Great Circle: A Novel

by Maggie Shipstead

  The mention of sex, discouraging though she meant it to be, aroused him. Trying to sound jokey but fooling neither of them, he said, “You don’t think it could be worthwhile in itself?”

  She remained outwardly composed, but he had the sense she was struggling. There was so much he didn’t know about her; he couldn’t guess what all she was weighing in the balance. Finally, with resolve, she said, “I won’t ever leave Lewis. I love him—it’s important you understand that. So I don’t see the point. It would just bring us both pain.”

  Sorrow settled in him, petulant disappointment floating on top. He said, “I should go.”

  She didn’t argue but escorted him back through the house. At the front door, they paused. “Please give my apologies to Lewis for not coming to dinner tomorrow,” he said.

  “I will.” She paused. “What will you do? Will you join up?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t want to.”

  “Of course not.”

  “Didn’t the idea of animals being mistreated use to drive you to blind fury? Don’t you feel the same way about people?” She stopped, placed her hand on his arm, ardent, damp-eyed. “We must be brave.”

  He saw she was warmed by her sense of her own goodness. Was he, in the same way, seduced by an idea of his own virtue? How could anyone see clearly through the innate haze of self-righteousness? “You wouldn’t even stand up to your father.”

  Her hand fell away. “You’d compare that to this?”

  “I’m only saying it’s easy enough to tell others to be brave when you’ve always chosen the safest path.”

  “That’s not fair. We’re not all as free as you to choose our own way.”

  “Choose, yes. You said you wished you were less conventional—well, you could have been, but you chose over and over again to do what was expected. And that’s fine, but don’t pretend someone else made you this way.”

  “I don’t!”

  “Good!”

  They stood glaring furiously at each other. She yanked open the door, and he strode out, donning his hat, hearing the slam behind him but looking resolutely ahead, away.

  Out the door, down the street, out of the city. There—he had it, a resolution.

  New York City

  April 1942

  Four months later

  A doorman ushered Marian off Fifth Avenue and across a black marble lobby into the custodianship of a brass-buttoned elevator operator who wore a faint smirk as he looked her over. He flung the grate closed, cranked over the lever Marian thought of as a throttle, sent them upward. She wondered what the other pilots had worn when they showed up for their interviews. “Your floor, miss.”

  Alone in the hallway she paused to gather herself, smoothing her trousers, adjusting her logbook under her arm. She knocked, and a uniformed maid opened the door to Jacqueline Cochran’s apartment.

  Inside and into splendor. The foyer’s floor was inset with a marble aviator’s compass. Along one wall a glass table and case were crowded with flying trophies—globes and cups and spires and winged figures. A mural of famous aircraft covered the walls and ceiling. Marian craned and swiveled as though she were at an air show: the Wright Flyer, the Spirit of St. Louis, Amelia’s Lockheed Vega, a squadron of biplanes, a stray zeppelin, and, of course, Jackie herself winning the Bendix transcontinental race.

  In Alaska, in February, Marian had heard from a pilot who’d heard from his sister who flew crop dusters in California about a telegram she’d received from a woman named Cochran. She was recruiting female pilots to join the Air Transport Auxiliary in Britain, ferrying warplanes. EVERY FRONT NOW OUR FRONT, the telegram said. FOR THOSE DESIRING QUICK ACTIVE SERVICE SHORT OF ACTUAL COMBAT BUT INCLUDING FLIGHT EXPERIENCE WITH COMBAT PLANES THIS SERVICE ABROAD SEEMS IDEAL CHANCE.

  Marian, panicked she would be too late, had cabled Jackie Cochran directly, giving a truncated explanation of her bush flying, a tally of her hours, a plea for consideration. Warplanes! If they took her, she would fly warplanes, the kind of aircraft she’d seen transiting through Alaska ever since Lend-Lease passed, hundreds of them bound for Russia. An answer tap-danced in along the wires the next day. Come to New York for an interview. If satisfactory, you will proceed directly to Montreal for flight check and from there to England.

