Rocket Girl

by George D. Morgan

  “Hello,” said a voice.

  “Is this Mr. Kanarek?”

  “Yes. Who is this?”

  “This is George Morgan.”

  “Did you get the bat?”

  “The what?”

  “The bat. Did you get the bat?”

  “The bat? You mean, like a baseball bat?”

  “Yeah. Did you get it?”

  “I'm not sure…”

  “The day you were born I went to visit you and your mom in the hospital. I brought you a present—a kid's baseball bat. Did you get it?”

  “Ummm…”

  “Ask your dad—he knows about it.”

  On the day of this conversation I am fifty-seven years old, but suddenly the image pops into my head. When I was very young, I had a small wooden bat, about half the size and weight of a regular bat. I always assumed my parents had bought it for me; they never said otherwise. It was the bat my father had me use when he first taught me how to hit a baseball. For a brief moment my mind tunes out the voice of Irving Kanarek and a long-ago memory of my father teaching me how to swing a bat pushes in to my conscious. I am about six years old, and we're in the backyard of our house in Reseda.

  “Hold the bat like this, son. Two hands firmly around the neck. Bring it back over your shoulder, then swing, like this.”

  My dad and I both hold the bat, and he demonstrates how to swing it. Then he walks ten steps away and pitches me the ball, slow and underhand. I swing the bat, and miss. He pitches several more balls—I swing and miss every one. After a few more strikes, I throw the bat down in frustration.

  “I can't do this!”

  My father walks back and gets down on one knee.

  “I'm going to tell you a little secret about hitting a baseball, okay?”

  I nod my head.

  “The hard part about hitting a baseball is you're trying to hit a round object with another round object. It's difficult. But the more you know about the science of physics, the easier it is. In my job I use a lot of physics, so I can give you information few other fathers know about—understand?”

  I nod my head.

  “I'm going to tell you a secret about hitting a baseball, and you have to promise not to ever tell anyone else. Okay?”

  I nod my head.

  My father looks left and right, making sure there's no one else around who will hear the secret. He holds up a ball, and whispers.

  “Keep your eye on the ball.”

  He takes ten steps back, and pitches me the ball. I keep my eye on it, and swing the bat. The round bat connects with the round ball, and the little white orb goes sailing over our backyard fence. It hits the roof of the Velkers' home, knocking off one of their roof tiles. It bounces once and plops into their chimney. My dad turns and looks at me.

  “Good. Now do it again.”

  Somewhere around the time I turned ten years old, the bat disappeared. God only knows what happened to it.

  “Oh yeah, Mr. Kanarek. I got it. Thank you.”

  “You're welcome.”

  I set up an appointment to meet with Irving in Costa Mesa the following weekend. I thank him for his willingness to help with my project, and hang up the phone. For the rest of the day I can't help but have a recurring thought: The man who defended Charles Manson and the Onion Field killers gave me my very first birthday present.

  In early 1935 Willy Ley, a young journalist, German rocketeer, and close friend of Wernher von Braun, convinced his supervisors in the Foreign Office to sponsor him on a journalism assignment to the United States. What Willy conveniently neglected to tell his supervisors was that he was secretly planning to permanently immigrate to America. The requisition for a “paid journalism assignment” was nothing more than a clever ruse designed to get Germany to pay for his escape.1

  As a journalist, Willy Ley was more aware than most Germans of the sinister side of Adolf Hitler's rise to power.2 He knew Hitler had murdered dozens of his enemies, and he suspected he would stop at nothing to become an all-powerful dictator. Ley was also aware of Hitler's quiet campaign to burn the Treaty of Versailles and remilitarize Germany. One of the most blatant violations of that campaign was the covert creation of a massive air force, what would come to be known as the Luftwaffe.3 Willy Ley could smell another war coming and decided it was best to leave the country while the borders were still open. So it was that one cold morning in February Willy shared a beer with his good friend Wernher, exchanged a few warm good-bye hugs, shouldered his duffel bag, then boarded a steamer bound for New York. Neither of them could surmise the chain of events that, in a very short ten years, would result in Wernher following his friend across the Atlantic.4

