Mike Mullane - Riding Rockets

She sobbed into my neck and I felt like shit. I tried to calm her with comments about the shuttle’s critical component redundancy, but that went over about as well as my “Let’s make whoopee” comment. I wasn’t going to talk her out of her fear. This was a woman who knew the cost of high-performance flight. She had held the decomposed hand of a friend at an aircraft crash site. She had seen the squadron commander and chaplain step from a car and walk to the door of a neighbor to deliver the “Your husband is dead” message. She had comforted the widows and children of how many friends? I could not guess. She was the woman who had seen through the NASA euphemisms to identify the astronaut family escorts as “escorts into widowhood.” Nothing I could say was going to bury Donna’s fears.

We sat for a while and just listened to the waves and watched pelicans kamikazeing after their meals. Donna broke the silence. “It’s been a lot of water under the bridge to get here.”

“Yes, it has.”

“I can see you right now as a teenager launching your rockets from the desert. It’s amazing where it led.”

“I’ve got a rocket right here you can launch.” There it was again, my shield of crude humor.

“Mike, can’t you be serious?”

I forced myself to be the man she wanted at this moment. “Okay. I’m sorry. I will be serious. Whatever happens tomorrow,” I felt her tense at the implication of the word whatever, “I’ll be living a dream. It wouldn’t have happened without you.” It sounded corny but it was the truth.

We embraced and kissed. It wasn’t From Here to Eternity passion but it was sufficient for the moment. It was easier for me to convey my feelings in this physical contact than it was through words. I could taste the salt on her cheeks…tears, not ocean.

I thought of how many random, seemingly inconsequential events steered me through life. If my mom and dad hadn’t ignored those “Danger, Unimproved Road” signs, where would life have taken me? If they hadn’t settled in Albuquerque, where the sky had captured me, what path would I have journeyed? If I had married a different woman seventeen years before, would I now be sitting on this beach?

In a remarkable coincidence, Donna was born on the identical day and year of my own birth, September 10, 1945, in Albuquerque, New Mexico. She was just a few hours older than me. (In her childhood, my youngest daughter was convinced that men and women had to marry someone who shared their birth date.) Donna’s mom and dad, Amy Franchini and Joseph Sei, were first-generation Americans, born of Italian immigrants. Both spoke fluent Italian, argued incessantly, and smoked like forest fires. When Donna was born, the couple already had one child, a boy, ten years old. They had been trying to have a second child for nearly a decade, praying to a pantheon of saints for a daughter. Amy Sei was thirty-five years old when she finally conceived. In their minds Donna was a miracle and she quickly became the center of the couple’s existence.

Donna’s life was the polar opposite of mine, root-bound. She never moved. Throughout her youth she lived in the same home, only a few blocks from one of the major pathways of adventure for the Mullane clan, fabled Route 66. As a little boy, I had passed within a few hundred yards of the little girl I would one day marry.

We were high school students when we first met. She attended the downtown Catholic high school, St. Mary’s, while I was a student at the uptown school, St. Pius X. Her cousin was my classmate, and through this family connection, Donna and I were introduced in 1961 in our sophomore year. This was a horribly insecure time in my life. My blemished face would have repulsed the Elephant Man. It looked as if I had lost a paint ball game in which the other side had been using Clearasil bullets. And, of course, there were my radar-dish ears to horrify the ladies. I could not imagine any girl finding anything attractive about me. When Donna was introduced I said “hi” and ran to hang with the guys. Destiny would have to wait for another four years.

I continued my tortured journey through high school, occasionally running into Donna at various teen functions, but never talking to her, much less asking her on a date. She wasn’t beautiful. Attractive, with a bubbly personality, would be an honest description.

In May 1963, I graduated from St. Pius and several weeks later departed for the hellish rigors of West Point. Donna was now two thousand miles away and nowhere in my mind. I was fighting to survive. Upperclassmen were taking numbers to get in line to scream in my face. Even after putting plebe year and its hazing behind me, the pressure did not diminish. The academic workload was overwhelming. I couldn’t imagine any other nineteen-year-old in America having it worse than I did. I was wrong.

In faraway Albuquerque, Donna was ill, suffering periodic bouts of nausea and vomiting. Since she had previously experienced a kidney infection, her mother assumed a reoccurrence and took her to the doctor. The blood test results came. With her mom sitting primly at her side the doctor delivered the diagnosis…pregnancy. The father was another teenager.

Donna’s parents were destroyed. This was 1964 and it was a minor scandal for even a Hollywood starlet to be pregnant and unwed. For a traditional Italian-Catholic family to have a pregnant, unwed daughter was worse than a diagnosis of a terminal disease. For the first time in her life, Donna got to see her father cry.

It was her brother who organized a face-saving escape. Donna would stay in Albuquerque as long as possible. Before her belly could betray her, she would travel to an out-of-state Catholic home for unwed mothers. The baby would be given up for adoption. Extended family and friends would be fed the lie she had left town for college, but few would believe it. The daughters of traditional Italian-Catholic families did not leave home until they were married. But a priest, who was a family friend, taught at a nearby Catholic university so he willingly joined the conspiracy, prepared to cover for Donna if anybody inquired after her.

While I was thinking my life had ended at West Point, Donna was certain hers was also over. She had far greater reasons to feel condemned. She was making the first trip of her life away from her parents…as a social and family outcast. Joe and Amy made it clear she had shamed them. “Don’t you dare look at that baby when it’s born” had been her mother’s send-off warning. “I don’t want you getting attached to it.”

For months Donna cried herself to sleep in a Catholic geriatric-care center operated by the Sisters of Charity. A portion of one floor of the facility had been converted into a dormitory that Donna shared with two dozen other scarlet-lettered women. In exchange for their room and board, the girls helped the nuns with the care and feeding of the aged. They carried trays through rooms and hallways scented with urine, feces, and death. Depression hung on them like a shroud. The mother superior proved to be the quintessential witch, treating them as morally flawed beings. There was no counseling, no trips, and few phone calls to or from loved ones. Donna wrote letters home, putting coded notes on the envelope to designate which mail could be shared with the extended family. In those she created a life at college. In the others she begged for forgiveness.

The girls found comfort only among themselves, but even that succor was transient. As quickly as friendships blossomed, they would end. Girls would give birth and move on to uncertain futures. Unlike other traumatic events that bond people for life, living in a home for unwed mothers was naturally terminal for friendship. None of the girls wanted continued communication for fear of discovery of their sinful secret.