Toward the end of the mourning period my grandfather attended the Twelfth Space Congress, in Cocoa Beach, Florida.
On the opening Saturday the first panel discussion was held over coffee and Danish in the Egret Room of the Atlantis Beach Lodge. An engineer on the team developing the new space shuttle led off his session by denying that he had ever referred to NASA’s astronaut corps as “a buncha flying truck drivers.” His accent had been engineered in Flatbush. His necktie and lapels were as wide as tire sidewalls. He wore round granny glasses and his sandy hair in a puffball. Astronauts were heroes, he said, that was obvious. And they would remain heroes right up to the day the Space Transportation System (STS) became operational. After that, “flying truck drivers” would be a fair description. Everybody in the Egret Room cracked up.
My grandfather laughed, too. He was on his way out the door with hot coffee from the catering table in a Styrofoam cup, already running late for his weekly appointment with grief.
“Space travel is still an incredibly exciting adventure in 1975,” the young engineer said. “But don’t worry, because at NASA we’re doing everything we can to change that.”
My grandfather laughed again, lingering in the doorway. In his view, heroism (if there was such a thing) would always be the residue of training. If you had been well trained, then adventure was something you hoped to avoid.
At the sound of his laughter, a woman sitting in the last row of chairs turned around and smiled at him. She patted the seat of the empty chair beside her and lifted an eyebrow. She was fifty, but her hand was youthful, the nails painted geranium pink. She was a vice president of accounting at Walt Disney World and recording secretary of the committee that put on this annual aerospace congress. She lived in Orlando. She had a daughter at Duke and an ex-husband who had flown jets for the navy in Vietnam. She wore L’Air du Temps. She also wore panty hose, which, until the previous evening, my grandfather had never encountered at close range, my grandmother having stuck till the last—February 10, 1974, (probable) age fifty-two—with girdle and garter belt. A high school classmate of Tony Bennett. An amateur photographer. Owner of a late-model Mercury Cougar the color of a spoonful of sweetened condensed milk.
He riffled through this deck of facts, trying to force the ace of the woman’s name. He was appalled to realize that he had forgotten it since the night before. The name of the first woman he had slept with since losing his wife, the first since 1944 who was not my grandmother! The woman gave the empty chair another pat, like she was attempting to lure a recalcitrant pussycat. My grandfather could feel his cheeks and the back of his neck prickling. He felt like he might have to be sick. He shook his head, hoping the look on his face came off wistful but fearing that it clearly read as nausea. He turned to go, using the cup of hot coffee as a focus of attention, of the will to refrain from vomiting. He escorted stomach and brimming cup along the carpeted corridor, a man in no kind of hurry. Past the Panther Room, past the Manatee Room, out into the lobby of the motor lodge.
She caught up to him by the registration table. It was stacked with bound copies of the proceedings from last year’s congress, at which the guest speaker had been Gene Roddenberry. Their tryst had begun at the Friday-night cocktail reception, held in Ramon’s Rainbow Room atop a space-age modernist bank in downtown Cocoa Beach, with a mutual confession of love for Star Trek. My grandfather had attended the annual space congress for ten straight years as co-owner and director of product development for MRX, Inc., and had skipped nine straight cocktail receptions until last night’s. He could not entirely dismiss the possibility that even in the midst of mourning my grandmother, he had been on the prowl for female company that year. But an annual conference of professionals and amateurs of rocketry and space travel was a pretty stupid place to go prowling, even at Ramon’s Rainbow Room.
“You okay, mister?” She had brought him a plastic lid for the coffee cup and a banana. She made a quick survey of his face, his hairline tingling with sweat, yesterday’s knot reused for his necktie. “You look pretty green. Hold this.”
She handed him the banana. She took a tissue from the hip pocket of the raw silk blazer, more or less the color of her fingernails, that she must have changed into that morning after slipping unnoticed out of his room. At seven o’clock his alarm had gone off, and when he reached for her in a place where for so many months there had been only cold linens, the trace of her warmth and lingering odor of L’Air du Temps made the bed feel emptier than usual; he had lived for eleven months with bereavement, but he had never felt so bereft.
“I know it’s probably the last thing you feel like doing, but if you ate that banana, you would feel better.” She dabbed at his clammy brow with the tissue. “Potassium. Electrolytes.”
He peeled the banana, ate half of it. Almost immediately, he felt better. “Oh,” he said, feeling like an idiot for not having realized sooner. “I have a hangover.”
“Guess it’s been a while.”
It was not a question but a laminate of implication and sass. Last night he had in all probability consumed more alcohol than cumulatively in all the years since V-E Day. Clearly, she knew more about him and his life than he could remember having told her. He made a quick probe at his memory, and guessed that some portion of the previous evening was likely never to be fully accounted for. He hoped that he had not sexually disappointed this good woman. He hoped that he had not cried on her shoulder. He feared that he might have done both.
“You better go,” she said. She looked at her wristwatch, a man’s big Accutron Astronaut. The lady was a space nut all the way. “Melbourne is a good half hour, depending on the traffic.”
Among the things he could not remember having told her, apparently, was that he would be missing that morning’s session on “The Space Shuttle (STS): A Progress Report” to drive down to Melbourne, Florida, a place he had never been, to say kaddish for my grandmother. He had found Beth Isaac listed in the Yellow Pages.
“Here,” she said. She took the cup of coffee from him and tenderly fitted it with the lid she had brought. A drop splashed the meat of her thumb and she said, “Ow.” She licked away the droplet and handed the cup back to him. “Aramaic, right?”
It seemed he had gone into a fair amount of detail about the nature of Jewish customs relating to death and mourning. “That’s right,” he said.
“And where do they speak Aramaic again?”
“Nowhere.”*
She gave his right arm a squeeze just above the elbow. He was not pleased to detect a certain amount of pity in her eyes. She brushed his cheek with her lips. “Finish your banana,” she said.
That afternoon, after he had returned from his errand in Melbourne, he would catch a glimpse of her as she was walking into the Atlantis Beach Lodge’s banquet room to attend the award luncheon. She formed part of a crowd of admirers and well-wishers, including all four of the other female attendees, around the imposing silver-haired gentleman who had come to Cocoa Beach to collect the award in question. That glimpse would turn out to be, as far my grandfather could remember afterward, the last time he ever saw her. And yet she would turn out to have been a key figure in shaping the subsequent course of his life.
He finished the banana she had given him as he was walking out to his car, and that was when he suddenly remembered her name, though by the time he got around to telling me the story, he had forgotten it again.*
*