“Last I heard she was in England.”
“Nursing assistant at a war hospital, that plucky gal.” Mather picked a sheet of paper up from the desk. “One anecdote from her last letter should suffice.”
As he spoke, he folded the paper this way and that. “One day she was delivering some documents, an innocent messenger for some VIP, scurrying through the ward, when a surgeon shouted at her to assist him. It was an emergency. Well, she has the heart of an authentic do-gooder, but no medical training whatsoever. He said it didn’t matter, this boy would die of infection if he did not amputate immediately, and there were no nurses available. He pointed to where she was to secure the delirious fellow’s leg.” Mather put the paper down to hang his hands out in the air, holding an imaginary thigh. “She put her hands on his swollen skin, and it was hot to the touch. The surgeon placed a blade against the skin, and the moment he applied pressure, the wound burst. My sister was not wearing a mask, of course, and it sprayed into her face.”
“That is a horror,” Charlie said.
“Blood, pus, who knows what hideousness.” Mather dropped his hands. “Poor boy probably died within the hour anyway. But my sweet, dutiful sister remained at the bedside, as ordered, until she found herself holding an amputated leg. Then that lovely girl asked the surgeon, ‘Where do I put this?’”
He picked up the paper again, crushed it into a ball, and tossed it toward a wastebasket. It missed and bounced away on the floor. “You don’t need a battle to destroy you. That nice tennis girl? That beautiful tomboy? Wrecked. Utterly wrecked.”
“Is anyone going to get out of this war intact?” Charlie asked. “Anyone?”
“Did you know,” Mather said, rousing himself, sitting up straight, “Fish, did you know that our armed forces set aside certain cities as ineligible for fire bombings? Apparently we wanted them kept pristine for the Gadget.”
“What do you mean?”
“If your atomic bomb blows down charred timbers, where’s the glory? They set a few places aside, intact. A better canvas on which to display the art of annihilation.”
Charlie sat with his head down for a full minute, struggling not to vomit. When he looked up, Mather was staring at him. “I’m having a difficult time with all of this.”
“Consider mankind as a species,” Mather replied. “Is it a collection of angels, who make music and art and automobiles? Or is it a mob of monsters? These are the questions I ask.”
“And what do you think, now that we know how to split an atom?”
“What I have long suspected,” Mather said, a smile coming to his face. “Our species is capable of anything.”
47.
My mother stayed till the stitches came out, then caught a train back to Chicago. Lizzie waited two solid days before coming to the doorway of my room, a look on her face that made me think she was going to say she was seriously ill.
“Here’s what you need to know first,” she said instead.
“About what?” I was flat on my back. I’d managed to make it downstairs twice each day, even shuffling half a block from the house the second time, though the climb back up the stairs was still daunting. I had dressed for the day’s first salvo, but paused before starting the struggle to get my shoes on.
“First you need to know that my husband, my powerful lover Tim, was scheduled to ship out from San Diego in three weeks.”
“For the invasion, yes. You told me.”
“He’s a medic,” she added. “So he’d be running right into the gunfire.”
“Let’s sincerely hope that doesn’t happen.”
“You believe that, don’t you? And we should take any steps we can to prevent it?”
“Lizzie,” I sat up, no easy task. “Of course. What’s this all about?”
She rubbed a finger under her nose. “Our country took steps.”
“Good. Did it work?”
“Not yet. But I need you to be thinking that way.”
“You’re scaring me a little,” I said.
“We’ve been keeping something from you. Mrs. Morris wanted to wait longer, but the hell with her.”
“Is it about Charlie? Is he all right?”
Lizzie hesitated. “He’s fine. Though he’s also probably not entirely okay.”
“Tell me,” I said. “Say it plain.”
Lizzie took a deep breath. Her fingers were in a knot. She shook them loose and sat on the bed. “There is a bomb. Well, two. Bigger than any bomb ever.”
“Does our side have them?”
She nodded. “We dropped the first one on a city called Hiroshima. It killed a hundred thousand people.”
“What?”
“The second hit the city of Nagasaki. They say that one killed seventy thousand.”
“Why kill the whole city? Were they some kind of military fortresses?”
“No. Just regular cities. But we killed everyone.”
“That’s not right,” I said, standing up. I had to hold the wall a second, while my blood caught up with my body. “Unless . . . has Japan surrendered?”
Lizzie shook her head. “I can’t imagine why not. The photographs in the papers are horrifying. The cities look flattened. Nothing left.”
“That sounds savage.”
“I’m not heartless, Brenda.” She unclipped her hair so that it fell around her face. “I feel bad for the women and children and old folks who got cooked by that bomb.”
“Naturally.”
“But their country started it,” she continued, reaching back to braid her hair. “They are the ones who refuse to surrender. The hell with them. Now they know we will make them fry.” She quit braiding and pushed her hair to one side. “They’ll quit soon. And my husband will come home in one piece.”
I considered that for a moment. “What does all this have to do with Charlie?”
Lizzie sighed. “The bomb was made here, kid.”
“What do you mean, ‘here’?”
“Los Alamos. In a giant secret lab. Other labs helped, but this was the main one. Charlie works at the place that made this bomb, that killed all those people.”
Oh, an old conversation came back to me: Charlie talking about building a giant gun, with a bullet so huge it could not be aimed.
“How great are we, right?” She was smiling. “Now Tim won’t die on some island ten thousand miles from here, and we are the greatest warrior nation ever. Also cold-blooded murderers, but who cares, if it means your man is coming home.”
“I thought Charlie was doing math.”
She laughed. “He was. Math on how to flatten an entire city with one punch.”
I sat down on the bed. Had I underestimated Charlie all this time? No. I knew him. I knew that his work had been tearing him up. I remembered the day he could not stop shaking. That man would not contribute to a weapon so destructive. “I’m telling you, Lizzie. Charlie doesn’t know anything about bombs. He’s a mathematician.” I set my jaw. “I don’t believe you.”
“I thought that might happen,” Lizzie answered evenly. “So I brought this.”