Family - a novel by Tom Lyons pdf

Family

A novel by Tom Lyons
Part 1
San Francisco, California, Bay Area
October 1945

1.

“When sorrows come, they come not single spies, but in battalions.”
William Shakespeare – Hamlet, Prince of Denmark

Doctor James T. Palmer

It is amazing how clear in my mind are the events that transpired on the
morning that I was kidnapped.
Crystal clear.
My short term memory, I admit, is not as precise as it once was; seems like I
forget a lot these days, but all of the events of the morning I was kidnapped are
stamped into my brain as if chiseled.
The morning, like all my mornings, was dripping in routine. I rise early, often
before the sun. On with the slippers, you know the kind, tattered and worn, but
comfortable. Then the slow shuffle outside to collect the morning paper. I settle in
with hot fresh brewed coffee.
I read the obituaries first.
Do I have a fascination with death? No. With my own death? Hardly. How
many good years do I have left? I am fifty, life expectancy these days for a healthy
male is sixty-five, which is better than it was forty five years ago in 1900, when the
average life expectancy for an American male was forty-six years of age.
I read the names, the dates when they were born, when they died. I look at

where they lived; when I see that the deceased lived in Hayward California I
extrapolate info more closely since I, too, grew up here in Hayward; perhaps I knew
them while he, or she, was alive? Many have faded black and white pictures above
the written obit; I read the description below on each. When it states that the person
died ‘suddenly or unexpectedly’, I think that the person may have had a heart attack
or brain stroke. When the description states that the person died “after a long
illness”, then I think that the person might have been suffering from a cancer.
I remember a great sadness weighed me down, like an anvil hanging on my
neck; I felt nausea knot my stomach. I would have to write an obituary myself; my
brother Ed, Doctor Ed Palmer to be more accurate, had just died in a single engine
plane crash in the foothills near Las Vegas Nevada. He was forty-eight years of age.
Ed was flying his normal weekly run between Lawrence Livermore National
Lab and Los Alamos Lab in the New Mexico desert. He was an experienced pilot and
had logged tens of thousands of miles; from early reports it looked like he was
preparing to land near Henderson Nevada to refuel, as his Champion 7 single engine
single winged plane had a flying range of 460 miles. Probably got tangled in one of
those violent hot air thermals that you fly into in the area, which could shake a small
plane around like a clothes washer and smash it to the ground like a raggedy Andy
doll. He had been missing for several days before a search party found the wreck
and one charred body.

-Don’t need you on this trip brother.
He said to me before leaving; frequently I made the trip with him.
-Not our normal weekly meeting. He added.
-Have to sort something out with Julius. He said, referring to Doctor J Robert
Oppenheimer, who, ninety days after Hiroshima, was already considered to be the
father of the Atomic bomb.
Little did I know that those would be the last words he would ever speak to
me.
Something else happened on the day that I was kidnapped; I remember it

clearly because it had never happened before. My car did not start right away. Babe
coughed a little when I turned the key. So I gave him a moment to catch his breath
and fired him up again.
At what point does a car cease to be an inanimate piece of metal and rubber
and become an old friend instead? Almost like a member of the family. For me it was
when Babe hit 180,000 miles. He kept chugging along. He never broke down.
-Just put one foot in front of the other, soldier on.
My son JT, the Navy Master at Arms would say.
“Babe” was a regal blue 1939 Lincoln Continental town car, with regal blue
leather interior and white wall tires, which I named after baseball legend Babe Ruth.
He owned the same model, year, and color car. The retired baseball great would
barnstorm the country teaching baseball to children. The newsreels I saw were
alarming; once a great hulk of a man with enormous appetites for all fine things in
life; booze, food, fancy clothes, and women especially - recent news footage showed
a thinner, gaunt like, skeleton faced man – as if he was ill.
Babe has a top speed of eighty miles per hour; I let her warm in the garage
for fifteen minutes before I drove off; that is how long it takes the glass vacuum
tubes of the state-of-the-art-radio to warm up. I listen to the latest news as I drive.
Sure he had lost some of his get-up-and-go just as old folks lose strength and
flexibility. As he aged I fed him correctly, made sure he had regular checkups, and
even bought him new glasses, er, I mean, windshield wipers when he needed them.
He rewarded me by being dependable and trustworthy; he was there when I needed
him; my butt fit into that driver’s seat like a hand slipping into a warm wool mitten.
He never had a problem; never let me down. Babe’s odometer was now approaching
230,000 miles.
-Atta boy Babe.
I said when he started on the second try.
-Atta boy. I remember that clearly.

