Scandal in the Secret City Read online

  I walked into my first interview with high hopes that were quickly dashed. We’d barely gotten past the pleasantries when the representative from Union Carbide asked, ‘When are you planning to have children?’ It all went downhill from there. Next up was Heinz. A jolly interviewer offered me a job almost right away. He wanted to hire me to study the vitamin C in tomatoes. He was nice enough but his statement that ‘it would almost be like being in the kitchen’ made me clench my jaw tight to keep my abusive thoughts to myself. And, frankly, there was nothing about that job that was vital to the effort to win the war no matter how hard he tried to expand the definition of that phrase.

  By the time I walked into the interview with a man from Eastman Kodak, I was on the verge of giving up. When I asked what the job entailed, he said, ‘Do you know anything about Eastman Kodak?’

  ‘I’ve used your cameras and was pleased with them.’

  ‘Good,’ he said and leaned back in his chair smiling.

  Really? Was that it? I pushed on. ‘What kind of work would you want me to do?’

  ‘It’s war work. We are hiring a number of technical people for vital war work.’

  ‘What kind of technical people?’

  ‘We’re hiring chemists.’

  ‘I have a baccalaureate from Bryn Mawr with a double major in Chemistry and Physics. Next month, I will receive a Masters degree in Analytic Chemistry from the University of Pennsylvania.’ Is he hearing me? Is he really listening to me? Or had he already looked at my skirt and scratched me off his list.

  He leaned forward slowly and steepled his fingers and said, ‘Good. Good. You’re definitely the kind of technical person we are looking to hire as chemists for this work and your additional background in Physics is an added bonus.’

  ‘What kind of war work?’ I asked. His answers were vague and evasive – why? I wanted more details about the scope of the position but if I pushed too hard would I offend him and ruin my chances of receiving an important job offer?

  He smiled, brushed a lock of hair off his forehead and leaned back in his chair. ‘I can’t tell you. It’s a secret.’

  A secret? Now, that sounded like war work. ‘Where would I work – at your headquarters in Rochester?’

  ‘Oh, no.’

  ‘Then where would it be?’

  ‘Sorry. Can’t tell you. It’s a secret.’

  A secret location? That does sound promising. ‘But it is vital work that could help win the war?’ I asked.

  ‘Most certainly. I can assure you it’s good.’

  I wanted to know more. ‘What is the goal of the work?’

  ‘I can’t tell you. It’s secret.’

  ‘How long will the job last?’

  ‘Until the war is over.’

  ‘Are you offering me a job?’

  ‘I can’t tell you. It’s secret,’ he said, setting his mouth in a grim line.

  I was dumbfounded. That was the most ridiculous thing that I’d heard all day.

  His eyes twinkled as his face broke into a broad grin. ‘That was a little joke,’ he laughed. ‘Of course, I am. Your country needs you, Miss Clark. Will you answer the call?’

  I nodded my head faster than I could think. ‘Yes, yes, I will,’ I said, surprised at the recklessness of my spontaneity. What had I just agreed to do?

  ‘Good. You will be hearing from us shortly about the transportation arrangements for your trip to Rochester for your orientation with the company.’

  My head was spinning, looping like a roller coaster, staggering under the burden of unanswered questions. I felt numb. I had one more appointment scheduled but it wasn’t for an hour. I hunted down the recruiter from Ames and cancelled our session telling him I’d accepted another offer, but didn’t really believe the words even as I said them.

  I had a job. I had achieved my goal. On the train ride home, doubts rose to the surface. Had I been right to trust that evasive Eastman Kodak man? The work had to be important if it was top secret, didn’t it? Maybe I shouldn’t have cancelled that last interview. I hoped I hadn’t made a naive mistake.

