The Astronaut Wives Club Part 18

One night, perhaps thinking about the A.W.C., Marge had the strangest dream that she'd had a baby, but, right after she'd given birth, she'd rushed off and left the baby at the hospital. When she finally remembered to pick her baby up, it had already learned to talk.

It was horrible.

Her dream was fresh in her mind when she walked into Togethersville's new gym, the Baysh.o.r.e Club, on Monday morning. The endless launch parties had added weight gain to the worries shared at A.W.C. meetings, and while some of the wives concluded that the bigger the hair, the slimmer the body would look, others. .h.i.t the shiny machines and piles of mats.

Jo Schirra, who was a faithful exerciser, was depressed. "They keep telling me muscle weighs more than fat," she said, but they'd been in exercise cla.s.s for a month now and she wasn't losing girth. Indeed, she had gained three pounds. Marge sympathized. Though she'd lost eight pounds herself, she was still way overweight. She'd gained thirty when they'd moved to Texas five short years ago. All that barbecue brisket and those trays of deviled eggs.

After their workout Marge stopped at the club's juice bar, where Bonita, the pregnant bar and ma.s.sage girl, whipped her up one of the club's signature milk-and-cuc.u.mber shakes. On the walls of the health bar were little mimeographed signs for the Baysh.o.r.e Club Quick Rejuvenation Diet, which would make you look like Venus: AMERICANS ARE BECOMING MORE AND MORE HEALTH CONSCIOUS. WE BELIEVE IT IS PARTICULARLY TRUE IN THE LAND OF THE ASTRONAUTS. "FIRST CLa.s.s PROTEINS" YOU SHOULD EAT: BRAINS 2 MED. PIECES; FOODS PROHIBITED: ANGEL CAKE. (That was before nutritionists figured out that a pound of sauteed beef brains contains more cholesterol than one needs in a year.)

Martha Chaffee joined Marge for a shake. She'd lost twenty pounds, down from a size eight to a four. Exercise was very good for pounding out all the nervous energy Roger's death had left her with. Though looking girlish and lovely as usual, Martha was feeling blue.

The two women were soon talking and crying, their arms around each other.

Martha finally told Mother Marge about the man she was dating. "He's convinced me there's another life for me, in time."

"Why, honey," said Marge, "just as sure as there are stars in the sky and that the sun comes up in the morning, there's another life for you."

It became clear to Marge that her baby, the Astronaut Wives Club, was alive and well here at the Baysh.o.r.e Club, where the wives grunted and groaned their way to health.

After her workout, Pat White changed into a pretty dress, instead of the slacks or dungarees the other busy mothers wore. It was amazing how Pat always managed to leave the Baysh.o.r.e looking as clean and lovely as she had coming in. Some of the gals still couldn't figure out what she did all day, not knowing that she was studying Greek literature at the University of HoustonClear Lake. Pat had majored in psychology at school but had never finished. Now she was learning all about cla.s.sical mythology, the G.o.ds and G.o.ddesses and their fate-bending desires.

Pat continued coming to exercise cla.s.s, but as the months wore on, she became pale and thin. Telltale signs of stress were in the shadows around her faraway eyes. She still wasn't sleeping. It was going around that Susan Borman, who was big on religion, had been working on Pat about being Mrs. Ed White in the next life.

The other wives also noticed that Susan, conspicuously absent from the Baysh.o.r.e, was often high-strung and raging about something or other when she'd drop over for a cup of coffee. Then she'd beg off and go nap for the rest of the afternoon.

Hopefully she was doing some good for Pat White, but it seemed that Pat needed a little more Beth Williams in her. Beth was the latest s.p.a.ce widow along with Nineteen wife Ada Givens, whose husband, Ed, had crashed his VW Bug in what was rumored to be a drunk driving accident. Beth's husband, C.C., had bought the farm in a T-38 crash in October 1967 near Tallaha.s.see, Florida. The astronaut was flying home to pregnant Beth and their one-year-old daughter.

"He died doing what he loved," the NASA administrator said when he came to make a courtesy call on Beth.

The feisty strawberry blonde didn't want his visit any more than she wanted the loaves of banana nut bread-the loaf of choice for a grieving astronaut widow. The southern belle swore like a sailor, telling NASA where they could shove their G.o.dd.a.m.n sympathy. "He didn't love NASA. He loved me. If he died doing what he loved, he would've been in bed with me."

