Moonglow by Michael Chabon
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 m
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:
Scientific inquiry and pursuit were inherently amoral or ultramoral.
The wonder of rockets was inextricable from their fitness as instruments of death.
The ideals of justice, of openness, of protecting the weak—of fundamental decency—for which he had fought, and Alvin Aughenbaugh and so many others had died, meant nothing to the country that espoused them. They were encumbrances to be circumvented in the exercise of power. They had not, in fact, survived the war. This last implied that:
In a fundamental way both proved and exemplified by the spectacular postwar ascent of Wernher von Braun, Nazi Germany had won the war.
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. U
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.