Riding Rockets (61 page)

We left the president to his never-ending work and followed Barbara Bush on a tour of the White House. If I had not been aware she was the First Lady, I would have never guessed it from her behavior. She was talkative, witty, and completely devoid of any air of celebrity. She reminded me of my mother. I could easily picture her baiting a hook or hoisting a beer or throwing another log on the campfire.

We stepped into an ancient elevator for a trip to the upstairs living quarters. With five astronauts, five wives, Mrs. Bush, and an assistant, we were cheek to jowl in the small volume. Mrs. Bush was directly behind me and I did my best to resist being crushed into her front. Before the elevator door closed, Millie, the first dog, somehow managed to wiggle under our feet to make it an even tighter squeeze. As the box crept upward, the silence was total. In spite of Mrs. Bush’s easy manner we were all very self-conscious of her company. To occupy the uncomfortable seconds we watched the elevator indicator panel with the same intensity as an astronaut watching a space rendezvous. Some of us moved slightly to accommodate the dog. Chris Casper, John’s wife, finally cracked under the oppressing silence. She nervously offered an icebreaker—“Oh, I feel it between my legs.” While it was obvious she was referring to Millie’s wagging tail, the words hung over our sardined group like really bad flatulence. A reference to anything between a woman’s legs was tough to comment on in polite company, much less in the company of the First Lady of the nation. Chris quickly realized her mistake and tried to recover by amending her words. She nervously added, “I mean I feel the dog between my…er…my legs.”

It was just too much for me to keep my mouth shut. She had served up a ball just begging to be spiked. I couldn’t resist. “Are you sure it’s not John’s hand?” I inquired. My comment elicited a few snickers and an elbow jab from Donna. As had frequently been the case in my life, I immediately wished the joker in me would have kept quiet.
What was Mrs. Bush thinking?
I wondered. Maybe this time I had gone too far.

I need not have worried. As regret shot through my brain, I felt Mrs. Bush’s hand lightly pat me on a butt cheek as she said, “
That’s
John’s hand.” Then she winked at Donna and said, “I’ve got him right where I want him.” I was stunned. She was a Mike Mullane clone. She couldn’t let a perfect setup fall to the sand—she had to nail it.

Upstairs her joking continued. She halted in front of a painting of some daughters of a forgotten nineteenth-century president. “What do you think about this portrait?”

We were all mute. The women in the painting had a striking resemblance to hogs wearing wigs and gowns. They were creatures right off of Dr. Moreau’s island of horrors. As our collective silence was fast approaching embarrassment, Mrs. Bush took the heat off and answered her own question. “This is the ugliest painting I’ve ever seen. The women were part of the First Family, for God’s sake. They could have requested some artistic license. What were they thinking? For my official portrait I intend to get an artist who will make me look good.”

She led us to a room with a view of people waiting to begin their White House tour. The crowd screamed in delight and grabbed their cameras when they saw Mrs. Bush waving. She was a queen who deported herself in every way as a commoner.

She was also a proud mother and grandmother. On every table and mantel were framed photos of her family. I didn’t see a single photo of her posed with any of the multitude of stars she had certainly met in her life. Clearly her VIPs were her children and grandchildren. She spoke of her philosophy of life: “In your old age you will never regret the contract never signed, the trip never taken, the money never earned, but you will definitely regret it if your children turn out poorly because of neglect.” She used Ronald Reagan as an example. “He’s a wonderful man but he has four children who won’t speak to him.” Maybe she was giving us the unsolicited advice because she could see in our eyes how driven we were. If there was ever a collection of men vulnerable to neglecting their families, it was astronauts.

We sat for tea and cookies and she told us stories about some of the people she had met and unusual places she had traveled. She volunteered her thoughts on a controversy in which she was embroiled and that was being given significant press coverage. She had been invited to give the commencement address at Wellesley College, but, after accepting, some of the students had organized a movement to disinvite her. These women considered her a poor role model since her only identity was through her husband. Apparently, for them, being a wife and mother were not qualifying credentials for a commencement speaker. Mrs. Bush was completely gracious and accepting of their dissent, but from the first moment Donna had seen the story in the newspaper she had been furious. Donna had spent her life as a wife and mother and didn’t consider herself a second-class woman for having done so. I worried she was going to offer an opinion to Mrs. Bush along the lines that those Wellesley girls were just a bunch of small-minded, immature bitches, but she maintained her composure. Fortunately Donna didn’t have my hair-trigger mouth.

