“Uh-huh.”
My grandfather went into the kitchen and got out the waffle iron. Then he told Sally he was going to change into his snake-hunting clothes. Sally didn’t say anything, or if she did, neither of them recalled it to me afterward. She had gone on into the living room and was trying to get her head around it. There were, as she would later put it to me, rockets everywhere. On every available horizontal surface: the coffee table, the bookshelves, on top of the television set. French Arianes, Japanese Mus, Chinese CZs, an Argentine Gamma Centauro. The expanse of wall that carried from the living area to the dining area beyond, which in Sally’s unit was taken up by a large hutch full of china, and in other units was often occupied by family photo galleries or earth-toned batik prints of Israeli and biblical scenes, was here taken up by four glass shelves mounted on metal brackets from just above the terrazzo floor to within fifteen inches of the ceiling. These held models of known Soviet launch vehicles, from the early R-7s that had put Sputniks aloft to the Proton. On another, relatively small shelf on the wall over the television was a collection of American rockets: the Atlas, the Aerobee, the Titan. Sally didn’t fully grasp all of this, and even when she glanced at the plaques mounted on each base, the names and designations meant very little to her. She could see the incredible detail, the antennae and hatch hinges, the care that had been taken with paint and identifying markings and national symbols. It was all very impressive, but in her view it was not necessarily admirable.
In the dining room table during the first years of my grandfather’s residency, there had been a proper dining set that was, to my knowledge, never used. At some point he had gotten rid of the chairs, shoved the table to one side, and put in a workbench. Sally looked at the orderly chaos of plastic and wire on the workbench, the rows and columns of little plastic drawers, each labeled with a bit of masking tape on which an enigmatic hand had scrawled something like ailerons or rearview mirrors or bushings.
“You made all these?” she called out. She was not able to keep the note of horror out of her voice. It was not that she had any particular objection to hobbies and hobbyists—they were hardly rare among her cohort or in the units of Fontana Village. But in the scope, depth, and singular-mindedness of my grandfather’s focus on rocketry and in the degree of painstaking detail he brought to bear, there was such naked obsessiveness that she was appalled. Not, again, because she had any objection to obsessiveness—on the contrary. When it came to art, she thought, the more naked the better. In the execution of her own paintings, she relied on obsessiveness and the compulsion to keep going, dig deeper, push further.
(“I guess it was just, well . . . Rockets?” she told me. “The whole Freudian aspect. I mean, the decor of this man’s house is basically nothing but phallic symbols.”)
But not quite. She lifted the sheet and looked at the model of LAV One that my grandfather had completed the day before they met. She knelt down to see it from eye level. She tried to imagine herself driving that tiny rover around the rim of the moon’s northernmost crater. She couldn’t manage it.
“How the waffles coming?” my grandfather said.
He came clomping out dressed in blue coveralls, black waders, and a pink-and-green madras bucket hat from the lost and found, courtesy of Devaughn.
“Oh no.” Sally stood up and turned to see what was making all the noise. “No, dear. That is not at all what you wear to go on a snake hunt.”
“It isn’t?”
Sally shook her head. “Think you know everything,” she said.
For a while she vanished into his walk-in closet. There was a pole on either side, but the left-hand pole was bare of clothes or hangers. The right-hand pole held scattered guayaberas and pairs of slacks and the charcoal suit he had worn to my grandmother’s funeral and every funeral since. He heard a mock-bitter sigh that did not sound entirely mock. Then he heard her raucous seagull laugh. She came out holding the aloha shirt that I had given him as a joke, palm green with topless brown hula girls who varied by color of lei. She handed him the shirt on its hanger without comment, and a pair of chinos. While he took off his boots and coveralls and put on the clothes she wanted him to wear to the snake hunt, he heard her talking on the phone. When he came out of the bedroom a second time, she was holding a Sputnik in her left hand like the skull of Yorick and using its accurately mirrored surface—an effect painstakingly achieved—to check the state of her hair bun. She looked him over. “Much better. Much more effective,” she said.
As she returned the Sputnik to its place, taking care with the four prongs of its long antennae, its identity seemed to register with her. “I was living in California then,” she said. “First husband. I remember one night there was a party going on, if you looked up you could see it, this moving pinpoint like a star in a hurry. People were afraid it might have a bomb or be a weapon of some kind, remember? Some bozo tried to convince me to sleep with him because the death ray was going to come down and vaporize us all.”
“And what happened?”
“He was right, we all got vaporized.”
“It was the booster rocket that you could see,” my grandfather said. “To be precise. You needed binoculars to see the satellite itself.”
“Let’s definitely be precise. What’s this one?” She leaned in to read the plaque. “Sputnik 2. The one with the dog?”
“Laika.”
“Laika! Right. And this one?” She pointed to a model of a satellite that looked something like a cruder version of the familiar space capsules of the manned era. “Lunik 3.”
“It took the first pictures of the far side of the moon. No one had ever seen it before.”
“Because it was so dark?”
“That’s a misnomer.”
“Oh, is it.”
“It all depends on how you define dark.”
“Indeed it does,” Sally said. “Now let’s go hunt that snake.”
She drove them to the shopping center in her Mercedes. Daimler and all the rest had used more or less the same type of slave labor as the Mittelwerk, and my grandfather disapproved in particular of Jews driving German cars, but it was a beautiful thing, with its stacked headlights and its grille like a chrome jukebox. Its six cylinders bubbled like mountain water over rocks. Anyway, it was 1990, and he would soon be seventy-five, and there was no use and certainly no virtue in holding on to a grudge. The Jews had outlived Hitler and he had outlived von Braun.
He was not accustomed to being driven by a woman who was not his daughter. Even when my mother was around, he generally did the driving. He surrendered the role to Sally along with his qualms about German automobiles and his doubts about the soundness of her ideas when it came to hunting pythons.
She had placed an order at the Italian delicatessen next to the Piggly Wiggly. Bread, a salami, a container of olives, a container of artichoke hearts, a container of stuffed hot peppers, three kinds of cheese, hard, soft, and semi-soft.
“What, no semi-hard cheese?” my grandfather said.
“That’s you,” said Sally.
She had two folding beach chairs in the trunk of the car along with an old wool blanket. He stood while she hung the chairs from his shoulder and then led her to the padlocked gate.
“Now what?” Sally said.
He did something odd then. He set the chairs on the ground beside the grocery bag with the food. He knelt down in front of the lock, working hard not to grimace or grunt. He put his ear to the padlock and twirled the dial to the left a little ways. He put an air of concentration on his face.
“You can hear it?”
“Sh.”
He stopped at the first number and then went on with the safecracker routine until the padlock sprang open.
“That is very impressive,” Sally said gratifyingly. “I’m really impressed.”