Tenderness

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  In eighteenth-century Osaka, a man named Nisan took the courtesan Dewa out walking, first taking care to sprinkle the clover bushes along the path with water, which looked like morning dew. Dewa was greatly moved by this beautiful sight. "I have heard," she said, "that loving couples of deer are wont to lie behind clover bushes. How I should like to see this in real life!" Nisan had heard enough. That very day he had a section of her house torn down and ordered the planting of dozens of clover bushes in what had once been a part of her bedroom. That night, he arranged for peasants to round up wild deer from the mountains and bring them to the house. The next day Dewa awoke to precisely the scene she had described. Once she appeared overwhelmed and moved, he had the clover and deer taken away and the house rebuilt. One of history's most gallant lovers, Sergei Saltykov, had the misfortune to fall in love with one of history's least available women: the Grand Duchess Catherine, future empress of Russia. Catherine's every move was watched over by her husband, Peter, who suspected her of trying to cheat on him and appointed servants to keep an eye on her. She was isolated, unloved, and unable to do anything about it. Saltykov, a handsome young army officer, was determined to be her rescuer. In 1752 he befriended Peter, and also the couple in charge of watching over Catherine. In this way he was able to see her and occasionally exchange a word or two with her that revealed his intentions. He performed the most foolhardy and dangerous maneuvers to be able to see her alone, including diverting her horse during a royal hunt and riding off into the forest with her. He told her how much he sympathized with her plight, and that he would do anything to help her. To be caught courting Catherine would have meant death, and eventually Peter came to suspect that something was up between his wife and Saltykov, though he was never sure. His enmity did not discourage the dashing officer, who just put still more energy and ingenuity into finding ways to arrange secret trysts. The couple were lovers for two years, and Saltykov was undoubtedly the father of Catherine's son Paul, later the emperor of Russia. When Peter finally got rid of him by sending him off to Sweden, news of his gallantry traveled ahead of him, and women swooned 38 • The Art of Seduction to be his next conquest. You may not have to go to as much trouble or risk, but you will always be rewarded for actions that reveal a sense of self-sacrifice or devotion.

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  of Victory in Rome. She would not have been pleased by this, because (according to one of her nuns) in a typically precise and much more decorous piece of self-fashioning, she made sure that she breathed her last posed as the penitent Mary Magdalene was commonly seen in paintings.26 She spoke plainly, and told her ascetics to do the same: Let them also be careful in the way they speak. Let it be with simplicity, straightforwardness, and devotion. Let them use the style of hermits and people who have chosen a secluded life. They should not use the new- fangled words and affectations – I think that is what they call them – that are popular in worldly circles, where there are always new fashions. They should take more pride in being coarse than fastidious in these matters.27 Teresa certainly spoke of her meetings with the divine in the passionate and intimate terms that mystics (mostly but not exclusively female) had employed for centuries. She spoke of the piercing of her heart, of her mystical marriage with the divine, although she managed to avoid quite the degree of physical relish exhibited by Agnes Blannbekin (see p. 421). She was very conscious of the tightrope which any woman walked in the Spain of her time when putting herself forward to speak on spiritual matters, but she still grittily insisted that women had something distinctive to say, and that it was their Saviour who made them say it: ‘Lord of my soul, you did not hate women when You walked in the world; rather you favored them always with much pity and found in them as much love and more faith than in men.’28 For both Teresa and Juan, the erotic biblical poem the Song of Songs became a key text for the divine revelation. Juan was not afraid of repeatedly picturing himself as the lover, and frequently the bride, of Christ, appropriating for himself the image which is more conventionally given to the institution of the Church or the female soul, and as a result, expressing himself in ways which now sound startlingly homoerotic: Oh, night that joined Beloved with lover. Lover transformed in the Beloved! Upon my flowery breast, Kept wholly for himself alone, There he stayed sleeping, and I caressed him, And the fanning of the cedars made a breeze. The breeze blew from the turret. As I parted his locks; With his gentle hand, he wounded my neck. And caused all my senses to be suspended. I remained, lost in oblivion; My face I reclined on the Beloved. All ceased, and I abandoned myself, Leaving my cares forgotten among the lilies.29 Juan found that even the ancient technical language of theology, the Chalcedonian Definition of 451, could be fired with his own sense of what the Song of Songs might mean: After the soul has been for some time the betrothed of the Son of God in gentle and complete love, God

