Reseña de New York Review of Books

THE most iconic telling of our great national myth of space conquest, Tom Wolfe's book "The Right Stuff," opens with a scene of a wife frantically imagining that her husband has died. The woman, Jane Conrad, has been informed by a growing chorus of fellow officer wives that something has happened at the Jacksonville Naval Air Station, where her husband, Pete, is a test pilot. Jane knows what something means. She can all but see Pete's mangled, charred remains lying amid the palmetto grass, the smoking wreckage of his aircraft strewn about. As the minutes tick by, she grows increasingly panicked and calls the office of Pete's squadron. They refuse to answer her questions. She hangs up and waits for her doorbell to ring, now certain of her fate. Her husband is dead. (We learn on the next page that he is, in fact, alive. A decade and a half later, Pete Conrad walks on the moon.) Imagine a book-length exploration of Jane Conrad's feelings of anxiety and helplessness, devotion and dread, and you'll get a sense of Lily Koppel's latest work of nonfiction, "The Astronaut Wives Club," essentially a retelling of "The Right Stuff" and Norman Mailer's "Of a Fire on the Moon" from the perspective of the women behind the spacemen. The story of NASA's early years typically follows an arc from fear to triumph. In October 1957, Americans stare up at the dark specter of Sputnik 1 and dream of Soviet missiles raining down from orbit. Less than 12 years later, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin land on the moon, the bear vanquished. Koppel tracks this same history, but in her version the trajectory is reversed. The women begin their journey as enthusiastic, patriotic housewives. They end it disillusioned, angry and wise. The first half of this book is little more than historical fluff. Writing in a one-of-the-gals third person, Koppel - a former reporter for The New York Times and the author of "The Red Leather Diary" -tells us that her subjects are "very different, complicated women," but portrays them as indistinguishable domestic goddesses. The wives face down the frenzied press with "slightly knitted eyebrows, perfectly applied lipstick and well-practiced aplomb." Shopping and socializing seem to be their primary vocations, and Koppel lavishes great detail on the wives' sartorial choices. (Betty Grissom selected both "a marigold scoop neck" dress for a group photo on the cover of Life magazine and "a sunny yellow shirt-waist dress, cinched at her slim waist with a belt," for an inside shot.) Lest we get the mistaken idea that these women lived for clothes, Koppel emphasizes how they slavishly adored their hunky hubbies. After one of them receives an unwanted lesbian advance in Mexico City, she and two other wives retreat to their hotel, where they "woke up to find their guys strutting into the room, reeking of maleness. That was more like it," Koppel adds. But tragedy comes to Togethersville, as the Houston astronaut suburbs were called, and with it both Koppel's narrative and her subjects grow sharper and deeper. As their husbands die in training-jet crashes and the Apollo 1 fire, the wives begin to examine their lives. They wonder why they need to put up with philandering, and they question whether their domestic sacrifices are worth it. After Ed White dies in the capsule blaze, his wife, Pat, falls into an unshakable depression. "She just worked at being Ed's wife," another astronaut wife tells Koppel, "and she was wonderful at it, and that was all." By the time the Apollo 17 capsule splashes down in December 1972, the astronaut wives are a transformed brood. Some have embarked on their own careers and divorced their hero-husbands. Others have failed to move on. In the heartbreaking epilogue, Koppel tells us that the original astronaut wives tried to meet again in the mid-1980s. The weekend before their reunion, Pat White committed suicide. Even Marge Slayton, the chief organizer of the wives, eventually had enough. Shortly after her husband, Deke, finally got his trip to space in 1975, she divorced him. "Like many of the wives," Koppel writes, "Marge just couldn't take it anymore - the lying, the cheating and the feeling that her husband had abandoned their home for that 'harlot of a town,' the Cape." Seven of the first 30 astronaut wives lost their husbands during the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo years. This sad, poignant book makes it clear that those women weren't the only widows. Eric Benson, a former editor at New York magazine, has written about the American space program for Men's Journal and the online magazine Guernica.