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. Under the circumstances, skepticism had felt like a kind of madness; to choose belief was the only way forward. It was the same with von Braun and the war itself. My grandfather chose the only way forward. He chose to believe that the bloodshed and destruction had not been in vain. It made a difference that Old Glory and not the Nationalflagge had been planted in the lunar dust. So he had put aside the letter, deciding just to try to keep out of von Braun’s way during the congress, and hope they never crossed paths. That was the motive behind his volunteering to mind the exhibition room during the Saturn Medal luncheon.
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.
Von Braun’s gaze lighted on a tall ficus in a pumpkin-shaped terra-cotta pot in the corner opposite him. He moved toward the potted plant with a hitch in his gait. He unzipped the fly of his brown suit trousers and took out his pallid old nozzle. There was a pattering, the first drops of rain hitting a dirt infield, then a fitful sloshing like somebody after a party pouring the dregs of beer bottles onto the lawn. Von Braun groaned and cursed softly to himself in the most scabrous German my grandfather had heard since the war. His own urinary vigor was no longer what it once was, and he felt an automatic pity for von Braun. The Conqueror of the Moon kept at it, and after a minute or two it was clear from the acoustics that he had himself a puddle. He coaxed out another laggard drop or two and then hunched his shoulders to zip himself up.
My grandfather forgot that he was supposed to be trying to keep out of von Braun’s way. When von Braun turned from the ficus tree, he saw my grandfather looking at him over the partition. Von Braun looked more embarrassed, certainly more contrite, than my grandfather would have expected. He felt his long-nurtured hatred of the man begin to waver. After all, how was the case of von Braun different from that of any other man whose greatness was chiefly the fruit of his ambition, that reliable breeder of monsters? Ambitious men from Hercules to Napoleon had stood ankle-deep in slaughter as they reached for the heavens. Meanwhile, there was no getting away from the fact that, thanks to von Braun’s unrelenting ambition, only one nation in the whole of human history had left its flag, not to mention a pair of golf balls, on the Moon.
“Congratulations on the prize,” my grandfather said.
“Thank you,” said von Braun. The wide-eyed look of culpability had already left his face, and now he squinted, studying my grandfather’s face. He might have been wondering if he ought to know it. He might have been trying simply to infer my grandfather’s opinion, in general or just in this instance, of a grown man who urinated into a motel flowerpot. My grandfather suspected that it was the former. “I very much appreciate the honor and support.”
“Oh, I didn’t vote for you,” my grandfather said.
Von Braun blinked and bobbed his big white unkempt head. “Who did you vote for?”
“Myself.”
Von Braun grinned and then asked my grandfather his name.
My grandfather felt his heart rate ascend steeply. Was it possible that von Braun had been told the name of the man who had uncovered the trove of V-2 documents that he’d ordered hidden, taking away one of his bargaining chips with the Allies upon capture? If von Braun should happen to recollect and recognize his name, would he call the police or have my grandfather thrown out of the congress? More to the point: Was this my grandfather’s chance, at last, to finish the job he had laid aside that night in favor of doing his duty? He was fifty-nine years old, and if he was no longer as strong as he had been at twenty-nine or thirty-nine, he was also no longer anywhere near so prone to fury. Since the day of his release from prison, he had never once gone looking for trouble. This turned out to be surprisingly effective as a means of avoiding it.
He told Wernher von Braun his name. It did not appear to ring any bells. It certainly had not come up for discussion, as von Braun observed, nor had it appeared, as far as he could recall, on the ballot.
“I was a write-in candidate,” my grandfather explained.
*
The walls of the Space Arts and Spacecrafts section of the exhibition room were hung with large-format color photos taken by attendees of the congress: Rocketdyne engines slashing a bright rip across the blue banner of a Canaveral morning. A crowd of people dressed in gumball colors, all craning their necks in the same direction to gape at something overhead. A slow-shutter telephoto exposure of a full moon rising over Mount Erebus that had been taken, according to its label, by von Braun himself during his trip to Antarctica in 1966. Oil paintings and watercolors of spacewalks, moonscapes, and splashdowns were displayed on easels of gold-painted bamboo. A number of paintings depicted with painstaking realism the unbuilt spacecraft and unvisited worlds that were the stuff of space-fan dreams. A few had been painted by the great Chesley Bonestall, a hero to my grandfather. And there were three tables of models: rockets, space planes, capsules, lunar modules, and rovers, built to a variety of scales from a variety of materials. Von Braun came around a partition from the corporate sponsors area, past a large Bonestall of Earth as seen from the Martian surface, a glowing aquamarine dot against the starry black.
Passing the models table, von Braun took a moment to admire a pair of French rockets, a Véronique and a Centaure, that my grandfather had brought with him to the show. My grandfather was identified as their modeler on little cards in front of them, and he accepted von Braun’s praise for their beauty. Von Braun came over to the demonstration table, where my grandfather was sitting behind the mess he had made. Fanciful bits of plastic in drab grays and whites were scattered across the tablecloth.