Uncle Anton's Atomic Bomb Read online

  Uncle Anton’s Atomic Bomb

  by

  Ian Woollen

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  Coffeetown Press

  PO Box 70515

  Seattle, WA 98127

  For more information go to: www.coffeetownpress.com

  woollen.coffeetownpress.com

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Cover design by Sabrina Sun

  Uncle Anton’s Atomic Bomb

  Copyright © 2014 by Ian Woollen

  ISBN: 978-1-60381-231-3 (Trade Paper)

  ISBN: 978-1-60381-232-0 (eBook)

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2014941206

  Produced in the United States of America

  * * *

  In memory of Nancy Sewell Woollen

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  Special thanks to Catherine and Jennifer at Coffeetown Press, and all my reader friends who collectively brought this book to life.

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  PART I

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  Chapter 1

  An Invocation of the 1950s

  Not to worry, darling. Time behaves strangely in quantum physics and the human mind. Sit back, sip your drink, and allow words and phrases such as “sock hop” and “fallout,” “Studebaker,” and “Red Scare” to summon up what images they will. Trust that your evening libation tastes pretty much the same in 1951 as it does today. And if you are a member of gen-whatever for whom the year 1951 has no reference point, imagine a period in American life when the term “unwed mother” had a nasty sting.

  The train from New York to Indianapolis lurched forward into the night. It was crowded with college students returning home for the summer. Easing off her city shoes, Mary Stark settled into a rear coach and pretended to sleep. Many of the Indianapolis natives had already located one another. The Pfeffinger twins roamed the aisles, recruiting bridge players for a game in the parlor car. Gusts of rain scraped at the windows. A fine mist floated in over Mary’s legs whenever the clanking door between cars heaved open. She dozed on and off.

  “Mary Stark! Are you hiding out back here?”

  Mary recognized the voice. She opened one eye. She was good at opening one eye. Ward Lynton Wangert looked exactly like a Yalie with three names should: pink-cheeked, brazen, working a toothpick.

  Mary said, “Wangert, did you graduate?” It was rumored that the golden boy might need another year.

  The train squealed into a curve. Ward Lynton Wangert nodded and wobbled a bit in the knees. He reached for the back of Mary’s seat. “May I sit down?”

  Mary Stark shrugged and scooted closer to the window. They had been loosely acquainted as children in Indianapolis. They learned to dance together in Miss Stewart’s Cotillion. They suffered through confirmation classes together at The Little Church on the Circle. But they did not know each other well.

  Ward had attended the Regency School, the private day academy. Mary attended School #43, where she co-captained the crossing guards. She went on to Shortridge High, lauded for having the only daily student-run newspaper in the country. She gained admission to Vassar off the wait list in 1947, aided by many prospective Vassar frosh who chose marriage over attending college. Ward Lynton Wangert boarded away at the Rokeby School, before doing a stint in the Army, then heading to college in New Haven. They occasionally caught glimpses of each other at mixers.

  Ward reached for the book that lay cracked on the seat between them. He squinted at the title, An Introduction to Russian. “I guess what they’re saying about you is true,” he growled. His bass croon didn’t match his youthful face.

  “You mean up there in the parlor car?” she asked.

  He shook his head. “I heard it from my parents. You know how people talk at home, especially about anything to do with Communists.”

  Mary sat up a little straighter. Her first job out of college was already creating a stir. Hired by the State Department to start an embassy school for the children of English-speaking diplomats in Moscow, Mary was scheduled to ship out in a week. She had not anticipated the political backlash. Sure, some grumbling about her grandfather being a vocal Debs man and her father an organizer for Henry Wallace, but hammer-and-sickle signs planted in her parents’ front yard?

  Mary said, “I’m going to be a grade school teacher. What’s the big deal? That’s what we girls are supposed to do, right?”

  Ward grinned and moved to the seat across from her. Plenty of room to put legs up and enough space for Ward to gaze on Mary Stark with an irritatingly direct stare.

  The Wangert Stare originated with the country doctors on Ward’s mother’s side. It was a diagnostic tool, used to size up a person.

  Ward studied Mary. She looked quite healthy and stylish, a picture of modern femininity. Except for the absence of lipstick. Fashion requirements were different in 1951. Now we all dress down in young person clothes. Back then, people dressed up in old person clothes, especially to travel. This created a disjointed adolescent phase when not-yet-fully-formed bodies and faces attempted to inhabit serious watch-fob suits and car-coat ensembles with gloves. Ward noted that Mary had successfully departed her disjointed phase. Her palette-shaped cheeks and emphatic forehead and chin had negotiated a mature countenance that deftly complemented her cashmere shawl and skirt.

  A passing conductor announced a brief stop in Zanesville. The train porters tossed out stacks of newspapers that thudded onto the platform. The graying sky signaled an imminent dawn. After crossing the border into Ohio, the collegians experienced a slight reduction of eastern pretensions, now that they could again draw on the leveling influences of the wide plains.

  Ward rested his hands behind his head. Gazing into Mary’s brown eyes, he said, “But why Russia? Maybe you’re just caught in that common trap, when we Midwesterners think we must escape our hometowns, go somewhere far away, the mythical big city, you know.”

