Thy Neighbor's Wife (20 page)

One of his favorite places was the island of Ponape in the Carolines, a volcanic elevation of lush land with beautiful jungles and rain forests, waterfalls and streams, and a few thousand friendly natives who, like the inhabitants of most other islands, spoke their own language and had their particular culture and customs. Williamson eventually learned their language and was invited into their homes, became familiar with their artifacts and participated in their ceremonies; he also drank their kava, a potent liquid made from the root of pepper plants, and at times this remote island seemed hauntingly reminiscent of the backwoods boyhood that Williamson thought he had left behind.

As the military forces gradually abandoned several islands in the early 1950$ to the trusteeship of the United States Interior Department, which supervised them under a United Nations charter, John Williamson accepted a premature discharge from
the Navy in exchange for agreeing to become a civilian government employee assigned to help maintain all the navigational and communications equipment necessary for the United States to continue its watchful contact within the South Pacific.

Assisted by both American and native technicians, Williamson made his office on the island of Truk, but he traveled thousands of miles each week checking the facilities at other outposts. One day while visiting an island in the western Carolines called Yap, he met an attractive blond German woman three years older than himself who was living alone in a Quonset hut and was employed in the records department of the American hospital at Yap. Her name was Lilo Goetz and she aspired to becoming an anthropologist, an expert on native culture in the South Pacific, which was a part of the world that had fascinated her ever since as a little girl in Berlin she had seen the first movie version of
Mutiny on the Bounty
. She read all the library books available on the South Pacific during her early school days, and in 1950, leaving her parents’ home in the American sector of Berlin, she flew to Honolulu and spent the next two years studying at the University of Hawaii.

After that she traveled widely through the Pacific and lived briefly on several islands before settling in Yap, and she knew she was adjusting successfully to her new environment when she finally became comfortable at making love to a Yapese man in the sitting and squatting positions most islanders preferred. Such positions required fine balance and strong legs, which in her case had been developed through years of athletic exercise and a love of dancing, and it was her appearance of conspicuous good health that greatly appealed to Williamson when he first met her in 1953 at a party given by one of the staff directors of her hospital.

Overcoming his usual reticence with women he did not know, Williamson engaged her in conversation and asked if she would have dinner with him when he returned to Yap on the following week. She accepted graciously and, while she did not mention it at the time, she was already somewhat familiar with him, having
recently made inquiries after noticing him from her office window one day during a hurricane while he stood on a nearby tower, seeming oblivious to the raging wind and rain as he took weather photographs. She had enjoyed watching him, his drenched and buffeted figure reminding her of the storm-swept sea captains she had seen in movies, perched bravely and defiantly on their masts; although, after dining with him, she discovered to her satisfaction that he did not seem in the least bit bold, reckless, or carefree. Instead, she found him reserved and pensive, an attentive listener and extremely well read, a little melancholy perhaps—and, where sex was concerned, quietly persistent. Though clearly disappointed when she refused to sleep with him after their first few dinner dates, he continued to telephone her and arrange to see her after each flight in from Truk; and as an indication of his desire to please her—after she had reacted negatively to the tattoo on his left arm, calling it the mark of a ruffian he was not—he went to a doctor and had it removed.

Soon Williamson was not only her lover but had also persuaded her to join him in Truk, which was eight hundred miles from Yap. He had hastened her departure by convincing her that the natives of Yap were becoming increasingly unhappy with the presence of Westerners, an opinion she was willing to accept after she observed one evening two unsmiling Yapese men loitering near her living quarters, brandishing machetes. In Truk, staying with Williamson, she felt secure and contented, and in March 1954 they were married on that island, spent their honeymoon there, and she considered this period of her life quintessentially romantic.

