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To Lorraine
You are the best part of any adventure
COUNTDOWN: 116 DAYS
April 12, 1945
Washington, D.C.
Harry Truman needed a drink. It was his eighty-second day as vice president. And as usual, he spent the afternoon in the Senate chamber, this time overseeing a debate about a water treaty with Mexico. As senators droned on, his mind wandered to his mother and sister, who still lived near the old Truman family farm back in Grandview, Missouri. Truman pulled out some paper and a pen, even though he was seated at his elevated desk on the rostrum in the Senate chamber.
“Dear Mamma and Mary,” he wrote, “ a windy Senator from Wisconsin” was going on and on about “ a subject with which he is in no way familiar.” It was part of Truman’s job as president of the Senate to o ciate over sessions like this. But he couldn’t wait for it to end. There was someplace else he wanted to be. He had no idea his life was about to change forever.
Now, just before 5:00 p.m., the Senate mercifully recessed for the day. Truman started walking across the Capitol by himself, without his Secret Service detail—through the Senate side, across the Capitol Rotunda, then Statuary Hall, and onto the House side. Dressed smartly as usual, in a double-breasted gray suit, with a white handkerchief and a dark polka-dot bow tie, Truman was always in a hurry. And part of that was he walked fast.
He headed from the main public oor of the Capitol down to the ground oor, downstairs to House Speaker Sam Rayburn’s private hideaway, Room 9, which was known as the “Board of Education.” It was the most exclusive room
in the Capitol—entry by Rayburn’s personal invitation only. Most afternoons, members of Congress met here after o cial business hours to discuss strategy, exchange gossip, and “strike one for liberty,” enjoying a drink, or two. Truman was a regular. And his drink of choice was bourbon and branch water.
The Board of Education was a classic Capitol refuge, some twenty feet in length and lled with big leather chairs, a couch, and a long mahogany desk that doubled as a liquor cabinet. The only dissonant note was an ornate painted ceiling, festooned with birds and animals and plants. Rayburn had a mural with a Texas “lone star” added at one end of the room.
When Truman arrived, Rayburn—“Mr. Sam”—told him that the White House was looking for him. “Steve Early wants you to call him right away, ” Rayburn said, referring to President Roosevelt’s longtime secretary. Truman xed himself a drink, then sat down and dialed the White House switchboard, National 1414.
“This is the VP,” Truman said.
When Early got on the line, he was brief and direct. His voice was tense. He told Truman to get to the White House “ as quickly and quietly” as he could, and to come through the main Pennsylvania Avenue entrance. Rayburn was watching Truman, who he always thought was kind of pale. Now he “got a little paler.”
“Jesus Christ and General Jackson,” Truman exclaimed as he hung up the phone, too shocked to even hide it. He tried to remain calm. He told the others in the room he had to go to the White House on “ a special call.” He immediately stood up, walked to the door, and put his hand on the knob, then stopped and turned. “Boys, this is in this room. Something must have happened.”
Truman closed the door rmly behind him, then broke into a full run, this time through the now almost-empty Capitol. His footsteps echoed around the marble corridors as he dashed past statues of generals and politicians, past the Senate barbershop, and up the stairs to his vice presidential o ce. He was out of breath. He grabbed his hat and told his sta he was headed to the White House, but to say nothing about it. He didn’t have time to explain. And anyway, he really didn’t know much more than that.
Outside, it was raining. Truman got into his o cial black Mercury car and gave instructions to his driver, Tom Harty. Once again, he left his Secret Service detail behind. Between the weather and tra c, it took Truman more than ten minutes to get to the White House. And all that time, he wondered what was going on.
President Roosevelt was supposed to be in Warm Springs, Georgia, where he had spent the past two weeks recovering from exhaustion after a wartime summit in Yalta with British prime minister Winston Churchill and Soviet premier Joseph Stalin.
Maybe FDR had returned to Washington. His old friend Julius Atwood, a retired Episcopal bishop, had been buried in Washington earlier in the day. Had the president attended the ceremony and now wanted to see Truman? But since becoming vice president almost three months ago, he had met privately with Roosevelt only twice. Why now?
At 5:25, Truman’s car turned o Pennsylvania Avenue, passed through the Northwest Gate, and drove up under the North Portico of the White House. At the front door Truman was met by ushers, who took his hat and directed him to the president’s small oak-paneled elevator.
First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt was waiting for him in her private study on the second oor, along with her daughter and son-in-law, Anna and Lieutenant Colonel John Boettiger, and Steve Early. The two women were dressed in black.
The rst lady walked up to Truman, put her arm on his shoulder, and said, “Harry, the president is dead.”
Truman was too stunned to speak. He had hurried to the White House to see the president. Now, here he was, suddenly nding out he was the president. It took him a moment to steady himself. He asked Mrs. Roosevelt, “Is there anything I can do for you?”
“Is there anything we can do for you?” she replied. “For you are the one in trouble now. ”
Minutes later, at 5:47, the news bulletin ashed across the country and the world: FDR, the man who led the nation over the past twelve years, through the Depression and Pearl Harbor and now to the verge of victory in Europe in the Second World War, had died of a cerebral hemorrhage at the age of sixty-three.
The White House, mostly deserted with Roosevelt away, suddenly sprang into motion. A meeting of the Cabinet was called for 6:15. Truman directed that congressional leaders be asked to attend. And Harlan Stone, chief justice of the United States, was summoned to the White House to administer the oath of o ce. There was one more thing Truman needed to do.
At 6:00, he called his wife, Bess, at their modest two-bedroom apartment up Connecticut Avenue. His daughter, Margaret, answered the phone. She hadn’t heard the news yet, and she started kidding around with him as usual. He cut her o and told her to put her mother on the line.
Truman normally shared everything with Bess. But there was no time for that now. He told her President Roosevelt was dead, and he was sending a car for her, Margaret, and his mother-in-law, Madge Wallace, who lived with the family. He wanted them by his side when he took the oath of o ce.
Truman hung up the phone. He could tell that the conversation had shaken his wife. Ever since he’d accepted the nomination for vice president the previous summer, he knew this was her greatest fear—that FDR would not live out his fourth term. Now he and his family had been thrust into the position she dreaded.
When Truman arrived at the Cabinet Room, he was the rst one there. He sat at the big table. Soon the room lled around him. One Roosevelt sta er later described Truman looking “like a little man as he sat waiting in a huge leather chair.” But when all the Cabinet o cials who were in Washington arrived, Truman stood. “I want every one of you to stay and carry on, ” he told them, “and I want to do everything just the way President Roosevelt wanted it.”
There was a delay as they waited for the chief justice to arrive. And Truman’s family had to get through a large crowd that had gathered outside their apartment building. Sta ers also scurried to locate a Bible, nally nding a Gideon in the desk of the White House chief usher.
At 7:09, Truman and Chief Justice Stone stood in front of the mantel at the end of the Cabinet Room, with Truman’s family and top o cials forming a semicircle behind them. The chief justice started the oath. “I, Harry Shipp Truman,” he said, assuming Truman’s middle initial S came from his father’s family, when in fact it stood for nothing.
“I, Harry S Truman,” he responded, correcting the chief justice.
That wasn’t the only glitch. After Truman completed the oath, the chief justice told him that he’d held the Bible in his left hand, but placed his right hand on top of it. So they had to do it again, this time with the new president raising his right hand. When the swearing-in was nally over, Truman kissed the Bible, then turned to kiss his wife and daughter.
After the oath, Truman talked brie y to his Cabinet. He repeated his intention to pursue Roosevelt’s agenda. He said he always wanted their candid advice, but made it clear he would make the nal decisions. And once he made them, he expected their full support.
As the meeting broke up and the other o cials went home for the night, one man stayed behind: Henry Stimson, the secretary of war. He asked to speak to the new president alone “about a most urgent matter.”
At age seventy-seven, Stimson was a legendary gure who had served ve presidents. Truman would be his sixth. Sitting with the new president, Stimson said he’d keep it short. The subject was complicated, and he’d provide more detail later. But he wanted Truman to know about “ an immense project that was underway” to develop “ a new explosive of almost unbelievable destructive power. ” The project was so secret—and so potentially dangerous—only a handful of people knew about it. Stimson said he would brief Truman about it fully after the president had a few days to settle in.
Harry Truman being sworn in as president on April 12, 1945.
That was all. Stimson’s short, mysterious brie ng left Truman puzzled. But he was trying to process so much: FDR’s death, the nation’s reaction, his sudden responsibility for leading the war e ort in both Europe and the Paci c. Stimson’s “project” was one more job that was now his. And he had no idea what it really amounted to. It was a day, he later said, when “the world fell in on me. ”
“I decided the best thing to do was to go home and get as much rest as possible and face the music,” he wrote in his diary.