After tea, Mrs. Bush led us downstairs to finish our tour, giving us a running commentary on the history of the rooms we passed. But she skipped over some recent history I was privy to. An astronaut who had made an earlier White House visit had told of entering a room in the company of Mrs. Bush and being brought to a sudden halt by the overpowering stench of fresh dog shit. Everybody had quickly fixated on the source…Millie’s deposit. The astronaut witness had recounted how a silence as heavy as the odor had enveloped their group. Nobody wanted to acknowledge the obvious, that Millie had desecrated the carpet. But, without missing a beat, Barbara Bush turned to look at her astronaut visitors and jokingly warned, “If I read about this in the
Post
tomorrow, you’re all dead meat!”

Mrs. Bush would have fit perfectly into our TFNG gang. I could see her at the Outpost and Pete’s BBQ and on the LCC roof. There are some things the trappings of wealth and power and great political office can never dissolve. Among these are the bonds of the military family. As the wife of a WWII naval aviator, Barbara Bush had long ago experienced everything we had lived and were continuing to live…fear, the heartache of hearing “Taps” played over friends’ graves, and consoling grieving widows and fatherless children.

As we walked away, I thought of those dissident Wellesley women. They had been right about one thing—Mrs. Bush shouldn’t have been invited to speak at their commencement merely because she was the First Lady. Any woman could be one of those. Rather, she should have been invited because she was a member of the Greatest Generation, because she had kissed her man off to war and been left to wonder if she would ever see him again, because—as the loving and supportive wife of a WWII naval aviator—she had done her part to save the world. Those were commencement address qualifications for any college, even Wellesley.

Chapter 42

Journey’s End

In May 1990, I retired from the USAF and NASA in an astronaut office ceremony attended by thirty or so of my peers. The gathering was held in the main conference room where, twelve years earlier, I had first heard John Young welcome our TFNG class. Dressed in my air force uniform, with my ribbons and the astronaut wings I had flown in space pinned to my chest, I accepted the Air Force Legion of Merit from USAF Major General Nate Lindsay. Nate had become a close friend over the course of my two DOD missions and I was honored he and his wife, Shirley, had taken the time to fly to Houston to attend the ceremony. Donna, my mom, and my son, Pat, were also in attendance. Even my Pettigrew genes couldn’t completely subdue the emotions that stirred in my soul at the sight of Pat. I could feel my throat tightening and my eyes welling. I began my air force career at my commissioning on the Plain at West Point in 1967. At that time, Donna and my mom had each pinned on one of my second lieutenant butter bars. Now, my twenty-two-year-old son, dressed in his air force uniform and wearing the same virginal rank, was shaking my hand and hugging me.

I kept my comments brief knowing everybody had to get back to work. Somewhere there was a countdown clock urgently marking the weeks to the next launch. I thanked everybody for their years of support, making a special reference to Pat, Amy, Laura (the girls had been unable to attend), and my mom. I saved my greatest praise for Donna. Tears threatened to douse her cheeks. I then concluded with the observation that I was the third generation of my family to have seen combat. My maternal grandfather had served in France in WWI and my dad in WWII. I had done a tour in Vietnam. I offered the hope my children’s generation would never see a war. At that time it seemed like a sure bet. The Soviet Union had ceased to exist. How could there ever be another threat to America as great?

That night, the astronaut office hosted a going-away party for Donna and me at a local restaurant. Beth Turner, one of the office secretaries, obtained a life-size cardboard rendition of a studly bodybuilder and placed it at stage center. She covered the face with my astronaut photo and the crotch with a sequined jockstrap stuffed with something flattering. Against this backdrop Hoot Gibson roasted me with stories of my botched T-38 landing in Brewster Shaw’s backseat, my near death experiences while performing STS-1 chase duties with “Red Flash” Walker, and my intercom comment from STS-27—“The RSO’s mother goes down like a Muslim at noon.” He also recounted how a group of female DOD security secretaries, tasked with declassifying our STS-27 audiotapes, had been confused by my multiple references to the “Anaconda.” They had assumed it might be a secret code word for our payload. I had to explain to them it was a Swine Flight euphemism for
penis.
As the crowd laughed at Hoot’s stories (he was so damned good at
everything
), I thought of how all astronauts long to leave a memorable and heroic legacy. Hoot had defined mine…screwing up a T-38 backseat landing, slandering the mother of the man who was two switches away from killing us on Swine Flight, and introducing some sweet young innocents to the disgusting humor of Planet AD. Oh well, I guess it could have been worse.