2.

I teach physics at Cal Berkeley; I live twenty minutes south of Cal in Hayward,
a sleepy little town, mainly a food-canning center, of 8,000 people. My wife Kat and I
do not have a fancy house, just an average size two bedroom, painted white; paint
peeling off of the wood siding. The bath is indoors though, which is nice, plus we
were just hooked up to the new city sewer system, so we were able to get rid of our
old septic, which tended to clog during the wet, rainy, winter season here in the Bay
Area. It’s one of the few homes in the area with a basement; our coal heater is down
there; we just had a new coal shute installed so I no longer have to shovel and haul
coal down stairs. Last week we purchased and installed a newer, larger, and more
efficient icebox in the kitchen; one who’s melted ice pan did not need emptying so
often.
I saw Navy warships as I left my house that morning; the battleship USS
California which was sunk by Japanese torpedoes at Pearl Harbor and the battleship
USS Alabama with its 16 inch guns capable of firing a 2,000 pound bomb over 17
miles through the air - lay anchored in the bay. The California was salvaged and
reconstructed here at the Alameda Naval Shipyard. I remember hearing bugles
sounding attention as flags, whipped by wind, were hoisted. Other Navy warships
lay anchored in the bay, destroyers mostly; the fleet was coming home.
Though early in the morning the streets in Hayward bustled with car traffic,
buses filled with busy worker bees rumbled by. Sailors dressed in white bellbottoms
and pillbox sailor’s hats walked by in pairs. They looked proud. I stopped Babe and
let a horse driven fruit truck pass.
-Fresh strawberries, strawberries!
The large round mustached fruit man yelled in a deep clear voice that
carried for blocks. I watched as one sailor, holding hands with a pretty young
woman, her red hair in a pony, stopped and bought a box of berries. She threw her
arms around his neck and kissed him eagerly as he fed her the fruit.
People were happy.

The war was over. Our boys were coming home. The slaughter of millions of
people was coming to an end. It was several months after V-J day, victory in Japan,
three months after we dropped the atomic bomb, “Little Boy”, on Hiroshima which
instantly vaporized seventy-five thousand Japanese men, women, and children and,
if reports were accurate, burns and radiation sickness killed another seventy-five-
thousand Japanese people over the next thirty days. But US military experts
predicted that our military could lose five-hundred-thousand-men during an
invasion on the Japanese mainland, so the powers that be decided that dropping the
A bomb would be the way to go. A week after Hiroshima, we vaporized another
ninety thousand Japanese men, women, and children at Nagasaki with an even more
powerful Hydrogen bomb.
Then the war was over.
I watched as a milkman, dressed in a starched white uniform, loped up a
brick stoop; he procured two glass bottle empties, then deposited two full bottles of
milk by the front door; I heard him whistle as he stepped towards the next house.
Like I said, people were happy.
Babe’s radio was fully warmed; I listened to the reports on the ’45 World
Series. Detroit had beaten the Chicago Cubs in seven games and the announcer was
talking about something called ‘The Curse of the Billy Goat.’ Apparently a Cub fan
was asked to leave game seven at Wrigley Field because the odor of the pet goat that
he had brought to the game was offensive to other fans. Before the incident the Cubs
had been winning the game, but Detroit rallied late to win the game and the series.
The announcer then stated that the Cubs would never win a World Series because of
the incident. The curse had been placed on the Chicago Cubs. Well, at least baseball’s
best players would be back in uniform next year; most were still in the service this
year.
I had a meeting scheduled at Lawrence Livermore National Lab that morning
so instead of heading North to Berkeley; I drove east towards Livermore. Once over
the hill all I saw was vacant land, the golden hills of California, wheat colored dried-
out flash-fire-ready land as far as the eye could see. The lab was built in the middle

of nowhere, away from crowded towns and people, so as not to contaminate with
the testing.
My thoughts turned towards my one and only child, my son JT Palmer, short
for James Thomas. JT was twenty-seven years old now and had served as a Master at
Arms aboard a naval ship in the Pacific. What ship did he serve on? Who knew?
Where in the Pacific did he serve? Did he see combat action? I don’t know the
answer to those questions either. The Navy does not release that information.
Sensitive information might fall into enemy hands which could jeopardize the safety
of all aboard. All I knew was that JT had spent the last three months at a VA hospital
in Hawaii, which means that he had been injured, probably during combat in the
Pacific theatre.
When he first entered the VA hospital the Navy sent me a short, one page
letter. Nothing more. Then I received a letter from JT, telling me that he was okay. It
took one week for each letter to travel across the ocean and arrive stateside; it took
ninety days for JT to be healthy enough to be released. He was due to arrive at Mares
Island Naval Facility within the next several days. Nothing in this life is more
important to me than my son; I had planned to be there when he arrived home. But
before he arrived I was kidnapped.