  For now, there was far too much action to keep Wernher firmly rooted in Germany—flying a rocket to the moon was his unyielding dream, and real progress on that dream was being made. The work of the German rocket boys was attracting attention—the kind of attention that writes checks. The previous December, the youthful von Braun crew had flown two of their most sophisticated rockets as a private demonstration for a group of army officers. Dubbed Max and Moritz, after a couple of kids in a popular German cartoon, the rockets broke all previous altitude records and made a significant impression on the visiting dignitaries.5

  Since rockets had not been included in the Versailles Treaty as one of the verboten weapons, it left a major loophole the German army was only too happy to jump through.6 Army generals and colonels began keeping a close eye on Wernher von Braun and his experimenting associates. Money had been flowing into the military like the Rhine River during spring runoff, and new technologies were given special funding priority. Any weapon that did not exist prior to June 28, 1919, was not a part of the Versailles Treaty and was therefore technically exempt. Von Braun and a small team of budding engineers were given a modest annual budget of 80,000 marks for research and development.

  Such financial modesty did not last long, however, as it was soon overshadowed by the potent vanity of unlimited funding. In March 1936, the army's commander in chief, General Feiherr von Fritsh, wanted to see what his 80,000 marks was buying. He decided to pay a visit to the Kummersdorf—the remote location von Braun and his engineers had moved to after the police-station incident. What the general saw immediately impressed him. His exact words to von Braun were, “How much do you want?”7

  After carloads of military money began arriving at the Kummersdorf, and hundreds of engineers, technicians, and clerks began to join the newfound payroll bandwagon, Wernher wrote a letter to his parents. In it he made a report of his recent successes, then he closed the letter with a simple observation, “As the Americans say, we have made it to the big time.”

  It was August 2007.

  I took a felt pen and addressed the two 9 × 13 manila envelopes, one to the theatre department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the other to the same department at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena. These were the top two engineering schools in the country, both of which I had applied to (and rightfully been turned down by) during my senior year in high school back in 1971. Each envelope contained a copy of the just-completed play about my mother. As is common with many writers and their projects, the play was easier to write than the title. I struggled with a number of alternatives, and wished many times I had thought of The Girl Who Played with Fire before Stieg Larsson had used it. Every title candidate I considered was too esoteric, too weird, or just too simple. In the end I settled for simple, and titled the play Rocket Girl. Those two words, I decided, would not win any titling awards on Broadway, but they said it all.

  The play had taken me a year to research and write, and now the time had come to place the messages in the bottles and toss them into the deep, wide ocean. I applied my DNA to the envelope seals, closed them, affixed the proper postage, then handed them over to the US Postal Service.

  Based on a thousand past writing-submission experiences, I expected to wait at least six months for a reply.

/>   Four days later, I received a letter with from some organization calling itself TACIT. I had no idea what TACIT was, but the return address was in Pasadena. I ripped open the envelope. Inside was a one-page letter from Shirley Marneus, the theatre director at Caltech. TACIT, it turned out, stood for Theatre Arts at the California Institute of Technology.

  Shirley Marneus was a well-known institution, having directed thousands of Caltech actors over a thirty-five-year career. In her letter she expressed enthusiasm for bringing Rocket Girl to Caltech. Her exact words were, “Your play and this school are a match made in heaven.” I mentioned how timing was important; the following year would be the fiftieth anniversary of the launch of America's first satellite, Explorer 1, and if at all possible I wanted the play to commemorate that event by having its premiere before the end of 2008. She assured me that was within their capabilities.

