What a curious scene then! This moderately undulated street of angled plots and recently constructed private homes, this curved asphalt bordered by trees of the same year of growth, with vista of cars parked in garages, air conditioners, lawn mowers, sprinklers and bicycles, a street in which five children and two adults on foot might be seen on any average hour of the day, what a shock down the block to the habituated eye to see that gaggle of Press all straining at a rope, TV men and still photographers in their customary war for position with word-men—the crush now fortified by the more curious neighbors, Texas grandmothers in the main with gray-greenish eyes, tight not unintelligent mouths, small-town grits in the anticipation, and a real Texas bone-and-leather use of elbows to fight their leading toe in for position against this invasion of hippie journalist gogglers and foreigners with cameras, beards, sideburns, Nehru jackets, turtlenecks, love beads, medallions, shades, tape recorders and foreign tongues, Japs talking to Japs, Germans to Germans, an Italian to other Italians and all the Scandinavians come to NASA-land in El Lago. “I’m an American!” cried out one full vigor of a gray-haired Texas female being pushed off the frontier by one ham-hock and handlebar of an English ruddy.
There would have been small mayhem, but Jan Armstrong came out then, escorted by an official who treated her with the kind of gravity reserved for the Pope’s sister. She was laughing and smiling, she was obviously very happy as she stepped on a raised platform behind the rope. The platform was about a yard square and a foot high, set out for her probably by the television men, and it may have been the color of its candy-pink carpet reflecting pink and violet and delicate rose hues to her healthy skin, but she was an attractive sight on this overcast Sunday afternoon. She was a woman one would not normally have thought of as beautiful, her hair was almost gray and close-cropped, her mouth while full and strong was without coquetry or that hint of duplicity so attractive in a woman for the implicit suggestion that only a real man could ever set her straight. No, her mouth spoke of the stubborn and the steadfast, and she was dressed in no remarkable fashion, she had on a white blouse buttoned at the neck and an orange-red skirt. She had a Scotch nose, strong, not small, not delicate in nostril, the wings cut with determination, the tip showing a hint of two lobes, she had in all the sort of face one sees in the best of small-town schoolteachers or librarians, that complete statement in the features of deep and dedicated strength, so she possessed in this hour a beautiful face, it was radiant—the word could finally be employed—the face was utterly separated from the planned street and the media men surrounding her with their microphones, the face lifted up to that moment in the past when she had directed her strength and her will to one goal, and the goal was now fulfilled—few faces are more beautiful than the dedicated when their deepest hour is in, when the plan utters its first word aloud, and the word is “yes.” So no question could bother her at this instant. If she had a reputation for being shy, grim, a swimming instructor, a phys ed teacher, a churchgoer, a conformist, a humorless embodiment of the space frontier in female form, she was now on top of it all, she was in rollicking good humor from the release of that safe landing.
“Will you let the children stay up and watch the moon walk tonight?” asked a journalist.
A devil came into her eye. “I don’t care for what they do,” she said with happy idiom, a grammar from the universal interior of the nation, not Midwestern, not Texan, by now from anywhere in there.
The questions went on. She laughed happily at their absurdity. She could not make a mistake. “Is this the greatest moment of your life?” asked one of the voices.
“No, sir,” said her shining face, “when I was married, it was the greatest moment of my life.”
They had known each other for three years before they had their first date, they had lived soon after their marriage in a cabin in the mountains with no plumbing, he would wave the wings of the test planes he flew as he burned through the sky over their house. It was a marriage of piano duets and long solo flights in gliders; the death of their only daughter, age three, came from a tumor of the brain. Aquarius hated to comprehend marriages by such contradictory details picked up on the fly, but these details promised to fit, they spoke of the serious physician’s daughter from Illinois, and the dream-absorbed boy with the lonely face of early photographs, the boy whose family moved a dozen times when he was young in Ohio. He had worked for a pharmacy at forty cents an hour to earn the nine dollars an hour for flying lessons. Would the relation of husband and wife to each other be so very different from Armstrong’s relation to the sky? Everything about Armstrong suggested that he would be happiest in the sky, that surf of space where intimations of a language few could speak might hover on the changing of a cloud.
“Are you pleased with the Sea of Tranquility as a place to land?” asked a questioner.
She liked Tranquility Base. It was obvious the word was agreeable. For those who have been living in dread, tranquility is grace, the very decency of ecstasy.
“What are you having for dinner tonight? Space food?”
She threw back her head like a mare so happy with the day she can support any rider, “No, sir,” she said and left it there, proper for NASA and the team, but the glint in her eye had its own look, “We ain’t quite so square as you think us, Mister Reporter,” said the unvoiced look.
Another few questions and the NASA representative at her elbow returned her to the house. The Press was off to cars and TV vans, the ride was on to find the Collins home and the Aldrin house, each a block from the other, but back in Nassau Bay itself, back in another soft checkerboard of curves at right angles to the intersection of other curves, a suburb built even closer to men’s occupations in buildings with windowless walls.
