All That Outer Space Allows (Apollo Quartet Book 4)

by Ian Sales

  It was a long drive, and an echo of those hours behind the steering-wheel seems to hang in the dark and muggy air, but she thinks she might like it here, this sprawling verdant city, with its subdivisions of low houses and wide featureless lawns, so very different to the desolate sandy expanses of Edwards; and though she can taste the bite of pollution in the air, her heart lifts.

  Which is more than Mary Irwin, wife of James Irwin—and the “role” Ginny is playing in this novel—felt in her autobiography The Moon is Not Enough: “But as we entered Houston after three days of cramped travel in our camper without airconditioning, and as I saw the murky pall of smog hanging over the city, and felt the muggy, suffocating heat, a little part of me withered inside.”

  From her purse, Ginny pulls out the scrap of paper on which she has scribbled the address given her by Walden. At one end of the apartment building is a staircase leading up to the second floor, and from the apartment number on the paper, her new home must be up there. She locks the car and climbs the stairs, and is soon standing before the door of the right apartment. She knocks.

  Moments later, the door swings open and there is Walden, his face bearing that frown Ginny knows he wears when he has been interrupted at some important task. She smiles wanly at him. His eyes widen, his arms open, he grins and steps forward and pulls her into a hug. She is so tired she almost falls against him.

  She is home.

  Chapter 4

  Pitch and Roll Maneuver

  Those first two months in the apartment, Ginny spends her days at the typewriter. New places always have this effect on her—until she feels settled she exorcises her discomfort with the written word. It was the same in Germany, though she never grew used to life in that country; and she did this too when Walden was transferred to Edwards and she found herself living in Wherry Housing. She has explored this new home of hers: the apartment building, the city and its meagre shopping clustered at the junction of US 75 and Main Street, the scattered subdivisions either side of the Gulf Freeway. There is nothing to see here, and even less to do. Walden disappears into the Manned Spacecraft Center every day, leaving her to her own devices, and though there are several astronaut families in the area and in the Cardinal Apartments—including Dotty and Charlie from Edwards—the other wives have their kids to keep them occupied. She sees the women in the yard and on the street and at the stores, and she stays on friendly terms with them, even offers to provide transport on occasion for those who lack it, since Walden has left her the Impala. (All of the astronauts will be paid ten thousand dollars per year by Life magazine for exclusive rights to their stories. Walden has used some of the money to buy himself a car he feels better suited to his new career.)

  Ginny sits at the table in their one-bedroom apartment and travels to the Moon and beyond in her imagination. She writes three stories in short order. But a deputation from the Astronaut Wives Club, a social club founded that summer by Marge Slayton and Louise Shepard, Ginny has already missed two of the monthly meetings, it’s four of the New Nine wives calling round to see her. Faye, Marilyn, Pat and Barbara, there to welcome Ginny into the fold, to her new life in “Togethersville”; but she is writing and when they see her in slacks and rough shirt, and the typewriter on the table, they purse their lips and she gets the lecture. It’s all very friendly, they sit in the apartment’s tiny lounge, drinking Ginny’s coffee, some of them smoking. Barbara talks about the need for the right breakfast, a “hot, nutritious breakfast” in NASA’s own words, but Ginny already knows this, she’s a test pilot’s wife, she had the “5 am breakfast” lecture years before.

  This is tougher than being a test pilot’s wife, says Marilyn, ten times tougher.

  What you do, adds Pat, reflects not only on your husband but on NASA, on the USA.

  Ginny is in the public eye now, they tell her; she must at all times be proud, thrilled and happy. And well-groomed, always well-groomed.

  But there are rewards. Once your husband has flown in space, says Barbara, you get to go places and meet people. NASA likes to have us there at parties and functions, like an astronaut’s accessory.

  This generates knowing laughter from the other three New Nine wives.

  Gemini 11 is due to launch next week, which means to date seventeen astronauts have been into space, some of them even twice, including the husbands of both Faye and Barbara.

  Faye leans forward and puts her coffee cup on the carpet by her feet. There should be no problems at home, she says, looking up at Ginny, nothing that might jeopardise your husband’s chance of a flight. You need to stand by your man.

  …her words eerily presaging the song, which is released a couple of weeks later, although Ginny does not hear it until months have passed. Tammy Wynette may be a native of Mississippi, but in 1966 the song’s sentiments are universal.

  The women leave after an hour. Despite the 85°F heat, Ginny opens the windows to dispel the smell of cigarette smoke and commingled perfumes worn by the wives. She looks back across at the dining table and the Hermes Baby sitting on it, and wonders that they never thought to ask her what she had been typing. Perhaps the clothes she’s wearing shocked them so much it slipped their minds. She is amused at the thought: the slacks and shirt are mannish but she could never be mistaken for a man. Nor for some sort of genderless human being, neither man nor woman—and a line of thought, no doubt triggered by the hot humid air pushing its way into the room through the open windows, has her imagining a race of androgynous people who, like many animals, are only sexually active when in heat, and then they can be one sex or the other. It’s not a bad idea for a story, she thinks; but she decides not to make a note of it—no way to use it occurs to her and it’s not an idea she feels qualified to explore.