3.

-We met fifteen years ago. Roxy said, emotion getting the best of her. As I
drove east towards Livermore, bright early morning sun making me squint to see
the road ahead, I recalled the conversation that my wife Kat and I had with Ed’s
widow.
-Did you know that? Roxy asked.
-We knew each other for three years before he proposed.
Roxanna, Roxy for short, had sat down abruptly when she heard the news, as

if sucker punched. It seemed like all the air had left her body. Born in Kiev Russia
Roxy had the classic Northern Slav appearance; lily white porcelain skin; it looked
like she would instantly burn and peel if she spent ten minutes outside in the
California sun. Slim, but short and stocky with frizzy blonde hair and a flat face and
nose; blue eyes that bored through you.
-She has good birthing hips.
My brother Ed had once said of her, though after ten years of marriage they
had no children. She was in her early forties, which would have made her a young
teenager when the last Russian Czar, Nicolas II, and his wife, son, and four
daughters, were assassinated in 1917. When she spoke there was no trace of an
accent.
-I was a dancer, a ballet dancer, when we met in Moscow. She started.
-Your brother was studying at Cambridge, but he would travel to my country
to lecture. Then she added: -Why weren’t you with him on this trip?
She was chain-smoking unfiltered Lucky Strike cigarettes.
-He said that he had a meeting with Oppenheimer.
-I thought that the two of you worked together.
For the most part this was true. My brother Ed and I were not the first pair of
brothers to become physicists who worked together. Ernest Lawrence, whom the
Lab in Livermore was named after, and his physicist brother John, were one such
example. A vision flashed through my mind, a vision of my brother Ed piloting his
plane; he loved to fly.
-Light the fires! He would say.
-And strap in tight, Jimmy boy.
He’d call me ‘Jimmy boy’ though I was fifteen months older than him.
-Check the cone.
Then he’d take off, plane heading west into the wind; at a height of one
hundred feet he’d bank hard southeast, then yell with glee. Over the South
Livermore hills we flew, over Site 300, until we were over the Central Valley. He’d
navigate by keeping the ever-present California sun to the left of the plane. I

remember smelling engine fuel. Eventually, we’d drop down over the Southern
Sierra and swoop down into Henderson to refuel. Navigating the bumpy hot air
thermals here was the most dangerous part of the flight; another vision flashed to
me, one of his plane hitting a violent thermal which could instantly hurl the plane,
like a small toy, several hundred feet downward in a couple of seconds. Perhaps his
motor stalled? Or worse yet, he could have lost a wing strut? This was not out of the
question as those struts were held in place by a few bolts only.
-I was not invited to this meeting. I said.
-His plane was found? Cigarette smoke spiraling upward.
-Yes. His plane.
What do you say to someone when his or her spouse had just died in a plane
crash? For that matter what do you say, or feel, when your brother dies?
There is nothing to say. We sat and cried.
-I made some matsah ball soup. Kat said.
My beautiful Kat. My wife of ten years. Tall, slim and blonde, she was striking
at forty-seven years of age. That smile of hers, that feminine tilt of her head while
she contemplated what was being said, it still had a devastating effect on me. Kat
was not my son JT’s natural mother. His natural mother, Edna Jean, had died twenty
years ago when JT was seven. She had picked up the family cat, in an attempt to put
it outside; claws flashed. Three days later her hand became infected, a day later it
turned into staff, and two days after that Edna Jean was dead. She was thirty years
old. Penicillin, or any kind of antibiotic, had not yet been invented. Though it
happened twenty years ago I still teared when I thought about my first wife.
-Have some soup. Kat said to Roxy, as she spooned out dumplings made of
matzah meal, eggs, water, and oil that had simmered in home made chicken broth.
-It’s good for you.
I could see that Roxy was upset; she was taking the news hard.

4.

