“Yes, yes!”
“Through these woods.”
“And then down the hill. There is a path, with the snow all gone it’s nothing, a walk of twenty minutes, perhaps, for a young man. Twice that, since you shall be in my enfeebled company. Come.”
Just before he followed the priest whose ward and beloved sexton he had murdered only a few hours before, into the darkness at the back of the trees, my grandfather took a look up—a last look up, it might be—at the stars. The Moon was down, and they had reclaimed the whole of the sky.
At that hour all across Europe, if the local skies were clear, people who believed, knew, feared, or hoped they were about to die were looking up at the stars. From Finland to the Balkans, from the Black Sea to the doorstep of Africa, across Poland and Hungary and Romania. Looking up, maybe, through a pane of Perspex, or through lenses that corrected for myopia. Through a tangle of razor wire, a gun slit, a grid of tracer fire, the blown hatch of an M1. Standing, stumbling, kneeling. Dead on their feet or running for their lives. From open fields, street gutters, and foxholes. Atop a pile of rubble, in a fresh-dug ditch, on a Turkish carpet in a house that had no roof, on the deck of a ship on fire.
No doubt some of these people looking up at the stars sought the lineaments of God’s face. Many saw no more than what was to be seen: the usual spatter of lights, cold and faraway. For some the sky might be a diagram captioned in Arabic and Latin, a dark hide tattooed with everyday implements and legendary beasts. At least one man, looking up at the stars that night from the edge of a forest in the Westerwald, saw an archipelago of atomic furnaces in a vacuum sea, omnidirectional vectors of acceleration radiant from a theoretical point of origin that predated humanity by billions of years, as unperturbed by mechanized mass slaughter on a global scale as by the death of one individual.
This was my grandfather’s line of thinking, and he found both comfort and guidance in it. He could trust or mistrust Father Nickel; either way the outcome would mean nothing to the stars. So why not, for one night, lay down the weary burden of mistrust? For an hour, say, and no longer. Just long enough to see the rocket. After that he would shoulder the burden again.
* * *
“So, what happened?” I said. “What’d he do?”
I had been schooled by now in the ways of South Philadelphia and the world that was, in my grandfather’s view, its macrocosm. I was expecting treachery, mischance, one debt incurred when another was repaid.
“He showed me the rocket,” my grandfather said.
“A V-2. You saw a V-2 rocket.”
“I saw more than one. This was just the first.”
“And?”
“And . . . ?”
“What was it like?”
He pursed his lips and angled his face toward the window. He considered the question for long enough that I began to wonder if he had forgotten it.
“It was tall.”
“Tall?”
“The old man said it was as tall as the steeple of his church.”
“Okay,” I said. I hadn’t pictured them as being so tall. “But, I mean . . . how did you feel? What did you think?”
“I don’t know how to put it into words.”
“Were you disappointed?”
“On the contrary.”
“Afraid?”
“Of what? It wasn’t going anywhere.”
It occurred to me that neither disappointment nor fear was an emotion my grandfather ever really struggled to express. Both could be stated plainly and left behind.
“Did it make you happy?” I said.
The word seemed to catch him a little off guard.
“Something like that,” he said.
* * *
In children’s drawings, all houses have chimneys, all monkeys eat bananas, and every rocket is a V-2. Even after decades of stepped-back multistage behemoths, chunky orbiters, and space planes, the midcentury-modern Enterprise, the polyhedral bulk of Imperial star destroyers and Borg cubes, the Ortho-Cyclen disk of Millennium Falcon—in our deepest imaginations the surest way to the nearest planet remains a trim cigar tapering to a pointed nose cone, poised on the tips of four swept-back axial fins. By the time I became conscious of rockets—and I grew up at the height of the space race, surrounded by the working models and scale models my grandfather’s company manufactured, by photographs and drawings of Saturns and Atlases and Aerobees and Titans—they had progressed well beyond von Braun’s early masterwork, in design as in power, size, and capacity. But it was a V-2 that would carry me into the outer space of a fairground ride, that labeled the spines of the public library’s science fiction collection. A V-2 was the “weenie” or visual anchor of Walt Disney’s Tomorrowland. In the V-2, form and purpose were united, as with a knife, a hammer, or some other fundamental human tool. As soon as you saw a V-2, you knew what it was for. You understood what it could do. It was a tool for defeating gravity, for escaping the confines of earth.