  What kind of work could be that secretive? Spy work and weapons development? Was there any reason someone would want a chemist for espionage? I couldn’t think of any. So it had to be weapons development. But what kind of weapons? I recoiled from thoughts of the lethal poisonous gases used during the last war and the terrible toll on those who survived exposure to mustard gas. I recalled a farmer who returned home seeming like the living dead, suffering as he coughed his way to an early grave. The Geneva Protocol banning these weapons had been signed by most countries more than a decade earlier – but not by my country. We were one of a handful of nations keeping that option open. What if they wanted me to work on that? I would have to walk away. I could not bear having poison gas on my conscience. Some means were not justified, no matter the end.

  TWO

  Back at home, I attacked my dissertation in a frenzy, hoping to complete it before I had to report to Rochester. On the day I received the first piece of Eastman Kodak mail, I finished writing and hand-delivered the paper to my professor. That first piece of mail was followed by a flurry of correspondence. Within a week, I knew I had to report on May 26 and received the train tickets to get there. I’d miss walking across the stage to accept my postgraduate degree, but I had secured it before I boarded the train and headed north.

  I arrived late that evening and reported to the personnel office at nine the next morning. At the reception desk, I waited until a woman about my age, with freckles sprinkled across her cheekbones and tightly curled bangs of brilliant red hair on her forehead, came out to the lobby to greet me. ‘Hello, Miss Clark. I’m Miss Farnham. But you can call me, Betty. Come have a seat at my desk.’

  In her office, I sat down in a straight back, wooden chair, and realized right away that it had been built for utility not comfort. Betty slipped around the desk extension that held a black typewriter and ran her hands under the back of her gray rayon jacket dress as she slid into a swivel chair. ‘First we have paperwork,’ she said with a smile, pulling out one sheet of paper after another from a file drawer in her desk.

  She rolled the first page into the typewriter. For an interminable hour, she asked questions, I answered and she typed. Finally, Betty jerked a sheet out of the roller and announced, ‘That’s it. Last one. I have cousins in Pennsylvania. You don’t sound like you’re from Philadelphia.’

  ‘I didn’t move there until I was twelve years old,’ I explained.

  ‘Where did you live?’

  ‘Virginia – out in the country.’

  ‘Oh, Virginia is such a pretty state. Not that I’ve been there. But I have seen pictures. I imagine it’s even prettier than that. Why did you leave?’

  I didn’t want to talk about the death of my father. I didn’t even want to think about the sequence of events that brought me north to live with Aunt Dorothy. Instead of being totally honest, I said, ‘Yes, it was a lovely place to live but I got a better education after I moved.’

  Betty cocked her head to the side as if she was about to ask more questions. I quickly changed the subject. ‘What’s next?’

  ‘We need to review the employee handbook,’ she said, pulling a large binder out of her drawer. She opened it to the title page and read: ‘Eastman Kodak Employee Procedures and Policies, Revised March, 1943.’ She looked up and smiled, then turned the page.

  ‘Introduction,’ she read and placed her finger on the first line moving it under the words as she continued, ‘Welcome to the Eastman Kodak Corporation. Employees wear their Eastman Kodak badges with pride. The name Eastman Kodak has long stood for leadership in photography. Now with freedom at stake, the men and women of Eastman Kodak are pioneering in new fields, helping free tomorrow’s world. Your hands are needed to help us win the war.’ Betty continued on through three pages in a monotonous reading voice that threatened to put me to sleep.

  When she paused to clear her throat, I said, ‘I’d be gl
ad to read through this on my own. It would be a lot easier on you and quicker, too.’

  Betty closed her eyes and exhaled forcefully. Placing one palm on top of the open book and putting her other hand on top of that, she stared at me with exasperation and irritation sparkling from her eyes. ‘Miss Clark, I must ask for your patience. We are trained in proper procedure and that requires that we go through this handbook together, page by page. When a war is at stake, we must always follow procedure. And, you need to give me your utmost attention.’

  I’d certainly said the wrong thing – so much for efficiency. ‘Sorry for interrupting, Miss Farnham.’

  Betty smiled. ‘Betty is perfectly fine.’ She cleared her throat again and returned to the reading, her finger moving smoothly from one word to the next.

