They were interrupted by the sound of some man bustling into the reception hall and loudly demanding to know where this damned John Pope was shacked up with his Korean popsie.
It was Tucker Thompson, rushed out by NASA, the State Department and Folks to protect their shared investment in Astronaut Pope. He looked awful. ‘They shoved me aboard an Air Force jet at Dulles. Flew to Los Angeles. Fifteen minutes to board Pan American, then non-stop across the Pacific to Auckland. Australian airline to Sydney. Same one to Canberra, and excuse me if I fall flat on my face.’
‘You exhausted hero,’ Cindy said. ‘Have a drink.’
‘And what do I find? America’s favorite Boy Scout shacked up in a cheap—’
‘Let’s start with one understanding, Tucker. We have not been shacked up. We’ve been talking.’
Tucker looked with amazed delight at the two, then broke into a wide grin. ‘You stay with that explanation, Pope, and I hope to God you can peddle it. But if Time gets hold of the truth, we’re dead ducks. And I mean all of us.’
Pope swung him around. ‘I told you. We came here to talk.’
Thompson brushed Pope’s hand away and fell into a chair. ‘In 1960 I sold the hard-shell Baptists in Texas on the line that John F. Kennedy was a sweet, simple-hearted Irish spalpeen who sang “Mother Machree” and would take no orders from the Pope. Maybe I can sell this. That a red-blooded American hero and his almond-eyed Dragon Lady …’
Pope came extremely close to belting Thompson in the mouth; instead he reached out and embraced him. ‘Tucker, an hour with you is better than a year in the sewers of Middle America. I love you.’
‘Stick to your story, son. It’ll draw more comment than the truth.’
‘It all matters so very little,’ Cindy said. ‘You took six American boys and the girls they married when they were young, and you wove a fairy story—’ Her voice broke and suddenly all her bravado vanished. She started to cry, and when she found Pope’s hand she held it close to her lips. ‘You were all so very small,’ she whispered. ‘You never told the world that, Tucker. That they were such ordinary little men. Not big and heroic at all, not with wide shoulders and heavy jaws. God, they were heroic in their age, and whenever the Moon rises red in October they will be remembered.’
Several fine books would be written about the astronauts—Mailer, Collins, Wolfe, to name the best—but if you want to know how it really was inside the men inside the capsule, the book to read is the one by the Oriental newspaperwoman Rhee Soon-Ka. She was a Korean, but to irritate her Japanese enemies she adopted an American name, Cynthia, and to irritate the American establishment, which she despised, she titled her account The Golden Midgets.
Any average wife who might have heard of Mrs. Pope’s reaction to her husband’s Australian escapade with the Korean newspaperwoman would have been dismayed that a self-respecting woman would allow herself to be so abused, and so publicly. It would be three more weeks before Captain Pope returned to the States, for he was obligated to tour New Zealand and then fly to South America via Fiji, Tahiti and Easter Island, and during this waiting period Penny Pope conducted her normal work with the Space Committee, often dealing with matters which affected her absent husband.
She never alluded to his misbehavior, and when Senator Grant tried to comfort her, she rebuffed him: ‘Captain Pope knows what he’s doing. We’ve always trusted each other.’ But if she would allow no one to mention the matter, she herself speculated constantly on how she must behave when John returned, and she found herself limited by restraints which other wives might ignore.
For she was not an average wife. She was a Navy wife, and that made a huge difference; from the first day of their courtship she had been prepared to stay at home for long periods while her husband served on some distant ocean; she was prepared to supervise the moving from place to place while he was in Japan or Germany; and she had always known that if she and John had children, it would be her responsibility alone to care for them during his long absences.
Those, of course, were the housekeeping details, and like many Navy wives, she never complained; Navy wives since the days of Darius and Xerxes had anticipated such absences, but there was also an emotional component of this problem, and this was a subject about which the wives rarely spoke among themselves.
