The Night of the Comet (19 page)

“Didn’t I tell you?” she said. “People are dying for this kind of thing.”

She agreed with Barbara, she said. The problem with Terrebonne was that there were just too few entertainment opportunities available for people with more sophisticated tastes. We might as well have been living in a jungle. There was no real social calendar to speak of; all we had were fishing rodeos, and oil company picnics, and those horrible, bloody, Cajun
courirs de Mardi Gras
, with drunken men on horseback flinging half-dead chickens in the air. Really, what chance did a lady have to get dressed up and put on her good jewelry and socialize in
polite company? Without even quite knowing it, everyone had been waiting for an event exactly like this one.

But they would have to hurry; they needed a band, a caterer, bartenders, decorations. She and Barbara swapped ideas over the phone like two high school girls planning for a prom. Barbara had seen some cute Chinese lanterns in New Orleans they might be able to use. Frank was asking around town about the food and drinks. One day my mother rode with Barbara to Thibodaux in her Town Car to browse for party supplies. They stopped afterward for lunch at the Thibodaux Country Club, and telling us about it over dinner, my mother found opportunity to repeat the phrase “lunch at the club” several times. They ran into Connie Delaney there, of Connie’s Gifts and Flowers, who agreed to do the flower arrangements. People were already talking about it, Connie had said. Everyone who came into her shop wanted to know who was going and what they should wear.

“Isn’t that exciting?” my mother said, gripping her fork and knife. Her enthusiasm had a wild, stubborn quality about it, as if now that she had gotten a foot up on the ladder of society, she would hang on for all she was worth.

She began to spend more and more time with the Martellos. She would take off in the car in the afternoon, drive across the bridge to Beau Rivage Estates, and not return home until the evening. She sat making phone calls with Barbara in their patio room, or they drove up to Thibodaux, where after running errands they stopped off at the club or visited Frank’s condo for “a little rest and relaxation,” as my mother called it. Removing her scarf as she came in the front door, she talked breathlessly about who else they had lined up to volunteer this or that service.

My father followed her from room to room, the newspaper dangling from his hand, trying to keep up. He asked questions and tried to offer suggestions. The decorations, for instance. If they were going to have a comet theme, he might have some ideas for that. They could do something with lights, something to suggest stars and planets, maybe? Those kinds of touches were important, my father said. Maybe he should come over and talk to Frank about it.

My mother rolled her eyes. He really didn’t need to worry himself,
she told him. She and the Martellos had everything under control. My father could talk it up with the other teachers at school if he wanted, but really, there wasn’t much for him to do.

At night when we were all getting ready to go to bed, my mother would still be up chatting in a whisper on the phone. She giggled and spoke in coded language, like a schoolgirl. “She did not!” she would say. “Well, you just tell her it’s none of her business.”

My father frowned behind his glasses, his face pinched and impatient. “Are you going to talk all night?”

“In a minute!” she answered.

He would close their bedroom door behind him, slamming it hard so that the walls shook and the living room windows rattled in their frames, prompting Megan to turn to me with raised eyebrows, as though to say,
Do you see this? Do you see what’s happening here?

What I saw was a growing rivalry between my parents, something I’d never noticed before but that manifested itself now in slammed doors, and muttered asides, and muffled arguments heard through the floor of my bedroom as my mother came and went on her various errands. But why it should appear now, I didn’t know, and not knowing this, I turned to the comet. And then, as the comet winked and sparkled provocatively in the lens of my telescope, it became perfectly obvious to me: my mother was jealous of my father’s comet, and like a jealous lover, she retaliated.

IT
was only 160 million miles away now, fast approaching Earth’s orbit. Day by day, my father relayed the latest news to us at school. Operation Kohoutek, set up by NASA, was coordinating the activities of hundreds of scientists around the globe. All the major telescopes, from Mount Palomar’s 200-inch Hale on down, were on line to track it. Planes were being equipped with infrared telescopes to fly into the upper atmosphere to photograph it. Balloons would carry aloft packages of instruments to measure X-rays and gamma rays.
Mariner 10
, the
Orbiting Solar Observatory 7
, and
Pioneer 8
were all set to gather additional data, and the launch of
Skylab 3
had been delayed in order to bring the astronauts in for a close-up view of Kohoutek as it swept around the Sun.

Though as yet invisible in the sky without a telescope, the comet was everywhere in the media by now. It had made the cover of
Time
, and there were features in
Popular Science
,
Newsweek
,
National Geographic
. “The Comet of the Century,” they called it. “The Christmas
Comet.” “Kohoutek Cometh!” My father clipped all of these stories and taped them to a display board he set up in the lobby at school, under the heading “Countdown to Kohoutek.”

“Got you a little bulletin board going there,” Coach DuPleiss teased. But even he paused to read the headlines. “Seriously—we don’t have anything to be afraid of, do we?”

The school astronomy club, which my father moderated, and which until recently had only four members, enjoyed an upsurge in popularity. They switched from monthly meetings to weekly ones, and a dozen students would gather after school in my father’s classroom to rap with him about the stars. He sat informally on his desk, swinging his legs, and entertained them with stories of the more spectacular and terrifying comets in history. There was the Great Civil War Comet, for instance, that appeared over the Battle of Shiloh spurting flaming red jets from its head. Or the Comet of the Black Death that swept across the sky like a sword during a plague that wiped out half the population of the world. Or the famous Cheseaux Comet of 1744, whose tail split into six rays that fanned out across the horizon and then lingered for months, terrorizing cities all across Europe and driving men mad. Donati’s Comet, the most beautiful comet of them all, hung in the sky for an entire year, expelling a series of shroudlike comas, like a woman casting off veils. Comet Encke dropped a piece of itself that exploded over Siberia with a blast a thousand times more powerful than the atomic bomb that flattened Hiroshima. The Star of Bethlehem: a comet? Could’ve been. Some scientists said it was.

