Her wedding? The press corps was going to crash her wedding?
Like a bunch of rowdy rugby players, they descended upon Einstein, elbowing the guests aside, knocking over a couple of chairs in their haste, and all of them clamoring about an atomic bomb and some place with an odd name that she’d never even heard of.
“We’ve dropped one on Hiroshima,” a reporter shouted out.
“What’s your reaction?” another one demanded, his pencil and notepad at the ready. “Did you know in advance?”
Flashbulbs popped as the professor, stunned, took a shaky step back. Helen instinctively moved to protect him.
“Without your discoveries, it couldn’t have been done,” the first one said. “How’s that feel?”
“Look this way!” a photographer hollered.
“No, over here, Professor!”
“What do you have to say?”
Einstein looked stricken.
“You think we’ve finally knocked the stuffing out of the Japs?”
“The Pentagon says we might have killed as many as a hundred seventy-five thousand of ’em, in one shot. That sound about right to you, Professor?”
Confusion reigned. The music stopped, the guests disassembled, a whole row of seats went over like dominoes as the reporters jockeyed for position closer to the beleaguered Einstein.
“When do you think they’ll surrender?”
Before her eyes, Simone saw the wedding collapse. Even the canopy, its stakes jostled by the crowd, became unfastened and blew away.
Lucas clutched her hand, and threw an arm around her shoulders.
Einstein, head down, his red carnation trampled underfoot by the pack of newsmen, was shepherded back into the house by Helen, who slammed the door firmly in the reporters’ faces… which didn’t keep them from running to the windows and trying to shout out their questions. A photographer climbed a tree in the backyard, hoping to get an angle into the house, but the branch broke and he thumped to the ground, groaning. No one paid him any attention. Someone else had turned up the radio of a car parked in the alley, and as she and Lucas stood there, equally ignored in all the commotion, she heard the voice of President Truman.
“The Japanese began the war from the air at Pearl Harbor. Today they have been repaid manyfold. And the end is not yet.”
Mrs. Caputo was kneeling on the grass, mouth open and clutching Amy, listening to the broadcast.
“It is an atomic bomb,” Truman continued. “It is a harnessing of the basic power of the universe.”
Simone saw the shades being yanked down in the kitchen windows.
“The force from which the sun draws its power has been loosed against those who brought war to the Far East.”
Loosed, Simone thought, like an evil genie, never to be contained again.
“God help us all,” Lucas said, his arm holding her tighter.
The curtains in the professor’s office upstairs were jerked shut, too, as if the whole house were being readied for a wake, not a wedding.
Which was suddenly how it felt to Simone.
The radio was playing “The Star Spangled Banner,” and from neighboring houses, she could hear shouts of exultation. Dogs were barking. Somebody cried, “Let ’em have it!” Surely, this would end the war — what nation could stand up against the power of the sun itself?
Mrs. Caputo, still on her knees, her arms wrapped around her daughter, was sobbing with joy.
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
On the gigantic movie screen of Radio City Music Hall, often billed as the “Showplace of the Nation,” Gene Tierney, improbably playing a Sicilian girl, was about to be kissed by John Hodiak, playing the American major entrusted with replacing a church bell stolen by the Fascists. The film was A Bell for Adano, based on the best-selling novel by John Hersey, and the minute Simone had spotted the ad in the New York Times, she had insisted they attend.
“What could be more appropriate for a former CRC man?” she’d said that morning while they finished a late breakfast at their hotel. For good reason, all of their breakfasts had been taken late. “Not only that, I’ll get to see this famous music hall before we have to go home.”
That was fine with Lucas; this was the last day of their honeymoon, and he had already shown her just about every other tourist sight he could think of. They had climbed to the top of the Statue of Liberty and taken the elevator 102 floors to the observation deck of the Empire State Building. They had strolled through the Central Park Zoo and the crooked streets of Greenwich Village, walked across the Brooklyn Bridge, and taken in a jazz session at a nightclub up in Harlem. For several days, they had virtually camped out in the Metropolitan Museum, where they could indulge their mutual passion for art and antiquities. Unsurprisingly, Simone had been especially enthralled by the galleries filled with Egyptian exhibits, though she’d also been vexed that so many of her country’s national treasures had been absconded with and were now on display in this foreign land.
The matinee performance was almost full, not only because the movie had just opened, but because the vast airy auditorium was preferable to the sweltering city outside. The temperatures had been in the eighties, and showed no sign of abating. Simone was scrunched down in her seat, her shoulder resting on Lucas’s shoulder, when they heard banging on the doors to the lobby.
Someone in the audience yelled, “Shut up! We’re watching a movie in here!”
The banging got louder. A pair of doors flew open, and an usher, in a red suit and braided cap, ducked his head in. For a moment, Lucas thought a fire might have broken out, but then he heard what the usher was shouting. “The war is over! The war is over!”
Other doors opened, and other ushers issued the same proclamation.
As the word filtered through the audience, people jumped to their feet, some hollering for joy, others weeping and embracing the strangers sitting next to them.
Simone straightened up in her seat and looked at Lucas. “You think it’s true?”
All week long, rumors had been circulating that the Japanese were about to surrender. The atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima had been followed days later by another, this one dropped on a place called Nagasaki. But still, Emperor Hirohito had refused to accept the Potsdam Declaration, and the war had dragged on. The United States faced the prospect of launching a massive land invasion of the Pacific islands, and the enormous number of casualties that such a campaign would incur.
Hundreds, then thousands, of people were pouring up the aisles of the massive auditorium, nearly trampling each other in their haste to get outside and celebrate the news. Lucas and Simone joined them, swept up in the tide like leaves on a rushing stream.
On Sixth Avenue, fire alarms were ringing everywhere, taxi cabs were blasting their horns, office workers were leaning out of upper-story windows, tearing up papers and throwing the confetti to the breeze.
“Now I think it’s true,” Lucas said, hugging Simone.
Everyone was heading past them, down toward Times Square, where the news would be officially confirmed by the electronic ticker wrapped around the third floor of the towering newspaper building. Holding her by the arm, Lucas navigated through the crowd, threading his way across Fiftieth Street to Seventh Avenue, then down the jammed sidewalk, and into the street — where all the cars and buses were stopped dead, and people were dancing between the lanes — before finally arriving in the square itself.