COUNTDOWN: 113 DAYS
April 15, 1945
Los Alamos, New Mexico
It was supposed to be spring. But fresh snow crunched underfoot as J. Robert Oppenheimer trotted across the top-secret Army compound in the New Mexico mesa. He headed straight across the snow to the makeshift movie theater. Oppenheimer was the scienti c director of the Manhattan Project, America’s massive secret e ort to develop an atomic bomb. On any other morning, he’d be juggling a thousand di erent papers in his o ce: reading progress reports, writing memos, or returning urgent telephone calls from Washington. While the country outside fought World War II, Oppenheimer and his corps of scientists inside the fenced-o installation focused all their energy and expertise on “the gadget,” a terrifying new weapon of mass destruction.
But not this Sunday morning. Today, he’d gathered the grief-stricken scientists, military men, support sta , and families living in the secret city of Los Alamos for a memorial service for President Roosevelt. He had never delivered a eulogy before.
A brilliant theoretical physicist, Oppenheimer had no trouble telling his peers or graduate students at the nation’s top universities about complicated scienti c theories that explained how the universe worked. He was uent in six languages and well versed in classical literature and Eastern philosophy. He learned Sanskrit just so he could read the Bhagavad Gita, a Hindu devotional poem, in its original language.
Three days had passed since President Roosevelt died at a spa in Georgia. Oppenheimer had spent most of that time struggling to nd the right words to memorialize him.
He felt the loss in a deeply personal way. The president guided the United States through some of its darkest hours. He’d been in the White House since 1933, stepping into the job in the depths of the Great Depression. He worked hard to restore the faith and con dence of the American people with ambitious programs designed to turn around the economy.
The nation turned to Roosevelt again when Japanese forces attacked the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on December 7, 1941. Most of America learned of the strike when a news bulletin interrupted their Sunday afternoon radio programs. “Japan?” People shook their heads in disbelief and adjusted their radios. Was it true? Could it be possible? The following day, Roosevelt addressed Congress and the nation via radio in a speech that would resonate through the years. The attack was “unprovoked” and “dastardly,” he said. December 7, 1941, was “ a date which will live in infamy.”
The president made a promise to the American people. “No matter how long it may take us to overcome this premeditated invasion,” he thundered, “the American people in their righteous might will win through to absolute victory.”
Congress declared war on Japan. Four days later, Germany declared war on the United States. The nation mobilized. For many Americans, FDR was the only commander in chief they had ever known. He was elected president four times, and almost three and a half years into World War II, just as the Allies neared victory in Europe—and the war in the Paci c reached a bloody climax Roosevelt had suddenly died.
Now a gust of uncertainty rattled the ranks of the Manhattan Project. Years earlier, it was Roosevelt who authorized the atomic bomb research and development project, bringing together the brightest scienti c minds for an operation he hoped would one day end the war. FDR was instrumental in getting major corporations—DuPont, Standard Oil, Monsanto, and Union Carbide—to design, manufacture, and operate revolutionary new equipment and plants to help build the weapon. Academic and industrial laboratories
o ered up their best, most creative scientists. It was costly, chancy, and cloaked in total secrecy.
No one knew for sure where, or whether, Harry Truman would take the project. As physicist Philip Morrison recalled, “Now, there was no one we knew at the top.”
The team at Los Alamos turned to Oppenheimer for answers. He was a genius of theoretical physics, but his gifts were not limited to science. His sharp mind could penetrate to the heart of any problem and deliver clear, concise solutions. His colleagues described him as the fastest thinker they’d ever met. At this moment, that clarity was needed more than ever.
Oppenheimer was six feet tall and weighed about 135 pounds, slender to the point of emaciation. But he dressed like a dandy in stylishly cut gray suits, blue shirts and ties, brightly shined shoes, and porkpie hats. With a cigarette dangling from his lower lip, bright blue eyes, and piercing gaze, he attracted women and intimidated men. “Oppie” was a rakish and self-assured character, as comfortable at a cocktail reception as he was in the lecture hall.
The son of a German immigrant who had made a fortune importing textiles in New York City, Oppenheimer was expected to succeed, and he didn’t disappoint. He graduated summa cum laude from Harvard University in just three years. At age twenty-two, he was awarded a PhD in physics from the University of Göttingen in Germany, where he studied under the acclaimed physicist Max Born. Within a few years, Oppenheimer landed prestigious teaching jobs at both the University of California, Berkeley, and the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. He split his time between schools; one semester at Berkeley, the next in Pasadena. Unlike most professors of that time, he was amboyant, a bohemian Method actor who lectured with infectious enthusiasm. Without notes, he weaved poetry and literature through lofty mathematical concepts. He made it clear that the most important scienti c questions were still unanswered and challenged his students to plumb the mysteries. As one colleague recalled, Oppenheimer brought a “degree of sophistication in physics previously unknown in the United States.”
Students were fascinated and inspired. They followed the professor back and forth from Berkeley to Pasadena, captivated by his eccentricities and zest for life,
his appetite for rare steaks, sti martinis, spicy foods, and cigarettes. An accomplished horseback rider and sailor, he seemed to have a friend around every corner.
But Oppenheimer had a dark side, too. His brilliance could be clouded by melancholy and peevishness. He didn’t tolerate small talk. He’d interrupt friends in midsentence, especially if he thought the subject wasn’t intellectually stimulating. Students who asked mundane questions were subjected to public humiliation. A longtime colleague described Oppenheimer as “dismissive to the point of rudeness.”
In 1942, when Oppenheimer was appointed to lead the Manhattan Project, some of his colleagues questioned his temperament and lack of executive experience, saying he couldn’t “ manage a hamburger stand.” He’d have to bridge the gap between innovative, independent academia and the rigid structure of the military.
Oppenheimer charged into the job, which he viewed as the most e cient means of ending the war. He persuaded world-renowned scientists to uproot their families and join him at the secret atomic weapons laboratory in Los Alamos, a remote area surrounded by deep canyons and high peaks at the southernmost tip of the Rocky Mountains. Oppenheimer worked well with military leaders, including his counterpart, General Leslie R. Groves.
Over time, Oppenheimer morphed into a marvelously e cient and charismatic administrator, his friends and colleagues said. Some of the greatest physicists in the world were assembled at Los Alamos, including six Nobel Prize winners. Their egos were immense, but somehow, Oppie made it all work. One colleague said Oppenheimer was very close to being indispensable.
By April 1945, Oppenheimer thoroughly embodied his role as the project’s scienti c director. He was just forty years old. He lived with his wife, Kitty, and two small children in a little cabin in a secluded part of Los Alamos. The onceeccentric professor now threw dinner parties for visiting scientists and colleagues at his cabin. The fun started with dry martinis and spilled out onto the front yard as the sun went down.
Los Alamos had grown from a few hundred people to eight thousand scientists and military personnel and their families. The perimeter of the 54,000-
acre site “the Hill”—was surrounded by a ten-foot fence topped with barbed wire. Inside, another fence cordoned o the technical area, where only those with the highest security clearance could go. Oppenheimer’s o ce was there, as well as the vast laboratories used for bomb research. Like a mayor, Oppenheimer often waved and greeted people as he strolled the treeless streets of Los Alamos. He was always poised and gracious, never at a loss for words.
A party at Los Alamos in 1944 (from left to right): Dorothy McKibbin, who was responsible for welcoming new recruits at the secret city; J. Robert Oppenheimer, the Manhattan Project’s scienti c director; and Victor Weisskopf, a nuclear physicist.
But on April 12, the news of the president’s death was a terrible shock. Thomas O. Jones saw a more subdued Oppenheimer that day, a man grappling with profound loss.
An intelligence o cer, Jones had his o ce in a building connected to Oppenheimer’s by an enclosed walkway. He was getting ready to leave when his telephone rang. Roosevelt was dead, the caller said. Jones didn’t believe it at rst.
“Are you sure?” he asked.
The caller repeated the message. Jones sat in stunned silence. He knew he had to tell the others. The base was shut o from the world. There were no outside radio stations or newspapers. The nearest town was Santa Fe, some thirty- ve miles away. Los Alamos, according to maps, didn’t exist. So most people here would have to get the bad news over a tech area loudspeaker.
Jones decided to tell Oppenheimer. He bolted from his o ce to the walkway between the buildings. Halfway across, he glimpsed a familiar gure heading toward him.
Oppenheimer already knew, but couldn’t believe it. “Is it true?” Oppenheimer asked.
