Great Circle

by Maggie Shipstead

  In Missoula, when he’d lost track of things, he’d been tormented by the knowledge that Sarah Fahey’s life was continuing without him, that she would go to UW and meet a boy and get married and do all the things she was going to do anyway if he’d never shown up at all. In bed with Geraldine, he feels a vague sense of triumph, as though by making love to a different woman he is taking some abstract retribution. But this feeling is even more impolite than the absence of love, and Jamie tries to quash it.

  What Sarah needs is forgetting.

  Geraldine tells him she is thirty, and he thinks he believes her. Somewhere around there. She’d inherited the house from her mother. There are three boarders besides Jamie: an older man who is a retired teacher, a young man apprenticing with a tailor, and a single woman around Geraldine’s age who works in an office and is always winking conspiratorially at Jamie. He is beginning to understand he is attractive to women. Aren’t you a tall drink of water, said a woman in dungarees picking up a large order of clay from the art supply store where he works, and when he’d asked, blushing, what that meant, she’d said, You’d be just the thing on a hot summer day. Later he’d seen her again at a lecture put on by the Boar Bristle Club, asked around a bit. Her name is Judith Wexler. She’s a sculptor.

  Sometimes he worries Geraldine doesn’t always remember he is just eighteen. Or, when he detects a trace of the maternal in her solicitous fussing, he worries she thinks of him only as a boy.

  But unease might be part of love, he speculates.

  Dear Jamie,

  I’m writing this from inside a stand of yellow aspens, where I came walking with no intention or expectation of meeting anyone, in fact with the purpose of being alone, when who should appear but Caleb. He’d tracked me with the same stealth he uses on the elk but kindly didn’t shoot me. Not much to report except that I’m fine. Barclay won’t let me fly, but I hope that will change. I have to hope. Anyway, please don’t worry about me.

  Have you spoken to Wallace? I have, and he seems well enough. I’m glad you won’t be following him to the doctor in Denver. Fresh starts, I suppose, are possible.

  Please keep writing, even if my replies are as anemic as this one. I’m not myself right now.

  * * *

  —

  It’s 1933.

  Elinor Smith, the teenage daredevil who flew under New York’s bridges, marries at the age of twenty-two, quits flying not long after, disappears from the scene. (Quits flying, that is, until her husband dies in 1956. She will make her last flight in 2001, age eighty-nine, nine years before her death.)

  The pilot Wiley Post has one eye and a Lockheed Vega named Winnie Mae. He flies around the world—alone, the first to do it alone—in under eight days with eleven stops. A northerly route: New York, Berlin, Moscow, a string of muddy towns in Siberia and Alaska, Edmonton, New York again, not technically a great circle but undeniably a big one. Post has two innovations on his side: a newfangled radio compass and a rudimentary Sperry autopilot. He can home in on radio beams to find his way, snatch catnaps in the cockpit. Still he is so desperately tired.

  Amy Johnson and her husband, Jim Mollison, fly west across the North Atlantic against the prevailing winds, aiming for New York. They crash in Connecticut but survive. (In 1941, transporting a training plane to RAF Kidlington, Amy, thirty-seven years old, will get lost in bad weather, bale out over the frigid Thames Estuary, and either drown or get sucked into the propeller of the boat that tries to rescue her, her body never found.)

  Bill Lancaster, an English pilot, crashes in the Sahara trying to break Amy’s record to South Africa. His wrecked plane and dry brown twist of a body will lie undisturbed and undiscovered on the empty sand until 1962. Every day the turning earth lifts him to meet the dawn. Elsewhere, the world will destroy itself, rebuild.

  Hitler bullies and bargains his way to the chancellorship. When he gives speeches, his head snaps back as though his own words are punching him in the jaw.

  According to the Treaty of Versailles, Germany is never again allowed an air force, but German pilots have been training in secret in the Soviet Union. (Not Stalin’s best decision, this particular helping hand.) Others are trained under the thin guise of civilian sports clubs, hearty young Aryans soaring in gliders through the fresh Alpine air.

