The figure in the long English coat was unmistakable. Rachel waved, but the distant woman did not lift her head to search the windows of the terminal for a familiar face, as the others did, partly because she was short-sightedly peering her way down the aluminium stairs, and partly because she was leading a little girl, who clung sleepily to her hand.
Rachel felt an electric current seize her heart. She tried to hold back her tears. Eight years, she thought. Eight years stolen from us, and here we are again.
Dorothea kept her eyes on the ground as she and her child plodded towards the terminal building, but that didn’t stop them from walking through a puddle. Rachel heard herself laugh abruptly. Still blind as a bat. Probably worse, now.
Rachel felt the hot hugeness of her love swelling in her heart.
Rachel waited on the crimson suede banquette, her handbag on her knee, her kid gloves growing damp as she clutched them. She had dressed as smartly as she could today. Working at Niemann Marcus had given her the choice of the best couture clothing.
When she’d started as a store assistant during the war, she’d felt it was only a step up from the switchboard, and hardly the life she would have chosen for herself, were it not for Hitler. The years had taught her to be grateful. She had risen quickly, and now managed one of the most prestigious ladies’ wear lines in Niemann Marcus.
The years had also taught her that clothes made the woman. And her job enabled her to live in a world of women, surrounded by her own sex, her eyes filled each day with refinement and beauty.
The clothes she had chosen today were expensive and stylish. She didn’t want Dorothea to think she had grown dowdy, now that she was past thirty. She hadn’t anticipated that Dorothea would choose to wear the old houndstooth coat which had captured her heart all those years ago. That had been a master stroke.
Finally, she saw them coming through the doors, carrying their suitcases.
Rachel got to her feet, her knees shaky, and hurried to meet them.
Dorothea didn’t see her until the last minute; but Rachel had time to notice that the years of war, hunger and hardship had made the houndstooth coat threadbare, the woman inside it thin and careworn. The child, too, was shabby, a black mourning band for her father around the arm of her jacket, which was too thin, even for this mild autumn day. She was sweet-faced, but looked undernourished, her blonde pigtails lank, her cheeks hollow. American food and a few trips to Niemann Marcus, Rachel thought, would cure all that. She had the means to make their lives beautiful again.
Dorothea looked up with a start as Rachel confronted her. Behind the round lenses, her eyes were still the grey-green of Saxony rain. She’d touched her lips with pink to make herself more attractive. But nothing could make that face more lovely to Rachel.
‘I’ve waited for you,’ Rachel said, her throat dry.
‘And I for you,’ Dorothea replied, almost inaudibly.
‘We don’t have to wait any longer.’ She held out her arms. ‘Welcome.’
The tired child stared up at the two women as they clung to one another. After a while, they drew her into their embrace.
Wisconsin
Cubby reached St Coletta at mid-morning. He’d started making his travel plans the moment he’d heard about the assassination on Friday. He’d wanted to be with Rosemary as soon as possible. During his long journey from California to the Midwest over this weekend, he had seen the grim faces, the women who still cried in public, the huddled groups who talked in hushed voices and occasionally glanced up at the sky. People were still saying the killing of the president was the prelude to a Russian attack. Some were waiting for the nuclear missiles to begin raining down.
Out here in rural Wisconsin, that horror seemed less likely. The November skies were cold sapphire, scattered with fleecy clouds that caught the sun. The last of the autumn leaves were clinging to the woods, red and frail. He saw a flock of wild turkeys scrambling across the road, and once a solitary whitetail buck, looking at him over its shoulder.
He turned off County Road Y towards the school, which was set among trees on a rise of land. As he drove slowly between the school buildings, several people waved to him. He was well-known here.
It had been called many things: ‘St Coletta Institute for Backward Youth’ had been pretty blunt. ‘St Coletta Feeble-Minded School’ had been well-meaning but discouraging. Finally, the Catholic Church had hit on the brilliant idea of renaming it ‘St Coletta School for Exceptional Children.’