“Yes, Oppie,” Jones said softly. It only con rmed what Oppenheimer expected to hear.
The workers in the tech area learned about the president’s death simultaneously. Everything stopped. Scientists turned to each other. Did you hear that? they asked. Some were shocked into silence. Others cried. They spilled out of the laboratories into the hallways and the steps outside. No one wanted to be alone.
In the walkway, Jones could see that Oppenheimer was visibly shaken, his face pale and grim. They talked about the president, how he’d saved the nation. Oppenheimer praised the good Roosevelt had done, his intelligence and “magnetic personality.”
In reality, Oppenheimer and Roosevelt never talked much. They kept a respectful distance, and mostly communicated through intermediaries. Whenever FDR had the chance, he praised Oppie for the “highly important” work he was overseeing at the Los Alamos Weapons Research and Design Lab.
In a June 29, 1943, letter to Oppenheimer, Roosevelt tried to smooth over the growing antagonism between scientists and General Groves, the project’s hard-driving military leader. Roosevelt had learned that some scientists were starting to snap under the pressure of what they considered impossible deadlines. They resented living under heavy guard. Some doubted the bomb could ever be built and questioned the wisdom of working with such dangerous material.
Roosevelt’s letter acknowledged Oppenheimer as the leader of an elite group of scientists operating under strict security and under “ very special restrictions.” The president appealed to Oppenheimer to convince his team the restrictions were necessary. He asked him to convey FDR’s appreciation for their hard work and “personal sacri ces.”
“I am sure we can rely on their continued wholehearted and unsel sh labors. Whatever the enemy may be planning, American science will be equal to the challenge,” Roosevelt wrote.
Now, as Oppenheimer prepared for the memorial service, he knew some of his scientists still harbored doubts about the project to develop an atomic bomb. Lately, in uential physicists like Leo Szilard were expressing moral opposition to
using it in war. Szilard started a petition drive, collecting the names of fellow scientists who felt the same.
But for just this one day, Oppenheimer wanted to put those concerns aside. He stayed up late the night before to nish his eulogy. In the morning he saw the snow blanketing his garden, the streets, the entire town. Morrison, the physicist, remembered the snow as a “gesture of consolation.”
The normally busy streets were quiet. Like most of America, Los Alamos was in mourning. The pavement outside the theater was bare, the snow trampled by the feet of hundreds waiting inside. Jones met Oppie at the door and ushered him in. The boss left behind his trademark porkpie hat.
President Franklin D Roosevelt’s letter to J Robert Oppenheimer, June 29, 1943
Oppenheimer walked slowly to the stage, and the people, crowded into rows of wooden benches, fell silent. For some who had known Oppie for years, he looked a little older than the brash young physicist who had been such a star in California. Many of the people inside, like Jones and Morrison, wondered if this meant the end of the entire project.
Oppenheimer stood onstage against the backdrop of a lowered American ag and waited a moment. Then, in a voice no louder than a whisper, he began, delivering a eulogy designed to reassure the thousands working at Los Alamos.
“When, three days ago, the world had word of the death of President Roosevelt, many wept who are unaccustomed to tears, many men and women little enough accustomed to prayer, prayed to God. Many of us looked with deep trouble to the future; many of us felt less certain that our works would be a good end; all of us were reminded how precious a thing human greatness is.
“We have been living through years of great evil, and of great terror. Roosevelt has been our president, our commander in chief and, in an old, unperverted sense, our leader. All over the world men have looked to him for guidance, and have seen symbolized in him their hope that the evils of this time would not be repeated; that the terrible sacri ces which have been made, and those that are still to be made, would lead to a world more t for human habitation. It is in such times of evil that men recognize their helplessness and their profound dependence. One is reminded of medieval days when the death of a good and wise and just king plunged his country into despair and mourning.”
Then Oppenheimer turned to the text that brought him so much comfort over the years.
“In the Hindu scripture, in the Bhagavad Gita, it says ‘Man is a creature whose substance is faith. What his faith is, he is.’ The faith of Roosevelt is one that is shared by millions of men and women in every country of the world. For this reason it is possible to maintain the hope, for this reason it is right that we should dedicate ourselves to the hope that his good works will not have ended with his death.”
Afterward, the scientists and their families stood, heads bowed and silent, too saddened to talk.
While it was unclear how Truman would handle the Manhattan Project, Oppenheimer tried to remain optimistic. After the service, he turned to a friend, David Hawkins, a physicist.
“Roosevelt was a great architect,” Oppenheimer said. “Perhaps Truman will be a good carpenter.”
But Oppenheimer was not sure. He only knew that after spending years of intense research and billions in taxpayer dollars, the scientists of Los Alamos had better deliver the goods, and soon.
COUNTDOWN: 105 DAYS
April 23, 1945
Wendover, Utah
Colonel Paul Tibbets Jr. grimaced and held the telephone handset away from his ear while a Salt Lake City policeman bellowed down the line. Over the weekend, some of the colonel’s airmen had blown into the city like cowboys at the end of a cattle drive, and the policeman rattled o a long list of trouble. Speeding, running red lights, whooping it up at the Hotel Utah with whiskey and wild women, brawling with the local roughnecks.
Tibbets sighed. He and his men had been bottled up at this desert airstrip for way too long. It was time for the 509th Composite Group to leave Wendover Air eld and start making some real trouble for real enemies.
He told the policeman it wouldn’t be long before they were out of his hair and out of town. Jailing his highly trained men over a weekend’s mischief would solve nothing, and it would waste the nation’s investment.
The policeman had to agree. After a few more soothing words, Tibbets hung up the phone.
For months, the colonel had driven his men relentlessly. They didn’t know the details. His men only knew they had been training for a secret bombing mission that could end the war. Now they were ready, but what about the bomb? That was his only question. He’d been back and forth to Los Alamos, and was told that the scientists were still “tinkering” with it. They were more concerned with producing the perfect weapon, instead of being satis ed with the one they had. It seemed they were forever improving the design, running
more tests, making endless changes before they’d let Tibbets actually drop the damn thing. And of course, there were still questions about whether the weapon would work.
Tibbets wasn’t only dealing with the cops, or the scientists at Los Alamos. He was running a complex secret military operation of his own here in Utah, involving hundreds of pilots, navigators, bombardiers, and support personnel. Only he and a handful of people knew what it was all about. And every problem in the 509th ended up on his desk.
His wife, Lucy, and two young children lived in a little house near the air eld, but he rarely spent time there. He was so consumed with the mission that playing with his kids and talking into the night with his wife had become sweet memories. That diligence was one reason why his commanders picked him for the job. He was organized, tough, and had joined the Army Air Corps years before the war started. But most important, he was “the best damn pilot” in the Army, as one general put it. His cockpit expertise was vital to the dangerous assignment. The pilot who ultimately ew the mission would not only have to drop the atomic bomb accurately. He’d then need to execute perfect turns and dives to avoid the bomb’s blast. Otherwise, the aftershocks could blow the plane to pieces.
If anyone could do it, Tibbets could. He was a con dent, handsome guy with a slight cleft in his chin. But Tibbets was no Hollywood character. He was a seasoned bomber pilot who thrived under pressure. Tibbets shepherded generals Dwight Eisenhower and Mark Clark on missions in North Africa in 1942 and 1943. Once, while he was ying Clark to Algiers, he landed awlessly while under re from antiaircraft shells and machine guns.
Tibbets ew dozens of combat bombing missions over North Africa and Germany, then was deployed to the United States to take charge of the B-29 Superfortress ight-testing program. The B-29 was designed by Boeing to operate faster, at higher altitudes, and with heavier bomb loads than its predecessor, the B-17 Flying Fortress. The B-29 was able to y more than 3,000 miles—just what the U.S. military needed as it moved closer to Japan. But the new bomber killed its rst test pilot and was thought by some to be too dangerous to y.
Tibbets proved fearless, and he expected the same from his fellow pilots. A decisive commander, Tibbets was a perfectionist, which irritated some of his colleagues. But Tibbets didn’t care. He was in charge, so they were doing things his way—“the right way. ”
He was born in Quincy, Illinois, the son of a former World War I infantry captain who afterward ran a wholesale candy business. That would lead, indirectly, to Paul’s passion. He took his rst ight in a biplane at age twelve, part of a promotion for the new Baby Ruth candy bar. His father was the area distributor for the product, and a local pilot was hired to drop Baby Ruths over a large gathering of people.
When the boy heard about the stunt, he begged the pilot to let him tag along. The pilot didn’t say yes right away; he didn’t want anything to happen to the boss’s son. Once permission was granted, the pilot put the boy to work helping a corps of warehouse workers attach a tiny paper parachute to each candy bar, so they would fall gently to the ground.
