August 1944 into the winter: the reorganization delivers the author to a counter to defend his room, and into the company of a sergeant of the Women's Army Corps who governed more of the Hill than any office above it. The installment contains a window, a water shortage, and, in its final paragraph, a card the reader is asked to keep in view. The name of the sergeant is not the name of the sergeant; see note 1. —Ed.
The Monday after the great reshuffle, the line at the housing office ran out the door, down two duckboards, and around the transformer shed, and I stood in it like everybody else. Ahead of me a full colonel waited behind a metallurgist's wife. I had spent a year learning where the Hill kept its power — the big office, the T-building safes, the pass desk on East Palace — and that hour in line corrected the map. The Army can take a man's name, his mail, and his Saturdays, and he will soldier on. Move his bed six feet and you hold his soul.
The counter, when I reached it, was a plank, a smoking stove, and a sergeant of the Women's Army Corps with a card index at her elbow the length of a coffin. While I waited my turn I watched her retire a full professor in four sentences, three of them his. Then she looked up at me. I have been gone through in my day by customs men, house detectives, and Millikan, and none of them got to the bottom of the trunk so fast.
"Name."
"Klipspringer, J., corporal, T—"
"The minutes man." She had my card out of the index before I finished. "Quiet end of T-4. You moved yourself in last March on a chit signed by a captain who doesn't sign chits."
"I have friends."
"You have habits," she said. "Friends I'd have heard about."
Sergeant Frances Doyle — Frankie to the detachment, Sergeant Doyle to colonels — was in her later twenties, a wedding band worn where the whole line could see it. South Boston Irish: a tribe that came ashore with nothing, collared the police, the priesthood, and the polls inside two generations, and has been drawing interest on the famine ever since; she ran that counter the way her city runs an election, courteously, with the result already in the drawer.
"Three doctors of philosophy want your end of the dorm," she said. "One has a wife coming in October. Tell me the story of the room, Corporal. Make it good; the line's long and I'm owed some entertainment."
I told her a lovely one — a grateful group leader, faulty wiring, a letter implied, never produced.
"Grand," she said. "Now the true one."
I gave her a cutting of the truth. "I run errands for men who don't put their names on paper, and I hear everything in three divisions before it's spelled right."
She squared my card on the plank. "Rumor's the only crop this mesa grows reliable. Bring me first pick of it. The room's yours while the crop is."
I made my first delivery the Tuesday — which dorm was running a still — and carried away, unasked, the electric heater sitting condemned behind her stove. Kowalczyk had taught me radios in Astoria, and a heater is a good deal simpler than a radio. I remade the cord, reseated the element, and set it back on her counter the next evening, glowing.
"That doesn't buy the room," she said.
"The room's settled. This is a courtesy between houses."
"Where does a Klipspringer learn solder?"
"Stepfather. Radios."
"That one I believe," she said.
What she had in that index was the Hill entire: who arrived, who moved, who bunked where over whose objection. She knew a marriage was finished a day before de Silva's shop knew the man had moved, and she knew why. The big office ran the war; the counter ran the Hill.1 My monthly weather for the captain brightened at once — dormitory rumor with the source rubbed off. He never got her name.
In October the mess hall put on its dances — ten men to every woman. Frankie danced once with any man who asked and not twice with anybody. I drew mine the third Saturday.
"You dance like a man minding the doors," she said.
"Old habit."
"Eddie's the same. Engineers." And there was the husband, dealt face up: Staff Sergeant Eddie Doyle, combat engineers, married in '43 on a forty-eight-hour pass and overseas ever since.
"I know the game you've been playing since August, Corporal," she said on the turn.
"And?"
"I'll tell you if it ever starts working."
By first snow the understanding had articles, delivered across the counter in her billeting voice. "Eddie comes home, you were never born. Nothing I say travels — the day one word of mine surfaces anywhere on this post, you're bunked with the mule skinners inside the week. And don't go liking me; you haven't the resources."
"I never fight above my weight, Sergeant."
"You never fight at all," she said. "It's why you're bearable."
In November two wives contested a vacancy on the row of old ranch-school houses — the ones with bathtubs — one holding seniority, the other a baby. "The tub goes with the baby," said Frankie, stamping. "Appeals lie to General Groves, who answers housing letters personally and with joy."2 They went out hating her instead of each other, and that was the end of it. The Army could have shortened the war a year by parachuting the Hill's wives into Berlin with word that Frau Göring had a corner flat and her own tub.
In December the water quit. The line up from the canyon froze and split, and what the town drank, cooked with, shaved in, and — on gala occasions — bathed in came up the switchbacks by tank truck, doled out by a list of gallons to a building, and the list was typed at Frankie's counter.3 Men shaved in the bottom of the coffee.
"T-4's third on tomorrow's truck," she told me one Tuesday, not looking up.
"What does first cost?"
"First's the hospital, second's the kitchens, and neither one's for sale. Third's the aristocracy, Corporal. Say thank you."
I said thank you. A week on she pushed a chit across unasked: hot water, Tuesday next. "Don't sell it."
"Sergeant, the thought—"
"You've sold everything else on this Hill," she said, "including, I'd guess, a few things that weren't yours and a few that weren't true. Don't sell the bath."