  Thus began a series of e-mails and phone calls as Shirley and I discussed what would be required to mount the play's world premiere. Astonishingly, she never once asked me to rewrite or edit any part of the play—almost unheard-of in the world of new play production. This concerned me, since all experienced writers know that rewriting is a healthy and necessary part of the process. I let it get to me, of course, allowing my ego to expand like an inflated zeppelin (The play must be perfect, blah, blah). Shirley set a date five months away for opening night, and I could not have been happier.

  Then reality set in.

  A few weeks passed, then Shirley began calling me, groaning about “scheduling problems.” Caltech had three venues suitable for staging a play, and apparently the school's faculty had all three of them booked well in advance for lectures, seminars, symposiums, and so on.

  “We'll have to reschedule the production.”

  The play was pushed back a few months—several times. When the year 2007 came to a close, and we still did not have a firmed-up opening date, I began to worry. Shirley kept reassuring me, but as the sun rose on January 1, it began to look like the odds were against achieving my “golden anniversary” idea. Still, I received frequent e-mails from Shirley with enthusiastic progress reports. January 31—the actual launch anniversary—came and went. February, March, April, and the communications from Shirley became fewer, then stopped all together.

  Toward the end of May, Shirley wrote to tell me she had decided to retire from her job. Immediately. Health problems had taken their toll, and she just could not handle her directing responsibilities any longer.

  “As of tomorrow,” she said, “Caltech will no longer have a theatre director.”

  Shirley said she would recommend to her successor, who had yet to be chosen, that Rocket Girl be produced at the school “eventually,” but that she could not give me any guarantees, which I completely understood. Whenever there is a regime change in the world of performing arts, the new powers-that-be bring with them their own vision of which plays/films/art/etcetera should be promoted. The odds were extremely remote that two theatre directors in a row would be passionate about risking their reputations on a new play.

  Rocket Girl, I realized, was almost certainly dead. While I waited for news from TACIT, I busied myself with other writing projects. There were dozens of them, which, like a panting Labrador, waited patiently each day for their master's attention. One morning, as I was working on a musical play composition, it dawned on me that I had never heard back from MIT.

  When I wasn't writing, I would do more research, continuing to delve into the mystery of my mother's life. I use the word mystery because that is what it is.

  Was Mary Sherman a secret agent? Perhaps she was an operative with the OSS. Or the CIA. I begin to wonder because the more I look into her life, the more evidence I find that seems to point to some sort of premeditated, intentional erasure of the historical record. It's as if Mary, or someone, has methodically and carefully expunged every record of her existence prior to her marriage to my father, G. Richard Morgan. I start asking myself, whom did my father really marry on July 29, 1951?

  It gets more Hitchcockian by the day.

  One day, I pick up the phone and call the records department at Minot State University (formerly Minot State College) in North Dakota. A year prior, I had had a phone conversation with the same department that said they did indeed have a record of my mother going to school at Minot in the early 40s. I decide it would be prudent, from a research standpoint, to have some sort of written documentation of her attendance, so I call and request a copy of her transcript. After running a records search they claim to have found nothing. They promise to keep searching and get back to me.

  Two days later, they call back: no transcript and no records of a Mary Sherman attending Minot State College. Ever.

  What happened between last year and this year?

  I could have gotten transcripts from the second college she attended, DeSales College in Toledo, Ohio. Except they closed down more than half a century ago, and no one knows where the archived records are. No one knows if such records even exist.

  Truth be told, many of these problems are of my own making. From childhood into adulthood I have consistently failed to understand the historical significance of certain records or events until it is too late. Photographs are a prime example. Until I began this writing project, my understanding of the importance of family photographs was meager. The house is burning—what do you grab first? Most people say, “The family photographs.” Me, I just say, “Get the hell out of the house!” But telling my mother's story has changed all that. Now I kick myself for missing opportunities to preserve a handful of written and photographic records. A few years ago, my father showed me a photograph of my mother's Ray High School graduation class. It was a black-and-white 8 × 10, and it was in surprisingly good condition. As the class valedictorian, Mary was seated in a place of honor, front and center in the midst of the class. That group consisted of about sixty smiling students. Where is that photograph today? No one knows. I did nothing to preserve it, and now it's probably gone forever. At the time my father showed it to me I failed to understand its significance or historical importance. I said something like, “Oh, that's nice,” then moved on to some other responsibility hounding me for attention.