When the plane was loaded with candy, Tibbets jumped in the cockpit and strapped himself in next to the pilot. The engine roared to life, the pilot pushed the throttle forward, and soon the airplane lifted free. With the wind in his face, Tibbets couldn’t help grinning. It didn’t take long for them to reach a race track, where the pilot circled low, letting the crowd get a good look at the biplane. As the pilot steered, Tibbets tossed candy bars overboard to the people below. For years after, Tibbets joked it was his rst bombing mission. From the moment the plane was in the air, he was hooked. As he would later tell his friends, “Nothing else would satisfy me, once I was given an exhilarating sample of the life of an airman.”
But his father wanted him to become a doctor. Tibbets attended the Western Military Academy in North Alton, Illinois, and in 1933 he enrolled at the University of Florida. After class, he’d often stop at Gainesville Airport to look at the planes. One day he decided it was time to learn how to y. He took lessons, seven dollars for thirty minutes. He was a natural. He quickly outgrew his instructor.
After his sophomore year, Tibbets transferred to the University of Cincinnati to complete his pre-med studies. He lived with his father’s friend, Dr. Alfred
Harry Crum, a surgeon. Tibbets spent most of his weekends working as an orderly at the doctor’s hospital, but in his spare time, he sneaked away to Lunken Airport to hang around with the pilots.
Dr. Crum noticed young Tibbets’s interest in ying and encouraged him to follow his dream. Perhaps he could make a career of commercial aviation. But Tibbets knew his father wouldn’t approve.
Then, toward the end of 1936, everything became clear. An ad in a Popular Mechanics magazine almost shouted out to him, “Do you want to learn to y?”
Tibbets already knew how, but it was the next line that really captured his attention: the Army Air Corps was looking for pilots. Tibbets, who was now twenty-one, sent an application in the next day’s mail, and just before he headed home for the holidays, the letter came: Tibbets was accepted in the program. He would become a ying cadet.
Now he had to tell his parents he was dropping out of college to join the military. His father didn’t take it well. “I’ve sent you through school,” he said.
“Bought you automobiles, given you money to run around with the girls, but from here on, you ’ re on your own. If you want to go kill yourself, go ahead, I don’t give a damn.”
His mother, Enola Tibbets, sat quietly through her husband’s rant. When he stopped to catch his breath, she let silence settle over the room before she spoke.
“Paul, if you want to go y airplanes, you ’ re going to be all right,” she said in almost a whisper. Tibbets felt reassured. He was making the right decision. Nothing bad would happen to him.
Tibbets carried those words with him every time he got into a jam during combat. The day he left for basic training in February 1937 his mother told him: “Son, someday we ’ re going to be really proud of you. ” And so far, in his eight years in the military, he had done everything right.
After basic ight training at Randolph Field in San Antonio, Texas, he was assigned to Fort Benning, Georgia. That’s where he met Lucy Wingate, a petite southern belle. They fell in love and married in 1938.
Tibbets rose quickly through the ranks of the Air Corps, which was renamed the U.S. Army Air Forces in 1941. Shortly after his deployment to Europe in June 1942, he was named commanding o cer of an entire squadron of the 97th Bombardment Group.
Tibbets led the rst American daylight heavy bomber mission over occupied France in August 1942. All told, Tibbets piloted twenty- ve combat missions in the B-17 Flying Fortress plane he named the Red Gremlin.
He ew Major General Clark from London to Gibraltar in preparation for Operation Torch, the Allied invasion of North Africa. A few weeks later, Tibbets ew Lieutenant General Eisenhower, the supreme Allied commander, to Gibraltar.
Tibbets’s skills were praised by his commander, Major General Jimmy Doolittle, who was already a military legend. He had led a daring bombing raid over Tokyo in 1942, the rst American attack on the Japanese mainland. The mission was later depicted in the lm Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo. Doolittle was played by actor Spencer Tracy.
Colonel Paul W. Tibbets.
So when Tibbets was called into Doolittle’s o ce in February 1943, he thought he’d likely be ferrying another high-ranking general somewhere. But Doolittle told him instead about a request from General Henry “Hap” Arnold, the Air Forces chief of sta . “General Arnold wants my best eld-grade o cer with the most experience in B-17s to come back to the United States,” Doolittle said. “They’re building an airplane called the B-29, and they’re having a lot of trouble with it. It’s yours. ”
A month later, Tibbets was stateside, doing ight test work with engineers at the Boeing factory. He went to Alamogordo, New Mexico, to help a professor calculate the B-29’s vulnerability to ghter attack. Tibbets’s job was testing out the theories in simulated combat runs. The B-29 assigned for the tests was fully equipped with weapons and armor plating, but when Tibbets arrived to work, he learned his plane was out of commission for at least ten days. He decided to try ying a “skeleton” B-29, a plane without any guns or armament. With the aircraft seven thousand pounds lighter, Tibbets was amazed at how easily it handled and how high it could climb. He led that data in the back of his head.
The Army opened a B-29 training school in Grand Island, Nebraska, in March 1944, with Tibbets as director of operations. It made sense. He had spent more ying time in the Superfortress than any other pilot. The assignment didn’t last long. In September, Tibbets was summoned to a secret meeting at the U.S. Army Second Air Force headquarters in Colorado Springs.
Tibbets knew nothing about the meeting, not even who would be there. He settled his nerves and stepped into the conference room. There were three people inside: Colonel John Lansdale, a U.S. Army intelligence o cer; Navy captain William “Deak” Parsons, an “explosives expert”; and Professor Norman Ramsey, a Harvard physicist.
Lansdale said he wanted to ask Tibbets a few questions about his military career. But they quickly crossed into Tibbets’s civilian life. Some questions were highly personal. This is an interrogation, Tibbets thought. Eventually, Lansdale said he had one last query: “Have you ever been arrested?”
Tibbets took a deep breath. Yes, he said. When he was a nineteen-year-old college student “ a nosy policeman with a ashlight” caught Tibbets and a girl “during a love-making episode” in the backseat of his parked car in North Miami
Beach, Florida. The charges were later dropped, he said. Everyone in the room already knew about his indiscretion. They had done their background research. They just wanted to see if Tibbets would come clean. When he did, they knew they had the right man. Then General Uzal G. Ent, commander of the Second Air Force, took over the conversation—and he got right to the point.
He told Tibbets about the Manhattan Project, a plan for a bomb so powerful it would explode with the force of “twenty thousand tons of conventional high explosive.” Tibbets had been chosen to develop a method to deliver the atomic bomb over the skies of Germany or Japan. His mission was code-named “Operation Silverplate.” Ent warned Tibbets he would be court-martialed if he spoke of it to anyone.
Tibbets could have anything he needed, they told him, from men to supplies. If anyone gave him trouble, all he had to do was say the request was for Operation Silverplate. He had a blank check.
Tibbets chose Wendover Air eld, a remote base along the Utah–Nevada state line, for the training program. He started assembling the right men for his new group. He combed his memory for outstanding members of ight crews who served with him in Europe and North Africa, as well as in the B-29 training program.
At the top of his list were Captain Theodore “Dutch” Van Kirk, a navigator, and Major Thomas Ferebee, a bombardier, his crewmates in the old Red Gremlin days. O duty, Van Kirk and Ferebee, both young and single, had loved to drink, gamble, and carouse their way around London. Every now and then, Tibbets joined in.
Ferebee was the rst to arrive at Wendover, and Van Kirk came soon after. On a mission, the bombardier was responsible for hitting enemy targets. For Tibbets, no one did it better than Ferebee. From a small town in North Carolina, Ferebee was tall and handsome, a former high school baseball star who got a tryout with the Boston Red Sox.
Captain Theodore J Van Kirk, Colonel Paul Tibbets, and Major Thomas Ferebee standing in front of the bomber they used during their bombing missions in Europe, the Red Gremlin.
With his mustache, smooth southern drawl, and his penchant for gambling and womanizing, he was like the ctional character Rhett Butler from Gone with the Wind.
Unlike Ferebee, Van Kirk had just settled down. The boyish-looking airman married a girl from his hometown in Northumberland, Pennsylvania. At twenty-four, Van Kirk was a little quieter than Ferebee, but both were perfectionists—like their commander. The trio worked together to assemble Tibbets’s sta ng wish list. That included Jacob Beser, a wiry, sarcastic Jewish kid from Baltimore who had been an engineering major at Johns Hopkins University.
