Space

by James A. Michener

  The figures were obviously folk art, but where they came from, Stanley could not at first decipher. To him they had the sentimental quality of Orozco’s marching women; indeed, they were identical in spirit. Yet Rachel loved them, and finally she told him what they represented. Perched on the bed, her head cocked alluringly so that her hair hung free, she said, “When I was thirteen my parents took me to Sweden. Mother deplored the place, finding it so different from Boston, but Father was deeply moved at seeing the bleak impoverished village from which he had sprung.” It was called Döderhult in the southeast province of Småland, and after a brief stop Mrs. Lindquist had wanted to hurry back to the civilization of Stockholm, or preferably London, but her husband had insisted upon staying, and it was during the second day that Rachel discovered the wonder of this little town:

  “I was walking aimlessly along a road that led to the Baltic when I saw a shop window containing a congregation of these little wooden figurines carved by a local man, and immediately I realized that they were the equivalent of the Tanagra figures of Greece. An enthusiastic teacher had taught us about them in our fifth-grade unit ‘Greece and Modern Man.’ I went right into the store and selected these seven. I hadn’t enough money, so the shopkeeper said he’d hold them for me till I could persuade my parents to anticipate my allowance. Mother was furious, called the little things junk, but Father was deeply touched. When he saw them he began to cry. Later he told me that the woman looking at the sky was his mother. “She looked exactly like that,” he said. And there they are.”

  [133] The artist, Stanley learned, was an untutored Swedish peasant named Axel Petersson, an intuitive genius who could make wood sing, and in time Mott grew to regard the little wooden people with even more affection and understanding than did his wife: “They make you human, Rachel. They tell me that you yourself are a Swedish peasant ... trying to act sophisticated.”

  In her intellectual tastes she was far from a peasant. On Sundays, when they had a few free hours, it was she who suggested that they read aloud one of the plays being produced in these years. Once under a tree in an Ohio valley she read him the entire Murder in the Cathedral; she had been to Canterbury during her sophomore year and was thus able to set the stage for him. He could see the assassins coming toward Becket, and for days thereafter he found himself thinking of medieval England.

  The most memorable reading was one she had insisted upon: “It’s very long, Stanley, but I think we need it.”

  It was Strange Interlude, and it occupied them for most of a long afternoon. When it came time for Stanley to take the book, he found positive delight in altering his voice for the asides, and in the midst of one unusually expressive passage, Rachel kissed him passionately. “You’re really very good, Stanley. You could have done well at a school like Yale.”

  “I did well at Georgia Tech,” he said defensively. “We knew who Eugene O”Neill was, you know.”

  “I didn’t mean it that way, really I didn’t.”

  “What did you mean by saying yesterday that we needed this play?”

  She smoothed down her dress, coughed and said, “Because for the last few months we’ve been talking in posed sentences, just like these characters. Our worlds are drifting dangerously apart, Stanley, and that’s perilous.”

  “You know what my work is, Rachel. I simply can’t talk about it.”

  “That part I know. I believe FBI men are watching you. At least I have good reason to think so. And they should. But we mustn’t be like the characters in this play, never speaking our minds.”

  “What do you want me to say-that I’m allowed to say?”

  “Europe? What do you think’s going to happen to Europe?”

  [134] “It’s inconceivable to me that Hitler can retain control of all Europe. It goes against all reason.”

  “And if he fails, will Stalin control it all?”

  “You have to face one problem at a time.”

  “But if the other man is looking far ahead, he may be able to solve two or even three problems at the same time.”

  “Even one defeats me, sometimes.”

  “Is your work so difficult?” Before he could respond, she said brightly, “Scratch that, Stanley. What I really wanted to ask was this. How do you see us living after the war ends? And I don’t even mean that. What I mean is, how long do you think the war will last?”

  “Four more years.”

  She gave a little cry: “Till 1947! Oh God, can we survive so long?”

  “We have to,” he said, and with that he resumed his reading.

  A few days later he informed her that he would be leaving Wright Field and moving to London. “No, you can’t join me there. Absolutely impossible.”

  “What do you think I should do, Stanley? Till the baby comes ... no, what I really mean is, after the baby comes?”

  He thought about this for a long time, then kissed her tenderly. “You know, the best thing we’ve done in years was to read Strange Interlude. He wrote that play about us.” He kissed her again. “But to answer your question, I don’t have a clue. I don’t know how long I’m going to be gone. It’s a vital mission and it could take years. Darling, I just don’t know.”

  The next morning, when she was preparing one of his suits for the cleaner, prior to his departure for London, she found in his coat pocket a photograph of a small man who, from the cut of his clothes, appeared to be German. The only noticeable thing about him was a mustache that wandered ineffectually over his upper lip, and he had on the kind of cap factory workers in England often wore. The picture bore no name, no identification of any kind, but she surmised that her husband was heading for Europe to find this man.

  She pondered a long time as to what she must do about this photograph, and she sensed that she had not been intended to see it. She could even have committed a crime of some kind in doing so, and she supposed that the best [135] thing to do was return it to its pocket and leave the suit as it was, without a pressing. But her compulsive sense of neatness would not permit this, and for the last two days of their time together in the Dayton motel she kept the photograph to herself. When the time came for him to leave for London, she kissed him ardently, then handed him the photograph.