  There is one important score: going through boxes of old records, my father finds an 8 × 10 high-school graduation portrait photo of his future wife. Somehow, in the course of all my many writing projects, I ended up with it. It's the only known photograph of Mary prior to her wedding day in July 29, 1951. The quality is decent, but it just makes me wish somewhere along the line the Shermans and Morgans had been more diligent in taking, storing, and preserving early family photos. The urgency seems so obvious now; what was I thinking? Taking no chances, my daughter Carley and I begin a project to accumulate and digitally store all family photographs.

  The house is on fire? Don't worry: everything's in the iCloud.

  My family's failures to keep and maintain a proper photo collection over the past eighty years certainly explains part of the reason there is a dearth of early photographs of Mary Sherman. But eventually I become convinced that something else is at work. My mind begins to wander and I start to consider more sinister possibilities. Only one surviving photo for the first twenty-six years of a person's life? The whole thing has a mysterious secret-identity, person-without-a-name, Jason Bourne quality to it. Given that she worked in a US government top secret weapons plant during World War II, it's not so far-fetched. What kind of family, after all, keeps no photos of babies, children, and young adults? There is the high-school graduation photo, but no one avoids that portraiture duty anyway. No photographs prior to high-school graduation, two photographs at graduation, then no photos of Mary Sherman for the next eleven years—until her wedding day.

  I send an e-mail to my sisters, Karen and Monica, complaining about the lack of photographic records from the Shermans. Independent of each other, they both e-mail me back and relate a story. Both versions of the story are very similar, so I give i
t a great deal of credence. It is a story they say our mother shared with them (but not me) many years before. We will call it the “Mother Does Not Abide Photography” story.

  The sun—a dependable traveler on a lonely billion-year journey—had been down for three hours. From one horizon to the other, the evening fireworks show was in full bloom. Mary lay on her back staring at it. Like oxygen slamming into the intake of a jet engine, the nippy night air flowed cold into her nostrils, warmed as it traveled down her throat, then expanded like a bellows once it reached her lungs.

  As she watched the sky, ten-year-old Mary imagined a large condor lazily gliding above her. It was just a crow, but she imagined it to be a mighty condor. The previous week her teacher had taught the class a lesson about large North American birds. Mary was especially fascinated by the California condor—the largest bird in North America.

  “Is it only found in California?” she had asked.

  “No,” her teacher had replied. “Some condors can also be found in Mexico.”

  “Mexico is too far. I'll have to go to California.”

  Mary could not tell her parents that one of her new goals was to someday see a California condor with her own eyes. She knew they would not care. Her parents would loudly disparage her, which would result in her older brothers finding out, and soon it would be just one more thing to be incessantly teased about. Mary had discovered that keeping one's dreams a secret was often preferable.

  She tried counting stars for a few minutes, then gave up. There were just too many of them. Lying on her back, she whispered heavenward.

  “I want to fly into space.”

  Of course, she knew that space travel was one goal that was grandiose. In 1931, humans traveling through space was solely the realm of science fiction. But it was a goal nonetheless—a goal that had set her on a new monthly routine. Several nights each month, the moon, vanquished by the peculiarities of its orbit, disappeared from the sky and revealed to humble humanity the depth of the infinite. On such moonless nights the sky would develop a display of brilliant magnificence. Each and every planet and star and galaxy would be highlighted by that perfect blackness, making their image clear and precise and glorious in their respective fixed positions. Her teacher said this lunar phase, during which the moon simply disappeared from the sky, was called the “new moon.” Mary thought that was odd.