  I jiggled a foot, crossed and uncrossed my legs, shifted from one side to another in my struggle to remain alert through the endless list of details about vacations, pay periods, rules and regulations. Then I thought it was about to get interesting when Betty read the title page for the section on laboratory protocols. My optimism fizzled fast when instead of specifics, all she read were vague and generalized rules with no real substance.

  When Betty shut the cover on the book and said, ‘Now, let’s go to the cafeteria and have some lunch,’ I felt as if I’d been rescued from a deadly fate. Walking down the corridor to the cafeteria, she explained, ‘You can bring in a lunch if you like, but the food provided here is inexpensive and rather good. Today, however, you are our guest. I’ll be charging our meals to the department.’

  We entered a long room, filled with rectangular tables with seating for four or six. The noise of dozens of simultaneous conversations bubbled around us. The aroma of meatloaf and macaroni and cheese made me aware of how hungry I was. I handed my plate across the counter and asked for a serving of both along with some green beans. Then I picked up a cup of coffee with chicory and a small bowl of tapioca pudding for desert.

  I followed Betty to an empty table near the back of the room. After spending hours playing the role of rigid bureaucrat, Betty now chatted to me like a long-lost friend who needed to be caught up on the latest news. I heard about her grandmother’s health, her dreams of marriage and child-rearing and her worries about her boyfriend on the frontline. She was so earnest, I didn’t dare laugh at the latter remark but knew that although everyone said their boyfriend was on the front, more often than not, they were in some boring place like Hoboken doing nothing more life-threatening than counting socks.

  Betty took me on a tour of headquarters after our meal. I peered in rooms filled with desks and bent-over heads hard at work before we reached a laboratory with rows of black tables. It appeared to be as up-to-date a facility as I’d ever seen. Each station marked by a fume hood, with sparkling glassware and pristine equipment distributed at every work area. Not a stray paper anywhere. Not a fingerprint on any surface. It didn’t seem as if the room had ever been used. I turned to Betty and asked, ‘What’s done in this laboratory?’

  ‘Nothing yet,’ she said. ‘It was all built for you.’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘Well, the whole group of you who are coming in for training. We’re hiring hundreds of new employees.’

  The room was large but nowhere near big enough to accommodate that many people. ‘Hundreds?’

  ‘Oh,’ Betty chuckled. ‘Not all of them will come to the corporate office for training. You’re in the first group, though, there’s about fifty of you. A lot of the new employees will be trained on site.’

  ‘What are we going to do here?’

  ‘You’ll be going through training.’

  ‘Training for what?’

  ‘I’m no scientist,’ Betty said with a laugh. ‘I wouldn’t understand it if they did tell me.’

  ‘You said that some people would be trained on site?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Where is that?’

  ‘You don’t know?’

  ‘No,’ I admitted, hoping I’d finally get an answer – but no luck.

  ‘That’s peculiar. They didn’t tell me but I thought they’d tell you. I would think your mother would want to know where you’re going.’

  My mother – another thing I didn’t want to discuss with a stranger. ‘Well, I sure can’t tell her since I don’t know.’

  ‘I guess they’ll tell you when you need to know. They say that to me a lot when I ask questions. I have the feeling, though, that I’ll never have a need to know much of anything. Ah, wartime … Well, that’s it for today, Miss Clark. Tomorrow morning at nine, you will be expected in room 238 for your orientation. Make sure you’re not late. They said they’ll be locking the doors to keep the rest of us from interrupting. That’s what they said. I have a feeling they just don’t think we need to know what’s going on under our noses.’

  THREE

  Room 238 looked like an ordinary classroom and it was packed full. I kept looking through the group for another woman but it seemed as if I were the only one there. Dr J.G. McNally walked to the front and began the real first explanation I’d heard about the work ahead of us. ‘Gentlemen, Lady,’ he said smiling at me, ‘Welcome to Eastman Kodak. We’re pleased to have you as members of our staff. We’re engaged in a very important project, war work. And it will involve you. You are chemists, and we need to have you work on the chemistry end of the project.

