Great Circle: A Novel

by Maggie Shipstead

  “He does, usually, and he adored you and your daughters.”

  Mrs. Fahey, perhaps hearing the exclusion of her husband, smiles and releases Marian’s hand. “He and Sarah in particular had a special friendship.” She stirs sugar into her coffee. “I’d like for you to meet her, but now might not be the time. How is Jamie? He didn’t say anything about himself in his letter. I’ve been imagining him at the University of Montana, but the postmark was from Vancouver.”

  “He’s well.” Marian hesitates, wondering if this elegant woman, lifting her coffee cup so delicately by its handle, won’t find Jamie’s life strange or disappointing. “He’s trying to be an artist.”

  Mrs. Fahey brightens. “Oh, I’m glad! His talent seemed unusual. I hope he’s famous one day. No, I shouldn’t frame it that way. I hope he’s fulfilled.”

  “Me too.”

  The woman looks at her, head cocked. “The way Jamie described you, I was expecting someone more…unorthodox. I mean in the way you dress.”

  “I’m trying not to stand out.”

  “Why?”

  “My husband will have people looking for me.”

  “Ah,” Mrs. Fahey says. “I see.”

  The next morning, when Mrs. Fahey comes to Marian’s hotel to escort her to the doctor, she unrolls a sheet of paper, holds it up so Marian can study her own charcoal image. “Jamie would draw me differently now,” she says. “It doesn’t seem possible I was ever so sure of myself.”

  “I don’t pretend to know you well, but I think you are very brave.” Mrs. Fahey rerolls the drawing, holds it out. “You take this. As a reminder.”

  Marian shakes her head. “I don’t know if I can keep it safe. But someday I’d like to have it. Do you mind holding on to it a while longer?”

  A tray of instruments rattling on wheels. A bright ceiling light. The sweetness of ether. An afternoon spent in bed in the hotel. Some blood. A dull pain. In the evening she writes a long letter, pages and pages, folds them carefully into an envelope. From the hotel’s telephone book she copies the address for the Bureau of Internal Revenue, buys a stamp from the man at the front desk. The next day she wanders along the waterfront, all the way down to a Hooverville that had once been a shipyard, looks out over the broken, ramshackle geometry of the shacks, dirt packed like grout in between. The pane of ice in her is gone, as is the bit of life floating beneath it, but she has not been restored to how she was before, only feels a new loss, welcome but still felt.

  On her way back to the hotel, she posts her letter.

  The next day she books passage to Alaska. Jane Smith, she tells the man in the ticket window, and so he records her on the manifest.

  * * *

  —

  In 1934, planes can fly farther, faster, in worse weather. More routes are opening.

  Jean Batten, a New Zealander, flies from England to Australia, beating Amy Johnson’s record by four days. (Today there is a statue of her at the Auckland airport.) Sir Charles Kingsford Smith crosses the Pacific from west to east. (The Sydney airport is named for him.)

  The Alaska Territory is big country, rough country, country without roads, country best traveled by air. Fly an hour or walk a week, they say. Mail routes that take a dogsled nearly a month might take a plane seven hours. Alaskans are already the flyingest people, but they need more pilots. In the end it is simple for Marian to do the thing she’s always longed to do: get paid to fly.

  Fresh off the ship in Anchorage, she’d found a place to live, bought a truck, and gone from hangar to hangar, Jane Smith in search of work, showing her logbook as proof of her experience. Asked about a license, she’d said, “I never got one,” and no one pressed her about why not. (Alaskans aren’t big on bureaucracy.) The logbook is an irregular document. So many destinations recorded no more precisely than “Canada,” so many flights marked simply “Cargo.” Even her name, so scrupulously plain, has an air of erasure. A man with a hangdog face, scarred lip, and crumpled hat looked at the logbook, looked at her, took her up for a check ride, hired her on the spot.

  She flies people and supplies where they need to go, learns to fly floatplanes, lands on water, lands on skis in the winter. She does most of her own maintenance, has to do emergency repairs so often she doesn’t consider much an emergency anymore. The small house she rents is on the outer fringe of town, where it’s easy to keep to herself. Was this what her father had done after he left Missoula? Slung his skills over his shoulder and set out? Sometimes she startles awake at the sound of animals outside, thinks Barclay has come for her. She keeps a rifle by the bed.

