Many Mansions. Isabel Bolton

tritons, a deuteron and a proton,

      A triton and a proton and a proton and a deuteron.

       In one of these six possible combinations—

      Triton—triton, triton—deuteron, triton—proton,

       Or a possible combination of these three

       Lies the secret of the triton bomb.”

      You’d have to possess the brain of Einstein to understand it.

      But here it was—the perfidious, the majestic secret explained if you could get it, and the words dancing with such terrible agility in her mind and heart.

       “The triton bomb

       is the last step

       In a six-step process

       One taking more

       Than six million years.”

      Could it be possible? Could it be humanly possible that the diligent, the honorable search for truth, the inquiry into the secrets of nature and the structure of the Universe would be closed and consummated with this annihilating explanation?

      “The protons are hooked on,

      one by one,

       To an atom of carbon

       Two of the protons

       Losing the positive electron

       And are thus transmuted

       Into an electron—

       As has been seen

       A nucleus of one proton

       And two deuterons

       Is a proton nucleus

       This is by far

       The most powerful reaction

       In nature

       And takes place

       In the sun

       At the rate

       Of four pounds an hour

       A reaction time

       That brings it within

       The range of possibility.”

      The paper dropped from her hands. She threw back her head and closed her eyes. “What is man that Thou art mindful of him or the son of man that Thou visitest him,” she cried aloud.

       TWO

      Patsy had come down to the sidewalk with him. She shivered for she was clothed only in her slacks, a light sweater, and a pair of huaraches. “There’s the precious manuscript,” she said, placing a well-stuffed folder in the laden pushcart that stood against the curb. Adam took it angrily from where it lay exposed to wind and rain, and repacking it with great solicitude in a nest of similar folders, turned to speak to her. But she’d gone without so much as saying goodbye. He could see her through the open door of the tenement house fleeing up the stairs to her own little flat on the third floor. To be sure, she’d offered to go along with him, and help him unpack his things. But he’d turned her down flat. “No, you don’t, my little bitch,” he’d said—the word had escaped him. There had been something in the way he’d said it that had, he expected, as good as terminated the whole affair.

      He resented the note of sarcasm with which she referred to his manuscript. He was done with Patsy. He surveyed the cart on which his goods and chattels were now untidily stowed away. The sight of the familiar objects was discouraging enough. How many times they’d gone with him from one place to another. A reproduction of van Gogh’s Old Shoes peeped at him from behind an alarm clock, and a portion of Picasso’s Clowns emerged from his old trench coat. God, how many books. There was his old victrola with a crank to wind up the turntable and a few albums of fine records. His radio was wrapped in a blanket. How had he ever managed to acquire these possessions, to move them from one place to another?

      The desolation that invaded him for the moment swallowed up his wrath. The sheer discomfort of digging into new quarters, unpacking and placing his books, setting up a table for his typewriter, rigging up some kind of contraption where he could cook, accustoming himself to the unfamiliar chairs, the unfamiliar bed, the general disorder and despair. A rut he could endure, but to meet with new contingencies—that’s what got him down. It was Patsy who had found the room; she had even offered to go along with him and help him settle in. “But no you don’t,” he said grimly, starting to push his cart through Jones Street into Bleecker, “no, you don’t, my little bitch,” and at this moment, turning east on Bleecker, a flight of pigeons wheeling all together and catching on their tilted wings some diffusion of brightness from the breaking clouds seemed to illuminate not only the dark skies but the murk and drabness of the February day. They gleamed and disappeared behind the belfry of Our Lady of Pompeii, just as Adam, all but knocked down by a heavy truck, and answering with peculiar vehemence the curses of the driver who had forced him and his pushcart against the curb, experienced an extraordinary instant. Half a dozen or more doors opening in his heart while he passed through as many moments in memory, and an accumulation of loneliness, a quite unutterable sense of his uniqueness flooding the present instant, brought him so intense a consciousness of all he’d learned of misery, despair and solitude that he seemed to have acquired nothing short of spiritual treasure. Hounded by misfortune, accustomed by some ill star that pursued him to the kicks and bludgeonings of fate, he would grind out of the misery and torture a work of art; he’d wrench a masterpiece from all that life had meted out to him. So, turned back upon himself—for he was a young man, he felt, quite sure of genius—ravenously devouring his experience and his bitterness, brushing the mud from several books that had been jostled from the cart, continuing his virulent exchange of curses and obscenities with the driver of the truck, he received so vivid and immediate a sense of his own predicament, all the vicissitudes of his late affair with Patsy, that, scrapping half the material of his novel now in progress, he determined that he would place the first big chapter of his book right here, in this very moment—Bleecker Street, with the low ramshackle houses, the dormer windows, the tenements, the pushcarts, the fruit and vegetable stands, the Italian vendors, women marketing, children and baby carriages, the street cries, the mud and drizzle. He’d make you smell and see and hear and live with it. And in the midst of the animated scene, he’d place himself, a young man with his goods and chattels in a pushcart, shoved up against the curbing while these profanities came pouring fresh from the wells of his misery and anger—getting square with Patsy, getting square with life.

      The traffic jam broke up, the trucks rolled on. Seeing an opportunity to cross the street, Adam maneuvered his cart to the opposite curbing and looking up saw the pigeons flying in close formation emerge from the clouds a second time and wheel behind the belfry and the golden cross. God, he’d snare those pigeons too, shedding their light from the cloud just like the Holy Ghost descending on the Village, and he’d introduce that newsstand there between the pushcarts with the morning papers and the headlines in English and Italian, shouting out their joyous message—the great big beautiful news about the great big beautiful bomb, the absolute weapon to blow the human race to Kingdom Come.

      As he nipped into Morton Street, pushing his cart in the direction of Seventh Avenue, the truck driver’s abuse and his own foulmouthed rejoinders mingling with the rhythms of the headlines, “Truman Orders Hydrogen Bomb Built,” still visualizing pigeons and pushcarts, fruits and vegetables, the belfry and the golden cross, and seeing as though he stood before him in the flesh Philip Ropes, with his chestnut-colored curls, that Byronic throat, the collar open at the neck, and remembering Patsy naked on her bed, her delicate fragile body