The Believer, page 19
But a call came from a cousin in Ohio with five preschoolers, a herniated disk and a sick husband. So Loisann did quit and went to help around the house. Looking back, she feels like it probably did as much for her as having stayed in school, since she was going to grow up and be a mother anyway. The next year she got the chance to teach at a summer Bible school in Mississippi. Borrowed a car with her sister and took turns driving down highways in bright heat. Remembers the incredible feeling of sitting in a motel room, realizing that no one in the world knew where she was. They stopped at a beach where she swam, wrote a poem on the sand. And then they were back in the car, driving through the night, drinking coffee and Mountain Dew, playing music at full volume to stay awake. As she describes this to me, I can summon the rushing wonder of first adult consciousness. Then she emits a jolt of high-frequency laughter and the channel is changed. We are back in this room, back in our thirties, together, separately, again. She could’ve just had a very easy life, she says.
When Loisann turned eighteen, her school asked her to return as a teacher, although she had no formal training. A few years later, her church sent her to teach at a home for disadvantaged children in Honduras. She found it challenging: the language barrier, the children. “It was only five students but one boy was legally deaf, one girl was FAS, fetal alcohol syndrome,” she whispers. “And then twins that were just teeeeeerribly disrespectful, just say whatever they thought in your face. So my hands were very full.”
Loisann ended up moving back to Ohio to help another sister, who had thirteen children, and her brother, a trucker, whose wife had left him seven children.
“Antoine’s fighting me,” Eliana complains.
“You be a peacemaker, okay?” Loisann soothes her.
“I would go over and make breakfast, and then I would go to school and teach, and come back and make supper,” she laughs bleakly. “Sometimes be there for the evening. Just do cleaning. But God knew what I would be needing that year and the same week I moved to Ohio was the week Anthony phoned, wanting to start a courtship.”
It had been a long wait. In Loisann’s world, a young woman makes herself a new dress for her first date with a young man, and another for their first Sunday together. A friend had given her a piece of special fabric for this purpose, but Loisann was twenty-four, then twenty-five, then twenty-six and still it lay unused. Finally, on a hot summer day, Loisann snapped. That material would be so nice and cool, she thought recklessly. Why let it rot in my drawer? Her friend advised that she should wait a little longer. A week later, Anthony called Loisann’s father. “Probably most young men would ask a father permission to court the girl,” Loisann explains. “Just as a way of honoring him, that my authority now is going to switch from him to Anthony.”
Mid-morning. Loisann pushes a gigantic gray stroller around the block to the playground, Eliana skipping by her side. While the neighborhood is infinitely better than it was, despite the talk of urban renewal this is still, by a number of measures, not a place many people would enthusiastically choose if they had better options. But those people are not the Witmars.
There are no other strollers on the sidewalks, no children at the playground, there is no one anywhere until someone stops to use the toilets near the chain-link fence at the park. Loisann allows Antoine to find his own balance on a ladder; Eliana points her toes up into the clouds as I push her on the swing. We are under a flight path and planes pass low overhead, gray on gray, their roar muting our voices. A light rain falls and we head back. Her sneakers soft on the sidewalk, Loisann rolls the stroller over a condom wrapper and tells me that during her first pregnancy, back in Myerstown, she would take beautiful walks every morning.
Thinking generally of the homicide rate in this borough, and specifically of the mother who died three months ago shielding her children from stray bullets on a playground not far from here, I ask Loisann whether she ever feels unsafe. “No,” she replies lightly. “I’m safe, I’m protected. And if I’m not, that’s because God has a different plan for me.”
Each time I visit Loisann at her home she pads around in her slippers, but I have never seen her without the white dome that covers the bun into which her long hair has been twirled. “It’s called a covering or veiling,” she explains, snapping an elastic at the end of Eliana’s braid and letting her go play. “When a child comes to an age where they sense in themselves they’re a sinner bound for Hell, they’re not going to make it, they need Jesus to cleanse them and give their life to him, we call that the age of accountability. It’s often around then that a girl will start covering her hair.”
The sound of the children squabbling rises and boils over. “This is my seat, Antoine,” Eliana tells her brother, over by their toy box.
“It’s for a couple different reasons,” Loisann continues. “For a woman to show that she is under God and also she’s under her husband. Now that does not mean that we are, like, below or less than. We’re equals. But when it comes to the final word, then the woman has to submit.” She reaches for her Bible, opens to First Corinthians.
“But I would have you know,” she reads, “that the head of every man is Christ; and the head of every woman is the man, and the head of Christ is God. Every man, praying or prophesying having his head covered, dishonors his head. But every woman that prays or prophesies, with her head uncovered, dishonors her head . . .
“So,” she says, crisply closing the book, “I take that verse to mean that the angels see that our heads are covered and—because we are purposefully putting ourselves under our God-ordained authority—the angels acknowledge that and have a special protection for us.”
