Racing the Moon
Page 13
By Christmas, Chuck was beginning to manage the basic design diagrams and calculations at the vocational school, and now even John could read what he wrote in blocky capital letters. Their parents invited Ebbs for Christmas dinner. She came with a letter. “Just came this afternoon, Special Delivery!” she announced. “VB’s agreed to give Chuck a chance. He says they’ve got a school at Fort Bliss that can pick up from where he is in his vocational schoolwork. If Chuck will enlist in the army and passes all their tests—which I’m sure he can do—VB will take him.”
“Hey! Hurray!” Alex shouted, even as she fought to hold herself in.
In order to enlist, Chuck had to present a copy of his birth certificate. Stuart stopped at the bank on the way home from work to get it out of the safe-deposit box. He arrived home with two stamped documents. The whole family stood around when Chuck unfolded the top paper. It was in German. The only word Alex recognized was “Carlus.” The names and surnames for both Mutter and Vater—mother and father—were strange.
Chuck’s face twisted. “I knew it,” he whispered.
“What does it mean?” Alex asked.
Her mother took a deep breath and explained. “After I came home and married your father I heard from a cousin in Germany about an infant whose parents—her dearest friends—had both just died in a typhus outbreak. My cousin could not keep this child. She begged me to come and take him. Germany was in chaos then, close to revolution, so we went and collected him. That second paper is the important one, Charles. It’s your adoption certificate. There you see your full name: Charles Stuart Hart.”
“I knew it,” Chuck said again. Alex couldn’t tell whether he was sad or angry.
“You knew from what I told you when I gave you the ring,” his mother said. “When I gave it to you I said it was old and had come down to you from your family in Europe. I hinted and waited for you to ask, but you didn’t. It seemed to me you didn’t want to know more right then.”
Chuck shook his head.
“You’re the same brother I had yesterday,” Alex said. “It’s not like they just hung a name on you like you told TJ. They rescued you because they wanted you—they wanted you to make it, like Ebbs and VB and me.”
“And me!” John said.
A week later the whole family and Jeep and Ebbs stood together in Washington’s huge Union Station. It was the biggest building Alex had ever been in, the waiting room an immense white marble hall with vaulted ceilings. Alex felt small in it. The government had sent Chuck a travel voucher to Fort Bliss with meals and everything provided. He seemed changed—serious, older, a little frightened. His chin-out, dare-’em edginess was gone. Alex had never seen him like that. It was like he’d settled into himself, wasn’t fighting to get out. It was like after trying on all sorts of different lives he’d finally found the one that fit.
His train was announced. They went to the platform.
There were hugs all around. John gave Chuck an envelope. “It’s the money I got tutoring Alex,” he explained. “Good luck.”
When Chuck got to Alex, he whispered, “Don’t worry, Alley. I’m going to do it right this time. I’m going to do it right for both of us. You’ll see.”
“Yes,” Alex said, clenching her teeth to keep from crying.
“Chin up, Alex,” Ebbs ordered as they rode home together. “We’ve got work to do. Starting now, we’re going to train you to be the astronaut VB said you’d be, get you ready for your Columbian moment.”
“My what?” Alex asked, blinking back tears.
“You’re gonna go off like Christopher Columbus,” Ebbs said. “Up and away—like his setting-out orders: ‘Nothing to the north, nothing to the south, nothing to the east’—only for you it’s nothing to the west either—just up! Right?”
“Right,” said Alex with a smile. She caught herself. “Right!”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Kate Klimo, who had the idea of my telling this story; Martha Armstrong, who knew them; and Dr. Jane Cotton Ebbs, who got me started when I was ten with talk about her space-food work for the army.
Others who helped: Arlene and Barry Borden, Abigail and Alan Dallmann, David Rohn, Jonathan Flaccus, Faith Moeckel, Martin Levitt, Jeffrey Carr, Robert Herbert, Dawn Armstrong, and Dr. Peter H. Smith, senior research scientist and principal investigator for the Mars Phoenix Lander, of the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory at the University of Arizona. “We’re bound to find something out there!” he said when I interviewed him.
Suggestions for further reading: Karen Ordahl Kupperman’s Captain John Smith (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988) is a good collection of John Smith’s writings. Another is John Lankford’s Captain John Smith’s America (New York: Harper & Row, 1967). For more about Wernher von Braun, I recommend Michael J. Neufeld’s Von Braun: Dreamer of Space, Engineer of War (New York: Knopf, 2007) and Ernst Stuhlinger and Frederick I. Ordway III’s Wernher von Braun: Crusader for Space (Florida: Krieger Publishing Company, 1994).