Blue Sky Dream (12 page)

“A View of the Church in America’s Growing Suburbia” promises the headline in the March 11, 1960, edition of
The Monitor
, in which a San Francisco priest offers his review of
The Church in the Suburbs
, a book by the Reverend Andrew Greeley. “In thousands of packaged communities across the land, a new way of life is taking hold, characterized by middle-brow conformity, groveling status seeking, and jolly togetherness,” summarizes the Jesuit reader. “But there are cracks in this picture window society [that] spell more trouble than crab grass in the rectory lawn.” Father Greeley is described as an up-and-coming sociologist who agreed with secular works of the day like David
Riesman’s
The Lonely Crowd
and William H. Whyte, Jr.’s
The Organization Man.
Such experts, whether they wore Roman collars or not, worried that too many families like mine were turning into emasculated corporate drones and mad housewives and spoiled children. The new suburbia, they warned, would test our souls with its soullessness.

My mother did not read such books, did not begin to comprehend such pessimism. In the synthetic shine of a new church, in the tape-recorded chimes of Queen of Apostles, she saw and heard what her God expected of a modern Catholic mother. Some evenings she and I would walk the several blocks to Queen of Apostles and look for the green light over the confessional that signaled a priest was ready to hear our sins. I would enter the closet next to the priest’s and I would marvel at how the whirring fan and lamp inside were rigged to turn off as soon as my knees touched the kneeler. I would be glad for how efficiently the Catholic process in this modern world flowed, the sliding back of Father’s window, the tallying of my sins for Father, his doling out of a penance that was reliably ten minutes’ worth of Hail Marys and Our Fathers. I would briskly give myself over to the receiving and achieving of short-term goals that was this process, rattling off the prayers as soon as I’d left the confessional. And then my mother, who was sitting in the next pew, would be done saying her own penance and her face would come out of her hands and she would smile at me. She would cause me, then, to connect the utilitarian with the eternal. She would remind me that the evening’s process was for the care and maintenance of the soul, the soul that was (
even here, especially here
) very real, real enough to be not just imagined but
felt
. She would do this with her usual cheerful air, saying to me as we left our church, “Now. Don’t you feel better?”

FOUR
 SECRET SAM
 

“A
ll of you kids. The lot of you. Come here. Front and center.”

My father was doing what he occasionally did on a Saturday afternoon at home. He was summoning the runny-nosed children of the neighborhood, any within range, and telling them to stand in a line on our front lawn. He was producing a stack of Kleenex, neatly folded over, from the back pocket of his blue jeans and he was moving down the ranks, swiping away mucus with an impatience that made little heads bob. He was clamping the Kleenex around the nose of each child and ordering him or her to “blow.”

“And blow.”

“And
blow
.”

“C’mon,
really
blow.”

The neighborhood kids, who could not know my father as I did, would stare back at him bewildered at his gruff attention. But that was my father, fully in character. With every “blow!” he was establishing a new and tidy order, carrying out a hands-on job
he’d invented for himself, inventing purpose where there had been nothing but the lazy aimlessness of a Saturday in the suburbs.

The nose blowing was a minor flash of impulse for my father. Most of his self-assigned tasks had about them (it seemed to me as a child) a grandeur of scope and motion and noise. Every weekend it seemed he brought home some new power tool—drill, skilsaw, saber saw, belt sander—all of them deadly serious in their gray metal boxes and, when brought to life, all the more serious for their loudness and potency. These tools made “the impossible doable,” my father would say to me. Also, they would “slice through skin and bone like butter” if you didn’t know how to use them properly. I had seen my father use his power tools to build a set of sawhorses and then, using those sawhorses, build all the other things he found necessary to build: his work bench where all his tools were neatly hung and stowed; a loft high in the garage rafters where the Christmas decorations were stored; a lidded toy box in the family room; a drying rack for the walnuts that grew in our backyard; the redwood deck shaded by its bamboo covering; a brick walkway around the deck with a crosshatched pattern taken from a do-it-yourself booklet.

There was nothing my father could not do himself, apparently, though rarely did he make much of an announcement about his day’s plans. You knew they were underway because you woke up to hear, say, the creak of shingles overhead as my father erected a new TV aerial or cleaned the drain gutters. Or you would hear the big Dodge 440 station wagon
vrooming
to a stop in the driveway, my father back from an errand you didn’t even know he was on, a load of planks sticking out far beyond the dropped tailgate, red flags flapping from their ends.

I surely wanted to be near the red flags and raw lumber, the loud drills and saws, whatever thing, whatever day, my father would make of them. But I also knew instinctively that all my father’s relentless motion, like his blowing of the neighborhood’s runny noses, was born of a mysterious impatience, an impatience always there within him. I could sense it as I stood by the bathroom
door watching him flick clean his shaving brush, a sudden eruption of wrist snaps ricocheting water and soap against the mirror. I saw it from my seat at the dinner table as I observed him shake up a bottle of Wishbone Italian, another overkill of wrist snaps turning oil and vinegar to froth in a second. I could see it in the briskness and tight focus he brought to any chore, as if he were racing to meet a crucial deadline.

The trick for me was to probe this impatience continually, to make some estimate of it and to guess whether, at any given moment, it might become my enemy. I always needed to know whether the impatience was now very close to the surface, verging on anger, seeking a target, seeking a target in me. I did best to watch and listen from a discrete distance. I listened for certain words that signaled the all clear. I listened, for example, for the word “copacetic,” slang from black jazz culture meaning “all right,” a word that had found its way into my father’s vocabulary by way of the Navy. “Everything here,” my father might announce while hooking my bicycle chain back onto its sprocket, “now appears copacetic.” And so it was.