There is another book in the house that is very special to Loisann. Part diary, part scrapbook, part photo album, Loisann made it when she was sixteen. She shows it to me and I stand very close to her, peering down at it. Pointing to a photo, she explains to Eliana, “This is when Mommy was a baby. Let’s turn the page!” She shows us a colossal snowman. A snow cow. Her as a toddler, holding a plastic comb on her head and standing next to a rooster with a red comb of his own. Her wedding day, mugging with Anthony for the camera next to a car on which someone has graffitied in soap: 1 + 1 = 15.
Gesturing towards her belly, Loisann says, “My mom was really hoping that this baby would be twins, because that would’ve given her the fiftieth grandchild. But now my sister-in-law is expecting, so she’s got her fifty.”
I see her home, her school, her sisters, her best friend, her nieces and nephews. Her bubble letters, her teenage poetry, her lists, her goals, her questions to herself, so private and so like my own at that age that something is suddenly plucked in my stomach that feels like a guitar string sounding. She turns to another photo. A teenage slumber party. “All the girls got together after the last day of tenth grade. We all went to my friend’s place overnight. In the spring, once a month the moms get together and bring in a hot lunch for the whole school.” Tenses are getting mixed up; the past in the room with us now.
As I look at this book, which she opens to me like her rib cage, it all falls away—the bonnets and the tractors, the odes to her god—until there is just the fast-beating heart of the gabbing and laughing, book-loving, overly conscientious girl who thought perfection would protect her. Writing so diligently to herself, whoever that would turn out to be. And for one moment, I feel I can see myself on the doorstep of the world just before everything I thought I knew dissipated.
It didn’t strike me as anything when she said it, but it feels like a gift now. When Loisann was teaching, she told me, they would make a point to do fun things to start the school year. Donuts and chocolate milk on the first day. A teacher leading all the students in a big game of follow-the-leader through the school and down a giant slide. And one year, everybody got a helium balloon. Tied a tag with the school’s address to the string in case someone who later found it cared to write and let them know. Then all the students simultaneously let go of their balloons and watched them float up and into the sky.
“We got responses for the next couple of months. One was as far away as Delaware!” Loisann said enthusiastically, before directing Eliana towards her chores.
I looked out the window, ground level, at the heads passing by. I did not know it then, but I was looking in the direction of the apartment, three blocks over, where my great-grandmother—for whom I am named—grew up. I know nothing else about her so do not really feel myself to be from there, or—for that matter—anywhere. But since I’ve discovered this fact of her address, it’s funny, she has become inextricably bound up with the Witmars in my mind. So that when I see those who are closer to what came before them, and feel that void at my own back, I reflexively think of the image Loisann described: a hundred hands letting go, releasing a hundred balloons into the clear sky. A colorful, collective surrender. The possibility that it might also be mine.
32
Theories of Flight
Fred & Rhonda
Eventually a neighbor helps Rhonda get a job at Coles Supermarket and she steps back into her days, dragged into and out of the city for her shifts, looking through the train window at the world drained of its rightful color. She goes to see Close Encounters without Fred, her heart breaking in the dark. The final scene is a foothold, somewhere she can rest on the cliff face. She watches the screen as the long-missing, the never-found—pilots and sailors—are returned home, striding out of an enormous flying saucer, their faces untouched by time. Maybe that’s what happened to Fred, she thinks. Maybe their life together is simply on pause.
Her father says he will pay the balance on the engagement ring at the jeweler’s in Moonee Ponds so she can have it as a memento. When they go to collect it, however, the jeweler will not hand it over, won’t even let her see it. Will never explain why.
She eventually gets her driver’s license, an apartment, furniture of her own, makes friends who never knew Fred, wears clothes Fred never saw, accepts a certain bluntness, her real life unspooling the whole time inside her like a quiet road.
Rhonda is nearly sixty, her hair a short gray. She lives in Queensland and enjoys crocheting and painting. She is still, in certain ways, the girl she was. Goes ice skating every Monday with a friend, tries to get faster every time. Has jumped out of a plane—loved the falling that felt like flying. She shows me her paintings, holding each one up for the camera as we skype. They are dreamily rendered. A forest scene. A country cottage. The last one is my favorite: hot air balloons hovering between water and sky.
“It’s like that movie Sliding Doors,” she explains, about the span between ages sixteen and fifty-seven during which she has always seen double—both the life she wanted and the life she had. “I think of Fred every day.” She never had children, though she’s had other partners and has been in her current relationship for thirty years. Each relationship has been challenged by the strength of her feeling for Fred, his phantom presence and the absence of the parts of her that vanished with him.
Some partners wouldn’t let her talk about him. This was how she learned to cry without making noise, locking herself away in the bathroom. Occasionally, while out grocery shopping, say, or paying for petrol, the Bee Gees’ “Night Fever” will come on, reminding her of their dancing lessons, and she will dissolve.
“I don’t know if we’ll ever have an answer,” Rhonda says.
“For a while there I believed that he was taken by a UFO—only because you could believe anything Fred said. He was so truthful. All his friends said the same: he wouldn’t say that [about the UFO] if it wasn’t happening.” She pauses. “Also, you’ve gotta think too, that by saying that he’s jeopardized his career, and his love for flying and for airplanes was so deep. But then, he’s telling the truth, so . . .” She shrugs her shoulders.