  “What are you doing messing around with planes? You’re good looking enough to get a husband,” a pilot says from behind her, low and turgid, standing too close as she fills a canister with water for a plane’s radiator. “Especially here.”

  “I had one, once,” she says. “He’s dead.” Her voice like a chipped blade. He steps back, waits for her to crank closed the tap.

  On clear days, north across the Cook Inlet, Mount McKinley appears. If she flies in that direction, it grows and grows, white as the moon, seeming to rise as the moon does, seeming separate from the earth, too huge to be of it. To the east are the sawtoothed Chugach Mountains, the Wrangell Mountains beyond, the Alaska Range to the north. Mountains everywhere: monstrous, ice-choked cousins of the forested peaks that had encircled her as she looped and spun over Missoula. (She doesn’t dare do aerobatics in Alaska, doesn’t want word to get around of a girl with a knack for them.)

  The impulse to flee persists; the horizon beckons. If she could just go farther, live nowhere, possess only an airplane, and if that airplane never needed to land, then maybe she would feel free.

  * * *

  —

  Jamie moves out of the flophouse, finds a small apartment of his own on a quieter street in the same neighborhood, one room only but clean and tidy with pine floors and an oddly miniature bathtub he can only fit in with his knees bent nearly to his chest. “Did you answer an ad seeking a gnome?” says one of his Boar Bristle friends.

  Judith has gone to Europe to, as she put it, see what it’s all about. “You won’t pine for me will you?” she’d asked him. “Because I’m going to forget all about you.” And she’d smiled her crafty smile that could have meant either she was joking or she wasn’t.

  There is often a loose swirl of women around them, Jamie and his friends, and Jamie now takes his appeal for granted. To demonstrate that he is, in fact, not pining for Judith, he beds the cigarette girl from a billiard hall, a couple of barmaids, a girl he meets out dancing who never stops making tart little jokes out the corner of her mouth, even when she’s naked. He regards his old belief that he should love the women he sleeps with as touchingly naïve.

  Judith has left some of her books in his keeping, and he reads Modern French Painters, Painters of the Modern Mind, The Artist and Psycho-Analysis. He worries he has strayed too far toward the picturesque, that his lines lack rhythm, his compositions originality, that he is old-fashioned. He worries he has nothing to say with his paintings and that is why Judith has gone to Europe, to find men who do.

  “Thanks, love,” he says to the women he buys beer and cigarettes from, not even hearing the word anymore.

  * * *

  —

  Eleven days into 1935, Amelia Earhart becomes the first person to fly solo from Honolulu to Oakland. Stars hang outside the cockpit window near enough to touch, she writes. Ten thousand people surround her after she lands, and her red Lockheed Vega seems to wallow on a human sea.

  “I wouldn’t want to fly over that much ocean,” says Marian’s boss, the man with the scarred lip.

  He’s not one for posturing, and she likes him for it. Most of the other guys say they’d do it, too, if they had the kind of money Earhart has from her husband and from smiling for pictures and putting her name on malted milk tablets and lu
ggage sets and whatever else. They act like her flights somehow don’t count, aren’t real.

  Jane Smith is a real Alaska flyer now. She shuttles between towns and what pass for cities, out to bush villages and encampments and lonely cabins, bringing mail, food, fuel, dogs, dogsleds, newspapers, motorcycles, explosives, wallpaper, tobacco, doorknobs, you name it. She flies men out into the backcountry who strike it rich and others who drown or freeze or get eaten by bears or blow themselves up. She flies corpses wrapped in canvas sacks.

  Once, a corpse smells so bad she lashes it to the wing. Once, a woman gives birth in her plane. Once, she lands on the frozen surface of the Chukchi Sea to rescue the passengers of a ship locked in ice. Somewhere she picks up a Russian word, polynya, for the patches of open water in the sea ice where whales come to breathe. The landscape is secretive and harsh and impossibly immense, and she borrows some of its inscrutability for herself, its disinterest in human goings-on. Unfriendliness is another form of camouflage.

