Great Circle: A Novel

by Maggie Shipstead

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I can’t tell if I do.”

  “Mitchell Baxter,” said Travis, and when Adelaide, predictably, looked blank, he added, “He was Hadley’s uncle. He directed Tourniquet.”

  “Ah,” said Adelaide.

  “He’s dead now, too,” I said.

  Carol, trying to get us back on track, said, “I think Jamie Graves and Adelaide’s mother, Sarah, were lovers.”

  “Of course Carol has the spicy theory,” said Leanne.

  Sir Hugo hoisted his distinguished eyebrows at Adelaide. “Do you think they were? Or do you perhaps know?”

  “They were childhood sweethearts,” she said, “but in my admittedly new acquaintance with Carol, I’ve noticed she thinks any two people who have anything to do with each other are probably lovers.”

  “I’m a hopeless romantic, what can I say,” Carol said.

  “I’m not,” said Leanne, pouring herself more wine.

  “Me neither,” said Sir Hugo. “I’m a hopeful hedonist. Redwood? Did you inherit the dreaded romance gene?”

  “It’s recessive,” said Carol, “and his father did not have it.”

  “I’m open to possibilities,” Redwood said. “I don’t know if that’s romantic or not. Maybe I’m a cautious romantic.”

  “When I first met Redwood,” I said, avoiding Leanne’s eye, “he told me his go-to emotion was ambivalence, and ambivalence isn’t romantic.”

  “What about you?” Adelaide looked at me glintily again.

  “Not a romantic,” I said.

  “Come on, don’t say that,” said Travis, who I’d begun to sense was nursing an interest in me. Ordinarily I might have flirted back, but something about his shininess, his zeal repulsed me.

  “No?” Adelaide said to me. “What, then? Are you a cynic? A skeptic? A stoic?”

  “I don’t know what I am,” I said. “Everything always seems to fall apart around me.”

  “You’re a wrecking ball,” said Sir Hugo.

  “What about you?” I asked Adelaide.

  “I was a romantic for a long time. Disastrously. I believe since then I’ve been what’s known as an opportunist.” Beadily, she looked me over. Her deadly confidence reminded me of a bird of prey, a hawk or a falcon. “A piece of advice for you,” she said. “Knowing what you don’t want is just as useful as knowing what you do. Maybe more.”

  * * *

  —

  Sometime after dessert, when everyone had adjourned to the living room for one more drink and to listen to Redwood play the piano, I’d gone to the bathroom. When I came out, a figure was waiting in the dark hall. Adelaide.

  She moved closer, holding out her phone. “I don’t mean to lurk, but would you give me your number? I might have something more for you about Marian, but I didn’t want the whole gang to know.” Her voice was low, unhurried.

  I didn’t ask why. I tapped my number into her phone. Then we walked back toward the crazy cascading sound of “Flight of the Bumblebee,” saying nothing, locked in a conspiracy I didn’t understand.

  An Incomplete History of the Graves Family

  1936–1939

  A German immigrant named Bruno Hauptmann is convicted of kidnapping the Lindbergh baby and executed. Charles and Anne Lindbergh, hounded beyond endurance by the press, flee to England with their second son. Someone in the American embassy cooks up the bright idea that Lindbergh should pay a friendly visit to the German Air Ministry, casually gather intelligence on the new Luftwaffe. He tours fields and factories and the air-research institute, Adlershof. He lunches at Hermann Göring’s gilded and bejeweled house, attends the opening ceremonies of the Berlin Olympics.

  Hitler, Lindbergh concludes, might be a bit of a fanatic, but sometimes you need a fanatic to get things done. (Lindbergh is a fan of getting things done.) The German people seem to be bubbling over with vigor; the Luftwaffe would woefully outmatch anything America could cobble together. No, the way German Jews have been stripped of their citizenship isn’t ideal, but Nazism is certainly preferable to Communism, isn’t it. Two sides to every coin.