It had been called many things, and it was many things: a school where the young were given hope, a farm, an orchard, a haven where the irreparably damaged were sheltered, a housing programme where the vulnerable could live with dignity. And it was now Rosemary Kennedy’s home.
Rosemary had her own cottage, a little white unit that was screened off from prying eyes by tall firs and cypresses that were always dark green at any time of the year. There were borders of geraniums and a patch of lawn, all kept neat by the gardeners. Compared to the residences of her surviving siblings, it wasn’t much to look at, but it was sufficient for her simple needs.
He pulled the rental car up in front of the cottage and got out, his ears singing in the silence. There was nobody in the little garden, so he entered the house. The television was on. Rosemary sat in front of it, flanked by two of the sisters. The sisters were both in tears. Rosemary, whom they’d dressed in black, was watching the images on the screen intently but with no outward show of emotion.
‘Oh, Mr Bigelow,’ Sister Ursula said, rising and coming to Cubby, ‘isn’t it terrible?’ She was pressing a handkerchief to her mouth so that Cubby could barely understand what she was saying.
‘How is Rosemary taking it?’ Cubby asked.
‘She was watching the television on Friday when the news came through. I don’t think she really understood. We’ve been trying to explain to her, but—’ Sister Ursula blew her nose. Her eyes were swollen and red. ‘Perhaps it’s a mercy if she doesn’t quite get it.’
Cubby sat on the sofa next to Rosemary. Her hands were lying open in her lap, as they so often did. He took one of them. ‘Hello, Rosie.’
She drew her eyes away from the screen and glanced at him. ‘Jack is dead,’ she said.
So she understood that much, at least. ‘Yes. I’m so sorry, Rosemary.’
She squeezed his hand briefly, then returned to watching the television. Jack Kennedy’s funeral was underway in Washington.
They watched the widow emerging from the White House, draped in black lace, leading her two small children by the hand. The coffin, covered with the Stars and Stripes, was laid on a gun carriage, pulled by six white horses. They began the long, slow march up Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol.
As the funeral cortege passed the blocks, the television cameras panned across faces in the crowd, the soldiers immaculate and expressionless, the civilians stunned, grieving. Many of the women wore headscarves, as though in church. A young girl looked on with tears streaming down her cheeks. Mostly, people were silent and motionless.
Cubby was remembering his meeting with Jack, twenty-four years earlier, in Southampton. He’d liked the young man, despite everything. Everyone liked Jack. He was luminous, persuasive, disarming. His murder in a public street in Dallas had changed America. A light had gone out and nobody knew how to reignite it. The nation was groping blindly.
The nuns brought cups of tea as they continued to watch the long-drawn funeral on the small TV that stood on a shelf next to a brightly glazed tortoise made by Rosemary in pottery class.
‘Is he the president now?’ Rosemary asked, pointing. Her words were slurred. You had to get used to the way she spoke before you could understand her.
‘Yes,’ Cubby answered. Johnson looked worn, already overburdened by the office he had once sought, and which had fallen to him so shockingly.
Rosemary hardly said another word after that. In St Matthew’s Cathedral in Washington, the requiem mass began. The cameras focused on a s
tatue of Jesus while a tenor sang Ave Maria. The voice of the priest was disembodied, intoning words which meant nothing to Cubby, though the nuns crossed themselves from time to time. He wondered how much of this Rosemary was following. He’d raced to be here with her in case she needed him, but it seemed as though the death of her brother, the third of her siblings to die – and all of them violent deaths – had left her unmoved.
Suddenly, however, Rosemary yelled, making them all start.
‘Lollie! Get off the chair!’
Rosemary’s poodle had jumped on to an armchair with a ball in its mouth. ‘Hush, Rosemary,’ Sister Ursula said in dismay.
But Rosemary was furious. ‘Get off! Get off! ’ Her yelling made the dog roll its expressive brown eyes, wriggling its stump of a tail. Rosemary got to her feet, still a tall and daunting figure. The dog leaped off the chair, dropped its ball to bark, and then picked it up again. ‘Taking her for a walk,’ Rosemary said, stamping after the animal, which was already making for the door.
