Portable Childhoods Read online

  She stood a few yards back from the others, her lips pressed tight together, staring down at one of the black spots. “Christ,” she said to the spot. “What have we done?” She lit a Chesterfield and stood there for almost a minute, then looked up at Dr. Gordon. He walked back to her.

  “Phillip? How safe is this?” She looked around, holding her arms tight across her chest, as if she were cold, although the temperature was already in the 80s.

  He shrugged. “Ground zero’s still pretty hot. But Oppie said the rest is okay, as long as we don’t stay out too long. Fifteen minutes. We’ll be fine.”

  Dewey didn’t know what he was talking about. Maybe sunburn. There wasn’t any shade. There wasn’t any anything.

  Mrs. Gordon nodded without smiling. A few minutes later she reached down and took Suze’s hand and held it tight.

  They kept walking through the empty place.

  And then, just ahead of them, the ground sloped gently downward into a huge green sea. Dewey took a few more steps and saw that it wasn’t water. It was glass. Shiny jade-green glass, everywhere, coloring the bare, empty desert as far ahead as she could see. It wasn’t smooth, like a Pyrex bowl, or sharp like a broken bottle, but more like a giant candle had dripped and splattered green wax everywhere.

  Dr. Gordon reached down and broke off a piece about as big as his hand. It looked like a green, twisted root. He gave it to Suze.

  “Happy birthday, kiddo,” he said. “I really wanted you to see this. The boys are calling it trinitite.”

  Suze turned the glass over and over in her hand. It was shiny on the top, with some little bubbles in places, like a piece of dark green peanut brittle. The bottom was pitted and rough and dirty where it had been lying in the sand. “Is it very, very old?” she asked.

  He shook his head. “Very, very new. Three weeks today. It’s the first new mineral created on this planet in millions of years.” He sounded very pleased.

  Dewey counted back in her head. Today was August 6th. Three weeks ago was when they got up early and saw the bright light. “Did the gadget make this?” Dewey asked.

  Dr. Gordon looked surprised. He tipped his hat back on his head and thought for a minute. “I suppose it’s all right to tell you girls now,” he said. “Yes, the gadget did this. It was so hot that it melted the ground. Over 100 million degrees. Hotter than the sun itself. It fused seventy-five acres of this desert sand into glass.”

  “How is that going to win the war?” Dewey asked. It was strange to finally be talking about secret stuff out loud.

  “It’ll melt all the Japs!” Suze said. “Right, Daddy?”

  Mrs. Gordon winced. “Well, if cooler heads prevail,” she said, “we’ll never have to find out, will we, Phillip?” She gave Dr. Gordon a look, then took a few steps away and stared out toward the mountains.

  “You girls go on, take a walk around,” he said. “But when I call, you scamper back pronto, okay?”

  Dewey and Suze agreed and stepped out onto the green glass sea. The strange twisted surface crunched and crackled beneath their feet as if they were walking on braided ice. They walked in from the edge until all they could see was green: splattered at their feet, merging into solid color at the edges of their vision.

  “I didn’t know war stuff could make anything pretty,” Suze said. “It looks like we’re on the planet Oz, doesn’t it?”

  Dewey was as amazed by the question as by the landscape. Suze usually acted like she didn’t exist. “I guess so,” she nodded.

  “This is probably what they made the Emerald City out of.” Suze reached down and picked up a long flat piece. “I am the Wicked Witch of the West. Bow down before my powerful magic.” She waved her green glass wand in the air, and a piece of it broke off, landing a few feet away. She giggled.

  “I’m going to take some pieces of Oz home,” she said. She pulled the bottom of her seersucker blouse out to make a pouch and dropped in the rest of the piece she was holding.

  Suze began to fill up her shirt. Dewey walked a few feet away with her head down, looking for one perfect piece to take back with her. The glassy surface was only about half an inch thick, and many of the pieces Dewey picked up were so brittle they crumbled and cracked apart in her hands. She picked up one odd, rounded lump and the thin glass casing on the outside shattered under her fingers like an eggshell, revealing a lump of plain dirt inside. She finally kept one flat piece bigger than her hand, spread out. Suze had her shirttails completely filled.