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  contemplation might not have been so readily heard: voices like Juliana of Cornillon, who spearheaded a much more physical popular devotion to Christ’s body in the Eucharist (see p. 407), and besides the Dominicans, generations of Franciscan preachers and theologians, inspired by Francis himself. Francis’s search for God had a new perspective. Not only Anselm but Augustine of Hippo and Dionysius the Areopagite had seen God primarily as Plato’s ‘Unmoved Mover’: so, after Francis’s time, did Thomas Aquinas. But rather than perceiving God as this self-sufficient divine being, Francis saw a person: his Lord. Again and again, Francis calls God ‘Lord God’ (Dominus Deus). The Lord enters agreements – covenants – with his people, just as he did with the people of Israel (see pp. 60–61). As his side of the bargain in covenanting, he acts, rather than simply is.32 His greatest action is in becoming truly human in Jesus Christ through his mother, Mary. Francis called people to see the ordinariness, the humanity, in Christ, in order that they could love and worship him better as God. It was Francis who built the first Christmas crib, complete with apocryphal ox and ass, as a devotional object in church. Francis’s personal view of God was echoed in an immensely popular and much-imitated early-fourteenth-century Franciscan work of devotion, long attributed to his disciple the Italian Franciscan theologian Bonaventure but now generally thought to have been written two generations later by another Italian Franciscan, John de Caulibus (hence the author is still often known as ‘Pseudo- Bonaventure’). John wrote his Meditations on the Life of Christ to help a nun of the Franciscans’ associated Order of Poor Clares in her contemplation of Christ’s earthly life, presenting it as a series of eyewitness accounts interlaced with commentary and exhortation which all imaginatively extended the Gospel narratives, so that the reader might be inspired to imitate Christ in her or his own daily life. John rejoiced in the fact that the Gospel narratives had not aspired to include everything about Jesus, and so he could fill the gaps. Here, for instance, is his augmented account of the birth of the Saviour: When the hour of truth had arrived, namely, midnight Sunday, the virgin arose and placed herself at the foot of a kind of column which was there. But Joseph was seated, morose because he had not been able to provide anything more fitting. He rose, picking up some hay from the manger and scattered it by our Lady’s feet. Then he turned aside. Thereupon the Son of God, leaving his mother’s womb without any breach or lesion was one moment inside the womb and next outside the womb on the hay at his mother’s feet. At once his mother bent over, gathered him and tenderly hugged him. She placed him on her lap and instructed by the Holy Spirit, began an overall anointing wash with heaven filled milk of her breast. Then she wrapped him in her veil and laid him in a manger.33 The Meditations were so pictorial in character (and manuscripts of the text so frequently full of illustrations) that they were one major stimulus to a newly

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  By their estimates, the astronauts still hadn’t consumed enough food or water, or slept enough hours. But what was NASA to do? They were dealing with three grown men, each of whom was risking his life for his country, who now didn’t want to eat their beef and egg bites. If the men began to starve, they’d eat. Forty-eight hours into the flight, Apollo 8 was two-thirds of the way to the Moon. By then, it had slowed to a velocity of just over 2,400 miles per hour, about 10 percent as fast as when it departed its parking orbit around Earth. That kind of reduction frustrated thirteen-year-old Jay Lovell, who’d thought it just about right when the spacecraft had been going more than 24,000 miles per hour when it left Earth orbit. It was now just past sunrise on Monday morning in Houston, and Valerie Anders was awake and feeding her five children. “My dad will be one of the first men on the Moon,” six-year-old Greg told her. Through her front window, Valerie could see the mass of reporters on the lawn, already gathered in the near-freezing December air. She made them a pot of coffee, which she put in her garage along with a stack of cups. And she sent eleven-year-old Alan to rake leaves in the yard. At the Borman home, Susan still couldn’t eat. Her sons began to worry. “You’ve gotta have something,” they said, but Susan couldn’t stomach it. Fred took up a forkful of potato salad delivered by some good soul. “Open up for the airplane!” he said, making the food swoop and loop with engine sounds, which was just what Susan had done for him when he was a little boy. If the method had been good enough for Fred and Ed, now it had to be good enough for their mother. She laughed, opened up, and took a bite. That morning, the Borman boys threw on some camouflage gear, grabbed their shotguns, and left the house to go duck hunting. The embedded Life magazine photographer sensed a great shot and asked Susan to pose with the boys before they hit the road. She did, reaching somewhere for the smile that had earned her an offer from the Ford modeling agency when she was in college, and finding it, if just for the moment. The boys sneaked out through the back fence, where they rendezvoused with Fred’s car, which he’d parked near a neighbor’s house. They intended to go to a friend’s farm in the country, but by that time the press had gotten wise to the teenage Houdinis and gave chase. Fred mashed the gas pedal to the floor, making several tight turns and leaving the reporters in the dust. Two days earlier, Frank Borman had become the fastest man in history. Yet the boys knew that their father would have reached an arm down from space and strangled them if he’d known they’d been speeding.

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  But the whole event was so nice that Lovell didn’t think much more about it. Five years later, the couples met for the fortieth anniversary of Apollo 8. This time, it was even more evident to Lovell that something was amiss with Susan; she acted strangely and hardly talked, and Frank constantly helped her, even with small things. Like his crewmates from Apollo 8, Lovell had flown private planes since retiring from NASA. Lately, he’d been piloting a twin-engine Cessna 421, able to make it from his home near Chicago to his other home in Texas—along with Marilyn, their dog, and luggage—in a slick five hours. But Marilyn had been growing increasingly concerned about her husband’s flying alone. In the gentlest terms, she urged him to find a copilot or sell the airplane. In 2013, at age eighty-five, he sold. Not a day passes when he doesn’t miss it. In 2015, after a sixteen-year run, Lovell’s of Lake Forest closed its doors, a victim of the economic downturn that began in 2008. Jay Lovell and his wife, Darice, opened a smaller, more casual place in nearby Highwood, Illinois. Jim and Marilyn eat there often. At their home near Chicago, Jim and Marilyn lead a quieter life than they did during the NASA years, when they could hardly leave the house without attention. Now they enjoy their children and grandchildren, and a golden retriever they found at a rescue shelter—one that watches the Apollo 13 movie whenever it plays on TV. For many years, Jim and Marilyn’s daughter, Susan, wore the mink jacket that Jim had sent to Marilyn on Christmas Day 1968, while he was orbiting the Moon. But late in 2015, Marilyn asked for it back, if only for a Chicago winter shaping up to be colder than most. Even now, Marilyn and Jim go for nightly walks near Lake Michigan. The shoreline makes for a perfect place to gaze up at the Moon, especially when it’s full and just rising over the trees. In summer 2017, the International Astronomical Union formally recognized the name “Mount Marilyn” for the lunar mountain Lovell picked out for his wife during Apollo 8. Every once in a while during their walks, Jim shows Marilyn where it is on the Moon. Every once in a while, he thinks, I’ve been there . —By the time the last Apollo mission flew in late 1972, Bill Anders had been at the National Aeronautics and Space Council for almost four years. In that time, he’d worked on projects like Skylab (America’s first space station), Viking (to put an unmanned spacecraft on Mars), and the Space Shuttle. He’d also lobbied successfully to include astronaut-geologist Harrison Schmitt on Apollo 17. To Anders, it made little sense for the agency to send only test pilots to land on the Moon; NASA needed someone who could expertly interact with and appreciate its geological wonders.

