Great Circle: A Novel

by Maggie Shipstead

  “I think I understand.”

  She tells him, flatly, about the war she’d fought with Barclay over her womb, the siege she’d endured. “I needed a shock to leave—it was the pregnancy that fortified me.”

  He rolls over to kiss the inside of her elbow, and when he lifts his head his face is strained with anger. “I already hated him, but now I want to kill him.”

  “There are worse things.”

  “That’s not the point.”

  “It’s in the past.”

  “Not entirely. You’re changed.”

  “You’re not.” They smile. She says, “I can’t make myself understand that I’ll never see Wallace again.”

  “Have you forgiven him?”

  “I think so. Barclay would have found another way.”

  Caleb makes a strange grimace. “He sent me a letter for you. Everyone knows I’m your postmaster.”

  “Wallace did?” She doesn’t understand why he has waited so long.

  “No, Barclay.” Caleb gets out of bed, rummages in his bag, drops a sealed envelope in her lap.

  Marian—

  I don’t know where you are, but I will live with not knowing. Not knowing is an atonement I can make and one I know you would want from me. In case you doubt the weight of my sacrifice, I will tell you my dearest dream is to walk out of these gates a free man, find you, and beg forgiveness. Without your forgiveness, I believe I can never consider myself truly free, and so I won’t be. I’m sure you think I want something more—that forgiveness, once gained, won’t satisfy me and I’ll try to forge onward, to take back your love, and that I will be as I was before: too passionate, throwing myself against your walls until I am battered beyond recognition to either of us. I used to think that if only you would open to me and embrace what was between us, we would both be happier. I was so caught up, so overwhelmed by my own certainty, I couldn’t see that you are someone for whom being fully open is the same as being destroyed. You kept telling me that the version of you that seduced me in the first place was incompatible with the version of you I wanted for a wife. You exert such a mighty pull on me, Marian. I was turned inside out by it; my guts were hung out for the birds to peck. I regret the things I did while writhing in that particular agony. I’m not blaming you, but I’m offering my suffering as a small token of explanation. I deserve to suffer more, I know. I can’t say I’m glad there was no baby, but I do recognize that maybe some larger wisdom was at work there.

  I’ll leave this now, Marian. I expect no reply, though I long for one. I won’t assume your forgiveness, but I’ll continue hoping to see you again one day so I might ask for it in person.

  Barclay

  P.S. Perhaps you’ve heard somehow, but Sadler and Kate have married. Are you surprised? I was. I wish them more happiness than we found.

  Marian sits for a moment with the letter open in her lap. Her eye catches the word passionate again, and she leaps from bed to throw the papers into the stove.

  * * *

  —

  After Caleb leaves, Marian is lonely for the first time since coming to Alaska. The uninhabited ring of space she’d cultivated around herself begins to seem less like a protective barrier than scorched earth. At night, restless, she thinks of Caleb, sometimes of Barclay, of how he’d been before he turned. (A turn—that is how she thinks of what happened when he’d pried the diaphragm from her body.) She touches herself, thinking of Barclay more often than Caleb, and afterward is ashamed, troubled.

  As an experiment, she goes to bed with a man and then a few others, ones she seems unlikely to run into again or can reliably avoid if she wants: no pilots, no miners, nobody in Valdez. There is a boatbuilder in Seward, a newspaperman in Anchorage, a Canadian geologist just passing through. Alaska has a glut of men. From each encounter she takes a small supply of images that she shovels like burial earth on top of her memories of Barclay: a stranger’s face contorted and exposed by concentration, the grip of hands on her hips, certain murmured words. She wondered what memories they take from her, what fragments they revisit in lonely times.

  Jamie finally writes:

  Dear Marian,

  I know Caleb has told you the sad news. Forgive me for not writing sooner. We’ve had such a long silence that breaking it felt somehow overwhelming. I’ve been blue ever since burying Wallace—bluer than blue, like the tail end of dusk. Some of it’s plain grief, but I think I am also mourning the past. I told Wallace that you are a pilot in Alaska, and he didn’t seem surprised at all, though to be fair he was generally a little foggy. I’ve tried to throw myself back into my painting—my one real companion since I left Vancouver—and I’ve been finding myself painting memories of Wallace’s paintings, landscapes I haven’t seen in years and remember only in the vaguest way, trying to reproduce them and also capture some sense of time’s distortion.