Beser jumped at the opportunity. When Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, igniting World War II, Beser had lobbied his parents to let him join the Royal Air Force. He hated the Nazis. He knew his relatives in France and Germany were natural targets for Hitler’s rabid anti-Semitism. His parents were angry, too, but they insisted he complete his degree. When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, Beser had had enough. He enlisted in the Army Air Forces the next day.
But more than three years later, Beser still hadn’t seen any action. After basic training, he was sent to Harvard to learn about radar. The technology was new and growing in importance, and he became one of the service’s highest-rated radar specialists.
Beser kept asking to serve in a combat unit, to “ avenge his relatives in Europe,” but he was turned down every time. He was stuck teaching radar to recruits. He had just put in another request when Tibbets picked him for his team.
Tibbets did the same with Sta Sergeant George “Bob” Caron, a tail gunner. When Caron blew into Wendover—a dusty expanse of desert about 125 miles west of Salt Lake City—his uniform was dirty and his collar unbuttoned, violations of military rules. As an MP lit into him, Caron heard a familiar voice.
“Is that you, Bob?”
He turned, and Tibbets shook his hand. Caron grinned and the MP stood down. The commander took Caron to his o ce and got right down to business.
“Bob, I need a man who knows what he’s doing and can teach others to do a similar job. And keep their mouths shut,” Tibbets said.
“Colonel, I won’t even mention I’m here,” Caron said.
Another choice was Captain Robert A. Lewis, a cocky, Brooklyn-born aviator. In the B-29 program, Tibbets became a mentor to Lewis. If Tibbets was the Joe DiMaggio of pilots, then Lewis was Ted Williams. Lewis believed he was the best pilot in the military, and a lot of other folks thought so, too.
By the time Tibbets recruited enough men to make up a dozen crews, he had assembled some of the top pilots, navigators, and ight engineers in the U.S. military. For Tibbets, loyalty and secrecy were the most important qualities. He tolerated raucous behavior among his men so long as he knew they would not tell anyone what they were doing.
He summed it all up for them at his rst brie ng with the 509th in September 1944: “You don’t discuss with anyone where you are, who you are, what you ’ re doing. With your wife, your mother, your sister, your girlfriend or anything.”
And to show how serious he was, the few men who spoke too freely were suddenly transferred to an air base in Alaska.
Tibbets’s crews worked for months, studying, discussing, practicing. They worked hard and played hard, looking for ways to ll their time during the long wait to deployment. Now spring was here, and things were getting squirrely in Wendover. It was time to move on.
In the meantime, commanders had been busy preparing a new home for the 509th on the tiny, strategic Paci c island of Tinian, 1,600 miles south of Tokyo. Captured by U.S. forces in July 1944, Tinian had become a key air base, easy to supply by sea and perfect for launching B-29 air attacks against Japanese cities.
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He indicated the white-robed figures of June and Rosamund in front of him. Rion nodded. Before he had spoken to the Colonel he had stood just behind him watching June. Her back was toward him but as she turned he caught glimpses of her profile. He had not dared to speak to her. His stop with the Colonel was a half-way halt, a pause to gain courage, cheered by a hope that the older man might break the ice of their meeting.
“How are they?” he said in a matter-of-fact tone, while his heart pounded with mingled hope and dread of June’s turning and seeing him.
“Well, very well,” said the other briskly. “Rosamund’s a perfect picture of health and happiness. And June—well, perhaps she’s a little thin and not quite up to her usual spirits. But she looks very pretty to-night.”
He waited to see what Rion would say to this. The Colonel had wondered of late if his friend had heard any gossip of June and Barclay. He knew the mining man led a simple life of engrossing work among men, far from the circles where the meaner spirits of the world seek to unveil the hidden wounds of their fellows. Rion’s answer struck upon his complacency with an impact of disturbing surprise.
“Do you know if Barclay’s here yet? Have you seen him? Mercedes sent me to find out if he’d come. He said he’d be late, and she seems to think it’s about time for him to illuminate the place by his presence. But I can’t find him.”
“Barclay!” exclaimed the older man in a disgusted tone. “What’s Mercedes want with him? A handsome girl like that oughtn’t to bother her head about a skunk like Barclay.”
“Go slow, Jim, go slow now,” said Rion, laughing; and placing his big hand on the Colonel’s shoulder he pressed it hard. “Mustn’t talk that way to me about Jerry any more. He’s going to become a member of the family. He and Mercedes are engaged. It’s announced to-night.
That’s why I’m here. That’s why Mercedes wanted the men of the family to rally round her, and lend the weight of their approval to something they don’t approve of at all.”
For the first moment the Colonel was too staggered to speak. He had expected it—as Rosamund had—but not so soon, not so indecently soon. His mind leaped forward to the certainty of June’s hearing it suddenly from a partner and something distressing happening.
“Stay here, Rion, for a moment,” he said quietly. “I want to speak to Rosamund.”
Even as he stepped forward, Rosamund, a few yards in front of them, wheeled suddenly from the two men before her, and came toward him. One glance at her face told him that she too had heard.
“Uncle Jim,” she whispered, as they came together and she made a desperate clutch at him, “quick! something dreadful’s happened. Mercedes and Jerry are engaged and it’s announced to-night. Everybody’s talking of it. Jack Griscom’s just told me. What’ll we do? June may hear it at any moment. We’ve got to get her away before she does.”
June stood just beyond them. Breaking into Rosamund’s last words came the little blow of her fan striking the floor. Her program fluttered down beside it.
“Why, Miss Allen,” said her companion, a youth who had been the first to impart the news of the evening, “what is it? You’re dropping everything.”
As he bent on his knees to pick up the fallen properties, the Colonel roughly pushed him aside. June’s stricken face appalled him. He drew one of her hands through his arm, and said in a low authoritative voice:
“Come. We’re going home. Walk to the door and I’ll get the carriage in a minute.”
She made an effort and turning moved toward the door. In the passing in and out of laughing people, flushed with exercise and
pleasure, no one noticed her except Rion, who suddenly saw her approach and sweep by, her eyes staring before her, her face set like a stone. Rosamund had taken the fan and program from the astonished boy, and with a rapid sentence to the effect that her sister felt faint, followed them. Rion dared to touch her arm as she passed through the doorway.
“What’s the matter with June?” he said bruskly. “She looks as if she were dying.”
“She’s sick. She—she—feels faint. It’s—it’s—a sort of an attack.”
She hurried on down the long flagged hall, at one side of which was the dressing-room. Rion followed and saw the three enter it. He stood outside, irresolute, not liking to look in through the open doorway and unable to go away. Presently the Colonel emerged, saw him, and hurrying toward him, said in quick, low-toned urgency:
“You’re just the man I want. June’s sick. I’m going to get the carriage and I don’t want any of these fools of people round here to see her. You bring her down as soon as she’s ready.”
“What’s the matter with her?” Rion asked again. “Is it serious?”
“It’s—it’s—the heart,” said the Colonel, bent on shielding his darling even to her lover and his own friend. “She’s—she’s—had attacks before. Yes, it’s damned serious.”
He was gone with the words, and Rion, standing by the dressingroom door, looked in and caught a glimpse of June standing between Rosamund, who was fastening her cloak, and a white-capped negress who was draping a lace scarf over her head. She looked like a sleep-walker, wide-eyed and pallid under their arranging hands. He did not move away this time, but instead walked to the door and said to Rosamund:
“The Colonel wants me to take you to the carriage.”
As they moved toward him he entered, drew June’s hand inside his arm and walked down the hall to the door. There were several short flights of marble steps leading from the porch to the street. When he came to these he threw her cloak aside, pushing it out of his way, put
his arm around her and half carried her down. Her body in the grasp of his arm seemed pitifully small and frail. She said nothing, but he felt that she trembled like a person in a chill.
At the foot of the steps the carriage stood, the Colonel at the door. The hour was an auspicious one for an unseen exit. It was too late for the most dilatory guest to be arriving, and too early for the most unfestal to be leaving. The street was devoid of pedestrians and vehicles, and lit by the diminishing dots of lamps and the gushes of light from the illuminated house, presented a vista of echoing desertion.
The Colonel opened the carriage door, helped Rosamund in first and lifted June in after her. He was standing with the handle in his hand when a footstep he had vaguely heard advancing through the silence struck loud on his ear. He turned quickly and saw a man come into view from the angle of the side street, walk rapidly toward the house, and then stop with that air of alertly poised hesitancy which suggests a suddenly-caught and concentrated attention. The object of this attention was the Colonel’s figure, and as the new-comer stood in that one arrested moment of motionless scrutiny, the Colonel saw by the light of an adjacent lamp that it was Jerry Barclay. They recognized each other, and the advancing man drew back quickly into the shadow of the house.