  In 1936, Marian is no longer Jane Smith, because Barclay is in prison. She reads about it in the newspaper. He could still send someone to find her, she supposes, but she has had enough of hiding, of vanishment. “My name is actually Marian Graves,” she tells people in Alaska who have known her for more than two years, and they have less trouble making the switch than they might have because she seems like a different person now, will look you in the eye, appears capable of interest, of pleasure, unlike the gloomy and taciturn Jane Smith.

  With the money she’s socked away, she buys her own plane, a high-wing Bellanca, and goes into business for herself. For a while, she flies out of Nome, lives in a ramshackle cabin near the airfield. Muskoxen wander past her outhouse, ancient-seeming creatures, haloed by their own frozen breath, their thick coats swinging around their ankles like monks’ robes.

  The price of gold has gone up, and she flies geologists to the fields, brings engineers to build the dredges and men to work them. With the seasons, she flies cannery workers and miners in and out. She flies to the reindeer herders, passing low over the swirling brown galaxies of their animals.

  People pay her in gold dust, in pelts, in firewood, in oil, in whiskey. Plenty often they try not to pay her at all.

  Plenty often she goes north over the Brooks Range, up where trees don’t bother trying to grow. In Barrow, at the Territory’s northernmost tip, seal and polar bear skins dry on stretchers outside the houses, and staked dogs howl at her plane. Once, out of curiosity, she flies beyond the whale-rib gateway that marks the extent of the coast and out over the loose northern jigsaw of spring ice that the planet wears like a skullcap, flies far enough north to see where the jigsaw begins to fuse into one immense ice quilt, ridged high where the currents have forced the pieces together.

  A dizzy feeling to being so far north.

  Barclay hadn’t assembled an army of lawyers when the feds came for him but pled guilty to their charge of tax evasion, took a sentence of seven years. He paid a fine to the government, but the ranch is safe, as it had long been in Kate’s name. Other assets—his speakeasies and roadhouses turned legitimate businesses after the repeal of Prohibition, his hotels, his shares in mining and construction companies, the Kalispell cottage, the Missoula house, the Stearman biplane, which had eventually been found where Marian had abandoned it—all this technically belongs to Sadler. Even Barclay’s bank accounts are in the names of companies registered to Sadler.

  Marian flies under green auroras. She flies under the midnight sun.

  The Bellanca gets wrecked and patched so many times it’s a jumbled mass of spare parts flying in formation, as Alaskans say. Better hope the termites keep holding hands, they say. Still it flies well enough until a storm blows it away across a frozen lake and crashes it to bits against rocks on the other side. She gets another one with a bigger engine.

  Since she is herself again, she writes to Caleb, tells him where she is, encloses a separate letter for Jamie, asks for his address since she can’t imagine he’s still in that flophouse in Vancouver.

  Jamie has left Vancouver entirely, Caleb reports, and gone into the mountains to be, he thinks, an art hermit. The decision was sudden and he wouldn’t say why, but he seems fine. I guess all three of us were meant to live in splendid isolation.

  She considers flying to see Jamie but finds she doesn’t want to leave Alaska, is frightened by the thought of crossing back into her old life. So maybe she’s not quite herself again, not that she’s foolish enough to think there is one fixed version of a person.

  In time she heads south to Valdez, forms a loose partnership with a pilot who supplies the high-altitude lode mines in the Wrangell and Chugach Mountains. He’s worked out a method for landing on glaciers. If the lig
ht is flat, he makes a low pass and drops something dark—anything, a gunny sack or a branch—onto the ice to help with depth perception. He shows Marian how to look for the undulation in the surface snow that means buried crevasses, how to slip sideways on landing so the skis are at a right angle to the slope and the plane doesn’t slide away over the edge.

  In Valdez, since she keeps skis on the plane all year for glacier landings, she takes off from mudflats when the tide is out. She learns to rock side to side in her seat as she throttles up to help pry the skis free from the ooze. To the mines she delivers the usual meat and flour and tobacco but also dynamite and carbide, steel and lumber and spools of cable, barrels of oil, all manner of machine parts. Once she has a pair of prostitutes as passengers, once a member of Roosevelt’s cabinet. Once she flies an orphaned grizzly cub to Anchorage, bound for a private menagerie.