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  genuinely did care for the Church’s mission to save souls. One of the most important ways in which the movement gained respect in the Church from the 1860s was to launch public missions, especially in settings of urban squalor: Anglo-Catholics took as their model not the emotionalism of Methodist or Evangelical mission but, appropriately, the dramatic missions conducted by various religious orders in Roman Catholic Europe on the classic Jesuit model (see pp. 682–3). Their strategy proved successful. The urban poor may not have been that impressed by Catholic ritual, but what they did appreciate was being taken seriously, and being shown love and consideration by well-educated Christian gentlemen. Many inner-city strongholds of Anglo-Catholic practice were established as a result, and remain even when their settings are now socially very different: in London, for instance, St Alban’s Holborn or St Mary’s Somers Town.67 As a result of these early Victorian excitements, the Church of England, and the Anglican world generally, developed two self-conscious groupings of Anglo- Catholicism and Evangelicalism, plus a ‘Broad Church’ middle ground whose adherents were more than a little impatient with the extremes (see Plate 63). The fact that the nineteenth-century Church of England never managed to provide any centrally planned system of clergy training, in the fashion of Roman Catholic seminaries, afforded each of the three ‘parties’ the chance to found their own theological colleges. These colleges proved the most effective agent possible in perpetuating the party spirit, which in Anglican circles can sometimes resemble the passions others devote to competitive team sports. The contrast with British Methodism, which from the earliest days of its clergy training planned its provision centrally, is instructive; Methodists are still much less inclined to fall into party camps. Not even the rather hasty condemnation of Anglican clerical orders by Leo XIII in a bull, Apostolicae Curae, in 1896 could discourage High Church Anglicans from continuing to puzzle away at the conundrum of Catholic Anglicanism – much as their Evangelical fellow Anglicans might disapprove of their even trying. They developed a spectrum of solutions, stretching between a moderate style which became known as ‘Central’ Churchmanship and an extreme Anglo-Catholicism which delighted in being more Roman than the pope.68 That spectrum has been one of the most fruitful products of that always tense structure, the Anglican Communion. It demands that its adherents use their brains to understand what Anglicanism might be, as well as their aesthetic sense to appreciate how it might reach out to the beauty of divine presence. It encourages a strong sense of paradox and uncertainty, of which Kierkegaard might well have grudgingly approved. It is one of the engaging features of the

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  Africa became independent countries in the 1960s. Those leaders were mostly from European-led churches, and very commonly were Christian schoolteachers (like Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia or Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe), with a history of patient study in Western-style universities, often in Europe itself. Prophets constructed alternatives. In the Zulu Isaiah Shembe’s AmaNazaretha Church, founded amid the growing racism of the white-governed Union of South Africa, Shembe maintained that his Church rather than the Zulu monarchy should be the source of Zulu national identity in future. He instilled the sense that true virtue lay in avoiding service to whites, especially amid the corrupt cities. In the worship-dancing which his followers still perform regularly through the liturgical week, following Shembe’s instructions, broom handles are brandished in place of the death-dealing assegais of warriors: so domestic values triumph over traditional Zulu military posturing. The dance empowers ancestors to dance in Heaven: it is a system of reciprocity, connecting with the dead in as satisfying a manner as the medieval Western Purgatory industry.100 Even if simply passive in suffering, a prophet might have a mighty effect on people all too familiar with suffering, rather like St Boris and St Gleb through the centuries of Russian Orthodoxy (see pp. 508–9). Simon Kimbangu, inspired to begin healing after the 1918 influenza epidemic, had a public or rather clandestinely public ministry for no more than five months, before he was imprisoned for life by the authorities in the Belgian Congo on charges of subversion. His thirty years of silence did not stop other imprisoned disciples from cherishing his memory as good news for multitudes silenced by ‘the prophets of Satan, missionaries, the Belgian government’. Now his Church, treasuring his body enshrined at its headquarters, is one of the largest in central Africa.101 Africa thus presented a constant interaction between African-initiated Churches, the still-growing Churches brought earlier by Westerners and a steadily more obvious Pentecostalism. Their growth over the twentieth century was phenomenal, far outstripping that of the population. In 1914 there may have been four million Christians in Africa, by 1950 seventy-five million, and much more was to come. One wise observer who knew Africa over more than thirty years, the Swedish Lutheran bishop in Tanzania Bengt Sundkler, observed that whereas in the nineteenth century African Christianity had largely been a youth movement, in the twentieth it was a women’s movement. Healing, that particular concern for women as they cared for their families, has become the great symbol of Christian success alongside education.102 This was not confined to charismatic Protestantism. The Maasai of Kenya were long resistant to Christianity of any sort; men proud of their warrior tradition despised its message of forgiveness and sexual continence. Women contrariwise rather

