“Yeah, but… you can see why they’d want to, right? If we won’t share our results with them?”
“Eileen,” said Paul, like he had the patience of a saint, “there has never been an accident in the history of the U.S. Naval Nuclear Propulsion Program.”
“But what about—”
“Enough,” he said, and we both stared at each other, because that one little word had come off sounding an awful lot like an order.
88.
MARY LOU GOT WHAT SHEwanted. I saw much less of Teo after the tender returned, and even less of him once the summer ended. He was in Sassari, and the only updates I received came from Francesca, who seemed to sense that I enjoyed learning about her nephew’s comings and goings.
What Mary Lou couldn’t have counted on when she warned me to stay away from Teo was that I’d begin spending more time with Bruno and Luca, who would have returned home long ago except that Bruno had somehow cobbled together the funding to conduct a preliminary environmental survey of the archipelago.
The survey, Bruno explained, would look at the islands’ meteorological and ecological characteristics in the hope of getting a better handle on where to conduct ongoing sampling and radiometric analysis. Meteorological characteristics referred to the stuff that was always changing—temperature, wind, rainfall, even water currents—but ecological characteristics were more stable. The fact that the entire archipelago was one big sheet of granite, for instance, or that the highest point on the island of La Maddalena was only eighty-nine feet above sea level.
Temperature was simple to track, as was rainfall. Measuring wind speed and direction was also relatively easy, provided the anemometer Bruno had ordered ever arrived. What the team spent the bulk of their time—and money—on that autumn was studying the archipelago’s currents. This was important work because radioactive particles traveled on currents. If the team knew where and how the water moved around the archipelago, they could determine the best places to take samples that would yield accurate results.
Bruno put Salvario on a semipermanent retainer and acquired a couple dozen current meters, which were plastic propeller-like devices attached to a cable. At one end of the cable was an anchor, and at the other end was a buoy. The water moved through the propellers, causing them to spin, andwith each revolution, a magnetic switch sent a pulse to a recording device that floated near the surface.
We placed these current meters all over the archipelago, including Santo Stefano Bay. But once they were in the water, maintaining them was a never-ending job. The data had to be downloaded, and the propellers got so scummy that they constantly needed to be taken apart and cleaned. I liked that job, so sometimes I’d go out on Salvario’s boat with Bruno and Luca and scrub the plastic until my knuckles were raw.
My Italian was getting better, which allowed me to have small conversations with Luca and Salvario while I worked. They liked to play this game with me where they’d ask me a series of very simple questions to test my language skills. I got a point for answering each question correctly. I argued that I should also get a half point if I managed to understand the question but lacked the vocabulary to properly respond. Luca laughed. “Lascia o raddoppia!”
“I have a question,” I said to Bruno in English one morning as I laid a sparkling propeller at his feet. He was messing with a recording device, but I knew he was listening. “Why not just ask Salvario and his friends to tell you how the currents work? Anyone who’s fished these waters for half a century has to know them like the back of his hand.”
Bruno squinted up at me, then repeated what I’d said to Salvario, who slapped his knee and said, “È da un pezzo che lo dico?”
“What did he just say?” I asked, though I was fairly certain I knew.
“He said this is what he has been saying all along.”
While we worked, Bruno told me more about marine radioecology, a relatively new field back then. In the fifties, scientists had become concerned with the presence of “artificial” radioactivity in the world’s oceans, and they’d been trying to get a handle on the situation ever since. Bruno explained that there were all sorts of ways radioactive substances could enter the water: fallout from nuclear testing, the everyday operation of nuclear-powered ships and submarines, accidents aboard nuclear-powered ships and submarines, and the discharge of industrial radioactive waste from nuclear power plants, which were always situated on the coast or alongside major tributaries.
Early studies indicated that the three hundred or so submarines in operation around the world were discharging five thousand cur ofradioactive waste into the oceans each year. This wasn’t terrible, but the issue was that some of these chemical components had long half-lives. A half-life, Bruno told me, was the amount of time it took for a nuclide population to decay by half of its original value, and there were apparently some nuclear by-products with half-lives so long, we wouldn’t be rid of them in our lifetime. “You can imagine,” said Bruno, “that if these components are allowed to accumulate, we’ll reach a point where it will be too late to do anything about it.”
