An Atomic Love Story by Shirley Streshinsky & Patricia Klaus

Author:Shirley Streshinsky & Patricia Klaus [Streshinsky, Shirley & Klaus, Patricia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781618580191
Publisher: Turner Publishing Company
Published: 2013-09-08T00:00:00+00:00

WHAT DID KITTY FEEL WHEN she learned about Jean's death? Probably that it was such a waste, all that fine education, Vassar and Stanford, a medical degree and a residency in psychiatry, and only 29. (Kitty had once blithely dismissed the popular Dorothy McKibbin for having done nothing with her fine Smith College diploma, even though Dorothy had all but singlehandedly run the Los Alamos office in Santa Fe, a prodigious feat.) But in the case of Jean, what Kitty would have felt most acutely was that she was no longer a threat. Kitty had her Joe, now Robert had his Jean.

The winter wore on, the longest and coldest in living memory on the Pajarito Plateau, temperatures plunging below zero. On the weekend, the boys' school ski run was rigged up, the ice on the pond scraped for skating, and if the weather calmed and the skies were bright blue, the families went hiking and exploring. In the evenings, they partied and danced and drank too much. Sometimes Robert and Kitty joined them, Robert dancing in an old-fashioned style he probably learned at dancing school.

When Kitty had had too much to drink, she would divulge extremely personal details about her sex life to the woman she happened to be befriending at the time. She confessed that Robert did not bother with foreplay, had no sense of fun, no playfulness at all. She had to teach him, she said. Because, she continued, she believed sex should be fun,313 not necessarily a religious experience. If Jean had been looking for ecstasy, Kitty wanted playfulness and pleasure. At Los Alamos she wasn't getting much of either. It might have been because her husband was working all day and many nights, the pressure so intense he was losing weight (his six-foot frame would go down to 104 pounds) and the belt with the big silver buckle had been drawn in several notches. Exhaustion might have explained his lack of energy for sex; so might a wife who was often drunk. Or it may have been Jean's death that made him less than responsive to the wife who thought sex should not be taken so seriously.

That Kitty was a very sexy dame, as one of the women at Los Alamos called her, was a given. Men responded to her, she was adept at flirting, a tease when she needed to be. Sex was how she had assured her marriage to Robert.

There was enough sex on the Hill to provide what would become a bumper crop of babies. RFD, they called it: Rural Free Delivery, just like the mail. Since the Army was paying the bills, and the young couples were stuck on this mountaintop, many of them figured they might as well take advantage of the time and the price, and produce their families. General Groves didn't like it, but there wasn't much he could do about it, since his director's wife would be adding to the RFDs before the year was out.

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