  Dewey was looking carefully at a big piece with streaks of reddish brown when Dr. Gordon whistled. “Come on back. Now,” he called.

  She looked at Suze, and the other girl smiled, just a little. They walked slowly back until they could see brown dirt ahead of them again. At the edge, Dewey turned back for a minute, trying to fold the image into her memory. Then she stepped back onto the bare, scorched dirt.

  They walked back to the car in silence, holding their new, fragile treasure.

  Dr. Gordon opened the trunk and pulled out a black box with a round lens like a camera. He squatted back on his heels. “Okay, now hand me each of the pieces you picked up, one by one,” he said.

  Suze pulled a flat piece of pebbled glass out of her shirt pouch. When Dr. Gordon put it in front of the black box, a needle moved over a bit, and the box made a few clicking sounds. He put that piece down by his foot and reached for the next one. It was one of the round eggshell ones, and it made the needle go all the way over. The box clicked like a cicada.

  He put it down by his other foot. “That one’s too hot to take home,” he said.

  Suze pulled out her next piece. “This one’s not hot,” she said, laying her hand flat on top of it.

  Her mother patted Suze’s head. “It’s not temperature, sweetie. It’s radiation. That’s a geiger counter.”

  “Oh. Okay.” Suze handed the piece to her father.

  Dewey knew what a geiger counter was. Most of the older kids on the Hill did. She wasn’t quite sure what it measured, but it was gadget stuff, so it was important.

  “Did Papa help make this?” she asked, handing her piece over to Dr. Gordon.

  Mrs. Gordon made a soft sound in her throat and put her arm around Dewey’s shoulders. “He certainly did. None of this would have been possible without brave men like Jimmy—, like your Papa.”

  Dewey leaned into Mrs. Gordon and nodded silently.

  Dr. Gordon made Suze leave behind two eggshell pieces. He wrapped the rest in newspaper and put them into a shoebox, padded with some more newspaper crumpled up, then put out his hand for Dewey’s.

  Dewey shook her head. “Can I just hold mine?” She didn’t want it to get mixed up with Suze’s. After a glance at his wife, Dr. Gordon shrugged and tied the shoebox shut with string and put it in the trunk. They took off their shoes and socks and brushed all the dust off before they got into the car.

  “Thanks, Daddy,” Suze said. She kissed him on the cheek and climbed into the back seat. “I bet this is the best birthday party I’ll ever, ever have.”

  Dewey thought that was probably true. It was the most wonderful place she had ever been. As they drove east, she pressed her face to the window, smiling out at the desert. She closed her eyes and felt the comforting weight of the treasure held tight against her chest. One last present from Papa, a piece of the beautiful green glass sea.

  Clip Art

  TRANSCRIPT of “Clip Art” segment of Bravo’s Behind the Office Door series.

  First aired October 23, 2006

  Voice Over: September, 1939

  [Grainy newsreel photos of Nazi tanks]

  Hitler’s army invades Poland, beginning a war that will transform Europe into a bloody battlefield. And in faraway Kokomo, Indiana, a young girl named Frances Tipton Hunter is given a birthday gift that will transform her from a dull, drab, ordinary child into the owner of one of the most fabulous collections the world has ever seen.

  [Photo of small child in pigtails, holding a shiny, blurry objec
t in her hand]

  She is given her first paper clip.

  In this interview, made just weeks before her death, Miss Hunter recalls that momentous day.

  [“Talking Head” {TH} shot of a wrinkled old woman with flaming dyed red hair]

  Frances: Well, it wasn’t just any clip, you know. If it had been a common Gothic or the like, I guess I would have said a nice ‘Thank-you, ma’am,’ and that would have been that. But it wasn’t. It was a 1936 Clarkson Tri-Fold In-and-Out. Have you ever seen one? Oh, they’re lovely. They were only made that one year, just up north, in Chicago. I guess that’s how my mother found it, Chicago being so close. She worked nights down on Slocum, sweeping up the executive washrooms. Found it on the floor, by the drain, and gave it to me for my twelfth birthday. I’d never seen anything quite so beautiful. Right then, I knew I had to have more.

  [TH shot of a very, very old woman in a wheelchair.]

  Caption: Mrs. Edith Hunter, mother. Age 102.

