It was my wits that got me a job operating a calutron in the heart of the Y-12 Plant. But it was luck that steered me to Leonard Novak the night he played and sang. You asked how I could not have known Leonard was gay. I did know. I also knew Leonard was marrying me to deflect suspicions about his homosexuality. But Leonard never knew I was marrying him to get information about his work. I didn’t get much; maybe his lips were looser with whatever lovers he took.
But I hit the mother lode with Jonah, who was tagging along with the photographer, Westcott, the day I became the calutron poster girl. If not for Jonah, I might have had nothing to show for two years of work but dial readings and the story about Lawrence blowing up the calutron. As luck would have it, though, while Westcott was setting up the camera and lights for the calutron shoot, Jonah was flirting and bragging about how he had a bird’s-eye view of the bustle and brilliance. That’s when I realized he could be my eyes all over Oak Ridge. That’s when I realized I had to make Jonah fall in love with me.
Once he did, it wasn’t hard to plant the idea in his head that we’d have more time together if he’d dictate his history of the project and let me type it up.
I didn’t dare make carbon copies; instead I took photos of Jonah’s manuscript pages, just as I’d done with the engineering drawings at the aircraft plant. My film drop was in the cemetery of First Presbyterian Church in downtown Knoxville, a block behind the bars on Gay Street. I could get a ride into Knoxville just about any weekend—Leonard was working eighty hours a week, and as long as I didn’t get into trouble, he felt guilty enough to let me do as I pleased. Everybody makes a big deal about how Oak Ridge was the city behind a fence, but the security guards were mainly searching guys for guns or hooch. Carloads of cute young women, out for a night on the town? The guards eyed us pretty closely, but they weren’t looking for film.
By the summer of 1945, the gaseous-diffusion cascades at K-25 were finally turning out significant amounts of slightly enriched uranium, and the calutrons at Y-12 were doing a good job of turning that into bomb-grade material. Leonard’s chemists at the Graphite Reactor had worked out how to create and extract plutonium, and the giant reactors out at Hanford were starting to crank that out steadily. In the two years since I’d gotten off the train, everything had come together. Groves pulled together all these theory-minded physicists and chemists, created immense factories around their ideas, and damned if it all didn’t work just like they said it would.
And Jonah Jamison wrote it all down, the epic saga of Oak Ridge. He was a good storyteller; much better than I’ve ever been. I read every word he wrote, and took pictures of them all.
Until the day he caught me, just as we were nearing the end of the story.
Leonard was on a trip to Hanford—as you know—so Jonah and I had gotten careless. He’d brought the typewriter over to the house, because his metal trailer was like a solar oven. He’d told me he’d be gone all morning, so I’d laid out some pages of typescript on the kitchen table, where the light was good, and I was shooting copies with my little Minox camera. I guess I’d forgotten to lock the door, because all of a sudden it opened, and there stood Jonah, the light pouring in around him, staring at me, staring at the pages on the table, staring at the tiny camera in my hands. We stood like that for what seemed like several minutes, just looking at each other, then he stepped inside, closed the door, and grabbed my wrist with his left hand. By the way, Bill, you’re right—his left arm and his grip were very strong. He bent my wrist back until I thought it would snap, and with his other hand he took the camera from me.
It was a hot day—early August, in a house with no air-conditioning. I wasn’t wearing much—just a short-sleeved shirt of Leonard’s, and it wasn’t even buttoned. When Jonah twisted my wrist back, the shirt came open, and Jonah looked down at my body. And even though he knew I was betraying him—knew I was betraying everything he was writing about—I saw that he still desired me, at least in that moment. When I saw the hunger, that’s when I knew I had a chance. Maybe he saw hunger in my eyes, too, mixed with my fear and desperation.
So we’re standing there, my wrist still bent back in his left hand, my shirt wide open, and Jonah takes the camera from me and sets it on the table, then he slides his hand down my throat and down my body. I’m trembling, and I can see that he likes that. He’s got his teeth clenched, and his nostrils are flaring, and his breath is getting ragged, and he’s starting to tremble, too, and then he starts fumbling with the buttons of the army coveralls he wore all the time.
“The bed,” I say. “Please. The bed.”