‘But the funeral—’ Sister Ursula protested.
Cubby also rose. ‘I’ll go with her.’
They walked among the trees, the poodle frisking around them. After a while, Rosemary took Cubby’s hand. Her fingers clutched his tightly, like a child. ‘They’re crying all the time,’ she said. ‘Getting on my nerves.’
‘They’re sad because your brother was a great man.’
She nodded. ‘I can’t cry any more. Don’t know how to.’ She touched her head. ‘After they did this.’
‘I understand,’ Cubby said gently.
‘Used to cry a lot. Before.’ She stopped at the sound of a distant shot.
‘It’s just a hunter in the woods, a mile or two off.’
She resumed walking. ‘I cried all the time when you went away.’
‘I know you did.’
‘Why didn’t we ever get married?’ she asked.
He was always stuck for an adequate answer to that, though she asked it almost every time he came. ‘Well, the war started. I had to go and fight.’
‘Can’t have children now.’ She laid her hand on her belly. ‘All gone. Operation.’
‘I know.’ They’d given her the hysterectomy some years earlier, but it was still fresh in her mind, even though she’d been through an early menopause as a result. She was forty-five now. ‘I’m so sorry.’
‘Wish I could cry now. But I can’t.’ Abruptly, she kicked at the dead leaves, her face red with anger. The fragile brown things flew into the air, then settled around her shoes. ‘I get so mad. So goddamn mad.’ She put her arms clumsily around him and held him tight, her cropped head on his shoulder. Cubby wanted to cry for both of them, but like Rosemary herself, he didn’t know how to any more.
They stood like that, leaning on one another among the stark trees, for a long while. At last, she kissed him clumsily on the mouth. There was nothing sexual in the kiss. It was almost a blow, her lips dry and hard. ‘Love,’ she said, looking into his eyes.
‘Love,’ he agreed.
They walked back to the cottage.
The funeral took all day. It ended in Arlington, in the dusk. The soldiers fired three volleys into the air. A bugler played ‘The Last Post’. The setting sun streaked the sorrowful faces of the crowd who stood among a sea of fallen leaves. Jackie and Bobby lit the flame that would burn for evermore. The coffin sank into the earth at last. Evening came swiftly, and the flame was left flickering in the darkness, alone and restless.
By now Rosemary was tired and irritable. He knew it was time to leave. He said goodbye to her, and then set off on the long journey home.
Kennedy Space Centre, Florida
It had been a particularly nerve-racking three days. The first launch had been aborted at the last second – literally. With seven seconds to go before ignition, Columbia’s hazardous gas detection system had suddenly reported high levels of hydrogen in the orbiter’s aft engine compartment. With vivid memories of the 1986 Challenger fireball, in which all seven crew members had died, Thomas König and the other system engineers in Kennedy Space Centre’s Firing Room No. 1 had had to take a decision. The launch had been aborted less than half a second before the three main engines were due to ignite.
Columbia’s five crew members had emerged from the spacecraft in their orange flight suits, disappointed but philosophical. The STS-93 mission was historic in being the first in space shuttle history to be commanded by a woman, Eileen Collins, with a second woman among the five-person crew, Cady Coleman.
On inspection, the hydrogen concentration indication had turned out to be a false reading.
‘We took the right decision,’ Thomas said to his dejected team, his German accent still noticeable after a lifetime in the United States. ‘Better safe than sorry. We’ll reinitiate countdown shortly.’
After recalibrating the gas detectors, they’d scheduled a second launch for two days later.
This time, the weather had closed in, with storms and high winds. The second launch had also been scrubbed. They’d initiated a twenty-four-hour turnaround, hoping the weather would improve, as the meteorologists were predicting.