  The maid steered her across a grand living room where a man was talking on the telephone in clipped, businesslike tones and down a hallway, its walls frescoed with more aircraft. A smartly dressed young woman brushed by, carrying an armful of files. Marian paused to examine a framed newspaper photo of Jackie in a cockpit, holding up a small hand mirror to apply lipstick.

  In a bright room with windows open over the East River, Jackie sat behind a white-and-gold desk, half submerged in a lake of papers held down against the warm breeze by paperweights of different sizes and materials: a brass eagle, a hunk of amethyst, a compass. As she stood and reached across to shake Marian’s hand, Marian absorbed her careful blondness, the red silk of her belted dress. She seemed a lacquered and corrected sort of person, a flattering portrait of a woman painted atop that very woman.

  After they sat down, Jackie toggled a finger at Marian. “This won’t do.”

  Marian thought Jackie was summarily rejecting her. “I won’t?”

  “You need to be an ambassador. You’re meant to represent American women. Ladies. Not grease monkeys.” Her accent was carefully refined, but underneath was a disguised twang, a sharp elbow.

  Marian looked down at herself. “I thought about getting a dress.”

  “Why on earth didn’t you?”

  In the morning she’d hesitated outside the glass doors of Macy’s, stylish ladies sweeping past, the corners of their shopping bags bumping her imperiously. She’d glimpsed gleaming floors and counters, bottles of perfume, her own incongruous reflection. “I didn’t want to get my hopes up,” she told Jackie.

  “That’s all inside out. You must dress for your aspirations.”

  “I don’t aspire to be anything other than a pilot.”

  Jackie’s smile was more of a wince. “Don’t be stubborn. You must know they want the contrast, the magazine pictures of the pretty girl like any other, neat as a pin, hair curled, serving coffee and cake, who happens to be the same girl flying the big plane. You can’t have the pilot without the lady.”

  So the lipstick in the cockpit was an armoring, not an obeisance or a pandering affectation but something more like a beetle settling its wings down into a smooth shield.

  * * *

  —

  An incomplete history: Jacqueline Cochran is born Bessie Lee Pittman in 1906, raised in shabby itinerancy in the humid sawmill towns of northern Florida by people who are almost certainly her biological parents, though later she’d tell everyone she was an orphan, preferring the idea of herself as separate. She is one of five children, a barefoot urchin, a crab-catcher and chicken thief. The story she tells—and it’s likely true enough—is that she wore dresses made of flour sacking and slept on a straw mattress in a shack on stilts with oiled paper for windowpanes.

  A leering old man tells her she’d started out as a boy but an Indian had shot her through with an arrow when she was very small, making her navel and surprising her so thoroughly that she’d sat down on an ax, becoming a girl. A girl is a boy who has sat on an ax, he says.

  She wonders why boys still have navels, then. Had they not been surprised when the Indian shot them? Or was it that there weren’t any axes around? The air smells of the high sharp burn of a blade through wood. A fine layer of sawdust sticks to her skin. She wanders where she will. When she is very small, she witnesses a man lynched in the woods, burned.

  Bessie Lee, eight years old, has a night job pushing a cart through a cotton mill, bringing spools to the weavers. As Jackie Cochran will tell it one day, that’s how she earns the money to buy her f
irst pair of shoes. She knows to eat her lunch quickly and hide in her cart for a nap, hopefully unnoticed by the men. (She learns to punch and kick, which is sometimes enough.) Soon she gets promoted to spinner and walks until dawn between the rows of bobbins, looking for snags. Lint in her lungs, ears full of the screeching machines. The steamy hot southern night presses down on the mill’s long roof, presses down on the cotton fields and the red clay earth as the child reaches into a machine and ties a broken thread back together with her small, nimble fingers, sets the bobbin spinning again.

  Bright little girl. Again she is promoted. She oversees a gang of fifteen children who inspect the newly woven fabric for flaws, fifteen bent and wizened miniature people, hunched like jewelers over smooth, rippling cool cotton.