Eager students rushed to buy telescopes at shops in New Orleans and Baton Rouge; when the shops sold out of telescopes, people bought binoculars. We would see them in the evenings, boys with their fathers, families who had never before had any interest in astronomy, people who had hardly ever noticed that there were lights in the sky, setting up their new telescopes in their yards or carrying them into empty fields at the edge of town, astronomy guidebooks in hand. My father, if he was passing on his bike, would stop to offer help. Sometimes he forgot the time and would come home long after dinner, burrs stuck to the cuffs of his trousers, apologizing.

Thanks to his Groovy Science column, he’d become known as the local expert on Comet Kohoutek, the go-to person for all things astronomical. He began to receive invitations to speak around the parish. During the day after his own classes, he visited schools in neighboring towns to talk to science clubs and student assemblies. In the evenings and on weekends he spoke at the Rotary Club, the Lions Club, the Ladies Auxiliary. He worked up a standard presentation for all these engagements, with ten-minute, thirty-minute, and forty-five-minute versions available. He practiced with note cards in the living room, until everyone in our family got to know his speeches almost as well as he did. They all followed the same basic outline:

IN
late November he appeared as a guest on Buckskin Bill’s “Storyland Cabin,” a morning show on WNGO-TV in New Orleans. He drove there early, and my mother, sister, and I watched from home before school as the show was broadcast. I was nervous waiting for him to come on. Half of Louisiana’s youth would see him; some of my classmates might even see him. What if he did something stupid?

Buckskin Bill was a middle-aged man in a fringed leather shirt and a coonskin cap. His Storyland Cabin was a small studio set designed to look like the inside of a log cabin, with a fake fireplace, deer antlers on the wall, and a rustic wooden bookcase filled with children’s books. For the interview, my father sat on an upturned log across from Bill, who rested his hands on his knees and asked his questions in gentle morning tones, as if he were speaking to a sleepy child.

“We’ve all heard a lot about this comet, Professor. It sounds really exciting. Why don’t you tell us a little bit more about it?”

In the tight frame of the camera, my father’s head appeared larger
and bonier than in real life. His skin had an orange-pinkish tint, like a pumpkin’s. He sniffed and jerked a little at the start, but once he settled down he conducted himself with aplomb.

He spoke simply but knowledgeably about the comet, following his usual script. He illustrated his remarks with a prop that he’d begun bringing around to his lectures, a foil-covered Styrofoam ball. He had a variety of cardboard tails that he attached to the ball to show different apparitions of comets, and he moved the model around his head to demonstrate how Kohoutek would circle the Sun.

“Gosh. Look at that,” said Buckskin Bill.

My father’s presentation was interrupted by Señor Gonzales, Bill’s puppet sidekick, who dropped down from above onto a stool between Bill and my father. He was dressed as a Mexican, with a thin black mustache and a sombrero, and he jumped and waved tiny guns attached to his hands. He acted the alarmist and wailed in a high, nasally Mexican voice, “The comet is coming! The comet is coming!” Buckskin Bill chuckled and patted Señor Gonzales on his sombrero. My father played along, saying to the puppet, “Now, now. There’s nothing to be afraid of, Señor Gonzales.” He brought the model comet down to show to the puppet, and together with Buckskin Bill they discussed what to expect and when the best time to view it would be. The puppet was mollified, and at the end pronounced Kohoutek
“fantastico!”
and did a jerky wooden-shoe dance on the stool.

“You didn’t think it was silly?”

“I thought it was good,” I said later that evening at dinner.

Megan said, “You should have strangled that little puppet.”

My mother commented on his skin tone and suggested he might consider using a little powder before his next TV appearance. “Not makeup. Just a little powder is all I’m saying.”

“It’s just something for the kids, obviously,” my father said, ignoring
her. But heck, even Carl Sagan wasn’t above appearing on
Sesame Street
. The important thing was that the astronomical community was finally getting the attention it deserved. He saw himself as a sort of emissary between the world of stars and the world of men. Ordinary folks tended to think of astronomy as something remote and removed from their lives, he explained, but with this comet they had the chance to bring it down to a personal level, to show people that all their stargazing really was relevant. Even Dr. Kohoutek recognized the need for this kind of public outreach.

Next month, my father told us, Luboš would be making his first visit to America. Everybody in the Astronomical Society was talking about it. For a man as notoriously lab bound and shy as Luboš Kohoutek, this was quite the venture. He’d be making the rounds: first he would speak at Harvard University, then he’d be the guest of honor at the biannual AAS conference, in Washington, and from there he would fly to Houston to visit NASA. But the thing that was getting the most attention was the Comet Cruise—a three-day comet-viewing excursion on the
Queen Elizabeth
, sailing from New York in early December. It had been sold out for a month, with East Coast socialites paying three hundred dollars apiece for the privilege of dining and dancing with the comet’s namesake. Other celebrities sailing with Luboš on the Comet Cruise, our father had heard, were Hugh Downs, Buzz Aldrin, Carl Sagan, and Burl Ives.

“Not sure what Burl Ives has to do with astronomy,” my father groused good-naturedly. “He’ll probably bring his ukulele, sing a few tunes.”