Family - a novel by Tom Lyons pdf

Family A novel by Tom Lyons Part 1 San Francisco, California, Bay Area October 1945 1. “When sorrows come, they come not single spies, but in battalions.” William Shakespeare – Hamlet, Prince of Denmark Doctor James T. Palmer It is amazing how clear in my mind are the events that transpired on the morning that I was kidnapped. Crystal clear. My short term memory, I admit, is not as precise as it once was; seems like I forget a lot these days, but all of the events of the morning I was kidnapped are stamped into my brain as if chiseled. The morning, like all my mornings, was dripping in routine. I rise early, often before the sun. On with the slippers, you know the kind, tattered and worn, but comfortable. Then the slow shuffle outside to collect the morning paper. I settle in with hot fresh brewed coffee. I read the obituaries first. Do I have a fascination with death? No. With my own death? Hardly. How many good years do I have left? I am fifty, life expectancy these days for a healthy male is sixty-five, which is better than it was forty five years ago in 1900, when the average life expectancy for an American male was forty-six years of age. I read the names, the dates when they were born, when they died. I look at where they lived; when I see that the deceased lived in Hayward California I extrapolate info more closely since I, too, grew up here in Hayward; perhaps I knew them while he, or she, was alive? Many have faded black and white pictures above the written obit; I read the description below on each. When it states that the person died ‘suddenly or unexpectedly’, I think that the person may have had a heart attack or brain stroke. When the description states that the person died “after a long illness”, then I think that the person might have been suffering from a cancer. I remember a great sadness weighed me down, like an anvil hanging on my neck; I felt nausea knot my stomach. I would have to write an obituary myself; my brother Ed, Doctor Ed Palmer to be more accurate, had just died in a single engine plane crash in the foothills near Las Vegas Nevada. He was forty-eight years of age. Ed was flying his normal weekly run between Lawrence Livermore National Lab and Los Alamos Lab in the New Mexico desert. He was an experienced pilot and had logged tens of thousands of miles; from early reports it looked like he was preparing to land near Henderson Nevada to refuel, as his Champion 7 single engine single winged plane had a flying range of 460 miles. Probably got tangled in one of those violent hot air thermals that you fly into in the area, which could shake a small plane around like a clothes washer and smash it to the ground like a raggedy Andy doll. He had been missing for several days before a search party found the wreck and one charred body. -Don’t need you on this trip brother. He said to me before leaving; frequently I made the trip with him. -Not our normal weekly meeting. He added. -Have to sort something out with Julius. He said, referring to Doctor J Robert Oppenheimer, who, ninety days after Hiroshima, was already considered to be the father of the Atomic bomb. Little did I know that those would be the last words he would ever speak to me. Something else happened on the day that I was kidnapped; I remember it clearly because it had never happened before. My car did not start right away. Babe coughed a little when I turned the key. So I gave him a moment to catch his breath and fired him up again. At what point does a car cease to be an inanimate piece of metal and rubber and become an old friend instead? Almost like a member of the family. For me it was when Babe hit 180,000 miles. He kept chugging along. He never broke down. -Just put one foot in front of the other, soldier on. My son JT, the Navy Master at Arms would say. “Babe” was a regal blue 1939 Lincoln Continental town car, with regal blue leather interior and white wall tires, which I named after baseball legend Babe Ruth. He owned the same model, year, and color car. The retired baseball great would barnstorm the country teaching baseball to children. The newsreels I saw were alarming; once a great hulk of a man with enormous appetites for all fine things in life; booze, food, fancy clothes, and women especially - recent news footage showed a thinner, gaunt like, skeleton faced man – as if he was ill. Babe has a top speed of eighty miles per hour; I let her warm in the garage for fifteen minutes before I drove off; that is how long it takes the glass vacuum tubes of the state-of-the-art-radio to warm up. I listen to the latest news as I drive. Sure he had lost some of his get-up-and-go just as old folks lose strength and flexibility. As he aged I fed him correctly, made sure he had regular checkups, and even bought him new glasses, er, I mean, windshield wipers when he needed them. He rewarded me by being dependable and trustworthy; he was there when I needed him; my butt fit into that driver’s seat like a hand slipping into a warm wool mitten. He never had a problem; never let me down. Babe’s odometer was now approaching 230,000 miles. -Atta boy Babe. I said when he started on the second try. -Atta boy. I remember that clearly. 