The Night of the Comet

by George Bishop

  Eager students rushed to buy telescopes at shops in New Orleans and Baton Rouge; when the shops sold out of telescopes, people bought binoculars. We would see them in the evenings, boys with their fathers, families who had never before had any interest in astronomy, people who had hardly ever noticed that there were lights in the sky, setting up their new telescopes in their yards or carrying them into empty fields at the edge of town, astronomy guidebooks in hand. My father, if he was passing on his bike, would stop to offer help. Sometimes he forgot the time and would come home long after dinner, burrs stuck to the cuffs of his trousers, apologizing.

  Thanks to his Groovy Science column, he’d become known as the local expert on Comet Kohoutek, the go-to person for all things astronomical. He began to receive invitations to speak around the parish. During the day after his own classes, he visited schools in neighboring towns to talk to science clubs and student assemblies. In the evenings and on weekends he spoke at the Rotary Club, the Lions Club, the Ladies Auxiliary. He worked up a standard presentation for all these engagements, with ten-minute, thirty-minute, and forty-five-minute versions available. He practiced with note cards in the living room, until everyone in our family got to know his speeches almost as well as he did. They all followed the same basic outline:

  1. What is a comet? Where do they come from? Why are they important?

  2. Famous comets in history

  3. Kohoutek—The Comet of the Century

  4. Viewing tips

  5. Nothing to fear

  6. Questions?

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  IN late November he appeared as a guest on Buckskin Bill’s “Storyland Cabin,” a morning show on WNGO-TV in New Orleans. He drove there early, and my mother, sister, and I watched from home before school as the show was broadcast. I was nervous waiting for him to come on. Half of Louisiana’s youth would see him; some of my classmates might even see him. What if he did something stupid?

  Buckskin Bill was a middle-aged man in a fringed leather shirt and a coonskin cap. His Storyland Cabin was a small studio set designed to look like the inside of a log cabin, with a fake fireplace, deer antlers on the wall, and a rustic wooden bookcase filled with children’s books. For the interview, my father sat on an upturned log across from Bill, who rested his hands on his knees and asked his questions in gentle morning tones, as if he were speaking to a sleepy child.

  “We’ve all heard a lot about this comet, Professor. It sounds really exciting. Why don’t you tell us a little bit more about it?”

  In the tight frame of the camera, my father’s head appeared larger and bonier than in real life. His skin had an orange-pinkish tint, like a pumpkin’s. He sniffed and jerked a little at the start, but once he settled down he conducted himself with aplomb.

  He spoke simply but knowledgeably about the comet, following his usual script. He illustrated his remarks with a prop that he’d begun bringing around to his lectures, a foil-covered Styrofoam ball. He had a variety of cardboard tails that he attached to the ball to show different apparitions of comets, and he moved the model around his head to demonstrate how Kohoutek would circle the Sun.

  “Gosh. Look at that,” said Buckskin Bill.

  My father’s presentation was interrupted by Señor Gonzales, Bill’s puppet sidekick, who dropped down from above onto a stool between Bill and my father. He was dressed as a Mexican, with a thin black mustache and a sombrero, and he jumped and waved tiny guns attached to his hands. He acted the alarmist and wailed in a high, nasally Mexican voice, “The comet is coming! The comet is coming!” Buckskin Bill chuckled and patted Señor Gonzales on his sombrero. My father played along, saying to the puppet, “Now, now. There’s nothing to be afraid of, Señor Gonzales.” He brought the model comet down to show to the puppet, and together with Buckskin Bill they discussed what to expect and when the best time to view it would be. The puppet was mollified, and at the end pronounced Kohoutek “fantastico!” and did a jerky wooden-shoe dance on the stool.

  “You didn’t think it was silly?”

  “I thought it was good,” I said later that evening at dinner.

  Megan said, “You should have strangled that little puppet.”

