Mysteries of Motion

by Hortense Calisher

  The ship’s commander or captain and co-pilot had remained invisible, though they must have been informed he’s here. Though all these men who’ve been picked for the Courier seem to travel in pairs and to think in the same style, there’s some other unity about them, nothing to do with their insignia or even their profession. Pilots and navigators, they’re the active crew who in shifts must run this ship—and after a while it comes to him what else they are—the ones so far known to him.

  Charlie Dove, Arthur Shefflin, Ervin something, and two or three others who are merely faces—they’re men of a sort rarely glimpsed in that combined top sector of Air Force and NASA operations known as The Joint, which is his father’s baby, though they sometimes figure in his father’s irritable home-comments. These are the ones who never appear at the Perdue house, in that inner circle which swapped its laser-powered calculations across his mother’s punchwork tablecloth, or lifted glasses white or umber with cosmic change. These are the staff who’ve made it to seniorship by every dogged effort and road of circumstance from honest to dirty, except—top competence. Or have it, but narrowly, without that extra flare of—comprehendo. Government was full of them, his father said. Life must be. His parents have a house-name for them: Grade A Dummyville. In a pinch they could be Comprehendo’s burden, or could outnumber him. Or he could make use of them, with their flaws in mind. His father has staffed the Courier with them.

  “Graduation’s such a paranoid time,” his mother had sighed, on that day very full of her noble ancestor. “You think everybody’s at you to settle your values. When really, nobody’s bothering except yourself.” She took snapshots of him, her careful substitute for indecent kissing and mothering. “I was the same.” The phrase which at once spoils all parental advice.

  “But we listen to them. How we listen to them,” Fred said, on the second-class train ambling through the Japanese dusk toward Fukuoka, and toward the summer jobs his father had got for them. “My head is all echo. Of course, I never let on.” They were passing through frail paper villages, the houses like lanterns in the woods strung along the train windows. “Eminent Perdue never lets on about his values, he only acts on them,” Mole said. “Then you deduce. What’s that smell?” Hair pomade. The whole car reeked of it. “Have some.” Freddie handed him a tin of it. “Put on a local value. Then you won’t notice it.” But they were already laughing more genteelly. The snares had begun.

  Maybe nobody ever really plotted. There were merely marshes of obligation, campaign promises to one’s friends and family, election gains and losses against one’s competitors—who, short of the national defense, were the only enemy—and suitable expropriations of performance and inertia from time to time. While the wind debates over the stage-lit domes as intended, his father and Dummysville greet every morning, the Chinese property man distributes the sunsets and removes them, a Gilpin rises on the national scene on a cockleshell wave and a modern general crosses the Delaware to forestall him—and the oysters come back to the Chesapeake.

  And out on his porch watching the skies for weather, some oyster dredger remarks to his wife: “See they’ve floated that Courier on billions of scrip. Rocketed it to the far atriums. So’s that Perdue kid could stowaway on it. So’s he can see that life is only Washington as seen from a hill. And so’s he can deduce his father.” The wife, maybe already pregnant with what may someday be another Gilpin, does not reply.

  Maybe nobody’s plotted except Mole. He knows what that means. An excellent schooling in Shakespeare, Aeschylus and all the other great comic books, has taught him it. Plus the headmaster’s required course in Greek and common doom. The plotter is always alone with his crime. In a nimbus of further crime-need. He has Mr. Chape’s own word for it. The class hadn’t yet found out what Chape considered his own personal crime to be, but they knew the feeling. Mole Perdue, who so early on had deduced his father, has no choice but to go on with it, even from half a million miles away.

  What Perdue, his father, loves about his wife is that she never messes up from too much of the same talent that keeps them socially above the ruck. Perdue knows too many high civil servants and “militicos”—a word his son has coined for him—to whose dinner parties people go already drearily certain that all the conventions of such parties will be observed. The real powers—that is, the admitted and known ones—rarely appear at such houses beyond the once-a-year obligatory showing. They come regularly to Elsa’s because she has their own tone and self-confidence—more verve and racier conversation—yet her evenings or summer garden-do’s never lose control. Those paper fans of hers are known all over Washington, and once or twice have made the newspapers beyond, after which she’d pulled in a little, without a word from him. Even their menus receded for a while, below their usual Viennese excellence. It isn’t his job to be known.