Next thing that I remember about that morning was what I saw while
approaching the City of Livermore. Farms, ranches, horses and cows penned by
barbed wire fences. ‘No Trespassing’ signs with the wording ‘Violators will be shot!!’
Some property lines were marked by meandering two foot tall rock walls, made
from small rock and built immigrant Chinese back in the late 1800’s. A few tattered
American flags dangled in the morning sun. Downtown Livermore was a collection
of small buildings; a livery store, the post office, where people milled about looking
for letters from the boys still not home from the war, plus a local bar, where a young
woman dressed in a tight white skirt, her faced painted with lipstick stood outside.
One paved road ran down the center of the town, the side streets were dirt, not yet
paved. The entire city smelled like a mixture of dust, horses and dung.
It was a wild-west town, except for the Atomic bomb producing nuclear
facility located two miles away.
I drove east along a narrow dirt road, then the unfathomable happened. Babe
started to overheat; he hissed like a teakettle. A mile out of town I heard a loud
metal clank under the hood, then a grinding sound like metal slicing metal, a freight
train slamming on the brakes. With steam flying from under the hood, dust thrown
into the air from all four wheels, Babe ground to a halt.
-Ah.
I slammed the steering wheel in exasperation.
-Come on Babe. Not now.
With a PhD in Physics I would easily recite the formulas on how to separate
uranium isotopes by bombarding them with high-energy electrons, but as I opened
Babe’s hood and looked inside I had to scratch my head and extrapolate for a
second. Babe had struck out; he had overheated and threw an engine rod.
Ok. No problem, I thought. I was a mile from the lab, so I loosened my tie,

untied the top button of my white dress shirt and removed my tweed sports jacket
and flung it over my shoulder. The October morning California sun was beginning to
heat; I could see waves coming off the road; beads of sweat dotted my forehead.
Then, from the east, I saw dust flying.
A car was approaching.


5.


Katherine Palmer blamed the London Blitz for the way things were in her life
nowadays but in her heart the voice inside her said that she had nobody to blame
but herself.
Kat rose at ten AM and tasted the now cold cup of coffee on the nightstand.
He’s always taking care of me, she thought.
She walked into the bathroom, looked at her naked body in the mirror and
began to examine her breasts. Kat chuckled at the memory of being eleven years old,
hoping that her breasts would come in soon. Worrying that they wouldn’t. By the
age of fourteen she would yell – “Stop growing already!” That’s when the boys
started showing up.
She started examining her own breasts when her sister Dee had found a
couple of ‘grape sized rock hard lumps’ in her left breast six years ago. Diedre was
two years younger than Kat.
Kat and Dee started taking care of each other when they were teenagers.
Mom tabled two waitress jobs to make ends meet. Pap sold encyclopedia’s from
door to door in San Jose California. Each morning he’d dress in his lumpy brown suit
and white starched shirt and yellow tie: he’d put on his brown fedora hat and pick
up the case that must have weighed fifty pounds.
-Make an investment in your child’s future. He’d told Kat he’d liked to say as
he knocked on doors. He knew he’d made a sale once he had showed a boy child a

picture of a dinosaur. The parents would notice the boy’s eyes go wide. Girl children
he would show pictures of houses, ones with yards that showed children playing on
green lawn. But once Pap got home from work it was straight to the vodka. Every
night. Sometimes Kat would see purple bruises on Mom’s face that she’d try to cover
with rouge. Mom never said much; quietly she went about the business of taking
care of her family; cooking, cleaning, scrubbing dirty wash and hanging it on the
clotheslines outside to dry in the breeze. But she locked her bedroom door. Dee was
fourteen when her breasts started to grow, then their father, too, began to look at
both of them the way men look at women.
-Stay away from her, you monster!
Kat yelled at him one night, so full of rage she almost spit, when she caught
Pap looking at Dee that way one evening. The girls, who shared a bedroom until Kat
left home at age seventeen, locked their bedroom door and made sure that they
stayed safe.

-My doctor says that it is a good thing for women to do.
Dee had said during one of the infrequent times they were able to talk on the
telly. Phone reception was poor.
-Examine your own breasts. She had said.
-Otherwise by the time they find a growth it may be too late.
Dee had lived in London with her British foreign correspondent husband of
thirteen years; he wrote articles on the tensions between England and Germany that
existed in the late 1930’s. Since phone lines had to travel across the country, then
under the ocean to Great Britain, it took thirty seconds for Dee to respond after Kat
said something to her. Plus the reception was poor.
Doctors cut both of Dee’s breasts clean off and they took a significant amount
of flesh from her armpits as well in an attempt to remove her lymph nodes. It took
six months before she regained reasonable use of her arms. The doctors injected her
with this brand new form of cancer treatment called chemotherapy, a thick
brownish yellow gooey liquid made from a derivative of the poison mustard gas that

