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Mary Alice let go of one hand and swung her leg back across me, so she was beside me again. She gave my shoulder a squeeze. “You done just fine,” she said. “You’ll be all right now.” I shook my head and cried.
I heard water running in the sink, and a moment later Mary Alice’s mother stepped into the stall again, holding two damp cloths. She handed one to Mary Alice, who mopped my face; with the other, she bent down and swabbed my blood-smeared thighs and bottom.
Suddenly there was a series of raps on the door. I nearly cried out with fear; the two black women exchanged swift, worried looks. More knocking, louder now. “Mary Alice? Miss Beatrice?”
“Yes, what is it?” Mary Alice said.
“Y’all about done in there? Y’all just about ready to get your picture took?”
I started to call out — I have no idea what I would have said — but luckily Mary Alice laid a hand over my mouth. “Just about,” she said. “One more minute.” She hauled me to my feet. “You splash some water on your face and comb your hair and put on this lipstick,” she said. “Then we got to get out there and act like everything is fine.”
In a daze — the cramps searing and my head buzzing — I rinsed my face and dabbed on lipstick. Then Mary Alice took my hand and led me out the restroom door. It was as if I had walked on-stage in a play: a card table in front of us glowed in a pool of light, and as Mary Alice and I stepped forward dozens of faces watched. Most of the faces were black, but several were white, and I recognized the uniforms and black armbands of MPs.
A few books were stacked on the table, and one lay open, its spine broken. It was the Bible, and it was open to the story of Adam and Eve. Westcott stepped toward us and ushered us into two chairs, which were angled at one corner of the table. “Ladies, you look lovely,” he said, though he looked at me closely, with what appeared to be concern. “Lean forward over the book a little, Beatrice. You, too, Mary Alice, and point to a word, like you’re asking Beatrice what the word is.”
Mary Alice’s index finger — blue-black skin, with a pink, pearly nail — traced a wavering line down one page, then came to rest beneath a verse. “What this Bible verse say right here, Miss Beatrice?” Her voice was a singsong caricature — like a darky in a Hollywood film — and I wondered if it was me she was mocking, or Westcott, or the segregated city and nation in which we lived and worked.
I looked, and I read the verse aloud: “The tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.”
“Amen,” said Mary Alice as the flash blinded me.
The MPs — sent by the bus driver, apparently, to make sure the white woman wasn’t set upon by sex-crazed black men — stayed while Westcott packed up his his camera and lights and loaded them back into his jeep. Mary Alice and I had remained seated while the gear was packed. When everything was loaded, I stood up to go, and when I did, I felt my dress sticking to the metal folding chair. I looked down, and the seat was sticky with blood. Mary Alice glanced at the chair, then quickly stood beside me, an arm around my waist. With her free hand, she signaled to her mother, who came and stood close behind me. We walked that way, the two black women and I, out of the building and into the night. Mary Alice helped me onto the bus, and as I stepped up into the enveloping darkness of the bus, I heard one of the MPs say something to the other.
What he said was, “Nigger lover.”
CHAPTER 37
Beatrice turned to look at me. It had cost her some pain to tell me the story, I could tell.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “You must have been desperate to have risked so much. You could have died. Or gone to prison.”
“Prison comes in all shapes and sizes,” she said. “So does death.” She turned and looked out the windows. “How did you know to ask me about that?”
I probably wasn’t supposed to say, but I felt I owed her a disclosure in return for what she’d just told me. “The FBI is looking at old files,” I said, “trying to figure out why Novak was killed. A doctor at the hospital reported that he suspected you’d had an abortion.”
“That son of a bitch,” she said. “I knew him for forty years, and I never could stand him.”
I realized I had no right to ask, but I asked anyhow. “Whose baby was it, Beatrice?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “That’s another reason I had the abortion.” She sighed. “Novak was traveling out to Hanford a lot in the spring and summer of 1945,” she said. “The big plutonium production reactors out there were coming on line, and there were technical problems to solve. It turned out that trace amounts of boron were absorbing neutrons and slowing down the chain reaction. ‘Poisoning’ it, that’s the term they used. Novak had to solve the mystery of the boron poisoning. He’d be gone for a week or ten days at a time, and I got into the habit of going down to the Rec Hall at night, to pass the time.”
“You were lonely when he was gone,” I said.
“I was lonely when he was here,” she said. “Maybe lonelier. I think I was the loneliest when he was sleeping in the same bed with me, twelve inches away but beyond reach. When he was gone, at least I could do something about the loneliness. Sometimes I even brought a man home with me. I’m sure I was indiscreet; I’m sure the neighbors talked.”
Or snitched, I thought. “I should go,” I said.
“Where? Home? Do you have a good woman waiting for you, Bill? Or a good man?”
“No. I have work waiting for me,” I said. I stood to go. Something on the end table beside her chair caught my eye. Resting atop a stack of opened mail was a small, rectangular piece of white paper with blue lettering.
“Good God,” I said.
“What?” She followed my eyes. “Oh, that,” she said. “What a jerk.”
The lettering read, “I know your secret.”
* * *
Amazing,” I said to Emert. I had called him when I left Beatrice’s house to share what she’d told me about the note. Thirty minutes later, as I sat in his office, he had already gathered a remarkable amount of information. “So this guy was just on a random fishing expedition? Trying to trick Oak Ridge geezers into spilling whatever beans they had to spill from the bomb project or the Cold War?”
“Espionage-flavored beans,” said Emert. “He was pitching a documentary to the History Channel. Atomic Secrets, he called it.” Emert waved a one-page printout — a bad photocopy of a fax, or a really good photocopy of a really bad fax. “This is a one-page treatment he’d faxed to the History Channel. He didn’t have a deal for it yet, though — it was just a proposal.”
I read the subtitle. “No wonder he didn’t have a deal,” I said. “Get a load of that subtitle. How Soviet Spies Pierced the Heart of the Manhattan Project. How clunky is that?”
“Yeah, well, Ken Burns he wasn’t,” said Emert. “But you gotta love the irony of ‘pierced the heart,’ considering how he died. Apparently he was hoping to dig up something juicy in Oak Ridge, something that would hook the History Channel.”
“How’d you get this so fast?”
“I’ll never tell,” he said, holding a finger to his lips, like the World War II billboards that reminded Oak Ridgers to keep quiet.
“Okay,” I said.
“Oh, all right, I’ll tell,” he said. “Right after you called from Beatrice’s driveway, I got a call from a desk clerk at the Double-tree, who saw the sketch in the newspaper. The secret-sniffing guy — Willard Clarkson was his name — checked into the hotel seventeen days ago, on January ninth. On the tenth, he faxed this to New York. He also asked for extra chocolate-chip cookies.”
“The Doubletree makes a damn good cookie,” I said.
“Yeah, but you’re only entitled to one cookie, and only at check-in,” Emert said. “This guy went back for seconds. He thought the regular rules didn’t apply to him.”
“What are you, the cookie police? You’re saying he deserved to die because he went back to the desk clerk and said,
‘Please, sir, could I have more?’? Hell, I’ve done that.”
“Never do it again,” he said. “Look where you could end up.”
