I had been looking through my telescope, the one my stepfather, Edward P. Bigelow, bought me for my thirteenth birthday, a mail-order Edmond Scientific Mt. Palomar-type reflecting model, complete with a finder telescope, a hardwood tripod, and something called an “Equitorial mount” that its thirteen-year-olod owner never did quite figure out how to use. I still remember the advertisement that I, or rather, that Leo, using his mother’s haircutting scissors that he wasn’t supposed to use on paper, carefully clipped from the back pages of Science and Mechanics Magazine (or was it Popular Mechanics?). “See the stars, moons, planets up close!” the ad said. The telescope came with a “free” Star Chart and a 272-page “Handbook of the Heavens.” And though its useful magnification was only 180x—barely powerful enough to resolve Jupiter’s moons—at $49.95 it really was a bargain. Even at that price my stepfather, whose retail hat business was failing badly, could scarcely afford it. But weeks of pleading on my part combined with his desire to win my approval (a desire that I did little to encourage) finally wore the man down.
Like the rest of the country I’d gone “space crazy.” Project Mercury had just sent Colonel John H. Glenn Jr. and three other astronauts spinning around the earth, and all I could think about was outer space. Saturday mornings, with mist still shrouding the yard and dawn just starting to poke through the windows, I’d belly up to Mr. Bigelow’s boxy wooden Zenith in the corner of his den (I still thought of it as his house) and—with the carpet itching my bare flesh—stare at the dartboard-like tuning signal while getting my ears pierced by an endless needle of white noise. Through the Star Spangled Banner, with Old Glory snapping in crisp black and white, I’d kick impatient toes against the floor. Finally, with a blast of three orchestral chords as ominous as the death knock that opens Beethoven’s Fifth, the theme music would begin and Fireball XL-5 would begin. Colonel Steve Zodiac, accompanied by the glamorous Doctor Venus, would board their unambiguously phallic spacecraft, off to save this or that corner of the universe. The show was filmed in “Supermarionation,” meaning the characters were puppets. When they caught the light you could easily see the strings. But there were no strings attached to my feelings: Steve Zodiac was my hero, as Colonel John Glenn and all astronauts were heroes of mine.
My stepfather didn’t share my enthusiasm for outer space. Not that he wasn’t proud of his nation’s achievement. Ed Bigelow was nothing if not patriotic. For the brief period during which my mother and I occupied his stately home on Crown Hill Avenue he flew the American flag proudly day by day from a pole screwed into one of the foursquare columns of his imposing porch. He’d even salute the thing on his way to and from his hat store, gray fedora doffed, right hand over his heart. It wasn’t the space program that my stepfather disapproved of but the man behind it, our thirty-fifth president, John F. Kennedy. Ed Bigelow hated JFK’s guts, and had hated them ever since the snowy morning of January 20th, 1961, when—on the same boxy Zenith—he watched him take the oath of office “without so much as a wool beanie” on his hairy, handsome, Irish-Catholic head.
The telescope arrived on a Saturday morning. I’d just finished watching Fireball XL-5 when the front doorbell rang and the UPS man stood there in his sewage-colored uniform, holding the long cardboard box. I sat on the living room floor and tore it open. As advertised the telescope was white with black fixtures and a varnished tripod. There had been no forewarning of its requiring assembly, yet it did. I spent the rest of the morning wrestling with parts and instructions, and the afternoon looking at trees, houses, antennas, chimneys and clouds, impatient for darkness, intent on the planets, moons and stars.
Total darkness fell at seven-thirty, but I decided to wait until after The Twilight Zone before trying out the telescope. In that evening’s episode two astronauts traveling in separate spaceships crashland on a strange, beautiful, uninhabited planet. One astronaut is a man, the other a woman. Each has escaped from a world annihilated by nuclear war. His name is Adam, hers is Eve. (You can work out the rest for yourself.)
When the show ended I carried my telescope upstairs to my adoptive bedroom, whose gabled walls my stepfather, in another attempt to win my affection, had painted over with a tromp l’oeil sky and puffy clouds. Against this cloudy backdrop a trio of P-58 Mustangs, two gull-winged Stukas, one P-47 Thunderbolt and a Messerschmitt banked and soared, held up by lengths of fishing line no more invisible than those animating Steve Zodiac, with whirling propeller blades simulated by discs of clear acetate. Painted bullet holes strafed some planes’ fuselages. From one of the Stuka’s two engines a long gouge of cotton, sprayed-painted gray, curled in a smoky loop toward the ceiling. My stepfather, who had acquired such skills in creating his own hat store window displays, made the model planes and painted the cloudy walls. When he proposed this decorating scheme to my mother she opposed it, saying it would give me nightmares. But Ed Bigelow stuck to his guns,claiming that, on the contrary, it would lull me to sleep.
He and my mom were both right. To the implied roars and splutters of airplane engines combined with the tattattattattattatt of wing-mounted machineguns and the presumptive screams of pilots plummeting earthward in burning parachutes, I’d drift off to re-fight the Battle of Britain, only to bail out of a sweat-soaked, tailspinning bed at approximately two o’clock in the morning, night after night.
Now that I had my telescope, though, I was grateful for these rude awakenings. Without them I might have slept through the one astral event that would distinguish my otherwise completely unremarkable career as an astronomer. This happened early in June, twelve days after my birthday, with seventh grade already over and summer vacation started. By then I’d constructed a small, level platform on the pitched roof of the porch onto which my bedroom window opened. Aside from two trees across the street the porch roof offered an unobstructed view of the night sky. It was a clear, cloudless night, perfect for stargazing. I peered through the aperture, my hopes set as ever on discovering an unknown planet or star or even a measly asteroid. Any fool with a $50 telescope could ogle Jupiter’s stormy red eye or count Saturn’s rings. I wanted more; I needed more. Beyond having a dead father nothing special had ever happened to me, and I was afraid that nothing special ever would happen, that I’d end up stuck in Bowler for the rest of my life, working in some factory or store, when I yearned to conquer the stars, like John Glenn.
At the very least I wanted a secret, to know something that everyone else in the world didn’t already know, to be offered some sign that the mysterious heavens were in some way aware of my mystery, of my existence. Even though I didn’t believe in Him, still, I wanted God to notice me.
That distant, puny, insignificant object seen through the wrong end of the telescope? That was me, Leo Joseph Napoli IV.
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