten to know her during smoke breaks and I liked her. Her mother, she said, was a sort of midwife, nurse, and healer. And an abortionist. When I found out I was pregnant, it hadn’t been hard for me to come up with a pretext for catching a bus with Mary Alice to Colored Town. I would sneak in by posing for the cameras.
When I became the calutron poster girl, I’d gotten chummy with the photographer, Ed Westcott. Nothing improper, not with him, but anytime he was taking pictures in my building, he’d stop by and chat for a minute. And when I found out that Mary Alice and her mother could help me out of my dilemma, I came up with an idea. Westcott was always looking for human-interest pictures — kids playing in a swimming hole, cub scouts learning to build campfires, cars stuck in the mud. Once he shot Santa Claus being frisked by security guards. Christ, we thought, if even Santa’s getting checked for contraband, who are we mere mortals to complain?
Westcott was famous, in a way. As the project’s photographer, he was free to come and go pretty much wherever he pleased, and he’d been ranging all over the townsite and the plants since the very beginning. Most of the guards would motion him right through checkpoints, smiling and waving; some of them would stop him just long enough to strike a pose and ask him when he was going to take their picture. Occasionally he did, which earned him all sorts of goodwill.
Anyway, what I suggested to Westcott was a picture showing me giving reading lessons to Mary Alice and some of the other girls in Colored Town. “I think it could be a good civic project,” I said. “Maybe if you did a picture and the paper ran it, we’d drum up some interest and some volunteers.” He liked the idea, and he agreed to meet me at the colored recreation hall. So when the bus driver asked me why a white woman was heading into Colored Town on a Saturday night, I told him Mr. Westcott was coming to take a picture of me teaching colored girls to read. That seemed to be a good enough reason.
Colored Town was officially called the “colored hutment area” on the map. Hutments were shabby, prefab plywood shacks, sixteen feet square. They were trucked in by the thousands and shoehorned together, about ten feet apart. There was a hutment area for whites, too, but the white hutments were better. The colored hutments didn’t even have real windows, just screened-in openings covered with hinged panels of plywood. If the people inside wanted daylight, they’d swing up some of the hinged panels and prop them open. That might have been okay in decent weather, but when it was cold, the choice was between warmth and light, and even the warmth wasn’t all that warm — every hutment had a cast-iron coal stove in the middle of the room, but as drafty as the buildings were, and as scarce as coal rations were, people in the hutments were miserably cold in the winter. The other thing about the colored hutments was that there were men’s hutments and women’s hutments, four people per hutment. Black couples who were married got split up so the army could cram four people into every one of those dreadful little shacks.
Colored Town had its own rec center, too, and the story there was the same — it was cheaper and crummier than the white people’s version. No Ping-Pong tables or pool tables or piano; just a few tables and chairs. Even so, when Mary Alice and I walked in that night, the place was crowded and lively. Couples sat at some of the tables playing bridge; groups of men with poker chips at others. At one end of the room, somebody had a radio, and couples were jitterbugging to the music. The instant I walked in the door, the noise died down and every head turned in our direction. Thousands of black people crammed in a shabby ghetto, and in walks a lily-white woman.
“You in the wrong place, white girl,” said a man just inside the door, but then Mary Alice called him by name and told him to mind his business. “She’s all right,” Mary Alice said. “She’s with me.” She led us to a distant corner of the room where a middle-aged man and woman sat in straight-backed chairs angled toward each other. “Mama, this here is Beatrice, that I told you about.” Her mother looked me up and down. The man looked away, as if to give us a measure of privacy, and I was grateful.