Toward the end of the mourning period my grandfather attended the Twelfth Space Congress, in Cocoa Beach, Florida.
On the opening Saturday the first panel discussion was held over coffee and Danish in the Egret Room of the Atlantis Beach Lodge. An engineer on the team developing the new space shuttle led off his session by denying that he had ever referred to NASA’s astronaut corps as “a buncha flying truck drivers.” His accent had been engineered in Flatbush. His necktie and lapels were as wide as tire sidewalls. He wore round granny glasses and his sandy hair in a puffball. Astronauts were heroes, he said, that was obvious. And they would remain heroes right up to the day the Space Transportation System (STS) became operational. After that, “flying truck drivers” would be a fair description. Everybody in the Egret Room cracked up.
My grandfather laughed, too. He was on his way out the door with hot coffee from the catering table in a Styrofoam cup, already running late for his weekly appointment with grief.
“Space travel is still an incredibly exciting adventure in 1975,” the young engineer said. “But don’t worry, because at NASA we’re doing everything we can to change that.”
My grandfather laughed again, lingering in the doorway. In his view, heroism (if there was such a thing) would always be the residue of training. If you had been well trained, then adventure was something you hoped to avoid.
At the sound of his laughter, a woman sitting in the last row of chairs turned around and smiled at him. She patted the seat of the empty chair beside her and lifted an eyebrow. She was fifty, but her hand was youthful, the nails painted geranium pink. She was a vice president of accounting at Walt Disney World and recording secretary of the committee that put on this annual aerospace congress. She lived in Orlando. She had a daughter at Duke and an ex-husband who had flown jets for the navy in Vietnam. She wore L’Air du Temps. She also wore panty hose, which, until the previous evening, my grandfather had never encountered at close range, my grandmother having stuck till the last—February 10, 1974, (probable) age fifty-two—with girdle and garter belt. A high school classmate of Tony Bennett. An amateur photographer. Owner of a late-model Mercury Cougar the color of a spoonful of sweetened condensed milk.
He riffled through this deck of facts, trying to force the ace of the woman’s name. He was appalled to realize that he had forgotten it since the night before. The name of the first woman he had slept with since losing his wife, the first since 1944 who was not my grandmother! The woman gave the empty chair another pat, like she was attempting to lure a recalcitrant pussycat. My grandfather could feel his cheeks and the back of his neck prickling. He felt like he might have to be sick. He shook his head, hoping the look on his face came off wistful but fearing that it clearly read as nausea. He turned to go, using the cup of hot coffee as a focus of attention, of the will to refrain from vomiting. He escorted stomach and brimming cup along the carpeted corridor, a man in no kind of hurry. Past the Panther Room, past the Manatee Room, out into the lobby of the motor lodge.
She caught up to him by the registration table. It was stacked with bound copies of the proceedings from last year’s congress, at which the guest speaker had been Gene Roddenberry. Their tryst had begun at the Friday-night cocktail reception, held in Ramon’s Rainbow Room atop a space-age modernist bank in downtown Cocoa Beach, with a mutual confession of love for Star Trek. My grandfather had attended the annual space congress for ten straight years as co-owner and director of product development for MRX, Inc., and had skipped nine straight cocktail receptions until last night’s. He could not entirely dismiss the possibility that even in the midst of mourning my grandmother, he had been on the prowl for female company that year. But an annual conference of professionals and amateurs of rocketry and space travel was a pretty stupid place to go prowling, even at Ramon’s Rainbow Room.
“You okay, mister?” She had brought him a plastic lid for the coffee cup and a banana. She made a quick survey of his face, his hairline tingling with sweat, yesterday’s knot reused for his necktie. “You look pretty green. Hold this.”
She handed him the banana. She took a tissue from the hip pocket of the raw silk blazer, more or less the color of her fingernails, that she must have changed into that morning after slipping unnoticed out of his room. At seven o’clock his alarm had gone off, and when he reached for her in a place where for so many months there had been only cold linens, the trace of her warmth and lingering odor of L’Air du Temps made the bed feel emptier than usual; he had lived for eleven months with bereavement, but he had never felt so bereft.
“I know it’s probably the last thing you feel like doing, but if you ate that banana, you would feel better.” She dabbed at his clammy brow with the tissue. “Potassium. Electrolytes.”
He peeled the banana, ate half of it. Almost immediately, he felt better. “Oh,” he said, feeling like an idiot for not having realized sooner. “I have a hangover.”
“Guess it’s been a while.”
It was not a question but a laminate of implication and sass. Last night he had in all probability consumed more alcohol than cumulatively in all the years since V-E Day. Clearly, she knew more about him and his life than he could remember having told her. He made a quick probe at his memory, and guessed that some portion of the previous evening was likely never to be fully accounted for. He hoped that he had not sexually disappointed this good woman. He hoped that he had not cried on her shoulder. He feared that he might have done both.
