Matilda stared at her son. After some time, she said, “What happened to the children? They were sent to their uncle, weren’t they? In Wyoming?”
“Minnesota, I think.”
“Do we have the address somewhere?”
“I suppose. Somewhere.” A cautious glance. “Why?”
“I’d like to do something for them. I don’t know what.”
“We might not be able to find them. They’re grown.”
“I’d like to try.”
“I’m not sure we want to dredge this back up.”
“Henry,” she said, hitting him with the full force of her reproof.
By the time an old address for Wallace Graves in Missoula, Montana, was turned up, 1939 had become 1940. Germany occupied Denmark, Norway, Holland, Belgium, France. Matilda wrote a letter, sent it off. No reply came, but neither was the letter returned. She wrote again. Throughout the war, she wrote every few months, always saying more or less the same thing: She was trying to locate the children of Addison and Annabel Graves because she would like to know what had become of them and to make some attempt to repay a debt. In 1945, she stopped writing.
In 1947, she received a reply.
* * *
—
And now Shirley is tapping on the door, showing in a tall, thin, blond, watchful woman in wool slacks and a long, unbelted cotton coat, and Pigeon is yapping and skittering around. “Hush!” Matilda says, scooping him up, offering her hand to Marian.
Marian has a strong grip. She appears older than she is, which must be thirty-three or thirty-four, a little older than Georgie. Her face shows lines made by squinting and worrying, and she has an aura of experience about her. The boniness of her father’s face has survived in her, but, like her mother, she has unusually pale hair and eyes, both bleached like things left too long in the sun.
“Tea? Coffee?” Shirley says. “May I take your coat?”
“No, thank you,” says Marian.
“You certainly look the part,” says Matilda.
“What part?”
“Shut the door, please, Shirley,” says Matilda. When they are alone, sitting on opposite sides of her desk, she says, “Well, here we are.”
Marian looks around the office but does not speak. Matilda is not afraid of silence and waits until Marian says, “I’d never been on an airliner before.”
“And?”
“It was all right. Strange to be cargo. Thank you for the ticket.” She shifts in her chair, crossing her legs, which are so long Matilda wonders where she finds slacks that fit. “It wasn’t necessary.”
Matilda waves this away, and vigilant, dim-witted Pigeon barks at the clatter of her bracelets. To appease him, she takes an open tin of smoked mussels from a drawer and feeds him one off a fork.
In her letters, Marian is not given to elaboration, but they have been correspondents long enough that Matilda knows about the deaths of Jamie and Wallace and about the brief, long ago visit and subsequent disappearance of Addison. She feels no further need to discuss the past, though she has decided that, if the moment presents itself, she will tell the truth about the explosives in the Josephina’s belly. In her early letters, she’d simply asked questions. Later, she told Marian she had come to believe her family, the Feiffers, owed the Graves family a significant debt (she was vague about its nature, let Marian infer she simply felt bad about Addison’s fate), and she intended to make some settlement. As the original form of the debt was not monetary, she wrote, its erasure was not possible, but money was what she had, what she could offer.
No, Marian had written back, she did not want money. I learned the hard way that patronage can be dangerous.
What then, Matilda asked, do you want? You would be doing me a kindness to accept my offer. In allowing me to lessen my burden of guilt, you would be the benefactor, not I.
A month had passed before she received Marian’s reply. I’ve considered your question, and what I want is to fly around the world north-south, over the poles. It had never been done. It would be very difficult and dangerous, perhaps impossible. She would need money, yes, enough to buy a suitable airplane and modify it and to pay a navigator to come with her, among other expenses. She would need fuel, a lot of it, which she imagined Liberty Oil would be in a position to supply, and she would need that fuel to be waiting for her in remote places, which she imagined Liberty Oil could reach. She would also need assistance in securing the necessary permissions and support.
Come to New York, Matilda had responded. I would like to meet you. We can talk more.
And here Marian is. Somehow this guarded woman is the same entity as one of the bundles in Addison’s arms in the newspaper photos, being carried down the gangway from the rescue ship.
Matilda sees no point in small talk. “I’ve decided to help you with your flight, but I have a question.”
Marian turns wary. “All right.”
“Don’t look so put out. Answering a question seems like a small concession.”
“I thought you said you were the one who owes me.” Not antagonistic but not playful, either. Marian’s body is relaxed, but the fact that she is still wearing her coat implies she might leave at any moment.
Matilda sets Pigeon on the floor, pushes aside the tin of mussels. “It might get tiresome to continually evaluate who owes whom. I was hoping we could be something more like collaborators.” Marian gives a slight tilt of her head that Matilda decides to take as a nod. Matilda says, “I want to know why.”
“Why what?”
“Why do this flight, of course.” Matilda ticks off her fingers as she talks: “As you say yourself, it’s very dangerous. Arguably, it’s pointless, too. They’ve been to the poles. They’ve drawn all the maps. There’s nothing left to discover. It’s the most absurd idea, really. Even if you miraculously survive, you’re buying a one-way ticket to exactly where you started.” She sits back. “So. Why?”
