The Woman at Otowi Crossing (1995)

Born and raised in the East, Helen Chalmers has been living for twenty years in New Mexico; for many of these years, she has had a relationship with Jack Turner, editor and owner of a small local newspaper. When she left the East, she also, for difficult family reasons, had to leave her baby daughter Emily in the care of her grandparents. The railway branch-line depot, which she managed alongside her tea room, has recently been closed.

Jack has sold his paper and hopes to settle down, but Helen resists his offer of marriage. Emily, now grown, arrives on a study assignment, and the two women find it difficult to come to terms with each other after so many years of separation. Encouraged by Tilano, an elder of the nearby pueblo, Helen’s spirituality finds an increasing affinity with Indian thought; Jack, however, has no patience with her visions and her concern for the nature of life and of the Earth.

The Manhattan Project has requisitioned the boys’ school on the mesa above the tea room. Tight security forbids scientists and their families to visit outside the compound; one of the few exceptions is Helen’s tea room, which must, however, cater only to them. Here Emily and Joel meet, fall in love, and begin the kind of relationship expressly forbidden by the regulations of the Project.

The scientists debate the ethics of their work, always plagued by what the results may be. When Jack returns at Christmas, he is enraged to find that the relationship between Helen and Tilano – albeit a platonic one – has deepened.

By the following spring, tension both on the Hill and in Helen’s life has increased; she now envisions a great light that will destroy the Earth. Emily and Joel find it difficult to maintain their intense relationship, and when he tells her the scientists are going away for a while, she tells him she is pregnant; but once again, she feels she is being abandoned.

Tranquillino has returned from the war with a broken body and a bitter spirit; while Helen is instrumental in helping him to regain his true spirit, she herself refuses to do anything about her own illness.

The Alamogordo test is successful, but Joel is seriously injured by it. The wives from the Hill, when they announce their husbands’ success in ending the war, are enraged at Helen’s attitude to so much death, while she herself is deeply troubled by an FBI investigation into rumors of her foreknowledge of the explosion.

When she finally agrees to see doctors in New York, her cancer is found to be inoperable. Before she dies, everyone whose life has been affected by this quiet woman thinks gratefully of her love of life itself. The opera ends, as it began, with her death, attended by her friends – and by the seven deer of Indian legend who wait to take her spirit elsewhere.