“You better go,” she said. She looked at her wristwatch, a man’s big Accutron Astronaut. The lady was a space nut all the way. “Melbourne is a good half hour, depending on the traffic.”
Among the things he could not remember having told her, apparently, was that he would be missing that morning’s session on “The Space Shuttle (STS): A Progress Report” to drive down to Melbourne, Florida, a place he had never been, to say kaddish for my grandmother. He had found Beth Isaac listed in the Yellow Pages.
“Here,” she said. She took the cup of coffee from him and tenderly fitted it with the lid she had brought. A drop splashed the meat of her thumb and she said, “Ow.” She licked away the droplet and handed the cup back to him. “Aramaic, right?”
It seemed he had gone into a fair amount of detail about the nature of Jewish customs relating to death and mourning. “That’s right,” he said.
“And where do they speak Aramaic again?”
“Nowhere.”*
She gave his right arm a squeeze just above the elbow. He was not pleased to detect a certain amount of pity in her eyes. She brushed his cheek with her lips. “Finish your banana,” she said.
That afternoon, after he had returned from his errand in Melbourne, he would catch a glimpse of her as she was walking into the Atlantis Beach Lodge’s banquet room to attend the award luncheon. She formed part of a crowd of admirers and well-wishers, including all four of the other female attendees, around the imposing silver-haired gentleman who had come to Cocoa Beach to collect the award in question. That glimpse would turn out to be, as far my grandfather could remember afterward, the last time he ever saw her. And yet she would turn out to have been a key figure in shaping the subsequent course of his life.
He finished the banana she had given him as he was walking out to his car, and that was when he suddenly remembered her name, though by the time he got around to telling me the story, he had forgotten it again.*
* * *
“Every Saturday, for a year,” my grandfather told me. “No matter where I was. And I was a lot of places. Your dad and Ray, let me tell you, they had really spread that mess of theirs around.”
It was a warm afternoon. At his request I had helped him out onto the patio he liked to observe, through the window, from his rented hospital bed. The abutilon was in flower, hung with a thousand plump red lanterns. The birdfeeder had been getting a lot of action, and the pebbled concrete beneath it was scattered with seed. “They managed to get themselves sued in four states. New York, New Jersey, Maryland, and Pennsylvania.”
“Delaware.”
“That’s right. Delaware. How did you know that?”
“I used to snoop.”
It was the only way I ever reliably found out anything as a boy.
“You remember one time, or maybe you don’t remember. The summer you and your brother stayed with us.”
“Mom was studying for the bar.”
“The two of you were playing outside. And he, I guess he must have stepped in some dog poop. Without knowing.”
“Vaguely.”
“After a while you and he come inside, you’re done playing. He goes into the kitchen. He goes into the living room, the TV room. Up the stairs, down the stairs. The bathroom. The garage. He goes into the coat closet! Like he’s giving a house tour. Every room, there’s a stinky little brown footprint.”
I laughed.
“See?” he said. “You’re not the only one with the fancy metaphors.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I’m talking about the mess your father and my goddamn brother made.”
“Yeah, I got that.”
“I mean, your mother’s just starting out with her law degree. Now her credit’s going to be destroyed? She’s going to lose her house? At first I went around, D.C., Baltimore. I was just trying to find out how much shit there was and how far they had tracked it. Then I started trying to get on top of it, negotiate with the IRS. Negotiate with the ones suing them. Sam Chabon was suing your father, did you know that?”
“Yeah.”
“His own uncle, suing him.”
“A proud moment.”
“I’m sorry,” my grandfather said. “He’s your father, you should love him.”
“I shouldn’t,” I said. “But I do.”
“Anyway, no matter where I was, if it was a Saturday, I would go and say kaddish. Adath Jeshurun or maybe B’nai Abraham in Philly. Ahavas Sholom in Baltimore, of course. Rodef Sholom in Pittsburgh. Beth El in Silver Spring.”
“You took me to Beth El.”
“A couple of times.”
The momzer appeared over the top of the roof and began to case the joint.
“I really don’t know why I was doing it, to be honest. Week after week, shlepping out Reisterstown Road or wherever to say a prayer.”
“You must have gotten something out of it.”
“I must have wanted to get something out of it, anyway.” He stuck out his tongue. “Moment of weakness.”
The momzer inched his way down the roof.
“Look at this guy.”
“I know. I kind of just want to give him some damn birdseed.”
“He wouldn’t know what to do if you did,” my grandfather said. “He would think you put poison in it.”
“You think he’s that smart?”
“He’s a momzer.”
We didn’t say anything for a while, and he closed his eyes. He had already told me that he could feel the sun “in his bones” and that the warmth of it was “pleasant.”
“We’re good at death, I will say that,” he said.
“Jews?”
“It’s ‘Do this, do that. Don’t do that.’ That’s what you need, somebody just to tell you what to do. Tear a ribbon, cover the mirror. Sit around for a week. Grow your beard for a month. And then for eleven months, every week you go to a synagogue, you stand up, and you just . . . it’s . . . I don’t know.”
