Blue Sky Dream (14 page)

I know that my father eventually did receive a Top Secret ticket allowing him to pursue, in some form, the more interesting work he coveted. I know that some years after that he was taken aside and told that Top Secret was not, in fact, the highest security clearance in the company after all, that Lockheed had long awarded Special Access clearances for higher level work on projects so secret, they were funded from an unlisted “black budget.” The very existence of this system of secrecy had been kept secret from my father until he was deemed worthy to join it. I know that my father, having been invited into this innermost sanctum, was given a yellow checkerboard badge imprinted with several numbers, each of them signifying a different Special Access granted. I know that over the years the numbers on the yellow badge accumulated, and as they did there was less and less that my father could tell his family about what he did for a living.

The system of compartmentalized secrecy at Lockheed was self-regulating in more than one sense. Workers were expected to check each other’s badges and to turn in any fellow worker who spoke too freely or handled secret documents improperly. As well, any ticketed worker at any time might be administered a polygraph test by the company’s security people. “If you found yourself flunking polygraph tests, your clearances were rescinded,” my father explains. “Your ticket was pulled, which made you an unemployable engineer at Lockheed. You’d go to NASA where the work was completely unclassified and deadly dull. You wouldn’t get money and promotions; the money and promotions were in the highly classified jobs. Security clearances
were precious commodities. They were merit badges that opened all kinds of doors for you.”

Whenever my father was polygraphed by his employer, he naturally would submit willingly, having nothing to hide and everything to gain. Had he revealed details of his work to anyone outside the proper compartments? No, my father could always answer truthfully.

At the dinner table, his young son would also ask him questions. “What do you do, Dad?”

“Welllll …” A question like that always invited a long pause. “At times in the past my work has involved me with satellites.”

“I know, but are you working on a satellite now?”

“Hmmmmm.” A pause. “I am not able to give you a yes or no on that one.” Another pause. “Let’s just say that I’m helping to troubleshoot a very complicated piece of equipment for the government.”

“Is it something that goes into space, Dad?”

My father would chuckle and he’d cock an eye at the ceiling for a bit. He would be weighing just what he could say and what he could not, what he might tell his nine-year-old son that might not show up later as a damning twitch of the polygraph’s needle. At my family’s dinner table, Lockheed was always listening in.

“I’m not really at liberty to go into the specifics,” was the answer my father often gave when my questions about his work invited the least bit of specificity. I soon learned to stop asking.

T
o have a father who worked on secret projects, to have a father who was himself a secret project in our midst, did not seem to us a deprivation. It meant to us that we were a promisingly modern family. The old notion of father as civic actor, the man who displays his competence in the public realm, the doctor or deacon or grocer on the corner, had, as everyone knew, given way to Dad as Organization Man. Now that fathers no longer lent their competence
directly to the community, now that they honed and displayed their competence within the closed system of the corporation, how natural it was that our father, a most modern Dad, worked within the most closed of systems. We did not think it strange that we never saw my father’s desk. Whenever we asked about it, my father would shrug and tell us he worked in various cubicles he purposely kept bare of pictures or knickknacks. “I don’t believe in making my place of work homey,” he would say, and so we never gave him presents for the office.

Where we lived, there were many other fathers like ours, men who disappeared into windowless buildings every morning and who, when they returned home, spoke vaguely about what they had done that day. When they gathered together on the weekends, they stuck close to whichever topic had drawn them together, the car being fixed or the fence being built or the cement pathway being poured. It was obvious even to a young boy like me that these men shared something, a sensibility owing to technical training and very much prone to creating purpose in the midst of an otherwise lazy, aimless Saturday in the suburbs. And I believed that whatever it was they had in common in their jobs, whatever it was they preferred not to discuss much with each other, it must be important in a way that the work of a grocer or deacon or even a doctor could not be. “If and when the Soviets ever launch their missiles,” I can remember my father telling me more than once when I was quite young, “you had better believe that Lockheed’s right at the top of their list. We’ll be the first to go. Lockheed, this house, everything in a fifty-mile radius.
Kablooey
.” Because my father always looked more winking than sad as he said this, I inferred that beyond the horror of his statement there lay reason to feel good, even proud about it. If we lived at ground zero, it must be because we were special. Perhaps I would never know what my father did at Lockheed, but I could rest assured it was important. That meant (should the enemy missiles not come) a bright future for me and every member of my family.

Did I imagine myself, then, in that future, taking up the
important work of my father? I have no memory of ever expecting that. After all, how does a young boy imagine himself following in his father’s footsteps if those footsteps lead into blackness? How can a secret systems engineer pass onto his son the tenets of his profession? With no picture in mind of what my father did at Lockheed, I turned my gaze toward what he did at home. But even at home, my father managed to make his projects secret ones, hidden behind his wall of impatience. I wonder now how my formation would have been different had I been a less cautious child, had I bulled away at my father until he swallowed his impatience and slowed his work and included me in the thinking behind it. I know there were times when he was a great explainer of the Whys and Hows of the world. Next to a bonfire at the beach, he would explain why flames crackled. Between innings of a baseball game on television, he would explain how a curveball curved. When we were together in the cockpit of an airplane, he would spend all the time it took to help me to understand what made the wings lift us into the air. But those were times when he was relaxed and inviting of questions. Those were not the times around the house when he was all action, seeming to move
among
his family rather than in any way
with
us. Those were not the times when my father wielded his can-do-anything competence with an urgency that drew me toward him, but with a fierceness, too, that kept me at bay.