For my grandfather, I believe, the war was everything that happened to him from the day he enlisted until the moment he walked into a clearing in the woods outside Vellinghausen, Germany, in late March or early April 1945. It was everything that resumed happening, the awful things he saw and the revenge he contemplated, from the moment he walked out of the clearing until the German surrender six weeks later. The thirty minutes or so that he spent with the rocket in the woods, however, was time stolen from the war, time redeemed. He would leave the clearing with that half hour cupped in his memory like an egg kept warm in the palms. Even when the war had crushed it, he remembered the pulse, the quickening of something that might break free and take to the sky.
When they walked into the clearing, the old priest sat down on an upended packing crate, crossed his legs, and lit a cigarette. The far-off pounding of artillery came to a momentary halt, and in the interval before the first birds, as the darkness deepened, some power seemed to enter and flow across the clearing. After a moment my grandfather identified that tide as silence. Then a bird sang, and the sky lightened, and you could begin to see the rocket aspiring to heaven on its mobile launch table. My grandfather divined its purpose with an upward leap of the heart.
Of course my grandfather knew that, from the point of view of German command, of Allied command, of Hermann Goering and General Eisenhower and the people at whom it was to have been launched, the rocket was still—was only—the war. The clearing had been cut by soldiers, the rocket had been transported here by soldiers. Soldiers would have armed, primed, aimed, and fired it. Like its fellows—around three thousand between September 1944 and March 1945—it had been fitted with a warhead that contained two thousand pounds of a highly explosive form of TNT that would detonate on impact. Its manufacture had been ordained and carried out not to bear humankind to the doorstep of the stars but to atomize and terrorize civilians, destroy their homes, shatter their morale. If some unknown mischance had not intervened, this rocket would have joined its fellows in racing the sound of its own arrival toward the city of Antwerp, where, on December 16, to take the worst example, a V-2 had fallen on the Rex Theater in the middle of a showing of The Plainsman, killing or injuring nearly a thousand people.
None of that, however, could be blamed on the rocket, my grandfather thought, or on the man, von Braun, who had designed it. The rocket was beautiful. In conception it had been shaped by an artist to break a chain that had bound the human race ever since we first gained consciousness of earth’s gravity and all its analogs in suffering, failure, and pain. It was at once a prayer sent heavenward and the answer to that prayer: Bear me away from this awful place. To pack the thing with a ton of amatol, to hobble it so that instead of tearing loose once and for all from the mundane pull, it only arced back to earth and killed the people among whom it fell, was to abuse it. It was like using a rake to whip egg whites, a dagger to pick your teeth. It could be done, but to do so was a perversion. Furthermore, ineffective. As a weapon, a tool of strategy, it was clear to everyone by now t
hat the V-2 had failed. Yes, four or five thousand hapless Frenchmen, Belgians, and Englishmen had been killed by the rocket bombs. Tens of thousands more had been left wounded, homeless, or afraid. But in the end, bombs of the ordinary variety had killed, maimed, and frightened people in far more terrible numbers. And now here were the Allies, deep into Germany, and the rockets were impotent and no longer fell.
My grandfather felt sorry for Wernher von Braun, whom he could not help envisioning as shy, professorial, wearing a cardigan. His pity for and anger on behalf of the imaginary von Braun tapped the reservoir of his sorrow over the loss of Aughenbaugh. Alvin Aughenbaugh, with a hint of Paul Henreid. The poor bastard! He had built a ship to loft us to the very edge of heaven, and they had used it as a messenger of hell.
“Lieutenant?” Father Nickel said. He put a hand on my grandfather’s shoulder.