  From Marian’s response: It’s been too long a silence. For now let’s not try to fill in everything that we’ve missed but continue fresh from the present.

  In July, Amelia Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, nearing the completion of an attempt to be the first to fly the earth’s full circumference, an equatorial great circle of twenty-five thousand miles, take off from Lae, in Papua New Guinea, bound for Howland Island, a fleck of land twenty-five hundred miles away. They never arrive. For decades people will believe she is still alive, that some complicated saga followed her last radio communication. But almost certainly she ran out of fuel, crashed into the ocean, and died.

  * * *

  —

  In January 1938, a spectacular aurora ripples over Europe. First a green glow on the horizon, then someone is connecting the stars with a quill pen, red ink bleeding upward, arching across in crimson pulses, in orange plumes that unfurl and vanish. London must be burning, people in Britain say, gazing at the sky. Firefighters in the Alps are sent to chase flickering reflections on the snow. Across the continent, people call their local police, ask, Is it war? Is it fire? Not yet. It’s a solar storm. Charged particles from the sun collide with gas molecules in the atmosphere. In Holland, crowds awaiting the birth of a princess’s baby cheer the aurora as a good omen. Across the Atlantic, in Bermuda, people think the streaks of red mean a ship is burning at sea.

  Jamie, in Canada, takes the aurora as an omen, too. He will do what he has been thinking about doing. He heaps six months of work in the snow, making a tidy cone of his paintings of his memories of Wallace’s paintings, splashes them with kerosene, tosses on a match. The paint blisters and bubbles; black-edged holes spread, disintegrating the canvas. Prodding the pyre with a branch, he feels terrible regret and also relief. The paintings were halfway between one thing and another. He’d needed to make them, but only in order to experience destroying them.

  The next time he goes to town, there is a telegram from Flavian. One of his landscapes has been chosen for a purchase prize by the Seattle Art Museum. Flavian, retroactively begging Jamie’s pardon for his audacity, had entered it in an exhibition. Flavian would like to know if Jamie has more work for the gallery. Also, Jamie is expected in Seattle in one month for the prize ceremony.

  * * *

  —

  Once, caught out overnight in Cordova by abysmal weather, Marian meets a well-dressed woman older than herself, the unmarried heiress to a cannery fortune, who offers to share her room in a hotel already overcrowded with fellow strandees. There is only one bed, of course. After a good meal with wine, after they’ve gotten under the covers, the woman murmurs an offer to scratch Marian’s back, quietly enough that Marian could pretend not to hear. But she says all right, turns on her stomach, tugs up her shirt.

  Fingertips trail down her back. A weight turns over low in Marian’s belly. It has never occurred to her that a woman could summon such a feeling, yet there it is; the touch is so light, so expert, that Marian is curious to know what
else might be possible. She shifts onto her back, and the gentle fingers, without hesitation, trace over her ribs. The woman’s lips touch Marian’s sternum as delicately as if meeting a porcelain teacup. Marian is wearing men’s white cotton drawers, and she lifts her hips and pushes these down.

  Through the whole encounter, she does not touch the woman, or kiss her. She remains perfectly passive, not submissive, exactly, but cool, almost regal, until her thighs clasp around the woman’s head, and she shudders. After, she turns over and, removing the woman’s lingering, questioning hand from her hip, goes to sleep.

  When Marian returns to Valdez, a letter from Caleb containing another letter from Barclay is waiting for her. She throws this enclosure into the fire without reading it. For a while, she thinks of the woman more than anyone else at night.

  Marian hears about Kristallnacht on the radio, feels dread tempered by distance. Everything seems far away except the mountains, the mines, the glaciers.

