The Cassandra Page 16

  He beckoned for me to take up my pen and paper.

  I did as I was told.

  * * *

  It was no surprise to me when, just a few days later, Germany surrendered.

  Beth wept with joy in the barracks and we embraced. Everyone raced outside to find the newspapers and read the headlines. That evening the mess halls were filled with happy drunks. The servers carried around endless trays of beer. Gordon came up to us and lifted Beth clear up off her feet, swinging her in a pretty circle. He tried to kiss her cheek and she frowned and ducked away from him.

  “Milly, I’m furious,” she whispered to me. “He’s as bold as he is stupid.”

  But her eyes glimmered. She was happy. Everyone was. The happiness was almost contagious, but I remembered what Dr. Hall said. Despite my smile when we all sang the National Anthem, so loudly it seemed the roof would peel away from the mess hall’s lofty frame, I trembled with an unsettled feeling, a rattling in my bones that hit a fever pitch when I sang the word Free.

  TRINITY

  My shoes arrived on a Thursday, sent via post to Dr. Hall’s office at Unit B. When they arrived, he was away, saying he had to run an urgent errand, and I was alone in the office. Of course, it never felt like I was alone, given the giant window that observed the control room, and all those men out there working, cracking jokes when their supervisors weren’t around, waving at me flirtatiously if I happened to lift my eyes from my work.

  I used Dr. Hall’s letter opener to cut the box open, and the smell of the shoes—oiled leather, rich and syrupy—ravished me. And how pretty they were! Like two adorable puppies, both of them a gorgeous calfskin brown, complete with chunky heels and brass buckled tongues that I could open and adjust for my comfort. I drew one of them up to my cheek and held it there—it was warm and alive against my cheekbone.

  “You’re a dream,” I murmured. “You’re more beautiful than I ever imagined.”

  Someone tapped on the control room window. A man stood there, holding his own shoe up to his face, his eyes closed in rapture. His coworker, standing nearby, hooted and laughed. I stuck my tongue out at them and then bent over my feet to try on my shoes.

  I’d just finished tying them when Dr. Hall arrived. He paused at the doorway and said, “After you,” and, to my surprise, a glamorous woman swept by him. Despite the heat, she wore a simple white scarf and a bronze silk gown, high-necked with a fitted waist. I hadn’t seen real silk on anyone since before the war, and it was beautiful, the way it shone against her body like a copper river. She was tall and sinewy with long, wavy brown hair. As she moved into the room, I noticed that she dragged one leg slightly as she walked. She managed to do so with grace; I even wondered if it weren’t an act, a subtle movement just to appear more unique and interesting.

  “Miss Groves,” said Dr. Hall, “this is Miss Dee. She’s an actress.”

  I jumped to my feet and extended my hand. “Hazel Dee! I know precisely who you are! I saw you just a few weeks ago at the auditorium, doing Euripides. You were wonderful.”

  She looked at my hand with incredulity and then her eyes dropped to my feet.

  “Darling shoes,” she told me, and I gushed that they had just arrived, and that they fit perfectly, so well, in fact, that I wanted to weep with joy, and I added that they were the same pair I’d once seen on Susan Peters.

  “Susan Peters,” Miss Dee said, one of her dramatic eyebrows lifting. “I know Susan Peters. She’s from around here, isn’t she?”

  “Portland,” I said. “But she was born in Spokane.”

  “Right. Spokane. Same as that other dope.”

  “Bing Crosby?”

  “Hideous man,” she said. She sat on the small sofa off to the side and rested her long arm languorously across it. “Susan’s all right, though. She’s a tough broad. An athlete and a hunter, did you know that? She hunts for all sorts of game with that beau of hers.”

  I was awestruck. First at someone insulting Bing Crosby and then at someone knowing Susan Peters personally. And Susan Peters a hunter! A bona fide Artemis from the Northwest! I adored her even more for this eccentricity. I wanted to pounce on Miss Dee and shake all of the gossip free of her.

  “I want a cigarette, Phil,” she said to Dr. Hall.

  “I’m fresh out,” he said. “I’ll go find you one.”

  “Please do,” she said, and I was glad when he left. I had Hazel Dee all to myself.