He closed his eyes again. A faint breeze stirred his soft white forelock. “If your wife, your brother, or God forbid, your child dies. It leaves a big hole in your life. It’s much better not to pretend there’s no hole. Not to try to, what do they say nowadays, get over it.”
I reflected that it seemed to be in the nature of human beings to spend the first part of their lives mocking the clichés and conventions of their elders and the final part mocking the clichés and conventions of the young.
“So you, you know, when it’s time for the kaddish. You stand up in front of everybody, and you point to the hole, and you say, ‘Look at this. This is what I’m living with, this hole. Eleven months, every week. It doesn’t go away, you don’t ‘put it behind you.’”
“That’s another one.”
“And then after a while you get used to it. I mean, that’s the theory. That’s why I went every week, no matter where I was, so I would get used to it. It worked that way with my parents. I guess I thought it would work with your grandmother, too.”
* * *
Congregation Beth Isaac was housed in a midcentury modernist chalet whose A-frame gables of azure blue betrayed its original career as an International House of Pancakes. Indeed, the shul was known locally, my grandfather learned, as Beth IHOP. In a showcase on a wall just inside the front entrance, among some newspaper clippings eulogizing the generosity and community spirit of various congregants living and dead, my grandfather noticed a trophy topped by a gold shaygets with a racquet. Beside it was a photo of a beefy young Jew shaking hands with a lanky fellow, both men wearing white polo shirts and white shorts. The lean-faced athlete was said to be British Open champion Geoff Hunt. The strapping Jew on the other end of the handshake was identified as Rabbi Lance Teppler.
An elderly female congregant saw my grandfather looking at the showcase as she was entering the sanctuary. She told her male companion to wait a minute, hold on a minute. She was wearing shapeless knit pants, cheddar orange, and a shapeless knit pullover top, black-and-orange poppies on a white ground. Her glasses were orange, too.
“Rabbi Lance is the world’s greatest Jewish squash champion,” she informed my grandfather.
My grandfather laughed, louder and harder than he meant to. Louder and harder than he had laughed in months, in years, than he had laughed since taking my father to see Buddy Hackett* play the Latin Palace in 1966. There was something absurd not just in the assertion but in the woman’s solemn expression and old-country accent—skvash tchempyin—when she made it. It hurt to laugh; it made his heart ache. And he felt sorry when he saw that the old woman was understandably offended. His effort to disguise his laughter as an uncontrollable coughing spasm did not fool her. She turned her back on my grandfather.
“A crazy man,” she said in Yiddish to her male companion, employing the audible whisper relied on by old Jewish ladies for millennia in their generous efforts to ensure that no one, in particular the target of their aspersions, ever be left in the dark about who was the target of their aspersions. My grandfather was just able to make out her companion’s English reply: “Looked a little hungover to me.”
Attendance was spotty that morning at Beth IHOP, and when he bounded onto the bimah, Rabbi Lance immediately picked out the new congregant with the poorly knotted necktie sitting in the back row. He nodded once, his expression hovering somewhere between smugness and reassurance: You are in excellent hands. He was blond and big-jawed, good-looking in the George Segal manner.
“I’d like to begin with a very simple, very heartfelt prayer,” he said. “Thank God the air-conditioning is working again.”
This prayer appeared to have been offered in earnest. It received a number of amens. Nine in the morning, it was already eighty-three degrees outside. My grandfather himself was an oenophile of air-conditioning and had already given top marks to the Beth Isaac vintage. From a wide grille on the back wall of the sanctuary, a cold blast blew down on his head, and maybe that had something to do with the fact that he did not attend so much as outlast the following service, preserved cryogenically by the air-conditioning until his tedium could be cured. He thought about the young physicist, with his appealing irreverence, and the recording secretary’s soft plump hand patting the empty place beside her. No sense of connection to his past, to the past of his ancestors, or to the scattering of congregants in the pews around him. They might have been strangers in a bus station, solo travelers bound for all points. They might have been separate parties at a pancake house, awash in the syrup emerging from a Wurlitzer organ, played by an old Jew with a Shinola-black pompadour, dressed in a curious tan coverall or jumpsuit and platform saddle shoes. As with pantyhose, though my grandfather had been aware for some time that Reform temples employed organists, this was his first direct experience of the phenomenon. He had always believed that the only real satisfaction offered by the experience of attending synagogue lay in the knowledge that church would be even worse. The presence and sound of the organ, he felt, went a long way to erasing that advantage.
When at last his moment came, he rose and stood, the only mourner at his end of the room, a solitary tower imprisoning an anonymous sorrow. First he wished for a Redeemer whose arrival he did not expect and a redemption he knew to be impossible. Then he told God all the nice things God seemed to need to hear about Himself. Finally, he wished for peace as it was conventionally understood, which he supposed was unobjectionable if no more likely than the coming of a messiah. At any rate, as Uncle Ray once explained to him, if you examined the language, the concluding lines of the kaddish might have been interpreted as a wish that God and everyone else would just, for once, leave the speaker and all his fellow Jews alone.