Their husbands tended to be absent during the very years when their sexual drives were strongest; when they finally became stay-at-home admirals, they were in their fifties, when absences would have been easier to handle. So the Navy wife always knew that her lusty man was stuck in some foreign port at a time when his desires, and hers, were greatest, and she preferred not to be told what happened at such times. Indeed, she blanked out this portion of her married experience and was usually none the worse for it.
Penny had tried to be an ideal Navy wife, and although her work in Washington had prevented her from living with John at his various duty stations, she had visited him whenever practical and had known with favor the wives of many of his associates. Once when she was visiting with the Claggetts at Solomons Island, Debby Dee had observed: ‘It’s really as if John was the civilian married to Penny, who’s in her own Navy.’ And that was often the way it was: he would have some free time but she would be occupied with her Washington duties, and she never pried into how he spent his freedom.
She knew from her Patuxent River days that Navy families were usually too busy to permit much hanky-panky when the husbands were ashore, and she was constantly surprised at how capably the wives adjusted to all difficulties; there were very few Navy divorces, and when one did occur, the separating partners quite often found some other Navy type to marry, as if they knew that it was they and not the system that was at fault.
The one constant peril faced by the military wife was not infidelity, it was alcoholism, for the officers’ club was always open, booze was cheap, loneliness was a constant spur to heavy drinking, and there were always older women on the bottle who sought the companionship of younger wives. Penny had watched a dozen older women become flaming alcoholics, and she had heard rumors of several celebrated cases in which the wives of top generals and admirals were habitually attended by junior officers whose job it was to see that the dipsomaniac did not create a scandal or fall headfirst down a flight of stairs. Since Penny drank only an occasional beer, this major pitfall presented no danger.
Most of all, her attitude toward marriage, and particularly Navy marriage, had been determined by her husband’s character. As a plebe at Annapolis he had been a straight arrow, always near the top of his class, always dating only her. At Pax River he had occupied bachelor quarters to save money, which he turned over to her. In Korea, according to Claggett, John had avoided the airfields where the pretty little Jo-sans waited table and slept in the officers’ quarters. He had never gone ratting about the countryside with Hickory Lee, and when this Korean woman invaded the Bali Hai with the avowed intention, some said, of sleeping with the entire contingent, she had been assured by the other wives that her husband would have nothing to do with her. Now both Debby Dee Claggett and Gloria Cater, eager to believe that the idol had crumbled, sent letters using the same rowdy phrase: ‘Join the club!’
A subtle change took place in Penny’s attitude. She still trusted John, but she also had to consider her self-esteem. She was three years shy of fifty, the occupant of a position of some importance and looked up to by the women graduates of good colleges who aspired to better jobs than typing. She represented something, and it was galling to think that she had been so poorly used, and in public. Her resentment caused her to look unsentimentally at the ramifications of her life, and what she saw evoked even deeper indignation.
When she attended public Senate hearings she noticed how many of the heavy-drinking old men found it impossible to follow arguments, frequently falling asleep in the midst of testimony. She marked the ones who grubbed servilely for every passing penny, yearning to sell their votes to any likely bidder, not even waiting to arrange t
he most profitable deal. When she compared these bumbling fellows with the best women appointees to federal positions, she was startled by the difference, and when she started to study the House members she knew, she was even more distressed, for here she saw public servants accepting money from Korean lobbyists, pursuing wildly deviant sex behaviors, and voting like idiots, while able women languished as mere assistants.
Her standards of comparison were high, for she had worked closely with three first-class politicians: Lyndon Johnson, who could contrive anything if it gave Texas and his private bank account a slight edge; Mike Glancey, who was perhaps the best man she had ever known, but whose vote was always negotiable on the principle of ‘You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours’; and good, faithful Norman Grant, a man of impeccable integrity who did the same swapping of votes, but on a slightly higher level. These were good men and they served their nation admirably, but it was quite clear to her now that America produced an equal number of good women who were held contemptuously down.
