For the first time since he had come to Los Alamos, Connolly felt himself an intruder. He had expected the science to be over his head; what went on in those barrack laboratories was some new form of alchemy, too mysterious to be reduced to a set of formulas. Now everything that surrounded it seemed equally complicated and incomprehensible, a series of questions to which there were no answers. They folded back on themselves, contradictory, insistent, then got lost in vagueness, their scale as measureless as theology. Connolly liked a problem with a solution. He liked the crossword filled in, a murder explained. But what was happening here left him finally overwhelmed, and out of place. All of them-the gentle emigre scientists, the eager American kids-were living in a state of abstraction as high and remote as the plateau itself. He turned toward the door and the audible sounds of the music, something real.
People were listening politely, some of them with their eyes closed, nodding to the familiar notes. The group was amateur but competent. They approached the music with a hesitant respect, but at least they didn’t plow through it, and the music rewarded them, carrying them through difficult patches with the logical force of its own structure. The music leaped; the notes joined each other and rose with the lamplight to brighten the room. Connolly realized with some surprise that everyone already knew the piece-it was as familiar to them as a jukebox hit-and he felt again oddly out of place, the little boy with his face pressed against the glass. But the music itself was welcoming, racing along now, simple at its heart, and no one in the room was excluded.
At his cello Professor Weber, usually bubbly, was sight-reading with determination, so fixed on the page that he seemed unaware of anything around him. Next to him a young American in a busy V-neck sweater played with confidence, glancing up from his instrument to take the audience in when the notes began to answer each other. Daniel, Emma’s Daniel, looked only at his violin, his eyes sometimes closed in concentration, his movements sure and accomplished. Connolly imagined him as a boy in Poland-what was that like? — practicing on a rainy afternoon. A good boy, responsible. Or had he been chased home by bullies, his case flapping as he ran from the tram? Connolly’s imagination bounced with the staccato notes, but the fact was, he didn’t want to imagine Daniel at all. A decent man, a gifted scientist. Why go further? As he brought down his bow across the strings, there was a surgeon’s accuracy-the strength was in knowing where things went, not in being forceful. But what did that mean? That he was self-possessed, or merely that he’d been trained properly all those rainy afternoons? He had seemed diffident before, but now Connolly wondered if he had misread him. And then suddenly his eyes opened and Connolly had to look away, embarrassed by his reverie. He didn’t want to know him. It was safer to speculate about the others; there were no consequences to that. The fourth member of the quartet, for instance, with his bulky double-breasted suit, Slavic cheekbones, and pudgy fingers that grasped the bow like a lance. But he couldn’t imagine anything about him.
Aside from the occasional rattle of coffee cups, the room was quiet and attentive. Still standing against the wall, Connolly found himself lulled by the music. The sharp rising notes had played themselves out, followed now by the deep bass of a cello bridge. In the slow, moody interlude, Connolly’s mind went back to the magazine and then, like a succession of snapshots, to Eisler’s wistful face, the cocktail chat in the hall, Johanna Weber’s name-remembering trick, Emma walking away. He looked around the room, trying to match faces to the faceless columns of the savings accounts. They’d be offended if they knew; he wished he could tell them it hadn’t meant anything. He wondered how many had seen the magazine. The room didn’t seem to be in mourning, not even for the President who had brought them all here. It was instead a kind of time-out, an evening of friends and yeast cakes and music from before the war, an evening from that culture Eisler claimed had already disappeared. Had it? In this room on Bathtub Row it still glowed.