  The next month, on the first Tuesday, Ginny puts on makeup, more than she usually wears, and a dress bought in Neiman Marcus only the week before, styles her hair, and drives over to the Lakewood Yacht Club for her first AWC meeting. There are forty-eight of them now, drinking tea and coffee and nibbling on cakes and cookies in the ballroom. Ginny spots Pam, but she also recognises Mary, and Dotty too, of course, and she sees Louise, another Mary, Joan and Wanita, who were also at Edwards. Ginny doesn’t know most of the other wives, so Pam and Dotty help out with the names, but it’s too many to take in at once, and Ginny is feeling a little uncomfortable, something of an outsider at this gathering, as she can see how closely knit the various groups are, how confident and assured and polished are the wives of the Original Seven and the New Nine. It occurs to her that her standing in this group is a consequence of her husband’s achievements. Right now, he’s just one of the new guys, spending his time in a classroom training to fly the new spacecraft. He may never go to the Moon, he may never even make it into space. The real pioneers are the ones who have flown; and their wives are golden in the reflected glory. There’s Louise, the Boston Brahmin, in white gloves; and Rene, as Ginny has heard, does indeed look very glamorous—and Pam tells Ginny in a whispered aside that Rene has been writing a newspaper column, ‘A Woman, Still’, for the past year. It’s a connection, Ginny thinks, we’re both writers—except Ginny writes science fiction and she’s pretty sure Rene is not going to consider that equivalent to a newspaper column; there’s no way the lurid covers and contents of Galaxy or If or Fantastic can compete with the prestige of the Houston Chronicle.

  Not that it matters, anyway. Even at Edwards, Ginny didn’t feel much like an Air Force wife, a test pilot wife, though she took care to make all the right noises. And this astronaut thing is too new—she’s read books on Mercury and Gemini, she’s seen the photographs of the missions in Life magazine, the space walk last year; but a connection between that and this room full of smartly-dressed women seems too fanciful to willingly suspend disbelief.

  She feels a fraud, perhaps because she dressed up especially for the AWC, and she’s awkwardly aware Walden shares a deeply competitive camaraderie with these women’s husbands which defines all their lives, men
and women alike; but she also knows she’s considered little more than some sort of domestic technician by NASA, just another government employee, engineering the home—what’s that phrase in The Feminine Mystique? “women whose lives were confined, by necessity, to cooking, cleaning, bearing children”. By necessity. There to keep the astronaut home running smoothly, her own wants and needs, her “mystique” not a factor in the equation, not mentioned in any scientific papers or training manuals, not part of the plan to put a man on the surface of the Moon. And return him safely to the Earth.

  Much as Ginny would like to avoid the AWC and its monthly meetings, she knows she has no choice.

  She is an astronaut wife now.

  #

  #

  Ginny has been thinking about a story, prompted by something she read in a book, Invisible Horizons by Vincent Gaddis, a paperback, with a waterspout prominent on its cover, the title above it in bright green letters. Where did she find this book? I don’t know—perhaps she bought it in the Edwards AFB commissary, although I don’t know if they sell books; perhaps it was the same place she found a copy of Americans into Orbit, a book store on a weekend trip to Los Angeles, or on a visit to her mother and step-father in San Diego. While I own Americans into Orbit, the 1962 Random House hardback edition, I know very little about Invisible Horizons as I’ve not been able to find a copy, I can state only that it was originally published in 1965 by Chilton Books, the same publisher who took a chance on Frank Herbert’s Dune in that year. Ginny’s edition of Invisible Horizons is the Ace paperback also published in 1965. One chapter in the book caught her interest, an alleged experiment in 1943 to turn a US Navy destroyer invisible—which will later enter occult science mythology on the publication of Charles Berlitz’s book The Philadelphia Experiment in 1979, Berlitz being best-known at that time for his 1974 book on the Bermuda Triangle. None of this, of course, is known to Ginny, who has simply happened upon something in a book which she thinks might make a good premise for a science fiction story.

  And so she wonders what it might be like to be aboard a ship as it fades from sight while beside her the contractor tries to explain how the house will look once built; but she’s gazing out across an empty plot of land staked out by wooden posts where one day walls and windows and doors and roof will materialise, as if brought into being by the passage of time, and the invisible warship in her mind’s eye morphs into a spaceship. She turns to the contractor, flashes him a smile as if she has heard, understood and agrees with every word he has spoken. As he leads her across the plot toward the dirt road, where his Dodge D Series pickup truck sits behind her Impala, and he swings out an arm and says something about a kitchen, it occurs to her that her story would be more interesting if she told it as her story, as a wife’s story. Ginny has stood in a kitchen, wondering if her husband will come home that day, knowing that every morning as he leaves for work he might be killed or injured. She has tried to make a sanctuary for him of their home for that very reason—and for all her independence and need for “mystique”, she loves Walden too much to jeopardise the fragile balance between his work and his home, his sanity and his safety, or even the good standing in which he is held by his current employers.

  I guess that’s everything, Mrs Eckhardt? says the contractor.