  Edith: My lands, I can still see her, afternoons, running home with her grubby fist clenched around some new geegaw. Franny’d check out all the dustbins along Slocum Avenue—that was the business section—and when she’d find a new one, lordy, how she’d carry on. Mister Petroski down to the stationery store gave her one every week, for sweeping the floors on Friday nights. I never saw the point of it, myself. Paper clips? When I was a girl, I had paper dolls, but not my Franny. She never did take after me much, except for the sweeping.

  [TH shot, elderly, balding man]

  Caption: Howard Finsterman, Kokomo High School Biology Teacher, retired.

  Howard: Frances Hunter? She was a keen one for organizing, I’ll say that. Fifteen years old and she already had an impressive collection, mounted and sorted by class and phylum. Well, brand name and style, but it’s the same skill, when you come down to it. By the end of the year, she’d filled up six lab books with specimens, dates noted, all arranged neat as a pin. Or as a paper clip, you might say. (Chuckles.)

  [TH shot, woman with cigarette dangling from her lip. She has big hair and electric blue eye shadow.]

  Caption: Olive DeSerria, classmate Olive: Geez, that takes me back. Franny was a character. Her and her paper clips. We was in secretarial school together. Miss Helvetica’s Academy of Ladies Business Skills. I had to staple my assignments, on account of Franny would pocket any clips in a New York minute. Her handbag rattled like a junk cart.

  (Pauses for a long drag on her cigarette, coughs.) I don’t think she never did graduate. But she done okay, huh? Otherwise why this fancy TV interview and everything?

  [TH shot, man in tweed jacket. He has a thick, bristling mustache.]

  Caption: Martin St. James Andrews, librarian

  Martin: An impressive woman, Frances. Knew her clips, she did. Give her a jumbled drawer, hundreds of them tangled round each other, and Bob’s your uncle! She’d have separated out the Banjo Gems and the Marcel Dual-Ds and swept the rest into the rubbish where they belonged. Without her, we’d still be in the dark ages when it comes to the office supply sciences. Take her cataloging of the two-bend spring clip. A masterpiece. We’ll not see the likes of her again.

  V.O.: Through the business-as-usual 1950s, Frances Hunter’s career flourished. Her collection increased to more than 17,000 clips. But the introduction of photocopiers into the offices of America threatened to banish her beloved fastener. Would the paper jam defeat the paper clip?

  [TH shot, thin young man with glasses held together with black tape.]

  Caption: Ronald Landers, Technical Writer, Apple Computer

  Ronald: Oh yeah. I was the go-to guy when it came to getting paper clips out of the Xerox machine. I had a whole pile of ’em on my desk. One afternoon, Danny in the next cubicle was working on our first floppy drive, the 3½-incher, and the disk kept getting stuck. I straightened out one of the mangled clips on my desk and said, ‘Here, try one of these.’ He stuck it in the eject hole, and—zowie! The disk popped right out. So paper clips made it into the manual.

  V.O.: The computer revolution introduced the small steel wonder to a new generation of aficionados. Frances was honored to cut the ribbon at the 993 opening of the Frances Tipton Hunter retrospective at the Museum of Bureaucratic Necessities. Curator Milton S. Gestetner recalls the event.

  [TH shot of a man with a goatee and a florid ascot]

  Milton: It took me five years of negotiations to acquire the Hunter collection. The Smithsonian wanted it, but Miss Hunter spoke up on our behalf and tipped it our way. Quite a feather in my cap. The highlights? Oh, dear. There are so many. I suppose the Reddy-Clip Four-Oh-Seven. One of only two known to have survived the Blitz in London. The other is in private hands. Went for nearly thirty thousand pounds at auction last year. Naturally, we’ve had to beef up security.

  V.O.: Frances Tipton Hunter

  [TH shot, Miss Hunter]

  Frances: My favorite? Well, there’s a very cunning copper one, sent to me by the Bureau of Yak-Binding in Kathmandu. Crafted by monks. Making them is a meditation, their life’s work. But if I could only have one, it would have to be this. It’s never been exhibited.

  (Holds out an ordinarylooking paper clip, slightly bent, on the palm of her hand.)