  My mother commented on his skin tone and suggested he might consider using a little powder before his next TV appearance. “Not makeup. Just a little powder is all I’m saying.”

  “It’s just something for the kids, obviously,” my father said, ignoring her. But heck, even Carl Sagan wasn’t above appearing on Sesame Street. The important thing was that the astronomical community was finally getting the attention it deserved. He saw himself as a sort of emissary between the world of stars and the world of men. Ordinary folks tended to think of astronomy as something remote and removed from their lives, he explained, but with this comet they had the chance to bring it down to a personal level, to show people that all their stargazing really was relevant. Even Dr. Kohoutek recognized the need for this kind of public outreach.

  Next month, my father told us, Luboš would be making his first visit to America. Everybody in the Astronomical Society was talking about it. For a man as notoriously lab bound and shy as Luboš Kohoutek, this was quite the venture. He’d be making the rounds: first he would speak at Harvard University, then he’d be the guest of honor at the biannual AAS conference, in Washington, and from there he would fly to Houston to visit NASA. But the thing that was getting the most attention was the Comet Cruise—a three-day comet-viewing excursion on the Queen Elizabeth, sailing from New York in early December. It had been sold out for a month, with East Coast socialites paying three hundred dollars apiece for the privilege of dining and dancing with the comet’s namesake. Other celebrities sailing with Luboš on the Comet Cruise, our father had heard, were Hugh Downs, Buzz Aldrin, Carl Sagan, and Burl Ives.

  “Not sure what Burl Ives has to do with astronomy,” my father groused good-naturedly. “He’ll probably bring his ukulele, sing a few tunes.”

  He spoke about the possibility of meeting Dr. Kohoutek himself—not on the cruise, of course, but maybe at the conference in Washington or while the scientist was passing through Houston. Who knew when he’d get another chance like this? It’d be like meeting a modern-day Galileo. Just to shake his hand, say hello, congratulate him on his discovery: that was all our father wanted. Oh, sure, he knew he was just a high school science teacher. But Luboš was just a man, like any other man, and besides, in his experience all astronomers shared a certain mutual respect for one another, no matter their standing. It was like with that Japanese fellow, the one who had found all the comets. No one cared that he worked in a factory, or that he didn’t have a PhD after his name; he could sit at the table with the best of them. It was like a club, my father said, and the only requirement for membership was your love of the stars.

  Because finally what mattered was the science itself. That was the main thing, and every astronomer understood this. Whether he was a professor at an observatory in Hamburg, or an amateur astronomer in Japan, or a teacher at a poor rural high school in Louisiana, any person who scanned the skies and felt that sense of wonder and shared it with his neighbor was making his contribution to the field, no matter how small. The comet might’ve held Kohoutek’s name, but really it belonged to all of them. Its discovery was the outcome of years, centuries even, of study and stargazing by countless astronomers, famous and obscure, all over the world. Here, finally, was the proof of the value of their profession, and all the attention in the media was well deserved; for Comet Kohoutek, as everyone now acknowledged, was the most important astronomical phenomenon of the century.

  He stopped and rested his hands on the table, as if the full significance of this was just sinking in. He had long fingers with wide white moons on the nails; they were the hands of a scientist, of a man meant to work quietly indoors—hardly the hands of a person who could stand up and meet the world blow for blow.

  He shook his head, amazed. It was real. It was here. It was coming. Fifty times
brighter than Halley’s, the comet to outshine them all. Nobody at our dinner table seriously doubted him anymore. How could we? All the world’s experts confirmed everything he’d been telling us for months. Even Megan had to admit he was right. He’d been right all along. We could practically hear his comet rumbling up there in the sky like a storm gathering above our house.