“Rion,” said the Colonel, turning to his friend, “would you mind taking the girls home? I’ve just remembered something I have to do that will detain me for a few minutes. I’ll go round the other way and be at Folsom Street almost as soon as you are.”
He waited to see Rion enter and then slammed the door on him, and drew back from the curb.
As the carriage disappeared around the corner he walked forward to the spot where Jerry was concealed. He could see his figure pressed back against the fence, faintly discernible as a darker bulk amid the darkness about it, a pale line of shirt bosom showing between the straight blackness of the loosened coat fronts.
“I knew that was you, Jerry,” he said. “It’s no good hiding.”
Jerry stepped forward into the light of the lamp. He was enraged and chagrined at the encounter.
“Hiding?” he exclaimed haughtily. “Why should I be hiding?”
The Colonel came close to him and said with low-toned emphasis:
“Because you’re a liar and a coward, Jerry Barclay; and you were afraid to meet me.”
Jerry drew back crying with amazed rage:
“Colonel Parrish!”
“And you tried to hide from me to-night when I know what you are and what you’ve done. You scrub—you—”
Barclay hit furiously at him, but the older man evaded the blow, and seizing him by the loosened fronts of his coat, with his open hand struck him on both sides of the face and then flung him against the fence. He squared himself to meet an onslaught but Jerry struck heavily and fell, a dark, sprawling mass on the sidewalk. The oath that he shouted as he reeled back was bitten in two by an ejaculation of pain and he lay motionless, groaning in the dark.
“Stay there and howl,” said the Colonel. “If I stayed another moment I’d kick you as you lie.”
And he turned and ran down the street. The rattle of a carriage struck his ear and a coupé turned the corner, its lamps glaring like two round yellow eyes. He hailed it, thrust a handful of silver into the driver’s hand, and gave him the Allen address on Folsom Street.
As the carriage rattled across town he lay back, his blood singing in his ears, his heart racked with rage and pain. He had done no good, probably been very foolish. But as June’s face rose on his memory, he wished he had hit harder, and the recollection of Jerry groaning against the fence soothed his pain.
CHAPTER XIII THE BREAKING POINT
In the middle of the December afternoon the Colonel had come in early to his rooms to change his coat and brush up a bit. He was going to call on the wife of a pioneer friend who had just returned from Europe. The Colonel was punctilious and called in a black coat, which he now stood brushing beside the window and anxiously surveying, for he had been a man who was careful of his dress, and the coat looked shiny.
It was a chill gray day and he looped back the lace curtains to see better. Outside, the fog was beginning to send in long advancing wisps which projected a cold breath into the warmest corners of the city. A mental picture rose on his mind of the sand dunes far out with the fleecy curls and clouds sifting noiselessly over them. The vision was not cheering and he put it out of his mind, and in order to enliven his spirits, which were low, he whistled softly as he brushed.
The room—the bare hotel parlor of that kind of suite which has a small windowless bedroom behind it—looked out on the life of one of the down-town streets. The Traveler’s Hotel had not yet quite fallen from grace, though the days of its prosperous prime were past. On the block opposite it a few old sheds of wood and corrugated iron (relics of the early fifties) toppled against one another and sheltered a swarming vagabond life. The hotel itself still preserved its dignity. The shops on its ground floor were respectable and clean. There was a good deal of Spanish and Italian spoken in them, which seemed to accord with their pink and blue door-frames, the Madeira vines growing in their windows, and the smell of garlic that they exhaled at midday.
The Colonel was giving the coat a last inspection when a knock made him start. His visitors were few, and his eyes were expectantly fixed on the door when in answer to his “come in” it slowly opened. A whiff of perfume and a rustle of silks heralded the entrance of June, who stood somewhat timidly on the threshold looking in.
“Junie!” cried the Colonel in delighted surprise. “My girl come to see the old man in his lair!”
And he took her by the hand and drew her in, kissing her as he shut the door, and rolling up his best arm-chair.
She did not sit down at once and he said, still holding her hand by the tips of the fingers and looking her over admiringly:
“Well, aren’t you a beautiful sight! And just the best girl in the world to come down here and see me.”
She smiled faintly and answered:
“Wasn’t I lucky to find you? I’ve been coming for some days only— only—” she sat down on the arm of the chair, prodding at the carpet with the end of her umbrella and looking down.
“Only you had so many other things to do,” he suggested.
“No, not that,” still looking down at the tip of the umbrella. “Only I think I hadn’t quite enough courage.”
She rose from the arm of the chair and walked to the window. As she moved the rustle of her rich dress and the perfume it exhaled filled the room. The Colonel looked at her uneasily. It was three weeks since the Davenport ball. She had kept her room for some days after the ball, saying she was sick. After that she had appeared, looking miserably ill, and in manner cold and uncommunicative. She had spoken of Jerry’s engagement to no one, not even to Rosamund. To the Colonel she had been gentle, quiet, and for the first time in their acquaintance indifferent and unresponsive. What her appearance this afternoon portended he could not guess.
“Not enough courage!” he now repeated. “Was there ever any time since I’ve known you when you wanted courage to come to me?”
“Never before,” she answered, standing with her back to him looking out of the window.
Her voice, her attitude, her profile against the pane, were expressive of the completest dejection. She was expensively and beautifully dressed in a crisp silken gown of several shades of blue. Every detail
of her appearance was elegant and fastidious. In her years of city life she had developed all the extravagance, the studious consideration of her raiment, of a fashionable woman. Now her costly dress, the jeweled ornaments she wore, her gloves, her hat with its long blue feather that rested on her bright-colored hair, the tip of the shoe that peeped from her skirt, combined to make her a figure of notable feminine finish and distinction. And surrounded by this elaboration of careful daintiness, her heaviness of spirit seemed thrown up into higher relief.
“Come, sit down,” said the Colonel, rolling the chair toward her. “I can’t talk comfortably to you when you stand there with your back to me looking out of the window as if we’d been quarreling.”
She returned to the chair and obediently sank into it. Her hands hung over its arms, one of them languidly holding the umbrella. He had thought his suggestion about quarreling would make her laugh, but she did not seem to have heard it.
“And now,” he said, drawing a chair up beside her, “let’s hear what it is you hadn’t the courage to tell to your Uncle Jim? Have you been robbing or murdering, or what?”
“I’ve been staying in the house mostly, looking out of the window. I— don’t feel much like going out. I—oh, Uncle Jim,” she said, suddenly turning her head as it rested on the chair-back and letting her eyes dwell on his, “I’ve been so miserable!”
He leaned forward and took her hand. He had nothing to say. Her words needed no further commentary than that furnished by her appearance. With the afternoon light shining on her face, she looked a woman of thirty, worn and thin. All the freshness of the young girl was gone.
“That’s what I’ve come to talk about,” she said. “I don’t feel sometimes as if I could live here any longer, as if I could breathe here. I hate to go out. I hate to meet people. Every corner I turn I’m afraid that I may meet them—and—and—then—” her voice suddenly became hoarse and she sat up and cleared her throat. For a moment a heavy silence held the room. The Colonel broke it.
“How would you like to go up to Foleys for a while?” he suggested. “Your father was telling me the other day that the superintendent of the Barranca had a nice little house and a very decent sort of wife. You could stay there. It would be a change.”
“Foleys!” she echoed. “Oh, not Foleys! It’s too full of the past before anything had happened. No, I want to go away, far away, away from everything. That’s what I came to talk about. I want to go to Europe.”
“Europe!” he exclaimed blankly. “But—but—you’d be gone for months.”
“Yes, that’s just it. That’s what I want—to be gone for months, for years even. I want to get away from San Francisco and California and everything I know here.”
The Colonel was silent. He felt suddenly depressed and chilled. San Francisco without June! His life without June! The mean little room with its hideous wall paper and cheap furniture came upon him with its true dreary strangeness. The city outside grew suddenly a hollow place of wind and fog. Life, that was always so full for him, grew blank with a sense of cold, nostalgic emptiness. He had never realized before how she illumined every corner of it.
“Well, dearie,” he said, trying to speak cheerfully—“that sounds a big undertaking; sort of thing you don’t settle up all in a minute. You couldn’t go alone and Rosamund couldn’t go with you.”
“I know all that. I’ve thought it all out. I haven’t slept well lately and I arranged it when I was awake at night. I could take some one with me, a sort of companion person. And then when Rosamund got married and came over there with Lionel, why, then I could stay with them. Perhaps I could live with them for a while. He has such a big house.”
She paused, evidently waiting to see how the Colonel would take her suggestions.
“That’s all possible enough,” he said,—“but—well, there’s your father. How about him?”