I listened for sounds my father would make. The click of his tongue, for example, against the roof of his mouth, a crisp, hollow
shtok
of satisfaction that things were going according to plan.
Shtok, shtok, shtok
, he would say as he dropped ball bearings into the grooved race he had cleaned and greased.
Annnnnd shtok
as he dropped maraschino cherries onto a row of ice-cream sundaes.

I listened for the most welcome signals of all, the bad puns and jokey routines he invented for just the two of us to tell each other again and again. When he wanted to share a laugh with me, my father might borrow the cartoon voice of Yogi Bear and pronounce the two of us
Saaaamarter than the average Beers.
If he was in a particularly good mood, he might go into one of his Maxwell Smart riffs.
Sorry about that, Chief!
he’d say as he tickled my legs with a spray of the garden hose. My father found
Get Smart
hilarious: the Cone of Silence, the phone in the shoe, the spy in the file drawer, the way Don Adams passed through one secret door after another until the last one, clanging shut, caught
him by the nose. Watching Max suck up to his superiors while bumbling his way to another victory over evil KAOS, my father laughed often and hard.

T
he impatience in him had made my father leave the Navy to test jet engines for General Electric in Ohio. “I hated life aboard ship. No sense being a sailor if you can’t stand sailing.” Impatience again had caused him to leave GE for California and Lockheed. “I had stars in my eyes for the technology. Dreams of the cutting edge.” The jet engine, after all, was a creation of World War II, its future at best one of endless refinement. But the technology of the space race was fresh and without clear limits, the sort of blue sky work done in LMSC Building 104, massive and windowless, where my father reported for the first time in August of 1960.

He was put to work on a spy satellite project called Samos. Already well into development, Samos was to be many elements brought together. Samos was a powerful Atlas booster that lofted the satellite into space and then fell away. Samos was the orbiting space vehicle called Agena, a twenty-five-foot-long, five-foot-wide cylinder stuffed with guidance, tracking, and propulsion apparatus. Lockheed built Agenas assembly-line style for a variety of satellite projects. My father remembers his first glimpse at one as it lay in a work bay stripped of its outer skin, technicians buzzing around it. As his eyes played over the “accelerometers, gyroguidance package, electronics for radio links, spherical tanks, hoses and tubes, rocket motor,” he found Agena “a gorgeous little thing. Everything shiny, bright and clean. It just looked good.”

Samos, too, was the spying payload mounted onto Agena. This payload was a kind of flying Polaroid camera plus fax machine. According to plan, once in orbit Samos was to shoot pictures of Earth’s surface, develop its own film, convert the negatives into radio signals, then beam those signals down to the
Valley of Heart’s Delight, where rooms full of workers at consoles would unscramble them back into pictures.

Samos, in short, was to be a complex system made up of many different systems, and this made Samos a perfect example of what aerospace engineering was getting to be wholly about in the early 1960s. My father had understood this when he leaped at Lockheed’s invitation to come join. He was eager to be among people who were pushing forward “systems theory,” people who were practicing and perfecting the promise of “systems analysis.” Now that the government was in the business of commanding into being grandly ambitious technological goals—nuclear arsenals, moon rockets, spy satellites—the need had arisen for a new approach to invention, a science that concerned itself with the breaking down of any such blue sky goal into myriad smaller ones. And, then: figuring out how to mesh all those discrete goals, once achieved, back into a functioning whole. Systems engineering was that science, and my father saw his future within it.

My father, as it turned out, was not to spend any more time in the corporeal presence of the gorgeous Agena. Nor would he be allowed any access to the camera payload that made Samos truly cutting edge, nor would he be invited into the rooms where the spy pictures were eventually received and processed. Within the system of Samos, it fell to others to lay hands and eyes on the actual machinery and to handle the true final product, the images collected.

My father’s function on this, his first Lockheed project, was to be an Orbital Test Planner. This meant that my father’s precise duty within the whole was to sit at his desk and imagine the satellite, whirling in space, as a mathematical abstraction. Lockheed needed to program the flight of Samos in such a way as to best conserve power and film aboard. This involved finding the optimal times to turn certain switches on or off, and this could be expressed as an equation on paper. My father was paid to make numbers slide off his slide rule, numbers which would eventually be placed in the hands of other men whose duty was to sit at the controls that guided the actual Samos satellite through space. By
that point in the process, some little change in protocol could easily have made my father’s numbers irrelevant, and so he never knew whether they were used or not. By that point in the process, however, Lockheed had already moved him to another desk where he was asked to imagine a different satellite, whirling in space, as a mathematical abstraction.

After some years of this Lockheed would grant my father a new phase in his early career, naming him a Systems Test Engineer. The work proved no less abstract and still the gorgeous Agena remained shrouded from view. “Most of my day,” my father remembers, “was spent looking at columns of numbers, data sheets, comparing specs with hardware and deciding whether numbers were good or bad.” His work was not done until the bad numbers had been defeated and replaced by good ones, until he could explain why the good numbers had come to appear to him shiny, bright, and clean, gorgeous little things in their own way. He would write all these good test results into thick binders full of graphs and tables. When enough such documentation had been accumulated, when the equation had been sufficiently solved, the Systems Test Engineer was to play salesman. He was to present his test results, well before the actual launch of the satellite, to help try to convince the government that Lockheed had fulfilled its contract to date and that payment therefore was due. This “DD250 Sell-Off,” as such meetings are called in the aerospace business, went well enough my father’s first time out. The officials of the Air Force who were buying on behalf of the American people were impressed by the sparkle in my father’s numbers. They authorized the release of some millions of the hundreds of millions of dollars budgeted in total. And then, under the harsh light of fluorescence, my father returned to poring over other data sheets in search of new numbers good and bad.