But the Apollo flights are different. America is in front, they’re beating the Soviets. It puts the astronauts back in the headlines. Frank, Bill and Jim even get a ticker tape parade after their trip around the Moon.
Ginny, of course, is still pretty much a nobody—she’s sort of famous because she’s an astronaut wife, but Walden Jefferson Eckhardt is only one of fifty-four astronauts and he’s never flown so no one is really all that eager to interview Ginny or snap photographs of her. None of the reporters, of course, know about her career as Virginia G Parker—she can just imagine the magazine articles if they ever found out.
As backup to Apollo 12’s LMP, Al Bean—Ginny is aware of Pete Conrad’s crew, with their matching gold and black Corvettes, but she knows the wives only in passing—Walden is at the Cape pretty much all the time. She understands he might have to take Al’s place, and she’d want him as prepared as possible should such an eventuality arise… To be honest, she’s used to it now, she’s used to being left on her own for weeks, seeing her husband only infrequently. The house keeps her busy—my God, the endless housework—the AWC is there when she feels the need for company, and the new sense of purpose she has brought to her writing is proving the sort of intellectual challenge she now realises she has been missing. For those long busy months of 1969, as spring fades and summer threatens to throw a blanket of muggy heat over Houston, Ginny is happier than she has ever been. Though she has never thought of herself as a homemaker, she is proud of their home, proud of the hand she played in creating it; and she is beginning to enjoy her reflected minor celebrity, the wife of an astronaut who will probably go to the Moon, even if it has yet to be officially confirmed.
In May, Apollo 10 launches, and its crew of three make the quarter of a million mile journey to the Moon, and then descend to within ten miles of its surface. But they do not land. Ginny visits Faye during the flight, sitting on the sofa, trying to listen to the other women present and the squawk box at the same time. But really she wants Walden home so she can ask him to explain what is going on. She hears something over the squawk box and it sounds like: Okay, it’s attitude control three mode control … commander is four jet … when you hit hard over here it’s going to be hot fire.
But Walden is not in Houston, and though Ginny can find her way around a diagram of the lunar module, and make an educated guess at some of the workings depicted in sub-system diagrams, much of the astronauts’ speech is impenetrable, full of acronyms and terms she doesn’t understand. What she needs is a glossary and a legend for the acronyms.
As the mission progresses, a day in orbit, three days travelling to the Moon, Ginny feels Walden’s absence keenly, they should be experiencing this together, Apollo 10 validates everything that has happened since he applied to NASA, since they moved to Houston. Ginny wants to share the excitement—and not just with the other wives, whose responses are… complicated. Faye and the two Barbaras fear for their husbands’ safety but are also proud of their achievement—every other wife is just frightened at the prospect of their own husband up there, reliant upon something built by the lowest bidder… Though they may all profess to be “proud, thrilled and happy”, that’s only for the sake of the press. Certainly those three sentiments are present, but they are only part of a potent rocket fuel of emotions.
I am, incidentally, indulging in some artistic licence here. In his autobiography We Have Capture, commander Tom Stafford makes absolutely no mention of his wife and daughters during his discussion of the Apollo 10 flight. And Lily Koppel in The Astronaut Wives Club skips straight from Apollo 8 to Apollo 11. But it seems to me the mission should play an important role in Ginny’s journey of discovery, an almost metaphorical role—in a story in which the US space program has been put to more than its fair share of metaphorical uses…
Ginny fears for the Apollo 10 astronauts because they are using the same hardware her husband will be using when he goes to the Moon; but she is also frightened they might fail, and so the program will be cancelled and Walden will never set foot on the lunar surface. And then there’s what she knows about the spacecraft… So many things that could go wrong, that could fail at any point during the mission and spell death for the crew, even with all the triple redundancies.
It’s something that science fiction, now Ginny thinks about it, never really considers. Space travel is a literary device, it serves to get characters across interplanetary or interstellar distances from point A to point B, as the story requires… But in the real world such journeys are dangerous, space travel is dangerous, space is a hazardous environment, as Ginny has been learning—and science fiction all too often glosses over those facts. It’s an unlooked-for disconnect and it has slowly insinuated itself into her life over the past two years, and she’s not entirely sure how to deal with it.
But, at the moment, she’s mostly concerned with the Walden-shaped hole in her world. It feels like he should be here, editorialising for her, giving a running commentary on the mission. Ginny looks across to the typewriter sitting on the dining table, the pile of training manuals from Walden’s den she has “borrowed”, and she knows they are no real substitute. She’s happy, more so than she has been in previous years, but she is beginning to feel like she has gained her happiness at the expense of something she treasured.
The happiness doesn’t last, of course; it never could. As June rolls on and the Apollo 11 launch date grows nearer, the press attention becomes more intrusive. The streets of El Lago are thronged with reporters and television vans, and everyone hides indoors for fear of being photographed doing something which might reflect badly on their husbands and NASA. Those stories Ginny heard about the Mercury Seven seem all too plausible, and Ginny isn’t even the wife of a “Moonwalker”. Yet.
And then she hears rumours from Florida. She knows about the “Cape Cookies”, but she foolishly believes it was before Walden’s time, or that he at least would stay faithful, she thinks she knows him well enough for that. But there’s a story going round about some of the guys and some girls and one of the names Ginny hears is her husband’s—someone saw him in a bar with a young woman. The sacrifices Ginny has made, playing the “happy housewife”, though she is nothing of the sort, in order not to jeopardise his shot at the Moon. And then he goes and… But did he really? She doesn’t want to believe it but she needs to be sure, she can’t just ignore it like so many of the other wives do, pretend it’s not happening, pretend that it’s even okay because he’s an astronaut, because he’s a man.
So Ginny flies to Florida, a commercial flight, hires a car at Orlando Airport, and drives to the Holiday Inn in Cocoa Beach, where the guys stay when they’re at the Cape but don’t want to stay in astronaut quarters.
She gets out of the rental car and gazes across the parking lot at the entrance to the hotel, and she wonders if she’s doing the right thing. Perhaps she should just turn her back on it, ignore it, the way the other wives do. Togethersville has had its casualties over the years, actual deaths, but also those wives who have left their husbands, husbands who have left their wives, like Pam, who left Al in November last year, and Harriet, who divorced Donn. After all those years keeping it together in Togethersville, the cracks are starting to show, and Ginny, who has always felt secure with Walden, she doesn’t want her marriage to crash and burn like some others are doing.