  “Easy for you to say,” Mary replied. Her father worked in a back office for the city transportation department, while Ward’s father was the city, some people believed.

  “Or maybe you’re inspired by patriotism,” Ward acknowledged, “and this is your way to feel involved in the great struggle of the day.”

  Mary turned to the window and suppressed a sigh. It was a sensitive topic. Her adult knowledge of the Soviet Union was minimal. She only spoke a few words of the language. An avid reader with a paperback stashed in every purse, she knew some Russian literature in translation. As a child, she played with a set of babushka nesting dolls. Her parents, veteran opera-goers, rode the train to Chicago to hear touring Russian singers.

  However, Daddy’s shifting position on the “Rooskies” was confusing. Over the years, her father filled their house, morning and evening, with salty commentary on his newspaper. At first the Rooskies were good guys, then in 1939 they became bad, then during the war they were good again, and now they were bad again.

  To put Ward Wangert off the scent—and save herself from a long-winded explanation of an uncharacteristically daring decision she herself did not understand—Mary Stark said, “It’s about Chekhov.”

  Ward displayed an enigmatic smile. “The playwright?”

  “Yes, he wrote stories too.”

  “Isn’t he the one who said, if a gun appears in the first act, it’ll be used in the third?”

  “Bang, bang,” Mary nodded.

 
As revealing as a discussion of Russian literature might be, Ward didn’t want to talk about Chekhov. He wanted to talk about who recruited her. Her embassy job was obviously a cover. He suspected an older member of his Yale secret society, one of the bowtie spy crowd, an individual who cannot be named here because his Cold War duties are still classified information. Ward felt apprehensive about raising the question, for his own safety. “Yeah, a great cover,” he thought. “She’s just a young schoolteacher serving the needs of the diplomats’ children.”

  He Who Remains Classified had also attempted to recruit Ward Wangert to serve the nation’s budding intelligence interests. Many early spooks came from Yale. Ward was a good candidate for the newly formed C.I.A.—clever, worldly, some military experience, and thanks to the Wangert family business, well-versed in the art of public relations. He Who Remains Classified applauded Ward for mixing a fine Old-Fashioned and always staying sober enough to drive home at the end of an evening. “I’ve got the perfect slot for you, Wangert,” he’d said, arm around the shoulder. He let Ward in on a secret. “A new directive just ordered the formation of a PsyWar Division. Disinformation, misinformation, manufacturing headlines. You’re the man for the job.”

  Ward Wangert, two days previously, turned down the offer, citing his only-son duty to the family business, Wangert Public Relations. Although ambivalent about returning to Indianapolis to join the firm, Ward felt even more skittish about signing up to serve a charismatic lush who capriciously bedded Seven Sister coeds. And during his two years in uniform, Ward had endured some disillusioning scrapes with the brass. While marching across the old brick parade grounds at Camp Edder, his drill sergeant caught him gazing around and yelled, “Wangert, eyes front! You thinking of buying the place?” Ward replied “No, sir! Don’t have change for a dollar, sir!” which resulted in three days of hand-cleaning every brick. There was also a mistaken AWOL charge from mishandled paperwork that brought about a search of his parents’ home. And what with the direction this McCarthy foolishness was headed, he just couldn’t take the plunge.

  “Didn’t I see you on campus a few times this past year?” Ward asked Mary, “football games or dances? I suppose it can get boring up in Poughkeepsie.”

  “In the winter,” she said.

  “Were you dating someone in New Haven?”

  “I was,” she said, with a clipped tone that signaled the end of this line of questioning.

  Ward feigned a chatty curiosity. He said, “I think I saw you once with my friend, ______.”

  Mary looked him in the eye and said, “I don’t know who you’re talking about.”

  She was sharp. She would be a good spy. Ward could not discern if she was lying or telling the truth, which probably meant she was lying. Another dark possibility occurred to him. Perhaps He Who Remains Classified was simply taking care of his troops, setting up this young lady as an amorous target for all the boys on the Moscow detail.

  Ward fumbled for a cigarette. He knew that it was impossible for him to share this concern with her. He sat nervously lapsing into his Wangert stare. The stare contained something different now. In the ineffable, ageless way that passion can suddenly, out of the blue, infect a human heart, Ward Lynton Wangert had just fallen in love with Mary Grace Stark. Fortunately, he said the best possible thing that he could say to her at this moment.

  He said, “Let’s talk more about Chekhov.”

  By the time the train reached the Indiana border they had covered her favorite stories, including “The Lady with the Toy Dog.” In 1951, American public libraries were filled with racy pulps, but Chekhov’s “The Lady with the Toy Dog” held the distinction of being the most erotic piece of writing available in a respectable edition. Mary and Ward speculated on the fate of the adulterous main characters. Would they flee to the provinces? Would their love endure?

  Mary and Ward compared notes on the mysterious sound in The Cherry Orchard. They discussed Chekhov’s dedication to his medical career. Mary revealed her desire to retrace Chekhov’s famous trip to Sakhalin Island. Ward kept quiet on the fact that to reach Sakhalin Island, the Soviets would miraculously have to allow her to travel in highly restricted territory.

