The Mountain Cage (25 page)

“It’s still experimental eye surgery,” Hillary had told Dick one summer evening in 1977, as they sat on a Mexican beach with Chelsea, “but I’ve read all the medical studies. With photorefractive keratectomy, there is a risk—I could end up with even worse vision—but there’s about a two-thirds chance of ending up with twenty-twenty vision, and even twenty-forty would be good enough.”

He was listening to her with his characteristic mixed expression of curiosity and amusement. “Is it worth it?” he asked.

“Well, it isn’t cheap.”

“I wasn’t asking about the cost, I was asking about the risk. Is it worth taking the chance and spending all that dough just so you won’t have to wear contacts?”

Hillary watched as their three-year-old daughter patted down another section of a sand structure that was beginning to look like a cyclotron. “That isn’t why I want the surgery,” she murmured. “NASA wouldn’t accept anybody as nearsighted as I am for astronaut training. If the operations are successful, I’ll have a chance.”

That was the first time she had confessed her long-held ambition to him. President John Glenn’s recent speech, in which he had recanted the testimony he had given before a Congressional committee in 1962, had made her old dream flower inside her once more. “I argued back then,” the president had said, “that women shouldn’t go into space, that it was the job of men to take risks exploring the unknown. As my wife and daughter recently reminded me, I can be mighty short-sighted for a guy who used to be a pilot. It’s time for women to join men in exploring the frontier of space.”

“We’d have to move to Houston if they accepted me,” Hillary went on, “but any university in Texas would jump at the chance to have you on the faculty. They’d probably pay you a lot more than Caltech.”

Her husband said, “Let’s see how your eye surgery goes first.”

That night, he ran for the bathroom in their beach house and vomited. That autumn, still recovering from the first operation on her left eye, she finally persuaded him to consult his doctor, who found nothing. In the spring of 1978, with twenty-twenty vision in her left eye and her right eye healing rapidly, Hillary finally got him to a specialist recommended by her colleagues at U.C.L.A.

Dick had a tumor of the abdomen. The surgeon who operated on him told her it was myxoid liposarcoma, a rare form of cancer that had already destroyed his spleen and one of his kidneys. He had an 11 to 41 per cent chance of surviving five years, depending on which study she looked at. It was highly unlikely that he would live another ten years.

Hillary forced herself to ignore two possibilities, neither of which she would ever mention to him. The first was that his work at Los Alamos on the atomic bomb might have been responsible for his disease. The second was that, had she not been so preoccupied with her eye surgery and her applications and interviews with NASA, she might have noticed the slight bulge at his waist earlier, might have pushed him into seeing the physicians and specialists soon enough for them to have saved him.

Hillary had not dreamed of her husband for some time, but now, drifting between sleep and wakefulness as the Sacajawea orbited Venus, she found herself standing on a sunlit beach, watching him as he waded in the surf. She had dreamed of him almost every night after his death, and the dreams had convinced her that he was still alive, that the recurring tumors and the second rare type of cancer that had struck at his bone marrow and the failure of his remaining kidney had never happened, had been mistaken diagnoses, until she woke up and once again remembered.

Everything she knew, all the research she had done, was powerless to help him. That he had lived for another ten years after his diagnosis had been beating the odds. What had kept him going was his work, his feeling that there was still so much to teach and to learn, so many more ways to find and use the language of mathematics to convey the simple and beautiful laws of physical reality.

She had withdrawn her application to NASA, devoting herself to making his remaining time as carefree as possible. The thought that NASA might be unlikely to welcome as an astronaut a woman who would disrupt the life of a stricken man, especially a man who was one of the world’s greatest physicists, crossed her mind for only a moment, and made her despise herself for thinking it.

“You know,” he had told her a few years before his death, “I don’t think we’d still be married if we didn’t have Chelsea. There wouldn’t have been enough to hold us together.” Cruel as the statement seemed, she knew it to be the truth. Rooted in conventionality, toiling at her own work and taking care of all the practical matters he saw as distractions, she knew that they had begun to drift apart even in the earliest days of their marriage. Having their daughter had linked his quicksilver brilliance to her stolidity; he had loved Chelsea enough to again feel some love for Hillary. She could look at their child and see what she herself might have become growing up in a different world, a world of sun and sand and a father who could reveal the wonder and beauty of that world.

After his death, she gave him the simple burial he had wanted, with no ritual and only herself, their daughter, and Dick’s sister and one of his cousins to mourn him at the graveside. A month after that, his friends and colleagues at Caltech held a memorial gathering in his honor. Hillary found herself in a large auditorium packed with fellow physicists, graduate students, former students, engineers from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, old girlfriends, and eccentrics Dick had met on the beach or in bars and cafes while playing his bongo drums. The written eulogy she had prepared suddenly seemed inadequate; it was conventional, sentimental, stodgy—all the things her husband was not.

She was to be the first to speak. She left her written remembrance on her chair; she would speak from her heart.

Chelsea watched her with Dick’s eyes as Hillary walked to the podium, looked into the sea of faces, and said, “Toward the end of Dick’s life, my dear husband and I used to talk about—pardon the cliché—the meaning of life. I can think of nothing more appropriate now than to offer some of his own remarks on that topic.” He had expressed such sentiments often enough, and the outlook they expressed was so central to his life, that she could easily recall his words. “He would say, ‘I have approximate answers and different degrees of certainty about things, but I’m not totally sure of anything and there’s a lot I don’t know, such as whether it means anything at all to ask why we’re here. But I can live with that, and die with it, too. I’m not scared by not knowing, by being in a universe without any purpose, and as far as I can tell, that’s how it is. It doesn’t frighten me. I’d rather admit I don’t know than grab at some answer that might be wrong.’“

Hillary paused, afraid for a moment that she might cry again. “That was how he lived his life, and that’s what he believed right up to the end.” The certainties of her Methodist youth were of little use now; Dick would have been furious at her and disappointed in her if she had invoked them. Over the years, some of his doubt and uncertainty had crept into her view of the universe. Her occasional prayers and Scriptural readings were more a nostalgic reminder of a comfort her spiritual beliefs had once provided than an affirmation of faith. She wondered if she ever would have come to that kind of agnosticism without her husband’s influence. Against everything she had been taught in childhood, she could even believe that her doubts might have made her a better person. There had always existed in her a tendency to self-righteousness; doubt made her more conscious of her failings.

