Delia watches her husband read, blinking the way he does when baffled by words.
I have no trouble in accepting the first explosion. It seems to me politically necessary, scientifically triumphant, and morally expedient. But this second blast is little more than barbaric. What civilized people could defend such action? We have taken tens of thousands more lives, without even giving that country a chance to absorb the fact of what hit it. And for what? Merely, it seems, to project a final superiority, the same world dominance I thought we were fighting this war to end…
David Strom gapes at his accuser’s daughter. “I don’t understand. He means I’m to answer for this?” He hands the paper to his wife, who speeds through it. “I am not the one to talk about this bomb. Yes, I’ve done work for the OSRD. So did half of our scientists. More than half! I did a little thinking about neutron absorption. A little later, I helped people to figure a problem surrounding the implosion. I did more work on electronic countermeasures that were never developed than I did for this device.”
Delia reaches out and grazes her husband’s arm. What can her touch feel like to him? His words relieve her a little, suggest the answers beyond her asking. But here: this letter, a sheet between them. Her father’s question has weighed on her for weeks. And her husband, she sees, has not yet asked it of himself. David takes the page back from her, resuming his penance at the pace of the foreign reader:
This country must know what it’s in danger of pursuing. Surely it sees how this act will look to history. Would this country have been willing to drop this bomb on Germany, on the country of your beloved Bach and Beethoven? Would we have used it to annihilate a European capital? Or was this mass civilian death meant, from the beginning, to be used only against the darker races?
Too much for David. “Yes,” he shouts. She has never heard this strain in him. “Surely. Of course I would use this against Germany. Think what Germany has used against everyone who is my relation! We have bombed all the German cities, by daylight and by nighttime. Flattened all the cathedrals. We were racing to make this final bomb before Heisenberg. Alle Deutschen… ”
She nods and cups his elbow. Her father, too, cheered David’s war work, what little David could tell him. The doctor, too, urged all speed to ring in the American future as quickly as possible. But her father was backing a thing invisible to him.
Know that I don’t blame you, but only need to ask you these few matters. You have seen up close what I can only speculate about. I had in mind a different victor, a different peace, one that would put an end to supremacy forever. We were fighting against fascism, genocide, all the evils of power. Now we’ve leveled two cities of bewildered brown civilians… You may not understand my racializing these blasts. Maybe you’d have to spend a month in my clinic or a year in the neighborhoods near mine to know what I wanted this war to defeat. I’d hoped for something better from this country. If this is how we choose to end this conflict, what hope can we have for peacetime?
No doubt this extraordinary turn of events looks different to you, David. That’s why I’m writing. If you could show me what I’ve failed to understand, I’d be much obliged.
Meanwhile, rest assured that I do not consider you to be supremacy, power, barbarity, Europe, history, or anything else but my son-in-law, whom I trust is taking care of my girl and those astonishing grandsons of mine. May Labor Day find you all well. I look forward to hearing back from you. Ever, William.
David finishes and says nothing. He’s listening; this much she must always love in him. Holding out for a hint of harmony. Waiting to hear the music that will answer for him. “I can get on a train.” His voice is a frayed rope. “Go out to Philadelphia and see him.”
“Don’t talk crazy,” she tells him, trying for comfort and missing by a wide margin.
“But I must speak with him. We must try to understand this, face-to-face. How can I do this thing, through writing, when nothing of what I must say is in my language?”
She takes him in her arms. “The doctor can come pay us a house call if he wants to talk. When was the last time we had him out here? He can come see his boys and have a listen to this little bun in the oven. You men can drink brandy and decide how best to fix civilization’s future.”
“I don’t drink brandy. You know this.” She has to laugh at the droop in him. But he does not lift at her laughing.
Her idea is inspired. She floats an open invitation just as Dr. Daley debates whether to attend the big postwar conference on the latest developments in sulfa drugs and antibiotics hosted by Mount Sinai and Columbia. Mixing pleasure and business appeals to the doctor’s efficiency. He arrives at the house on a September evening. Jonah and Joseph are on their feet and flying to the door at his knock. They sing “Papap” at the top of their voices, primed all day for the man’s arrival. Delia peers down the corridor as they bang into each other, each reaching for the handle to let their grandfather in. Joseph still favors his twisted ankle. Or maybe she imagines it. She has her hands full with basting bulb and ladle, but she towels clean in a moment and is off to the door, two steps behind her boys.
She reads the violence as her father steps into the room. She thinks at first, This bomb, this matter of morality he comes to discuss with David. But something nearer has happened. He doesn’t lean down to embrace the boys or carry them. He barely lets them cling to his legs before he brushes past down the corridor, radiating fury.
She’s seen this before, more times than she cares to remember. Seen it first when she was no older than Joseph. In her boys’ faces, the seed of that poison tree: What did we do? The question she herself could never answer. Now it’s her boys’ turn to suffer the inheritance she can’t keep them from.
Her father nears her, and she tries to hug him. He pecks her on the chin. She feels him struggle, with that last scrap of dignity so powerful in him, to bite down this rage and swallow it whole, a cyanide capsule they give to agents caught behind enemy lines. She knows he won’t be able to. He’ll wrestle and fail, no less spectacularly than the world has failed him. Meanwhile, she cannot ask, can’t do anything but play along, a show of cheer while waiting for all hell to break.
It takes until after dinner. The meal itself — turkey, broccoli, and creamed corn — is polite, if strained. David doesn’t notice, or he’s shrewder than Delia ever supposed. He asks about the sulfa-drug conference and William answers in Western Union. William tries instead to rehash the mess at Potsdam and Truman’s doomed slum-revitalization program. David can only grin, hopeless on both scores. Delia feels them both fighting to stay off Japan, the atom shadow, the dawn of the new cosmic age. The case this night’s meeting was meant to hear.
After the apple compote, her sons drift from the table to the spinet, that wedding gift from Dr. Daley, far and away their favorite toy. They tinker with octave scales. “Play me a nice old-time song,” Dr. Daley tells them. “Can you do that? You boys play a little tune for your grandpap?”
The two boys — four and three — smash down onto the bench and play a Bach chorale: “O Ewigkeit, du Donnerwort.” Jonah gets the melody, of course. Joseph holds down the bass. This is how it goes: two boys discovering the secret of harmony, delighting in passing dissonance, tumbling over the jumble of moving lines, romping through the transformed scale. “O Eternity, you thunderous word! You sword boring into the soul! Beginning minus ending, Eternity, time without time, take me whenever it pleases you!” Nobody in this room knows the words. It’s notes only in here tonight. The boys weave their runs, butt wrists, kick each other’s shins where they dangle in the air, lean away in the swell of progressions, come back playfully on the smallest slowing, home. The music is in them. Just in them, this opening chrysanthemum of chords. It makes them happy, each juggling lines utterly separate that nevertheless fall one inside the other. Breathing in this perfect solution to a day that belongs to no one.