  “I hope you find him,” she said.

  When in the summer of 1945 the colonel from the Air Force arrived in Worcester, where Rachel Mott was maintaining quarters for her son Millard while she worked at a nearby war production company, he informed her that her husband had been commended for his role in finding and rescuing several important German scientists. When she asked what kind of scientists they were, the colonel told her truthfully that he did not really know. “I think we can assume they had something to do with weapons, but exactly what kind I wouldn’t even dare guess.”

  She then asked whether one of the scientists had been a small, rather thin man with a scraggly mustache, and he said, “Ma’am, the fact is, I don’t know anything. Except that your husband is alive, and the Air Force thinks very highly of his work.”

  “Will he be coming home soon?”

  “I would surely think so.”

  Stanley arrived in the United States in November 1945, but was not even allowed free time to visit his wife in Massachusetts. He called her as soon as the military transport docked and said, cryptically, “It’s vital that you take yourself and Millard immediately to Fort Bliss in El Paso, Texas. Ask for a friend of mine named McCawley”-he spelled the name twice. “And I leave it to you to get us the best damned quarters in the fort. I love you, and I want to talk to you directly, not like in Strange Interlude.”

  That was all he said. Fort Bliss; El Paso, Texas; McCawley. She supposed that he had spelled the man’s name incorrectly, but when she reached Fort Bliss she found that it really was McCawley. He was a sergeant with unusual powers in the assignment of quarters, and when, dead tired from her mysterious trip, she told him that she was Stanley Mott’s wife, he beamed. “One of the best. I served with him in France. Tireless.”


  [136] “What was he doing; Captain McCawley?”

  “I wish to hell I was a captain. It’s sergeant. And I was a sergeant then, doing his paper work.”

  “Which was what?”

  “Top secret then, top secret now.”

  “Then why am I here?”

  “Because your good husband, God bless his muscle-bound ways, is going to arrive on Thursday.”

  “For a long stay?”

  “Years, I should think.”

  And that was all she could discover. Her husband was still a civilian, still engaged in some top-secret business. But he was on his way to Fort Bliss and would be stationed there for a long, indeterminate period. She sighed and proceeded with the three-day job of wangling from the military in charge of the fort the gear she would need in order to convert their barracks quarters into a decent home.

  In this assignment. she received much help from Sergeant McCawley, who had a thieving mind and a cynical approach to military life: “Get all you can the first week, when they’re glad to have you aboard. Because later on, invariably you become dirt.” Because the main flood of whoever was arriving had not yet appeared, she and McCawley had their choice of rooms, furniture, kitchen equipment and bedding. He wanted to force upon her a whole roomful of junk she knew she did not need, and when he saw how sparsely she had furnished the quarters, he said, “Mrs. Mott, I would advise you to accept this crud, whether you need it or not. Because maybe later on you can trade it off with your neighbors, whoever they are.”

  “I think this is adequate,” she said, but he looked so hurt at having his advice rejected that she asked him gently if he would mind baby-sitting Millard while she went in to El Paso to purchase a special gift for her husband.

  “How long since you’ve seen him?”

  She counted up the dreadful years of lonely train rides, of giving birth to a baby when one didn’t know if the father was still alive, the spells of heartbreaking loneliness. “It was a long time, Sergeant, and I hope it’s never repeated.” In McCawley’s car she went from one art shop to another, until she found a fairly good silk-screened copy of Orozco’s marching women. By good luck it had been framed austerely, not California-style, and she bought it for [137] twenty-eight dollars. The man gave her the wire and pinned hook for hanging, and when she returned to her quarters McCawley helped her find just the right spot over the davenport, where Stanley would have to see it as soon as he entered the door.

  “This room does look pretty nice,” McCawley admitted, “but I have a surprise for you.” He had sequestered a storage locker in the basement of the barracks, a large wired-in cubicle with a newly printed sign: STANLEY MOTT. Inside was enough military furniture to accommodate two families. “Believe me, Mrs. Mott, you can use this in artful trading.”

  On Thursday, as promised, the long train pulled in to El Paso station, where carefully guarded military trucks, with their canvas sides in place to prevent observation, rolled up in long lines to receive the military prisoners assigned to Fort Bliss. Rachel was not permitted in the station area, so she did not see the German scientists debark: General Helmut Funkhauser giving orders, Wernher von Braun’s principal assistants stepping gingerly onto Texas soil, inconspicuous Dieter Kolff coming forth in a huge American hat that obscured his face. No women had been allowed to accompany their husbands to America, but there were over a hundred men, confused and insecure, assigned to a fort they did not understand for duties which had not been explained.

  At Fort Bliss the Germans were unloaded first from the trucks, and now Rachel could see for the first time her husband’s prey, and that one-time photograph had been so deeply engraved on her memory that when she saw Dieter Kolff come down the steps of the truck, she recognized him immediately and uttered a small prayer: “Thank God, Stanley found him.” She knew that these words made no sense; she had not the slightest comprehension of why Kolff had been so eagerly sought, but as the daughter of a well-disciplined Swede and a Saltonstall of Boston, however remote, she knew intuitively that men and women felt better when they fulfilled the task set them.