“A lot of people have gone through the records and important people, like pilots, say it wasn’t handled very good.” She mentions the witnesses who saw the lights that night. A couple in Apollo Bay who said they saw Fred’s Cessna flying towards land, the green light above it. “They reported it but they were criticized by everyone at the time, so the gentleman just shut up. Didn’t say any more for all this time.
“By hearing that, I sometimes think now, ‘Well, is he in the bush there at Apollo Bay, Cape Otway?’” She remembers how Fred’s mates drove down to Apollo Bay to do their own land search. She went down too, with her parents, but the media was unrelenting and her father decided it was best for them to turn around and go home. A mate of Fred’s told her that the police effectively stopped them from going into the bush. “It’s so thick, so rugged,” she explains. “The police said to them, ‘If you’re going in there, we’re not going in after you.’ So they made that decision themselves not to go in. Anything could happen in there. If Fred is in there, it’d be like finding a warplane hidden in the jungle.
“So,” she says, the thin strokes of her eyebrows rising up and out like a drawbridge, “I don’t really know, truthfully, whether he’s in the bush there, whether a UFO took him, or whether he just flew off.”
There is a part of Rhonda that is still in her parents’ hallway holding the line. She has the registration of Fred’s plane and the moment it disappeared tattooed on her arm. She’s kept in touch with Fred’s family. Tells me his grandmother is still alive. Rhonda sees the occasional clairvoyant, asks about Fred. “You want answers, that’s the thing. And some don’t know or some you can tell the answer’s probably not right. I went to one earlier this year and she did a card reading and she said that he has not passed over. So, let’s throw that in there as well,” she says with a tired chuckle. “You really don’t know. There’s no answer. I’ve looked for the answer but there’s none.”
Every ten years, on the anniversary of his disappearance, Rhonda flies down to Victoria, drives to Cape Otway where there is a plaque to The Unknown commemorating her long-missing, her never-found Fred. And every year on their anniversary she opens a box, slips the ring on her finger. A placeholder, curved like the horizon itself, signifying objects eternally trapped in the distance and flattened to the impossible simplicity of a line.
There are many hypotheses about what happened to Valentich. Here is one of them.
Writing in the Skeptical Inquirer, James McGaha (a retired US Air Force pilot and astronomer) and Joe Nickell (a former stage magician, private investigator and “skeptical ufologist”) emphasize Valentich’s age and inexperience. How he was “enthralled with UFOs.” “In brief, Valentich may have been an accident waiting to happen,” they argue.
What could they have been, those four bright lights above him, hovering at height? Venus. Mars. Mercury. Antares, one of the brightest stars. A diamond-shaped constellation, McGaha and Nickell suggest, the interstitial darkness back-filled by the mind to suggest a presence.
What I’m doing right now is orbiting, and the thing is just orbiting on top of me.
And the green light he reported? Potentially another error in his perceptual shorthand. “Remember,” they write, “Valentich’s first description of the UFO involved only four bright white lights; he made no mention at that time of a green one. It could actually have been nothing more than the Cessna’s own navigation light on its right wing tip.”
If the UFO was really just a constellation, then Valentich mistook the movement of his own plane in relation to stationary celestial light for the movement of a UFO in relation to his plane. “This points to what was really happening to the poor inexperienced pilot,” McGaha and Nickell lament. “Distracted by the UFO, he may have then been deceived by the illusion of a tilted horizon.” This effect occurs when the sun has gone down but still illuminates part of the horizon—the rest of the sky gets gradually darker and the resulting imbalance of light can cause the horizon to appear at an angle. If a pilot compensates by “leveling” the wings, the plane will start to spiral downward: “at first slowly, then with increasing acceleration.”
It is their contention that the young pilot—”flying while excitedly focusing on, and talking about, a UFO”—entered such a graveyard spiral. Noting his statement, seconds before he cuts out, that his engine was “rough idling,” they explain that the plane’s tightening spiral would cause an increase in G-forces with a consequent decrease in fuel flow, resulting in that effect. Alternatively, if the Cessna was already inverted by that point, it would produce the same effect because it had a gravity-fed fuel system. In other words, Valentich thought he was flying when actually he was falling.
“It’s called spatial disorientation,” the air traffic controller Steve Robey said when this possibility was raised in an early interview. “You’ve lost control of the airplane, you fight to regain the orientation, and it is quite a strange feeling, really. There’s no way you can talk on the radio like he was talking to me . . .”
As a pilot himself, Steve had experienced that situation. “You’ve lost visual contact with the horizon and you’re fighting like hell to fly the airplane by the instruments when your senses are telling you something different. You’re doing everything you can to regain control of the plane.”
“I have believed all this time that he was genuine in what he was seeing and saying,” Steve tells me over the phone. His voice is mellifluous and kind, and there is a straight, even grain to it like ironwood. After that night, he says, he got letters from all around the world. “I was someone they could talk to.”
He is deeply empathetic to Rhonda, “Frederick” and the Valentich family. Also, the investigators—”you’re going to want to look for earthly reasons about why this was happening”—though he believes it is misguided, “shameful” even, to focus on Fred’s academic performance.
