“Acadian,” says Karen. “That’s really interesting. There was actually quite a bit of intermarriage between the Acadians and the native Indians, wasn’t there?” Her tone betrays no awareness of her faux pas.
There is a pause. Everyone is smiling. Jack knows that Mimi will assume the woman is catty, but he can’t see anything but interest on Karen’s face. She looks like a stranger in a strange land, here among the lawn chairs. Even her husband is recognizable in his way — a bearded, rumpled professor. But Karen is a woman with undone hair and no makeup, talking about the finer points of Canadian history. “That’s how they got out of taking the oath of allegiance to England, right? Before the Expulsion.”
Mimi smiles and shrugs.
Karen continues, “By claiming Indian blood.”
Jack looks at Mimi. Will she roll with it? Tell the story of le grand dérangement? That’s why I’m so good at moving.
Vimy Woodley comes to the rescue. “We know so little of our own history, really, don’t we? I’m afraid I’ve never heard of the Expulsion.”
Jack tells the story of the English forcing the Acadians from their homes two hundred years ago, and Mimi rallies: “That’s why I’m so good at moving.”
They all laugh, and Betty Boucher reaches for Mimi’s hand. She says in her Manchester accent, thick as a good cardigan, “Well I’m English, love, and I’d like to say I’m sorry. There!”
At the kids’ table, Mike stands up and whips his arm round and round like a propeller. When he stops, his hand has puffed and turned red with tiny burst capillaries.
“Wow,” says Lisa, and turns her eyelids inside out.
“Neat.”
Then they all follow Roy Noonan around the side of the house to watch what he can do with his braces and retainer. He leans forward with his hands on his knees and chews his tongue until a waterfall of clear saliva pours from his mouth.
“Kids,” calls Maman, “come get your dessert.”
Mike breaks into song: “Comet! It makes your bathroom clean”—to the tune of the Colonel Bogey March—“Comet! It tastes like Listerine”—leading them back the long way around the house—“Comet! It makes you vomit! So drink some Comet, and vomit today!”
Betty clears the table and asks Vimy if her daughter Marsha can babysit Saturday. Mimi scoops ice cream into cones for the kids and asks Steve his opinion on appendectomies.
“Well,” he answers, “my motto is, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”
Mimi smiles up at him and says, “You sound just like my husband.”
Hal is drafted by the kids to adjudicate the start of a pickup game of softball. Steve and Vic slip into the house for more beer, and Jack stands chatting with Henry Froelich. “What’s your background, anyhow, Henry? Math? Science?”
A couple of beers in the Centralia summer evening and Hamburg 1943 is awfully far away — Jack can see nothing wrong in getting to know his neighbour. And Froelich doesn’t appear to mind the question, seems relaxed despite his tie and long-sleeved shirt.
“My subject was engineering physics,” he says, then raises his eyebrows as though gauging the degree of Jack’s interest.
“Wow,” says Jack. “What the heck is that?”
Froelich smiles and Jack tips the wine bottle over the man’s glass. “Go ahead, Hank, I’m all ears.”
“Well….” Froelich crosses his arms and Jack can see him in a lecture hall — the axle grease under his nails could just as easily be chalk. “I studied, and then I taught, how things go.”
“What things? Planes, trains, automobiles?”
“There are applications for all these, yes, and others. Propulsion, you see. But I was a very theoretical young man. I did not — um — dirty my hands, as they say.”
“Not like now,” says Jack, gesturing with his thumb at Froelich’s motley-looking old jalopy across the street.
Froelich nods. “Yes, I grow pragmatic with age.”
“I’m going to take a wild guess, Henry. You were a professor, am I right?”
“Yes I was.”
“A doctor of … engineering physics.”
“Ja, genau.”
“Well what the heck are you doing teaching the multiplication table out here in the middle of nowhere?”
Froelich laughs. Vic joins them. “What’s so funny?”
Jack is about to dodge the question, not wishing to put Froelich on the spot if he’d rather not discuss his past, but Froelich answers, “Physics. My first love.”
“No kidding, you a science buff, Henry?”
“He’s a PhD,” says Jack.
Steve joins them with a fresh beer.
“That’s not too shabby,” says Vic. “Nuclear?”
“Engineering.”
Vic shakes his head. “If I had my life to live again, that’s what I’d do, that’s where the action is, eh? Avionics. Jet propulsion. Rockets.”
It’s on the tip of Jack’s tongue to ask Vic if he didn’t get enough of “things that go boom” during the war, blasting away in the back of a Lanc, but he remembers Froelich and says instead, “I’d be an astronaut.”
“What do you want to do that for?” says Vic. “That’s not flying, that’s just sitting on a big bomb and praying.” Froelich breaks a smile and nods. “‘To the moon, Alice!’” cries Vic.
The others chuckle but Froelich looks a bit bewildered. Is it possible he has never seen The Honeymooners?
Steve muses, “The moon is an ideal setting for golf. Imagine how much longer it would take to play eighteen holes in zero gravity.”
Jack knows Steve is two years younger than himself. But even without that information, he would know by Steve’s particular brand of insouciance that he’s not a veteran. Not that veterans can’t be insouciant — Simon, case in point. But Simon’s insouciance has an edge. Like Vic’s bonhomie — he is still drinking in every moment, grateful to be alive. Like Hal Woodley, over in the field behind the house, pitching for the kids. This is what they fought for.
Jack says, “Well we better get there quick or you know what we’ll find on the moon.”
“What?” says Steve.
“Russians.”
Vic and Steve laugh.
“Wernher von Braun said that and he oughta know.”
“Who’s he?” asks Steve.
Vic rolls his eyes, and Jack spells it out. “Von Braun is Mr. Ballistic Missile. Grand Pooh-bah of the American space program. NASA to you.”
“Oh that von Braun,” says Steve. “Had you going, didn’t I?”
“Stee-rike!” cries one of the kids, and out in the field the teams trade places.
Steve says, “Why would anyone want to go the moon, anyhow? It’s cold up there.”
Like Moscow, thinks Jack, reminded of Simon’s comment last summer. He takes another swig of beer. “Well what are we going to do, let the Russkies beat us at everything? At the rate they’re going, they’ll be there in ’65.”
Vic says, “The moon is, it’s … the holy grail, it’s the brass ring….”
Froelich sighs. “Forget the moon just now, we are talking here about space, yes? A band of cold and dark one hundred miles above the surface of the earth, worthless—”
“Yeah,” says Steve.
“—apart from that it is an extension of air space and this is where the next war will be decided.” Jack pours Froelich more wine. “From up there”—Froelich points—“the Soviets can interfere with Western satellites, they can — how do you say—?”
“Neutralize,” says Jack.
“Ja, neutralize missiles before they will leave the ground or the submarine. They also can launch a space station, they can arm it like a garrison and make extraordinary reconnaissance of earth. The moon is somewhat a minor scene, a….”