  More and more planes are built, other flying machines, too. Airships. Autogiros. Flying boats. Records are made and broken for distance, speed, endurance, altitude. (Marian hears little of this, as she seldom sees a newspaper at Bannockburn.)

  More airlines spring into being. A United Airlines Boeing 247 explodes over Indiana. The first bombing of a passenger plane. No one ever figures out who did it or why.

  A great blankness settles in Marian. Never has she been so idle. She has no daydreams, no ambitions. Once in a long while, Caleb comes and finds her out on the ranch, startling her, carrying her old life on him like a scent.

  Dear Marian,

  I have moved across the harbor to Vancouver proper. I’m afraid Geraldine and I didn’t part on good terms. I disappointed her, but I could not have done otherwise. I am sorry about it, though.

  * * *

  —

  Jamie lives in a rooming house on a block of Powell Street where unruly Gastown begins to subside into tidy Japantown. His accommodations are not a private home like Geraldine’s but a grimy three-story building between a billiard hall and a Japanese barbershop.

  Relief in the grit and anonymity of this new iteration of life, in the rowdy city bustle, the Gastown beer parlors and loggers’ hiring halls, the clanging, whirring streetcars and huffing freight trains, the Japanese greengrocers and noodle counters, the inscrutable signs and chockablock window displays just to the south in Chinatown.

  Perhaps he might dip a toe into the nightlife. Perhaps away from the dark influence of Wallace’s house he can have a few drinks and not lose track of things. Being free of Geraldine makes him miss her, but the missing feels dangerous, needs to be dispelled. He needs to be touched, needs new memories to lay over the old.

  A few bleary nights, a quick and queasy encounter with a prostitute.

  He paints street scenes, harbor scenes. Once a week he gives drawing lessons to a rich widow, arranging still lifes of fruit and flowers for her to render with timid, fussy lines. He falls in with some other members of the Boar Bristle Club, all men in their twenties, most barely scraping by. Two teach at the art school, a few have had work in traveling exhibitions or won museum purchase prizes. They critique each other’s work, but mostly they drink together. He asks them about Judith Wexler and they tease him mercilessly—She’d eat you for lunch! There be dragons, lad! Abandon all hope, ye who enter her!—without telling him anything of use.

  He writes to Marian:

  I have a feeling I have reached a juncture full of consequences that can’t be anticipated but will later seem inevitable. Should I embrace a bohemian life as a temporary lark or resist it as a trap? I’m afraid of being sucked under as Wallace was (as I nearly was), but to live without any fun at all seems too extreme a precaution and also discouraging to the making of art. I want love but not a wife, not yet. I want drink but not dissolution. I want momentum but not to careen. I suppose what I want is some kind of equilibrium, but I suppose I want the thrill of tipping back and forth, too. Do you know what I mean? Maybe not—you’ve always been one for single-minded pursuit. Maybe the answer is in painting. It’s true that when I’m working is when I’m most at peace.

  Happy birthday.

  * * *

  —

  They are nineteen. Marian, by this time, is pregnant. Her monthly blood had been irregular for months because she has gotten so thin, but she knows even so. Her breasts throb as though the skin might rip. She manages to hide her nausea from Barclay, knows she can’t keep the secret for long.

  How stupid she’d been, how passive and
superstitious and wishful and ridiculous: an earthbound ghost wandering among the trees, a breeding sow waiting in the bedroom. She had wondered, in spite of herself, if there might be some truth to Barclay’s certainty that the moment of conception would convince her of her destiny as a mother, but instead the meeting of sperm and egg had been the formation of that first ice crystal on the surface of a lake from which a solid, unbroken pane blooms and feathers out to the encircling shore. She peers down through it into the black depths of herself and does not hate the floating mote of life suspended there but will not pity it, either.

  No denying anymore that Prohibition is bound to end. Barclay’s associates have been coming to Bannockburn to discuss what to do. “Cattlemen,” he tells his mother. “Come to talk cattle.”

