“I did this crazy thing where I packed a bag with his stuff, the book, the pictures. Like he was just going home to Fontana Village after a nice long visit.”
I got up and she passed me the spray-painted disk. I peered in through the uptilted flap of the hatch at the little people my grandfather had hoped and failed and succeeded to shelter and keep safe. The three-quarter-inch grandparents on their gravity couch, the three-quarter-inch mother in a G-chair with her half-inch preteen son in the chair beside her and her pea of a second-grader perched on her lap. Everyone wearing comfortable but practical blue coveralls and grip slippers. The lush tops of the carrots, the lipstick-kiss roses. The detail was rudimentary at that scale, so my grandfather had painted the faces with skin tones and left it at that. At first the blankness of our faces always used to seem weird if not symbolic in some way I didn’t care to contemplate, but now I was used to it. You could imagine smiles into those blanks. You could write any kind of story across them that you pleased.
*
My grandfather stopped talking a day before he died. In the course of what turned out to be our last real conversation, I happened to ask if he had ever again crossed paths with von Braun after the time in Cocoa Beach. My grandfather shook his head. It hurt to shake his head. He tried to push himself up into a sitting position with a grunt of impatience. I helped him adjust the bed so that the back was more vertical, but he said that was worse. So I lowered the back to a more oblique angle than the original one. He said that was double worse. I raised the bed, fluffed the pillows, slid a pillow under his knees. That put too much pressure on his heels. The pain medication, he said, was making him feel like he wanted to crawl out of his skin. And it wasn’t like it made the pain go away; it just helped you swim across it without sinking. We gave up trying to make him more comfortable.
“Nah, I never saw von Braun again,” he said. “He died a couple years later. I forget what the cause was, something painful. I heard he was in a hell of a lot of pain.”
I waited, thinking he might be about to append something along the lines of All of which he richly deserved or So maybe there is a God after all.
He didn’t say anything. He lay there with his eyes closed for a long time after that, sculling along the surface of the sea of pain a little nearer toward his story’s end or maybe, if that great eschatologist Wernher Magnus Maximilian Freiherr von Braun turned out to be right, toward the story on the opposite shore that was waiting to begin.
Acknowledgments
Walter Gates Gill (collection manager for the Health branch of the New Jersey State Archives, Trenton), Judy Fosca and Evan Alkabetz (respectively research librarians at the John F. Kennedy Space Center Library, Cape Canaveral and the CIA Library, Langley), Esther Stecher (née Mangel), Jessica Sichel, Barry Kahn, and Lorraine Medved-Engel, if they existed, would have been instrumental to the completion of this work. Ian Faloona and Justine Frischmann most decidedly do exist, and their kindness and hospitality repeatedly saved this book’s life. The MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire, would seem in its unstinting perfection to be impossible and yet it, too, miraculously exists, as do Phil Pavel and all the staff at the highly unlikely Chateau Marmont, Hollywood.
Not long before he died, my mother’s maternal uncle, Stanley Werbow (1922–2005), a professor of medieval German at the University of Texas and a former staff sergeant operating in the field with the 849th Signal Intelligence Service at the Battle of Monte Cassino, was persuaded by one of his daughters to dictate some memories of growing up Jewish in Philadelphia and Washington in the early part of the twentieth century. Though fragmentary and rambling, that narrative, as vivid, intelligent, and wry as Stan Werbow himself, provided the spark that kindled this one, along with some crucial bits of atmosphere. Uncle Stan—who stirred the pot that served up The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, too—was among my most supportive and most exacting readers. I hope that he would have been pleased with this monstrous stepchild of those artless reminiscences; I know that, if not, he would never have hesitated to tell me.
Neither Stanley Lovell’s Of Spies and Stratagems, Michael Neufeld’s Von Braun: Dreamer of Space, Engineer of War, Annie Jacobsen’s Operation Paperclip, Bob Ward’s Doctor Space, Dennis Piszkiewicz’s The Nazi Rocketeers, Murray Dubin’s South Philadelphia, nor Gilbert Sanders’s Jewish Baltimore: A Family Album is to blame for this pack of lies. Keith Jarrett’s The K?ln Concerts, Windy and Carl’s Depths and A Winged Victory for the Sullen’s self-titled first album reliably screened out the voices whenever they stirred in their corners. And when I was looking for a path of escape, Alejandro Jodorowsky’s charming introduction to his The Way of Tarot made a Fool of me.
I am grateful for the help of Steven Barclay, Jennifer Barth, Jonathan Burnham, Sonya Cheuse, Amy Cray, Mary Evans, Simon Frankel, Madalyn Garcia, Courtney Hodell, Adalis Martinez, Maddie Mau, Howie Sanders, E. Beth Thomas, Lydia Weaver, Matt Weiner, and Emily Werbow, and for the inspiration, understanding, and blessed distraction provided by Sophie, Zeke, Rose, and Abe Chabon.
Finally, as at the beginning and at every step along the way: eternal gratitude for the support, encouragement, love, protection, and, above all, for the existence, however improbable, of Ayelet Waldman.