  And perhaps it was only my impression, but as the comet raced nearer, my father seemed to be growing in size himself. He was slightly bigger than before, bigger than life. Seeing him now at home or at school—prepping his lessons, riding his bike, standing watch on the playground in his black raincoat—I pictured the glow of his certainty surrounding him like an aura, so that his glasses, his oiled hair, his white shirt and black tie became things not to jeer at, but rather the marks of his profession, things to almost admire about the man. It was as if he had finally fixed the focus on himself so that it was clear who he was. He needn’t be ashamed of who he was; he was who he was. This comet, this lump of ice and gas, validated everything he’d ever stood for. It was evidence to the world that the life of Alan Broussard, high school science teacher and amateur astronomer, hadn’t been a waste after all.

  And for the first time in my teenage life, I began to feel a measure of pride for my father. For the first time since I was a boy, I wasn’t ashamed to answer to my name.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  “COMET Boy! You are the comet!”

  I stood at the kitchen window watching for her. The trees were bare and the weeds lay flat along the edges of the bayou. Five houses up, Mr. Coot was burning leaves in his backyard, sending smoke drifting in a low gray fog down the water. The afternoon light was clear, the air thin, the clouds high and white. In this cool, denuded landscape, the distance between her home and mine seemed to have shrunk. If I looked carefully, I could read the grain on the wood of their boat dock; if I listened, I could hear the click and thunk of their front door as the Martellos came and went during the day. Catching Gabriella as she passed from the car to the house or strolled up the drive to check the mailbox, I would call to her from our backyard. I hardly had to raise my voice for her to hear me. “Gabby. What’s up?” She would answer, “Comet Boy! You are the comet!” And the invisible golden cord joining us would snap and twang, causing me to almost buckle over with joy and misery.

  This feeling, this painful tugging in my gut whenever I laid eyes on her—was this what people called love? And did she feel it, too? How could I know?

  My father stepped up beside me at the window and sniffed lightly to signal his presence. It was the Saturday after Thanksgiving Day. Megan had gone out and my mother had left for another visit to the Martellos, leaving just the two of us at home. My father peered up through the window to check the clouds.

  “Should be some good viewing again tonight if the weather stays clear. I’m curious to see what that tail’s doing.”

  I saw my mother arrive at the Martellos’ house across the water. She parked the Rambler in the street in front, got out, and lifted bolts of silver cloth from the backseat; she and Barbara were working on some sort of costumes for the ball, only two weeks away now. Frank jogged up the driveway to meet her and helped her carry the supplies to the house.

  “Friendly guy, isn’t he?” my father said, but he didn’t sound too pleased about it. We watched until they disappeared around the front corner of the house. “The women have abandoned us. We’re on our own now.” He stepped away from the window. “Hungry? Lunch?”

  I cleared the table while he put on an apron and set about making sandwiches. The house was dim and cool, the lights off, the gas turned low to conserve energy, on account of the Arabian oil embargo. As he laid out slices of white bread on the countertop and methodically layered the components—mustard, turkey, lettuce, tomato, mayonnaise—he talked about the ball. He was still surprised people had responded as favorably as they had—seventy-two reservations so far and calls were still coming in. They probably didn’t give a hoot about any science labs, he said; they just wanted their party. But no matter. With a couple thousand dollars he’d be able to do quite a lot for the department. He’d been talking with the other science teachers about how to best use the money, and everyone was drawing up their wish lists: new microscopes, spectroscopes, circuitry kits, centrifuges, topographical surveying equipment. With luck, they’d have the labs up and running again before the end of the school year; then we’d be able to do some really nifty projects in my class. “Wouldn’t that be neat?”

  He squared the sandwiches and cut them diagonally. “Pickle? I love a good pickle with lunch.” He added some to a plate, and I poured apple juice for us and sat to join him at the table.

  We ate our sandwiches, passing the salt and pepper. He wore a flannel shirt tucked into khaki-colored pants, his professorial formality set aside for the holiday. In spite of our differences—his short hair, mine long, his old-fashioned glasses, my new-fashioned bell-bottoms—I felt a rare sense of companionship with him. It could’ve had to do with the fact that I was nearly as tall as he was now, so that I sat higher in my chair, my head almost at a level with his. We had stepped away for the moment from father and son, teacher and student. We might have instead been a couple of guys on a camping trip, roughing it together without the women. The cool air batted the thin walls of our cabin, rattling the windows as we hunkered down inside, sharing our scrappy meal, one made that much more enjoyable by its improvised nature.