Beth couldn't stand smothering Togethersville in the first place, and that's why she and C.C. had chosen to live in d.i.c.kinson, Texas, ten miles away. Unlike the Corvette boys, C.C. had driven a green Chevrolet pickup, which everybody made fun of when he parked it in the lot of the Manned s.p.a.cecraft Center. He had gotten several parking tickets because no cop could believe that an astronaut would drive a pickup truck with SELMA OR BUST painted on the rear. C.C. wasn't like the other astronauts, and Beth wasn't like their wives. She let it be known that if she received one more copy of The Prophet, Kahlil Gibran's eternal best seller, she might throw it at the well-wisher.

Even to the funeral, she'd never worn black. She'd gone wearing a sharp new suit and a gaucho hat C.C. liked.

Like Betty, Beth would be just fine. On the other hand, the wives couldn't help but notice that Pat White usually spoke of her Ed in the present tense. Pat said she often dreamed of Ed, and when she awoke in the morning she could hardly believe he was gone. She'd just seen him. It worried the wives how Pat clung to Ed's image as an American hero, and hers as the hero's wife. They thought that after almost a year, it was time for her to move on.

And that morbid Karmann Ghia rotting in Pat's garage? The wives couldn't imagine that was helping her outlook and mental health. Ed had wanted to give it to his son, but until young Eddie III was old enough to drive it in three or four years, the sports car sat up on blocks in the garage. Pat liked having the Karmann Ghia there. She found Ed's car somehow comforting.

What about dating, Pat?

The wives urged her to get out-give it a whirl again, like Martha Chaffee, whom the Cernans had been setting up on blind dates. Martha had even let someone buy her a nice fur. But Pat seemed to be drifting ghostlike through life.

One morning Clare Schweickart went over to visit her and Pat offered to fix lunch. After they finished their meal, Pat gathered up the dirty dishes and the gla.s.s of milk she'd served Clare, and poured the half-drunk contents of the lipstick-stained gla.s.s back into the carton in her fridge. She looked to Clare like a zombie. That's when Clare vowed she would build a life for herself so that if anything happened to her redheaded astronaut husband, Rusty, she would never be like that. Clare thought it one of the most frightening things she'd ever seen.

When Pat failed to show up at exercise cla.s.s, the other wives knew something was terribly wrong, especially when n.o.body could reach her on the phone. Someone called a neighbor, who had to break into Pat's house. Pat was found clutching a bottle of pills, which had to be wrestled from her hands.

How many did she take? What was she thinking? the wives asked each other. Then they helped Pat cover up what she'd done.

13

Susie

The Mercury Seven wives hosted a farewell lunch for Rene at Jo's house out by the pool. They took lots of pictures. This time, they felt, the group was really breaking up for good. Early one of the following mornings in August 1967, the Carpenters pulled away from their brick ranch house. Annie and John came out in their bathrobes to see their neighbors off. Two of the Carpenter kids, peering out from the back of the station wagon, watched the disappearing Glenns waving good-bye from their driveway. They were off to Bethesda and their new home.

Scott's heart was still undersea. During Sealab II, Scott had spent a record thirty days in deep-sea submergence living, a virtual isolation tank dropped to the ocean floor off the coast of California, hundreds of feet below the surface. Coming up from that mission, Scott had placed a phone call to LBJ from within his decompression chamber, which was filled with helium. He spoke in an Alvin and the Chipmunks voice. Now Scott was ready to go deeper on Sealab III.

In Washington, Rene was still writing her column, and becoming more political with the escalation of the Vietnam War. She was frequently invited to gatherings at Hickory Hill, Bobby Kennedy's large white brick manse. His wife, Ethel, held a lovely welcome tea for Rene.

Set on a tract of family land in McLean, Virginia, Hickory Hill had been a flurry of activity since Bobby had thrown his hat into the 1968 presidential race. The Democratic nomination was up for grabs now that LBJ's war in Vietnam was having such disastrous domestic consequences. Since the Tet offensive in January, the war news was ever more dire, and many responsible elders were joining the youth of the country in ever larger protests against the war. After peace candidate Eugene McCarthy beat out Lyndon Johnson in the New Hampshire primary, Bobby saw his opportunity and announced his candidacy.

The scene at Hickory Hill was populated by PYGs, the so-called Pink, Yellow, and Green People. Composed of Pucci-loving socialites and Lilly Pulitzerclad hangers-on, the PYGs lounged about Hickory Hill as if it were their own, blending seamlessly into Bobby's wife Ethel's very expensive but understated color scheme.