  People like to remind her that she is from outside. You can’t become an Alaskan. It’s just not possible. She is not one of them, but still, she feels she belongs.

  * * *

  —

  Denver, spring of 1937. Jamie edges around the bedroom door, and Uncle Wallace, sitting propped up with pillows, squints uncertainly.

  “It’s Jamie,” Jamie says. “I came to see you.”

  Wallace’s face cracks open with delight. “My boy,” he says. “How wonderful.”

  Jamie grasps Wallace’s hands, sits on the edge of the bed, catching the sweet odor of morphine. “How are you?”

  “At death’s door.” Wallace pats Jamie’s cheek, the patchy blond scraggle that grows there. “But you’re not a boy at all with this beard. It’s been at least a year since I’ve seen you—is that possible?”

  “I suppose it is,” Jamie says. They have not seen each other in more than five years. Five years since he’d put a frail, trembling drunk on the train to Denver.

  “And where is—where is—”

  “Marian’s in Alaska. She’s a pilot.”

  “She’s the reason I’m here, you know. Her and her husband. Is he in Alaska, too?”

  “He’s in prison.”

  Wallace seems unsurprised. “Good,” he says, but mildly, as though he’d been told the weather was fine.

  Wallace’s housekeeper, stout and matronly, pushes the door open with her rump, backs in with a tray of coffee and sliced cake. “Thought you might like a hot drink and something to eat, Jamie, after your journey.”

  “This is my son, Jamie,” Wallace tells her, patting Jamie’s arm.

  “I’ve met Jamie,” she replies. “I let him in. He’s your nephew.” To Jamie, she says, “He gets confused. Especially about names, things like that. Details.”

  “I’m not confused,” Wallace says bitterly, but when she holds a cup of water to his lips, he smiles and takes a docile sip. She touches his forehead, and Jamie wonders what they have been to each other.

  “Tell me something,” Wallace says when she’s gone. “Anything. Dying is boring. Regale me with tales from outside this room.”

  Jamie tells Wallace about the mountain cabin where he lives, once abandoned, a half-day’s walk from the nearest settlement. He’d repaired the roof and floor, recaulked the gaps between the logs. He keeps a garden and chickens for eggs; he fishes in a nearby river, has learned to can vegetables and smoke fish, to plan ahead for the winter. “You remember I wouldn’t fish before?” he asks Wallace.

  “Yes,” Wallace says vaguely, nodding. “The worms, wasn’t it?”

  “I felt sorry for the fish,” Jamie says, “not the worms. I still do, but I’ve made peace with it.”

  Wallace nods again. “You have to live the way you want,” he says. “That’s what I did. No other life seemed honorable to them because theirs was such a wretched hardship. They thought anyone who lived another way was too big for their britches and must be immoral.”

  Now Jamie is confused. “Who thought that?”

  “Our parents, of course. You remember. You were the same way.”

  Wallace has him mixed up with Addison. “Was I?” Jamie says.

  “Of course you were. If you hadn’t left, I might never have thought of leaving. But you had to go to sea.” Wallace pats his hand. “Tell me something else.”

  Though Jamie isn’t sure whether Wallace is talking to him or Addison, he tells him, trying to make the story sound funny, about the two men who’d come to his apartment and nearly drowned him, how he’d assumed they’d been sent by Barclay Macqueen when in fact they’d been emissaries of Mr. Ayukawa, whose daughter had run away, probably with some man.

  “We’ve all had mishaps,” Wallace says. “Then what?”

  In the mountains, he’d begun painting obsessively. Even before he’d had a mattress or a functional stove, he’d stood in the ruined little shack and worked.

  “I’d had an idea about incorporating the curvature of the earth into my paintings, and I’ve been building from there. I’ve been making landscapes that are sort of…folded. Have you ever seen how the Japanese fold paper?” There is a sketch pad on Wallace’s nightstand, and Jamie rips out a page, tears it carefully into a square, folds a crane.

  “A bird,” Wallace says, holding the delicate thing in his trembling fingertips. “Did the man pay you for the painting?”

