“Call me Bill,” I said, “unless you want to make me cranky.”
She smiled, then tilted her face toward the window and closed her eyes; the low sun highlighted the wrinkles left by decades of laughter and pain, but underneath I could discern the planes of a younger woman’s face. “That sun looks like a five-o’clock sun to me,” she said. “Close enough, anyway. The vodka’s on the bookshelf behind you. Pour me two fingers’ worth, would you, Bill? There’s ice in the ice bucket. Join me if you like.”
“I’d better not,” I said. “I can tell I need to keep my wits about me when I’m with you.” I didn’t see any point in telling her that I didn’t drink alcohol; she might think I disapproved of drinking, and that wasn’t the case. Rather, having spent years battling Menier’s disease, I tended to steer clear of anything that had the remotest chance of making me dizzy.
A crystal decanter, silver ice bucket, tongs, and two tumblers sat on a silver tray on a waist-high counter running the length of the back wall. Below the counter were cabinets; above it were bookshelves containing hundreds of volumes, ranging from small paperbacks to large leatherbound volumes. I wondered if she’d read them all. I put a few ice cubes into a tumbler, then poured the vodka from the decanter, catching a whiff of orange in the liquor. Did “two fingers” mean with or without the ice, I wondered, but I hated to betray my ignorance by asking. Without, I decided, and kept pouring, since the ice alone filled at least one finger’s worth of space.
One end of the counter held a cluster of framed photographs, and as I delivered the vodka, I detoured past the pictures. A half dozen or so in number, they were all in black-and-white, and I guessed by the clothing and hairstyles that they were from the 1940s. Suddenly I recognized one of the photos: I had seen it in the museum and the library the day of Novak’s funeral. It showed a striking young woman perched at a console of dials and levers, and in the five seconds it took me to walk back to the chairs with Beatrice’s drink, I realized that the pretty girl in the photo had the same cheekbones and jawline as the old woman facing the fading light. “That’s you in the picture,” I said.
“Not anymore,” she said. “That was a lifetime ago. But back during the war, I was the calutron poster girl.”
“What’s a calutron?”
“A California University cyclotron,” she said. “Invented by Ernest Lawrence, the Nobel laureate physicist from Berkeley. We used them at Y-12 to separate uranium-235 for the bomb. We weren’t told that’s what we were doing, of course. The foreman just told us to watch the gauges and twist the dials to keep the needles centered. So I watched and I twisted. And atom by atom, I was separating the isotopic wheat from the chaff, you might say. I was a winnower, Bill, on the threshing floor of the atomic barn.”
I held out the tumbler to her, and I noticed a slight tremor in the hand that took it. The sunlight caught the ice cubes and made them glow, like golden, living things. Beatrice’s skin was translucent in the sunlight; through it, I could see the spiderwork of thin purple veins, and—underneath—the withering strings of muscle and tendon. I almost thought I could see bone, too, but perhaps I was imagining it. She drew a deep breath, blew it out, and then took a sip of vodka. “I was a beauty once,” she said, pointing with her glass toward the photograph. She didn’t say it boastfully; it was a statement of fact, with a layer of nostalgia underneath. “As I said, that was a lifetime ago. I’m not that girl anymore. But oh, the stories I could tell you about her.”
“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.