89.
IN A CONTINUED EFFORTto give myself more to do, I enrolled in a biology class that the Human Resource Management Office was offering through the University of Maryland Extension Program. There were four of us in the class, and the instructor was none other than Lieutenant Bobby Carpenter. Angela had recruited him to teach the class because he’d been a biology major at SUNY Binghamton before joining the navy. I suppose she figured that if he was smart enough to work on a nuclear reactor, he was smart enough to teach three sailors and me basic cell theory.
The HRMO had special-ordered textbooks through the University of Maryland, and while they were late getting to us, they did eventually arrive. The book, which was calledPrinciples of Biology, must have been three inches thick, but carrying it around gave me a sense of purpose, and during the fall of 1974, I was never without it. In the mornings, I took it to Café Gargiulo, where I’d sit sipping my cappuccino and making flash cards. Then I’d drag it home and out to the patio, where I’d set myself up in a lounger, the book propped on my lap, and draw diagrams of prokaryotes and eukaryotes until my legs fell asleep.
I liked learning about the origins of life, about organic molecules that had managed to grow into membranes and teeny-tiny microorganisms before becoming these complex multicellular organisms that could walk and talk and fight and fuck. Bobby talked a lot about adaptation and how animals, big and small, were always responding to their environment. This worked for me, because I had this sense that I, too, was changing. I wasn’t the same person I’d been five years ago, or even one year ago, and I convinced myself that maybe all this change was going to lead me somewhere good.
Paul wasn’t big on change, and he had so many problems with me taking the class that I lost count of them all.
First, he thought it was ridiculous that the HRMO would try to offer a lab science with no lab or lab equipment to speak of.
Second, he thought Bobby wasn’t qualified to teach the course. “Professors are meant to have PhDs,” he argued when I told him that I thought Bobby was doing a great job.
Paul’s third and perhaps most significant complaint was that the class took me away from him. Two nights a week, I picked him up at the pier and dropped him off at home, then made a mad dash over to the community room at the HRMO while he heated up leftovers. Paul claimed he would have been fine with this arrangement but for the fact that the class wasn’t going to “do anything” for me. I needed about sixty more credits to get my bachelor’s degree, which translated to something like twenty classes. “You going to take a class a semester for the next ten years?” he asked me on multiple occasions, and I’d get a little belligerent and say, “Maybe,” when what I was really thinking was that I might at some point go back full-time. Honestly, it kind of offended me that he hadn’t thought of that himself.
My parents were pleased I’d gone back to school, even in such a limited capacity, but they were also distracted. In mid-September, an Eastern Airlines plane carrying eighty-two people had taken off from Charleston International Airport and crashed just outside of Charlotte, North Carolina. All but ten people on the plane had died, and the news had sent Charleston reeling. It seemed that everybody knew somebody on the plane, or at the very least, they knew somebody who knew somebody on the plane.
For my parents, thank goodness, their connections to the dead were tenuous. A customer of my dad’s, the daughter of a woman who used to teach with my mom. But news of the crash and its aftermath dominated my mother’s letters for a time, and I got the impression that she’d become almost obsessed with it. There were so many memorials and funerals and so much eulogizing that I think, in some way, my mother began to feel less alone in her own grief.
I invited my parents to La Maddalena for Christmas, but when they declined, citing the high cost of plane tickets, Paul and I were persuaded to register for an MWR trip with Laura and Bobby. We went to Munich, where we attended a bunch of Christmas markets and drank far too much mulled wine. Well, all except Laura, who told us on the first night of the trip that she was pregnant and due in July.
We were thrilled for her, of course. And Bobby, too. But the announcement didn’t help things with Paul and me. That night in Munich, whenwe were getting ready for bed, he started talking about having kids, and I couldn’t figure out if it was because he really wanted them or because he had some kind of competitive thing going on with Bobby.