Rabbi Lance in turn wished that my grandfather and all the other mourning Jews around the world find comfort, and he gestured for people to sit down. My grandfather sat. It seemed to take a long time for his ass to hit the wooden pew again, and even when it did, the rest of him seemed to keep on going down, down.
Over the course of the past year he had trusted, in the absence of evidence, that in time, if he stuck to the formula prescribed by the kaddish, it would work in this instance as it had when his parents died, his mother shortly after his father. Since my grandmother’s death, in the most hardened bunker buried deepest under the Cheyenne Mountain of his heart, he had clung, as though it were a nuclear briefcase handcuffed to his wrist, to a contingency plan: Sooner or later, when he was ready, a woman was going to come along and fuck him. When that happened, he would know that he had begun to recover at last. But sitting in his pew at the back of Beth Isaac, with the organ sounding like the incidental music of an old radio soap opera and the final set of platitudes and baseless claims washing over him, he was obliged to confront the possibility that he might never recover from the loss of my grandmother. Her death had left everything, not just the bed, half empty. A Sandra Gladfelter with her undoubted charms and her clean L’Air du Temps smell of carnations would only ever make the hole seem larger, like a human figure placed alongside a Titan rocket in a diagram to give a sense of the rocket’s scale.
“Hi, there.”
It was the organist, the little old man with the jumpsuit and the shoe-polish hair. A homosexual, my grandfather supposed. He looked around and was surprised to discover that in spite of the impatience verging on rage that had compelled him to leave Beth IHOP, he appeared to be the only person left sitting in the pews. He had no idea how long it had been since the service concluded.
“I just wanted to see if you were all right.”
“I’m fine.”
For the second time that morning, somebody handed him a tissue. My grandfather wiped his eyes.
“You don’t want to go to the oneg?” the organist said. “You don’t want to eat a little something?”
My grandfather shook his head.
“I noticed you stood for the kaddish,” the organist said.
“My wife died last year.”
“Cancer?”
“Yeah.”
“Hey, that’s too bad, sweetheart, I’m sorry. She was sick a long time?”
“The first diagnosis was, I guess it was 1968. They operated, you know, they did radiation. It went into remission, but then it came back.”
“I had it, too,” said the organist. “Cancer. Radiation. Believe you me, sweetheart, it’s no fun.”
“I believe you,” my grandfather said.
“I’m going to the oneg now, all right?”
“Sure. Nice to meet you.”
“You’re all right?”
“I’m fine.”
“You don’t want to have a piece of cake?”
“No, thanks.”
The old man patted my grandfather on the shoulder and walked out of the sanctuary. He moved with grace and remarkable dignity, given the platform shoes. My grandfather looked at his watch. He had volunteered to give a demonstration of model building in the Atlantis Beach Lodge’s exhibition room that afternoon, and it was time to be getting back. He sat for a minute longer. He was maybe a little bit tired. He was tired of lawyers and their posturings and of the brutal politesse of taxmen. He was tired of shouldering the weight of other people’s bad decisions along with his own. Most of all he was tired of mourning my grandmother. Even after intermittent full-blown madness had subsided to chronic nervousness and the limitless insecurity common to actors, she had been an exhausting woman to love. But he had loved her no less passionately for the hard work. If there were times when the weight of the secret she carried, whatever it had been, made it impossible for her to love herself and thus to return his love, the fierceness with which she had clung to him even at those moments was recompense enough. It had fed his various hungers. Now there was only the daily scutwork of missing her. He wanted to rest. He wanted, like all the mourners of Zion, to be left in peace.
The car had sat for two hours in the hot sun. It stank of scorched coffee. He leaned in to grab the cup. As he turned back toward the building to look for a waste bin, he stepped on something round that gave under his heel. His foot shot out in front of him and he sat down hard on the asphalt. He dropped the cup and the lid popped off. The remnant inch of coffee dispersed itself efficiently, spattering his shirtfront, necktie, and pants. That night he would find a brown stain on his right sock.
A black rubber ball huddled against the left front tire of his car, as if seeking protection against his wrath. It was smaller than a tennis ball, a Dunlop with a tiny yellow dot. My grandfather picked up the squash ball and heaved it back overhead, in the direction of the synagogue. “Fuck you, Rabbi Lance,” he said.
He reached for the plastic cup lid (he never located the errant cup) and for the first time noticed the complexity, even intricacy, of its molded surface. Coffee served to go in a Styrofoam cup with a polystyrene lid was a relative novelty in 1975. At first the lids had been plain disks that you needed to remove completely to get at your drink. A couple of years back you started to see lids with a tabbed lip. You were meant to pull the tab, thus tearing a suitable opening into the frangible plastic. Since the lid was an otherwise featureless disk, however, with no perforations, what usually happened was that either you ended up with a jagged slit or else ripped the lid in half. By habit, when he got coffee to go, my grandfather had learned to ignore the treacherous tab and, as he had this morning, remove and then replace the entire lid every time he wanted to take a sip of coffee.
