The second point I’ll make is that the old methods, which Paul would have employed, to track the repair crew’s radiation exposure were always going to tell only half the story. Your dad’s film badge, if it was ever even collected and processed after the incident on theSeneca, could detect penetrating radiation—gamma rays and some beta particles—but it was useless when it came to detecting low-energy beta emitters, not to mention anything your dad swallowed or inhaled. To assess internal radiation exposure, your dad’s medical team would have needed to look at bioassays, and while it’s likely that they did do blood draws and urine analysis to try to detect and quantify the radioactive material in your dad’s body, my bet is you’ll never get your hands on those results, no matter how many FOIAs you file.
The last thing I’ll point out, and I find this particularly interesting, is that in studies of the effects of radiation exposure on nuclear workers, the results are skewed by what researchers call the “healthy worker effect.”Nuclear workers, and certainly nuclear engineers like your dad, are some of the smartest human beings on the planet. They have to be, to do the work, but the result is that they’re a fairly homogenous group of people. On average, they come from higher socioeconomic classes, are more educated, and generally make healthier lifestyle choices than their peers. Why does this matter? Because if the navy trumpets a study that claims nuclear workers have an average life expectancy that’s equal to the general population, you should ask yourself one question: Why isn’t their life expectancy actually higher?
I saw your mother a few times after you were born and your father got out of the service. Once, on a trip to Charleston, I borrowed my mother’s car and drove up to Norfolk, where your family was living at the time. You were maybe three or four, and your father wasn’t sick then, but he wasn’t well, either. His symptoms, as I remember, would come and go. Headaches. Muscle weakness. Nosebleeds. Nothing they could pin on radiation syndrome, precisely, but not the type of health problems that most thirty-two-year-old men dealt with.
I remember your mother and I took you to Virginia Beach for the day. The beach was nothing compared to Bassa Trinità or even Spiaggia di Punta Tegge, but it was a nice outing, and without your dad around, Laura and I could talk a little more freely. While we watched you play in the sand, she admitted that she’d given up on having a second child. I asked if she’d had more miscarriages, but she shook her head, said that the problem was she couldn’t even get pregnant. She was convinced that your father’s radiation exposure hadn’t been good for his sperm count, but this was 1980. Regular people weren’t going to see reproductive endocrinologists; your parents took their lumps and comforted themselves with the knowledge that they had you.
I didn’t see your mother again until 1989, when Teo and I traveled to D.C. for a conference. We brought Dino, and I wanted to take him to see the Vietnam War Memorial. You had to have been twelve or thirteen. Do you remember that visit? You came with us to the memorial, and I had brought along paper and charcoal to make a rubbing of Lenny’s name. We let Dino try, but he was only four, and then you made one. Actually, you made several, because you were a perfectionist and wanted to get his name,LEONARD J O’MALLEY, just right. I thought the memorial was themost beautiful piece of architecture I’d ever encountered, more stunning than the Pantheon or any of the other wonders I’ve encountered in my life abroad. It was there, at the Vietnam War Memorial—watching you and my son touch Lenny’s name—that I came the closest I’ve ever come to believing that maybe there is a God.
By then your parents were living in Gaithersburg, and your dad was being treated for prostate cancer at Walter Reed Medical Center. The treatment options weren’t great in that era, and your dad, who was barely forty, was young to lose his prostate. Your mother put a good spin on it, but when we went down to the basement to make up the sofa bed that first night, she told me that the cancer had proved to be resistant to radiation, which was why they’d had to go with the more aggressive surgery. At that point, she’d read everything she could on the correlation between early radiation exposure and its impact on subsequent radiation treatment, and she was convinced that what had happened on theSenecahad not only caused your father’s cancer but made it more difficult to treat.
I don’t remember when they got the bladder cancer diagnosis. It must have been your junior or senior year of high school? It had been several years since Laura and I had spoken, and the news we shared with each other arrived by letter and was the same stuff we’d have put in an annual Christmas letter, if either of us had been inclined to write them. I knew that your dad’s doctors had hoped to remove the tumors without taking the whole bladder, but once they got in there, they realized there was no saving it. He did a round or two of chemo after that, hoping to reduce the likelihood that the cancer would spread.
The last time I saw your father was in the fall of 1997. The cancer had metastasized to his liver, and his doctor had said he likely had less than six months left. You were in college—I’m not sure your parents had even told you yet—and your dad decided he wanted to take your mom to Europe, so they did London, Paris, Amsterdam, and Rome in one two-week sprint. It was all too much for him, but he was intent on giving your mom as many happy memories as he could before things got worse.
Teo and I tried to convince them to stay with us in Rome, but I think the nights were already getting hard, and your dad wanted more privacy than we could give him. They stayed at a nearby hotel, and we arranged to meet them for a couple of meals. One night, we had dinner at a little placein Trastevere that I’ve always loved. It was warm enough to sit outside, and we had some good wine and talked about the old days. Laura made Teo retell theYou can have it any way you wantstory, and when he did, she admitted—for the first time—that I had done the right thing by leaving Paul. “It’s not that he was a bad guy,” she said. “But he was the wrong guy for you.”
Bobby agreed with her, and then somehow we got talking about the night of the accident.
“Paul was a mess that night,” said Bobby. “Anyone could see it. In hindsight, I should have said something.”
“You couldn’t have known,” said Laura, and I nodded in agreement, then poured us more wine.
“Can I ask you something, Bobby?” I said.
“Yeah, sure.”
“The night we talked. In the infirmary. You told me what happened in the containment room, but you didn’t tell me the shielding was missing.”
“I didn’t?”
I shook my head. “I’ve always wondered why you didn’t say anything.”
“Paul was your husband.”
“Whom you knew I was cheating on.”
He blushed. “Do you want the truth?”
I nodded.
“I wasn’t wearing the right respiratory gear.”
“You weren’t?”
“Lots of guys didn’t wear it back then. I’d go so far as to say none of us did.”
“And if you’d been wearing it—”
“It wouldn’t have mattered so much that the shielding was missing.”
“Did Paul know that?”
“Yeah, sure. He was in the same boat. None of us doing what we’d been taught.”
I sat there staring at your dad in disbelief. Here he was at the end of his life, with a firm understanding of how he was going out and why. He had every reason to be bitter, to blame Paul and even me for what was happening to him, but—rightly or wrongly—the only person he blamed washimself. I’m going to sound like I’m a hundred years old when I say this, but they don’t make them like that anymore.
At the end of the night, we hugged goodbye. I pretended there was some chance Teo and I would fly east in the coming months, and that if we did, we’d pay your parents a visit. I’m sure they saw right through the charade, but it was too painful to call our parting what it was.