2. I teach physics at Cal Berkeley; I live twenty minutes south of Cal in Hayward, a sleepy little town, mainly a food-canning center, of 8,000 people. My wife Kat and I do not have a fancy house, just an average size two bedroom, painted white; paint peeling off of the wood siding. The bath is indoors though, which is nice, plus we were just hooked up to the new city sewer system, so we were able to get rid of our old septic, which tended to clog during the wet, rainy, winter season here in the Bay Area. It’s one of the few homes in the area with a basement; our coal heater is down there; we just had a new coal shute installed so I no longer have to shovel and haul coal down stairs. Last week we purchased and installed a newer, larger, and more efficient icebox in the kitchen; one who’s melted ice pan did not need emptying so often. I saw Navy warships as I left my house that morning; the battleship USS California which was sunk by Japanese torpedoes at Pearl Harbor and the battleship USS Alabama with its 16 inch guns capable of firing a 2,000 pound bomb over 17 miles through the air - lay anchored in the bay. The California was salvaged and reconstructed here at the Alameda Naval Shipyard. I remember hearing bugles sounding attention as flags, whipped by wind, were hoisted. Other Navy warships lay anchored in the bay, destroyers mostly; the fleet was coming home. Though early in the morning the streets in Hayward bustled with car traffic, buses filled with busy worker bees rumbled by. Sailors dressed in white bellbottoms and pillbox sailor’s hats walked by in pairs. They looked proud. I stopped Babe and let a horse driven fruit truck pass. -Fresh strawberries, strawberries! The large round mustached fruit man yelled in a deep clear voice that carried for blocks. I watched as one sailor, holding hands with a pretty young woman, her red hair in a pony, stopped and bought a box of berries. She threw her arms around his neck and kissed him eagerly as he fed her the fruit. People were happy. The war was over. Our boys were coming home. The slaughter of millions of people was coming to an end. It was several months after V-J day, victory in Japan, three months after we dropped the atomic bomb, “Little Boy”, on Hiroshima which instantly vaporized seventy-five thousand Japanese men, women, and children and, if reports were accurate, burns and radiation sickness killed another seventy-five- thousand Japanese people over the next thirty days. But US military experts predicted that our military could lose five-hundred-thousand-men during an invasion on the Japanese mainland, so the powers that be decided that dropping the A bomb would be the way to go. A week after Hiroshima, we vaporized another ninety thousand Japanese men, women, and children at Nagasaki with an even more powerful Hydrogen bomb. Then the war was over. I watched as a milkman, dressed in a starched white uniform, loped up a brick stoop; he procured two glass bottle empties, then deposited two full bottles of milk by the front door; I heard him whistle as he stepped towards the next house. Like I said, people were happy. Babe’s radio was fully warmed; I listened to the reports on the ’45 World Series. Detroit had beaten the Chicago Cubs in seven games and the announcer was talking about something called ‘The Curse of the Billy Goat.’ Apparently a Cub fan was asked to leave game seven at Wrigley Field because the odor of the pet goat that he had brought to the game was offensive to other fans. Before the incident the Cubs had been winning the game, but Detroit rallied late to win the game and the series. The announcer then stated that the Cubs would never win a World Series because of the incident. The curse had been placed on the Chicago Cubs. Well, at least baseball’s best players would be back in uniform next year; most were still in the service this year. I had a meeting scheduled at Lawrence Livermore National Lab that morning so instead of heading North to Berkeley; I drove east towards Livermore. Once over the hill all I saw was vacant land, the golden hills of California, wheat colored dried- out flash-fire-ready land as far as the eye could see. The lab was built in the middle of nowhere, away from crowded towns and people, so as not to contaminate with the testing. My thoughts turned towards my one and only child, my son JT Palmer, short for James Thomas. JT was twenty-seven years old now and had served