Pat Collins was another woman in another state. She was conventionally good-looking with the sort of attractive and competent features one finds in secretaries to important executives or in the woman who is supervisor of hostesses for an airline. She had black hair pinned up high and green-blue eyes bright as the lights in a valuable stone. Her arms and legs were very slim, and she smiled a lot as she talked to the Press. She seemed flustered, and not unravaged by the tension of the last few days. Her remarks were polite, enthusiastic, hardworking. She said that by the time they touched down on the moon, she was cheering, but in fact she had the glitter of an actress who is loyal to the company and loyal to the production, and so will mouth the lines clearly even if the theater is half-empty, the play is falling apart, and the cast will be given their notice in another night. She was loyal to what was demanded of her, but the strain was showing—of the three wives she had had the most difficult relation to the event. She was obliged to suffer with the other wives as an equal among equals, share the agonies and the jubilation of the landing with them, yet in fact her husband was not landing, he was up in the air all alone, he would be alone for another day or more, sometimes alone on the back side of the moon while the others explored ground no living man had stepped upon. She had a face which was obviously not without ambition, one of those faces which exhibit no outrageous vice but nonetheless want the best for themselves, not ruthless so much as ready to commit oneself to the partner and work all the way to go all the way. Now her husband had gone 99.9 percent of the way. If it was secretly hard on him, it would have to be twice as hard on her. What a role to play! The interviewers asked her again and again, “Do you mind that your husband is not landing with the others?” And again and again in a voice which was using the reserves of her good looks she kept replying in a tone determinedly bright (and so bumped over to the edge of the haggard) that she didn’t mind a bit and knew Mike didn’t either. The laws of propriety at NASA went as deep as the regulations at a hospital—woe to any astronaut or wife who uttered in public any sentiment which would fail to bore the expectations of fifty million viewers. There was a true and proper standard of behavior for every public situation in which they might find themselves. A clear rule of measure: do not under any circum
stance say anything more interesting than Richard Nixon would say in the same situation. That was the clubhouse rule; Pat Collins was obeying it. Since she also had the look of a woman who must have real flashes of Irish beauty when relaxed, the expostulations of complete happiness made her remarks so ordinary that Aquarius discovered afterward he had not worked to take a note.
Down the block was the Aldrin house, a structure of pale orange brick with another steep roof. There was a wait for Mrs. Aldrin. It had begun to rain out of an uneven lead-colored hesitant sky—a few drops would tattoo on the big Texas leaves of the modest suburban trees and then halt, then rain a little harder, stop again. It was thought at first that the delay was due to uncertainty whether to begin the interview under such conditions—after a while a rumor circulated that Mrs. Aldrin was primping for the Press. It made sense to Aquarius. She had wanted to be an actress—she had worked at having a career for a period, had made the rounds against the objections of her father. Having been married to three women who were actresses at one time or another, one of them even a modest movie star who had her career much interrupted for such marrying, Aquarius was able to make brokenhearted jokes about the woes of any man so foolish as to smash into the devotions of an acting career by an act of marriage. As a consequence he was naturally interested in Mrs. Aldrin. She, like Jan Armstrong, had had a long courtship. He was obliged to recognize on looking at a newspaper photo that she looked much like her husband, as indeed Jan Armstrong looked like her mate, and Pat Collins like Mike Collins. He did not understand these marriages of people who looked alike and courted each other for years—he did not know if the delay of proper people who looked alike came from deep respect for marriage, or was rather excessive caution to make certain one’s narcissism would find the cleanest mirror. He did not know. It seemed to him he had always gotten married in a hurry to women who were remarkably different, except for his final inability to get along with them. Gloomy as the weather was Aquarius. From time to time, like the memory of a telegram whose news was so awful one kept circling the fact of it, came back the simple unalterable fact that Teddy Kennedy had been in a bad accident and a girl had drowned and he had not reported it until morning.
Joan Aldrin had blond hair, she was a big woman with generous features, nose, teeth, mouth, there, all there, but finally she was all eyes. They were the large expressive soulful instruments of a woman who had a real and intense awareness of her stage, which is to say a sense of the air she offered, the way it was received, the space between. She made a good entrance beneath an umbrella thoughtfully held over her by the man who served as guide from the house to a roped-off space between the trees, she was a lady who transmitted palpable gratitudes for courtesies rendered, she had the ability to exercise the air, but not as a flirt or a sexual provocation, rather as a tragedienne one instant, a comedienne the next, she had the quick-changing vital bounce of a woman who might have made a reasonable career in musical comedy—she had as she spoke the slightly slow withheld timing, the meaningless but tasty syncopation that women who belt out a song give to a dull line. So, as she spoke, it was fun to listen.
“What were you doing when they landed?”
“Well, I was holding onto the wall. I was praying,” she said in a loud and syncopated whisper.
She was at once utterly serious, and camping it up. A part of her had been in agonies of suspense which went right into the agonies and deepest attachments of her marriage—another part of her, droll as the humor of her full nose had been obliged to see herself—“Here you are, big girl, holding onto the wall at a time like this!”