  During a mill strike, ten years old, she gets a job in a beauty shop sweeping up shorn hair and mixing shampoo.

  Here begins her rise.

  * * *

  —

  Jackie clasped her hands on her desk, said to Marian, “If you’re picked, you’ll transport planes where they need to go. From factories to airfields, for example, or from airfields to repair depots or vice versa, freeing up RAF pilots for combat. No matter your experience, you’ll start with trainers. Everyone does. If you’re good enough, you’ll upgrade from there. You’ll learn a whole class of planes—twin-engines, say—and then be expected to transport types you’ve never flown before just by reading the specs. It’s an actual, concrete contribution, but it will be difficult. Do you think you’re up for it?”

  Marian was so terrified of saying something that would mean she would not get to do what Jackie had described, she found she could not speak. She nodded.

  “Yes?” said Jackie.

  A whisper: “Yes.”

  “Did you fly here from Alaska?”

  “Yes.”

  “In what?”

  “A Beechcraft 18.”

  “How long did it take?”

  “Nine days.”

  “Not a speed record, then.”

  “There was some weather, and I stopped to visit my brother in Oregon.” Poor Jamie, cornered by his own goodness, trying to talk himself both into and out of joining up. What should I do? he’d said. She said maybe he could get a job making recruitment posters. She wanted him safe.

  “In Alaska, you must be used to weather.”

  “I’m used to it being awful.”

  “Good. The Brits aren’t teaching ATA pilots to fly on instruments, so you’ll have a leg up. There’s lots of cloud and fog over there, and it comes on you quick.”

  “Why aren’t they teaching them instruments?”

  Jackie poked at a stack of papers. “They say because they want the ferry pilots to stay within sight of the ground and not be tempted to go over the top. It’s wishful thinking. The climate there is pernicious.” She paused briefly to let Marian admire the word. “You get caught out, and then what? Even if you know what you’re doing, it’s hazardous. You’ve heard of Amy Johnson? The English girl who flew to Australia? She was flying for the ATA and had plenty of experience on instruments, and she still got stuck above the cloud and baled out and drowned. I don’t mean to scare you. You’d have heard about it anyway before long.”

  “I know lots of pilots who’ve died.”

  “Me too. By the way, if you get over there, don’t tell the Brits I was complaining. They think I complain too much. But in my opinion, not teaching instruments is a waste of airplanes. And pilots. They say safety’s the reason for it. I think it’s more about ex— What’s the word? More about being fast and cheap. What’s that word?”

  “Efficiency? Expediency?”

  “Expediency! That’s it. I’m always learning new words. I collect them. What sort of schooling did you get?”

  “Only to eighth grade.”

  “But you know words.”

  “I read a lot as a kid.”

  For the first time, like a lighthouse newly lit, Jackie emitted a gleam of fellow feeling. “So you’re like me. An autodidact. That means you’re not afraid to work.”

  “I like to work.”

  “Do you know, I bought my own Model T when I was fourteen? With money I made doing hair.”

  * * *

  —

  By eleven, Bessie Lee Pittman is cutting hair, rolling and pinning and plaiting it. She has a way with beauty, with improvement. Respectable women come in through the shop’s back door, embarrassed by their vanity, while the prostitutes, the fancy girls, march in the front. Bessie Lee likes the fancy girls, the stories their madam tells about distant cities.

  She doesn’t tell Marian, or anyone, this part of the story: Fourteen or so, she comes up pregnant, marries the father, Robert Cochran. The baby stays with the Pittmans in Florida while she moves to Montgomery, buys herself that Model T with money made from doing permanent waves. But is being a beautician enough? For her? For little Robert Jr.? She trains to become a nurse, takes a job with a doctor in a mill town. In the light of an oil lamp with a corncob wick, she extracts a baby from a woman laboring on a too-familiar straw mattress. Three other children are lying on the floor. There’s no clean blanket to wrap the baby.