  ‘As chemists, you need to know that you will be working with Uranium.’ He paused and watched for the reaction of the group. Some squirmed, nervous about the prospect; others appeared rather excited by it. I was pleased for two reasons. First of all, any talk of a radioactive element evoked visions of Madame Curie dancing through my head. Secondly, I feared he might have said Chlorine or Phosgene, chemicals being used in the ongoing experiments to create airborne substances that would eat away at the protective masks worn by the enemy and defeat that line of defense against poisonous gases. Uranium also meant I wouldn’t be involved in any lethal gas experiments. Uranium required such a high temperature to vaporize there was no way it could be implemented as deadly airborne fumes on the battlefield.

  ‘That is the last time you will ever hear me use that word. And you will not use that word. Not here. Not anywhere. Not ever. When you need to call it anything, you will call it Tube Alloy. You will be prosecuted and persecuted if the proper word ever crosses your lips. If you say it, even among yourselves, you’re subject to immediate arrest and very likely a jail sentence.

  ‘Tube alloy. That is its code name. And your hexavalent compounds will be called tubelineal oxide. Your tetravalent compounds will be tubinous suflate or tubinous tetrafloride or so on. You’ll get used to it. We’re going to use code names because we don’t want anybody to find out what’s going on. You will be trying to develop methods for separating the tube alloy from solutions that hold iron, copper, nickel, cobalt, molybdenum or whatever.’

  After this speech, I then spent two months in the Rochester laboratory becoming familiar with the equipment, using extraction and refinement processes on ‘tube alloy’, separating it from other substances on the basis of their differences in weight. I couldn’t stop wondering what the expected end result was. Before I’d finished at the University of Pennsylvania, I’d heard rumors of fission experiments being conducted at a secluded facility at the University of Chicago. Was I being trained to work there? Would I be developing a new bomb? I didn’t dare ask.

  Most of my free time, I had only myself for company. The strong emphasis on secrecy built a communications barrier, making all of us chemists avoid any of the employees outside of the circle of those who needed to know. After hours, we were encouraged not to discuss our work and were too nervous to talk to each other about the possible projects that lay ahead. The men seemed to find non-work oriented camaraderie outside of the laboratory but being the only female meant I didn’t have a roommate as all the others did. Conversations seem to center around whatever it was that men talked about and tended to stutter
and stall whenever I entered a room.

  On the bright side, I was performing well during training. More often than not, one of the scientist/trainers would stop by and ask questions about my methodology and results, but after the first ten days not one of them uttered a word of criticism or corrected any of my procedures, as I’d overheard them doing to many others working nearby.

  It was an exciting opportunity for learning because although I’d studied uranium as a rare earth in college, the chemistry of it was unknown. There were no textbooks on it, all that I’d ever read was one little paperbound pamphlet which had only a single page on the chemistry of uranium. We were all becoming experts on the subject – how it worked, how to test it, measure it, weigh it and purify it. I felt like a pioneer on the edge of a limitless frontier.

  Two or three recruits seemed to disappear overnight. At first, I thought they were sent to the site to work and grew impatient about when my turn would come. But then I talked to the chemist at the station next to me, he said that his roommate was sent home after Dr McNally deemed him inappropriate for the work ahead.

  ‘What does that mean?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t think they gave him a reason,’ he said with a shrug.

  That’s why I got so nervous when I was told to report to Dr McNally’s office. Had I failed to measure up? I couldn’t think of any area where I’d fallen short in my performance or in my adherence to security, but I imagined none of the others who were sent home had seen it coming, either. My knees were shaking when I poked my head through the doorway. ‘Dr McNally, sir?’

  He looked up and smiled. ‘Come in, Miss Clark, come in.’

  He wouldn’t be smiling if he were sending me home, would he? Or was he that glad to be getting rid of me?

  ‘Miss Clark, all reports have indicated that your work in the laboratory has been impeccable. You have been chosen as one of the first to go out in the field.’