But in November, when she was six months pregnant, she developed a case of pernicious anemia, and Williamson thought that they should finally leave the Pacific to live on the mainland of America, not only for Lilo’s benefit but for his own as well. He was no longer challenged by his work and was also tired of the transitory existence at sea, the flying and floating from place to place, the flimsy housing on tropical islands. He had heard, too,
that there now were opportunities for engineers and technicians on the eastern coast of Florida, in and around Cape Canaveral, where the government was embarking on a missile program that, it was hoped, would one day launch satellites into space. Several major corporations were committed to spending large sums of money on space research and development; and American scientists, together with Wernher von Braun and other transplanted German missile men now employed by the American military, were designing larger, more powerful versions of the V-2 rockets used by the Nazis during World War II.

Since Lilo was not only willing but eager to live in the United States, they left Truk as soon as she was well enough to travel; and in late February 1955, a month after they had arrived in Florida, and Williamson had been hired by Boeing, a son was born to them. Lilo named him Rolf. Having a child diverted her from the disappointment she felt at having to live in a small, dank motel that was isolated on an oceanfront wilderness a few miles from the military base at Cape Canaveral. This was not the Florida she had read about in travel magazines—here it was all desolate dunes and scrawny palms backed by swamps and dominated by mosquitoes. Located more than a hundred miles down the coast from Daytona Beach, with an even longer drive southward to Fort Lauderdale, Cape Canaveral was as yet unprepared to accommodate the women and children who had followed the missile men and technicians to this sequestered seaside rocket range. The closest grocery store, in the town of Cocoa Beach, was three miles away. The nearest movie theater was fifteen miles; the hospital where Rolf had been born was twenty miles; and for a good restaurant or a modicum of night life it was necessary to drive sixty miles inland to Orlando.

Nostalgic as she sometimes was for the picturesque islands of the South Pacific, Lilo was also aware that her husband seemed happy with his work, although military regulations prevented him from discussing much of it with her. Each morning he drove
their small black Ford convertible to the air base and joined other engineers and technicians in the hangars where their offices and laboratories were, and in the evening he returned to the motel to have dinner in their two-room apartment. Nearly everyone in the motel, as well as the people occupying the rickety frame houses on the edge of the highway, were somehow connected with the military mission at Cape Canaveral, and it seemed ironic to Lilo that these pioneers in futuristic technology would be living and working in such antiquated, ramshackled surroundings.

But this began to change in 1956 as new homes and motels were constructed back from the beach and along the lagoons; and in 1957—after the Soviet Union’s
Sputnik
had shocked America—there suddenly seemed to be an unlimited amount of government funds available for the space race with the Russians. Each day military planes landed at the Cape with high-ranking officers and scientists from Washington, and von Braun and his retinue commuted regularly from Huntsville. Taller towers, more launching pads and hangars were built along the waterfront, and the number of missile workers doubled and tripled. Real estate developers and speculators exploited the swampland around Cocoa Beach; stores, saloons, fast-food places opened and were joined by the operators of vending machines, gas stations, laundromats, and pharmacies as well as insurance agents, doctors, clergymen, and bar girls.

Just before the land boom, Lilo and John Williamson built a small house on two acres of Cocoa Beach lagoon property for less than $10,000, a value that soon quadrupled. Williamson left Boeing for a better job at Lockheed, and was now among the engineers working on the X-17, the Polaris, and other missiles, and he was also sent out of town on unexplained trips. When at the Cape, he sometimes worked through the day and night, and the frequent failures and malfunctions of the early rockets kept Williamson and his co-workers in an almost constant state of fatigue and depression. They all felt the pressure of having to catch up to the Russians, whose larger rockets were now equipped to carry a
dog and even a man into orbit; and the increasing presence of the press at Cape Canaveral meant that no American mishap would long remain a secret.

At home with Lilo and his son, Williamson was tense and remote. He slept irregularly and spent many hours in the middle of the night reading technical manuals or science fiction novels, or preoccupying himself with the design or maintenance of some mechanical gadget. He demonstrated little interest in his son, who was now close to three years of age; and on a Sunday morning in August 1958, while Williamson was on the front lawn adjusting the propeller on a swamp buggy, the little boy fell over the side of a wall into the lagoon. The splash could not be heard because of the noise from the propeller, and when the child became entangled under a docked sailboat, he could not rise to the surface.