I did not sell the bath, though I had an offer. The lapse dates from those weeks: I began turning up at the counter with nothing to protect and nothing to collect, a condition I had previously known only at gunpoint. I had lately met a girl in Chicago I couldn't read at any range; a woman who read me through on sight was, God help me, restful company. I liked her. It was against every policy I hold. I kept going back.
The telegram came on a Thursday. "Eddie's got emergency furlough," she said, no color in it. "Fourteen days, the first since '43. I've a pass from Saturday — Santa Fe, the hotel two streets off the plaza. His train's Monday from Albuquerque." I said something graceful. "Saturday's mine to spend as I like," she said, looking at me dead level. "Monday I'm a wife, and you were never born. Carry my bag down, and don't be clever anywhere near me."
Of the Saturday I say nothing. The Sunday went like this: I had stayed to breakfast, the lapse operating, and at eight, with the church bells going, the desk clerk's voice came up the stairwell: "Sergeant Doyle! Your husband's below — come in early—!" Eddie had jumped down at Albuquerque and hitched an Air Corps truck. The Army had spent two years teaching him to advance ahead of schedule through obstacles, and the obstacle in place was me.
She was moving before I was afraid, off the pillow and giving orders. "Window, Corporal. Now." While I fought the sash she stripped and remade the bed single-handed, hospital corners. The sash was painted shut; it let go all at once, loud enough for the street, and I went over the sill much as I had gone over the Prine wall in '42, except that Pasadena had been May. The porch roof carried three inches of snow on a skin of ice. I sat down, took the slope and the gutter with my hip, and finished in the wood-yard drift in stocking feet with my tunic in my teeth. My left shoe came out of the window after me. Above, the sash came down; behind the glass, faintly, a woman was becoming a wife again.
A burro stood in the wood-yard and watched me dress behind the woodpile. I crossed the plaza at the parade step, collar up, one shoe full of snow, past Vera Crews at the cathedral corner on her way to early mass; she took in the state of me and the hour and asked nothing, then or ever. Then I begged a ride north on the morning water truck and rode the tank up the switchbacks in wet serge, home to the shortage.4
For the fortnight of the furlough I was the most scrupulous man in New Mexico. I minded my minutes, kept off the counter, and answered Bunny's January letter — three pages on Clipper's winter coat, one line on missing me.
In February the stamp came down on somebody's card and she said, not looking up, "He's gone back over. Engineers go where the rivers are." Then: "He looked older. He wouldn't say from what."
"I'm sorry."
"You're not."
"No," I said. "But I can stand here while you are."
She squared the cards once. "You owe the government a sash cord."
"Put it against the room."
"It's against the room." And the Tuesday trade resumed on the old terms, and the window was never mentioned between us again.
The same week a clerk carried in the tray of winter arrivals — the British mission's newest draft, a dozen cards in an unfamiliar cut. I read them upside down while Frankie dealt them into the index: names, degrees, doubled billets, complaints already forming. One card went by with almost nothing on it: quiet, courteous, no requests entered — and in the corner, the notation that outranked a colonelcy on that mesa. The use of a motorcar. "No trouble at all, that one," Frankie said, boxing it. "Never so much as asks for hot water." I let it go by without a twitch. Some catastrophes you smell two days out; some you stand in line for; and the quietest kind, I can now report, asks for nothing and has the use of a car.
The Women's Army Corps detachment at Los Alamos was among the largest of the war, and the post ran on it: billets, passes, payrolls, records — the administration of the secret city was very largely a WAC administration, a fact the literature took some forty years to notice. "Doyle" is the first of the two names in these Papers altered on the advice of counsel, as noticed in the Preface. The sergeant who actually held the housing counter in this period appears in the detachment's records with a commendation for administrative efficiency; having supplied that much, the editor supplies nothing else. A veteran of the detachment, interviewed in 1975, did remember "a corporal from T who fixed our heater once and then hung around all winter like he was paying rent on the doorway." The reader may decide who was managing whom. —Ed.
Housing generated more grievance at Los Alamos than any other subject, technical subjects included; General Groves, who feared neither Congress nor the enemy's progress, ranked quarters first among the site's sources of complaint, and the surviving correspondence bears him out by the linear foot. The old ranch-school houses with bathtubs conferred a rank no badge could, and the street they stood on is called Bathtub Row to this day. The author's account of the domestic politics is unkind and, the editor is advised by those who were there, restrained. —Ed.
The water crisis of the winter of 1944–45 is historical. The supply line froze and burst, and for weeks the town's water came up the switchbacks by tank truck, to be rationed building by building, boiled by order, and grudged by all, while residents melted snow and went unbathed for days at a stretch. The memoirs of that winter contradict one another on nearly every point of substance; on the subject of the baths they speak with one voice. —Ed.
Staff Sergeant Edward Doyle's battalion of combat engineers spent December 1944 and January 1945 in the Ardennes. The emergency furlough the author treats as a stage direction was of the kind granted, that winter, to men whose units had been used up and rebuilt around them. He rejoined his battalion in February and served to the end of the war. The author knew all of this when he wrote the scene at the window. He wrote the scene. —Ed.