  Not nationally, and not even late in career, like such “character admirals”—his son’s phrase again—as say, Rickover was. The Navy, being the sentimental part of the military, is different. Even the Army is, since an army, even one using weapons so rarefied as to be almost things of the spirit, has to be visible. Yet Perdue can’t keep a free press from asking questions on the military or political aspects of such a mammoth effort as the space one. What he can do, and has, is to keep that side of it constantly forgettable. Just because of such a press, and such a public, rapacious for daily news and weekly features but over the long run indolent, it can be done amazingly well. Unlike the socialist world, his government doesn’t have to issue calendared White Papers, or Five Year Plans.

  His best contribution has been never to have one open season for congressional appropriation. Lots of small ones, rather, in which NASA can raise its “progress uncertain” or “timetable delayed” skinny palm, yet rarely make the front page. While even the tremendous commerciality of aeroresearch is not the biggest bell struck—nor even the profusion of watch parts and other micro-hardware you could manufacture cheaper in space. For every time NASA asks for more, it does so in a comforting sea of flash aeromedical news. Give an American a better heart monitor for hospitals and henceforth you have a hold on the heart itself.

  Admiral Perdue’s own father had been the first black Hollywood director to make it big, though even by Gramp’s time the family had been cocoa-color to wash-pink. “The American public wants to be aesthetic,” he always said. “Just you keep telling them they are—in wanting what you want to give them. You’ll reap from it. But that’s not the hull story.” He always came down folksy on a word or two; only time you could see the Hollywood in him. “We still let in dissidents, remember? After any war. During some other people’s. What people here want—ancestrally if you please”—he always said that for the gallery—“is to be let in. To anything. From art to politics. Even to killing—you ask it the right way. Everybody want to be let in, remember that. Everybody except those few at the top who already are. You don’t really have to do it, o’ course. Just give the look of it. I don’t make art movies, except by mistake.”

  So—the civilians’ shuttle plane, Courier, and its goal, the so-called habitat for civilians. Still a space station really, enlarged suburbanly. A mobile home, trying to look like a real house.

  Who could anticipate that a Gilpin would train such high-class philosophy on it? Who could anticipate a Gilpin? Perdue, his father, shivers, stepping up the walk to his house over the little red hands of the Japanese maples, which always fell prematurely. The garden is the only place where to his taste Elsa goes wrong. Mole, in one of his unfathomable switches, likes the stiff flower rows, too many of them red. “Like jelly jars. A jelly garden. Goes with the house.” Whose “expression,” however, Mole dislikes, adding that too many of the Georgetown fronts have it. “Like a Pekinese the husband walks. Sour Ming.”

  Warmth chortled in Perdue. Son-warmth. Nothing shows in his face. The best of sons have to flout what their fathers do. He’d done the same. A father has to take his chances with it. Fred and Mole lolling with their knees s
ky-high the way boys do, saying, “We don’t want to be just drop-ins, you know. Into college.” Still he, Perdue, has done what he can to make old Kim keep young Fred at home. Off the Courier, that is, without making a point of it. Offering Fred a post even, to make further space environments. The best good deeds have to go unnoticed, when not of the sort to be told to sons. These days, when Perdue passes old Kim on the tow path where men like them jog, Perdue with his bodyguard discreetly jogging behind, old Kim’s nod is maybe a mite cool. Perdue can tell. Men of their mixed bloods have an advantage. Their faces, not being of the dominant race, are not as interpretable. Except to each other. Must gall Kim that Mole has elected to go to Japan again, on last-summer contacts Fred had blithely shared with him. When it was Kim’s boy had won the prize.

  Perdue’s next-door neighbor, a famous hostess, always has too many cars in front of her house and his. But he won’t complain, because sometimes the parties are Elsa’s, though not tonight. Two cars are from the working press. The press milks a lot out of this street. He has his eye on one of the other houses for his elder daughter; the younger one may in time take over his. Mole won’t marry for years. He has his eye on those geishas, he said. Perdue smiles, though it doesn’t show.