  “I adore Susan Peters,” I said. “She’s a doll. I saw her once—”

  “‘I saw her once,’” Miss Dee interrupted loudly, dramatically, “‘hop forty paces through the public street, and having lost her breath, she spoke, and panted, that she did make defect perfection, and, breathless, power breathe forth.’”

  I applauded lightly. “That’s just lovely. Are you a poet, too?”

  She simpered. “It’s Shakespeare, sweetheart. Antony and Cleopatra.”

  “Shakespeare,” I said stupidly. I’d never heard anyone quote Shakespeare that way. “How delightful.”

  She considered me scrupulously, her eyes laughing even as her mouth stayed firm. “Nothing’s more delightful than you are, my darling.” She closed her eyes, and I saw pain streak behind her eyelids, and then the pain fell from one of her perfect ears and swung in a parabola into my own head.

  Not now, not here, not with her. Then, Now. When I say so. Watch.

  The room disappeared from under me and my vision went black except for a small white light in the center of the darkness: a snow globe, shaken and confetti-stippled, and Hazel Dee within it, too, in a wheelchair, hunched over herself like a question mark. Dr. Hall pushed her through the white paper snow, whispering desperate plans to her hanging head.

  The snow globe shattered and the sound of the glass rang in my ears. The room returned to me as it had been. Hazel Dee’s eyes were still closed. I was relieved to have all of my faculties—I had not embarrassed myself, not this time.

  “He’s in love with you,” I said.

  Hazel Dee’s eyes flew open in surprise, then narrowed at me. After studying my face, she relaxed, chuckling, and said, “Yes, dear, I know. The poor fool.”

  I sat down at my desk, recovering myself, but my head ached. I was nauseous. I put my face in my hands.

  “You don’t love him back,” I said through my fingers. I didn’t want to say it. I didn’t want to upset her. But it was too late, the words coursing, set free by the ache in my head. My hands dropped to my lap. “You never will. You’re using him, because of your illness. You hope he will help you, but he won’t. He’ll want to, he’ll do everything he can, but no one can help you.”

  I wasn’t looking at her, but I could feel her stare, the force of it. She was the sort of woman I would never be. No matter her future, I hoped she would never lose the memory of her power.

  I thought, for a moment, that she might rise to her feet, approach me, smack me across the face. I waited for the normal reaction to my visions: a jigsaw puzzle of hatred, anger, denial that if it were rearranged would show itself to be no more than pure fear.

  Her face, beautiful in its maturity and intellectuality, was as still as a pane of glass.

  But after a long silence, she said, “But what choice do I have?”

  I didn’t respond. Choices were alternate passageways that descended in one way or another to the same dark crypt.

  “A girl mustn’t give up hope,” she added, but her tone was grave, listless.

  Dr. Hall returned then with a pack of cigarettes, and he immediately handed one to Miss Dee and lit it for her with gallant ministration.

  “The mood’s gloomy in here,” he said. “I hope Miss Groves hasn’t been boring you with her Hollywood crushes.”

  “Quite the opposite,” Miss Dee said, and when I glanced at her to see how mean she looked, her expression was instead kind, sorrowful, as though she’d realized my own future and mourned the trouble we both faced. “In my opinion Miss Groves is your resident genius.”

>   “She’s fairly useful, isn’t she?”

  Dr. Hall squeezed my shoulder, an affectionate, paternal grip. I felt how grateful he was in that motion: He ached to impress Miss Dee.

  “If you see Susan Peters again,” I said to her, “please tell her hello from Mildred Groves.”

  “I’ll tell her about your beautiful shoes.”

  She came forward and kissed my face, first one cheek and then the other, and then, turning to Dr. Hall and briefly placing her palm on his chest, she excused herself, saying that she was very tired. She would return to his home in Richland for a long nap. He offered to walk her to the cattle car and guided her into the hallway.

  I tidied up the office, humming. I tried and failed to remember the words from Antony and Cleopatra. Brief phrases only: Forty paces … defect perfection … power breathe forth.

  Luella Woods appeared in the doorway, peeking her head around the frame, showing only her strong throat and too-familiar face. I looked into the mirror of her. We reflected each other cleanly.

  “Is she gone?” she asked me.

