My mother pulled away, scanning my face. “Let me look at you.”
“I’m all right. I’m really all right.”
“Was it a bad boy you were mixed up with?”
I shook my head. “Not bad. But he was no Charlie Fish.”
She smiled. “There’s only one of them.”
“I need to go,” I said, expecting her to argue, predicting her resistance. “I can’t stay here. I need to leave Chicago.”
“Probably you do, Brenda.”
“Excuse me?”
“Before you pack your bags though, look at this.” She drew me to the breakfast table, where a map of New Mexico was already spread flat.
“This is the homework I had to leave the store to do today. Did you know that libraries subscribe to newspapers from all over? They have a whole room of them.” She handed me a list she’d made. “These are jobs in Santa Fe, from the want ads. A church is looking for an organist and choir director. Land that, and all we’d have to do is find you a place to live.”
“This is possible?”
“This is necessary, my girl. For about twenty reasons.”
“And I would go?” I asked. “And live there?”
“I’m betting there isn’t an organist of your ability in two hundred miles of Santa Fe. And working as a professional will keep you skilled for the conservatory.”
My hands dropped to my sides. “Mother.”
“I know,” she said. Our eyes met. What she was suggesting meant something huge. She would be the only one of us left in Chicago. And I would follow my heart to New Mexico. For the first time in my life, I thought my mother looked old.
She lit a cigarette, making a slow upward exhale. “I know, my girl. I know.”
26.
As it turned out, he had learned everything he needed to know from Beasley. A tortoise with a soldering iron, Charlie squatted on the wide fabrication table, half-trusting the sawhorses that held it up, and built his assembly step by torturous step. How odd it was, that the stork man in a Chicago basement had brought him to this point: fourteen devices in a single circuit, more than anyone had built before, designed to detonate simultaneously. Leaning over the triggering place, and reaching four devices down the line, he touched the tester’s sensors to each end. The white light blinked on, the indicator needle jumped. Easing down as if from a rickety ladder, he allowed himself a second to admire his progress.
“Why are you climbing around like that?”
Charlie jerked upright, catching his breath, and saw Mather leaning in the doorway. He took out a toothpick and needled his front teeth. “You look like a monkey.”
“The testing device is too small,” Charlie answered. “Short wires. I have to test the assembly in parts.”
Mather smirked. “It wouldn’t occur to you to connect more wire, so you could check the whole thing? Start to finish?”
“I tried that for two weeks.” Charlie circled the fabrication table. “But whenever something didn’t work, I had to diagnose piece by piece anyway.”
“I heard two of your last ones didn’t go off as planned.”
“True. But ten did, which was a new record.”
“Sounds like failure to me.” Tonguing the toothpick to one side of his mouth, Mather sauntered into the room. Wires splayed all over the table, threading among little mounds of electronic parts. “Reminds me of a toy train.”
Charlie climbed gingerly on the near corner, hunching the tester over more nodes. “Maybe, but it’s a powerful toy.”
“Still,” Mather said. “It appears you deserve your nickname.”
The needle jumped again. “I have a nickname?”
“Come on,” Mather scoffed. “You were probably the first to know.”
Charlie crept off the table. “I don’t know what day it is. I can’t remember the last time I showered, or ate an actual meal.” He straightened, the tester’s wires dangling. “Nicknames have not been a priority.”
Mather took out his toothpick and inspected the tip. “Bronsky must have a string tied directly to your balls.”
Charlie circled his project, then paused. “Did you hear that the SS killed fifty thousand Poles last week, to retaliate for the Warsaw uprising? Bronsky is not the problem. I have fifty thousand strings tied to me.”
“What a good soldier you are,” Mather scoffed.
“I hope not.” Charlie arrived at the last four points in his circuit. Mather stood in front of them. “Excuse me,” Charlie said.
“I’m in your way.” Mather stepped aside, then leaned on another corner of the table. It began to tip and Charlie rushed over.
“Please. This is weeks of work. No touching.”
“You,” Mather said, hands high like he was under arrest, “are a man incapable of irony. Using it, recognizing it.”
Charlie narrowed his eyes. “Why do you insist on being such a difficult person?”
Mather sighed, giving him a bland regard. “I wonder if you would understand.”
Charlie set down the tester. “Try me.”
“All right.” He pointed with the toothpick. “For all of your gee-whiz ways, Fish, there have been times in your life in which you were the smartest person in the room.”
“Oh, I don’t know about—”
“Spare me the oh-shucks. You were admitted to Harvard, so you were likely first in your class in high school. Probably the sharpest mind in some college classes too. Didn’t you graduate at twenty?”
“This project grabbed me before graduation,” Charlie said. “But I was eighteen.”
“There.” Mather leaned against an empty desk, crossing his arms. “Now imagine being the smartest person in the room, for every room you ever inhabit. Imagine how tedious humanity would seem. How shallow. ‘Hello, how are you today?’ God help me.”
“Is that your affliction, Mather? Too smart to be nice?”
“You mock me, which I may deserve. But I tell you this, Fish: Over in Theoretical, I am no big deal. Fermi has intellectual thunderbolts that reimagine the world. Just crossing the street, he realized that atomic reactions could occur. And Bethe, calculation by calculation, has such colossal brain power, I feel like an ant.”
Mather straightened. “It may well turn out that this strange, perverse, remote place is the happiest I will ever be.”
Charlie had no idea how to answer. Was the man indulging in unbridled arrogance? Or was he committing brutal honesty? He decided to change the subject.
“Tell me,” Charlie said. “What became of your beautiful sister?”
Mather shrugged. “She’s a WAC. Some hospital in London. Rarely writes.”
“Maybe she’ll meet a prince, like you always thought she deserved.”
Mather paused before a blueprint of the Gadget, the sphere with nodes poking out. This version was more detailed than the one at Sebring’s lecture, with measurements, dimensions, details about how much explosive would be placed in each node. “Prince or not, he’d better have a decent backhand.”
Meanwhile, Charlie had turned from him, leaning over the last set of nodes. He touched the tester’s wires to either end, and the little white light came on. “There it is,” he announced. “The whole thing works. Fourteen detonators on one command.”