as a Master at Arms aboard a naval ship in the Pacific. What ship did he serve on? Who knew? Where in the Pacific did he serve? Did he see combat action? I don’t know the answer to those questions either. The Navy does not release that information. Sensitive information might fall into enemy hands which could jeopardize the safety of all aboard. All I knew was that JT had spent the last three months at a VA hospital in Hawaii, which means that he had been injured, probably during combat in the Pacific theatre. When he first entered the VA hospital the Navy sent me a short, one page letter. Nothing more. Then I received a letter from JT, telling me that he was okay. It took one week for each letter to travel across the ocean and arrive stateside; it took ninety days for JT to be healthy enough to be released. He was due to arrive at Mares Island Naval Facility within the next several days. Nothing in this life is more important to me than my son; I had planned to be there when he arrived home. But before he arrived I was kidnapped. 3. -We met fifteen years ago. Roxy said, emotion getting the best of her. As I drove east towards Livermore, bright early morning sun making me squint to see the road ahead, I recalled the conversation that my wife Kat and I had with Ed’s widow. -Did you know that? Roxy asked. -We knew each other for three years before he proposed. Roxanna, Roxy for short, had sat down abruptly when she heard the news, as if sucker punched. It seemed like all the air had left her body. Born in Kiev Russia Roxy had the classic Northern Slav appearance; lily white porcelain skin; it looked like she would instantly burn and peel if she spent ten minutes outside in the California sun. Slim, but short and stocky with frizzy blonde hair and a flat face and nose; blue eyes that bored through you. -She has good birthing hips. My brother Ed had once said of her, though after ten years of marriage they had no children. She was in her early forties, which would have made her a young teenager when the last Russian Czar, Nicolas II, and his wife, son, and four daughters, were assassinated in 1917. When she spoke there was no trace of an accent. -I was a dancer, a ballet dancer, when we met in Moscow. She started. -Your brother was studying at Cambridge, but he would travel to my country to lecture. Then she added: -Why weren’t you with him on this trip? She was chain-smoking unfiltered Lucky Strike cigarettes. -He said that he had a meeting with Oppenheimer. -I thought that the two of you worked together. For the most part this was true. My brother Ed and I were not the first pair of brothers to become physicists who worked together. Ernest Lawrence, whom the Lab in Livermore was named after, and his physicist brother John, were one such example. A vision flashed through my mind, a vision of my brother Ed piloting his plane; he loved to fly. -Light the fires! He would say. -And strap in tight, Jimmy boy. He’d call me ‘Jimmy boy’ though I was fifteen months older than him. -Check the cone. Then he’d take off, plane heading west into the wind; at a height of one hundred feet he’d bank hard southeast, then yell with glee. Over the South Livermore hills we flew, over Site 300, until we were over the Central Valley. He’d navigate by keeping the ever-present California sun to the left of the plane. I remember smelling engine fuel. Eventually, we’d drop down over the Southern Sierra and swoop down into Henderson to refuel. Navigating the bumpy hot air thermals here was the most dangerous part of the flight; another vision flashed to me, one of his plane hitting a violent thermal which could instantly hurl the plane, like a small toy, several hundred feet downward in a couple of seconds. Perhaps his motor stalled? Or worse yet, he could have lost a wing strut? This was not out of the question as those struts were held in place by a few bolts only. -I was not invited to this meeting. I said. -His plane was found? Cigarette smoke spiraling upward. -Yes. His plane. What do you say to someone when his or her spouse had just died in a plane crash? For that matter what do you say, or feel, when your brother dies? There is nothing to say. We sat and cried. -I made some matsah ball soup. Kat said. My beautiful Kat. My wife of ten years. Tall, slim and blonde, she was striking at forty-seven years of age. That smile of hers, that feminine tilt of her head while she contemplated what was being said, it still had a devastating effect on me. Kat was not my son JT’s natural mother. His natural mother, Edna Jean, had died twenty years ago when JT was seven. She had picked up the family cat, in an attempt to put it outside; claws flashed. Three days later her hand became infected, a day later it turned into staff, and two days after that Edna Jean was dead. She was thirty years old. Penicillin, or any kind of antibiotic, had not yet been invented. Though it happened twenty years ago I still teared when I thought about my first wife. -Have some soup. Kat said to Roxy, as she spooned out dumplings made of matzah meal, eggs, water, and oil that had simmered in home made chicken broth. -It’s good for you. I could see that Roxy was upset; she was taking the news hard. [...]