  I nodded.

  “Pathetic, isn’t it?” She stepped fully into the room. I took note of her reasonable shoes. My own suddenly seemed lavish. “An actress with a physicist,” she said. “Sounds like the plot to a bad play.”

  Luella Woods’s laugh was low and swift, the laughter of someone who was too smart to be truly happy.

  “I can see it in the marquee now,” she said without much inflection. “A Doomed Love, starring Hazel Dee and Phillip Hall.”

  I stared at her flat-mouthed, wondering, Does she see their future as I do?

  “What I’m saying,” she said, “is we’re here to work, not to fall in love or think that we’ve fallen in love. There’s too much to accomplish.”

  I emptied Dr. Hall’s ashtray and returned it with a clunk to his desk.

  “I’m telling you this because you’re practical like I am,” she said, and I found the humorlessness of her tone oddly calming. “You concentrate so well when you’re on the job. So do I. It’s a waste of government money, these actresses and singers and musicians they bring here.” I almost laughed here—I personally loved all of these events. “There’s more important work to be done.”

  She was awkward, standing there in her lab coat and plain shoes. She was trying to talk in a friendly way but her words fell like bricks to the floor, heavy and hard. If she noticed how limp and one-sided the conversation was, she didn’t let on. In this way, too, we mirrored each other.

  “I see myself in you,” I said, out of compassion, maybe, or discomfort.

  “Exactly,” she said. “We’re like-minded. We know what needs to be done.”

  I see myself in you and I don’t like it.

  “Those shoes are not something I’d buy, though.” She motioned to my feet. “They’d destroy my ankles. I’d trip and break my face.”

  “They’re very comfortable. Much better than my last pair.”

  “Well, I’ve got to run. Lots to do. Lots to oversee.” She gave me a little wave. “See you soon.”

  “Okay,” I said, and waved, too. “Have a good day, Mrs. Woods.”

  Alone again, I struggled to remember what I was doing. I fingered the papers on Dr. Hall’s desk, then decided to leave them be. I pushed his ashtray around until it looked properly aligned in the corner; I returned some pens to their container. What I liked about myself was my ability to fade away. Movies, stories, books, daydreams, shoes even. Luella Woods didn’t understand such thinking, perhaps because it was the inverse of thought. I enjoyed the bright tapping sound my new shoes made as I paced the office. I told myself (lied) that I didn’t care what she thought of me.

  Dr. Hall returned a minute or so later and slumped over his papers, staring into them as though he couldn’t comprehend the language printed on them. I didn’t tell him about Luella Woods. He was thinking of Hazel Dee. The romance of it pained me low in my belly.

  After a time he told me, “She’s sick, you know.”

  “Oh? Hazel?” I feigned surprise.

  “She’ll be fine. I’m helping her.”

  “She’ll rely on that help,” I assured him.

  “She’s been here a few times, you know, to help with morale.”

  I thought of my Dark Twin, how incapable she was of enjoyment, how sad that made me for her. I should take her to the movies, I thought. I pictured her sitting there in the dim light, glowering with impatience, fingers percussing the armrest.

  “We met the first night she performed,” Dr. Hall continued, “and I’ll admit, I’m quite taken with her.”

  “She’s magnificent,” I said.

  His shoulders relaxed. As he did only in moments when he was deep in thought or very troubled, he took out the package of cigarettes. He withdrew one and lit it from the matchbook in his front pocket. Then, apologetically, he offered one to me but I shook my head; I hated the smell of cigarette smoke. It reminded me of Mother and Martha, of the moments when they stood together on the front stoop, conspiring against me.

  “I don’t like to smoke,” he said, as if to nobody, “but now and again it calms me.”

  I waited. He wanted to speak, and I didn’t want to interrupt him.

  “You know, Miss Groves,” he said, “I’m happy you met her. Sometimes I think she’s not real. It helps that you’ve seen her, too, and that you also find her magnificent.”

  She will destroy your life.

  “Magnificent,” I said again, and he nodded dreamily, no doubt thinking of Hazel Dee in her bronze silk gown, but when I spoke I didn’t see Hazel Dee, I saw Hanford, Unit B, herself. I thought of the pile with its hundreds of metal slugs, how they looked like furious, unblinking eyes glaring with malice through the thick concrete walls, through metal and steel, over the river, over the mountains, across the oceans, fastening their gaze to the terrible, indescribable lands beyond, places crawling with an endless supply of enemies.