killed tens of thousands of young men in the trenches in Europe during World War I.
First, Dee’s facial coloring turned pale, then her hair fell out in clumps. She lost
weight, over twenty pounds; she vomited everything she ate; she kept puking until
the bile in her stomach had come up as well.
Sixty days after the chemotherapy treatment ended Dee seemed to be doing
better; the weekly letters that she sent from London expressed her increased
optimism about her health.
But the London blitz, or the battle for London, which started in September of
1940 changed all that. German Luftwaffe Heinkel HE III bombers dropped
thousands of one hundred and ten pound incendiary bombs on London for fifty-
seven consecutive nights. The bombs specifically manufactured to spread fire as
quick as they could, by using napalm and white phosphorus, were designed to
firebomb London into submission.
In one of the last letters that Kat received Dee explained that she had
volunteered for the Red Cross. They had fitted her with a uniform, gave her a metal
helmet and a whistle; she was in charge of a horse driven cart, where the wounded
were stretchered to underground bomb shelters while waiting for transport to
hospitals once the bombing stopped late in the evening. Dee sounded upbeat; she
seemed healthy and did not say anything about her cancer.
On the fifty-sixth straight evening of bombing, according to the letter her
husband Wilfred wrote, which arrived in Hayward forty-five days later, Dee had
been killed when a Nazi bomb had scored a direct hit on where Dee and sixty-eight
other souls lay hiding in an underground bunker. That was over four years ago in
1941.
Kat started drinking Vodka.
Vodka didn’t leave a smell on your breath, so Kat could hide her drinking
from her husband Jim; she’d use eye drops to reduce redness. She didn’t think that
Jim knew how much she drank. She’d hide the alcohol at Jim’s father’s house two
doors down the street and she managed to drink about a half-quart a day while she
was there taking care of him. He had memory issues; some mornings he forgot how

to dress. She’d clean house, cook and feed him; his stomach made loud noises while
he swallowed his food. Lately she had to bathe and dress him in clean clothes too as
he sometimes soiled himself and didn’t know that he did so.
But by the end of the day, when she arrived home to cook dinner, she had
consumed enough vodka to anesthetize herself enough not to feel the emotional
pain of missing her dead sister.

When Kat was seventeen she met her first boyfriend, Billy McQuade. Tall and
handsome with red hair, he was a high school senior like Kat; he played point guard
on the basketball team. Billy’s father was a successful insurance salesman; to Kat it
seemed that Billy always carried a wad of money. She liked him well enough; he
took her to dances; Kat loved to dance. He was energetic and a good dancer, light on
his feet. They’d dance the Black Bottom, the Catwalk, the Fox Trot; they’d dance all
night. Kat felt free; she didn’t have to wear a corset while dancing; one night she
dared to show off her calves with a below the knee length pink pleated skirt. That
was the night she let Billy get to second base.
The following week while they sat on a blanket on a secluded beach near
Santa Cruz, Billy reached over and kissed Kat. He opened his mouth. Then he took
Kat’s hand and placed it on his crotch. She didn’t want to disappoint Billy, but
something just didn’t feel right. She asked him to stop. He didn’t. She started to cry.
Billy still did not stop. Kat knew that something had gone terribly wrong. Quietly she
sobbed. This was not – when she envisioned this moment as a young girl – how she
wanted to lose her virginity.

Six weeks later Billy sat down with Pap, at Kat’s house in San Jose. Saying that
‘he wanted to do the right thing.’
-This is man’s talk.
Pap said to Kat motioning to her to leave.
-It doesn’t concern you. As she left Kat thought she heard Pap: -How you
gonna make this right for me?

To Kat it seemed like he was asking Billy for money; Kat felt stunned.
That night after Pap had more than his normal amount of vodka, he stood
outside Kat and Dee’s locked bedroom door; he kept calling her a whore.
Two weeks later Billy and Kat married; seven months later Kat’s daughter
May was born; one month after Maisy’s birth Billy McQuade ran off with another
girl. Neither Kat, nor Maisy, ever saw him again.

There was no money for a place for Kat and Maisy to live; they stayed at
home with Kat’s parents and Dee. Kat had always wanted to go to college; Dee
helped watch Maisy while Kat took secretarial classes at night.
-Women don’t need no education.
Pap would say, when he saw Kat studying.
-How’s that gonna help a woman clean and cook and take care of the house?
Kat couldn’t help but think: here is a man who sells encyclopedia’s for a
living, impressing on his clients how important it is for children to get an education.
Hypocrite, she thought.
Kat did the best she could with Maisy, but she wondered how the child would
fare without having a father to help raise her.
With Dee’s help watching Maisy Kat got by, but when Maisy was nine Dee
met her journalist husband and moved to London.