  No, this is all wrong. This must not be her life.

  Robert Jr., playing in the Pittmans’ backyard, four years old, dies in an accident. A fire. He’s buried under a heart-shaped headstone. Jackie erases him from her story of herself, can’t bear not to.

  Away, away. She must get away.

  Twenty years old, divorced, Jacqueline Cochran arrives in New York City, gets herself hired at Antoine’s beauty salon in Saks Fifth Avenue. Monsieur Antoine, Antoine de Paris, the original celebrity stylist, has a flair for the next big thing. He’d invented the shingle cut and a charmingly gamine coif as short as a boy’s that he gave to Coco Chanel, Edith Piaf, Josephine Baker. He likes Jackie and her strict lipstick and resolutely powdered nose, the whiff of sawdust under her expensive perfume.

  Every winter she travels from New York to Antoine’s Miami outpost, driving her Chevrolet in one long go, picking up hitchhikers for company. In Miami there are speakeasies and jazz bands and casinos, swanky supper clubs, cocktails, and long white beaches. You wouldn’t know there was any Great Depression from Jackie’s silk stockings, her gold compacts with little round mirrors that show only her a bit of herself at a time. But none of it is enough. None of it lasts. Curls go limp. Oil seeps through the powder. Up in the Panhandle there’s still that grave marked by a heart. The night sky presses on the roof of her hotel, on the palm trees in its gardens and the flamingos sleeping under them. The wish to break free persists, but break free from what? The gilded life she has so laboriously constructed around herself? Away, away, but to where?

  * * *

  —

  “I bought myself a Ford, too, as a kid,” Marian said. “I earned the money driving a delivery truck.”

  Jackie’s approval shone more brightly. “Is that so? Laudable. What will you do with the Beechcraft if you go abroad?”

  “Sell it, maybe. Store it. I don’t know. It’s had a hard run already. I’ve been a bush pilot.”

  “I know. Your telegram said.” Jackie held out her hand for Marian’s logbook, flipped to the last page, looked at the total hours. Her plucked and penciled eyebrows rose and flexed. “I was surprised I hadn’t heard of you, if you’ve flown this much. I thought I had a good idea of the most experienced girls out there, but this goes to show.”

  Marian waited to hear what it went to show, but Jackie just kept paging through the book. “I’ve kept mostly to the north,” she said. “And to myself.”

  “You’ve certainly flown.”

  Goaded by the remembered gleam of the flying trophies, the gleam of Jackie’s hair, Marian said, “I have more hours than are in there. A lot more.”

  At once Jackie clouded over. “Why
aren’t they recorded?”

  Marian shouldn’t have said anything. She looked hard out the window, trying to think how to explain that she’d flown for a bootlegger without a license, that she’d been Jane Smith before she could be Marian Graves again. “For a while,” she said finally, “I was going by a different name.”

  “Why?”

  “I’d left my husband, and I didn’t want him to find me.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “He’s dead.”

  “I see.” Jackie followed her gaze out the window, seemed to be thinking.

  * * *

  —

  In 1932, Jackie finds herself at a dinner party in Miami, seated beside a Wall Street millionaire still in his thirties, Floyd Odlum. He is from Union City, Michigan—humble roots, a Methodist minister’s son who’d made himself into a financier. In 1929, he’d had a bad feeling, heebie-jeebies severe enough that he sold off most of his holdings before the crash. After, he bought up companies cheap. They say he is the only man in America to make money on the Depression. He’d heard there was a woman at dinner who actually worked for a living (he didn’t meet many of them) and asked to be seated next to her.

  Over crab cakes, he asks: What do you want?

  The salt, if you wouldn’t mind, Jackie says.

  Ha. I meant in life.

  Her own cosmetics company. But there is so much territory, so much competition, especially with everybody tightening purse strings, some people left with just strings and no purse.

  Little luxuries go a long way when you’re feeling downtrodden, she says.

  He says, Hope in a lipstick.