Riding Rockets (24 page)

That evening, on the ride back from the party, Donna turned to me and said, “This is a strange business when you have to preselect an escort into widowhood.” She was enduring a lot for my dream.

I was selfishly consumed by the flight, and it weighed on the entire family. Why Donna didn’t just walk away from me in the final weeks was a miracle. On one occasion I arrived home to news that Pat had strep throat. “The flight surgeon wants you to come in for a throat swab, too.” It was no surprise that Donna had sought medical help at the surgeon’s office. The doctors also served as astronaut family physicians. But I was furious with her. Though I was feeling fine, I had no idea what a throat culture would reveal. Visions of
Apollo 13
and Ken Mattingly’s removal from that mission because of an exposure to German measles aroused my paranoia to insane levels. I raged at her, “Goddammit, Donna, I’m ten days from leaving for KSC! This could screw me!” I made no inquiry of Pat’s condition. Donna had never met the man who was now in her face. Tears streamed down her cheeks. I ordered her, “Until I launch, don’t go back to the surgeon’s office for anything! Nothing! Find a civilian doctor.” I would later apologize to her, but I will always carry the memory of this failure as a husband and father. There are some things you can’t take back. I ignored the flight surgeon’s request, but he badgered me at my office until I finally submitted. The swab results were negative.

At T-7 days to launch I moved into the temporary trailer complex that served as the JSC crew quarters. This was a requirement of flight medicine’s mandatory health quarantine, a program designed to minimize the chances of an ill family member infecting a Prime Crew astronaut in the homestretch to a mission—just what I had feared in the case of Pat’s strep throat. From this point onward, everybody, including our wives and all NASA employees whose duties put them in contact with us, would have to first be checked by the flight surgeon before they could be in our company. School-age children were forbidden any contact.

I said good-bye to the kids. Pat and Amy were now sixteen, Laura thirteen. I had always been open with them about the dangers of spaceflight, so they understood the significance of this parting, that it might be the last time they would ever see me. Pat and Laura were composed and quiet, while I detected a nervous intensity in Amy’s eyes and voice.

I invited Donna to every crew quarters’ supper and, after a quick exam by the surgeon, she was allowed to attend. On the last evening before our departure to Florida, we went to my room and slowly and quietly enjoyed ourselves under the sheets (
very
slowly and
very
quietly, for it was a trailer). In the dark I whispered in her ear, “The next time we do this, I’ll be radioactive.” Neither of us mentioned the other possibility…that there might not be a next time.

On June 22, 1984, “Zoo Crew” departed for Florida in a flight of four T-38s. In a routine that had long been perfected by NASA PR, our wives had preceded us. The press liked this human touch of the women waiting to greet their men and NASA was happy to oblige them. As we entered KSC airspace we took a turn around
Discovery,
then slipped into a fingertip formation and entered the “break” over the shuttle landing facility. Hank waited until every plane was landed and we taxied to the apron together. We cut the engines, popped our canopies, and climbed from our jets. Our spousal embraces were captured by a clutch of news photographers. It was a
Life
magazine moment. We were the heroic knights, come to joust with the forces of death…fire and speed and altitude…and our fair maidens were there to bid us adieu.

The final two days before a launch were designed to be relaxing. There were no simulations. We studied our checklists, flew in T-38s, and enjoyed suppers with our wives. But relaxed? Not a chance. I was hours from achieving a lifelong dream. Pure adrenaline was surging in my veins. Sleep was a struggle. The night terrors were ready to awaken me at the instant of unconsciousness.

We said the final good-bye to our wives at an L–1 luncheon at the astronaut beach house.
^*
The last time I had been there was with Judy. As Donna stepped from the van, I was glad I had no regrets about that night. The NASA-catered lunch was attended by our wives, the family escorts, and key launch personnel. The gathering was informal. There were no speeches, no toasts. Everyone helped themselves from a table set with sandwich fixings and chips. We filled our plates, found a place to park a beer, and enjoyed ourselves.