Maisy was thirteen when Kat met Doctor James T Palmer. For the previous
several years, she had rented a small flat in Oakland for herself and Maisy; she now
worked for the University at Cal in Berkeley, as a secretary in the Physics
department. Dr. Palmer was in his early thirties, a couple of years older than Kat, or
so she guessed, and he taught Physics there. Her first impression of him was that he
didn’t look like the normal professor type. He was tall and athletic looking with
thinning brown hair; he had intelligent green eyes; he was not some bespectacled
distracted man with unruly hair, his head whirling in algebra equations and physics
issues and buried in a textbook. He seemed nice; he had a great smile.

The first time they met outside of the Cal campus they met for martinis; he
brought her a single red rose, her favorite flower. The following weekend, from Kat’s
point of view, something very strange and wonderful happened; their date that
Saturday lasted over twelve hours. They met in downtown Berkeley for coffee in the
morning; then they walked up and down University Avenue exploring bookshops.
Then they saw the popular movie, ‘It Happened One Night’ at the California theatre.
The movie had just won the best picture Academy Award, the dashing Clarke Gable
and the beautiful Claudette Colbert starred in it. Before the movie they watched a
comedy short, featuring a fat man and a tall thin man, named Laurel and Hardy; they
dressed in frumpy black suits and bowler hats; Kat laughed until her sides ached.
They had dinner at Looney’s, sitting outside on a warm autumn evening, and then he
walked her to the bus stop and waited until she boarded the bus back to her
apartment. After two more twelve hour dates Kat couldn’t believe how comfortable
she felt spending time together with this man.
Not once during the first six months that they dated did Jim try and have sex
with her. At first this confused Kat; isn’t that what men did? Try to get you into bed?
Not Jim. Kat loved him for that; she realized that Jim wouldn’t hurt her – he was
looking out for her. She didn’t think that Jim was a fag, or a pansy, which was a
popular name for gay men these days. Her female softness shined through with this
understanding about her new boyfriend.
-Let’s wait. He would say in that deep voice of his.
-There’s no need to rush. Let’s make sure we have something between us
first.
But he would hold her hand when they were together, they were in each
other’s physical space the way lovers are; at the end of their twelve hour dates, just
as Kat arrived home (he now accompanied her on her bus trip to her flat and made
sure she arrived home) he would tenderly kiss her on the lips. Kat felt safe.
After they had been dating nine months, after another of their wonderful
dates; one night as they stood on her front stoop, Jim bent down to kiss her
goodnight.

-This is silly.
Kat said; she took his hand and led him up the stairs and into her apartment.
They had been together ever since.
When Kat married Doctor James T Palmer in the Spring of 1935 she knew
that she, and her daughter Maisy, were loved; she devoted herself to being the best
wife that she could; she vowed to take care of Jim and to provide the best home that
she could. She felt so safe with Jim that as time passed Kat initiated many of their
love making sessions.

Kat finished her self exam of her breasts; she found no lumps; she felt
relieved; while she dressed the bells on the telly hanging in the hallway began to
ring.
-Dad didn’t show for his meeting this morning.
It was Maisy. Now twenty-eight, married with three children of her own, Jim
had helped her get a job at the lab several years ago.
-Did he show at the lab at all?
Kat asked, meaning the campus of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory,
sprawled across fifty acres of rural farmland. She recalled Jim telling her about the
meeting. He had said that he had to meet with his ‘family’. The family of five - The
five physicists; Doctors James T Palmer, his brother Doctor Edward Palmer, Doctor
Charlie Watson, the world renowned Doctor Oppenhemier himself, and the famous
Italian physicist, Doctor Mario Azzerghetti. Except now, with the death of Edward
Palmer, it would be more aptly titled ‘the family of four.” They should have called
themselves ‘The Manhattan Five’; as they were the physicists here in California that
worked on the Manhattan Project.
-No one has seen him today.
-Well, he’s probably in Berkeley,
Kat heard herself answer, worried, her antennae on alert. In the years she
had known Jim he had never missed an appointment; it wasn’t in his nature to miss
one; not only did he never miss an appointment, he was never late for one either.