  Jamie had laughed on the Ayukawas’ doorstep, laughter that stung and buzzed in his sinuses like turpentine vapors. He’d bent over with his hands on his knees, wiping away tears. “She ran away?” he’d said.

  To Wallace, he says, “He paid me more than we’d agreed on. I think he felt guilty.”

  “Good,” Wallace says. “Good.”

  In five days, he is dead. There is a will, leaving the house in Missoula to Jamie and Marian. He wishes to be buried in Denver.

  Jamie delays writing to Marian, whom he feels obscurely estranged from, writes to Caleb instead. He does not intend for Caleb to go to Alaska to tell Marian the news, but that is what Caleb does.

  * * *

  —

  “What’s the closest you’ve ever come to dying?” Marian asks Caleb. They are lying in her bed, in her cabin outside Valdez. He has been with her for three nights; she doesn’t know how long he will stay.

  She had sprung for a double bed to celebrate her return to her real name, and they have never had so much space to share. Sprawled on his back, he says, “I don’t know. I don’t think you can know.”

  “Isn’t there something in the past that chills you to think about?”

  “Not one thing in particular.” Facetiously: “It takes more than death to scare me, Marian.”

  “Do you remember after Trout died how I flew to Vancouver?” She tells him about the skipping engine, the crevasse, the cold. That was when death had felt closest, she says, but maybe she’d actually been closest when she was a baby on the sinking Josephina. She would have died and never known anything about it, never known what a ship was, or an ocean, or a fire. She wouldn’t have known what death was.

  Caleb said he thought all living things knew about death, at least enough to struggle against it.

  “Or maybe I came closest some other time,” she said, “and didn’t even notice.”

  The first night, after he’d told her Wallace was dead, after they’d walked along the shore, watching the sea lions and bald eagles, she’d drawn him into bed. She hadn’t been with anyone since Barclay, and memories of him came as sharp intrusions of panic and claustrophobia. She hadn’t told Caleb what Barclay had done, but he seemed to have an instinct. He held her gaze when he came, offering her his helplessness. The second night had been better, and the third, and on this, the fourth, she’d almost believed she’d returned to the time back before Barclay, when she and Caleb had made love with simple urgency. Almost. She can never go back.

  He is broader than she remembered, solid, a man.

  A little impatiently,
he says, “It’s too much to think about: everything that might have happened but didn’t.” But, in the same brusque tone, he says to the ceiling, “There was one time when I was a kid. Gilda had a man. Usually I ignored what she did, but that night I couldn’t take the sound of them. I decided to go to your house even though it was snowing hard. It didn’t even occur to me to worry about finding my way, but the snow was piling up. I couldn’t see the shape of the ground to get my bearings. I couldn’t see anything, really. The wind was up. I’d been walking for much too long, but I didn’t want to admit I was lost, not that admitting it would have changed anything. I knew I shouldn’t, but I sat down to rest.” He stops.

  She remembers Barclay’s story about the night they’d met, about collapsing drunk in the snow. “Then what?”

  “Well, I didn’t die.”

  “Go on. Tell the rest.”

  “You can imagine. I got too cold. I remember trying to decide if I could bear to keep living with Gilda. In the end I don’t know if I really decided anything, but I stood up and walked a little way, and then I saw the lights of your house, not far away at all. I went in through the kitchen and tried to pretend I wasn’t as cold as I was, but Berit wasn’t fooled.”

  Marian props herself up. “I remember that! I’d forgotten all about it. Is that what happened? I remember you coming in completely blue and Berit whisking you away. I listened at the bathroom door and heard you crying in the tub.”

  He winces. “My hands and feet were frozen. Thawing them was awful. Berit kept asking why I’d been outside, and I kept telling her I’d heard wolves around the cabin and had gone out to hunt them. Usually she didn’t have any patience for my tall tales, but that time she played along. She asked if I’d gotten any. She sat beside the tub and listened to me chatter while I thawed. I was crying the whole time, it hurt so bad.”

  “Good old Berit.”

  He makes a small sound of agreement, says, “But afterward, for some reason, what Gilda did didn’t matter anymore. I felt, I don’t know, fortified. Like suddenly I was aware I could choose my fate.”