Oh Pure and Radiant Heart, Lydia Millet [top romance novels .txt] 📗

of the day rose away was not where Ben spent his formative years. Ben lived lifetimes of exhaustion before he was ten.

But when she was a child the ground had been steady beneath her feet, and in the spring and the summer she had grass stains on her tennis shoes. The tennis shoes had always been new, and as soon as they were gray her mother bought her fresh white ones. She picked crab apples from the trees in the schoolyard and played with the smiling girls across the street, whose parents came from Holland. They liked to perch pipe-cleaner tiaras on their heads and pretend they were queens and princesses. They dressed in old clothes that smelled of mothballs, which they fished from a wicker trunk in the play room, and pranced up and down the street on silver platform shoes with their flowing robes trailing behind them. They had sung loudly as they paraded down the street, sung at the top of their lungs.

The platform shoes, her mother had told her later, were all she had kept from the sixties.

Of course there had been slights, disappointments, the shock of the world. She had been left alone once or twice and felt abandoned, forgotten by others. She knew she was only a narrow slip of existence.

When the family dog was hit by a car she stood with her face to the wall for fourteen hours. —Do other kids kill themselves when their puppies die? she asked her father, wracked with sobs, having seen the dear brown body twisted against the curb. Laying the dog to rest on a bed of tissue paper in a liquor box he had told her—Not very often, honey.

So instead she nobly turned to the wall in mourning.

Her mother and her father had not interfered. They let her be noble and watery with grief in silence. Once, in passing, her mother stooped to kiss the top of her head in a benediction, and then moved around the room tidying and humming.

The house was sweet with cleanness and always the same, fans whirring on the high ceilings with their dark crossbeams. She and her brothers floated in the pool on blowup whales and alligators until their thin, sleek calves and bony shoulders were evenly toasted. Her mother, who often wore a string of pearls around her neck, liked to bake bread and the smell of the baking bread would waft through the open windows and over the lilac bushes.

Ben had never known anything like that.

She pushed her fingertips against his temple, stroking a wing of his hair. Then she flicked the light off again.

Innocent and ignorant, she thought sadly, turning to lie on her back, there’s no real difference, actually we are both. Finally our ignorance consumes us, licking our backs with tongues of fire. And behind us the earth is left black.

What odd monsters will walk here after us, she wondered then, staring up.

She thought of them roaming the plains, the aftermen, their legs as tall as buildings but as thin as wire. She saw them bounding over the barren wastes like giant mosquitoes.

She wondered if they would be the leavings of men, the grandsons of robots, their veins and sinews delicate skeins of wire. Or if men had left nothing they might be the descendants of beetles and dragonflies. She tried to imagine their hearts, metal and polymer or muscle and blood.

And if there is memory then, if there is any recollection, it is our ignorance that will be remembered, she thought. Our innocence will be forgotten, our kittens will not go down in history.

A few minutes later, restless under the sheets, she thought: Secrets have lain waiting in matter, down through the centuries.

The soldier who chose Julius Robert Oppenheimer as lead scientist for the Manhattan Project was General Leslie R. Groves. A West Point graduate and an engineer by training, Groves had built the Pentagon before he set to work building the A-bomb to win the war against the fascists. “I’m not prejudiced,” he once said. “I don’t like certain Jews, and I don’t like certain well-known characteristics of theirs, but I’m not prejudiced.”

Although he admired Oppenheimer he hated Leo Szilard. Convinced Hitler was working toward an A-bomb or would be soon, Szilard had persuaded Albert Einstein to sign a letter he wrote to Roosevelt in 1939. With this letter they alerted the president to the possibility of an atomic bomb and thus, rather lamentably for two pacifist academics, touched off the nuclear arms race.

Later, Groves tried to have Szilard imprisoned as an enemy of the state. “If there were to be any villain of this piece,” he said, “I’d say it was Szilard.”

He also wrote of Szilard, as marginalia in a book: “He was completely unprincipled, amoral, and immoral.”

In 1948 Groves retired from military service to work in the private sector, as a Vice President of the RAND Corporation. He died in 1970 of heart disease.

As for Szilard, he thought Groves was a moron.

It was Szilard who made up the term breeder reactor.

Finally Ann got up again because she was still turning in the sheets.

The floors were red clay tile and cool against her bare feet. As she walked noiselessly through the rooms she touched certain fixtures and furnishings, letting her fingertips drift over their surfaces: the candles on iron stands, which smelled of vanilla and orange, the soft, old wood of sideboards and shelves, the soft, fibrous paper of a lampshade that gave off a faint, warm glow. The walls of the house were hung with paintings lent or given to her and Ben by a friend who owned an art gallery, and their amber and gold oils were carefully lit. She pulled the sliding doors open and stepped outside onto the flagstone patio.

There was a mild night wind and a new moon. Sitting down on the edge of the fountain with gray shrubs and flowers around her ankles—sage, for instance, and lamb’s ear, and a plant that Ben called hens