“No. No! I’m going to explain all of that. Listen, here’s my number. When I was off in Los Alamos, I turned off my phone and lost my old number. Please write the new one down. Do you have a pen?”
She doesn’t and has no intention of finding one.
“Hyde Park 3-5806. Got it? Hyde Park 3-5806.” He repeats the numbers deliberately, hypnotically. “I’m saying it one more time. I know how your memory works. Hyde Park 3-5806. Call me.” Later, as she lies in bed, the prefix and digits play in her brain—a poisoned refrain.
* * *
The men in the lab called one another by their last names. So she took to calling him Weaver. Hazel eyes of constantly changing color, impressive brown hair, a dimpled Cary Grant chin. He was the cartoon of a good-looking man. He knew it, and this was the thing she disliked most about him. His swagger. His certainty. She was aware from the start the man was a flirt, and not just with her. His tony accent would have thrilled any girl. Weaver was recruited from Cambridge University to join the Manhattan Project in New York. Fermi brought him to Chicago a year after Rosalind began in the lab.
When she asked Weaver if he liked the city, he said, “It doesn’t matter where I am as long as I’m working on something important.” She wanted him to cherish Chicago, to see its brawny wonder, to note the architecture and the lakefront. She told him it was the ultimate American city. The heart of the country. Weaver did appreciate food and art. “There are ripping good steaks here. I’ll give you that.” But he was a man who lived in the hills and valleys of his equations and theories, lived for proving himself right.
Science always gave them something to talk about. She and Weaver loved to argue about neutron sources. Had Fermi walked away from powdered beryllium too soon? She thought so. He didn’t. And what about this secret new element, plutonium, produced by bombarding uranium-238?
“There’s our future,” she said.
“It’s too hard to produce.”
“That’s what we’ll create at the Hanford Site. I’ll bet you a thousand dollars.”
“I’d rather it was a thousand dinners together.” He reached out his hand to seal the deal and then drew her hand to his lips. He still owes her years of dinners.
Rosalind had her own vision of what she wanted out of the project. She knew that piercing a single uranium atom could create more than three million times the energy of fossil fuel. If harnessed, channeled, it could be put to constructive use, heating cities and running machines in a clean, endlessly available way. But when she shared the idea with Weaver, he smirked.
“Duchess, the Nazis are working on an atomic weapon. Right this minute in their little lairs, twirling their mustaches. No one is thinking about anything but the war right now. We’re dedicated to self-defense, pure and simple.”
She was annoyed but not surprised. She watched the men around her and was disturbed at how much they enjoyed the war, seemed stirred to life by the conflict. Marking trees, proving themselves right, defeating others. The ability to draw power from an atom: Could it ever be safe in male hands?
CHAPTER TWO
In a restaurant like the Berghoff, pulsing with families, couples, tables of six, a lone diner is bound to stand out, especially one as tall as Szydlo. Which is why he’s asked for a spot by the left wall: far enough away from Rosalind Porter’s table for four, close enough to observe her. As Rosalind leans toward her niece, her golden earrings glimmer against the ebony of her hair.
Szydlo’s been watching her for two weeks now, could draw her with his eyes closed: the shiny black hair barely contained by tortoise combs, skin as pale as milk, wise arched brows. She could be Hedy Lamarr’s sister. Once, he passed close to her on the street, just to be near, not forty paces behind. And what he picked up wasn’t perfume. Instead, the scent of warm honey. He thinks of it when he’s restless in bed: the pure, round aroma of her. And it arouses him despite himself.
Watching Miss Porter speak to her brother-in-law and shake her head at her sister, he realizes that up till now, he’s seen her as a lone figure. So it’s fascinating to note, even in this moment with other people around her, there’s a side flick of her eyes, a glance down at her hands, that says even among family, she feels apart.
This is what he’s learned about Rosalind Porter: She shops at the A&P and buys simple, cheap things as though she’s on a budget—fruit from the bruised bin and the cuts of meat on sale. She walks with an abstract look as though her mind is awhirl with facts and figures. He’s watched her at the bank pointing out an error in her account. The manager came by to apologize, so she must have been right.
She’s organized, habitual, leaves the apartment at the same hour each day and arrives home at the same time. She rarely sees her friends because they live in the suburbs. When she talks to them on the phone—he experiences a shameful delight listening in—they rattle on about themselves, their children, and their husbands, and she encourages them. They only ask how she’s doing at the end of the call, then hurriedly ring off. The exception is someone named Zeke. Zeke asks her innumerable personal questions. He has all the sway and female flirtatiousness that Miss Porter lacks. He’s clearly an old friend. When they go out to dinner together, she hooks her hand into Zeke’s elbow. When she speaks to him, she looks up into the sky and laughs. There’s love there. Just not the kind most people understand.
Miss Porter has no obvious religious affiliation, rarely wears a hat, often dons sandals to walk to work. Once, on Lake Shore Drive, she stopped to look out at the lake for more than five minutes. Szydlo had to stand in the shadows of one of those big stone houses to watch her, hoping no one would come out and tell him to get off their lawn. He was transfixed by her full skirt puffing taut as a sail in the lake breeze. Her black curls flared into a luxurious corona. When she turned, she looked as though she didn’t know where she was. What had she discovered in the dark wink of the lake?
As she talks to her niece now, he notes she suddenly seems blissful and intimate. The tender way she pets the girl’s hair, the way she leans toward her, it’s obvious how much she cherishes her mirror image, this ten-year-old girl who looks astonishingly like her. If Rosalind Porter is a lone, icy figure, her love for her niece melts her.
* * *
“Should I order the Wiener schnitzel or the sauerbraten?” Ava whispers to Rosalind. Ava’s been a regular at the Berghoff since she was two. No kids’ menu for her.
“Do you feel in need of a hug or a giggle?” Roz asks.
“Which is which?”
“The hug is the sauerbraten. The Wiener schnitzel is more fun.”
“Why haven’t I had it? Wiener schnitzel. Wiener schnitzel! You say it.”
Rosalind does until they’re both laughing. Dinners with Louisa, Henry, and Ava are Rosalind’s true north. Louisa is twenty years older than her, the only mother Rosalind remembers, and she feels closer to Henry than she ever did to her father. After Louisa was born, their mother was unable to have another child. And then in her forty-second year, she was astonished to find herself pregnant. Six months after baby Rosalind arrived, she was dead from ovarian cancer. Was it the cancer that had made her fertile at last? Or was it the pregnancy that set the cancer on its fatal course? The result, in any case, was a motherless child.