Moonglow. Michael Chabon
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Lucite box frame, of the last crew of the space shuttle Challenger. In this photograph astronauts Michael J. Smith, Dick Scobee, and Ronald McNair sat at a table with their helmets in front of them like fishbowls from which they planned to draw lucky numbers. Behind them stood Ellison Onizuka, Christa McAuliffe, Gregory Jarvis, and Judith Resnik, cradling their helmets in their hands. The crew’s flight suits, like the shiny cloth that covered the table, were a variation on the blue of the Florida sky in which they would soon be lost. Their seven smiles mocked them, at least to my eye. At one end of the blue table, like a human skull in a still life, stood a scale model of Challenger strapped to its fuel tank and booster rockets. In the photograph, the model shuttle looked like a child’s toy, albeit a splendid one. It was hard to see the fine detail that my grandfather had put into this particular commission, how the cargo bay doors opened to reveal the remote manipulator arm, how the engine nozzles could be made to pivot. You could pull open the nose of the fuselage and look into the crew cabin, rendered in faithful detail down to the buttons and switches of the instrument panels and the “Sally Ride curtain” over the toilet.
Even if his scale model had not been selected by NASA for inclusion in the official mission portrait, my grandfather likely would have planned to attend the launch on January 28, 1986. He was a habitué of Cape Canaveral who drove up for almost every shuttle firing, as if trying to make up for his boycott—painful to him to have to maintain, I knew—of every Apollo mission. But that Tuesday corresponded to the eleventh yahrzeit of my grandmother’s death. At 11:39 a.m., when an O-ring failed and the shuttle began to break apart, my grandfather was at her grave in Jenkintown, Pennsylvania. He didn’t learn of the disaster until he got back to his motor lodge in Center City and turned on the television.
He sat without moving, without blinking or breathing, as a flower of fire bloomed on a stem of vapor. In that and subsequent replays he watched fragments of the disintegrated spacecraft snake across the sky, wandering, doubling back, as if blindly searching for one another in the blue.
As soon as I heard the news—I was then in graduate school at UC Irvine—I tracked him down through my mother. I had expected that when I reached him, my grandfather might sound low, even mournful, but I ought to have known better.
“Too goddamn cold!” he said. “Thirty-six degrees at launch. Idiot bureaucrats.”
“Why didn’t they scrub it?”
“Because they’re pencil pushers. Judy knew better than to launch in weather like that.”
The astronaut Judith Resnik was a particular favorite of my grandfather’s. She was a brilliant engineer who had, on a prior mission, become the first Jewess in space. Her tangle of wild black curls had enacted medusa feats in zero gravity.
“Poor Judy,” my grandfather said. I could hear the voice of a television reporter in the background, shouting to be heard over the wind gusting along a stretch of Florida beach.
“I’m sorry I couldn’t be with you,” I said. “How was it?”
“How was the cemetery?”
“Dumb question.”
“It was very festive.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Frankly? The grave looked untidy. I was shocked.”
The wind whipped up along the beach on the motel TV.
“Grandpa? You there?”
“Yeah.”
“You okay?”
“No.”
“I know you miss her. I wish she were still here.”
“I’m glad she isn’t. If she saw what a mess her grave is, she’d be furious and she’d blame me. Because I insisted on that cemetery.”
“Oh.”
“Everyone else is already buried there, it was already paid for a long time ago.”
I knew my grandfather didn’t mean that he was glad my grandmother had died. I knew how much he missed her. I didn’t know, because he had not yet told me, that inside the crew cabin of his Challenger model, one of the webbed panels enclosing the sleep niches could be lifted on a hinge to reveal two miniature human figures. They had been the original occupants of LAV One’s moon garden before my grandfather enlarged the scope of that structure’s function. A man and a woman, five eighths of an inch tall, lay together in a sleep niche, naked in each other’s arms.* The male figure spread his body like a shield across the female; the female figure’s long hair was painted a vivid shade of auburn.
My grandfather never revealed the intention behind this “Easter egg”—not to me, at least. It may have been a gag or, never one to let an empty grave or a $3.99 model kit go to waste, my grandfather may simply have been economizing. When I look at the Challenger mission photograph now, I don’t see the seven smilers, pretty Judy Resnick, or even, really, the model itself. I see the hidden lovers, fates entangled like their bodies, waiting for release from the gravity that held them down all their lives.
* * *
She touched his leg, and he woke up. The world around him was his bedroom and not a jail cell. My grandmother was taking her skirt and sweater from the valet on which she had neatly hung them. “Ten minutes,” she said.
My grandfather put on a blue work shirt and a pair of chinos and went downstairs to find his mud-caked work boots. My grandmother had resumed work on her interrupted coq au vin. She stood at the stove with her head inclined over a wooden spoon that brimmed with steam. He came up behind her and touched his lips to her nape. She shivered. He felt that she expected him to say something. They had spoken very little so far, and he was not sure what he meant to say or what she needed to hear. He wrestled fiercely against the urge to say nothing at all. In his powerlessness to undo what had already been done or avert what lay ahead, he resorted to the usual inanity.
“We’ll be fine,” he told her. “It’ll all be fine.”
She did not contradict him, did not assent. She took a sip from the spoon. She made a sound that committed her to nothing. “Go,” she said. “She is expecting to see you.”
My grandfather waited at the top of the drive to meet the school bus, ready with the Zagnut bar. The sky was promisingly blue. To occupy himself, my grandfather constructed an almanac of nights lost to the House of Detention. The moon would be at three quarters and waning. Tonight, after he had eaten his wife’s good coq au vin and dried and put away the dishes, he and my mother would rejoin Oliver Twist in his interminable sufferings. My grandfather would lie beside his daughter and then his wife, in turn, until their breathing gathered into sleep. Then he would go to the top of the hill behind the house, with his telescope and a thermos of tea, and lose himself for an hour or two in contemplation of the Sea of Serenity; Algol and Deneb; Eridanus, the river of stars.
“It will all be fine,” he said aloud.
When the bus pulled up, he watched my mother, fourteen and lanky, slouch her way along the aisle, down the steps. When her feet touched ground, she burst into a run. He pressed his nose against her hair and breathed in her school smell, a smell like the flavor of a postage stamp. Against her better judgment, he persuaded my mother to devour the entire candy bar before they got to the bottom of the drive, where the hickory tree fingered the sky, awaiting my grandmother’s next attempt on its life.
The candy bar spoiled my mother’s appetite for dinner, but in the interest of peace, not wanting to betray my grandfather, she forced herself to clean her plate.
My grandfather saw my grandmother for the first time in February 1947, at Ahavas Sholom synagogue.* She had been posed beside a potted palm, in a fox stole and sunglasses, under a banner that read try your luck! The fur was on loan from the president of the Sisterhood. The dark glasses