The lid on the coffee Sandra Gladfelter had given him was something new: It had grooved perforations to make tearing a spout easier. It had a notched slot that was clearly intended to hold the tab open and in place once you had peeled it back. The lid’s surface was reinforced by a structure of four raised ribs, in an X, to further reduce the chance of misadventure while tearing. Thought and consideration had gone into the design, but even apart from its functional engineering, as an object it was beautiful. Its whiteness and the abstract geometry of its protuberances had something futuristic about them, as if it were a line cap or battery hatch that had fallen off a passing starship.
It reminded my grandfather of the surfaces fabricated by modeler Douglas Trumbull to render the spaceships, vehicles, and lunar buildings in 2001: A Space Odyssey, covered in bumps, ridges, and raised grids meant to suggest machinery whose function was obscure and yet plausible. In fact, my grandfather thought, this lid might have been used to model an architectural element of the Clavius moon base in that film. He turned the lid this way, that way, ignoring the heat rising up from the pavement through the seat of his trousers. He remembered the promise he once made to my grandmother: that he would fly her to find refuge on the Moon. He pictured the two of them in colorful spacesuits like those worn by the astronauts in 2001, an orange one for him, a blue one for her, out for a spin across the lunar surface in their rover. They approached a hatchway embedded in the lunar soil. His gloved hand reached for a control switch and slowly, along its parallel grooves, the automatic hatch panel rose into the black sky so that he could drive the rover into its sublunarian garage. The hatch closed behind them. The garage filled with breathable air. In just a little while, they would regain the peace of the sanctuary he had built for her on the Moon. Slung from the webbing of his rack, he would watch her cutting flowers in her hydroponic garden as the world hid its nightside and peace descended on their refuge in space.
* * *
An accordion wall of carpeted beige panels divided the Atlantis Beach Lodge’s banquet room from its exhibition hall, where my grandfather sat at a table, behind a sign with his name printed below the word demonstration and above the melancholy legend former president and technical director, mrx, inc. The exhibition hall was divided into three areas by a series of movable partitions, also carpeted, but in orange. My grandfather sat in the area devoted to “Space Arts and Spacecrafts.” He had the entire room to himself, so the question of what he was in the act of demonstrating remained open. Taking refuge, he supposed: his body behind a partition in the exhibition hall, his imagination in the main reactor unit of the first human settlement on the Moon. He had not been able to keep his promise to my grandmother—or to himself, really—during her lifetime, but maybe, he was thinking, there was a way to make it happen in his imagination, where my grandmother lived on.
From the other side of the accordion wall came muffled rumors of the proceedings taking place in the banquet room. Men delivered speeches that verged dreamlike on intelligibility. Submarine speeches, turbulent with laughter and applause; then one great swell of applause that took a long time to ebb. After that my grandfather heard a new voice, thin but strong, with a singsong intonation.
The autumn Bulletin of the space congress had trumpeted the inauguration of an annual Saturn Medal “for significant contribution by an individual who has helped mankind to aim for the stars.”* It offered a slate of candidates chosen by the committee of which Sandra Gladfelter served as recording secretary, a ballot card, and a preaddressed return envelope. Voting was open to all subscribers who could afford the price of a stamp, with the results to be announced in the next issue.
When my grandfather saw the final tally—a landslide—he considered coming forward with an account of the things he had witnessed at Nordhausen. He started writing an open letter to the Bulletin, thinking he might also send it to the editorial page of a newspaper, but he soon began to question the letter’s value or point. It was hardly a secret that the “father of space flight” had some kind of Nazi past. Since the end of the war, historians, journalists, and former inmates of KZ Dora had made well-documented attempts to refute the Saturn medalist’s lifelong position: that he was innocent not just of having committed war crimes at the Mittelbau but of having the faintest idea that war crimes were being committed there at all. None of the worst charges leveled against him ever seemed to stick, let alone register, in the public’s mind. If they did register, they were dismissed as part of what seems to have been an actual Soviet campaign to discredit him.* To the extent that the Cold War was fought by means of symbols, Wernher von Braun had delivered the greatest blow ever struck by either side. Usually, you could rely on Americans to believe the worst about their heroes, but nobody wanted to hear that America’s ascent to the Moon had been made with a ladder of bones.