At some point when I was ten or eleven or maybe twelve, my father and I settled into an unspoken agreement that I was not “handy.” I had not demonstrated an appetite for the technical, the making of purpose in an empty day. I had not done much with my Erector set, had never finished my plastic model of the U.S.S.
Constitution
, did not seem to want to do more than hold the flashlight for my father whenever he was in action. I was not a handy boy, and so I filled up the lazy aimlessness of a Saturday with dreamy play. Most often, I constructed my fantasies around the theme that obsessed American popular culture at the time: secrecy and spying. James Bond was too racy for us kids to see, but his appeal had been well commodified and kiddified by the
mass marketers. Between the Saturday morning cartoons there were ads for spy toys. “Six Finger! Six Finger! Man alive! How did I ever get along with five!” went the jingle for a toy gun that looked like an extra finger in your hand, the very sort of weapon a secret agent on TV might use. I got one of my own and, as well, one of those gizmo-stuffed attaché cases that every spy carries. The Secret Sam case, as it was called, contained among other things a breakdown rifle with a scope and a hidden camera that allowed me to take pictures of playmates without them knowing it.

I took as my models the dashing men of cool competence and action I saw on
Secret Agent
and
The Man from U.N.C.L.E.
and
Mission Impossible.
These television shows seemed to grab my imagination far more than they did my father’s. But then, my father was intimate with the evolving nature of Cold War espionage. He knew that by then the ones who guarded and stole the nations’ secrets were those who spent their days studying data sheets looking for numbers good and bad. He knew that from here on out, the most successful secret agents would be robots in space, built by compartmentalized workers who lived in the suburbs. Perhaps that is why my father preferred to watch
Get Smart
, to laugh as silly Max passed through one secret door after another until the last one, clanging shut, caught him by the nose.

Saturday would come and my father would be off in the Dodge 440 on an errand to pick up what he needed to stop the washing machine from leaking or to run a gas jet into the family room fireplace or to install a new sprinkler in that area of the backyard lawn that was turning brown. He would be away from the house, and so I would climb from one of his sawhorses onto a niche in the chimney and from there I’d pull myself onto the roof. I’d be playing the theme song to
Mission Impossible
in my head—
dun ta dun DA da, dun ta dun DA da, na na NAAA, na na NAAA
—as I stole across the shake shingles, making my way to the other side of the roof, below which there lay a neat mound of grass clippings from the morning’s mowing.

From this high vantage I would look across the site of all my
father’s projects, taking in our house and yard and garage and driveway, imagining this to be an enemy compound I had been sent to infiltrate. Below me, where the clipped grass was piled, I would imagine two Soviet sentries standing guard over the compound. A man had to be certain and quick, a man had to know exactly what he was doing to take out two Soviet sentries at once. I would leap off the roof into the grass and slice the throats of my enemies, both of them with one smooth, expert stroke. And then I would lie in the fresh-smelling grass for a moment, letting the spy music play through my head. I would lie there drifting on the edge of my father’s Black World.

FIVE
 LOST IN SPACE
 

N
icky Giannini, who lived in the yellow three-bedroom at the end of the cul-de-sac, was my best friend. Whether it was time to ride our Stingrays, dig roadways in the dirt for our Matchbox cars, sit in the branches of a walnut tree, or catch grasshoppers in a jar, the two of us instinctively knew it, did it. We roamed the sun-drenched universe of our neighborhood as if guided by the same map of impulse.

Only on those rare days when Mrs. Giannini had us inside to play, on those days too hot or too rainy to be out in the universe, would I be reminded that Nicky came from a world strange to my own. Mrs. Giannini was the only mother on the cul-de-sac with gray hair, which she swept back in an unfashionable pile. She wore old lady’s eyeglasses, silver-rimmed and cat-eyed, and she began her cooking of dinner
early
, on some days even before lunch, filling the house with tomato sauce smells. The house she kept was far more precise and muted than my mother’s, devoid of the flash, the daisy yellows and pumpkin oranges, of my
mother’s taste. In the Giannini living room, where no children were ever allowed, there was a polished upright piano, and a fancy couch with clear plastic over it. In the family room there was an elaborate (and said to be dangerous) machine just for pressing clothes; the rest of the space was filled with vinyl furniture, a TV on casters, and a braided oval rug onto which Nicky and I would dump his huge box of Tinkertoys.

There was, as well, a hi-fi that Mrs. Giannini liked to play much of the day. Her records were ones I could not imagine my mother and father owning. A man named Dean Martin who sang with a
who cares?
leer in his voice about the moon being a pizza pie. A man named Jimmy Durante, big-nosed and clownish on his album cover, who rasped out baby words like “Inka-Dinka-Do.” My parents listened to singers who made a serious attempt to do well. They played “sound tracks” like
My Fair Lady
and
Camelot
, and my mother particularly liked the earnest harmonies of Peter, Paul, and Mary. Mrs. Giannini did not have anything like Peter, Paul, and Mary in her collection.

Nicky’s father was not only older than any other father I knew, he was much more formal, a man who wore pressed white shirts even on Saturdays and who expected a true Italian supper—pasta
and
meat—when he arrived home after his day as a supervisor at the phone company. Nicky was the youngest of three, which made life around his house seem all the more exotic to me. When Nicky and I were nine or so, his sister, Celeste, was primly nearing the end of high school. About Nicky’s brother, Joe, a few years younger than Celeste, there was nothing prim at all.