The Physicists' Daughter, page 7
She could see Gloria’s living room through an open archway. There, the hundreds of books that had always been piled on every horizontal surface were now neatly shelved on built-in bookcases. Justine felt a pain in her chest when she saw the copy of J. J. Thomson’s Recollections and Reflections that her father had given Gloria from his own collection. The polished oak shelf where it sat shone. So did all the house’s polished and oiled woodwork. There wasn’t a speck of dust in sight, and that lack of dust was the most disorienting thing of all.
As far back as Justine could remember, her mother had worried about Gloria’s tendency to alternate between frenzied, brilliant work as a physicist and periods of sad silence, neither of which was conducive to housekeeping. Justine remembered a year when Gloria had finished teaching in the spring and simply collapsed. Isabel had visited every day, holding her hand while torrents of words about anguish that little Justine couldn’t understand poured out of her. By summer’s end, Gloria was herself again and the darkness that her sadness had cast over Justine had lifted. She wished her mother could know that Gloria’s home finally seemed like a comfortable place where a happy person lived.
Justine had never realized until that moment that she’d inherited her mother’s worry for Gloria. Her godmother looked wonderful, with bright eyes and a wide smile, and Justine was grateful.
Gloria’s hair was still a mass of salt-and-pepper frizz, although maybe it had become a little saltier since the last time Justine had seen her. It was still forced against its will into a coil of braids at the crown of her head, in the same spot where her mother’s graying red-blond locks had always been gathered into a bun, but Gloria’s head no longer drooped with overwork. Her eyes, behind bifocals framed in silver wire, were still an intense black. Justine guessed that Gloria was well into her fifties, but her pale skin was firm over her high cheekbones and angular jaw. She was still very beautiful, in the way that hurricanes and rushing floodwaters are very beautiful.
Justine wrapped her arms around her godmother and squeezed hard. Gloria squeezed her back for a long time, then she tipped Justine’s head back and looked into her eyes. In her lightly accented English, she asked, “Did you eat?”
When Justine admitted that she had skipped breakfast, Gloria barked, “Sit down at the table. It will take me just one moment to scramble some eggs for you.”
As Gloria hurried to the kitchen, eyes alight, Justine realized that she was a fool. If anybody understood what it was like to be a young woman on her own in the world, it was Gloria. Gloria didn’t talk about the years before she was fifteen, when her Polish parents had put her on a ship alone. Justine had heard her utter a single short sentence, only once, that gave a glimpse of the reasons they sent her away.
“We were hungry.”
She should have found a way to come back to her godmother sooner.
Gloria’s disembodied voice boomed from the kitchen. “You called me from a phone at your rooming house, yes?”
“Mrs. Guidry lets us use it for emergencies. I told her it was an emergency.”
“And so it was. Yes, it was quite the emergency. I have not seen you in…oh…well, it has been too long.”
Within minutes, Gloria emerged carrying a tray bearing two cups of steaming coffee. Then she went back to fetch Justine’s eggs and toast.
Justine’s mother had told her the bare bones of Gloria’s history. Within days of arriving in Chicago, the teenaged girl had found a job making buttonholes for a woman who sewed men’s shirts. Within weeks, she was in night school, learning English and arithmetic so that her employer would never again be cheated by the men who bought her shirts.
By the time Gloria was thirty, she was working for physics professor Gerard Byrne beside his pregnant wife, Isabel, who had earned her doctorate alongside Gloria. By the time Justine was born, they were all in New Orleans, where her father had refused to accept Tulane’s job offer until Gloria was offered a position at the university’s coordinate school, H. Sophie Newcomb Memorial College for Women.
Isabel had stayed home to take care of the baby, helping Gerard and Gloria with their calculations while she dandled Justine on her lap. Over time, her vision had failed, but she had kept going, writing the letters, numbers, and symbols bigger and bigger until she couldn’t make out even the largest and boldest markings. Then she had switched to braille. All the while, Justine was growing older and learning to spare her mother’s eyes by helping her with more and more complex work. Her father’s final paper had credited Justine as the fourth author, behind her parents and Gloria.
As Justine looked around the dining room at the shining woodwork and the windows free of a single bug speck, she imagined Gloria venting her uncontrollable grief over the loss of Gerard and Isabel by controlling everything else that she possibly could. All Justine had done with her grief was run away from it.
Gloria plunked a plate of moist and fluffy scrambled eggs in front of Justine. The toast was a perfect and even brown, and it was spread with butter that was soft but not melted.
“You still cook like a scientist,” Justine said.
“Is that a good thing?” Gloria said, nibbling on a piece of dry toast.
“You bet. Everything’s precisely the way it should be, cooked for the optimal amount of time at the optimal temperature.”
Justine looked at her coffee, white with milk, and its creamy color woke her from her nostalgic dream. She hadn’t had a breakfast like this since before the war, and she shouldn’t be having it now.
“You put sugar in this, didn’t you?”
Gloria feigned surprise at the question. “Of course.”
Justine wanted to say, “I see that you didn’t put any milk in yours, and probably no sugar,” but they both knew why Gloria wasn’t drinking her beloved café au lait. Milk and sugar were precious things in wartime, when they could be had at all.