“Oh, my father!” the note of scorn in her voice was supplemented by a side look at him which showed she had no further illusions as to her father. “My father can get on very well without me.”
Even if she had come to know Allen at his just worth, the hardness of her tone hurt the Colonel. It showed him how deep had been the change in her in the last three years.
“It’s hard on him just the same,” he said, “to lose his two daughters at once.”
“Parents have to lose their children,” she answered in the same tone. “Suppose I’d married a foreigner like Rosamund?”
The Colonel did not answer. Suddenly she laid the hand near him on his.
“There’s only you and Rosamund,” she said. “And now Rosamund’s going too.”
“It’s—it’s—pretty hard even to think of,” he answered.
“But, Uncle Jim,” she urged in the egotism of her pain, blind to all else, “I can’t stay here. It’s too much. You must guess how I feel.”
“I can guess,” he answered, nodding.
“I can’t bear it. I can’t stand it. If I could die it would be all right, but I can’t even die. I’ve got to go on living, and if I stay here I’ve got to go on hearing everybody talking about them and saying how happy they are. Every time I go out I run the risk of meeting them, of seeing them together, with Jerry looking at her the way he used to look at me.”
She spoke quietly, staring at the window before her with steady eyes.
“June,” he said almost roughly, “I want to talk sensibly to you. All the traveling in Europe won’t make you feel better if you don’t make an effort to shake yourself free of all this. Now listen—Barclay’s shown you what he is. He’s a blackguard. I told it to you three years ago, and you know it now by your own experience. Why do you love him?
Why do you go on caring for a dog like that? I—I—upon my word, dearest, if it was any girl but you I’d be ashamed of her.”
“You don’t love a man because he’s good, or noble, or any of those things. It’s not a thing you reason about. It’s something that steals into you and takes possession of you. I know what Jerry is. I suppose it’s all true what you say. He may be different from what I thought he was. He may be cruel and unkind to me. But that won’t make me change.”
“But good God, he’s treated you like a dog—thrown you over for a girl with money, made surreptitious love to you when he was bound to a woman he’d ruined and whose husband was his friend! Heavens, June, you can’t love a dirty scrub like that! You’re a good girl—honest and high-minded—you can’t go on caring for him when you see now what he is!”
“Oh, Uncle Jim, dear, you can’t change me by talking that way. Women don’t love men with their reason, they love them with their hearts. The Jerry that I know is not the Jerry that you know. There are two, and they’re quite different. The Jerry that I know and used to meet in the plaza on Turk Street, was always kind and sweet to me, and I used to be so happy when I was with him! I know now they’re both true. I guess yours is as true as mine. But even if it is, I care just the same. There’s no arguing or convincing—only just that fact.”
“After he’s made a public show of you and engaged himself to Mercedes not two months after Mrs. Newbury’s death? Such a dirty record! Such a mean, cold-blooded, calculating cur! Oh, June, where’s your pride?”
“Dead,” she said bitterly, “dead long ago.”
She suddenly sat upright, turned on him, and spoke with somber vehemence:
“There’s no pride, there’s no question of yourself—sometimes I think there’s no honor, with a girl who feels for a man as I do for him. I know him now, all about him. I know in my heart that he’s what you say. I think sometimes, deep down under everything, I have a feeling for him that is almost contempt. But I’m his while he’s alive and I am.
I can’t any more change that than I can make myself taller or shorter If I’d known in the beginning what I do now it would have all been different. It’s too late now to ask me where my pride is, and why I don’t tear myself free from such a bondage. It’s spoiled my life. It’s broken my heart. Sometimes I wish Jerry was dead, because then I know I’d be myself again.”
He looked at her horrified. Pallid and shrunken in her rich clothes, eaten into by the passion that now, for the first time, he heard her confess, it seemed to him that she could not be the girl he had met at Foleys three and a half years ago. To his strong, self-denying nature, her weakness was terrible. He did not know that that weakness was one of the attributes which made her so lovable.
“I dare say there’s something bad about me,” she went on. “I can see that other people don’t feel this way. I know Rosamund wouldn’t. If Lionel had not really cared for her and asked her to marry him she would have gone to work and just uprooted him from her mind like a weed in a garden. She wouldn’t have let things that weren’t right get such a hold on her. But I—I never tried to stop it. And now the weed’s choked out everything else in the garden.”
“Don’t let it choke out everything. Root it up! Tear it out! Don’t be conquered by a weed, June.”
“Oh, Uncle Jim,” she almost groaned with the eternal cry of the selfindulgent and weak, “if only I had stopped it in the beginning! I wouldn’t have grown to love him so if I’d known. It’s been such useless suffering. Nobody’s gained anything by it. It’s all been such a waste!”
There was a silence. The Colonel sat looking down with his heart feeling heavy as a stone. When he came against that wall of acquiescent feminine feebleness, he felt that he could say nothing. She stirred in her chair and said, her voice suddenly low, her words coming slowly:
“They’re to be married in January. It’s going to be a short engagement. Black Dan’s going to give them a house down here with everything new and beautiful. I’ll see them all the time,
everywhere. I know just the way they’ll look, smiling into each other’s eyes.”
She stopped and then sat up with a rustling of crushed silks.
“How do people bear these things? I haven’t hurt anybody or done any harm to have to suffer this way. When I’m alone I keep thinking of them—how happy they are together, not caring for anything in the world but each other. I think of him kissing her. I think that some day they’ll have a baby—” her voice trailed away hoarsely and she sank back in the chair, her head on her breast.
The Colonel got up and walked to the window. These same savage pangs had once torn him. In his powerful heyday it had taken all the force of his manhood to crush them. How could she wage that blasting fight? He turned and looked at her as she sat fallen together in the embrace of the chair.
“I think you’re right, June, about going away,” he said. “It’s the best thing for you to do. The old man’ll have to get on as well as he can for a while without you.”
She did not move and answered in a dull voice:
“It’s the only thing for me to do.”
“When were you thinking of going?”
“Soon—as soon as I can. Anyway before January. I must go before then. And—and—Uncle Jim, this was what I came to ask you and was afraid. We’ve been a long time getting to it.”
She looked at him with a sort of tentative uneasiness.
“It’s asking a good deal,” she added, “but you’ve always been so good to me.”
“What is it, dearie?” he said gently. “Don’t you know it’s my pleasure to do anything for you?”
“I want you to give me the money to go with.”
For a moment the Colonel was so surprised that he looked at her without answering. As she spoke the color came faintly into her face.
“It—it—won’t be so very much,” she went on hurriedly, “perhaps enough for a year. I thought five thousand dollars would do.”
“Five thousand dollars,” he said, recovering himself, “five thousand dollars? Why of course—”
He paused, looking down on the floor and asking himself where he was to get five thousand dollars.
“I’ll get it for you, only you’ll have to give me a few days.”
She leaned forward with a sudden energy of animation and clasped his hand.
“I knew you’d do it,” she said. “I knew if I came to you for help I’d never be disappointed. I asked father for it, and he!—” she completed the sentence with a shrug.
“He hadn’t it, perhaps,” suggested the Colonel.
“That’s what he said. He said he couldn’t possibly give it to me, that he was in debt now. And look at the way we live! Look at this dress! He knows how I feel. He has only to look at me, but he said he couldn’t give it.”
“Will five thousand be enough, do you think?” said the Colonel, who had no comments to make on Allen, of whose mode of life and need of money he knew more than June.
“I don’t know. I don’t know anything about traveling. I’ve never been anywhere but in California and Nevada. But it ought to be enough for a while. Anyway, if I had that I could go, I could get away from all this. I could get away from San Francisco and California, and the people and things that torture me.”
She rose from the chair and picked up her umbrella. Her languor of dejection had returned. She cast a listless eye toward the pane and said:
“I must go. It’ll soon be dark.” Then she moved toward the window and for a moment stood looking down on the street.
“It’s quite easy for you to give it to me, isn’t it?” she asked without turning. “You’re not like father, always talking about your wonderful,
priceless stocks, and with not a cent to give a person who’s just about got to the end of everything.”
“Don’t talk about that,” he answered quickly “There can’t be a better use for my money than to help you when you’re in trouble. I’ll see you in a few days and arrange then to give it to you.”
She turned from the window.
“Well, good-by, then,” she said. “I must go. Good-by, Uncle Jim, my own dear, dear Uncle Jim.”
She extended her hand to him, and as he took it, looked with wistful eyes into his.
“I feel as if you were really my father,” she said. “It’s only to a father or mother that a person feels they can come and ask things from as I have from you to-day.”
The Colonel kissed her without speaking. At the doorway she turned and he waved his hand in farewell, but again said nothing.