  Charles Lindbergh goes to Germany, accepts a medal from Hermann Göring. A camera flashes.

  When, in April 1939, he returns to the States, he is less a hero than before, rumblings in the press about how he’s become a mouthpiece for the Germans, an appeaser. America, Lindbergh is very certain, must not enter the war. “We must band together,” he writes in The Reader’s Digest, “to preserve that most priceless possession, our inheritance of European blood.”

  He believes himself fair-minded, blessed with elevated logic. And if Lindbergh believes something, then, Lindbergh believes, it must be true. He starts making radio addresses, then public speeches, draws crowds, fills places like Madison Square Garden with thousands of people who simply don’t want to go to war again but also with Nazi sympathizers, fascists, and anti-Semites (whom the others are willing to overlook).

  A brief detour into the future: After Pearl Harbor, Lindbergh shuts up. He tries to go to work for PanAm or Curtiss-Wright, and his offers are at first eagerly accepted then awkwardly rescinded because the White House disapproves. Eventually he persuades the marines to send him to the South Pacific as an observer, asks to go to the front lines. He flies dawn patrols and rescue missions, fires on Japanese planes though he isn’t really supposed to, figures out methods of reducing fuel consumption, which expands fighters’ ranges. He’s genuinely helpful. His reputation is rehabilitated somewhat, but he will never be as he was.

  After the war, his marriage frays but endures. Anne writes books, chafes under his efforts to control her and the children when he is home, which is not often. He secretly takes up with three German women, has seven secret children with them. Does he want to repopulate the world with little Lindberghs? He tells his children again and again that they must be mindful of genetics when choosing mates.

  In his sixties, he dedicates himself to advocating for endangered species and indigenous people. He is obsessed with the threat of nuclear war. He’d helped to shrink the world but wishes it had not shrunk.

  When a Saturn V rocket rises from its launchpad, carrying the astronauts of Apollo 11 to the moon, Lindbergh is there in Florida, craning up at the vanishing spark. The rocket burns more fuel in the first second of its launch than the Spirit of St. Louis did getting from New York to Paris.

  In 1974, on Maui, he dies. He does not want to be embalmed, chooses wool and cotton clothes and wrappings that will decay. He wants Hawaiian hymns to be sung for him. He makes sure there is room for Anne in his grave lined with lava rocks, but, almost three decades later, she will choose to be cremated, scattered elsewhere.

  * * *

  —

  Flavian had come personally to drag Jamie out of the mountains and bring him to the prize ceremony at the Seattle Art Museum, which he had endured uneasily, unused to crowds of people and nervously vigilant for any Faheys. None had appeared, but the Turner watercolors he’d discovered in their attic had been on display, arranged in a luminous row on an otherwise empty wall with a plaque beneath: On Loan from the Fahey Collection. They are only simple washes of color on small rectangles of textured paper, and yet they seem to convey sprawling vistas of the sea and sky, infinite space.

  Among the many hands he shook, one belonged to a man from the WPA. Why wasn’t Jamie working for the Federal Arts Project, he wanted to know. It was meant to keep artists in work. They needed a mural for a library in Bellingham. Would Jamie do it?

  Yes, he said, though Flavian was displeased, wanted him to keep painting canvases that could be sold and, please, Jamie, please, don’t burn any more, at least not without showing them to Flavian first.

  But Jamie had liked the idea of painting something rooted to one place, something solid. He closed up his mountain cabin, shaved his beard, returned to his home country. After he’d finished the mural in Bellingham, the WPA had sent him to Orcas Island to paint a mural in a post office. Now, in the first weeks of 1939, he is on a train, going to meet Marian in Vancouver. Their reunion is long overdue, but she didn’t want to cross back into the United States proper. Not yet. He wears a black overcoat and a gray worsted suit, finds himself eager to revisit the city he’d fled in a panic.

  Marian had fit two auxiliary fuel tanks into her plane’s cargo hold and taken three days to fly from Valdez, with four stops. She’d kept mostly to the continent’s shoreline, snowy peaks to her left. She felt mostly the simultaneous focus and boredom of an uneventful flight, though she’d had to wait out some weather and, a few times, under the steady grind of her engine, she’d thought she heard the phantom skipping and coughing of Barclay’s Stearman.