  “They’re bootleggers,” Marian whispers to Mother Macqueen, leaning over her chair. “Your son is a criminal, as you well know.” But Mother pretends not to hear, hums as she knits.

  Barclay is loath to relax his surveillance of his wife and seldom leaves the ranch, but once in a while business keeps him away overnight. Marian waits. She has no real plan, only her will, which has returned to her like a wayward hawk coming to the glove.

  One afternoon Barclay and Sadler drive away, not to return until morning. She waits through supper with Kate and Mother, waits beside the fire while Mother’s knitting needles click away the seconds, waits in bed through midnight, beyond midnight, until the silence feels settled. She creeps down the stairs, testing every footfall, certain the tattletale house will betray her.

  The September night is warm and clear, with half a moon. She wears trousers, a plain shirt, a canvas jacket. She takes a knapsack containing a wool blanket, a water canteen, some food, a flashlight, a compass, a knife, and a stash of money she’d withdrawn from the bank in Missoula on her last visit and kept buried in a tin can near the airstrip. Everything else she thinks of as her own is in the cottage behind Wallace’s house. Mrs. Barclay Macqueen’s fine clothes and jewelry—none of it has anything to do with her. The moon blues the ranch road as she crosses it, casts her shadow, blues the wings of the Stearman. She’d thought Barclay might have disabled it in some way, was prepared to walk over the mountains, but after she pours in oil and cleans the spark plugs, the engine turns right over. When she discovers the gas tank is still half full, she trembles with anger and shame. He’d been so certain she wouldn’t disobey him.

  She wishes she could go to Missoula, to Caleb, to her cottage. She wishes she could go to Miss Dolly’s, to Mrs. Wu. But it is too much to hope that no one at the ranch will hear the plane take off, that anyone will be fooled by her note. In Missoula, she would be found before noon.

  A trundling rush along the bumpy ground in the dark, a parting. She banks over the moonlit mass of trees, turns northwest. The sky stays clear, but even the densest clouds would not have stopped her. Passing over the dark sheen of a lake, she takes off her wedding ring and drops it.

  * * *

  —

  “He doesn’t know about the baby?” Jamie says after Marian has told him the story. The morning she left Bannockburn, she had landed the plane in the wilderness when it ran out of fuel, concealed it as best she could by pushing it nose-in among some trees before walking ten miles to the nearest town. There, she’d spoken to no one except the bored station clerk who’d sold her a one-way train ticket to Boise. She’d gotten off after two stations and bought a ticket to San Francisco, repeated the ruse once more, then stayed on a train to Vancouver.

  “No,” she tells Jamie.

  “He doesn’t know where you went, either?”

  “I didn’t tell him, and I’m almost positive he never knew I brought you here. He would have gloated and held it over my head. Still, he might show up sometime. I’m afraid he will, but I can’t do anything about it. If he comes, just tell him you don’t know where I went, which will be true.”

  “I’m not afraid of him.”

  “You ought to be. I’m sorry, Jamie. It’s all my fault.”

  They are walking beside Oppenheimer Park. On a baseball diamond, a team of Japanese men is practicing. Jamie points at them. “They’re the best in the city. If you stay, we’ll go to a game. Everyone comes out.”

  “I can’t stay long. Promise to be careful, will you?”

  “What can Barclay take from me? I don’t have anything.”

  “You know it’s not what he’d take. I’ve always been afraid of exactly this situation.”

  “Well, you shouldn’t have stayed with him for my sake.”

  “I didn’t. I was paralyzed somehow.”

  “What made you un-paralyzed?”

  “Getting pregnant.”

  He hesitated.

  “I can’t have it,” she says brusquely. “I’d be tied to him forever. Even if by some miracle he never found out, he’d have gotten his way. And adoption is out of the question. I couldn’t leave a baby to wonder about its parents. It’s not an experience I’d recommend.”

  “No. Me neither.” He ushers Marian into a tearoom.