Marian looks annoyed. “That question doesn’t interest me.”
“You mean you don’t know the answer?”
“Not exactly.”
“You don’t know exactly, or that’s not exactly what you mean?”
“Both. The second one.”
“People will want to know why.”
“What people?”
“If you do it, I thought you might write a book.”
Marian laughs. “I couldn’t write a book.”
“Anyone can write a book with a little help.”
“I wouldn’t know what to say.”
Matilda fetches a stack of hardbacks from a shelf, sets them on her desk in front of Marian. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. Beryl Markham. Amelia Earhart. Charles Lindbergh, though he is included grudgingly as she has not forgiven his admiration of the Nazis. “You’ve read these?”
Marian turns her head sideways, reading the titles. “Yes.”
“Then you know what to say. Write what you see, what you think, what happens. It’s not terrifically complicated. The experience is the thing. You. Not some imaginary line on the globe. If the book catches on, other avenues will open up. Lecture tours. They might even make a film about you.”
Marian looks caught between amusement and alarm. “Maybe I’d like to keep myself to myself.”
Matilda made a pfft sound. “Don’t pretend you’re so modest and naïve. If you were, you wouldn’t want to do a stunt like this.”
Marian sits back. “I have a question for you, too.”
“By all means.”
“It’s the same as yours: Why?”
“I’ve told you—I’m trying to atone.”
“For what? What is this debt you talked about?”
Here is the moment, so conspicuous now it has arrived.
Matilda explains how Lloyd’s dislike for his own father had fueled his hatred of Ge
rmany. In a steady voice she relays what Henry had told her about the crates on the Josephina. “Your father didn’t know,” she says. “Not explicitly. I didn’t, either, but I think I should have guessed. I didn’t want to know, that much is clear.”
Marian’s face has tightened in concentration. Matilda can imagine her wearing a similar expression while flying through a storm.
“I’m not sure what to think about this,” Marian says. “I think mostly I’m relieved to know what happened.”
“Aren’t you angry? I was so angry.”
“I might have been, at other times. But it was so long ago.”
“Your life would have been very different.”
“Yes. But I can’t know how.”
After a long pause, Matilda decides to return to the business at hand. “What would be the next step? For your flight?”
“Finding the right plane.” Marian turns eager, leaning forward. “I think a surplus Dakota is the best possibility. They made thousands of them. They’re almost indestructible. They can land anywhere, and it’s not hard to put skis on them. In the war, they’d have a bigger crew, but I think I could do it with just a navigator. With auxiliary tanks, you’d have the range, too, though barely, and that’s assuming I could refuel twice in Antarctica, which is a problem but, I think, not an insurmountable one. On the Ross Sea side there’s cached fuel, but on the other…that I haven’t figured out yet. It might make sense to look for a plane in Australia or New Zealand and start the flight down there. I’ve been thinking through different scenarios. It’s a question of sneaking in between the seasons. The Arctic is less of a problem than the Antarctic.” She has become animated, gesturing at an imaginary map, but catches herself, subsides warily. “There’s still a lot to sort out.”
Another silence, something carefully stretched between them to test its strength. Matilda nods. “All right.”
Marian looks at her questioningly.
“Let’s get a plane,” Matilda says.
They talk for another hour, form the beginnings of a plan, poke around the edges of a formidable list of tasks. When Marian stands to leave, Matilda rises, too, hands her a canvas-bound book.
Marian flips through the blank pages. Yellow paper gridded with pale blue squares. “What’s this?”
“It’s for you to write in.”
“Write what in?”
“Write about the flight.”
Marian closes the book, holds it out. “I already have a logbook.”
“Call it whatever you want. A journal, a diary. Call it The Enchanted Chronicles of Marian Almighty for all I care. Don’t tie yourself in knots over it. Just write down what happens, and you can decide later what to do with it.” She surprises herself with her own earnestness as she reaches up to grip Marian’s shoulders, shakes her gently as she says, “You must do everything you can to remember. Not just what you see, but what it means. To you.”
Skip Notes
* From The Sea, the Sky, the Birds Between: The Lost Logbook of Marian Graves. Published by D. Wenceslas & Sons, New York, 1959.
Why go at all? I have no answer beyond my certainty that I must.
—marian graves
Long Beach, California
33°47ʹ N, 118°07ʹ W
June 30, 1949
0 nautical miles flown
The fleeting golden moment between afternoon and evening. The sun hanging peaceably in the western sky, warming the broad pale beach and the wooden roller coaster and palm-lined promenade, the tidy ranks of small houses stretching inland among green-crowned trees, the sprawled figure of Marian Graves lying on her back in the overgrown grass behind her rented bungalow. A book rests open and facedown on her belly; it is the blank journal Matilda Feiffer had given her a year ago. A breeze ruffles her close cap of hair, soft and fine and so pale it is almost greenish, like the fluff inside an artichoke.