Hoot finally ended the roast by embracing me in a cheek-to-cheek hug, an act of physical affection that surprised me. But I understood. Like warriors back from the battle, we were intimately bound by our own unique duels with death, by the incommunicable experience of spaceflight.

The audience applauded, the youngest astronauts being the most enthusiastic. It had been the same way back in my freshmen days.
Why don’t these old farts just leave or die or something?
I was now the old fart and my departure was freeing up one more seat into space. For silver-pinned astronauts, that was something to applaud.

Back home Donna and I talked long into the night. I tried to convey to her my everlasting gratitude for the life she had given me, but how do you say thanks for a dream? I tried with “I’m glad you walked out of that party in 1965 to kiss me.” I don’t think I could have said it better than with those few words. But for that kiss, my life would have been different.

As sleep was approaching, I thought there was one other thing I had to do before I walked out of NASA. I needed to hitch a ride to KSC.

I stopped outside the launchpad perimeter fence, where the tourist buses parked, and stepped from the car. The visitors center was closed and tours had ended so I knew I wouldn’t be disturbed.
Columbia
was being prepared for her tenth mission and was almost completely hidden by the rotating service structure. Only her right wing and nose and the tips of the SRBs were visible. I had wanted to drive to the pad and take the elevator to the cockpit level, but I knew that would have been a bureaucratic hassle. Even astronauts weren’t free to move through security checkpoints. So my last view of
Columbia
would be as the tourists saw her: from a quarter mile away, wrapped in her steel cocoon, hardly looking like a spaceship at all.

The sun had recently set and the pad xenon lights were on. The wind brought muted loudspeaker calls to my ear and the techno-talk spun me back to the summer of 1984, which had been filled with so much fear, disappointment, and joy. But mostly it was the joy of August 30 that now sharpened in my mind’s eye. My heart accelerated at the memory of engine start. I could feel the rattle of max-q and see the fade-to-black as
Discovery
raced toward her orbit. Hank’s voice was as clear in my brain now as it had been six years earlier: “Congratulations, rookies. You’re officially astronauts.” I could hear the cheers of Judy, Mike, and Steve at the realization our silver pins had undergone the alchemy of fifty miles altitude and been transformed into gold.

I got back in the car and steered for the astronaut beach house. My last moments as an astronaut had to end on that beach. No other place conjured up more memories or more emotions than its sands. Its quiet solitude and proximity to the infinity of the sea and sky gave my soul a release unattainable anywhere else.

I pulled into the driveway, climbed the stairs, and opened the door. The house was deserted, as I knew it would be. Except for prelaunch picnics and spousal good-byes, few astronauts or NASA officials ever visited the facility.

Nothing had changed since my STS-36 visits. In fact, nothing had changed since my first beach house visit twelve years earlier. A framed abstract painting, which suggested a collision of multiple sailboats, hung on a wall. It had probably been selected by the same decorator who had chosen an exploding volcano for crew quarters wall art. (We were astronauts, for chrissake. What would be so wrong with some space and rocket photos?) The mantel of the fireplace was still crowded with various liquor and wine bottles. Some had probably been emptied by Alan Shepard, Neil Armstrong, Jim Lovell, and other legendary astronauts. On the windowsills and end tables were shells, sand dollars, and other flotsam collected by generations of astronauts and their spouses. I was sure their beachcombing, like Donna’s and mine, had merely been a distraction from that impending final good-bye. The small den was still crowded with the same Ozzie and Harriet–era furniture: orange vinyl chairs, orange vinyl sofa, faux-wood coffee and lamp tables, and ceramic light fixtures decorated with splatters of, what else, orange paint. A small television, old enough to have captured the 1960s Gemini launches, sat on another imitation-wood piece.