“Can we afford not to believe it?”
“Even their Secretary of Defense does not believe it.”
“Yeah, McNamara backtracked pretty quick on that one, eh? Still, you never know what they’ve got in the pipeline.” Jack spits out a speck of tobacco. “What’s that you’re smoking, Hank? Smells familiar.” More acrid than Amphora, a Continental edge to it — dark, as opposed to milk, chocolate.
“Von Eicken. Deutsch tobacco.”
“That explains it.”
“Eisenhower warned his country it could be very dangerous to make a war economy during peacetime.”
“Are we living in peacetime?” asks Jack, aiming a stream of smoke up into the deepening blue of twilight.
“Right here? Right now? Oh yes.”
Jack nods a little, in time with the music—If you’re happy and you know it clap your hands, if you’re happy and you know it clap your hands, if you’re happy and you know it and you really want to show it….
“Friede,” says Froelich.
Jack looks at him sharply, then recalls. Of course. Peace. “You know, Henry, we can ban the bomb and do all that good stuff but we can’t stop mankind exploring.”
“You want very badly to go to the moon, my friend.” The stem of Froelich’s pipe is moist; his face has filled out with conversation, shadows turned to creases.
“Come on, Henry, you’re a scientist—”
“I was.”
“How can you not be excited about it? Pure research—”
“There is no such thing. Some questions receive funds, others do not. Who is rich enough to ask the questions?”
“Yeah but just imagine how it’ll change our point of view if we do get there.”
“The world will still be a dangerous place, perhaps more so if—”
“That’s where you’re wrong,” says Jack, his cigar unfurling slowly. “Think how our petty wars are going to look from nearly three hundred thousand miles up. Think how we’re going to feel flying through the dark. Can you imagine? Dead silence. And way down there behind us, there’s the earth. A beautiful blue speck, lit up like a sapphire. We won’t give a damn then who’s a Russian or who’s a Yank or whether you’re red, white, black or green. We might finally figure out that we’re all just people and we’ve all just got one shot at it, you know? This little life.” He glances over at the others, gathered round the music. Mimi has her eyes closed, singing with Vic. “‘Un Acadien errant—a wandering Acadian—banni de son pays—banished from his country….’” The mournful minor key of folk songs the world over.
Henry Froelich says, “This is a beautiful idea.”
Jack looks at him. The man looks sad all of a sudden, and Jack wonders what he has seen in his time. In his war. He is of an age to have seen a great deal. Past fifty, easily. Old enough to remember the first one — The Great War. Men who fought tend not to talk about it, but they readily acknowledge that they are veterans, even to a former enemy. Indeed, by now a fellow feeling exists among pilots who once strove to shoot each other out of the sky. But Jack cannot picture Froelich in uniform. He was more likely part of the war effort at an industrial level. Jack can easily see him on a factory floor: white shirt and clipboard, peering into the guts of a jet engine. Is he atoning for something? Maybe Centralia is a form of self-exile.
Froelich continues, his voice soft and dark like the black of his beard. “This rocket of yours, Jack, it can do all this perhaps. This is very noble. Very beautiful. Like a poem. But it does not come from a beautiful place, it comes from….” He appears to have lost his train of thought. He glances about, takes a breath, raises his eyebrows briefly and recovers it. “You think it will take us up to heaven, ja? But it does not come from there.” He taps his pipe. “Also it is very expensive. Unfortunately only war is rich enough to pay for such a beautiful poem.”
Froelich pours himself more wine.
“Has it ever occurred to you, Jack, this? That Apollo is named for the sun? And yet the project is aimed at his sister, Artemis, the moon?”
Froelich looks at him, waiting for an answer.
“You got me there, Henry.”
“Once upon a time there was a mountain cave. And inside the cave was a treasure.” There is a glint in Froelich’s eye. Jack waits. Is it possible his neighbour is a little drunk? “You see Jack, it is a fact that only the bowels of the earth can provide us with the means to propel ourselves toward the sun. Someone has to forge the arrows of Apollo. Even as someone had to build the pyramids. Slaves, yes? Which one of God’s angels is rich enough, do you think, to pay for our dream to fly so high we may glimpse perhaps the face of God?”
Across the lawn, Vic and Mimi sing the second verse: “‘Un Canadien errant’” … a wandering Canadian … if you see my country, my unhappy country, go and tell my friends that I remember them….
“Tell me something, Henry. What are you doing here?”
“Oh well, after the war I met my wife in Germany, she volunteered at the U.N. camp where I—”
“No, I mean how come you’re not teaching at a university somewhere?”
Jack fears he has been rude to his guest — he has known the man less than twenty-four hours and now he’s grilling him. But Jack is used to getting to know people quickly. Because you do only get one life, and if someone can give you a tour of a road not taken, why would you not seize the chance? “I’m sorry, Henry, it’s none of my business.”
“No, it is a very good question, and I have a very good answer.” Froelich smiles and the hard glint leaves his eye. He reminds Jack of pictures he has seen in National Geographic of emaciated holy men. Serene, starved. He answers: “I have everything I want right here.”
Jack follows Froelich’s gaze over to Karen, picking up the babies in the grass. To his daughter in her wheelchair.
“Cheers,” says Jack.
“Prost.”
They drink.
The singsong has changed tempo again. Betty is warbling in a Cockney accent to her husband’s accordion accompaniment, “‘Will you love me when I’m mutton as you do now I am lamb?!’” Laughter, applause. And a lull — the children are gone. A few minutes ago, as though at some signal inaudible to the adult ear, they ran off, pelting down the street in the direction of the school. The lawn is suddenly peaceful and the women draw a collective sigh of relief. “Silence is golden,” says Elaine. Betty’s younger two are in the McCarthys’ house, asleep on the couch.
Karen Froelich, having taken her babies home, has returned for Elizabeth. “Thanks, Mimi, it was a really nice get-together.”
“Oh Karen, you’re not leaving already.”
“Yeah, come on over any time.” She turns, saying to her husband, “Have fun, Hank.”
Jack watches Froelich kiss his wife and say something in her ear as he lightly holds her hand. Again there is a certain quality in her expression, not precisely sad but as though she were smiling at something in the distance, or perhaps the past. She touches her husband’s chest briefly. Jack watches her walk away, pushing the wheelchair over the grass. She is pretty when she smiles.
“Jack.”
“What’s that, Hank?”
“You make a nice party. Thank you.”
Vic gets out from under the accordion, stretches his legs and reaches into his burlap sack.
“I’ll put the kettle on,” says Betty.
Elaine hands her cocktail glass to her husband. “Just a teeny one.”
Vimy and Hal Woodley say their good nights — they’re expecting a long-distance call from their daughter at university, and in any case it wouldn’t do for them to be the last to leave. With their departure a further slight relaxation sets in.