While the shuttle crew tried to relax, Thomas and the rest of the team worked round the clock on preparations for the third countdown. Third time lucky, everybody said. The mission would be a short one, five days in orbit; but every minute of every day would be filled with work for the astronauts. There were several secondary payloads to be deployed, including the Chandra X-ray Observatory, an orbiting X-ray telescope fifty times more powerful than anything yet used, capable of reading the letters on a stop sign from twelve miles away.
On the space station, the astronauts would monitor several ongoing biological experiments, and would all take turns on the treadmill to collect valuable data on how exercise in space affected the microgravity of the space station. Routine stuff; but even after all these years, there was nothing routine about space exploration. Every day brought new wonders and new challenges.
‘You’re going to miss all this, Tom,’ a colleague said to Thomas.
He nodded. ‘Yes, I am.’
It was his last launch. Now into his seventies, he was ten years older than NASA’s official retirement age. His lifetime with the Agency, and his deep involvement with the Space Shuttle Program, had kept him working, sharing his experience and wisdom. But by the time Mission STS-93 returned to Florida, he would be in retirement. A tall, spare figure in white shirt-sleeves and dark tie, he would in his turn be missed by all those he had worked with. His reputation for brilliance and reserve, tempered with kindness, was legendary.
The day of the launch dawned clear. The meteorologists had prophesied correctly. The Firing Room system engineers were all at their desks by midday. The huge screens on the wall in front of them showed the space shuttle, aimed at the heavens, waiting to be unleashed from earth’s sullen bonds. Steam rose tranquilly around it into the pellucid afternoon sky.
Reflected in the lagoon that extended beside the launch pad, Columbia appeared pristine, though the shuttle was now ten years old. Unlike other spacecraft, which took on the appearance of turkeys left too long in the oven, Columbia returned from space relatively unscathed each time. Her tiled surfaces were carefully designed to withstand the heat generated by ploughing into the earth’s atmosphere at orbital speed during re-entry. Only a close look revealed the scuffs and burns left by twenty-five previous missions.
STS-93 was to be a night launch, taking off shortly after midnight. The astronauts began to take their seats in the shuttle again during the late afternoon.
The humid Florida night fell. In the darkness, loud with the voices of frogs and night birds, Columbia glowed like a beacon. She had become as iconic a sight to a generation of Americans as the Statue of Liberty herself. The intense light from the floods glanced off her sleek fuselage, streaming up into the sky, as though – or so Thomas thought – she were illuminating a path for herself to the stars.
Commander Coll
ins’s voice came through the communications link a few minutes after midnight: ‘Great working with you guys, see you in five days.’ And then the launch sequence was underway.
A night launch was a spectacle which Thomas always enjoyed. Ignition of the three main engines was reminiscent of a volcanic eruption. Huge glowing clouds billowed around the launch vehicle. Then it began to lift cleanly, jets of fire spitting from the three gaping nozzles.
The thunder of her engines made the earth vibrate under the feet of the watchers. Outside, it was deafening. Like a midnight sun, the rocket lit up the night as it climbed the sky. For a while, it was too bright to watch. Then the dazzling fireball dwindled swiftly. Within a few minutes, it was no more than a spark in the blackness. With burnout and separation complete, Columbia had consumed two million pounds of fuel, half of her launch weight, within ten minutes of her departure.
An appearance of cool professionalism was the norm in the launch centre these days. The days of ecstatic cheers and high-fives had passed. Everybody tried to look as though this was just part of a normal day, a result that had been planned for and expected. But as Columbia ascended on her fiery tail, the mood was elated.
Thomas left the centre sometime around two a.m., his eyes aching, his back weary. He knew that farewell parties and award ceremonies awaited him during what remained of the week, but this was effectively his last working day.
He had never been a sentimental man – he had cut extraneous emotions out of his life as far as he possibly could – but the aftermath of a launch always left him somehow saddened.
The departure of that gleaming white thing left a sense of loss, of something wonderful and magical that would never come again; of moments of glory and wonder that had illuminated the darkness for a while and then had left him bereft and alone.
He had lived with that sense of loss all his life.
The Ocean Liner Page 31