by Kate Wilhelm
It was the goddamn helplessness, he thought, pushing his hands hard against his throbbing temples, willing the headache to vanish. Goddamn helplessness, he muttered under his breath; that was what finally made people riot in the streets and try to burn down every symbol of better times. That was what made the Westerners hate and despise the Easterners, who in turn feared and hated them and the threat they posed. That was what made the militarists want to take over, just to be able to try to do something, anything, no matter how desperate a gamble it was.
And that was what Sid had been talking about, he thought dully. Anything is better than nothing, any action better than no action. Even a bankrupt government might react with final desperation to the crushing onslaught of the humiliation of helplessness.
Ramona Cluny had gained a few pounds in her middle years, but her face was unlined, and her eyes were bright blue, youthful looking. She had been aghast when Cluny told her there had been no offers for a bright young doctor.
“They’re crazy! Have they lost interest in the stars suddenly? They think they know enough about black holes and cosmic rays to do them for all times?”
Cluny laughed. Those were the only two astronomical terms she knew, and she used them whenever the conversation turned to his career. His mother had come back to Chapel Hill, where she had gone to school, where she had met his father. She had been very practical about it, saying, “There are always students who need extra money, and are willing to mow the lawn, or cut down a tree limb, or rake a yard, whatever needs doing. This crop leaves, there’s a new one. I’ll get by.” And she was getting by quite well. At first, after his father’s death, he had worried about her being able to cope with the world alone, but the efficient way she had rearranged her life made him suspect that she had done the coping for a long time and he simply had not been aware. Now she raised a garden every year to supplement her ration coupons; and she traded her surplus vegetables and berries for eggs and milk, whatever else she needed. What she could not use immediately, she canned and dried, and her trading material lasted throughout the year.
“What will you do now?” she asked.
“I thought I’d hang around here, if you can put up with me, and take a rest. I’ve been grinding away for a long time. And I might have a go at Dad’s papers. I guess he left a lot of stuff behind, didn’t he?” That was as directly as he could put the question, he realized. He never had asked before, and now he wondered why he had not, why she had not mentioned them if there were files or notebooks, anything at all.
They were sitting in her living room, drinking tea. After dinner he had helped her do the dishes, and they had taken the tea to the porch, but a chill had driven them indoors again. A June bug buzzed at the screened door and midges flew erratically around the lampshade, inside it, out again, back inside. The single lamp drew every insect to it: midges, moths, a lacewing. . . . The little noises grew louder as he waited for his mother to answer. Finally she cleared her throat, put her cup down, and leaned forward.
“I knew one day I’d have to talk about the last years,” she said. “I kept thinking you’d ask something that I couldn’t answer without explaining everything, and I don’t know enough to explain everything. He was not well for a long time, longer than anyone knew.” Again she paused, not so long this time. “I can tell you exactly when he became ill. The night Dan Brighton died. It killed your father too, but it took him longer, that’s the only difference. He might as well have been up there, in the little capsule along with Dan. He never got over it. He began to blame himself. He blamed himself for getting the station closed down, for sending Dan up that last time, for the malfunction, for everything. He became obsessed with it. He wanted to burn all his papers. We moved several times during those last few years, of course. Georgetown, then Florida. I told him his papers were in a safety-deposit box, that no one could get to them, that no one knew anything about the box. That would satisfy him for a time, but he would start it over again. He had to burn the evidence. They would destroy him. They would destroy you.” Her voice had been steady, but now it wavered, and stopped. She lifted her tea and the cup clattered on the saucer.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“What could you have done? I was terrified the Air Force would find out, give him a medical discharge. Section Eight? Do they still call it that?”
“Good God! Mother, you should have told me. I could have come home. I might have done something!”
She shook her head. “I decided,” she said. “It was my decision. I made him take the early retirement. I gave him no rest until he agreed to it. I knew he couldn’t pass his next medical, and he would tell them he caused the accidents, Dan’s death, everything. They were looking for a scapegoat. He would have offered himself. I couldn’t let him do it. He made something unique and beautiful and they would have wrapped it around his neck and strangled him with it. I know what they can do. I wouldn’t let it happen.”
Cluny felt he was listening to a stranger, someone he never had known at all. He remembered her on trips, whistling for the birds, being answered as if she were one of them. He thought of her quiet voice reading countless stories and books to him, how she had held him when he had been hurt, all the times he had been able to weep because she made weeping by a boy seem natural. And all those years, he had not known her at all.
“Toward the end,” she said quietly now, “whenever he begged me for his papers so he could get rid of them, I told him he had already burned them. That seemed to satisfy him. I thought it satisfied him. Then the day he died, he told me to let you have them. To let you decide. We’d been deceiving each other a long time, each of us afraid the other would find out.”
Cluny’s throat was too tight and dry for him to speak. He swallowed tea, got up to pour for both of them, and when he sat down again, he had forgotten what he intended to say.
“But I was home off and on during those years. I should have noticed something.”