After lunch, all but our significant others departed and we were left alone to say farewell. Diane Coats took it hard. She was a naval aviator’s wife. She knew the danger. Hank’s wife, Fran, seemed composed. This was her second time through the drama and that probably helped. Or maybe she was dying inside but hid it for the benefit of the younger wives. After all, she was the commander’s spouse and had to set the example. Our payload specialist, Charlie Walker, and his wife were struggling. Judy was spared the spouse separation issue. If Sally Ride, Steve Hawley’s wife, was experiencing any fear, it wasn’t on display.

Donna and I walked to the beach and turned north. The day was a furnace and the surf splashing on our legs was welcome. Just a few miles away was Pad 39A and
Discovery.
In our stroll we joined the end of a line of astronauts and their spouses, stretching two decades into the past, who had made this same walk in the shadow of their machines: Redstones, Atlases, Titans, and Saturns. A river of tears had been shed on these sands as couples struggled to come to grips with their tomorrows and the potential for glory or death. Now it was our turn.

I was ill-equipped to deal with this moment. When it came to emotions, I was my mother’s son. I once teased Mom about her seeming lack of emotion and she replied, “You’ll never know what a Pettigrew [her maiden name] is feeling. It’s just the way God made us. We keep it all inside.” At the DNA exchange of my conception I had been stamped a Pettigrew. It’s not that I don’t deeply feel things or that I’m afraid of unmanly labels if I reveal them. It’s that I can’t. What I feel in my soul and how those feelings are verbalized are two entirely different things.

The good-bye could not be delayed and Donna finally brought it to the surface. I could hear her sniffling. She stopped and embraced me. “Mike, hold me.” As I had always done in poignant moments in my life, I now tried to hide behind humor. “We could go back to the beach house bedroom and do more than hold each other.” Always the joker, that was me.

“Just shut up, Mike, and hold me. It’s not funny.”

She sobbed into my neck and I felt like shit. I tried to calm her with comments about the shuttle’s critical component redundancy, but that went over about as well as my “Let’s make whoopee” comment. I wasn’t going to talk her out of her fear. This was a woman who knew the cost of high-performance flight. She had held the decomposed hand of a friend at an aircraft crash site. She had seen the squadron commander and chaplain step from a car and walk to the door of a neighbor to deliver the “Your husband is dead” message. She had comforted the widows and children of how many friends? I could not guess. She was the woman who had seen through the NASA euphemisms to identify the astronaut family escorts as “escorts into widowhood.” Nothing I could say was going to bury Donna’s fears.

We sat for a while and just listened to the waves and watched pelicans kamikazeing after their meals. Donna broke the silence. “It’s been a lot of water under the bridge to get here.”

“Yes, it has.”

“I can see you right now as a teenager launching your rockets from the desert. It’s amazing where it led.”

“I’ve got a rocket right here you can launch.” There it was again, my shield of crude humor.

“Mike, can’t you be serious?”

I forced myself to be the man she wanted at this moment. “Okay. I’m sorry. I will be serious. Whatever happens tomorrow,” I felt her tense at the implication of the word
whatever,
“I’ll be living a dream. It wouldn’t have happened without you.” It sounded corny but it was the truth.

We embraced and kissed. It wasn’t
From Here to Eternity
passion but it was sufficient for the moment. It was easier for me to convey my feelings in this physical contact than it was through words. I could taste the salt on her cheeks…tears, not ocean.

I thought of how many random, seemingly inconsequential events steered me through life. If my mom and dad hadn’t ignored those “Danger, Unimproved Road” signs, where would life have taken me? If they hadn’t settled in Albuquerque, where the sky had captured me, what path would I have journeyed? If I had married a different woman seventeen years before, would I now be sitting on this beach?

In a remarkable coincidence, Donna was born on the identical day and year of my own birth, September 10, 1945, in Albuquerque, New Mexico. She was just a few hours older than me. (In her childhood, my youngest daughter was convinced that men and women had to marry someone who shared their birth date.) Donna’s mom and dad, Amy Franchini and Joseph Sei, were first-generation Americans, born of Italian immigrants. Both spoke fluent Italian, argued incessantly, and smoked like forest fires. When Donna was born, the couple already had one child, a boy, ten years old. They had been trying to have a second child for nearly a decade, praying to a pantheon of saints for a daughter. Amy Sei was thirty-five years old when she finally conceived. In their minds Donna was a miracle and she quickly became the center of the couple’s existence.