It turned out that after thirty years of carrying the outrage in his pocket like Aughenbaugh’s lighter, ready to strike its flint at any moment, my grandfather had lost or misplaced it. He couldn’t bring himself to rail against the rehabilitation of SS-Sturmbannführer von Braun for as long as it would have taken to write a one-page letter. He didn’t have the heart or the stomach for the implications:
It was the final point that my grandfather felt most reluctant to dwell on or ponder. He disdained patriotism. His illusions about American decency had not survived his reading of American history. In every presidential election from 1936 to 1948, he had voted for Norman Thomas, the Socialist candidate. But even skepticism, setting a limit to all belief, has its limits. That afternoon in the office of Dr. Leo Medved, he had chosen to continue to believe, not to question, what my grandmother had always told him about her wartime history. Under the circumstances, skepticism had felt like a kind of madness; to choose belief was the only way forward. It was the same with von Braun and the war itself. My grandfather chose the only way forward. He chose to believe that the bloodshed and destruction had not been in vain. It made a difference that Old Glory and not the Nationalflagge had been planted in the lunar dust. So he had put aside the letter, deciding just to try to keep out of von Braun’s way during the congress, and hope they never crossed paths. That was the motive behind his volunteering to mind the exhibition room during the Saturn Medal luncheon.
At the fifty-minute mark the hectoring tone gave way to a hushed rasp; von Braun had become an avowed Christian on his conversion to all-American and it was not unusual for his public remarks to take a pious, indeed mystical, turn. A few moments later there was a second torrent of applause. The sound pressed against and rattled the accordion wall until, on a surge of applause so loud it made my grandfather jump, one of the carpeted panels seemed to give way.
My grandfather stood up and peered over the partition into the middle section of the exhibition, given over to displays by Bendix, Rockwell, and other corporations that sponsored the congress. He saw that the accordion wall in this section had a small doorway in one of its panels. The carpeted door was open, and through it applause rolled in to flood Wernher von Braun. He stood in the doorway with his back to the exhibition room. He bowed and nodded to the audience. He assured well-wishers and some nearby minder that, yes, he was perfectly fine. He shut the door, muting the sound of applause, and turned to face the corporate sponsors section of the exhibition room. His eyes appraised the exhibits as though he intended to loot them or have them demolished. His blond hair had turned to white with ivory stains, like nicotine on the teeth. It still grew thick and he wore it modishly long. Its pallor contrasted with the flush of his face. He looked like a man in the grip of some kind of bodily attack—stomach cramps, back spasms, cardiac arrest. My grandfather tried to remember what disease was rumored to be killing the man.
Von Braun’s gaze lighted on a tall ficus in a pumpkin-shaped terra-cotta pot in the corner opposite him. He moved toward the potted plant with a hitch in his gait. He unzipped the fly of his brown suit trousers and took out his pallid old nozzle. There was a pattering, the first drops of rain hitting a dirt infield, then a fitful sloshing like somebody after a party pouring the dregs of beer bottles onto the lawn. Von Braun groaned and cursed softly to himself in the most scabrous German my grandfather had heard since the war. His own urinary vigor was no longer what it once was, and he felt an automatic pity for von Braun. The Conqueror of the Moon kept at it, and after a minute or two it was clear from the acoustics that he had himself a puddle. He coaxed out another laggard drop or two and then hunched his shoulders to zip himself up.
My grandfather forgot that he was supposed to be trying to keep out of von Braun’s way. When von Braun turned from the ficus tree, he saw my grandfather looking at him over the partition. Von Braun looked more embarrassed, certainly more contrite, than my grandfather would have expected. He felt his long-nurtured hatred of the man begin to waver. After all, how was the case of von Braun different from that of any other man whose greatness was chiefly the fruit of his ambition, that reliable breeder of monsters? Ambitious men from Hercules to Napoleon had stood ankle-deep in slaughter as they reached for the heavens. Meanwhile, there was no getting away from the fact that, thanks to von Braun’s unrelenting ambition, only one nation in the whole of human history had left its flag, not to mention a pair of golf balls, on the Moon.
“Congratulations on the prize,” my grandfather said.
“Thank you,” said von Braun. The wide-eyed look of culpability had already left his face, and now he squinted, studying my grandfather’s face. He might have been wondering if he ought to know it. He might have been trying simply to infer my grandfather’s opinion, in general or just in this instance, of a grown man who urinated into a motel flowerpot. My grandfather suspected that it was the former. “I very much appreciate the honor and support.”
“Oh, I didn’t vote for you,” my grandfather said.
Von Braun blinked and bobbed his big white unkempt head. “Who did you vote for?”
“Myself.”
Von Braun grinned and then asked my grandfather his name.
My grandfather felt his heart rate ascend steeply. Was it possible that von Braun had been told the name of the man who had uncovered the trove of V-2 documents that he’d ordered hidden, taking away one of his bargaining chips with the Allies upon capture? If von Braun should happen to recollect and recognize his name, would he call the police or have my grandfather thrown out of the congress? More to the point: Was this my grandfather’s chance, at last, to finish the job he had laid aside that night in favor of doing his duty? He was fifty-nine years old, and if he was no longer as strong as he had been at twenty-nine or thirty-nine, he was also no longer anywhere near so prone to fury. Since the day of his release from prison, he had never once gone looking for trouble. This turned out to be surprisingly effective as a means of avoiding it.