When Lilo, who had been in the kitchen, came out to look for him and did not find him, she ran toward the beach. Williamson searched along the lagoon, dived into the water, but failed to see the trapped body. Later, after the police had arrived, the dead child was discovered. Lilo collapsed and required sedation for the next two months. John Williamson assumed his full share of guilt for the negligence, and, after the burial, he left Florida with Lilo for Germany, where they stayed with her sister and brother-in-law.

Returning home six weeks later, in October 1958, Williamson welcomed a year of detached duty from Lockheed so that he could work as a military consultant in California and later at the Wright Air Force base in Dayton. Lilo accompanied him, lived with him in motels and furnished apartments, kept busy with outside employment, and in late 1959 was gratified to discover that she was again pregnant.

After they had gone back to Florida, however, Lilo was often alone when John made overnight trips to missile tracking stations in the Caribbean; and one evening he urged her to revisit her
sister in Germany—he said he was now involved in an important confidential assignment, adding that he would soon join her in Europe and they would probably be moving to Pakistan. He seemed excited and pleased by these events, and she was just as eager to be leaving forever this place in which she had mainly felt loneliness and despair.

But while in Germany, Lilo received a message from him saying that their plans had abruptly been canceled. He would not be meeting her in Europe, they would not be moving to Pakistan; she was to return to Florida. When Lilo rejoined her husband in Cocoa Beach, she was so shocked by how haggard-looking and dispirited he was that she did not immediately press him for an explanation about Pakistan. He had deep circles under his eyes, he had put on weight, he was chain smoking, drinking heavily, and seemed almost in a coma or under the influence of some drug. Months would pass before she could guess why he had not joined her in Europe before moving to Pakistan.

From the little he revealed, and from rumors she heard around the Cape, she understood that her husband had been working as an engineer on U-2 spy planes—one of which, in 1960, had been announced shot down by Russian artillery, resulting in the capture of the pilot, Gary Powers, who disclosed the American espionage mission. The protesting Russians also announced that some U-2 flights had been made from a base in Pakistan.

While this incident made world headlines for weeks and greatly embarrassed President Eisenhower and American military leaders—and suspended the U-2 project—the political clamor eventually subsided; but her husband remained endlessly morose, conveying at times a deep bitterness toward certain unnamed government and military officials. Lilo could only speculate that he had become embroiled in some lasting internal dispute over the communications equipment or the operational capabilities of the U-2, which was apparently expected to fly at such a high altitude that no Soviet ground weapons could hit it. In any case, the Russians had once more proved their technological skill, and, if her husband’s mood was any indication, there was much misery
within the secret ranks of American spy pilots and their civilian collaborators.

John Williamson continued to go to his office each morning at Lockheed, but Lilo doubted that he could rise above his sullenness and boredom to function satisfactorily as an instrumentation engineer. When she once hinted that a psychiatrist might be helpful, he reacted coolly. He expressed only mild pleasure after the successful suborbital flight of the astronaut Alan Shepard in 1961 and the space launching of John Glenn in 1962—two events that inspired outbursts of joy and revelry among the thousands of spectators lined along the beach and the hundreds of technicians and officials at the Cape. While he escorted his wife to the postlanding celebration parties attended by other engineers, politicians, and astronauts, he did not appear to be having a good time. He drank a lot and said little. He had become, at least with Lilo, almost unapproachable, so different from the romantic figure she had seen standing on the wet, wind-lashed tower years ago during the Pacific hurricane. She conceded the possibility that he might be involved with other women, of which there were several attractive ones now living near the Cape and working in the offices of the space administration, or the stores of Cocoa Beach, or the restaurants and bars of the new motels. If he was not having sex with at least one of these women, he was doing without it, because his sex life at home was almost nonexistent.