The Atomic Weight of Love by Elizabeth J Church

their visibility in the dark. Churchill with his cigar boarding invasion crafts to encourage departing troops, Eisenhower speaking to the soon-to-be-liberated population of France, encouraging “all who love freedom” to “stand with us.” Bomb after bomb burst into huge, fuel-filled clouds of smoke and fire. I held on to Alden in the darkened theater, and when I saw the parachutes of so many men open and drift earthward, all I could think about was their courage, their faith. I wondered, too, where Jerry was, if he were anywhere near France. Alden leaned toward me quietly and said, “We will end this carnage.”
    Alden took me to San Felipe Pueblo, north of Albuquerque. With the other tourists, we sat cross-legged in the dirt along the edges of a wide, rectangular courtyard, and Indian dancers filed in from two sides, keeping time with a circle of four men who beat out increasingly intense rhythms on drum heads made of leather and sinew. Draped across the shoulders of the women were beautiful, colorful woolen weavings. The women wore white leather moccasins studded with silver buttons and fringes that curled with the pounding of their feet. Sweat ran down the faces of performers and audience members alike, and rattles made from seed-filled gourds made me think of rattlesnakes—something Alden said people regularly found in homes and yards out here.
    In Santa Fe we walked down picturesque, unbelievably narrow corridors where I could not shake the feeling that we were being followed, that Alden was being watched. Surely the usual Santa Fe residents had to know something was going on just north of the old city, up on that mesa where Los Alamos grew overnight. The influx of people had to be obvious. Even I could spot probable Los Alamos transplants as they made their way through town on errands impossible to fulfill in Los Alamos: watch repairs, car parts, more liquor than your fellow scientists should know about. The scientists even walked differently, precisely, either wholly self-conscious or lost in the clouds. I saw them squatting to inspect bolo ties, belt buckles, and rings sold by the Indians who lined the shadowed portico of the Palace of the Governors on the Plaza, and I saw them seated on benches, hungrily spooning chunks of Woolworth’s Frito pie into their mouths.
    Maybe everyone felt as if they were being watched; everyone was on edge. Alden must have become inured to having someone look over his shoulder, check his credentials; he must be used to locking his thoughts away. Maybe he had always lived an inviolate, completely interior, intellectual life. I had a strong sense of vulnerability though, of unseen violation. I wasn’t used to living that way—I lived my life on a college campus where thoughts and ideas flourished because they thrived in sunlight, in soil enriched by other theories, by challenge. I realized what a huge adjustment this wartime secrecy must be for an academic like Alden. Even on the Hill, as he called Los Alamos, conversation was circumscribed.
    I took Alden’s hand, willing my thoughts to enter his bloodstream through that skin-to-skin contact, wanting for him to know that while we couldn’t really discuss much of his life, I honored his sacrifice. I was determined to focus on something other than the leviathan secret weighing on our marriage, our intimacy.
    I fingered the wool of Navajo rugs and thought about Scottish woolen works, what my father would have said and done in the arid New Mexico heat. We ventured east of the Plaza to the cool interior of the minuscule gothic Loretto Chapel to see the wooden spiral staircase, built with only wooden pegs. Alden rested his palm on a curve of the wood as if it were a reliquary, and I inhaled the mix of incense, candle wax, and desperate prayer. Standing there, with my hands resting on the back of a pew, my eyes relaxing into the wedding-cake white of the altar, I wanted to believe in a God—a God that would end the war, the state of