He told Wernher von Braun his name. It did not appear to ring any bells. It certainly had not come up for discussion, as von Braun observed, nor had it appeared, as far as he could recall, on the ballot.
“I was a write-in candidate,” my grandfather explained.
* * *
The walls of the Space Arts and Spacecrafts section of the exhibition room were hung with large-format color photos taken by attendees of the congress: Rocketdyne engines slashing a bright rip across the blue banner of a Canaveral morning. A crowd of people dressed in gumball colors, all craning their necks in the same direction to gape at something overhead. A slow-shutter telephoto exposure of a full moon rising over Mount Erebus that had been taken, according to its label, by von Braun himself during his trip to Antarctica in 1966. Oil paintings and watercolors of spacewalks, moonscapes, and splashdowns were displayed on easels of gold-painted bamboo. A number of paintings depicted with painstaking realism the unbuilt spacecraft and unvisited worlds that were the stuff of space-fan dreams. A few had been painted by the great Chesley Bonestall, a hero to my grandfather. And there were three tables of models: rockets, space planes, capsules, lunar modules, and rovers, built to a variety of scales from a variety of materials. Von Braun came around a partition from the corporate sponsors area, past a large Bonestall of Earth as seen from the Martian surface, a glowing aquamarine dot against the starry black.
Passing the models table, von Braun took a moment to admire a pair of French rockets, a Véronique and a Centaure, that my grandfather had brought with him to the show. My grandfather was identified as their modeler on little cards in front of them, and he accepted von Braun’s praise for their beauty. Von Braun came over to the demonstration table, where my grandfather was sitting behind the mess he had made. Fanciful bits of plastic in drab grays and whites were scattered across the tablecloth.
“What is all this?” von Braun said.
My grandfather noticed that when von Braun’s eyes strayed across a three-fourths-complete model of the prototype STS, he averted his face with a slight jerk of the head, as if the sight of the space shuttle were painful or loathsome. Von Braun leaned over to take a closer look at the scattered bits of molded plastic. He reached down to pick up an elongated and U-shaped extrusion of gray PVC. There was another beside it, the curve of its U slightly flattened. He fitted the pieces together to form the tapered cylinder of a jet engine’s housing.
“You use commercial model kits?” Von Braun looked back at the two French vehicles on the models table. Like all my grandfather’s hobby work to this point, they had been made, with fine woodworking tools and a Dremel, generally from balsa and maple. Each vane, flap, and fairing was custom-built. “No, surely not.”
“Normally, no,” said my grandfather. “I’m just fooling around; they call it ‘kit bashing.’”
On the way down to the space congress from New York, stopping for gas in Myrtle Beach, my grandfather had spotted a hobby shop. He had stopped to pick up some extra 0000 sandpaper for the STS model, which had been the intended demonstration object until the intervention of fate in the form of a one-night stand, a squash ball, and a coffee cup lid. He had begun the shuttle model shortly after the previous congress. But the turmoil of the past year had taken a toll on his time for model building, along with everything else.
The hobby shop in Myrtle Beach turned out to be having a sale on plastic model kits. Impulsively, thinking I might enjoy them—he was planning to stay at our house in Columbia on his way back to New York City after the congress—he had picked up several kits: a couple of panzers, a Zero, a French Mirage, a Bell Huey, an AMC Matador, and a model of the PT-73 from the old McHale’s Navy television show. He also bought several tubes of Testors glue.
In the hour that had passed since he began his demonstration, he had cut the parts from the sprues of the latticed frames that held them and spread them out—axles, struts, rotors, turret guns, joysticks, the components needed to form the Matador’s bucket seats—to get a sense of them. He had pulled out the pieces needed to build one of the panzers’ hulls and, with the help of an X-Acto knife and glue, configured them into a flattened square structure about the size and shape of a coaster. It was wider by about half an inch than the plastic lid that, having dabbed it with Testors, he now settled onto its smooth upper surface.
“What is it? May I ask?”
My grandfather did not reply. He did not intend to reply. He was relieved to discover, on meeting Wernher von Braun, that his heart was no longer filled with homicide nor his brain with retribution. But he had no desire to converse with the man.
“Some sort of hatch? A launch pad?”
My grandfather heard and recognized—picked up like a beacon—the uncontrollable curiosity that was so often the vice of a solitary dreamer. He fought down the urge to explain his theories of lunar settlement, though the urge to explain was overwhelming in my grandfather, quasi-sexual, a kind of intellectual horniness. Anyway, what did he think his silence could accomplish? In 1945 Von Braun had eluded my grandfather’s grasp and the grasp of justice. He had not simply managed to avoid the violent, sordid, or punitive fates that befell so many of his comrades and superiors—he had risen to a singular pinnacle of fame and lionization. He was, by any measure, the luckiest Nazi motherfucker who ever lived.
“A satellite!” von Braun guessed. “Some kind of solar cell?”