The interview went on. Aquarius monitored it with a mild part of his brain. There was talk about one activity, then another—what the plans were for watching the moon walk—would the children stay up, so forth. The mood was sluggish. The Press had interviewed two wives already.
She was too much of a performer to come in third in a three-horse race. “Listen,” she cried out suddenly in a big voice, waking up the Press. “Aren’t you all excited?” She looked around coquettishly, carefully, as if to measure what employment could be made of an audience as supersophisticated and sodden as this. Then it came over her, as it had come over everyone else from time to time. There were men on the moon.
“They did it!” she shrieked happily. “They did it!”
After she had gone back inside, there was a vacuum. Her vitality was gone. One wouldn’t have minded more of her.
Aquarius was left with his gloom. It was finally a dubious male occupation to interview the wives of men who were heroes for the day. He was depressed as he walked away thinking of his own wife, and his own marriage, now deteriorating—what work to be obliged to look in on other marriages in their hour of triumph!
IV
That night, the walk on the moon had been scheduled to begin long after midnight, so plans had been laid for late moon-watching parties. But the astronauts, to no one’s surprise, were in no mood to sleep, and the moon walk was rescheduled for eight in the evening. Yet, this once, the astronauts were not on time.
Waiting in the movie theater, the Press was in a curious state of mingled celebration and irritation. It was hard not to feel like a fool. They were journalists, not movie critics, and tonight they would be taking notes on the events which transpired upon a video screen. Of course, the climax of days of the most difficult kind of reporting was finally at hand, but it was a little as if one’s nervous system had been appropriated and the final shake would take place in somebody else’s room.
The psychology of journalists is not easy to comprehend—they scurry around like peons, they have the confidence of God. Over the years they develop an extraordinary sense of where the next victory is located. If a man gives a press conference and is not surrounded by reporters when it is over, he need not wonder how his fortunes are moving—the reporters have already told him. It is for this reason journalists pick up the confidence that they shape events—in fact they are only sensors in the currents of the churn, Venturi tubes to give you the speed of the history which passes. Nonetheless, there is no psychological reality like a man’s idea of himself. Even if a writer has lost the best reaches of his talent by putting out facts for years which have been stripped of their nuance—writing newspaper stories in short—still he retains an idea of himself: it is that his eye on an event may be critical to correct reportage of it. Now put five hundred reporters in a room to report on the climax of an event “equal in importance to that moment in evolution when aquatic life came crawling up on the land,” and put a movie screen in front of them, and a television transmission on that screen which is not only a pioneer effort in communication from a satellite one good quarter of a million miles away, but is also, you may be sure, wildly out of focus. Reporters wear eyeglasses in order not to miss the small print—bad focus on the screen puts a new injury right inside the wound of the previous injury. Something in them reverted. Watching the mooncast, they were like college kids on Friday night in the town movie house—one never knew what would make their laughter stir next, but their sense of the absurd was quick and furious. Like college students who roar with disgust because by God they were being trained to run a supposedly reasonable world with highly reasonable skills, and yet the fools who made this movie had the real power, so the press took the mooncast on its own literal terms of spectacle—where it was good as spectacle they loved it, where it was poor they mocked.
But let us take it from the start. The screen was dark when the voices began, and since it stayed without image for many minutes while one heard the voices of the astronauts working to get ready, a strain developed in the audience. Would the picture ever come on tonight, or had something gone wrong?
Then one learned from the Public Affairs Officer that the Portable Life Support Systems were working—the astronauts were now connected by umbilical tubes to the big white box on their back, that box which could cool them, clear the fog from their helmets, give them oxygen to breathe, and absorb the waste
s of their exhalation. But the minutes went by. There was no image on the screen. Oxygen was being used. They had only a few hours of Life Support in the system—would they be obliged to use it overcoming the difficulties of opening the hatch? Hoots and a hum of restlessness worked through the theater. The journalists were nervous. That rare hysteria which is generated by an inability to distinguish between the apocalyptic and the absurd was generating. What if—assuming they could actually see something—what if Armstrong were to take a step on the moon and simply disappear? Whatever would one do in this theater? The event would be a horror to watch if tragedy occurred; yet it would be a humiliation if it all went on schedule.
A cheer not unmixed with mockery came at the announcement at 9:40 in the evening that the hatch was open. Still no image on the screen. Now followed long incomprehensible instructions back and forth, talk of window clanks and water valves, high-gain antenna and glycol pumps. Out of all this, quiet exhortations from Aldrin to Armstrong. Through the words emerged the realization that Armstrong, made twice bulky by his space suit and the Portable Life Support System on his back, was trying to push through the open hatch of the Lem out onto the small metal porch which led to the ladder which in turn he could descend to the moon ground. It was obviously a very tight fit to get through the hatch. As Aldrin gave instructions there was an inevitable suggestion of the kind of dialogue one hears between an obstetrician and a patient in the last minutes before birth.
Of a Fire on the Moon Page 13