A true individual, Rene had her own style. She now wore her platinum hair shoulder length. A profile in the New York Times featured the headline "Rene Carpenter Regards Conformity as a Big Bore." Wearing a green copy of a Pierre Cardin dress for the photograph and posing with the family's fluffy white Samoyed, Rene brought political reporter Myra MacPherson into her bedroom closet, which included a vibrant orange-and-gold chiffon dress by Rudi Gernreich, designer of "the futuristic look." She usually found daring designer clothes on sale-"because I like to wear what no one else dares buy," said Rene. "I'm not the understated type. It bores me to tears." Myra even wrote about the white fur and aqua corduroy dress that Rene had worn in high school for a dance back in Boulder in 1945.

Myra included in her article Rene's vitals: just turned forty, size six, and "totally averse to wearing something just because it was 'in,'" adding, "Mrs. Carpenter willingly cla.s.sifies herself as 'sort of a kook.'"

Rene said that even when she was an astronaut wife, she'd always resisted being "the professionally brave wife." Because she couldn't keep her political views under wraps any longer, she was giving up her newspaper column for a brand-new adventure-being Ethel Kennedy's right-hand companion during her husband's campaign.

Clearly, Rene was someone who was interested in more than just her miniskirt hem lengths-"from mid-thigh to three inches above the knee and she gets a sick look when anyone mentions midis," Myra dutifully reported, along with Rene's latest declaration: "I will never lengthen my skirts."

"I want to discuss issues," said Rene, ready to stump for Bobby, to make speeches to the many women's groups proliferating across the country.

Getting ready for a psychedelic-themed neighborhood party in Togethersville, Fourteen astronaut Donn Eisele (p.r.o.nounced eyes-lee) painted "Love Bug"style daisies on his wife Harriet's naked knees, using her eyebrow pencil and lipstick. Choosing something as simple as the right shade for the flowers, be it red or purple, could prove too much for Donn. He admitted to Harriet that it sometimes took him an hour to decide which hammer to use from the garage for a repair project. In Donn's Air Force days, Harriet had a standing request from the squadron commander to encourage her husband to get to work on time. Even now when Donn was a big-shot astronaut, Harriet needed to keep him motivated and give him the occasional swift kick in the pants.

The other wives were amazed by four-foot-ten Harriet, who wore her short dark hair in a high tease. "She's a dynamo," they said of the pint-sized, big-hearted mother of four. Harriet was indefatigable, always doing what needed to be done.

Every morning she drove her four-year-old Matt, who had Down syndrome, to a special school half an hour away in Pasadena, Texas. The cla.s.s was run by the Houston Council for r.e.t.a.r.ded Children and lasted for two and a half hours. It pretty much shot her day. Harriet also had a newborn and two other children to care for, but she never complained. Matt was very special to her. He loved Snoopy and singing songs and was so good at throwing his toys up on the roof that Harriet was constantly having to climb a ladder to retrieve them. She and Donn joked that he might one day join the Major Leagues.

Harriet had been a nurse back in Ohio. One time, when she was in training, a psychiatrist needed help holding down a squealing patient for electroshock therapy, and little Harriet volunteered.

"Oh, honey, you can't, you're too little," said the doctor.

"But I've got muscles," Harriet told him as she showed him her biceps, and then she did it. After that, the doctor requested her every time and they got to be good friends.

Now that she was living in Texas as an astronaut's wife, Harriet longed to see a DeBakey heart operation. Dr. Michael DeBakey had implanted the first artificial heart in a human in 1963, having created a prosthetic artery on his wife's sewing machine. And he was right there in Houston! Harriet was so interested in what was going on in the world of medicine that the wives suspected she may have regretted having given up her career to marry Donn.

Harriet enjoyed the Love Bug party and the other neighborhood gatherings, be it shrimp boils or luaus. But she didn't like the high-society galas, at least one every weekend, which took her and Donn away from the precious little family time they had as it was. With the guys gone all week, Harriet didn't think that it was fair to their children to abandon them on the weekends. The only wife she knew who liked the galas even less was her best friend, Faye, who lived across the street in El Lago.

A pleasingly plump big-hair blonde and the Astronaut Wives Club's top pastry chef, Faye Stafford had been Football Queen back in Weatherford, Oklahoma, but rolled her eyes at the stuffy society queens at the fancy Houston parties she was expected to attend. The ladies were too far removed from her reality to understand that the astronauts lived on government salaries, no matter what perks they received. With Life money going to college funds, the wives really couldn't afford expensive gowns. Now, with fifty men strutting around the neighborhood calling themselves astronauts, that Life pie was sliced paper-thin.

"Casts-of-thousands dinners," Faye called those gatherings that were becoming more frequent as NASA got closer to landing a man on the Moon.