  In winter, the sun rises in the south. Far enough north, it never rises at all. She wears long johns and wool sweaters and over those a reindeer-hide suit. At first glance you wouldn’t even peg the pilot Jane Smith as a woman, would only see a shaggy block—she still remembers Sitting-in-the-Water-Grizzly, signs a blank postcard to Caleb that way and asks someone going to Oregon to mail it from there—but she carries a knife and a pistol for when second and third glances happen. Rough country.

  Cold is murder on planes. Fuel tanks freeze; hydraulic pumps don’t work; rubber tires and gaskets turn brittle and leaky; instruments quit. On cold mornings, she lights a fire pot under the engine, puts a canvas tarp over it to keep the heat in, watches like a hawk because the gas or oil or tarp itself might ignite at any moment and sometimes does. She’s put out more fires than she can remember. She’s broken propellers, skis, a wing, flown with sprays of leaking gasoline fanning out behind her. Once what she thought was solid ground had turned out to be marsh and splashed up at her as the wheels touched, flipping the plane. She was all right, hanging upside down in her seat, mucky water running in under her head. A mule team had to come pull the plane out. She patches skis with flattened-out gas cans, propellers with stovepipes, struts with birch trees. She flies in weather others shake their heads at, stashes her money away as she’s done since she was a child.

  Once, she flies to McCarthy, only knows she’s to pick up a man and bring him back to Anchorage. He’s waiting beside the airstrip in handcuffs. He’s a miner, she’s told. He raped another miner’s wife.

  Fine, she says. She has them stow him in the back with some bundled furs she’s picked up. They cuff him to his seat. Fifteen minutes in the air, and she rolls the old junker plane tidily upside down. She figures if it breaks apart at least she’ll take him with her, but they come upright again. He’s screaming, both his shoulders dislocated.

  Bad weather, she says when she delivers him under a bright blue sky. Got bumped around a bit. The story gets out, makes a man think twice before he tries to get close to her.

  Come summertime, the one-eyed circumnavigator Wiley Post is touring Alaska with beloved national wit Will Rogers in a nose-heavy, cobbled-together plane: wings from one model, fuselage from another, pontoons from yet another. Marian glimpses them in August when she’s up in Fairbanks, shakes her head at that plane, those fat pontoons. Near Barrow, at the northern edge of the continent, Post and Rogers crash taking off from a lagoon and die. Marian knows lots of dead pilots now. Alaska’s an easy place to crack up. Bush pilots fly into mountains, vanish over the ocean.

  All the more reason to keep to herself. No need to mourn.

  * * *

  —

  Helen Richey, a well-known racer and aerobatics pilot, gets hired by Central Airlines to be the first American woman to fly commercial passenger aircraft. But she’s rarely on the roster, isn’t trusted in bad weather, is asked to give talks promoting the airline instead of actually flying. The men in the pilots’ union—there are only men in the pilots’ union—won’t let her join. She quits. What else can she do? No American airline hires another female pilot for another thirty-eight years.

  A new American plane, the DC-3, makes commercial passenger travel profitable, can take off from mud, sand, snow, whatever you want, develops a reputation for being tough, even indestructible. Two propellers, a ninety-five-foot wingspan, an engine that can be serviced quickly and easily. The wartime version will be the C-47. Ten thousand of them. Skytrains, Dakotas, Gooney Birds. They’ll fly the hump from India to China, schlepping cargo through a maze of mountains too high to fly over, the passes still at fifteen thousand feet. They’ll disperse D-Day paratroopers like dandelion seeds. They’ll crash in jungles and deserts and mountains and cities. They’ll litter the ocean floors. Of the ones that survive the war, plenty will be repainted, refitted, find new peacetime careers. One will be the Peregrine.

  In November, a balloon called Explorer II is released in South Dakota, reaches 72,395 feet with two men inside, an altitude record that will stand for almost twenty years. In their photos, seen for the first time: the curvature of the earth.