-I’ll call his office at Cal and see where he is.
For some reason she found herself thinking about what happened fifteen
years ago when Maisy had her first period. Kat had prepared Maisy by explaining
the ‘female change’, as well as purchasing newly invented disposable pads. Plus, Kat
had Lysol disinfectant, which was used as a feminine hygiene product. But when her
new boyfriend Jim had asked her why Maisy remained in her room when he came
by one day, Kat had told him what had happened. Kat remembered how quiet and
withdrawn he had become; how a look of worry had crossed his face. God only knew
why she had thought of that now.
-Thanks, Mom. Maisy said.
-Call me after you talk to him.



6.

As Maisy Donald hung up the phone she took a long drag on her cigarette,
smoke curling into her nostrils and up past her head towards the ceiling.
-Lock up for me Becky? she asked. She sat in a large room where eleven other
women were busy typing; the clickity-clack of typewriters a constant noise.
-Can’t. Becky said happily while studying the polish on her nails.
-My young man has shore leave. We’re going to a show in Oakland. She stood
up, smoothed her skirt and put on some rouge.
-I’d climb all the way to the moon for him. Becky added.
-I’ll do it for you Maisy, another one of the girls chirped in. She was tall and
rail thin, her neck stuck out of her dress collar like a flamingo’s.
-What do you have to do? Her name was Joan.
Maisy lit another cigarette with the stub of the one she just finished. Her right
eyelid twitched involuntarily, as if there was a small ant crawling in there. Maisy
was worried about her stepdad; it was now almost 5 PM and he had not shown up at

the lab all day. She had phoned the local police and reported him missing; they said
that they couldn’t start any investigative work until the person was missing for
twenty-four hours. No matter how important this particular missing person might be.
Maisy felt worried.
-Mary’s got the croup, Maisy said, referring to her oldest daughter. Then she
added, Walt has night shift at the shipyard.
Maisy’s husband Walt worked the crane at the Alameda shipyard; repair
work on the Naval ships went on around the clock. Well, at least I’ll get a nights rest
tonight, Maisy thought. After eight years of marriage Walt still expected sex every
night; he got mad when he didn’t get it.
-I want to get a mustard plaster on her.
Which was the best method to treat a child’s cough. Mix equal parts dry
mustard powder, flour, and water. Mix until it has the consistency of cream cheese,
and then wrap it in a cloth towel and heat. Place the plaster on Mary’s chest until her
skin flamed red. When the pain from the burn becomes too severe, the treatment is
finished.

Maisy had long red hair, clumps of face freckles and clear blue eyes.
-The spitting image of your father. Her Mom would often say. The father she
never met. Short, petite, pretty, and perfectly proportioned with a woman’s curves;
giving birth to three babies in the past ten years had changed her figure. Carrying
three babies to term wrecked those womanly curves of hers. If she came out of the
shower dripping wet and fully dressed she probably weighed all of ninety pounds.
It was when she was seventeen when she looked her most attractive. That’s
when she became pregnant for the first time. Mary was ten years old now; Maisy
and Mary’s father never married; he split before Mary was born. Walt was Peggy’s
father; she was now eight. Walt and Maisy married just before Peggy was born; she
didn’t want both of her girls to grow up without knowing their father. Then she had
a third child; Walt named their newest baby girl Elizabeth; Beth was almost two.
Maisy started to eat more after Beth was born; she gained ten pounds, a lot of

weight for a girl with a tiny frame; that was when her first feelings of melancholy set
in.
-I don’t care how much weight you gain, Walt had told Maisy one night.
-I’ll never leave you.
Maisy thought: Was he trolling for sex?
What Maisy really wanted to do tonight was to make sure that her daughter
was feeling better, then maybe she’d mix herself a dry martini and listen to Billy
Holiday.
Maisy could not make the connection about being depressed, having three
children by three different fathers, and her own father abandoning her at birth. But
she liked to read and she recently read journals on the most popular treatment for
depression these days – Electroconvulsive therapy, or electroshock treatment. The
aim of electro shock was to induce a seizure so that the patient would have
convulsions and lose consciousness. In this way, according to doctors, it could
‘jumpstart the brain.’ It was simple to administer. Electrodes were attached to both
sides of the patient’s head; the switch was flipped, the machine whirred on; several
hundred watts of electricity were pumped into a patient’s head, until they convulsed
and passed out. Men, apparently, needed a larger electrical jolt then women in order
for the treatment to be effective.
After reading about electroshock therapy Maisy decided that she would
never want to go through that; but she also knew that in some depression cases the
patient did not have a choice; a qualified doctor could make sure that electroshock
therapy was mandatory.