  When she’d arrived at the hotel, the man at reception had given her clothes a long, censorious looking-over, but she’d lifted her chin and held out her money (grease under her fingernails). She’d arranged with Jamie that he would choose a hotel but she’d pay for their rooms. She’d insisted. He has little money, and she’s doing all right. In the hotel she’d taken a bath and tried to tidy herself, but there was only so much that could be done, only so much she was willing to do. Even if she’d wanted to wear a dress, she no longer owns one. She has a lipstick but no other makeup. Her face is densely freckled, her hair chopped and mangled as always. She’d put on a clean shirt and trousers, wiped her boots with a hotel towel, smoothed her hair, pinched her cheeks. She wants Jamie to look at her and see a seasoned bush pilot, to see, somehow, six years of survival in rough country and to be impressed by the fight of it but also to believe her competence is so total that every challenge has been met with ease and aplomb. So she’d armored herself in boots and trousers and shearling jacket but with some regret, as she also wants him to think his sister beautiful. She hopes she won’t seem too strange.

  He is standing near the fireplace in the lobby, his hands in his pockets, and he turns toward the stairs as she walks down. He doesn’t seem startled, only happy. She is the one who’s surprised. He is a grown man, though of course he is. Like her, he is still very blond and freckled, but his hair is expertly cut and stylishly oiled. Even in the small motion of turning to greet her, he’d given off a new self-contained ease. “Are you always so dapper?” she asks as he hugs her, patting her bearishly on the back.

  “Only when I want to impress someone.” He holds her at arm’s length. “You’re still not interested in blending in.”

  “Will I embarrass you?”

  He offers his arm. “Never.”

  They walk to dinner, their long strides matching. They are a little stilted with each other at first, uncertain how best to carve into the years that have passed. They talk about Wallace, about the house and what they ought to do with it. Jamie, they eventually agree, will go to Missoula to sell it, find a place to store what should be kept (Addison’s books and souvenirs, Wallace’s paintings) and sell the rest. Old Fiddler has died, but he’ll find homes for the dogs still around. Neither imagines ever living in Missoula again. Jamie insists war will indeed come, gets a righteous pleasure from predicting cat
astrophe even though, in his heart, he can’t quite believe people would be so foolish. Even someone like Hitler—how can he want another war? How can anyone want it? Jamie is puzzled by the fundamental concept, the idea that people must kill one another in staggering numbers until someone somewhere somehow decides they should stop.

  Marian has no answers. Her world is so uncrowded she can’t fathom enough people getting together to have a war. The idea of battle seems puny and futile against the inhuman enormity of the north.

  They eat at a chop suey place Jamie knows, a dim, narrow room with bottle-green booths and hanging lamps. The waitress brings beer and cups of egg soup, but Jamie leaves his spoon in the saucer. He says, “Have you heard about Barclay?”

  Marian looks up. “Has he been released?”

  “He was.” Jamie hesitates. “But there’s something else.” He pauses again, clears his throat, says, “Barclay is dead.”

  The news thumps her like a gust of wind. A ringing in her ears. Jamie goes on, “It was in the newspapers. I thought you might have seen. Not long after his release, he was driving from the ranch to Kalispell, alone, and it seems someone knew enough to be lying in wait. It was a rifle shot from a distance.”

  She finds she is bracing against the table, grasping its edge. She makes herself let go, gulps from her beer. “When?”

  “Just last week. Caleb said everyone thinks Sadler did it, since he and Barclay’s sister had gotten used to being rulers of the realm. The police don’t seem very interested in investigating, and I don’t know how much there is to investigate, anyway. No one saw anything. Sadler seems to have an alibi. According to the newspaper, Barclay died a pauper. On paper anyway. You were mentioned in the article but not by name, probably Sadler’s doing. It just said no one knew where his wife had gone. There was a will, but I guess you weren’t in it.”