June walked home through the soft gray damp of the late afternoon. As she looked up the lines of the long streets that climbed the hills, then sloped down toward the water front, she saw the fog blotting them out, erasing outlines, stealthily creeping downward till the distance looked like a slate blurred by a wet sponge. She remembered evenings like this in the first year of her San Francisco life, when she walked home briskly with the chill air moist on her face and her imagination stirred by the mystery and strangeness of the dim, many-hilled city, veiled in whorls and eddies of vaporous white. There was no beauty in it to-night, only a sense of desolation, cold and creepingly pervasive as the fog.
CHAPTER XIV BED-ROCK
It took the Colonel a week to raise the money. He did it by selling the second of his South Park houses. The sale being a hurried one of property already well on the decline, the house realized less than, even in the present state of eclipse, it was worth. Five years before it had been appraised at fifteen thousand dollars. To-day the best offer he could get was nine.
He placed the money in the bank, the five thousand to stay there till June had decided more definitely on her movements. The remainder he would leave on deposit to his own account. June, in Europe, with five thousand dollars to her fortune, was not beyond the circle of his sense of responsibility. Some one must have money to give her when she needed it, as she certainly would. Her habits of economy had long ago been sloughed off with her faded cotton dresses and her country-made boots. Rosamund would be able to give her a home, but there must be some one somewhere upon whom she could make a demand for funds.
There was no need now for the Colonel to study his accounts. He knew them through and through. There was so little to know. The shut-down mine in Shasta and his mortgage on the Folsom Street house were all that was left to him. On the day that the sale of the South Park house was decided upon he wrote to Rion Gracey, asking him for a position, any overground position that the owners of the Cresta Plata thought he would suit. It was a hard letter to write. He was nearly sixty, and he had never, since his youth, asked any one for anything for himself. But one must live, “G. T.’s widow” had to be considered, not to mention June, living in England and having to be dressed as June should always be dressed.
Two days later the details of the sale were completed and the money deposited. Late that afternoon the Colonel, clad carefully in the shiny coat June had caught him brushing, went across town to Folsom Street. He had done what she had asked and all was ready.
The servant told him she was confined to her room with a bad cold, and after a few minutes’ wait in the hall, he was conducted up stairs, and found her lying on a sofa in the great front room, with its lofty ceiling and tall, heavily draped windows. The sofa was drawn up before a small fire that sent a fluctuating glow over her face, flushed with a slight fever, and burnished the loose coil of brown hair that crowned her head. She had a heavy cold, her voice was hoarse, her words interrupted at intervals by a cough. She was delighted to see him, sitting up among the cushions on which she reclined to hold out her hand, and rallying him on the length of time since his last visit.
“But I’ve been busy,” he said, drawing a chair up to the foot of the sofa, “busy over your affairs, young woman.”
“My affairs,” she answered, looking puzzled; then with sudden comprehension, “Oh, the money!”
“That’s it,” he nodded, “the money. Well, it’s all ready and waiting for you in the bank. When you want it we’ll open an account for you, or buy a letter of credit with it, or make whatever arrangement seems best. Anyway, there it is whenever you want to go.”
“Oh, Uncle Jim!” she breathed. “And now what do you think’s happened?”
“What?” he asked with suddenly arrested attention. It was on his mind that startling things might be expected to happen in the Allen household at any moment.
“I’m not going!”
“You’re not going? Junie, don’t tell me that!”
The joy in his voice and eyes was transfiguring in its sudden radiance.
He left his chair and sat down on the end of the sofa near her feet, leaning toward her, pathetically eager to hear
“I’ve changed my mind,”—a gleam of her old coquetry brightened her face. “Isn’t that one of the privileges of my sex?”
“What made you change it? Good Lord, dearie, I’m so glad!”
“I’ll tell you all about it. There are several threads to this story In the first place Rosamund didn’t like it. She thought it was queer for me to go to Europe alone and leave father, and just before her wedding, too. She wouldn’t hear of my not being at the wedding. But the other reason was more the real one.”
She sat up, her elbow in the cushions, her head on her hand, the fingers in her loosened hair. Her eyes on the fire were melancholy and contemplative.
“You remember what I said to you about not being able to live here any longer? How I couldn’t stand it? Well, father’s going to Virginia City.”
“What difference does that make? He’s been going there for years.”
“Yes, but to live I mean. To take us and make our home there. That’s the reason I’ve changed my mind. I needn’t go so far as Europe. We’re all going to leave California and live in Nevada.”
The Colonel was astonished He was prepared for strange actions on Allen’s part, but a bodily family removal to Virginia when his affairs were in so complicated a condition was unlooked for, and incomprehensible. And why had not Allen spoken to him of it? When in town they saw each other almost daily on Pine and Montgomery Streets.
“Isn’t it a very sudden decision of your father’s?” he asked. “He had no idea of it last week. You didn’t know it when you came to see me that day, did you?”
“I didn’t know of it till two days ago. It’s all happened in a minute. Father himself didn’t know it. I was still thinking about going away and arguing with Rosamund about it, when he came and told us he’d decided to move to Nevada, that he had more business there than here, and it would be much cheaper having one house in Virginia than for him to be up there, with us down here in San Francisco. What made it particularly easy and convenient was that some one wants to buy the house.”
This was a second shock, but there was illumination in it. The listener felt now that he was getting to the heart of the matter.
“Buy the house!” he ejaculated. “This house?”
“Yes, this house. I’ve forgotten the man’s name. Some one from Sacramento wants to buy it just as it stands, with the furniture and everything. It’s not a very good offer, but property’s gone down here, as it has all over this side of town, and father says it’s not bad, considering that it makes it so much easier for us to go.”
He was, for the moment, too astonished to make any comments. She spoke as though the sale was decided on, the move settled. He knew that neither of the sisters was aware of the mortgage he held on the property, and he listened to her in staring silence as she went on:
“So that’s why I’m not going to Europe. Virginia’s far enough away from San Francisco. I’ll—I’ll—not see them up there or hear about it as I would down here. And then there was another reason that’s made me glad to stay. When I thought of leaving you and Rosamund —it was so hard—too hard! I don’t seem to be one of those independent women who can go about the world alone far away from the people they love. I’d leave my roots behind me, deep down in the ground I came from. I don’t think I could ever pull them up. And if I tried and pulled too hard they’d break, and then I suppose I’d wither up and die.”
She turned her eyes from the fire to him. She was smiling slightly, her face singularly sad under the smile. He looked at her and said softly:
“My girl!”
He sat on with her for a space, discussing the move and making plans. With some embarrassment he told her of the fact that he had written to Rion Gracey, applying for a position. The thought that he would be in Virginia called the first real color of life and pleasure into her face that he had seen there for weeks. He saw that the excitement of the move, the hope of change from the environment in which she had so suffered, had had a bracing and cheering effect on her. It was evident that she had set her heart on going. Despite her cold and general air of sickly fragility she was more like herself,
showed more of her old vivacity and interest, than she had done since the night of the Davenport ball.
On his way down the stairs he decided, if Allen was not in, to wait for him in the sitting-room. But as he reached the stair-foot a faint film of cigar smoke and the more pungent reek of whisky floated from the open doorway, and told him that the master of the house was already there.
Allen was sitting by the table, a decanter and glass near his elbow, his cigar poised in a waiting hand, as he listened to the descending footsteps. The Chinaman had told him that Colonel Parrish had called to see June, and Allen stationed himself by the doorway to catch the visitor on his way out.
“That you, Jim?” he called, as the footfall neared the end of the flight. “Glad you came. Drop in here for a minute before you go. I’ve something I want to talk to you about.”
The Colonel entering, noticed that the other was even more flushed than he usually was at this hour, and that his glance was evasive, his manner constrained. He pushed his cigar-case across the table with a hand that was unsteady, and tried to cover his embarrassment by the strident jocularity of his greeting. The Colonel, sitting down on the arm of a heavy leather chair, did not beat about the bush.
“What’s this June’s been telling me,” he said, “about you all moving to Virginia? Since when have you decided on that?”
“Only a day or two ago. I was going around to see you to-morrow, about it, if you hadn’t come this afternoon. I’ve about made up my mind to go. My business is all up there now. There’s no sense living in Virginia two-thirds of the time and running a house down here.”
“How about Rosamund’s wedding?” the Colonel asked.
“Have it up there. You can have a wedding in Virginia just as well as you can in San Francisco. I can rent a house—a first-rate house, furnished and all ready, and give her just as good a send-off as any girl in California. That’s what I calculate to do. It’ll require money up there or down here, but that’s an expense that’s got to be.”