Gloria couldn’t afford to give away her eggs. Her milk. Her bread. Her coffee. And, dear God, certainly not her precious sugar. The administrators of Sophie Newcomb College had never appreciated having an opinionated woman, and a foreigner at that, forced on them, so Gerard Byrne’s power as a renowned scientist had only gone so far. Gloria’s academic position had always been precarious, only a year-to-year contract and an inadequate lab space. When Gerard died, Gloria lost the inadequate lab space and most of her course load before he was even buried.
“Have some plum preserves, dear,” Gloria said, holding out a jar of store-bought preserves that might as well have held a pint of dollar bills.
Justine’s heart sank. Gloria couldn’t afford to pamper her like this.
Justine knew exactly how close to the edge her godmother’s budget was. If she’d let Gloria do what she had wanted to do when her parents died—put a roof over Justine’s head and send her to college—the house where they sat would have been gone in months.
So Justine had run. She’d sold her parents’ house and everything in it before the bank could take it all, then she’d run to The Julia without saying goodbye. She’d run from Gloria’s need to take care of her, even at the expense of her own future.
Remembering all of these things, Justine found that her breakfast plate offended her. Locking her eyes defiantly on Gloria’s face, she took her clean coffee spoon, scooped up half of her untouched eggs, and dumped them on the saucer holding Gloria’s toast. When Gloria tried to protest, she cut her off. Justine supposed that she was too gruff about it, but there’s no gracious way to say, “Eat something. You’re too skinny.”
Then she grabbed Gloria’s cup before she could even start drinking the dark, bitter brew and began sloshing coffee back and forth between their cups like a chemist pouring reagents between two beakers. When each cup held a mixture of the same shade of brown, she knew that the fraction of coffee was the same in both cups and so was the fraction of milk. And presumably, so was the fraction of sugar. The heat lost to the air while she sloshed meant that the temperature of their coffee would now be less than optimal, but she was satisfied, because there was no way in hell that she was going to slurp down a perfect cup of coffee when Gloria didn’t have one.
She handed Gloria’s cup back to her. Her godmother’s steely gaze held hers for a long second, and Justine braced herself for the explosion. Then Gloria lifted the cup in a toast. “My little girl is all grown up now.”
They both drank deeply.
Then Gloria, who had never been known for tact, sliced through the veil of politeness that had been separating them from the hard truth. “You could have grown up without running away, you know. You were cruel to go without a word.”
Gloria sipped the sweet, milky coffee, holding it for a moment in her mouth to savor it. “But I knew why you did it. That’s why I let you go without tracking you down and bringing you back where you belonged.”
Justine imagined Gloria storming The Julia and hauling her home. She was very glad to have missed that humiliation.
Gloria continued to muse. “I did the same as you, you know. I went away so that my parents wouldn’t have the burden of feeding me. And I survived. I always do. And so shall you. Let us call our scores settled. Fate dealt us hard hands and we played them.”
Gloria’s short nod put a period at the end of that sentence. Justine knew that this was the only time she would ever hear about Gloria’s long-lost mother and father and the Polish home she would never see again. Gloria had said what she had to say. This was bad because Justine needed distracting. She just could not cry in front of Gloria. It would be unseemly.
“Eat your eggs.” Gloria’s crisp voice scared the tears away. “So you are working at Segram’s Fabrics? Have they made you a manager yet? Well, assistant manager. Sam Segram would never put a woman in a manager’s job, but he would be happy for you to do the managing for him while he paid you a woman’s salary.”
“I left Segram’s a couple of years ago. I took a factory job at—”
She interrupted herself when she saw Gloria sit up straighter, while still glaring down at her eggs.
“—at Higgins. I’m working at Higgins Industries now.”
The black eyes flicked back up at her, brilliant with pride.
“You are working in manufacturing? You are welding? If your father could only see this. So proud. He would be so proud.”
“No welding yet. Well, just a little, but I’m mostly doing assembly work. You know—standing on an assembly line…screwing in screws…twisting nuts onto bolts…”
Gloria brushed aside those humble details.
“You are building boats? Aeroplanes?”
“That’s why I’m here. I don’t know what I’m building. I hoped you could tell me.”
The shining eyes stayed on her face, but the smile faded a little. “They don’t tell you what you are doing? If your work is for the war effort, they should tell you, so that you will be proud and work hard.”
“We’re sworn to secrecy. The penalties for giving away war secrets are…”
“Harsh? Indeed. But how can I tell you what you’re building if you can say nothing about it?”
“Gloria, I think somebody’s trying to sabotage our work. I don’t know who it is, and I don’t know why.” She swallowed hard, then spit out the words she hadn’t even been able to say to Georgette. Or to herself. “I’m afraid.”
Gloria reached behind her without looking and pulled a clothbound lab notebook off an incredibly organized shelf. Justine was stupidly happy to see it. Her godmother must have bought cases of those notebooks in 1924 or so, because Justine had hardly ever seen her without one, and they all looked the same.