• From Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982)

  She sucked her teeth with a sharp intake of breath and sighed a long sigh. “Chile, why don’t you go on back home to your mama, where you belong?” I almost burst into tears. I felt like screaming, drowning out her plaintive, kindly, old-woman’s voice that kept pretending everything was so simple. “Don’t you think she’s worrying about you? Do she know you in all this trouble?” “I’m not in trouble, Miz Lewis. I just don’t feel well because of my period.” Turning away, I crumpled up the used towel and dropped it into the basket, and then sat down again, heavily. My legs were shockingly weak. “Yeah. Well.” Miz Lewis sucked her teeth again, and put her hand into her apron pocket. “Here,” she said, pulling four dollars out of her purse. “You take these and get yourself a taxi home.” She knew I lived in Brooklyn. “And you go right home, now. I’ll cross your name off the list downstairs for you. And you can pay me back when you get it.” I took the crumpled bills from her dark, work-wise hands. “Thanks a lot, Miz Lewis,” I said gratefully. I stood up again, this time a little more steadily. “But don’t you worry about me, this won’t last very long.” I walked shakily to the door. “And you put your feet up, and a cold compress on your tummy, and you stay in bed for a few days, too,” she called after me, as I made my way to the elevators to the main floor. I asked the cab to take me around to the alley entrance, instead of getting out on Brighton Beach Avenue. I was afraid my legs might not take me where I wanted to go. I wondered if I had almost fainted. Once indoors, I took three aspirin and slept for twenty-four hours. When I awoke Monday afternoon, the bed-sheets were stained, but my bleeding had slowed to normal and the cramps were gone. I wondered if I had gotten some bad food at the foodshop Sunday morning that had made me sick. Usually I never got upset stomachs, and prided myself on my cast-iron digestion. The following day I went back to school. On Friday, after classes, before I went to work, I picked up my money for ushering. I sought out Miz Lewis in the auditorium washroom and paid her back her four dollars. “Oh, thank you, Autray,” she said, looking a little surprised. She folded the bills up neatly and tucked them back into the green snap-purse she kept in her uniform apron pocket. “How you feeling?” “Fine, Miz Lewis,” I said jauntily. “I told you I was going to be all right.” “You did not! You said you was all right and I knew you wasn’t, so don’t tell me none of that stuff, I don’t want to hear.” Miz Lewis eyed me balefully. “You gon’ back home to your mama, yet?”

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  There was just the question—“Will you marry me?”—and her answer—“I will.” —A month later, Frank and Susan were married in a Tucson Episcopal church. After honeymooning at the Grand Canyon and in Las Vegas, the Bormans reported to Perrin Air Force Base, then to Williams Air Force Base in Chandler, Arizona. These were fun and adventurous times for the new couple, even if training was risky. Men died from losing control while pushing the limits in these high-performance jets, but it never occurred to Borman that he’d be hurt. Others had survived the training, and he knew he was better than any of them. Susan never complained about the dangers of Frank’s job, the hours it required, or even their tiny home, a trailer with no air-conditioning. Once, after Frank’s model airplane flew away from him, Susan spent the next day searching the area for miles, knowing how disappointed he was to have lost it. She didn’t find it, but Borman was touched that she didn’t want him to worry, even about little things. Soon Susan was pregnant. A month before the baby was due, in September 1951, Borman was transferred for the second time in eight weeks, this time to Nellis Air Force Base in Las Vegas. He protested, arguing that the move was too much for his eight-months-pregnant wife. A captain reminded him, in various shades of blue, that there was a war going on in Korea. Borman gathered blankets and a pillow and turned the bench seat in the back of the Oldsmobile into a bed, tucked in his pregnant wife, and drove to Las Vegas. On October 4, 1951, Susan gave birth to a baby boy, Frederick. On the same day, Borman flew two missions—no time off for a brand-new father, such was the urgency of wartime training. The work of a fighter pilot was exceedingly dangerous; six men died over one weekend, all at Borman’s base. At home, Susan never allowed her husband to see how these accidents made her shake. New orders sent Borman to the Philippines, closer to the war in Korea, which was just what a fighting man wanted. Still just twenty-one years old, Susan sold the Oldsmobile for the price of a one-way plane ticket and, with baby on lap, made her way to Manila. Another son, Edwin, was born in a Quonset hut at Clark Field in July 1953. A few months later, Borman’s tour in the Philippines ended, and so had the Korean War. The battle he’d signed up to fight had faded away. Borman spent the next several years logging hours in fighter jets, learning to drop atomic bombs, waiting for his chance to defend America. Always he posted the highest marks, blending rare piloting skills with a fighting instinct and a mission-first tunnel vision. Wherever he went, he considered Susan his secret weapon, a partner, mother, and best friend who arranged their lives so that his only worries were in cockpits.