... -Xenomorph X-E-N-O-M-O-R-P-H Xenomorph -Correct That was a tough one a little known name for an extraterrestrial Several students walked from the podium, heads hanging down, I remember watching my eleven-year-old son; he was tall and skinny with feet too big for his body -Your next word is Encyclopedia Explained the moderator Two students misspelled -Encyclopedia JT started -E-N-C-Y-C-L-O-P-E-D-I -A. .. that he wanted to do, desperately First, he wanted to make more atomic weapons, second he wanted to kill more Japs; he was not ready to stop the hating the Japs, and last, but most importantly, he wanted to divorce his stupid fat wife Sarah 8 Doctor James T Palmer -Gladiolus G-L -A- D-I-O-L-U-S Gladiolus -Correct I was in a dream-like state; it felt like I was conscious, yet I could not move any part of... display -Got you! He announced one day while we were playing chess -What are you talking about? We were six moves in Plus, I am no slouch at chess, or so I thought -Dad Lasker versus Capablanca He said nonchalantly – Nineteen hundred and eleven Game two of the world championship match Capablanca’s Benoni defense? He was referring to a move that he had just made Above my pay grade -Lasker played white and... executed, usually bayoneted and eviscerated Laughing Japanese soldiers then cannibalized the dead women It was early evening and Charlie still had not calmed down His wife, Sarah, was planting annual fall flowers in their yard Add color she thought; she whistled while she dug and planted She was wearing a Hawaiian moo-moo dress that covered her weight and flab Charlie never saw Sarah naked, not even during... kept calling her a whore Two weeks later Billy and Kat married; seven months later Kat’s daughter May was born; one month after Maisy’s birth Billy McQuade ran off with another girl Neither Kat, nor Maisy, ever saw him again There was no money for a place for Kat and Maisy to live; they stayed at home with Kat’s parents and Dee Kat had always wanted to go to college; Dee helped watch Maisy while Kat... feel what this was about How about the Russians? Once it became clear that Germany was going to lose the war Russian military intelligence began to infiltrate our ranks It was not a secret that Stalin desperately needed A bomb capability; he was afraid that after the war the United States would start dropping them on Russian cities Over the past two years each physicist who had worked at the Lab had been... Maisy Now twenty-eight, married with three children of her own, Jim had helped her get a job at the lab several years ago -Did he show at the lab at all? Kat asked, meaning the campus of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, sprawled across fifty acres of rural farmland She recalled Jim telling her about the meeting He had said that he had to meet with his family The family of five - The five physicists;... thinking about what happened fifteen years ago when Maisy had her first period Kat had prepared Maisy by explaining the ‘female change’, as well as purchasing newly invented disposable pads Plus, Kat had Lysol disinfectant, which was used as a feminine hygiene product But when her new boyfriend Jim had asked her why Maisy remained in her room when he came by one day, Kat had told him what had happened Kat... their approach; after all the United States and Russia were allies during the war It was usually a request to sit down for dinner or cocktails, or the promise of a hard earned vacation to warmer climates; but we all knew what they wanted – information about our atomic research, which was top secret Giving out our secret weapons research to anyone was considered espionage, punishable by death Now that... Watson seethed How dare they scale us back? The Manhattan Project was started in 1939; at its peak the project employed 130,000 people at thirty sites located across the country Few employees had any idea of what was going on; which was the building of the Atomic bomb for use in warfare against Germany and Japan Only a handful of physicists and army brass at the top of the food chain really knew Doctor . hill all I saw was vacant land, the golden hills of California, wheat colored dried- out flash-fire-ready land as far as the eye could see. The lab was built. had helped her get a job at the lab several years ago. -Did he show at the lab at all? Kat asked, meaning the campus of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory,