On Wings Of The Morning

by Marie Bostwick

  Mama eyes were glued to my face, but she didn’t say anything. I couldn’t tell what she was thinking.

  “Mama, do you remember Mrs. Hutchinson from church?” Mrs. Hutchinson had been my fourth-grade Sunday school teacher, and Mama’s and even Grandma’s before that. “She wrote me a letter after I made lieutenant, congratulating me and saying how everybody was so proud to have a real live war hero come from Dillon.”

  Mama nodded. “Mrs. Hutchinson is right. Everybody in town is proud of you. You’re Dillon’s first pilot.”

  I shook my head. They were wrong. I could bear that, but I couldn’t bear the idea that Mama would think I was something I wasn’t. Even if it meant she’d think less of me, she had to know the truth. “Mama, I’m no hero. I just love to fly, that’s all. When I climb into the cockpit and feel the engine hum, it’s like feeling my own heart beating. And when I lift off from the runway and rise up toward the sun, it’s like reaching out to touch the door of heaven.” And it was, every single time. Just for a moment. Just until I remembered that somehow, some time in the past, someone had decided to make flying a way to wage war. What kind of a man was I?

  “As soon as I look down and see the airfield fading off in the distance, I’m afraid, because I know there’s a good chance of me or one of my friends not making it back. With all my heart I want to turn back at that moment, but I keep the plane on course because I know I have to. Somebody has to.”

  “Morgan! I think maybe I let you read too many books when you were little.” Mama’s tone was lighthearted and teasing. My heart sank. I thought she was going to make a joke out of it, start trying to sweep the truth under the rug like we always did, her holding the broom and me lifting the edge of the carpet to make sure it was well covered and out of sight. But she didn’t. Not this time.

  “Morgan, books are the only places where people aren’t afraid. Real people are scared every day. Some of them climb under a rock and hide, and others, the good ones like you, stuff their fears into a sack and do what they have to do. That may not be too courageous, but it’s enough to get the job done, and it takes a lot of heart. So, you just let Mrs. Hutchinson send her letters, all right?” And she smiled, smiled all the way to her eyes. She meant it. She knew I was afraid. She’d known it all along.

  I wished she’d said so before. I wished we could have learned to talk this way years ago, but at least we’d had this. It was a start.

  “Mama, I’ve got to go.”

  She nodded and reached across the table and took my hand. “Morgan, how do you suppose that out of the whole world, I got the best young man on the planet as my son?”

  I pulled her hand toward me and gave it a big kiss. “I’m glad you came, Mama.”

  “Nothing in the world could have kept me from it.”

  We hugged and said good-bye on the sidewalk. I held on to Mama for a long time, squeezing her as tight as I could. There were tears in her eyes and mine, but I didn’t try to keep them back. I kissed her through my tears and said, “I love you, Mama.”

  In the end, that was what it all came down to. Neither of us, not Mama and not me, was as brave as we wished we were. Maybe no one was. We loved each other anyway. That was the one thing that always had been and always would be true.

  A few hours later my gear was stowed beneath the cramped bunk that would be my quarters until we docked. I stood on the deck of a destroyer, watching the fast receding shadow of the California coastline and thinking about what Mama had said.

  Sometimes you had to stuff your fears in a sack and do what you had to do. That might not be courage, but it was as close to it as I was going to get today.

  The sea was getting rough, and the wind blew cold across the deck. I cupped my hands and blew into them trying to warm them, but it was no good. I shoved my hands in my pockets and lifted my head. The coastline was gone. The only thing I could see, front, behind, and on every side, was the swelling and cresting of the blue-black ocean tide.

  PART THREE

  26

  Georgia

  Chicago, Illinois—July 1944

  “Georgia! Get in here! You’ve got to see this!”

  “Coming!” I promised as I put the last two punch cups on the silver-plated serving tray and carried it into the living room.

  “What do you think?” I looked up to see Pamela with her head tilted back, cheeks sucked in so the bones stood out, arms extended gracefully in a cover-girl pose, wearing a paper-plate hat covered with mounds of mismatched gift bows and tied under the chin with a garish lime green ribbon.

  Pamela batted her eyes seductively and shook her head ever so slightly, making the pile of bows quiver. “Irresistible, aren’t I?”

  “Definitely,” I said blandly as I set the tray on the coffee table. “I think you should wear that to church instead of a veil.” At this the entire group—Pamela, Fanny, Donna Lee, and two more of our old friends from Avenger Field, Jeannie Billings, and Becky Teeters, who had shared Doris’s bay—collapsed into gales of laughter. They laughed so hard they were literally crying.

  Suspicious, I leaned down and sniffed one of the punch cups. The ladylike pink liquid had a definite odor of grain alcohol. “Pam!” I scolded. “Did you spike the punch at your own bridal shower?”

  Pamela, too choked with laughter to answer, just shook her head.

  Donna Lee grinned and waved her hand above her head. “Of course she didn’t! What kind of a bride would do that? It was me,” Proud of herself even if her speech was a little slurred, she continued, “It’s just a little Jack Daniels, Georgie ... I mean, Georgia. I only put in half the bottle. Don’t be such a party pooper.”

  Smiling, I bent down, picked up the tray, and started back toward the kitchen.

  “Hey!” Pamela protested, “Where are you going with that? I’m thirsty!”

  “I’ll be right back,” I promised. “Why don’t you finish opening your presents? The big one in the corner is from me.”

  I left behind a wake of giggling protests and went back into the kitchen. Fran was standing at the sink, filling the coffeepot with water. “You read my mind,” I said. “Definitely time for some coffee. Make it strong.”

  “Will do,” Fran said as she put the pot on the stove and turned up the flame.

  “Frannie, thanks for letting me have Pam’s shower here. It was really nice of you, and they’re all having such a good time. I’m sorry about the punch.”

  Fran shrugged off my apology. “What’s to be sorry about? They’re just girls kicking up their heels a little. There’s nothing wrong with that. If it were up to me, I’d take the punch back in there and let them have at it. They’re having such fun.”

  “Yes, but they won’t be in the morning. Every one of those girls is due on the flight line tomorrow. Trust me. An airplane is no place to have a hangover. They may call me a party pooper today, but they’ll thank me tomorrow.

  “Anyway, thanks for letting me have them here. I thought about having the shower in Waukegan, but it would have been too hard for everyone to get to. As it was, it practically took an act of Congress to figure out how to get everybody to Chicago on the same day between assignments. If it weren’t for you, I could never have pulled it off.”

  “Really, it was no trouble,” Fran said as she washed cake crumbs off a plate. I picked up a dish towel and started drying. “Besides, I like your friends.”

  A shriek of delight erupted in the living room. Pamela’s voice called out, “Oh! They are just beautiful! Oh, Georgia! You shouldn’t have!”

  Fran looked a question at me. “Towels,” I reported. “Pink, and edged with eyelet lace. From Marshall Fields. Monogrammed.”

  Fran smiled. “Georgia, you always did know how to choose the perfect gift.” She put down the plate she was holding and wiped her hands on a nearby towel.

  “Come on. We can finish these later. Let’s go back to the party.”

  The presents had been opened, the cake eaten, the coffee drunk, and the whisky buzz had w
orn off, but nobody wanted to leave. Fran didn’t seem in a hurry to get rid of us, so we all stayed put. It was nice just to sit and talk. We talked about clothes we wanted but couldn’t afford, movie stars we’d never met, shoes, men, face cream, and diets—the same subjects that came up anytime girlfriends got to gossiping. But, also, as it did anytime a group of pilots gathered, whether they be male or female, the conversation soon turned to flying.

  All pilots enjoy hearing and telling war stories, but I think we WASP were even a little more eager in this regard. We really were doing something special, jobs that just a couple of years previously would have been utterly off-limits to women, and we were doing them as well as any man—sometimes even better. Originally we were only supposed to be assigned to ferry aircraft. But as time went by, the WASP were pulling all kinds of duty. Donna Lee and I were ferrying planes, though in just a few weeks I would get a new assignment. Pamela was a test pilot, taking up aircraft that had been recently repaired or rebuilt after accidents and making sure everything was in good working order. Sometimes it was and sometimes it wasn’t, so test piloting could be particularly hazardous. After our graduation from Avenger, Fanny, who was the tallest and strongest of us, went to four-engine school and learned to fly the huge B-17 bombers that pilots affectionately nicknamed the “Big Friend.”

  We took as much pride in the accomplishments of our sister WASP, even those we’d never met, as we did in our own. Fanny told us about Dora Dougherty and Dorothea Johnson, two WASP who’d been trained to fly the newest class of very heavy bombers, the enormous B-29 Superfortress. The Superfortress had been rushed into production without the kind of thorough testing and modifications that its predecessors had received. Consequently, its engine had a nasty habit of overheating and catching fire even before takeoff. Understandably, pilots were not too enthusiastic about getting behind the wheel of the B-29.

  “So,” Fanny said, “some bright-eyed colonel gets the idea of teaching a couple of girls to fly that big monster and then take them around the country on a little dog-and-pony show. You know, to kind of show the boys what they were missing. Maybe tweak them on the nose a little for being afraid to fly a plane that two little girls were handling with no problem.”

  “Did it work?” Fran asked.

  “You bet. One look at Dora and Dorothea and they were lining up around the block just waiting for a turn. They were not about to be shown up by a couple of girls. The girls didn’t get to fly them for long, though. After a couple of days the brass called from Washington and pulled the plug on the whole thing because they said it wasn’t right for them to be ‘putting the big football players to shame.’” Fanny made a sympathetic “poor baby” face, and we all cracked up.

  “Just like the words to the old song!” Donna launched into a lusty, if slightly off-key version of the WASP theme song, and everybody joined in.

  Zoot suits and parachutes

  And wings of silver, too.

  He’ll ferry planes

  Like his mama used to do!

  Becky and Jeannie were best friends and had some good stories of their own. They’d been stationed to a base in North Carolina and flew A-24s. They were assigned to tow targets back and forth across gunnery ranges, giving anti-aircraft artillery gunners a chance to improve their aim. “The gunners are supposed to aim at the targets, and, mostly, they hit them,” Becky said. “But Jeannie had a real close call last week. Somebody aimed right at her!”

  We gasped at this information, but Jeannie rolled her eyes. “They didn’t aim at me. Not on purpose, anyway. Becky, if you’re going to tell the story, then tell it right.”

  Becky looked offended and said, “Well, fine, then. You tell it.”

  “Fine. I will,” Jeannie said, giving Becky a good-natured elbow in the ribs. “The gunnery officers are supposed to fire tracer bullets to show the gunners where to aim. So the other day I was flying through the pattern, and I hear this noise—Crack! Crack! Crack!—like something was smacking against the fuselage. I radioed down that I think they might be hitting me. Then the gunnery officer comes back and he says, yeah, they had a new guy on the range who thought he was supposed to shoot the tracers right at the plane!”

  Jeannie started to laugh, and everybody else joined in. “Can you beat that?” she howled. “I can’t imagine what he thought that big white target I was towing behind me was for. Maybe he thought I was flying around up there hauling my laundry behind me so it would dry faster!”

  We laughed even harder, and Becky piped in proudly, “Yeah, and when she landed there were five big bullet holes in the fuselage. Just about this far from where her head had been!” Becky held up her thumb and forefinger to show us exactly how many inches her best friend had been from danger.

  Donna Lee whistled, impressed. “That was a close one!”

  “Oh, that’s nothing,” Becky said. “Stuff like that happens all the time. Target towing is dangerous, but somebody has to do it. Otherwise, we’ll never win this war and our boys will never get home.” Becky had a husband stationed in France. He was in the artillery.

  “Well,” I said, trying to lighten the mood a little. “For some of us, the war is nearly over. Isn’t that right, soon-to-be Mrs. MacAllister?” I turned to Pamela. “What do you think? Are you going to miss it? The three-hundred-mile hop that turns into a weeklong, cross-country marathon with no clean clothes to change into? The run-ins with crabby base commanders who hate all women, and especially women who fly airplanes? Coming in on final approach only to find that the landing gear sticks but nobody bothered to list that on the maintenance sheet?”

  The girls laughed. We’d all been through that one.

  “Are you sure you’re willing to give all that up, just for a lifetime of eternal wedded bliss with the handsomest pilot in this man’s army who also happens to worship the ground upon which your dainty feet walk?” I teased, fluttering my eyelashes. “Hmmm?”

  Fanny chimed in sarcastically. “Gosh, Georgia! You make it sound like so much fun. Come on. You’re not fooling anyone. You love every minute of it. Everybody knows you’d rather fly the dawn patrol over the Dakotas in the dead of winter than make love.”

  I rolled my eyes at Fanny. “Oh sure,” I scoffed.

  “Well, it’s true,” Fanny insisted. “You are the original career girl. You’re the Rosalind Russell of the air—untouchable and all business. Every single pilot on the base has tried to date you—”

  “And half the married ones!” Donna Lee interrupted, and the girls howled, but Fanny ignored them all and continued.

  “And you give them all the brush-off. What’s the matter with you? Don’t you ever think about getting married again?”

  The girls got a little quieter. They all knew about Roger, but they almost never mentioned him. Fanny had a habit of blurting things out sometimes. Probably the lingering effects of the punch weren’t helping her to temper that trait. By this time Fanny realized she’d said the wrong thing. Donna Lee elbowed her, and Fanny mumbled an indistinct apology.

  It was an awkward moment, and it was up to me to get us past it. “Well, I would think about it if I could find a beau as good-looking as Captain John MacAllister,” I said brightly. “But, this isn’t about me. It’s about the bride elect. So, come on, Pamela. I demand an answer to my question. Will you miss it? Cold chow served on mess trays? Sleeping in a barracks with ten other girls? The adventure? The glamour? The predawn wake-up calls?”

  Pamela lifted her shoulders toward her ears, took in a big, deep breath, and held it for a moment before exhaling dramatically and releasing her shoulders. “Yes.”

  The girls chuckled.

  “It’s true,” Pam smiled, but her voice was wistful. “I will miss it. How could I not? But what can I do? I love John, and I want to be with him. It wasn’t so bad before, when we were both assigned to Kansas. But he got this promotion, and it was just too good to pass up. But there’s no assignment for me. And if he marries an activated WASP, they’ll probably give th
e job to someone else. You know how the military feels about ‘fraternization.’” She held up her fingers, making quotation-mark movements around the forbidden term. “It’s a great opportunity for John. When we move to Alabama, he’ll be in charge of the whole training program. We’ve already rented a house, just a mile from the base. John will be able to come home for lunch,” she finished cheerfully.

  “That will be nice,” Fanny said, and Pamela nodded agreement.

  We were all quiet.

  “Oh, well.” Pamela shrugged nonchalantly. “But there is some good news. Did you hear? Georgia will be taking John’s old job. She’s going to Liberal, Kansas, to be a flight instructor.”

  The other girls murmured excited congratulations, and I happily accepted them. I’d always wanted to be an instructor; now I was finally going to get my chance. I’d only be teaching instrument instruction and navigation, but it was still exciting. I lifted my coffee cup in a toast. “Here’s to John! I’d never have gotten the assignment if he hadn’t recommended me. He’s a great guy, Pammie,” I said in all sincerity.

  “Well, he’d never have recommended you if he didn’t think you were the best pilot for the job, but, yes”—she sighed happily—“he is a great guy. I’m crazy in love with him. I must be. That’s the only thing that would make me give up flying.”

  “But,” I protested, “it’s not like you’re giving up flying. You’re just giving up flying for the WASP. Once the war is over and there’s enough fuel for private use, you’ll be able to go up anytime you want. I thought your dad was going to buy you and John a little Piper Cub for a wedding present.”

  “He is,” Pamela confirmed, “but, like you say, I’ll have to wait until the war is over to be able to fly. Even Daddy won’t be able to pull enough strings to keep me in fuel before gas rationing ends.”