She shook her head. “Sometimes he was away on trips, sometimes, often during the last two years, he was in his room and I just told you he was away. He knew, dear. Sometimes he was fine, and then he was home when you were. When he was ill, we thought it best to say he was away on business. He was afraid it would ruin your life to know. It was important to him to have you finish school without any worries, the way he had gone to school. That was very important to him.”
Cluny stood up and started to pace the pretty little room. There were scattered Persian rugs on the shiny floors; vases from China, Japan, France, were filled with roses and lilacs. The room was cluttered with art from all over the world. All of it was familiar; he had grown up with it, and all of it looked strange, as if he were seeing it for the first time. Like this woman saying these incredible things about a man he never had known.
“You should have told me,” he said again.
“I couldn’t have,” Ramona said wearily. “You had come to despise him by then. What would have been the point?”
“That’s not true!” He felt a flush sweep through him and he kept his back to his mother.
“Anyway,” she went on, “he always knew you’d want the papers. Even when he wanted to burn them, he knew. He was afraid I wouldn’t be able to keep them for you.”
“How did you? I thought they sent someone to collect stuff like that?”
“They did. He had a small file in his office. They took that. The others were in my trunks, where I put them the first night he talked about destroying them.” She stood up also then. “I’ve never looked at them. They’re all about the station, I think. I’m not sure.”
“You hated it, didn’t you?”
“We all did,” she said, arranging the tea things on the tray, her back to him. “All the wives hated it and were jealous of it. It was like a disease, something only men caught and never recovered from, something that finally killed them off one after another.” She straightened, holding the tray, still not looking at him. “Why do you want the papers n
ow? It’s dead. It will stay dead, won’t it?”
Cluny found he could not answer, and after a moment she left the living room with the tray. Presently he heard her washing their things, making too much noise with the dishes.
“Three things she does when she wants you to bug off and leave her be,” his father had said a long time ago. “She’ll go out and start yanking up weeds like the devil. Never saw a woman pull weeds like that in my life. Weed a whole garden in an hour when she’s in that mood. Or else she’ll bang the dishes as if she wants to break every last one of them. Bang, crash, bang. You stay out when you hear that. And if there aren’t any dishes to wash, and it’s not the right time of year to yank out weeds, she’ll get out her quilting box and start counting pieces. Never quilts, never will, but she sure as hell can count quilt pieces.”
Sid had been right, Cluny thought. He had guessed right about the files kept at home. And she had defied the space administration, the Air Force, the entire U.S. government, by hiding those documents in her trunks under quilts and quilt pieces.
He left the house and started walking the quiet streets. This was a hilly section of the old city, where the trees had not been cut for a hundred fifty years or longer and now were giants with intertwined arms, as if drawn together to share secrets. A distant whippoorwill called, over and over and over.
He had known, he realized. He had known more than he had been able to admit to himself. And since she had denied it, he had been able to deny it also, to pretend he knew nothing. His trips home had been infrequent because they had moved around so much, he had said, and he thought that was at least a partial truth. They had moved a lot after the station had closed down. Apparently no one had known what to do with an ex-space satellite authority. But they had discouraged visits too, he realized now. One year they had given him money to go to Europe for the summer vacation; another year they had mailed him the house keys and they had been gone, on a tour of duty, she had said at the time. Possibly they had gone no farther than the next town, he thought now.
All right, he told himself sharply. Enough. It was done.
There were papers, and his father had known that he should not have them in his personal possession. There was that. Also, his father had thought he, Cluny, should have them. Trunks full of dreams. Tomorrow he would start sharing his father’s dreams for the first time. Before, when he had lived at home, when he had been a boy, he had taken it for granted that his father was the iron hand behind the satellite. It might have been a bridge, or a skyscraper; it would be there for all time. That was how he had thought of it, when he had thought of it.
He headed back to the house. It was not like that, he knew now. His father had built a dream, had made it real and tangible and visible for everyone else to share with him. And in the end, they had rejected it, and his father had found that the dream was not separate from him, but was such a living part of him that when it died, the rest had to follow.
It wasn’t just the death of the dream, Cluny thought then, but the price he had paid for a dream that had turned out to be empty. He knew exactly when his hero worship of his father had crashed. He had been fourteen. He remembered his own awkwardness, how certain he had been that everyone was staring at his big feet, his bony arms and wrists, the funny way his clothes hung on him. If they were long enough, they were too loose and baggy. His father had been neat and handsome in his full-dress uniform.
“You mean that slob Mannheim’s coming here to dinner? He’s a fascist pig. I wouldn’t let him within a mile of my house!”
“Butt out. It’s business.”
Cluny walked to the table and deliberately removed his place card and tore it in half. “Sure,” he said.
Something happened that night that was never to be repaired. There was no way his father could recall the shame and humiliation he had revealed before his face set in a stony mask of rage, and no way Cluny could undo the look of contempt he had not tried to hide. How many asses had the old man kissed to get what he wanted, how many swine had he brown-nosed, how many jackasses had he bowed to?
After his father’s funeral he had gone over that scene repeatedly. He had been young, too idealistic, too naive. His father should not have been so hurt by anything a green kid blurted out. Cluny had writhed under the coals of guilt he heaped on himself, and his excuses and explanations meant nothing. Through them all he heard over and over his parting words that night: “I’ll never put myself in a place where I have to eat shit for anything!”
