You said that the Manhattan Project was a major historical event. Is it possible to see it with any sort of perspective? We’ve been a long time without a nuclear war.

Yes. Well, it’s probably like any bankruptcy. The longer you’re able to put it off the worse it’s going to be. The next great war wont arrive until everyone who remembers the last one is dead.

You think that nuclear war is inevitable.

I agree with Plato that only the dead have seen an end to war. And people dont fight with rocks when they have guns. Etcetera and so on.

We’re living in a fool’s paradise.

I dont know what we’re living in.

All right. Family history. Your mother I take it grew up in that house.

Yes. She did.

But when I asked you about it what you told me was what your grandmother remembered.

My mother was in high school when the war came to town. She may have thought that the world was ending. I dont know. My grandmother used to reminisce, my mother used to cry. All recent history is about death. When you look at photos taken in the late nineteenth century what occurs to you is that all of those people are dead. If you go back a bit further everyone is still dead but it doesnt matter. Those deaths are less to us. But the brown figures in the photographs are something else. Even their smiles are woeful. Filled with regret. With accusation.

You dont think this is just your own maudlin view?

No.

Wasnt your father seen by the family as the villain in this drama?

Yes. Of course. My grandmother was horrified when my mother went to work at Y-12. She didnt know what it was about but she thought the chances of it being something good were pretty much zero. But those werent just the best paying jobs within five hundred miles. They were the only paying jobs. My mother was fresh out of high school and working as a waitress at a drive-in. She was really smart and she should have been in college but there wasnt any money. She’d expected to get a scholarship out of the State beauty contest but she came in third. Which was something of an embarrassment because everyone knew the fix was in. She felt sorry for the winner because of the lame congratulations and she tried to be her friend but that didnt really work out. She was a straight A student and valedictorian of her class but she wound up third runner-up in the Miss Tennessee contest. Just out of the scholarship money. So that was that. She told me that the Tennessee Eastman employment office was in a plywood shack and that when she got there in the dark at five oclock in the morning the line was already the length of a football field and the mud was ankle deep. But she had the job.

What did she do?