She had for some years been listening carefully to the arguments of certain liberated women who had been addressing these problems, but she had never been attracted to their cause. Germaine Greer, the Australian, she found too harsh, Bella Abzug too abrasive, and Betty Friedan far too lacking in feminine qualities; and sometimes she suspected their logic, for without fanfare she had acquired one of the good jobs in Washington and she supposed that other women could do the same. But when Gloria Steinem and a woman with the fascinating name of Letty Pogrebin began analyzing situations exactly like her own, she began to listen more attentively, and she saw that women were discriminated against in scores of situations, that they were compressed by society into certain cliché molds, and that the consequences were nearly as damaging to the men as to the women they subjugated.
She became painfully aware of these matters when Tucker Thompson returned breathlessly from Australia to coach her in how the good people at Folks expected her to play the role of the insulted wife. ‘Mrs. Pope, in Australia we had a near-miss. I flew all the way to Canberra. Christ, that’s a big country, and I suppose you know what I found. Scandal about to erupt all over the place. NASA is fed up with your husband, and Time and Newsweek are sitting on the story, just hoping for a break that’ll allow them to level a real blast.’
‘What’s holding them back?’
‘Your husband is a national hero. How would they play it? For laughs? I don’t think they’d dare. As a hard sex story? I doubt it. Now, if we get in first with a style-setter, we can pull their fangs.’
‘What does your magazine recommend?’
‘That we take the bit in our teeth, run the flag up the pole, and show a spread of you welcoming your husband home after his triumphal tour.’
‘Would I be kissing him, did your editors think?’
‘Yes. The important thing is to set the pattern. It would be dreadful if this affair got out of hand.’
‘Isn’t it already out of hand?’
‘Not unless you make it so,’ Thompson said firmly. ‘This is a national problem, Penny. NASA’s reputation at a time of budget review. The whole shmeer.’
‘It would be quite easy for me to kiss my husband,’ Penny said, ‘because I love him.’
‘God, if we could only work a quote like that into the story. But it would raise more questions than it answered.’ Then, for the first time, he began to suspect that this dangerous woman whom he had never liked was toying with him. ‘You do intend to cooperate, don’t you?’ he asked hesitantly.
‘It would be undignified to behave otherwise,’ she said.
‘You mean that?’
‘Of course I do.’
‘Could I have more coffee?’ He was perspiring, and after a deep swig of java he said expansively, ‘It’s downright remarkable, Penny. The NASA selection committee picked six families, out of a hat as it were, and they got six all-time winners. How many other American girls would have behaved better than you six? Death, disappointment, threats of divorce, now scandal, you kids were champions.’
‘We intended to be,’ Penny said, borrowing her husband’s favorite phrase.
‘It’s been an honor to be associated with a girl like you.’
‘I’m forty-seven.’
‘We never mention that in the articles. To our readers you’re all still girls, well dressed, well behaved. I’m terribly proud to have known you girls, Penny.’
‘You keep speaking as if it were all past.’
‘It is. Space is a dead duck. If I were an evil man, I’d play this Pope versus Pope thing for high scandal—the end of the epoch, the fond farewell to a group of symbols. I could write that story now, no strain. And it would be one hell of an exit.’ He shook his head as if regretting that he was no longer working for a Hearst newspaper with its huge headlines. Then he said, ‘But I love you kids as if you were my own family. This is my swan song, too, you know. Yep, retired against my will next month. And I refuse to sully something I’ve loved. Penny, let’s go out in style.’
‘What is the proper style?’ she asked.
‘The American wife, loyal, trusting, forgiving. We don’t want to show you in your office this time. We’ve done that and it always seemed harsh. What I have in mind is a small house somewhere—’
‘What I have in mind, Tucker, is my office, with an American flag in the corner, as always, and the big photograph of Johnson, Glancey and Grant, the architects of our space program.’
‘But—’
‘I am just as much a part of NASA as my husband, and in some ways, I think, even more important, because I helped keep the whole damned thing running.’