-Lock up all documents, Maisy said.
-So our friends are happy. Motioning to the two soldiers standing in the
hallway, firearms at their side. The twelve women worked for senior staff at
Lawrence Livermore National Lab, most of the senior staff here worked on nuclear
research, much of the documentation was classified. Heaven help us, Maisy thought,
if information contained in these documents got into the wrong hands. That’s why

the big strong young soldier boys with guns were posted outside twenty-four-seven.
To make sure that didn’t happen.
-Thanks again Joan, Maisy said, for helping me out.
With that she extinguished a cigarette with a twist of her foot, did a quick
lipstick application, and headed for the door.
-See you in the morning.
-No problem. Said, Joan, the tall slim woman with the neck like a flamingo’s.
-Oh. Maisy added.
–Don’t forget to slip the covers on the Remingtons.
Dust between the keys was the death knoll for all typewriters.

Though her stepfather, Doctor James T Palmer, was the one who secured the
job for Maisy as his personal secretary, Maisy liked to think that she kept her job
because she was skilled. First, she typed at the speed of over one hundred and
twenty words per minute, her fingers a blur across the keyboard. An expert in
stenography, shorthand, where messages were hidden in such a way that no one,
apart from the writer and the intended recipient, suspects the meaning of the
message, was also a skill she had. Stenography was one way that she and Doctor
Palmer kept their correspondences confidential. Plus, she had proven herself so
organized and efficient, that she had been promoted to manager of the pool. All the
girls reported to her; she divided the work depending on who was best suited for
each particular job.
As she drove down the same road that her stepfather’s car Babe broke down
on nine hours earlier today she wondered about the death of her stepfather’s
brother, physicist Doctor Ed Palmer. Nothing suspicious had been found at the crash
site; his plane had burst into flames at impact and had burnt to a crisp. To twist a
popular quote of one of the young soldier boys outside her door: Maisy didn’t know
shit from shinola when it came to airplanes. But who knew what caused his plane to
crash; there had to be some kind of investigation? And now her Stepdad doesn’t
show for an important meeting. They were two of the five lead physicists on the

project. This can’t be a coincidence?
Her thoughts turned toward her children and to her youngest child Beth.
Maisy wondered why she did not take precautions. Giving birth to three unplanned
children? She came to a conclusion. A child needs me. That thought gave her comfort;
she felt better about herself if someone actually needed her. A child loves
unconditionally; somebody actually cares about me. Deep down, she knew that is why
she didn’t take precautions; she actually wanted the children; they would need her,
they would love her, they would never leave her.
She thought of Beth, her youngest; how she brought love and joy into her life.
Beth looked less like Walt every day; she wondered when Walt would notice; that
thought filled her with fear.





7.

-Damn shame is what it is Watson, a damn shame.
To Charlie, Doctor Robert Oppenhemier looked like a poor man’s version of
Winston Churchill. Short, heavy set, and barrel chested, he had a head shaped like a
bowling ball. There was, however, no mistaking the man’s genius: an IQ of 195, with
an eidetic memory for all things to do with math, equations and chemistry; he had
once mentioned to Charlie that he had formulated his most important theories
before he was twenty two years old.
Charlie inhaled the cherry smell of Oppenheimier’s pipe, as the esteemed
physicist relit it, inhaling through tobacco stained teeth.
-The US Army is in charge of this, has been since day one. So I guess we have to
begin to close up shop.
Privately, Doctor Charles Watson seethed. How dare they scale us back?

The Manhattan Project was started in 1939; at its peak the project employed
130,000 people at thirty sites located across the country. Few employees had any
idea of what was going on; which was the building of the Atomic bomb for use in
warfare against Germany and Japan. Only a handful of physicists and army brass at
the top of the food chain really knew. Doctor Robert Oppenhemier’s ‘family’ of five
physicists here at Lawrence Livermore’s National Labs were among the select few.
Charlie felt comfortable with Oppenheimer’s description of family: Oppenheimer
insisted that they all get together often, with wives and children. Many a holiday, or
child’s birthday, were spent together at Oppenheimer’s sprawling ten acre ranch in
the South Livermore hills; yet when the five physicists showed at work their job was
to build weapons of mass destruction that could vaporize tens of thousands of
people in a flash, including other people’s children.
But at this morning’s meeting, only Oppenheimer and Watson were present.
Edward Palmer’s plane went down a week ago; his brother James Palmer