  Dr. Hall, it occurred to me, was in love with both Unit B and Hazel Dee, not one more than the other, but neither party would ever love him back.

  KING AND QUEEN

  Part of my job on the Safety and Security Committee was assisting with the plans for the big S&S Dance, where we would crown King Safety and Queen Security and acknowledge the departments with the best safety record. Unit B was a contender for the prize. A painted sign next to our time clock read, NO WORK-RELATED INJURIES FOR 268 DAYS. I traded out the tiny wooden placard every evening after work, and it was a simple and satisfying task, watching the sum increase one sturdy black numeral at a time.

  A few days before the dance, Tom Cat and I took the cattle car to Richland to buy supplies for the party; decorations, streamers, swizzle sticks, and the like. Tom Cat wasn’t on the committee but he volunteered to help me when I mentioned the necessary trip to town, and I was happy for the company. I liked spending the committee’s money on items that would be used for one night only. The woman at the department store filled up four paper sacks with our requests, and when she placed two of them in my arms I quivered with the furtive existences within, brief, joyous excitement tempered by a swift and certain end. It was a better sort of way to pass one’s time on earth, much preferred to the slow drive, the long plateau, the unseen sputtering out. I made a joke to Tom Cat about how I would like to live my life as a swizzle stick, and he smiled and said he knew just what I meant, all that motion, all those hands, but that wasn’t what I meant, not at all. Still, I was glad Tom Cat didn’t laugh at me the way someone else might have. Silly Milly. Mad Milly. Tom Cat didn’t see me that way. It seemed like he never would.

  With our arms loaded, we crushed in with all of the other Hanford residents who had finished their own chores in Richland. The car smelled of men and exhaust. The passengers watched us as we entered, their expressions ranging from bored to kind to mocking. Two of them rose quickly, offering me their seat, and I accepted the one closest to the doors.

  I sat squashed between tw
o large sets of shoulders and arranged my bags at my feet. Tom Cat stood a short distance away from me, eyeing me with a protective air. A couple of other men studied me, too, up and down, dull, unapologetic dog eyes sliding over my curves. I scolded myself for not feeling flattered by the attention.

  I was glad to be seated, my legs wobbly and unsure. The throngs of men stood all around me, the rows of shining belt buckles wrapping around me like a cage. The fence of them locked Tom Cat out. I kept my gaze focused on my knees. I thought with longing about how being married must instantly make you less afraid of the foreignness of men. The man next to me grunted and shuffled in his seat, trying to find a more comfortable place on the bench, and his hand grazed my knee. Marriage would involve touch far more intimate than this. I tried to think of Tom Cat’s hands on me, tried to feel excited at the prospect, but I felt nothing other than a cold dread.

  * * *

  The day of the dance, Tom Cat and I agreed to meet in the beer hall and decorate. Beth promised to help, too, but she was tied up at the infirmary for a few hours in the morning, so Tom Cat and I walked to the beer hall just the two of us, chatting amiably over the bags in our arms.

  We spent the morning nailing up streamers and cutting paper decorations. We put up signs around the room: STAY QUIET AND STAY SAFE; SECURITY IS AN INDIVIDUAL RESPONSIBILITY (BE AN INDIVIDUALIST!); UNIT B: WINNER, NO INJURIES FOR 272 DAYS!

  From construction paper we cut out crowns for King Safety and Queen Security. I secretly hoped Beth would win. It made sense, her being so beautiful and kind to everyone, and also being a nurse, an emblem of care, but I wondered who would be crowned king. I thought about Dr. Hall and laughed to myself.

  “What’s so funny?” Tom Cat said, looking up from his work.

  “Just wondering who will be king is all.”

  “My two cents on Gordon Nyer,” Tom Cat said. “He’ll get a lot of votes.”

  This disappointed me. I thought of Gordon pushing into our barracks, stealing Beth’s green nightgown. Where was the nightgown now? I didn’t want to think of it lying in a trash can or, worse, in his sock drawer.