  Tonight he and Elsa have a date for a drink alone; she knows the pressures on him. Staying on to check Canaveral round the clock—four nights now, five?—he’s late for it. The last of the old black maids who wait at the corners for the Washington buses has gone home. Good, she won’t look daggers at him for living here. Or murmur, “Uppity.” Standing on the step, he looks forward to Elsa opening the door for him, wife-warmth flooding his heart. She knows a lot about the human heart, related as she is to the man who wrote the book on it. And yet believes so staunchly in the worth of his.

  He shivers again, waiting. Early prizes can be saddening, later. Whom the gods love, et cetera. Gods are useful; multiple or single, they take the dirt off one’s hands. He really believes in them. Let the Gilpins be the atheists. And there’s no reason to be sorry about young Fred yet. It’s all on the knees of the gods.

  The door opens. The entry hall is so small, so low-ceilinged, the heads of the newsmen gathered behind Elsa bob at him as if on pikestaffs.—Oh, Lee—Her home-name for him—Lee—the Courier.—Yes, Elsa?—The Courier’s, all right, Lee.—Yes I know. Just left the office—. The press can’t already be here for anything wrong there. Besides, he’s wearing an intercom.—Gentlemen?—He knows them all so well. Saw them at the launching. Will go on seeing them.—Lee—. What’s wrong with her? She never interrupts like this. Knows when to sink back, when to shine. Always at his side.

  —Admiral?—the senior of them all says. Always ranks you, tenderly. For the blow that’s coming. But from where?—Admiral, we’re reliably informed that a passenger on the Courier under the name Fred Kim is really your son. Can you give us a line on it?—Her mouth is what’s wrong with Elsa. There ought to be a fan in front of it. For she truly knows his heart.

  Nothing will show on his face.

  And that’s the way it’ll be. Sketch him often enough and it comes out paint. I’m not as sure of her; she’ll never let on what she really thinks of him. But that’s him. Except for too much of the NASA bit. That’s Gilpin. Funny, how it crept in. But in every other way, that’s him all right. I’m always so shitty good at it. At putting myself in his place.

  Mole looked down at himself. Wonder will I tell Gilpin?…Know I’m going to. Funny, how when I went up to Gilpin in that grisly corridor, how he seemed to recognize me. Though that’s only the man’s way; they all say. If I tell him I’m here, won’t I have to tell him why? He’ll worm it out of me…Know I want him to.

  Freddie won’t talk—if the press get to him in Osaka. But he’s there. And I’m—wherever here will be. Somebody’ll leak it. Maybe the somebody will be me. And that’s the way it’ll be. For the honorable admiral.

  The sharp ache in his chest isn’t a physical one. That’s unfair. Everything ought to be physical here.

  He ought to be hearing from others in the cabin. Not a rustle above the flight’s steady wash. Soon the aides must come with food—or did muscle drill come before? He’s almost hungry enough to raid the emergency supply under the seat. Would an alarm ring out? He’s tempted to—just to hear something. No, can’t afford yet to get caught with his hand in the cookie jar, or in any unspecified act. Maybe no one here can. Maybe robot-hands, not in the manual, would unfold out and discipline them. Or maybe no one’s here, except him. Which would he prefer? He won’t answer. He prefers to be a child at his window, waiting to be called to meal. When all children are good. Soon the mother-voice will chime.

  He dares a look at the window. A tremendous corps de ballet of stars leaps at him and over his head. Shift focus and those stars are stationary, Mole passing. Fixed points, maybe, of a far somebody’s toleration, they gaze toward him out of the uncountable woods. Creaturing toward him, who can fly. If he had his golden branch with him, his magical brass-bone, he’d play clarinet for them. He’s trilling, the long note unfurling from his mouth. Softly, p’roo. Who’d think that one could whistle, in non-gravity? In his dream or doze, his cabinmates answer him.

  A man’s descending hand, naked out of its mitt, nicks past his shoulder but can’t rest there. To his sleep-myopic eyes it’s huge and sculpturally near, a marble hand from a Rodin, from a monument. The hand of God, broken from the largest statue in the universe, is at his shoulder. But on the underside of its wrist, on the soft inner part over the tendons, is a human mark.

  “Haven’t played the clarinet in years,” Mole mumbled. He woke. “Who’s whistling?”

  “You started it.” Gilpin, grasping a wall bracket, is dangling over him.