  “This reminds me of when I was a bachelor,” he said, pushing his glasses up with the back of his hand.

  He told me how when he first moved to Terrebonne he lived on his own in a rented apartment in town. He used to do all his own cooking then. Washed his own clothes. Stayed up all hours of the night. Those were the days. Guys would come over and leave their beer bottles everywhere. “Your mother was appalled—appalled—when she saw that apartment.” He chuckled at the memory.

  To be reminded that my father was once a young man was always a little startling for me. Washed his own clothes? Up all hours? Beer bottles everywhere? That was hard to believe. To my eyes at least, he appeared to have been stuck at the same age, in the same body, for as long as I’d known him, as unchanging as a photograph in a school yearbook. But as unlikely as it seemed, I knew he’d been young once, too. Maybe he had even experienced the same confused longings and attachments that I felt now. Maybe he had had his Gabriella.

  I edged up to the question between bites of my sandwich.

  “How’d you and Mom ever, you know, get together?”

  “You’ve heard this story before, haven’t you? She was working in the drugstore. I was a new teacher.”

  “Right—”

  “I had a stomachache, and I used to go there every night.”

  He began to retell it, his version of the scientist and the shopgirl story. Though I’d heard it before, I was eager to hear it again because it struck me as especially relevant just now. Maybe here would be some clue to my feelings for Gabriella, some guide to how I should act.

  And so as the faint blue flames flickered in the gas heater and the winter scratched at the walls outside, I filled in the blanks in his story with my imagination until I could almost see my father as a hair-slicked, bespectacled bachelor, a young man who looked much like he did now only smaller, skinnier, a little jerkier: Alan Broussard as he once was, back before there was ever a thought of an Alan Broussard, Jr.

  Back then, he told me, he never meant to be a teacher. He much preferred being a student. He loved everything about his department at LSU: the research, his classmates, the professors. Dr. Brewer, his advisor, always said he had the mind of a scientist, the ability to get inside a problem and visualize a solution. Not everyone had that. But then he happened to attend a recruitment fair for prospective schoolteachers at the university field house, and one week later, much to his surprise, he received a phone call from the Terrebonne school district offering him a job.

  He didn’t even know where Terreb
onne was. But he wanted to prove to his parents that he could stand on his own two feet. “Go have your Wanderjahr,” Dr. Brewer said. “That’s what I would do.” And so he bought a secondhand car and five new ties, shook his father’s hand, kissed his mother’s cheek, and drove south. Down he drove, down to the toe of the state, carrying the torchlight of science into the jungle.… He ran over a snake outside Napoleonville.…

  “Okay, okay, I already know all that,” I interrupted him. “I’ve heard it all before. As innocent as a Christian tossed to the lions. Everyone came to school by boat. There was a girl named Melinda.”

  “She found a fossil.…”

  “Right, I know. You can skip all that. And then one day, after grading papers all evening …,” I said, prodding him to move along to the important part of the story.

  “Right. Okay. And so then one day, after grading papers all evening, I walked over to the McCall’s Rexall. She was all alone in the store, the only employee working that night.…”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  SHE was alone in the store, the only employee working that night he walked over from his apartment for some stomach medicine. The bell on the inside of the door dinged when he stepped into the shop. She didn’t look up.

  “What can I do for you?” she asked in a flat, sleepy voice.

  She might have been one of his teenage students herself, so young and bored she seemed. She was leaning on the counter near the cash register studying the latest issue of Movie World magazine. The headline of the article she was reading, viewed upside down by my father-to-be, said “Is Debbie Waiting Too Long?”