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  MY GOD, WE ARE REALLY DOING THIS The crew of Apollo 8 returned to their quarters at Cape Kennedy on December 10. Just eleven days remained until their mission. Their schedule would be simple from this point forward: train in the simulator, study the flight plan, jog. At night, when he could find a spare moment, Borman walked outside his tiny bedroom and looked up at the Moon. On December 15, at 7 P.M. EST, NASA began its official launch countdown, five and a half days before the planned lift-off. That gave everyone associated with the flight time to coordinate, and to fix any problems that might arise along the way. As the clock started ticking that Sunday evening, Lovell borrowed a car and drove sixty miles north along the Florida coast to a town called Edgewater, where he rang the doorbell at a house near the beach. His mother, Blanch, opened the door. She lived here now. Her seventy-third birthday was approaching, and her son had come to celebrate early. Over dinner, Jim explained the mission to his mother. Sitting shoulder to shoulder on the living room couch, Jim sketching out his rocket’s trajectory, Blanch wearing her glasses and leaning in for a closer look, the two might have been in Milwaukee thirty years earlier, a mother and her young son who had only each other to rely on, each present for the other one’s dreams. The next day, NASA chief Tom Paine flew to the Cape to visit with the astronauts and to deliver an important message. After dinner—and a few drinks to loosen things up—Paine spoke frankly to Borman, Lovell, and Anders, with one final statement he wanted them to remember. He laid it out like this: First, if any of them had any reservations going into the flight, anything they hadn’t felt comfortable discussing with Chris Kraft or Deke Slayton or anyone else at NASA, even if it was nothing more than a feeling or an intuition that something wasn’t right, he should feel free to

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  During services, Valerie gave thanks for Bill’s successful departure from the Moon and prayed for a safe return to Earth. By this time, the astronauts’ families had composed Christmas wishes for their husbands, which Carr delivered by radio to the crew 209,000 miles away. He spoke first to Lovell. “Christmas morning around your house was kinda quiet, says Marilyn. She said that they’re all thankful the mission has gone so great. They missed having you around the tree this morning, but they wanted to reassure you that your presents are waiting, and the roast beef and Yorkshire pudding will be on the table when you get home.” “Hey, that sounds good, Jerry. Good old roast beef and Yorkshire pudding,” Lovell said. “Hi, Frank,” Carr said, now speaking to Borman. “Christmas morning has come at the Borman house. And the boys and Susan and your mom and dad all send their love. They say for you to stay in there and pitch.” These words meant a great deal to Borman. That had been his father’s motto during the Depression, after he’d lost his gas station lease and things looked bleakest for the family, when he’d taken two jobs, changing tires and driving a laundry truck. In a more private time, Borman might even have cried thinking about all his dad meant to him. But here, on a mission, he remained a commander. “Okay, thank you,” he radioed back to Houston. “Please reciprocate for me.” Carr had a message for Anders, too, but Anders was sleeping and would get his later. Apollo 8 coasted for another two and a half hours, its velocity dropping as lunar gravity continued to act on the ship. At a distance of about 39,000 miles from the Moon was the equigravisphere, the point at which Earth’s gravity became dominant. Home was still 200,000 miles away, but now the spacecraft began to fall faster, a gradual acceleration that would take it to a speed in excess of 24,500 miles per hour at reentry into Earth’s atmosphere. But that was a long way off, and for now, when the crew looked out their windows, with no landmarks in sight, they seemed to be standing still. A little more than an hour after crossing the Earth-Moon gravitational divide, the astronauts began to prepare for the first of two television

• From Scandalous Liaisons (2007)

  In the last few weeks, he’d shared daily living with her in every way a man would share his life with his wife. He’d observed her in the bath, watched her eat, and assisted her toilette. In return, she’d become fascinated with watching his masculine ablutions. She relished brushing his hair and mending tears in his clothing. She adored taking care of him and giving him the affection he’d gone so long without. Sebastian absorbed every drop with an awed appreciation that tugged at her heart. “Damnation,” he groused, brushing the splattered water off his torso with a towel. “You are like to scare the wits from me, woman!” “I’ll be scaring more than your wits if I ever find you attempting that again!” He took a deep, slow breath. Olivia set her arms akimbo and tapped her foot indignantly. “You said it was unfashionably long,” he explained, still holding his hair in his hand. “So it is.” “Well, we’re docking in a few hours.” “I’m aware of that.” And she hated it, hated that soon they would lose the wondrous intimacy of their long sea voyage and endless days of pleasure in their bed. Within hours, she would be simpering and smiling at the vultures of Society, the very ones who had picked her flesh to the bone only a year ago. And she would have to share her darling husband with them, a man who bore wounds that still festered. The thought made her stomach turn. “Therefore I’m cutting it,” he said curtly. “No, you are not.” His blue eyes met hers, capped with a frown. “Make sense, Olivia, and hurry up about it!” She released her breath and stepped toward him, not stopping until her body was pressed against his. She wrapped her arms around his lean waist. “I like your hair the way it is.” Disbelief etched his handsome features. “I like running my fingers through it when you are sitting down and I’m standing at your shoulder. I like seeing strands of it left on my pillow. I like it swaying around my shoulders when you are thrusting deep inside of me.” With gentle fingers, she pried his hair from his tense grasp and rubbed her face in it. “I was cutting it for you,” he said hoarsely. “Keep it for me,” she whispered, meeting his intense gaze. “When we stand in crowded ballrooms, I will see your queue and know that you are mine. I will be reminded of how wild you are, how you struggle against the bonds that hold you, and I will think to myself, ‘He chose the bonds that bound him to me.’ And I will be happy.” Her hands stroked up the rippled expanse of his torso and came to rest over his heart. It beat beneath her palm in a panicked rhythm. “God, Olivia,” he breathed in a strangled whisper. “Do you have any idea what you do to me?”