  Jamie happens upon the images in a magazine, goes home and slathers white gesso over a canvas, erasing a half-finished harbor scene. He begins again: a segment of his neighborhood from a high angle, almost a bird’s view, slightly warped as though by the shape of the planet, with shallow bands of harbor, mountains, and sky squeezed in at the top, ever so slightly bowed. What he wants to express, he has come to realize, is infinite space.

  A Mr. Ayukawa, who owns a department store in Japantown, buys the painting from Flavian’s gallery. When Jamie stops in to collect the check, Flavian relays an offer of a commission. Mr. Ayukawa would like a portrait of his daughter. “He’s a businessman,” Flavian says, his voice heavy with significance. “You know my meaning? He is in many businesses.” Jamie is reminded unpleasantly of how people had talked about Barclay Macqueen. “You are a polite person, but you should be extra polite to him. Oh—you know that Judith is back?”

  “I’ve seen her.”

  Judith had swanned into a Boar Bristle lecture, her new French husband in tow—a poet, apparently. She’d kissed Jamie on both cheeks, told him he must go to Europe, that Vancouver was utterly provincial, that art here was barely even art. He’d wanted to ask her why she’d come back, then, though he suspected the answer was because in Europe she would not have the pleasure of lording her time in Europe over everyone else. He remembered Sarah Fahey’s sister calling Seattle a backwater, how she’d made him embarrassed for believing Seattle marvelous and cosmopolitan.

  He went out and got drunk after that, painfully nostalgic for the months he’d spent enchanted by Judith, the thrill of climbing the dark stairs to her studio, the way her skin was always filmed with fine gray dust from her clay. He’d really thought—fool—that when she came back she would feel more for him than before, that somehow the expansion of her world would not diminish his place in it.

  The Ayukawa family lives in a fine white house on Oppenheimer Park. Miss Ayukawa—eighteen years old, a nisei born in Canada—sits for him in a large parlor furnished in a ponderous Western style with dark rugs and heavy furniture. His painting of the neighborhood has been mounted above a long walnut sideboard. The room might have been gloomy but for the large windows. It is a breezy, unusually sunny morning. As Jamie makes preliminary sketches, rafts of yellow light and leafy shadow sweep across the floor.

  “We’ll never have this light again,” he says. “I shouldn’t get used to it.”

  She wears a plain brown day dress; her hair is swept up in a smooth twist. Sally, she’s said to call her. Her beauty doesn’t escape him even in his downtrodden state. “I should remember this city as gray because it almost always is,” she says, “but I think I’ll remember the sunny days best.”

  “Remember it?” He glances at her grandmother, present as a chaperon
e, clad in a cotton kimono and asleep on a burgundy silk sofa. Her needlework lies abandoned in her lap; her wire-rimmed spectacles have slipped toward the tip of her nose.

  “I’m going to Japan. I’m getting married.”

  “Oh, I see.” Her tone does not invite congratulations. “And this portrait is…a wedding gift?”

  Her upper lip flattens in anger. Her feathery eyebrows draw together. “It’s for my parents to remember me by.”

  He doesn’t know what to ask that will unearth what he wants to know. Instead he asks her to tip her head down just a bit. After two hours, a uniformed maid comes and ushers him out.

  The next time he comes to the house, the day is overcast, but the scene is as it was before: Sally in the brown dress, beside the same window; her grandmother asleep on the sofa.

  Sally gazes out the window, still and steady, but as Jamie works, he senses inward agitation. He has not looked at a person so carefully in a long time, is out of practice trying to depict, the way he had in Seattle, the tidal zone where a person’s inner and outer selves wash together. “How do you want your parents to remember you?” he says, moving his brush rapidly over the canvas.

  “As I am, I suppose.”

  “What I mean is, a person’s thoughts show through. For example, if you want to leave behind a version of yourself that’s happy, you should think about happy things.”

  “Happy things,” she repeats, looking again out the window. “I’m going to a country I’ve never been, where I know no one, to marry a man I’ve seen one photograph of. I’m afraid an abundance of happy things doesn’t spring to mind.” Her voice has risen, and she and Jamie both look at her grandmother, who does not stir.