  He pulls open the driver’s door to his truck, and now Ginny can’t see the name emblazoned on it because she’s just come up blank, her head full of story, of an image of herself standing at the stove, and superimposed over it, a ghostly overlay, another woman in some future fashion—perhaps a dress made of small white plastic discs which shimmer and clack when she moves, Ginny thinks she saw something like it in Vogue, which of course she does not read herself, it must have been in the beauty parlour, or perhaps when visiting Pam or Mary or Dotty or Joan—

  And so she gives another bright smile, puts a hand up to adjust her sunglasses and says, yes, yes, of course, thank you so much.

  The contractor holds out a hand to shake, and she looks down at it, briefly disconcerted, and then takes it, his rough workman’s hand enfolding her own with the painted nails she has yet to get used to—the time it takes to keep them shaped and polished!—she feels like she should be a completely different person, not the Ginny whose body she has been inhabiting these thirty years but another person, weak and frail, with her soft red-nailed hands, powder and paint, pantyhose and heels.

  It’s all part of the astronaut package. The past few months of parties, the press gatherings, even the television appearance, at all of which her husband has been dutifully accessorized with her, and she has remained polite and noncommittal—but enthusiastic about space, NASA and Walden—they have been exciting times, intoxicating even, after their years of exile in the desert. And the money she has spent so she can look the part! Walden has his new car, but when he demands to know where all the money is going he is blind to the fact she’s wearing a new outfit.

  Ginny tells herself all this is fair payment so the man she loves can do what he so dearly wishes to do: go into space, perhaps one day walk on the Moon; but in her increasingly more frequent self-critical moments she knows she’s only fooling herself, making the charade palatable. For the possibility of Walden on the lunar surface, she will keep herself “pretty”, she will dress like the other astronaut wives, she will be thrilled, happy and proud.

  And smile until her jaws ache from the hypocrisy of it all.

  #

  Months later, Ginny will regret her moment of inattention when she learns she apparently agreed to something she doesn’t recall. Walden is furious and believes the contractor unilaterally decided it for himself, but Ginny, if only to deflect his rage, admits it may have been her fault, she had misunderstood or misheard the man. In time, they’ll come to appreciate the contractor’s choice, but for now it sours their pride in their new house, which Ginny feels is only fair since the pride seems to be mostly Walden’s—as if he built the house himself, as if he personally oversaw its construction. She hasn’t the heart to tell him she apparently used the “wrong” contractor, not the one the other astronauts used, and some of the wives have been unpleasant to her about it. That sours her sense of achievement.

  It doesn’t help that days after breaking ground on the plot in El Lago Walden and Ginny had bought, Gus, Roger and Ed die in a fire in the Apollo 1 command module. Ginny, who knows Betty, Martha and Pat only passingly as fellow members of the AWC, like all of the wives feels the deaths keenly because it seems a tragedy she believed the best of science and engineering worked to guard them against; but now all of their husbands are hostages to the same fickle fortune—and the fact none of them has been able to take out life insurance becomes suddenly and horrifyingly and heart-breakingly relevant and real. It’s not simply the all too imaginable prospect of a future without their husbands which stabs so deeply, but a stripping from them of their own purpose.

  This is not strictly true, of course. At this point in the story, it may be 1967 but women are not chattels, although the Equal Pay Act only became law four years before—a chief campaigner for which was, coincidentally, one of the Mercury 13, Janey Hart. It would be foolish to pretend the United States has actual gender equality. Women had not been given the vote until 1920; and whatever freedoms they may have enjoyed during the Second World War were rudely taken from them when the GIs returned home—as illustrated by the appearance of Ginny’s mother in this story in the previous chapter.

  Though it may seem the astronaut wives do little but keep house, mother their children and worry about their husbands, many also have other interests, or even part-time jobs—Rene, as mentioned earlier, is a newspaper columnist, and later becomes a radio host and television presenter; some wives are substitute teachers; others are heavily involved in the activities of their local church or community theatre. But some are indeed only wives and mothers, as Lily Koppel writes in her book, The Astronaut Wives Club, about Pat White: “She had dedicated everything to him. She had cooked gourmet meals. Sh
e had handled all his correspondence… ‘She just worked at being Ed’s wife,’ said one of the wives, ‘and she was wonderful at it, and that was all…’”

  Ginny has years of practice at dreaming up possible futures, but she weeps because Apollo 1 suggests a future she begs providence to keep purely fictional. Walden has always been, and remains still, the brightest star in her map of the galaxy; and she cannot bear the thought of life without him. So she spends days privately weeping for a loss she has not experienced and may never experience; and then she wipes her eyes and fixes her mascara and joins the rest of Togethersville in succouring the new widows.

  Later, once the funerals are over and life has returned to what passed previously for normal, although perhaps it is a little more tightly wound, Ginny, who is often inclined to ascribe attributes, either luck or inevitability, to things which do not possess or deserve them, feels the tragedy may blight their new house, might perhaps apply itself to Walden’s career. But she is not a foolish or suggestible woman, if anything she likes to think she sees the world as operating along rational lines, according to fixed physical rules and laws, not all of which have yet to be discovered, a consequence she believes of her choice in literature, of the magazines to which she subscribes, avidly reads and contributes—