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  they might have preferred it to NASA’s space suit. All of them, however, understood its necessity. The custom-tailored one-piece suits could be pressurized, and they were made fireproof by Teflon cloth. Layers of Mylar, Dacron, and Kapton protected from heat, while other layers provided cooling and controlled pressure. In all, these suits contained more than twenty layers of protective materials, enough to do battle with a universe that becomes hostile to humans just a few miles above Earth’s surface. Fully dressed, the suit’s wearer looked like a futuristic version of the Michelin Man and walked a bit like Frankenstein’s monster, but the suit could be his lifeline during a space flight if the cabin lost pressure. A team of technicians, dressed in surgical masks to avoid spreading germs, descended on the astronauts, ordering them into their long johns and biometric sensors (to transmit physiological data to Houston), then helping them don their suits. Borman’s equipment specialist would be Joe Schmidt, an all-around good guy, and the same sergeant who’d helped him into his pressure suit so many times at Edwards Air Force Base, where Borman had been a test pilot. The two were old hands at this kind of dance. To enter the space suit, Borman had to shimmy and shake his way in through a tight zipper opening in the back of the garment, favoring no limb over any other lest the rest of him be left behind. After he popped his head through the neck ring, oxygen and cooling hoses were attached to blue (input) and red (output) valves at his torso. The next piece went on easily—a soft cap like the ones worn in the 1930s by barnstorming pilots, the men who gave rides to kids like Borman, Lovell, and Anders. (NASA’s caps, however, were woven with state-of-the-art communications gear— no yelling above the wind required.) Gloves were affixed and secured. Finally, a transparent bubble helmet was attached to the neck ring. (Borman’s head was so large that his helmet cost an extra $45,000 to build.) Now fully kitted up, with pure oxygen flowing into their suits from portable ventilators, Borman, Lovell, and Anders were already separated from Earth, the only three men on the planet who needed the planet no more. On the way out of the suiting room, Lovell’s technician gave him a pocket handkerchief to dress up his space suit, while Schmidt presented Borman with a small paper Christmas tree. The gifts weren’t intended to be brought on board, but it was the thought that counted.

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  been corrupted by Lovell’s mistake—in particular, a set of numbers that defined how the guidance platform ought to be aligned with the stars. Once Houston had uploaded the correct values, Lovell began a process of righting the ship, rotating it and sighting on stars, until, after about half an hour, the men understood again how their spacecraft stood in relation to the universe around them, and to home. — It was just after nine o’clock on Christmas night in Houston when Mission Control offered another gift to the astronauts, one they’d been planning for some time. In place of the usual beeps and technical talk, NASA beamed up a recording of “Joy to the World” by Percy Faith and his Orchestra. Anders got a chill when it played; the music seemed to be coming from every direction, almost divine. Then he heard “O Holy Night” by the Norman Luboff Choir, but as the spacecraft turned in barbecue mode, the sound became warped. Anders had become so entranced by the music he’d forgotten to switch over between Apollo 8’s various antennas. Tuned wrongly in space, even Christmas music could become eerie. A few hours later, Anders reported that the crew had seen the Moon only once during its journey home. They were now 150,000 miles from Earth and 90,000 miles from the Moon. Five hours after that, they were 20,000 miles closer to home, and traveling about 3,800 miles per hour. By now, Apollo 8 had been in flight for more than five full days. Borman jokingly told Houston that they should “spread out one of those banners” in the Pacific Ocean splashdown area, and that Apollo 8 would try to “coast through it.” Twenty-four hours remained until scheduled splashdown. — Around five o’clock Houston time on the afternoon of December 26, after almost a full day of uneventful cruising, Apollo 8 reached the halfway point between the Moon and Earth. It had been thirty-seven hours since they left the Moon, but if all went well, it would take just another twenty hours to reach the Pacific Ocean. The astronauts had one television

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  They are putting this crew at risk. And yet there was no escape for any of them. So they stayed, droplets of the Hong Kong flu and who knows what else atomizing into the room. During dinner, Kraft got to talking to Lindbergh about airplanes, a nuts-and-bolts conversation between one of the great original aviators and an old flight test engineer. Seated nearby with the president, Borman stole glances toward Kraft’s table, envying the conversation he was missing. He also noticed that LBJ seemed irascible, describing his annoyance at a press corps—and maybe an entire swath of the American public—whose criticism of his Vietnam policies seemed to have beaten him down. Listening to the president rail against the media, Borman felt empathy for Johnson, not just for the stigma of Vietnam that would attach to his legacy, but for how it must feel to be a man in the final days of his standing, knowing that soon he would never again matter in the way he once had. Chapter Eleven

• From Bright Lights, Big City (1984)

