“How do you know all this stuff,” I asked, “when we didn’t even know who he was until twelve hours ago?”
“Because the FBI has files, too,” he said, “and ours weren’t stored in a firetrap in St. Louis. And because Jonah Jamison was considered a potential security risk.”
“A security risk?” That made no sense to me. “If they didn’t trust him, why didn’t they get somebody else to write about the project? Why take the chance?”
“Well, he looked like a red-blooded American risk,” said Thornton. “His Achilles’ heels were booze and women. And Groves really wanted him. Jamison had written some flattering pieces about Groves in 1942, when Groves spearheaded the construction of the Pentagon. That was the Army’s biggest project before the Manhattan Project, and apparently the stories made Groves look brilliant. Jamison was drafted at the end of ’42, and Groves had him posted to Oak Ridge in early ’43. He was reported AWOL on August 4, 1945—two days before Hiroshima.”
“And he disappeared without a trace?”
“Until you dug him up,” Thornton said. “Him and that thick stack of pages.”
“I sure wish we could read what was on those pages that were in the grave,” said Emert.
“I sure wish we knew who killed him for writing it,” I said. “Anything in his security file shed light on that?”
“Unfortunately, no,” Thornton said. “But speaking of security files, your storytelling gal pal turned up in two of the snitch reports to Acme Credit.”
“Beatrice?”
“Yup. One came from a neighbor, anonymous, who wrote, ‘That woman has the morals of an alley cat.’”
I couldn’t help it; I laughed at that. It was impossible to imagine Beatrice, her silver hair and wrinkled face, behaving scandalously. “The bad girl of AARP,” I said.
“Maybe not now,” he said. “But maybe back then. The other report came several months after that first one. An army doc at the Oak Ridge field hospital wrote that she came in bleeding and running a fever. She claimed she’d had a miscarriage. But the doctor suspected she’d had an abortion.”
CHAPTER 36
WE WORE BADGES EVERYWHERE IN THOSE DAYS—NOT just to work, but to the grocery store, the post office, even church. Heaven forbid you should try to gain access to Jesus when your clearance was only for Yahweh. MPs ranged everywhere checking badges. The black section of town, Colored Town, was practically fenced off. If the face on your badge wasn’t black, a guard or MP sitting in a jeep beside the road into Colored Town might wave you over and ask what business you had in there.
The business I had in there was an abortion.
A year after I married Novak, I realized I was pregnant. This was not happy news. For one thing, I was working with radioactive materials.
We know a lot more now than we knew then about radioactivity and birth defects. I was working with equipment that flung atoms of U-235 and U-238 all over the place. In theory, the calutrons were collecting all the uranium, but in practice, it wasn’t so neat and tidy. It was probably like one of those big movie-theater popcorn poppers, the kind with the pot suspended up high inside a glass box. It’s designed to contain the popcorn, but if you look at the floor back there behind the concession stand, you’ll always see stray kernels that have ricocheted out through a gap in the gizmo. The calutrons were like that. At the end of every shift, they would run Geiger counters over us as we were leaving, and sometimes they’d find a stray particle or two of U-235 on somebody’s coveralls, which they’d remove with a magnifying glass and tweezers. It wasn’t that they were concerned about our health; it was that the uranium was so precious, they couldn’t afford to let a speck of it slip out the gate.
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.