  Mole’s ear can distinguish two or three ordinary chuffers, an off-key Wish-I-were-in-Dixie and one fancy birdman trill. Everybody in the cabin must be at it. Testing space with the tongue. Tasting Outer. God, above him, has a one-day beard.

  The space suit hangs on Gilpin shabby-perfect, the way his clothes used to when he was lecturing, easy togas for that well-known head. Which is staring down intently at Mole’s breast pocket. The free hand, marble no longer, floats at his side. The unsupported feet tread air. Sweat starts from the stubbled cheeks—floating is hard work. The free hand lowers to touch Mole’s ungloved hand, turning it palm up. Freddie had done the purple wrist mark on it with a tattoo needle. He’s an able draftsman, but the marks on the two wrists held up for Mole’s inspection are not quite the same. A bead of sweat, loosed from the nodding head above him breaks into a cloud of minute globules, dispersing out.

  “Sonny Perdue?” God says.

  Lying on his rack, Mole gazes up, the joints of his limbs lifting and lowering as if he himself is the air’s articulation. Thought is breaking out on him, like sweat too, crusting his upper lip with what tomorrow may be beard. The whistling has died, silenced by the truer music of affairs.

  “Saw your picture once, in your father’s office.”

  Mole, staring up, acquires his first definition of God. God is whoever is ambulating, half-created by the horizontal’s awe for the vertical.

  “Does your father know?”

  Mole smiles down, studying his own body’s rise and fall. Suddenly, with a swift glance at the panel, which says nothing new, he thumbs the right spot on the couch arm, his straps fly up and he with them, grabbing the hand rail in the cabin wall just in time. He’s panting, but where everybody wants to be, from Peter Pan on. Walking on air. From his cabin mates below, a faint cheer. “Know what?”

  “That you’re here.”

  Swung by their hands, he and Gilpin ride chest to bumping chest. Must he answer him? Can’t have two idols; you must choose. Letting one destroy the other. According to all the comic books.

  “I know.” It feels to him as if he’s chosen himself. Perhaps it’s meant to. This is what Freddie couldn’t tell him. I’m the real liftoff. As Tom here is. As all the whistlers are, in all the goodly vessels.
We’re the orbit in the greater dark, and we’ll be the docking, or the overshoot. All of us—the passengers of ourselves. Even to any dummies on the flight deck.

  Is he now in possession of all the flight facts?

  Quick, the panel’s glowing angrily. RETURN TO COUCH.

  “Tom—ask you something?”

  But Tom’s head is bent. One wavering hand has slipped its rung. The other’s about to, loosing him to be dashed upward, or from side to side. How it would actually be—Mole can’t recall. But his muscles already move, as on any old playing field. One of his fists uncramps itself, snagging Gilpin by the belt. Straining Gilpin toward him, lifting him like a sack of nothing, a human bubble, he hooks him to the wall. Turning carefully, leaning into it, he does the same for himself. No time for the couch.

  So they swing again, side by side.

  “Thanks.” Gilpin’s greenish around the mouth. “You wanted—to ask me?”

  Mole shakes his head—oops! The tendons he overworked there a moment ago stretch oddly light, but not without effort. There’s weight in space, but it’s not—weight. Let the question hang there. “Never mind.”

  “Sorry.” Gilpin’s grimace is new. Three years ago when Mole first heard him speak he had a roundish crowd-blending countenance hard to remember. Now his hawk-lids droop, scarab-patched. One would know him anywhere.

  So this is Tom Gilpin. Not old, nowhere near aged, but one can see how his aging is going to be, with no return possible. So this is Mole’s father as well. Those who have to tot up their century. Men of power have such killing smiles when they’re weakly like this—but would one die for them?

  Gilpin caught sight of the panel. He sighs, looking downward. “Is that couch a hundred miles away? Or only ten?”

  They’ve linked onto the highest grips on the wall. Mole half wants to let go, to try how it would be to bob in helpless ricochet. How niggly careful you have to be here. “You just go down hand over hand. Hand under hand. And leg. See those notches? They’re on the transverse. Makes it easier. Just be careful—not to rise.” He grins helpfully. Down below, the others in the cabin, all second crew, are now sitting upright like good pupils.