  Megan comes out wearing a maroon silk shirt with puffed sleeves which is not open to immediate interpretation. One less button buttoned might mean sexy , but what you see suggests casually dressy . “Sit down,” Megan says, gesturing toward the couch. You both sit. “I like your place,” you say. “It’s small, but I can’t afford to move.” You hope the conversation improves. A few minutes ago you were colleagues headed out for a bite to eat. Now you are a man and a woman alone in a room with a bed. One of the photographs on the end table beside the couch is a large glossy of a younger-looking Megan onstage with two men. “That was my last play. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in Bridgeport, Connecticut.” You pick up another picture, a boy with a fishing rod holding a trout, cabin and woods in the background. “Old boyfriend?” Meg shakes her head. She slides across the couch and takes the picture, studying it earnestly. “My son,” she says. “Son? ” Megan nods, looking at the picture. “This was taken a couple of years ago. He’s thirteen now. I haven’t seen him in almost a year, but he’s coming for a visit as soon as school lets out.” You don’t want to appear too inquisitive. This sounds like a dangerous subject. You haven’t heard about a son before. Suddenly Megan seems much less scrutable than you had imagined. She reaches across your chest to put the picture back on the end table. You can feel her breath on your cheek. “He lives with his father in northern Michigan. It’s a good place for a boy to grow up. They do boy things—hunting and fishing. His father’s a logger. When I met him he was an aspiring playwright who couldn’t get his plays produced. It was hard. We were broke and it seemed like everyone else had money. And I wasn’t the greatest wife in the world. Jack—that’s my ex-husband—didn’t want his son growing up in the city. I didn’t want to leave. Of course I didn’t want my son to leave either, but when the decision was made I was in Bellevue stupefied with Librium. Obviously in no position to fight for custody.” You don’t know what to say. You are embarrassed. You want to hear more. Megan sips her wine and looks out the window. You wonder how painful this is for her. “Did your husband commit you?” “He didn’t have much choice. I was raving. Manic depression. They finally figured out a few years ago it was a simple chemical deficiency. Something called lithium carbonate. Now I take four tablets a day and I’m fine. But it’s a little late to become a full-time mother again. Anyway Dylan—that’s my son—has a wonderful stepmother and I see him every summer.” “That’s awful,” you say. “It’s not so bad. I’m okay now, Dylan has a good life. I call that a good deal.

• From Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982)

  Icies were suspected by many Black mothers of spreading polio through Harlem, and they were to be shunned, along with public swimming pools. Eventually, the icie-carts were banned from the streets by Mayor La Guardia. Wherever we were, as the shadows of late afternoon began to grow long, we began to wind our way homeward. We both knew that there was only so much we could presume before our freedom would be cut off, and we tried to keep this side of that line. Sometimes we goofed and overstepped some ignored rule, and then Gennie would be decked for a few days. For me at home, punishment was always much more swift and direct and short, and many days that summer my arms and back were sore from whatever handy weapon my mother could lay her hands on to hit me with. When Gennie was decked, I would go over to her house for the day. We sat and talked and drank coffee at the kitchen table, or lay naked on her mother’s sofa bed in the living room and listened to the radio and drank Champale, which the cornerstore man gave Gennie on credit because he thought it was for her mother. Sometimes we visited her grandmother who lived upstairs, and she would let us play her Nat King Cole records. Dance Ballerina dance and do your pirouettes in rhythm with your aching heart Gennie’s mother had raised Genevieve alone from the time she was an infant. Her father had left Louisa before Genevieve was born. I liked Mrs. Thompson. She was young, and pretty, and very reasonable, I thought, compared to my mother. She had been to college and that made her somehow even more acceptable in my eyes. She and Gennie could talk to each other in a way not possible between my mother and me. Louisa seemed very modern. Genevieve and she shared many of the same interests, and the same clothes, and I thought how exciting it must be to have a mother who wore and liked the same kinds of clothes you did. That summer, Genevieve met her father, Phillip Thompson, for the first time. She fell completely under his charming net. He was a quick and bitter man of much wit and little love, who preyed upon whatever admiration he could find. (Genevieve was fifteen when she first met her father. She was two months short of sixteen when she died.) Frequently, Gennie visited Phillip and Ella, the woman with whom he lived. She and Louisa began to fight more and more often over Gennie’s seeing her father. Louisa had worked fifteen years by herself to provide Gennie with a home and food and clothes and schooling. Now suddenly Phillip appeared, handsome and irresponsible, to sweep Gennie off her feet. Louisa Thompson was not a woman to bite her tongue. By the middle of the summer, and with Phillip’s prodding, Gennie decided she wanted to go and live with him and Ella.

• From Scandalous Liaisons (2007)

  Julienne opened her eyes and wondered if she’d fainted. She felt boneless, languid with warmth. As she realized the heat came from Lucien, her mouth curved with pleasure. She snuggled closer, and then stilled at the sound of his harshly indrawn breath and the feel of his erection against her thigh. She looked at him in dismay. He was suffering, and she’d been too sated to notice. He rose to his elbow and looked down at her, his face drawn tight. “I have to go.” She lowered her eyes to the hard ridge of his cock. Reaching down, she brushed the outline with a shy, tentative stroke of her fingers. It jerked beneath her touch. He pushed her hand away with a curse, then caught it back and kissed her fingertips to soften his rejection. “You mustn’t touch me, Julienne.” “But I’d like to,” she insisted. Her heart swelled, filled with tenderness for him. “That was so wonderful . . . what you did . . .” His gaze was achingly tender. “I’m glad you thought so.” Julienne pressed her lips to his. His hand slid to her nape, prolonging the kiss. Then he sighed and rolled onto his back. In a fluidly graceful motion, he left the bed. Lucien grabbed up his shirt and dropped it over her head. “Stay with me.” She shoved her arms through the sleeves and gripped his wrist quickly when he turned to leave. “I don’t think I can.” “But you wanted to watch me sleep.” When he hesitated, she pulled the counterpane back in invitation. He was so obviously torn that it touched her heart. Suddenly he blew out the candle and slid in beside her. He curled against her back, his knees behind hers, his lips at her shoulder. She clung to his arms as if she would never allow him to go, which was entirely the way she felt. With his warmth and scent surrounding her, she quickly fell asleep. Chapter Four “Oh, dear, this is dreadful. Absolutely dreadful. We’re ruined. You are ruined! What will we do? We shall be run from our home and—” “Aunt Eugenia, please!” Julienne threw up her hands. “Keep your voice down! The servants will hear you.” Eugenia Whitfield snapped her mouth closed and bit her lower lip. Julienne sank into her brother’s chair in the study of Montrose Hall and crushed his letter in her fist. The soul-deep satisfaction she’d enjoyed since leaving Lucien that morning was gone, replaced by weary resignation. “I am not ruined.” “You spent the night with Lucien Remington!” “Aunt Eugenia!” Eugenia squirmed in misery on the chaise. “I did not spend the night with Lucien Remington. I merely spent the evening in his establishment, which no one aside from you is aware of. I’d prefer to keep it that way, so lower your voice. Please!” “What will we do about Hugh?”