  “Stanley!” she cried, and there from one of the last trucks stepped her husband, looking precisely as he had when he left, no heavier, no thinner, no mustache, no scars. When he saw her he walked properly toward her, then broke into a run, embracing her furiously. She refrained from [138] crying, but after their fourth or fifth kiss she did point to where Dieter Kolff was marching to his new quarters: “I see you found him.”

  “Took two years.”

  “Was it worth it?”

  “We were all screwed up about Peenemünde, but ...”

  “What’s Peenemünde?”

  “I’ll tell you when we get home. Where is home?”

  When she led him to the apartment and opened the door, the first thing he saw was Sergeant McCawley standing there with Millard, and he called for the two-year-old boy to run to him. McCawley had trained the lad to cry out “Daddy,” and there was new embracing, but as Stanley clutched his son he saw over the boy’s shoulder the Orozco, the painting he had so admired at Georgia Tech. Placing Millard in a chair, he went to the wall and took down the painting. Handing it to his wife, he said, “All the time I lived in confusion I remembered our apartment with the Mondrian ... the order ... the neatness. I’ve outgrown Orozco. Let’s trade it in for something simple and clean.”

  But when he tossed his duffel into the bedroom he saw the little wooden figures of Axel Petersson, especially the older man dancing with his wife, and the pair were so real, so instinct with the humanity that binds lives together, that he grabbed them in his hands and danced about the room, smiling at his wife and shouting, “This is what we waited for, all of us,” and he caught his wife and they fell on the bed.

  Later in the day, after they had slept and showered, McCawley drove them to the art shop, where Stanley himself traded the garish Orozco for a fine Mondrian, a vertical rectangle with black lines delineating handsomely proportioned blue and red and yellow spaces, and when he hung it in his new living room he kissed his wife and said, “Very sensible, Rachel. In here, where we present ourselves to the world, crisp neatness. In the bedroom, where we live our true lives, the dancing figures.” And that’s the way it was to be.

  At the end of one week Rachel Mott told her husband, “I’m in love with these crazy Germans. I can’t believe Hitler ever touched them.”

  She respected the manner in which the scientists [139] organized their living space. Each man assumed responsibility for bringing order into whatever corner was assigned him, and each kept his area impeccably neat. She noticed also that each man devised for himself some work space on which he could spread out his papers, or make his tools.

  She was both amused and impressed by General Funkhauser, for he was an obvious fraud but one determined to please his new American masters. He perfected his English and explained things for her, telling much more about Peenemünde than her husband had felt free to do. He was first to volunteer for any arduous duty and seemed to know more about the A-4s than even Von Braun, and he explained several times how he had rescued, at no slight danger to himself, the papers summarizing the top-secret work being done at Peenemünde. She smiled at his pretensions but continued to listen to his blandishments.

  From her talks with General Funkhauser, who now weighed thirty pounds less than he had at the rocket base, she learned that if the war had continued a few months longer, or if on the other hand Funkhauser had been placed in command of rocketry a few months earlier, Germany might have won. One afternoon she asked him if rockets could indeed carry men to the Moon, and although he had once condemned Von Braun and Kolff to death for having suggested this, he now revealed himself to have been an ardent space enthusiast: “I always said that with rockets we can go anywhere-the Moon, Mars, Venus, even directly to the Sun.”

  About the fourth week Rachel began to suspect that General Funkhauser was not entirely disinterested in his courtship of Stanley Mott’s wife, b
ecause at the conclusion of any particularly long discussion, he managed to bring up the subject of that basement storage cubicle where there were several pieces of furniture he could use, and gradually the surplus found its way to Funkhauser’s quarters, until he had a kind of eighteenth-century Prussian overstuffed castle right in the heart of Fort Bliss.

  At the end of one meeting, General Funkhauser lingered to say, “The men admire your beautiful hair, Mrs. Mott. It’s so blond and German.”

  “Swedish,” she corrected.

  “Swedes are mainly German,” he said. “Completely Nordic.” To this she made no response, so he added, “But [140] you’d look ever so much prettier if you wore your hair in braids. The way my sister did.”

  “Where is she now?” Rachel asked.

  “Killed by American bombers.” When he saw her wince, he added, “The men talked about your hair, Mrs. Mott. They agreed it would look better-more German, that is-if you wore braids.”

  The idea of sacrificing her carefully devised Grecian coiffure for a pair of dangling Saxon braids delighted Rachel and she broke into laughter, but General Funkhauser was not amused. “Later, you will see.”

  He then changed his attitude completely, becoming a sweet Rhenish peasant. “The men think you are beautiful, Mrs. Mott. You remind them of their wives.” Before she could respond, he added, “That little table, the one where the leaf drops down. I could use that very capably for my papers, Mrs. Mott. Do you think ...”

  She laughed and said, “Any man who tells me I’m beautiful can have any table he wants,” but the general frowned at this suggestion that he had praised her only to get one more piece of furniture.