My grandfather averted his face. Automatically, he moved to shrug off the old priest’s hand, but in the end he left it where it was. Between him and Father Johannes Nickel, as between two stars, lay unbridgeable gulfs of space-time. And yet across the sweep of that desolation each had swum, for a moment, into the other’s lens. Poor von Braun! He needed to know—my grandfather felt that he must find him and tell him—that such a thing was possible. Scattered in the void were minds capable of understanding, of reaching one another. He would put his hand on von Braun’s shoulder the way the old priest’s gnarled paw now lay benedictive on his own. He would transmit to von Braun the only message lonely slaves of gravity might send: We see you—we are here.
16
In 1972 Uncle Ray recruited my father—then employed as team doctor to the Washington Senators—to invest in his latest undertaking, a chain of fancy “billiards clubs” called Gatsby’s, that served liquor and welcomed female customers with Tiffany-style lamps and foofy cocktails. At its peak—just preceding its complete extinction—the chain encompassed five locations in Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Pittsburgh. In decor the clubs combined elements of gentlemen’s club, traditional chophouse, and the then-popular “fern bar.” In concept the undertaking combined elements of pipe dream, tax dodge, money-laundering scheme, and irretrievable mistake. Uncle Ray was not entirely forthcoming to my father about the identity of their silent partners, and my father was not entirely forthcoming, it seems, about the extent to which he was already a focus of attention for having failed to report income to the IRS. Anyone who cares to waste a few hours among the archives of the Post, Sun, Inquirer, and Post-Gazette may trace the fragmentary outlines of their disaster, which cost my great-uncle a beating that left him hospitalized for weeks and made my father a quasi-fugitive for the rest of his life.* I don’t have the space or the stomach to go into the details here, and anyway, the Gatsby’s debacle was barely a footnote, if that, in the history of the Philadelphia Mob.
In my family, naturally, it proved of more significance. With Uncle Ray facing criminal charges and my father in the wind, my grandparents and my mother were left holding a variety of bags. My grandfather constructed a defensive array of high-impact lawyers, but even with this shield in place there were penalties, liabilities, and liens. To raise the necessary funds, he forced a reluctant Uncle Sammy to buy out his interest in MRX, and the happiest (or at least the most productive) period of his life came to an end. Less than a year after he lost the company he loved, he lost my grandmother, too.
By the time he met Sally Sichel, almost nothing of value was left apart from the condo (which my grandmother had been able to visit only once after its purchase) and fifty-seven model spacecraft built to a rigorous scale from premium materials. From his private stock my grandfather culled ten of the best, including a sweet little Sputnik PS-2 that obliged you, if you lifted a hinged panel, to contemplate the awful fate of a tiny Laika (a modified husky pinched from an N-scale Alaskan Railroad kit).
Three days after meeting Sally, he sold all ten of the rockets to the Bluestein twins up in Cocoa Beach. He used the proceeds to pay Devaughn and purchase the supplies he would need to hunt down the snake that had eaten Ramon.
Every night at nine except Sunday, Devaughn would meet my grandfather at a Waffle House, drive him to Atlantis, and drop him at the gate with its gaffed lock. My grandfather would shlep off into the darkness laden with his gear—canvas sack and work gloves, flashlight, and the panoply of special tools he had crafted: snake hook (vinyl-coated storage hook welded to the end of an old golf club), snake stick (a length of narrow-gauge PVC pipe fitted with a noose of nylon cord), and, of course, snake hammer. Precisely two hours and thirty-five minutes later he would return carrying his waders so as not to muddy Devaughn’s car. Then Devaughn would drive my grandfather back to the Waffle House before starting the midnight shift at Fontana Village.
“Every night?”
“Except Sunday. Sunday Devaughn went to church.”
“I must have talked to you during that time, right? I’m on the phone with you, and you’re telling me you had rice pudding for dessert or whatever, and meanwhile you’re getting ready to go snake hunting.”
He registered my pointless question and then looked away.
“Fine,” I said. “Why?”
“You saw the show. Alien Invaders. It wasn’t eating just pets. It was eating a wide and troubling variety of native birds and amphibians.”
“Oh, really?”
“Endangered species.”
“And house cats.”
“It was an alien invader. It didn’t belong there.”
“Humans don’t belong there, either,” I said. “Why didn’t you hunt them?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I guess I never get around to it.”