  It was 1962, at the Cartapagological Society’s annual dinner at the Statler Hotel in St. Louis. I was the keynote speaker, and sitting next to me on the dais was Cornelius Brosnan himself. Imagine! The man whose 1899 patent established the first modern paper clip. Of course he was very old by then, all shaky and sunken. But after the fish course, he pulled a bit of wire from a little leather case in his pocket, and with his gnarled, spotted fingers, he bent this Konaclip for me. Right there at the table. (Looks at it fondly.)

  A hand-made triple S-bend! At 97! He dropped it into my hand and said, ‘For you, Frances. You’ve transformed my little gadget into a work of art.’ I nearly wept. And I’ve kept it with me, all these years, in a small rosewood box in my writing desk.

  V.O.: From that first birthday gift to the dedication of the Hunter Chair for the Study of Bent Metal Fasteners at M.I.T. just weeks before her death, her life was dedicated to the glory of one of our most common—and most overlooked—household objects.

  Frances Tipton Hunter earned the affection and respect of millions of secretaries, clerks, and editors, for whom she will always be, simply, “The First Lady of the Paper Clip.”

  [Head Shot of Frances, backlit dramatically, with an Art Deco–like fan of paper clips forming an arc behind her.]

  V.O.: Few have done so much with so little.

  [Hold for four seconds, fade to credits]

  Triangle

  MICHAEL CONNOLLY put his papers down on top of the podium and looked out over his audience. The meeting room was only about half full, which didn’t surprise him. As a junior professor, he wasn’t exactly a big-name draw, and since he was the last speaker at the Trends in 19th-Century Studies conference, he suspected a lot of people had ducked out early. He wiped the flop sweat off his forehead with the back of his hand and began.

  In the middle of the second page he saw Simon walk in the side door and take a seat near the back of the room. Michael faltered, then recovered, but Emily Dickinson and the iambic quatrain went on auto-pilot as his mind raced to figure out how he was going to get off the podium and out to his rental car without talking to Simon.

  The night before, nervous about delivering today’s paper, he’d gone down to the bar for a nightcap. After the third scotch, it had seemed a fine idea to go back to Simon’s room. He shuddered at the idea of talking to the man again.

  Michael wished, for the hundredth time, that he had just swallowed his pride and called Willy at his mother’s condo in Boca Raton. Willy would have reassured him that the paper was good, that he’d do fine. But they’d had an argument on the flight out to Miami. Willy was offering him advice on the presentation, what to wear, who to schmooze with, and Michael had snapped at him. Said he could do it on his own, thank you, and didn’t need
any coaching from the renowned Dr. William Cline.

  He’d regretted it as soon as he’d said it, but didn’t take it back. Willy had looked at him, hurt, then shrugged and opened his book. The rest of the flight had been tense and silent. Michael tried to say something when they landed, patch things up before they split for the weekend, but Willy’s mother had met him at the gate, and there hadn’t been time.

  Michael paused to take a drink of water from the glass at his elbow and returned his focus to the 19th century. The audience applauded politely at the end of the paper, and the chair of the English department rose from his seat in the first row. Michael could see Simon making his way toward the front through the exiting crowd. He stepped down from the podium and offered his hand to Dr. Bourne.

  “A fine lecture, Michael,” the older man said. “Are you going to the Norton cocktail party? I’d like to hear more about your thoughts on Dickinson’s use of the standard hymnal.”

  Michael shook his head. “I’d love to, but I have to catch a plane. If you’d like to walk out to my car with me, we could talk for a few minutes, though.”

  Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Simon gesture, but Michael pretended he hadn’t seen him, and walked out of the lecture hall with Dr. Bourne.

  Michael peeled off his poplin jacket as soon as he was in the rental car. He was sick of South Florida. Its still, cloying air seemed to cling to everything like an invisible film. He wanted to be home, sitting on the back deck with Willy, watching the cool fog roll over Twin Peaks. He wanted this whole weekend to be over.

  He looked at his watch. It was just after 4:00. More than two hours before he needed to be at the airport to meet Willy for their 7:30 flight. A lot of time to kill when you don’t want to be somewhere any more. He decided to go shopping, buy Willy a present. A gesture of reconciliation for their fight. And to atone for Simon, take the edge off his guilt, a secret apology for a crime Willy could never know he’d committed.