Oh Pure and Radiant Heart by Lydia Millet (shoe dog free ebook .txt) 📕

house when he was gone; he was a shifting element in her eyes but no longer a central one.

His wife had new enthusiasms.

Szilard and Oppenheimer began to take what Oppenheimer called “constitutionals” after breakfast, walking down upper Canyon Road toward the galleries and cafes. Breakfast for Oppenheimer was a piece of dry toast; for Szilard it was eggs and bacon and buttered scones or English muffins or chocolate chip cookies with pecans or walnuts, of which he had become very fond. (He also liked a banana, and could be seen with his cheeks full, munching, at intervals throughout the day.)

During their walks Szilard kept up a constant patter as Oppenheimer smoked. She would see Oppenheimer nodding slowly at what Szilard said as they made their way back into the house, or occasionally shaking his head.

Oppenheimer adopted a clay pot on an exterior windowsill as a repository for his cigarette butts. They built up daily, a grave full of bones rising. Whenever she passed the pot on the windowsill she worried that there were too many dead cigarettes in the soil. They were vandals, dirty and derelict.

She shrugged off a suspicion that he was going to die for the second time soon.

Ben decided to wait it out, open his arms and persist. He would not pass judgment, or at least not be raucous in his disbelief; he would let her believe what she wanted and meanwhile prosecute his life as he had before, seemingly impartial, waiting for a revelation that was not even his.

In Make Way for Ducklings the mother duck walked through the city followed by the winding line of her young. She was aided in this enterprise by kindly policemen, who stopped the cars to let the ducklings cross the street. Ann herself, though, had seen few policemen come to the assistance of ducks, and often observed drivers swerve on purpose not to avoid a snake or rabbit but to run over it.

She worried about Oppenheimer and Szilard when they were out of her sight.

Thinking of Make Way for Ducklings, on the table near Eugene’s body, she also reminded herself that she did not believe in signs or portents, inherent purpose behind coincidences. Her friend Sheila, who owned a store that sold hand-made soap in fruity scents, always ascribed coincidence to divine intervention in her daily routine. Sheila believed the world was in direct, conscious contact, and had, for reasons of its own, special business with her. If a lampshade in a tulip motif arrived at the store on the same day she happened to dab her neck with perfume bearing a tulip logo, Sheila viewed the simultaneity as a miraculous gesture of goodwill, pregnant with significance, from the hovering divine. The simultaneous presence of the tulip-related items, despite the fact that both had been directly and purposefully acquired, reinforced in Sheila the conviction that she herself was blessed, and moreover that tulips were part of the meaning of Sheila, grateful participants in the drama of Sheila’s personal growth.

At these moments of uncanny significance, moments such as two tulip-related items appearing in her sphere on the very same day, Sheila became righteous with the certainty of her own transcendent grace and sure of the complicity in this grace of the great goddess Gaia, the cycles of the moon and tides, and her menstrual blood. This blood contained, she had told Ann, molecules from the bodies of ancient cavewoman ancestors, ancestors Ann pictured as breast-beating, hair-tearing, and possibly employing hardy reeds as dental floss.

It also contained, Sheila had said solemnly after perusing the New York Times Science page on a Tuesday, “actual molecules left over from the Big Bang.”

—We are all one! she had said, hands raised dramatically, after reading about the molecules.

—But so what? Ann had asked.

Sheila had taken this question as hard evidence of a resistance to spiritual matters. She thought Ann was being facetious. But Ann did not trust Sheila’s instincts vis-à-vis her own blessedness, if only because this blessedness had single-handedly allowed Sheila to build up her collection of dangly earrings, with which she professed herself admittedly “obsessed,” to three hundred and eighty-four pairs by the most recent count. The earrings were a bi-weekly reward for loving herself, as Sheila put it, with a generous and totally unconditional love.

On the other hand, Sheila was kind to animals and would never run over either a rabbit or a snake. She collected crippled cats and dogs and gave them food and shelter, wrapping the wounded in vibrantly colorful afghans knitted by her mother.

Ann did not wish to see meaning latent everywhere. If she let herself feel that the world was laying omens in her path she might soon believe she was receiving marital advice from stray pigeons, strutting on the pavement like bug-eyed morons. She might soon see a secret intelligence in the eyes of a passing Standard Poodle, and pin it down spread-eagled to force it to confess.

Now that she had an actual contestable belief, a preposterous, irrational belief—namely the conviction that something that seemed impossible was real—she would have to discipline herself. She would have to keep herself temperate and measured so she did not spin off wheeling into the night, an object of derision.

Szilard had argued with Oppie, as he called him now, near the end of the war in the Pacific. The argument concerned the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Oppenheimer knew the bomb would be used; he knew three years of his life had now been consecrated to the machine of its eventual use. But Szilard did not think the bombing was defensible under any circumstances. He did not fully understand that he was beating his head against the sturdy wall of an edifice that later would come to be called the “military-industrial complex.”

But then Szilard could be oblivious on many levels to the exigencies of politics. He believed reason could conquer all, could talk a man down from the perilous heights of compulsion. He steadfastly refused to admit that the feral urges