Hillary bowed her head. She would honor her husband’s memory by not praying for him.

Hillary strapped herself into her seat. “I don’t know about you,” Evelyn said from her pilot’s seat, “but I’m a little scared.” It was an admission none of them would have made had any male astronauts been present. The ship’s drive might fail, stranding them in orbit around Venus. The
Sacajawea
might accelerate until the midpoint of their return journey and never decelerate. If the mission failed, it would almost make certain that they would all have Venusian geological features named after themselves, which wasn’t exactly consoling.

“Maybe someday, people will settle Venus,” Chelsea had told Hillary in a phone call from MIT a couple of months ago.

“No way,” Hillary had said. “You’d need a completely different planet.”

“That’s what I meant, Mom.” Chelsea had gone on to speak of terraforming—engineering algae to seed the sulfuric clouds, finding a way to shield Venus from the sun so that it could cool, maybe even using the nanotechnology Richard Feynman had envisioned, twenty years before there was even a name for that field, to build microscopic machines capable of altering the planetary environment on a molecular level. Hillary had suddenly wished that Chelsea’s father could have seen what his daughter had become, how much of him there still was in her.

She was suddenly overwhelmed by a vision of Venus as a future home for humankind. A terraformed Venus would not isolate colonists and their descendants from Earth, as a colonized Mars would through the necessary adaptation to a much lower gravity. People would come and go freely. She remembered all the stories of Venus she had read as a girl, from the swampy planet of the earliest tales to the vision of hell transformed into a new garden.

“All systems go,” Evelyn murmured. “Girls, we’re ready to roll.” For a moment, Hillary had the sensation of being outside herself, as though everything around her were no more than a dimly imagined possibility that had never come to pass, and then the thrust of the
Sacajawea’s
engines pressed her against her seat.

They were on their way home—but with the success of this mission, Hillary was sure that Earth would not remain humankind’s only home for long. The Moon’s research outposts would soon welcome settlers, and there would be Mars to explore. As Venus shrank on the rear view-screen, Hillary recalled the fifteen-year-old girl in Park Ridge who had dreamed of becoming an astronaut, and knew that in spite of the setbacks and delays, the years of postponing her dream and finally winning a place as an astronaut and then of waiting for a chance at a mission, that all of the hard work and the sacrifices and the disappointments had been worth it.

She had kept faith with her younger self.

Evelyn Holder had brought her husband to the White House reception and dinner in honor of the four astronauts. Judith Resnik was accompanied by Senator Bob Kerrey, who was rumored to be getting more serious about her; if he did decide to run for President, having an astronaut as a wife could only help. Victoria Cho had her good friend Ellison Onizuka, fellow astronaut and space station veteran, in tow.

Hillary stood with her daughter, smiling and nodding as she shook hands and exchanged pleasantries with the other guests. Chelsea Feynman, who had given up her usual uniform of jeans and sweatshirts for a long blue silk dress, was holding the medal that the President had presented to Hillary. She proudly opened the small box to show the medal to the Vice-President, as she had earlier when former President Glenn had asked to see it.

“You know,” the Vice-President was saying, “I truly envy your mother. I would have loved to have been an astronaut myself. You should be very proud of your mother.”

“I am,” Chelsea said.

Hillary smiled as the Vice-President turned over her medal to read the inscription on the back; he was both a space policy wonk and a big supporter of NASA, so she had resolved to be as pleasant to him as possible, despite his reputation as something of an opportunist and a hatchet man for the President. At any rate, Vice-President Newt Gingrich seemed on his best behavior tonight.

“To Hillary Rodham Feynman,” Vice-President Gingrich read from the medal, “for the courage she has shown in the exploration of space.” He beamed at her and her daughter. Hillary remembered how, a year after Dick’s death, she had impulsively added his last name to her own on her application to NASA. In public, she was still known by her own name, the name she had kept throughout her marriage, but in NASA’s records and any awards she received for her service as an astronaut, she would always be listed as Hillary Rodham Feynman. Her feminist soul was at peace with that; her husband, perhaps in more ways than even she realized, had helped to make a better space program possible. His consultations with the NASA scientists and engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, she was sure, had saved the space agency many mistakes, perhaps even disasters.

The First Lady, taller in person than she seemed on TV and with a mass of attractive curly brown hair, bore down on them, apparently about to rescue Hillary and Chelsea from the Vice-President. Mary Steenburgen Clinton might give the appearance of a soft-spoken Southern lady, but it was widely believed that her husband might never have risen to become president without her. Not long after marrying the up-and-coming young Arkansan politician William Jefferson Clinton in the early Eighties, Mary Clinton had given up a promising career as an actress to become her husband’s closest advisor and unofficial campaign manager. A charming but disorganized, undisciplined, skirt-chasing, and only intermittently successful politician had gone on to win election as his state’s governor, as a senator, and finally as president in 1992. Mary Clinton’s gentle demeanor, it was said, was only part of a public performance that concealed a sharp political intelligence and the well-honed instincts of a female Machiavelli.