• From Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982)

  It was a strictly homemade job done by a Sufi Muslim on 125th Street, trimmed with the office scissors and looking pretty raggedy. When I came home from school that day my mother beat my behind and cried for a week. Even for years afterward white people would stop me on the street or particularly in Central Park and ask if I was Odetta, a Black folksinger whom I did not resemble at all except that we were both big Black beautiful women with natural heads. Besides my father, I am the darkest one in my family and I’ve worn my hair natural since I finished high school . Once I moved to East Seventh Street, every morning that I had the fifteen cents I would stop into the Second Avenue Griddle on the corner of St. Mark’s Place on my way to the subway and school and buy an english muffin and coffee. When I didn’t have the money, I would just have coffee. It was a tiny little counter place run by an old Jewish man named Sol who’d been a seaman (among other things) and Jimmy, who was Puerto Rican and washed dishes and who used to remind Sol to save me the hard englishes on Monday; I could have them for a dime. Toasted and dripping butter, those english muffins and coffee were frequently the high point of my day, and certainly enough to get me out of bed many mornings and into the street on that long walk to the Astor Place subway. Some days it was the only reason to get up, and lots of times I didn’t have money for anything else. For over eight years, we shot a lot of bull over that counter, and exchanged a lot of ideas and daily news, and most of my friends knew who I meant when I talked about Jimmy and Sol. Both guys saw my friends come and go and never said a word about my people, except once in a while to say, “your girlfriend was in here; she owes me a dime and tell her don’t forget we close exactly at seven.” So on the last day before I finally moved away from the Lower East Side after I got my master’s from library school, I went in for my last english muffin and coffee and to say goodbye to Sol and Jimmy in some unemotional and acceptable-to-me way. I told them both I’d miss them and the old neighborhood, and they said they were sorry and why did I have to go? I told them I had to work out of the city, because I had a fellowship for Negro students. Sol raised his eyebrows in utter amazement, and said, “Oh?

• From Scandalous Liaisons (2007)

  “One evening I went to Glenmoore’s room to check on his welfare. His chamber was freezing, since no one could be bothered to light the grate. The chamber pot was full and smelled dreadful. I couldn’t be certain when the last time was that someone had fed him.” Charlotte shuddered at the memory. “And you took care of him,” he finished, feeling a flicker of pride to which he had no claim. “I had to,” she murmured, stroking his palm with her fingertips. “Animals are treated better.” Sliding further atop the bed, Hugh rested against the headboard and pulled her back between his legs, wanting to hold her and offer whatever solace he could. He stroked his hands down her arms and kissed her shoulder. “You are so sweet, Hugh.” She wrapped his arms around her waist. He buried his face in her hair to hide his embarrassment. “Tell me more,” he said gruffly, deflecting the conversation away from him. “Glenmoore was ill but still lucid and sane. He didn’t know who I was, of course, but once I explained, he took my presence in stride, and we spoke at length. I really liked His Grace. He had a sense of humor and a zest for life I admired. I couldn’t leave him to suffer simply because Jared wished to be rid of him—” “Why was his wife not caring for him?” “Glenmoore wasn’t married at the time. He wed not long after I arrived.” Hugh rubbed his lips against her shoulder, frowning. “What woman in her right mind would marry a man in that condition? He had an heir and was unable to produce further issue. She had nothing to gain.” “There are reasons for everything, Hugh.” Charlotte rested her head back against his shoulder. “You must trust that hers were sound.” He snorted in disbelief, then said, “Carding must have been furious when you handed him his congé.” “Oh, he was,” she agreed, snuggling deeper into his embrace. “He ranted and railed, and threatened to destroy me so that no other man would ever have me.” She took a deep breath. “But after the despicable way he treated his father, I wanted nothing further to do with him. I told him to do his worst.” “Bloody hell,” he breathed, impressed. No one defied a duke, let alone a slip of a girl who relied on him to support her. Charlotte laughed. “I’m no martyr, so don’t think that. I was already planning to sever my arrangement with Carding, and I’d saved up enough to live comfortably. Offering to care for Glenmoore afforded me the time to discover what I wanted to do next and to help the old duke at the same time. It seemed a perfect arrangement.” “But something happened to your plans.”