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

She had researched the subject because she felt an obligation to know about the scientists’ personal lives. It seldom occurred to them to explain themselves, so to follow their conversations she needed a complete background. Oppenheimer in life had been close to Serber and so she had read about him: born and raised in West Philadelphia, the grandson of immigrants from Russia and Poland, he had been thirteen when his mother died of a nervous system disease, having spent her last years in dim rooms, shielded from noise and light. Scarlet fever had left Serber himself near-sighted and all his life he wore bottle-thick glasses. Yet women had tended to find him attractive. He had lived longer than any of the atom bomb scientists save Teller, finally dying of cancer in 1997. —A younger woman.

—Bob was a good physicist. A great help. I was quite fond of him, said Oppenheimer with a studied mildness.

Both he and Szilard liked to pore over pictures of the young scientists they had known in 1945, images of these men that had been made long after they had known them. Even Fermi could be roused by this, occasionally moved to laughter by the sight of his boyhood friends transformed—somewhat gruesomely, it had to be admitted, in one fell swoop—into doddering old men.

—There’s Segré! he said, crowing and pointing. —My God! Emilio! We used to call him the Basilisk when we were at school in Rome. He turned a fiery eye when displeased. So much taller than me. And then look at him! He liked to fish for trout. Now he looks like one.

—Not now, said Oppenheimer. —Now he’s deceased.

—You know what I mean, said Fermi.

—His son wrote a book about him, said Ann. —He said he was emotionally unreachable.

—Is that bad? asked Fermi.

—I think you, on the other hand, said Oppenheimer to Szilard, —aged quite well.

—Oh, Leo was always the same, said Fermi. —Fat. Fat people retain a youthful appearance.

—What? said Szilard.

—The fat puffs out the wrinkles.

—What? repeated Szilard, indignant but willing to ham it up if his performance would help draw out Fermi. He turned the book toward him to scrutinize himself posing for a group photo. —That’s the other guy. Maybe he got fat, sure. But not me. You’re saying I was big like he got to be, even when I was young? That’s bullshit! I’m young now! Look at me!

—You’re going native, said Oppenheimer, smiling. —Since when did you use such offensive language?

—When in Rome, said Szilard. —I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to be a fossil. Not when I already have being dead to deal with. I go by the school, talk to the kids between classes. It’s quite an education. Haven’t you talked to the kids?

—I can’t understand a damn thing they say, murmured Oppenheimer.

—I’m learning the language. Bullshit dopeass gay-ass motherfucker, said Szilard carefully. —Girlfriend, you a stanky ho.

One morning after Ben had left for work she was heading down the hall in her nightgown and gnawing on a piece of toast when she heard Szilard singing tunelessly in the shower. He sang a song he had apparently learned from the radio or in the CD store, where he sometimes spent an afternoon conducting research on our nation’s vibrant youth culture. —You and me baby ain’t nothing but mammals, so let’s do it like they do on the Discovery Channel.

It made her laugh abruptly, alone in the hallway. She stopped and stood there and ate the last crust; then she opened a door at random and stared inside at the dusty photo albums standing on a shelf beside a stack of linens. They were not hers but her parents’, part of her inheritance when they died. She had taken them out of their apartment when she was going through their belongings but since then she avoided looking at them. It had hung over her since.

She picked up the album on top of the pile and opened it to a black-and-white picture of her mother as a child, standing with a blond boy in swimsuits on a beach, holding sandcastle shovels. Their faces were young and perfect, large soft dark eyes and unlined skin.

Joy, she thought: maybe when you don’t have it yourself, when you don’t have the grace, you look for it to shine out of someone nearby.

She felt her smile fading and thought: Watch yourself. It wasn’t the answer to look elsewhere just because she couldn’t make her own light.

—Can you give me a towel? interjected Szilard loudly, sticking his wet head out the bathroom door.

She reached into the closet again and pulled one out, crossed the hall and handed it to him. He shut the door without further comment.

We’re so many, we’re so hard to distinguish from each other, but we long to be distinguished, she thought, putting the album away without looking at it any more, shutting the closet door and walking away from Szilard and his ingratitude.

Because of that we feel compelled, beyond being happy, also to feel chosen. We want to feel anointed and brought in, to know we have been spoken to, she thought, and went alone into the yard, shutting the door behind her softly to watch the neighbors’ solid, square-faced tabby cat stare up into a tree without moving. She walked over to pet it and then retreated to her front steps to sit down again. The cat resumed its observation of the tree and she followed its gaze: in the high branches was movement, a small animal.

But then when she looked back at the cat it had fallen onto its paws. Its chin was resting there, and slowly it rolled sideways onto the ground. There was something wrong with the movement and she got up suddenly and ran over to it. It was breathing shallowly, and its eyes rolled toward her slowly though it did not turn its head. She felt its side, the warm roundness of the stomach, the sleek back, and