  “What about the novel that he never wrote?” Ward said, “Wasn’t everyone expecting him to produce one of those fat Russian tomes?”

  “I think it would have been about the Sakhalin trip,” Mary said, “but he fell ill before he could write it and died.”

  “Would you like a coffee?” Ward asked and touched her knee. “How about some breakfast?”

  Upon arriving in Indianapolis, Mary’s opinion of Ward Wangert had improved enough that she agreed to exchange letters with him. On the sunlit platform of Union Station, with pigeons flapping inside the venerable shed, Mary and Ward shared a more-than-polite embrace in full view of their families. They ignored the stares of relatives and classmates.

  The meeting of the two families felt a bit awkward. The Starks and the Wangerts attended the same church, which should have counted for something. The Starks usually sat in the rear and stared forward at the well-coiffed Wangert heads in the front pew.

  Ward, one hand grasping Mary’s elbow, made the introductions. “Mother, I’d like you to meet a new old friend.”

  Ward’s cat-eye spectacled mother, Constance Wangert, leveled her diagnostic stare at Mrs. Loretta Stark, who apparently did not mind appearing downtown in her gardening denims. Chomping his first cigar of the day, Fred Stark, of the city transportation department, took the opportunity to grill Ward Sr. over the rumor that Wangert Public Relations was representing General Motors in an effort to buy out the trolley system and replace it with buses.

  “Now, see here, Mr. Wangert … this would damage the city terribly!”

  Thus it began.

  Chapter 2

  Moscow Debacle

  Ward promised himself that he would not reside at his parents’ house more than a week. He wanted an apartment in the Morace Hotel, a popular Deco behemoth that fronted on Fall Creek. The hotel manager survived the Depression, on advice from Ward’s father, by leaving the lights on in several rooms each night, creating the impression of a thriving business. This ploy lured at least a few customers to the first-floor restaurant and bar.

  Ward Jr. stopped in at the Morace bar daily, but he stayed on with his parents for two weeks, then three. The enticements of the Wangert mansion were hard to resist. Meemo, the housekeeper and cook, still on the job at age seventy, greeted him each morning with coffee and the familiar refrain, “Wardy, boy, you are a mess.” She prepared Ward’s favorites, including K-bars, the sacred food of the Wangert clan, a toothsome concoction of butter, chocolate, sugar, cereal, and a secret ingredient.

  His parents, relieved to have their son home, encouraged him to golf and swim at the Woodstock Country Club. Ward’s father kept his duties light at work, assigning him the task of cataloguing the firm’s collection of military art and antique weapons. In addition, his mother asked Ward to compile a list of architects to build a bomb shelter in the Wangerts’ backyard.

  “Either your worrying has got the best of you again,” Ward Jr. said, over cocktails on the back patio, “or what you really want is a wine cellar.”

  “The atomic age does provide her with an entire new dimension of things to fret about,” Ward Sr. needled. When speaking, he habitually puffed and pursed his cheeks and lips, as if every word was being blown through a bugler’s embouchure.

  “Your father always likes to be ahead of the curve on these things,” Constance said, “and, of course, it can be a way to generate—”

  “I know,” Ward nodded, “Publicists need publicity too.”

  “What about Frank Lloyd Wright? Do you think he might be interested?” Constance said, flinging a string of pearls around her wattle neck. Daily, she struggled to transform her heavyweight prizefighter features into a powdered apparition of charm.

  In 1951, bomb shelters were still new on the mainstream residential market. Ward
contacted two local architects, who volunteered some rudimentary sketches. He solicited proposals from three larger firms in Chicago who specialized in home additions for the wealthy. He studied government brochures at the Central Library, and made notes about ventilation systems and recommendations for underground stockpiling. But his attention veered to picture books about Moscow. He tried to imagine Mary Stark strolling through Red Square. Her letters couldn’t arrive fast enough.

  Ward met the first-post mailman each morning on the sidewalk.

  Mary’s letters were little pieces of journalism. Sketches of street life in a nation still ravaged by the war’s devastation. She described a beauty parlor with one permanent wave machine for “the ever visible Moscow Fluff.” Peasants clustered to ogle Stalin’s grand subway stations. The young bucks on the embassy staff played a game of racing down the long subway escalators and jumping aside at the bottom, to force their KGB tails to walk ahead of them. “I spent an hour in a meat line yesterday. How these miserable people put up with all the pushing and shoving, I don’t know. The air was heavy with Stalin’s Breath and the Great Unwashed. A few women got impatient and began yelling at the butcher, who yelled right back.”

  Her new establishment, the Anglo-American School, was located in the back of a large house on Kropotkinsky Street. A friendly diplomat’s wife, Celestine, helped her paint the schoolroom and “add a little ginger to the place.” Celestine also took Mary to the opera. “We saw Die Fledermaus. I still haven’t quite figured out what they did to it. Somehow it was a cross between Abbott & Costello and a high school production of H.M.S. Pinafore. The Russians loved all the slapstick, which became a major portion of the show. It started at 7:30 and by 11:30 we gave up and went home.”