Thompson saw instantly that he was venturing into waters far too deep for him to negotiate. This office bitch was going to behave just as he feared she might: Give me a hundred Alabama cheerleaders any day, twisting their pretty asses in the sunlight, to one girl who got straight A’s in college. The cheerleaders know how to act in any situation, and the damned college girls never learn.
‘I’m afraid what I had in mind won’t work, Mrs. Pope.’
‘I’m sure it won’t.’
‘You better pray that Time and Newsweek don’t start running with this story.’
‘They have my office number.’
He was about to leave, but he could not allow one of his Solid Six to dash headlong into danger. ‘Please, Mrs. Pope, we’ve had a tremendous run with this story. Gemini … Apollo … your husband’s heroics … Claggett. Jesus Christ, don’t throw mud on Claggett.’
Lowering her head, she said in a whisper, ‘You wrote in one of your stories about how Randy and John had flown together in Korea, then tested planes at Pax River, then shared a Gemini phone booth for sixteen days. And of how John had to leave him dead on the Moon. It was very strong writing, really.’ She looked up at him. ‘Do you think I’d do anything to sully those relationships?’
‘I don’t think you would.’
‘Of course I’ll cooperate. Bring your photographers. But it will have to be in my office.’ When he groaned, she said, ‘You’re a master with words, Tucker. Spin one of your fables. The modern wife who does two things superbly—runs her office, loves her man.’
‘I don’t think it’ll play in Peoria.’
He decided not to try the John-Pope-and-his-loving-wife-Penny story, for he saw that it contained far too many time bombs, but as he was about to leave, distressed by his failure to manipulate Mrs. Pope, she suddenly caught his arm and forced him back into a chair.
‘You’ve done me a great favor, Tucker. Up to one minute ago I never gave Betty Friedan much time. I simply did not like her style, but everything you said fortified the basic thesis in her Feminine Mystique. Writers like you, and your magazine, are major forces in creating the myth of what an American woman should be. The little house, not the office. A white jumper, not a business dress. The forgiving wife, not the woman who feels herself humiliated.’
‘Penny,’ he broke in, ‘it’s no longer
something I worry about with Folks. To hell with Folks, they’ve said to hell with me. But I beg you, don’t divorce—’
‘Who said anything about divorce?’
‘You said you were humiliated by John’s behavior in—’
‘Of course I am. I’m humiliated by what he’s done to me. But I’m just as humiliated by what you and your magazine would like to do. The fake posing. The fake quotations. Tucker, you’re on your way out. John’s on his way out of NASA. I may be on my way out of my job as counsel to the committee. Let’s all go out with a bang.
Here’s the one quote from me you’re authorized to use in your wrap-up: “Mrs. John Pope said, when apprised of her husband’s juvenile performance in Australia, ‘I’d like to kick his ass from Canberra to Tahiti, then hand him a NASA medal for acting like a perfect Boy Scout.’ ” And I want you to run it with the photograph of me kissing him beneath the American flag in my office with this caption: “All is forgiven. He’s the only Boy Scout I have.” ’
‘I wonder if we could get away with it?’ Thompson mused. ‘I wonder if there’s some way I could imply that you said “kick his ass from Canberra to Tahiti” without actually saying it?’
‘Use it as I said it,’ Penny snapped, ‘because that’s the way I’m going to say everything from here on out.’
Disgusted with this modern woman, he started to stamp out of her office, but one more danger signal flashed. ‘Maybe you haven’t heard, but your husband has cooked up a story that all he and the Korean Typhoon did for three days was talk. Please, if that’s going to be his version of three days in the sack, let him get away with it. Don’t laugh at him in public.’
‘Did he say that?’ she cried, and when Thompson nodded she gave him a huge kiss. ‘Tucker, you are adorable, corrupt, stupid, even a little evil … but downright adorable.’
Space: A Novel Page 77