109 East Palace Read Free Page A

misgivings, and none whatsoever about the man who was to be her boss. She could not explain why she was immediately taken with this tall stranger, a New Yorker in a funny hat who observed the social formalities of Park Avenue in the wilds of New Mexico. There were just moments in life when one found oneself open to opportunity, to the unexpected, whatever the risks. Dorothy was from pioneer stock. A decade earlier, after burying her husband, she had come out west to make a fresh start for herself and her baby. She had the strong sense that this man’s offer promised a new adventure. “I never met a person with a magnetism that hit you so fast, and so completely,” she told our interviewer years later. “I just wanted to be allied with, have something to do with, a personality such as his.”
    In the days that followed, she learned that the man she had met, who went by the name of Mr. Bradley, was actually J. Robert Oppenheimer, a famous American physicist from the University of California at Berkeley and the leader of a secret wartime project. Bradley was the name he would use in and around town, and the way she was to address him in public. She would learn never to mention his real name and, for that matter, never to mention him at all. Not to anyone. She was told never, under any circumstances, to use the word “physicist.” “I was told never to ask questions, never to have a name repeated,” she wrote, recalling her initiation into the most momentous scientific project of the twentieth century. “I soon knew that I was working for a project of great importance and urgency.”
    Though not a native Santa Fean, Dorothy knew the area as well as anyone, if not better, and she supposed that in her own way she belonged there. The old town, with its bright sunshine and crystalline air, had been lucky for her once years ago, and she had claimed it as her own. That was back in 1925, when thin and weakened by the tuberculosis infecting her lungs, she had come to the Sunmount Sanitarium seeking a cure for a disease that had killed more Americans, young and old, rich and poor, than any other affliction up to that time. Her mother had brought her by train, and they had taken a room at La Fonda, unaware they would be forced to bide their time for a full month because of the long waiting list for entrance to the famed sanitarium. Finally, after money and influence had secured her daughter a place at the popular hospice, Dorothy’s mother prepared to leave. When they said their tearful good-byes on December 9, both of them knew the parting might be final. Dorothy was twenty-nine then and had already lost two beloved sisters: Frances Margaret, who had died of tuberculosis six years earlier, and Virginia, to a respiratory infection when she was still a child. Dorothy had been devastated by their deaths. Now that she, too, had fallen ill, she was determined not to spread the contagion to her family and friends. To avoid any chance of being the cause of that misfortune, Dorothy chose banishment and isolation. Their family doctor had confirmed the wisdom of seeking complete rest in a sanitarium, sealing her fate as an outcast. She had no choice but to try to rid herself of the debilitating disease once and for all, or risk never having a normal life. “The tuberculosis was holding her back,” said Betty Lilienthal, an old friend. “She was going to beat it, no matter how long it took.” In those days before antibiotics, the period of recuperation for “lungers” in a sanitarium was of indeterminate length—from six months to several years, even a lifetime.
    It was a far cry from the wealth of opportunities that had awaited her on her graduation from Smith College in 1919, where Dorothy Ann Scarritt had been voted president of her freshman class and was one of the most popular in her year. “Not bad,” she liked to boast, “for a little girl from Kansas City.” Far from being intimidated by the East Coast sophisticates, she