  As they sit, she says, changing the subject, “What did you decide about the bohemian life?” A waiter brings a ceramic pot, two handleless cups.

  “I didn’t so much make a decision as slide into an ongoing compromise.”

  “This tea is green. What kind of compromise?”

  “Try it. It’s good. The compromise is that I’m living day to day without making any sweeping decisions.”

  Just live each day was what Judith had told him to do when he confessed his anxieties. She’d shrugged her bare shoulders, sitting naked on her mattress, smoking a cigarette, unable to comprehend why he would worry so much. Don’t decide anything. He has not yet told Marian about Judith, whom he is desperately in both lust and love with. Marian would not like Judith, would find her pretentious and self-absorbed, and he is not sure he wants to grapple with whether that view might be correct.

  “Is that compromise?” Marian says. “It sounds a little bit like procrastination. You don’t think you’ll go back to being how you were before, do you?”

  “No,” he says thoughtfully, “but the worry is always in the back of my mind. I think worrying acts as a kind of brake. Anyway, I’ve been concentrating on painting. I’ve sold some in the club’s exhibitions. And there’s a photographer here, Flavian—he’s from Belgium—who’s opened a gallery and wants to sell my work.”

  “That’s good.” She peers into her teacup. “This tastes like plants.”

  “Tea is plants.”

  “If you sell another couple paintings, could you move out of that place where you’re living? It looked like a flophouse.”

  “It is one, basically, but I don’t know where else I would want to go. That’s the problem. I might as well stay where I am and save the money. This way I can afford my share in the studio, too.”

  “Can we go there? I want to see what you’ve been painting.”

  “We’ll go this afternoon.” He leans forward, lowers his voice. “But, Marian, what are you going to do?”

  “I can’t have it,” she says again. “I would have gone to Miss Dolly’s—there’s someone there who could help—but Barclay would find out in no time. So I was thinking I’d ask at the brothels here until someone tells me where to go.”

  When he thinks of Barclay, he feels the same fury as he had years ago, when he’d almost killed the boy who’d been throwing stones at that dog. The fury, logically, exists only within the confines of his mind, his body, but it seems so much bigger and stronger than he is, elemental, something that might break him apart from the inside. He imagines Marian knocking at brothel doors, being sent to some disreputable doctor. A dark room, a tray of rusted instruments. “Barclay would kill you if he knew.”

  “I don’t think so. But even if I knew he would, it wouldn’t change anything.”

  What can
he offer her? He knows nothing about the secret doings of women. He thinks of the prostitute he visited in Gastown, can’t imagine asking her for the time of day, let alone help in procuring an abortion for his sister. Judith might know, but he wouldn’t trust her to keep a secret. Then a connection shunts into place in his brain so forcefully there’s an actual physical sensation. “I know someone—” He pauses. Does he know her? The sum of his knowledge is small but suggests she is capable and compassionate, invested in this kind of problem. What if she turns Marian away, though? Then Marian will do what she is planning to do anyway. What if she has Marian arrested? She wouldn’t—he thinks he knows that much, at least.

  “You should go to Seattle,” he says. “I know someone there who might be able to help you. It’s better than not knowing anyone.”

  Marian goes to Seattle by train, in an ordinary traveling dress bought for its ordinariness, an ordinary hat to cover her short hair, plain shoes. She carries a new suitcase containing another such disguise and also her old clothes, which serve as a talisman, a promise she will soon revert into her real self. She gives a false name when she checks into her hotel: Mrs. Jane Smith springing into existence.

  “You’re just like your portrait,” Mrs. Fahey says. They are in a downtown bistro.

  “Portrait?”

  “Jamie drew you for us. I still have it. I’ll bring it to show you tomorrow. He did it from memory, which seemed extraordinary to me and even more so now that I see how apt it was.” She puts her hand on Marian’s. “I’m so pleased to meet you, even though I’m sorry the circumstances aren’t happier. I don’t know how Jamie knew to contact me. I’ve helped other girls in situations like yours, but I certainly never mentioned anything about that to him. He must have good intuition.”