Dick Morrow tests the Brashear telescope

September 1928

For the first few miles he cranes around to check on the telescope’s steel box.  It is the color of a bluebird and in the dark car it shines.  The Brashear emblem glints near the brass latch.  He worries about the vibration damaging the mirror.  The calibration on a Brashear is sub-millimeter and while they pack it well for shipping, he thinks it is best to be conservative.  He avoids potholes and when he sees a car jounce ahead of him he slows to reduce the jolt.

It takes him two hours to reach Stanhope.  Beyond the town reached via a dirt track there is a hunting lodge that is in the family.  As he  eases the car up the humped and mounded road he expects to find the house empty.  He is surprised to see a Ford parked on the mossy gravel under the trees.  A man in an undershirt comes to the porch wiping his hands on a towel.  It is his uncle Owen.  He is a big egg of a man with pronounced smudges under his eyes; he is a physician.  His uncle waves and stuffs the towel in his back pocket.  His trousers are green wool.

They greet each other.  Dick towers over the man.  Owen’s grip is cool and wet; he has been cleaning fish.  “You get booted,” Owen asks.  He has a conspiratorial grin: he is twice divorced.

Dick says, “Needed some dark skies.”  He wrenches open the stubborn rear door of the runner and slides out the long blue box.  Owen comes forward to help.  It is not heavy but awkward, and there is a teetering moment when the thing seems about to fall into the leaves.  But Owen has it and together they carry the box to the long rustic porch.  Bindweed has made its way into the rough pine balusters.  Half a wasps’ nest, broken open like a pomegranate, is cemented up in a corner.  Last fall’s leaves are still here, in places.  Dick breathes the dark, piney air with a familiar satisfaction.  They lower the box to the boards: too slender for a coffin, it resembles the box a big gun would come in.

Dick kneels and unclasps the brass locks, which are like those on a toolbox.  He swings up the lid.  The pieces are all still nested in their soft foam.  Nothing broken.

Owen lets out a low appreciative breath, not quite a whistle.  “Jazzy,” he says.

Dick grins up at him.  The pieces do have the dense heft of weaponry.  The mirror cell is a blunt barrel and the tube is a long brutal piece of work.  He pats them.  “Just want to give it a run,” he says.

“After dinner,” Owen suggests.

“Sure,” Dick agrees.

Owen has caught what looks like about a dozen small bluegill.  Years of intermittent batching have made him a decent cook.  They eat from tin plates, which they keep on their laps as they smoke on the porch.  The rule of no smoking inside the lodge is codified family law.  There is a bottle of Canadian whiskey between them and they take turns swigging at it.  “Married,” Owen sighs, when he hears the story of Mexico.  “Well, my good best wishes to you.”

“We’re a good match,” he tells him.

Owen shrugs to acknowledge that maybe this is so.  His two ex-wives came quickly, and went fast too.  He has been single for a while now, Dick does not know exactly how long.  He remembers the wives, though, blonde and high-legged but not much otherwise alike, the change happening when Dick was young enough to be confused by its meaning.  That perhaps Janey had been altered unusually into this new person named Vicky; that it was such an alteration in body that she had changed her name as well.

It occurs to Dick that marrying his cousin Florence may have been a form of cowardice.  He isn’t sure.  He thinks of Alan Barber and a knot of friendly antagonism forms in his throat.  He puts a fork into his fish, separates flesh from flesh.

Then, pacing himself carefully, he reaches for the whiskey again.

When it is dark, Dick and his uncle wash their plates with bachelor tidiness, then on the porch they bend to heft the long blue box. Together they carry it along the path into the woods.  The path is familiar and no trouble.  It climbs a few hundred yards to a knobby hilltop clearing.  The stars are out.  Owen grunts with surprise and pleasure at them: glittering there above the grass.  In the middle of the clearing they set the box down.  A little breeze reaches them here.  Owen is sweaty and Dick smacks his shoulder to thank him for the help.  Then he hands his uncle the flashlight.  It takes ten minutes to assemble the telescope; it is little more than a toy, after what he is used to, with only a 10-inch reflecting mirror, but it is his.  He leaves the camera fitting off – he has no film with him – but puts the rest together.  Finally he mounts it on the wooden tripod and secures it with the pivot bolt.  It is a long showpiece of a reflector, brass fittings on a black metal housing.  He presses down gently on each leg of the tripod to secure its footing in the rocky soil.  “Want a look?” he asks.

“What I’m here for,” Owen says.

“Let me find something for you,” he says.  Dick puts his eye to the objective.  It is a good clean view, small and tidy.  Before he can think twice about it he aims it at Libra.  After a moment he finds 1928 – VII – Florence.  It is more than a smudge now: you can make out a white head and the streaming tail.  “Here’s something that’ll give you a kick,” he says.  “A comet.”

Owen grunts again and pushes himself up.  He steps forward and places himself carefully at the eyepiece, his hands on his thighs for balance.  He is silent as he makes sense of what he sees.  He is no dummy; Dick has been giving off his air of grimly amused injury all night, and this isn’t like him.  Something is up.  His new marriage, Owen suspects.  Or money.  But he will wait to be told.  He eyeballs the comet.  It is a hairy blur, meaning nothing to him.  “Well,” he says.  “That’s interesting.”

“Named guess what.”

“Dunno.”

“Florence.”  He snorts down a wounded laugh.  “Fellow has a thing for her named it after her.”

Owen whistles.  Marriage it is, all right.  “Some nerve, I’d say.”

“Well,” Dick considers.  He hasn’t meant to tell this story, but now he finds himself eager to talk.  “Florrie likes him too.”

“You think they’re up to something?”

“No,” he answers.  “I don’t think so, anyway.”  He thinks of the stars in Mexico, the empty beach, the fire burning to embers under its lid of tropical leaves, Florrie in the dark lifting her sandy foot into his lap, its gritty texture on him, the bony articulation of her toes.  He loves Florrie, all right, and cannot imagine his life without her.  He knows her, too, is the thing.  Has known her forever.  Since she was cutting out dolls.  This, suddenly, is what rankles, as he stands in the familiar field with the grass around his boots.  “He talks a good line, you know, but he’s nobody.  He’s from Ohio somewhere.”

“You talk to Florrie about it?”

This is delicate; Florrie is family twice over.  “No,” he admits.  “I guess I thought it’d make it worse.”

“Probably right.”

“I don’t know.”  Dick leans forward and takes Owen’s place at the objective.  The funny thing about a comet is that it appears frozen in place while you know it is traveling very fast.  The tail flows like a windswept veil, and the eye strains to see the motion.  Florence.

It is embarrassing, really.  To have his wife be the object of that sort of attention.  Because of course nobody deserves it.  It is ludicrous.  Juvenile.  This is what Barber doesn’t know.  Not yet.  That nobody is worth such a stupid gesture.  He straightens.  He is feeling suddenly old and weary.  And it strikes him that possibly he is insufficiently passionate; and that maybe this is what Florrie sees in Barber.  That despite her sensible exterior she is in fact a sucker for the sweet talk.

Then he has a thought.  He turns the telescope toward Gemini.  Why hadn’t it occurred to him before?  He could get some film.  Start his own goddamned search.  “Son of a bitch,” he says.

Owen snorts in the dark.  ”Attaboy,” he says.