Back in the house, he lifted the telephone to call Sid, then put the instrument down again. There would be time. Alpha had waited nearly ten years; it could wait another day or two.
He thought then of Lina Davies, so breathtakingly beautiful that he had not dared approach her after all. He had frozen, had slipped in time to his past, when, as an adolescent, he had known no girl would look at him, answer him if he spoke. It had been that same adolescent self who knew she was more perfect than a human being could be, she was a goddess, a divinity. And he was nothing. On the crowded sidewalk where he had waited all morning for her to appear, he stood rooted until she disappeared in the midst of people; then he had turned and walked hopelessly away.
Now, his hand on the telephone, he saw her again; her shoulders bare in a halter dress, her hair loose on her back, the fluidity of her walk. . . . He cursed himself for being a fool. He turned off the lamp and sat in the living room until the fragrance of lilacs and roses became overpowering, and then he went to bed.
CHAPTER
3
THE attic was hot; there was a wasp nest over the east window, and a mouse nest in a dark corner at the other side. There were four trunks, assorted furniture, discarded toys and ice skates and an archery set. There was a pedal sewing machine with a beautiful floral design on the front of the cabinet; there were two mattresses and an antique brass bedstead.
Two of the trunks held nothing but bedding, out-of-date clothes that never would be used again, and many scraps of fabric, some sewn together in patterns, other loose pieces stuck in to fill corners.
The other two trunks had bedding on top, with the contents of several file drawers neatly folded into a comforter in the first one, and into a quilt in the second.
Dreams, Cluny thought, lifting the quilt out carefully, spreading it on the floor. He left the papers on the quilt, brought out the comforter and added the piles of papers to the first stacks, and then he started to sort them.
His mother called him to lunch later, to dinner still later. He was hardly aware of what they talked about either time. Late that night, she stood in the doorway of the attic silently, and when he became aware of her, he had the feeling she had been there a long time.
“I wish to God I had let him burn them,” she said. “I wish I had burned them myself.” She turned and went back down the steep stairs.
Cluny’s eyes stung and his head ached. The heat, poor lighting, sitting on a trunk hunched over, seeing a life open to view, take form, develop—it all was there—made him feel that for hours he had been inside his father’s head, had felt with him, schemed with him, suffered with him, shared triumph and finally total defeat.
Slowly he got up, his legs stiff and sore, his back hurting with a dull pain. He didn’t bother to put away the papers, but simply turned off the light, closed and locked the door, and went down. For a long time that night, he was unable to sleep. The face his father had chosen to show the world was not the face he now saw when he drew him up before his inner eye. A dreamer, even a poet, a romantic who yearned for space, for the stars: that was the self his father had hidden so well behind the competent engineer’s mask. The first fantasies of going into space had started when he was a child, and the fantasies had never changed. They had sustained him even after he realized the limits he might reach—the space station.
Asleep at last, Cluny dreamed of his father wearing a helmet and a metallic suit that gleamed when he moved; a strange weapon was in his hand—a ray gun, of cours
e. His father was piloting a small ship against the eternal black of space, and a shadow was creeping toward him, gray against black; the shadow grew until it had blotted out all the stars, the swirling brilliant dust, the spinning galaxies. Then he was his father, or at least it was he, Cluny, who was operating the ship, which was hardly bigger than a bathtub. The shadow was still expanding, one edge of it nearly reaching the metal of the ship. Cluny knew he could not let the shadow touch him, or his ship, and began to maneuver in a darting, impossible motion that eluded the shadow successfully. There was a crowd waiting for him on the planet where he landed. He could feel his face grow hot with pleasure as they cheered; then he was not looking at the people at all, but overhead at a green sky with furious clouds of magenta, yellow, scarlet, gold, all boiling, roiling, erupting in flares and explosions. They merged and the color became a dead black, an endless black that drew him toward it irresistibly. He thought, quite dearly, “When I get to the horizon, I’ll be free.” The sound of his own voice wakened him. He was sweating heavily, his bed was sodden, his hair stuck to his forehead.
The next day Cluny found a notebook with pages torn out. He frowned at it, put it aside. He was not trying to read everything yet, but was sorting, glancing through notebooks, putting the papers in chronological order. There were sketches, drawings of interiors, of the satellite against the backdrop of space, detailed plans for structural work, pages of mathematics. . . .
He frowned at a cartoon. It showed a cowboy astraddle a moon lander with its four legs extended stiffly; like a bucking horse, he realized, and his frown changed to a grin. The cowboy was throwing a lasso that would land around a mountain of a meteor streaked with bands of different colors. It looked like spumoni ice cream. It was not his father’s work, he knew. That kind of humor had been beyond him. He put it aside with the notebooks that had been torn—there were three by then. There were more cartoons, and he realized they had been done by Daniel Brighton. There were pages of small precise writing, also Daniel Brighton’s, signed by him, or initialed by him. Letters? But they were not written like letters, rather like the notes a man makes to himself.
