14 November, 1943
The air was shedding its veneer of autumn as easily as a winter's coat, and she stood at the rail looking out over the Atlantic as the great ship steamed to the southeast. Even from this modest height - and she guessed she was about fifty feet or so above the water's surface - the sense of speed as the Iowa knifed through the sea was palpable. And it looked as though the destroyers and the nearby cruiser were working hard to keep up with the immense battleship, for indeed they were. Now, on their second day at sea, the small convoy was carrying the president to Morocco; from there the gathering of diplomats and soldiers would fly with him on to Tehran, where a meeting between the all the president's men and both Churchill and Stalin was scheduled to take place.
"Why am I here?" she asked the wind. "What possible use could I be to him?"
She turned and saw him in his chair near the rail, perhaps fifty feet away, just under the huge sixteen inch guns of the number two turret. The teak decks were mottled by random hits of spray, the three barrels cast giant, oblate shadows over Roosevelt and the deck under his chair, so that one moment he was alive in early morning sunlight, the next a wraith sheathed in shadow.
"That's what we are," she sighed, "the two of us. Sun and shadow, light and dark. Good and evil."
Once the theoretical nature of their work had borne fruit, she had begun to see the real contours of darkness inside Roosevelt's Pandora's Box. And she had begun to see her role uncovering the darkness, until now she knew more than ever before just what would be released. And she wasn't simply a passive receptacle standing idly by while others did the work of unraveling the darkest fire man had ever kindled, and yes, she understood she was more than just an active participant, too. She had grown into one of the most important members of the group designing the charge that would induce fission, and was helping Sealy and his team working with Boeing on the B-29 modifications. She would help bring the ultimate irony to humankind: she would help usher in a new era, the atomic era, and the world would never be the same again.
As she watched Roosevelt, she wondered what he would do with this immense power. Let the world know what he alone possessed, let the Germans and the Japanese understand the consequences of prolonging the war? Or, keep the power a secret? Unleash it on an unsuspecting world without any warning at all?
And she watched Roosevelt more closely now that she understood him better. She had never once considered how much his personal struggle with polio had redefined his character, how much the wounded man's experience in Warm Springs had altered his patrician's frame of reference. The entitled Assistant Secretary of the Navy would eventually become the Governor of New York, but only after defeating his own very personal demons. She'd never really known these things about the man, not until the night before, anyway. When they'd sat and talked on this very deck, under the stars.
And he seemed to know each and every star in the night sky, from the origins of their names to their uses as aids to navigation. He loved ships too, she soon discovered, everything about big ships. He'd championed the development of naval aviation - in the First World War of all things - and even submarines. She'd known so little about him when he was first elected, but now - after working with him off and on for four years, she thought of him almost as a father.
Fathers had been in short supply all her life, after all, and though she hardly ever thought about it she knew she had missed out on something important. Charles was Charles, a brother and never anything more, yet Charles had assumed the role of father when she was still quite young. And, as it turned out, he had never really had understood her very basic need. He became a friend, then a sort of career advisor, yet he never expressed any sort of familial love for her - and that was a scar that had never really healed. He cared, true enough, but he had never once expressed anything at all like love for her - never even a brother's love. Because he wasn't her brother...not really...and that was an unspoken truth between them.
And yet, Roosevelt had seen through her hastily erected veneers, had seen her need, and he had done so in an instant. After their first meeting in the White House he had begun writing letters to her, silly, half-affectionate fatherly missives she first at first dismissed as the ramblings of a lonely old man - then she had found something else in his words. A need to connect personally with the reality of her work, not only to understand her better, but to better come to terms with what they were building out there in the high New Mexican desert. And so she wrote to him, too. Long letters about the problems the team faced, little notes about how odd it was being one of the few women out there under the high stars. She was impressed a man with so many responsibilities took the time to correspond with her, then, as she wrote to him she would lapse back into the dream, see him standing by that window, looking at Saturn's rings...
'Why don't you find a man, get married,' he wrote once, and she thought about the answer to that question for a long time before she set out to craft a reply.
'I thought I had, once,' she wrote to the president. 'Your physician, Ben Goodman. We spent a few days together in 1939, and I thought we had created something. Something real and lasting, only then he drifted away. I have no need to be hurt again...'
His next letter rocked her world.
'He speaks of you often,' Roosevelt wrote, 'yet I was given to believe you had spurned his advances. Is that not the case?'
And so, when she had boarded the Potomac with Roosevelt a few days before, she was instantly on guard when she saw Goodman walk aboard just ahead of the president. Neither had looked her way; indeed, neither had acknowledged her presence in any way. And as the only female on a US Navy battleship steaming across an ocean full of U-boats, she had been locked away in the executive officer's stateroom, apparently for the duration of the crossing, lest she distract the men, or so she was told...
Then, last night.
Roosevelt had asked that she come to his cabin after dinner. He wanted, the hand delivered note plainly stated, to talk with her about an idea or two.
When she was escorted to his cabin the door opened and she found him tucked into bed, sipping some sort of amber liqueur. "Could I pour you a snort?" Roosevelt asked, grinning.
"What is it?" she remembered asking.
"Drambuie."
She shrugged, a blank look on her face.
"It's a liqueur, made from scotch whiskey," another voice said, and she turned to see Goodman at a writing desk across the captain's ceremonial in-port cabin.
"I see," she said, though of course she didn't. She couldn't, not just now, because her vision had grown confined and dark, and her thoughts muddied as the currents of time slowed. She had watched Goodman pour her a glass, then turned to the president sitting in his bed. He was smiling, she saw, and looking not at all unlike another grinning Cheshire cat of some ill repute.
She had taken the glass and carried it too her nose, closed her eyes as the honied scent found her, then she took some of the liquid on her tongue and let it settle there. When she opened her eyes Goodman was sitting across from her, his eyes still full of a quiet, smoldering empathy.
"Like it?" Goodman asked.
"I do. Yes, very much, as a matter of fact."
"Well then," Roosevelt crooned, holding up his glass. "A toast! Here's to swimmin' - with bow-legged wimin'..."
Goodman grinned and shook his head, then took a sip, his eyes never leaving her's, not for a single instant.
"I hope you're not asking me to swim with a bunch of bow-legged women, Mr. President," she laughed, almost under her breath.
"No, no, not at all, Claire. We were going over some production figures this afternoon when someone asked about the work on blast dynamics on the airframe. It's been weeks since I read an update on that work, and I wanted to get your take on the problem."
"Now, Mr. President?"
"Yes, yes...now."
"Well, sir, as you know, the basic question is altitude versus the aerodynamic properties of the bomb itself. How long it will take the warhead to reach the target..."