In the end, in classic Nazi style, Wernher von Braun had committed suicide—or anyway his dream had killed itself, a victim of its own success. The Moon had been abandoned. The Apollo program was dead. Thanks to the relentless obsession of von Braun, in a span of five years a lunar voyage had gone, in public opinion, from wondrous and impossible odyssey to short-haul bus run, from national mandate to the greatest waste of dough that human improvidence had ever conceived. At NASA Braun himself had been first sidelined, along with the Saturn Vs, and then shown the door. All the grandiose mission plans that he’d been hawking for decades, in the books he cowrote with Willy Ley, on The Wonderful World of Disney and in the pages of Collier’s and Life, with all those stunning Bonestall paintings of earthrises and Mars landers and farms rotating in low earth orbit, seemed to have been mislaid in some cultural bottom drawer. Nobody talked anymore about orbital wheels at the Lagrange points, about lunar He3 mines or human settlement of Mars. It was the age of the space shuttle, of flying truck drivers. Like the Saturn V, Von Braun was a dinosaur. My grandfather could not help feeling a certain amount of pity.
“Nuclear reactor,” my grandfather said.
“Are you serious?”
“Just the upper portion. Rest of it will be buried.”
“Buried in what?”
“Lunar surface.”
“It’s a moon base?”
“I just started.”
Von Braun lowered himself, grimacing with pain, until he was at eye level with the table. “What is the scale?” he said. He seemed to have forgotten that only two minutes before, my grandfather had caught him pissing into a potted ficus. He was a past master, after all, in the art of expedient forgetting.
“Dunno, 1:66, maybe?”
“Not large, then.”
“Forty kilowatts ought to be enough at first.”
My grandfather picked through the model parts looking for tiny rectangular bits—mirrors, battery covers, gun-port covers—that he could use to complicate and give realistic texture to the model’s surface. This was precisely the technique Trumbull had used for the models in 2001. The pieces were all the various colors of plastic used in the kits they’d been pillaged from, and none the same color as the plastic lid, but once you had spray-painted them the same matte shade of pale gray, the unit would take on a convincing texture.
“Rankine cycle?” von Braun said. “Like the SNAP-10.”
This supposition was lamentably mistaken, and my grandfather was desperate to explain why the simpler mechanics and greater efficiency of a Stirling engine would be infinitely preferable to the turbine of the SNAP models that von Braun and NASA had been pushing a decade earlier. This time he managed to stick to his resolve, and this time von Braun seemed to get the message. Or maybe he was just tired of crouching. He gripped the edges of the table and pulled himself to his feet. He went back over to the models table and reached out with a finger to stroke the smooth-sanded surface of the Véronique, finished in a glossy shade of cream.
“She is really quite beautiful,” he said. He waited to give my grandfather a chance to agree with or dispute this opinion. My grandfather refrained from observing that it wasn’t too surprising the Véronique had caught von Braun’s eye, since it had been engineered in large degree by France’s own cadre of captured Peenemünders. “Still,” von Braun continued, “Frenchmen in space.” He smiled. “You have to admit, there’s comedy in the notion.”
“Yeah?” my grandfather could not prevent himself from saying. “How do you feel about Jews on the Moon?”
“Beg your pardon?”
“I did a little consulting work for the state of Israel,” my grandfather lied wildly. “They’re putting a lot of muscle and money and brainpower into a next-level system, Jericho 2. Lunar orbiters and landers. To build a Jewish settlement on the Moon.”
Von Braun looked momentarily taken aback but recovered himself. Give him credit: Having generated so much of his own in his lifetime, the man knew bullshit when he heard it. “Perfect,” he said. “Just the place for them.”
But that was not the end of the story of magic coffee-cup lid. Later that afternoon the young shuttle engineer from Brooklyn came looking for my grandfather. His attention had been drawn to the Véronique and the Centaure models and he had to agree, the work was exquisite, just as Dr. von Braun had told him. He wondered if my grandfather might be amenable to or interested in building models for NASA, both as part of the research and development process and for purposes of education and display? The pay, he said, would be not half bad.
My grandfather said he would think about it. Then he changed his mind and decided to accept the young engineer’s offer without thinking about it. He said he did too much thinking as it was, and if he got this decision out of the way it would free up his brain to think about something else. The young engineer asked for an example of the kind of thing my grandfather had in mind, thinking-wise. “Jews on the Moon?” my grandfather said.
“Oh yeah, I heard about that,” said the young engineer. “I think the old Nazi motherfucker was totally freaked out.”
My grandfather started to laugh.
“Score one for the Hebes,” said the young engineer.
At that my grandfather laughed long and hard. When he could speak again he thanked the young engineer, wrote down his telephone number, and they agreed to be in touch soon. Over the next fourteen years my grandfather went on to build more than thirty-five models for NASA, of different types and functions, at a variety of scales. The reputation of his work for faithfulness and quality brought him commissions from private collectors all over the world. He had no doubt that the work Wernher von Braun indirectly brought his way had helped him emerge from mourning the loss of my grandmother and of the company and the success that meant so much to him.