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.