She checks her watch, holding her wrist above her face. Six-seventeen. Eddie had said he would drive himself from Florida. He was in the mood for a journey. You’d better be, Marian had replied over the crackling long-distance line. The flight would be twenty-three thousand nautical miles, give or take.
In a letter now three weeks old, he’d told her that he would arrive on this day, June 30th, at six-thirty in the evening, and, as he is a navigator, she’d taken him at his word.
She rolls onto her side, smooths the book flat, takes up the pen. She writes only rarely, and tentatively when she does, letting stray thoughts catch in the pages like crumbs. She’s surprised she writes at all. She can’t imagine her little scribbles (and they are scribbles—her handwriting is awful) ever making a real book, but some inconsistent, unplumbable impulse keeps nudging her to pick up the pen.
I’ve thought more than I should about whether it would be possible to do the flight alone. It’s an absurd idea, but I still pick at the question until reason puts its foot down and says, no, you cannot.
I mean no insult to Eddie; no person in the world would be fully welcome. The idea of going alone should terrify me, because going alone would mean death, but when I imagine it I feel no fear, only wistful longing. Does that mean I wish to die? I don’t think I do. But the pure and absolute solitude in which we leave the world exerts a pull. I suppose I think a solo flight would be the purest possible attempt. But why? There is Matilda’s question again. The reason sits there like a pebble just out of reach, inert and nondescript and insignificant, interesting only in its inaccessibility.
Or maybe the problem is that I want no navigator but Eddie, and also I never want to face Eddie.
A car horn sounds three times, quick and bright.
* * *
—
What had been her last words to Ruth at the Polygon Hotel? She doesn’t remember clearly—the sedative pills from the medic at Caleb’s camp had been powerful—but she has a horrible dread they had been Go away. Grief had made her cruel. She’d needed to hurt Ruth, to make her see she wanted Caleb instead, to drive her off. Jamie’s death had seemed like direct punishment for her having been foolish and selfish enough to enjoy her corner of the war, her freedom in it, and Ruth could never be disentangled from that.
Marian had written back to Ruth’s letter, but she’d taken too long. The envelope was returned. In September 1944, in North Carolina, Ruth’s plane had caught fire on takeoff and crashed. She died, Zip told Marian in Hamble. I’m sorry. I know you two were close.
Marian had stared at Zip, waiting to be overcome, but felt only pressure and heaviness, then nothing. Jamie’s death had rent and torn her in such a way that she was no longer watertight; her emotions drained out, leaving her empty. So passed her grief for Ruth—she was too ruined to hold it. Guilt, though, lingered. For the first time since she’d started flying, she found no solace in being airborne. She picked up her chits, collected her planes, took them where she was told. Her own existence oppressed her.
After Caleb left with the invasion force, she had started saving money without knowing why. She took the bus instead of riding her motorbike. She left the Polygon Hotel for cheaper digs. Once the Germans began to retreat, she started getting ferry assignments to Europe and devised a minor smuggling operation. If she was flying to Belgium, she would leave her parachute behind and instead fill its bag with tins of cocoa, which wasn’t rationed in England but was in short supply for the liberated Belgian bakers. She would sell the cocoa and buy things that were rationed or unavailable in England—sugar, clothes, leather goods—and then sell those on the black market in Britain.
After Ruth died, she understood why she was saving up: She didn’t want her old life, but she couldn’t imagine a new one. The money was to buy time in between.
* * *
—
As soon as she opens the door, Eddie grabs her up and swings her like the pendulum of a gigantic bell, back and forth, tolling. When he s
ets her back on her feet, she squints against the sun’s glare, trying to see if he’s changed. It’s been six years.
He touches her shorn head with a big, gentle hand. “Look at this.”
“You’re two minutes early.”
“My watch much be fast.”
“That’s yours?” A royal blue convertible Cadillac coupe gleams at the curb, top down. Its buffed, elongated curves look like they’ve been formed by the wind.
“Homecoming present to myself. I got a deal from an old friend. I’m getting rid of it before we leave.”
She catches a trace of sadness on his face. “No, don’t! Put it in storage.”
“No, I don’t want her to get lonely. Here, let me get my bags.”
In the house, they babble too brightly about things that have only just happened, the past so recently traversed it’s still unsettled, as though by a wake. His square, horsey face and long, sturdy forearms are tan. He’d lingered on the drive, he says, followed whims and detours. He has his same old affable charm, but something is different, something nebulous but pervasive. He reminds her of a statue that has been broken and glued back together, its shape the same but its surface spiderwebbed with cracks.
She talks about flying cargo to keep in practice. She’s always at the bottom of the roster, has been told she can’t fly passengers because the idea of a female pilot makes people nervous. None of it matters: not her thousands of hours, not the Spitfires and Hurricanes and Wellington bombers she’d flown, not her landings on high glaciers and frozen lakes and narrow sandbars. But so far the cargo hasn’t complained that she’s a woman. The engines and hydraulics she’s worked on haven’t minded. (She has her mechanic’s license now, too.) Had he heard? Helen Richey killed herself back in January—pills. They say she did it because she couldn’t get any flying work.
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