“But, I mean, it was really all about Sally, wasn’t it?”
“What was about Sally? What are you talking about?”
“The snake had been eating pets for months, you didn’t care. Then you met Sally, all of a sudden you want to kill the thing. You were doing it for her sake.”
“Was I?”
“Grandpa. Come on.”
“Maybe.”
“Totally.”
“Well,” my grandfather said. “There are worse reasons for killing, believe me.”
* * *
My grandfather took Sally to an overpriced crab house in Boynton Beach, a rope-trimmed tourist trap that my grandmother had despised. On the way home, as though her ghost had poisoned his chowder, my grandfather experienced cramps. As a rule, he avoided shellfish and pork because, while he had long since left his religion in the Neolithic, where he felt it belonged, he retained, in his words, “a kosher belly.” The trouble in his stomach embarrassed him obscurely, so he kept it to himself. It would be a matter of getting to a toilet as soon as possible. On the way home from the crab house, he obliged himself to drive patiently. The effort required kept his mind off the pain.
“Good lord, I just remembered,” he said. He had parked the LeSabre and they were walking toward Sally’s cluster of units through the luminous Florida dark. She had invited him to come have a look at her place. Curiosity about the interior arrangements of one another’s units was a kind of currency at Fontana Village, one in which even my grandfather traded. There was not necessarily anything more to her invitation, he had decided, than that. “I think I might have forgotten to unplug my soldering iron.”
That afternoon he had recapped a buzzing old Zenith at the request of his neighbor Pearl Abramowitz. There was nothing he had been able to do for Pearl’s other complaint: that increasingly, all the people singing and talking on her radio seemed to be doing so in Spanish. He had, however, remembered to turn off the soldering iron. It was not even a question of remembering; he had made a habit of it. That was the purpose of habit, in my grandfather’s view: to render memory unnecessary.
He could see that he had let Sally down, but she covered it with a joke. “I’ve only known you three days,” she said. “But that doesn’t sound like something you would forget.”
This was undeni
able. “No, but if I don’t check . . .”
“Of course. I totally understand.”
“I’ll be over in ten minutes. Five minutes.”
“Go.”
He hurried back to his unit and repaired to the bathroom, where fighting, though fierce, was mercifully brief. He washed up and discharged three precise bursts of Alpine Summer air freshener. He went back out to the living room. The yellow sofa, the whitewashed wicker étagère, the expressionless walls had a disintoxicating effect on his imagination. He saw the elaborate scale model of LAV One on its mound of simulated lunar surface, on which he had lavished thousands of hours and dollars, for what it was: five pounds of painted plastic scrap sitting on ten dollars’ worth of plaster cloth and chicken wire. What was he doing, chasing after Sally Sichel? “Asking her out,” so improbably, on a “date”? The recliner they’d had since Riverdale, in which my grandmother used to sit, watching Jeopardy! and yelling deliberately incorrect guesses at the screen, as though trying to throw the contestants off their game, leveled its mute reproach.
Sit, it seemed to implore him. Stay. Slacken. Vegetate.
The telephone rang. It was Sally.
“You all right?” she said, and for a moment he thought she had inferred from a grimace, a sharp intake of breath, the uproar in his belly. Had he groaned or, God forbid, farted without realizing it? “Did your house burn down?”
“I’m fine,” he said. “I had turned it off.”
“I see.” Her tone was distinctly disbelieving. This irked my grandfather for a moment until he recalled that in fact he was lying to Sally. She was an observant person, a noticer. There was no human quality that my grandfather held in higher regard. “Well,” she said, “that’s too bad.”
“It’s too bad?”
“Yes. A little fire might help with the cold feet.”
This remark puzzled my grandfather—his feet were fine—but then he understood: Sally had no idea that his dinner had given him a cramp. She supposed he was just running away from her, that he was afraid of having, as he put it to me, “feelings in that direction.” Once he understood, he was shocked. It came as a worse shock to discover, on searching the feelings he was afraid of having, that Sally’s supposition was correct. There had been nothing wrong with his stone crab chowder apart from too much salt. The cramp was a case of nerves, not food poisoning.