Gloria pulled a pencil out of the knot of braids on the top of her head. It must have been there the whole time, but Justine hadn’t noticed. Gloria had always kept her writing utensils in her hair.
“What kind of sabotage do you mean? Why do you think this? Can you tell me?”
“I can tell you about the broken parts I mended. There’s nothing about them that could give away anything about my work. They’re just standard parts on a conveyor belt that could be used in any factory in America. Three times in the past two weeks, the assembly line apparatus where I work has broken down because a lateral guide has failed. Under magnification, I can see damage to the metal that isn’t random, and it can’t be explained by malfunctioning equipment.”
“You think it looks intentional.”
“Yes. My boss knows I can weld, so he keeps asking me to fix the broken parts, but they keep breaking.”
“Your saboteur is not smart.”
The word “saboteur” gave Justine chills.
Gloria jotted something in her notebook. “It would be far better to leave no pattern for someone to notice.”
“That’s true. But ‘not smart’ is not the same thing as ‘not dangerous.’ I’ve also heard rumors about other strange happenings within my department. Missing tools. Broken cables. Things like that. Outside my department…well, there was an accident yesterday and somebody was killed, but I just can’t tell whether it’s connected.”
Gloria nodded as she stared at the notebook page, letting her pencil hover an inch above the paper. “Your boss? I presume you haven’t told him about your suspicions. Him?”
“Yes, him.”
Gloria nodded. “Of course.”
The pen descended to the paper and began sketching a network of straight lines and curves. Justine knew that it would grow more elaborate as they spoke. Gloria had left a lifelong trail of doodles behind her, on ink blotters, on newspapers, on tablecloths. Only her best students opened their graded papers to find them decorated with Gloria’s scribbles.
Without looking up, she said, “You have not told your boss. Why? Because he is incompetent? Or because you don’t trust him?”
“Yes.”
This earned Justine a glance through the top half of her godmother’s bifocals. Gloria’s eyes squinched into a quick smile, then they darted back down to the notebook.
“Ah. Both incompetent and untrustworthy. Lucky you. You have considered talking to the police?”
“That oath of silence covers everybody. Everybody. Besides, I’ve heard things about the police that—”
“You’ve heard correctly. Power corrupts.”
“Then what should I do?”
“You could go to the military, but it is a hierarchical organization. I do not know how you would find an individual of a sufficiently high rank to help you, instead of handing you up the chain of command. Any chain of command has weak links, and some of those weak links are traitors. Approaching the wrong person would gain you a pat on the hand and a phone call to your boss explaining your tendency to hysteria. Approaching the wrong person could even get you killed. And how would you begin? Stroll into a random recruiting office and start talking?”
“So I wasn’t wrong to come here. Nobody can help me but you.”
“What do you think I can do? I presume that you want me to determine what you and your fellow workers are building, so that you can get some sense of why someone would sabotage your work. That is a tall order, but it is not completely out of the question.”
Despite Gloria’s claim that she probably couldn’t help her, Justine was already beginning to feel hopeful.
Gloria stopped speaking for a moment of silent nods and scribbling. “You cannot trust your boss with your fears, and you cannot know which of the people around you might be a saboteur, if there is one. Unfortunately, your oath of secrecy means that you can’t tell me what I need to know to help you, and I do not suggest that you break your oath. Should your loyalty ever be called into question, the truth will show on your face.”
Gloria’s stern expression bloomed into a warm smile. “You have a very honest face, my dear.”
The pen went down. “It seems we are at an impasse. Is there anything you can tell me, within the constraints of your oath?”
Justine unbuttoned her cardigan and slid it from her shoulders to reveal a simple white cotton shirt. Every square inch of it was smudged with carbon dust.
Chapter 9
Mudcat walked away from a certain Craftsman-style house in a certain residential neighborhood, head down and hat pulled low over his face. He was free to go because he’d seen what he needed to see. The air was warm and he wished for a beer, but it wasn’t even noon yet. Besides, he couldn’t buy real beer in this part of the world. The best he’d been able to find was a New Orleans brand called Dixie. The locals loved it because they were Americans and they confused watery lager with actual beer.
Technically, he was American, but apparently nothing more than a German mother was needed to develop a palate adapted to more potent brews. These days, he drank America’s thin, pale excuses for beer because he had to drink something. The war and a long period of Prohibition had dominated his life, so drinking German beer had always required travel or influential connections or more money than he wanted to spend. Fortunately, his career provided travel and connections, and sometimes those connections had money.
With every weak, astringent mouthful of Dixie Beer, he wished for doppelbock. Strong and sweet, doppelbock was like liquid bread, and it was a quick route to the kind of happy drunkenness that might obliterate, at least for a while, the constant fear that drove him. Everyone in his line of work was driven by fear, although not so many were honest enough to admit it.
This job wasn’t going well, but Mudcat reminded himself that all was not lost. He had one agent behind the doors that stood between him and the Carbon Division’s secret lair, and that agent had brought him information that provided a partial understanding of what was going on behind those doors. He simply needed more. He was coming to believe that Justine Byrne was the right person for the right time and place.