Donna’s life was the polar opposite of mine, root-bound. She never moved. Throughout her youth she lived in the same home, only a few blocks from one of the major pathways of adventure for the Mullane clan, fabled Route 66. As a little boy, I had passed within a few hundred yards of the little girl I would one day marry.

We were high school students when we first met. She attended the downtown Catholic high school, St. Mary’s, while I was a student at the uptown school, St. Pius X. Her cousin was my classmate, and through this family connection, Donna and I were introduced in 1961 in our sophomore year. This was a horribly insecure time in my life. My blemished face would have repulsed the Elephant Man. It looked as if I had lost a paint ball game in which the other side had been using Clearasil bullets. And, of course, there were my radar-dish ears to horrify the ladies. I could not imagine any girl finding anything attractive about me. When Donna was introduced I said “hi” and ran to hang with the guys. Destiny would have to wait for another four years.

I continued my tortured journey through high school, occasionally running into Donna at various teen functions, but never talking to her, much less asking her on a date. She wasn’t beautiful. Attractive, with a bubbly personality, would be an honest description.

In May 1963, I graduated from St. Pius and several weeks later departed for the hellish rigors of West Point. Donna was now two thousand miles away and nowhere in my mind. I was fighting to survive. Upperclassmen were taking numbers to get in line to scream in my face. Even after putting plebe year and its hazing behind me, the pressure did not diminish. The academic workload was overwhelming. I couldn’t imagine any other nineteen-year-old in America having it worse than I did. I was wrong.

In faraway Albuquerque, Donna was ill, suffering periodic bouts of nausea and vomiting. Since she had previously experienced a kidney infection, her mother assumed a reoccurrence and took her to the doctor. The blood test results came. With her mom sitting primly at her side the doctor delivered the diagnosis…pregnancy. The father was another teenager.

Donna’s parents were destroyed. This was 1964 and it was a minor scandal for even a Hollywood starlet to be pregnant and unwed. For a traditional Italian-Catholic family to have a pregnant, unwed daughter was worse than a diagnosis of a terminal disease. For the first time in her life, Donna got to see her father cry.

It was her brother who organized a face-saving escape. Donna would stay in Albuquerque as long as possible. Before her belly could betray her, she would travel to an out-of-state Catholic home for unwed mothers. The baby would be given up for adoption. Extended family and friends would be fed the lie she had left town for college, but few would believe it. The daughters of traditional Italian-Catholic families did not leave home until they were married. But a priest, who was a family friend, taught at a nearby Catholic university so he willingly joined the conspiracy, prepared to cover for Donna if anybody inquired after her.

While I was thinking my life had ended at West Point, Donna was certain hers was also over. She had far greater reasons to feel condemned. She was making the first trip of her life away from her parents…as a social and family outcast. Joe and Amy made it clear she had shamed them. “Don’t you dare look at that baby when it’s born” had been her mother’s send-off warning. “I don’t want you getting attached to it.”

For months Donna cried herself to sleep in a Catholic geriatric-care center operated by the Sisters of Charity. A portion of one floor of the facility had been converted into a dormitory that Donna shared with two dozen other scarlet-lettered women. In exchange for their room and board, the girls helped the nuns with the care and feeding of the aged. They carried trays through rooms and hallways scented with urine, feces, and death. Depression hung on them like a shroud. The mother superior proved to be the quintessential witch, treating them as morally flawed beings. There was no counseling, no trips, and few phone calls to or from loved ones. Donna wrote letters home, putting coded notes on the envelope to designate which mail could be shared with the extended family. In those she created a life at college. In the others she begged for forgiveness.

The girls found comfort only among themselves, but even that succor was transient. As quickly as friendships blossomed, they would end. Girls would give birth and move on to uncertain futures. Unlike other traumatic events that bond people for life, living in a home for unwed mothers was naturally terminal for friendship. None of the girls wanted continued communication for fear of discovery of their sinful secret.