On Wings Of The Morning

by Marie Bostwick

  Even now, just thinking about it made me want to throw something. Without thinking, I grabbed the P-38 model that was sitting on my desk and furiously launched it across the room and toward the door, which opened just before the model crashed into it.

  “What the ... ?” Instinctively, my replacement lifted his hand to shield himself from the tiny P-38 attack and closed his fist around the body of the little plane as deftly as if he’d been catching a ball on the fly. “Is this some new kind of combat simulation?”

  My hand flew up to cover my mouth, and my voice was muffled, blocked by my outstretched fingers. “Morgan?” I squeaked in disbelief. “What are you doing here?”

  Previously distracted by the Lilliputian onslaught, Morgan now focused his attention on me. He looked just as surprised as I felt. “Georgia? I’m the new navigation and instruments instructor. They told me to come here and meet up with the instructor I’ll be replacing.” His furrowed brow smoothed out as a smile spread slowly across his face. “I’m awfully glad to see you, Georgia. I didn’t think I’d ever see you again. But”—he shrugged, confused—“what are you doing here?”

  I’d heard from Pamela that he’d been found, and I’d thanked God for it, but Pam’s letter hadn’t said anything about Morgan being sent home. I’d assumed he was still in the Pacific. What was going on? “Morgan, is this some kind of a joke? Did Hemingway put you up to this?”

  “Pardon me?”

  I didn’t answer. I was still trying to get my mind around this whole situation. But the confusion Morgan’s face told me that, no indeed, he wasn’t kidding. He glanced around the room, craning his neck as if the person he was supposed to meet might be hiding under a desk or behind the American flag that stood next to the blackboard.

  “They told me I’d find the old instructor in here. I guess he must have stepped out for a minute. Have you seen him?”

  “Yeah,” I said in a voice brittle with irritation. “I have. You’re looking at him.”

  Suffice it to say, we didn’t start off on a very good note. Certainly Morgan wasn’t the first pilot I’d met who had been so unable to conceive of a female flight instructor that he mistook me for the secretary, file clerk, cleaning woman, or girlfriend of the “real” instructor—far from it—but somehow I’d expected more from him. We quarreled, and by the time it was over, I’d stormed out of my office and walked home without even showing him around.

  By the time I reached my apartment, I’d walked off a good bit of my mad and actually felt ashamed of myself. After all, it wasn’t his fault. All he’d done was taken a job; he didn’t know it was my job. But, still, of all the people to have replace me! The man who’d wooed me one minute, rejected me the next, and then sailed off to the Pacific without ever sending me so much as a postcard. Of all the humiliations I’d suffered since Hemingway had triumphantly given me notice, this had to be the worst. For a minute, I thought of just going back to the base, turning in my wings, and going home. After all, it was just a matter of days until they’d force me to do exactly that. Why prolong the agony?

  I spent the rest of the day and evening pacing, thinking, and riding the roller coaster of my emotions, but by nightfall I’d come to a conclusion. No matter what, I wasn’t going to let them get to me. Uncle Sam, and Colonel Hemingway, and the reporter from the Galveston Gazette, and every man on the face of the earth who’d ever told me I should trade in my wings for an apron and a wire whisk could just kiss my backside. And if Morgan Glennon felt that way, well, then, he could pucker up and get in line! They could be as ungrateful and mean-spirited as they wanted, but I wasn’t going to stoop to their level. I was going to do my job and do it well until the minute they said I couldn’t. In the end, they’d force me out, but when they did, I’d leave with my head held high and my dignity intact.

  Before I went to bed that night, I brushed my uniform and dragged out my ironing board, carefully pressing a knife-edge crease into my slacks and made sure my battle jacket was spotless and free of even the thought of a wrinkle. Come hell or high water, I was going to be the sharpest-looking, most professional instructor on base. Even so, I knew a well-pressed uniform could only mask so much. At least until December 20th, I was still a WASP, and if Morgan was smart, he’d best watch out for my sting!

  Of course, that was before I heard about the stunt he’d pulled with Lieutenant Anders. When I got wind of that ... Well, let’s just say that my opinion of Morgan Glennon was considerably altered.

  38

  Morgan

  Dillon, Oklahoma—November 1944

  Crossing the border from Kansas into Oklahoma, I glanced at Georgia for what must have been the tenth time since we’d left Liberal, but I couldn’t help myself; I just had to make sure she really was there, sitting in the front seat of the Packard I’d borrowed from Paul, on the way to Thanksgiving dinner with my family.

  Less than two weeks before, she’d hurled a model plane in my direction, along with a variety of names and accusations, and then stormed off. Well, I hadn’t taken too kindly to that. I’d stormed off myself, to the watering hole nearest the base, ordered a beer, and waited for the desire to punch something to fade. Before long Anders, the base commander’s toadying aide, showed up and parked himself on the bar stool next to me, getting drunk and giving his opinion on women, the WASP, and the world in general.

  When I sat down, I’d felt bitter, twisted, and misunderstood, but after five minutes of listening to the obnoxious aide, my attitude had altered considerably. If this jerk’s posture in any way reflected that of his boss (and I was pretty sure that was the case; Lieutenant Anders clearly didn’t have the smarts to come out with an opinion that hadn’t been issued to him by whatever superior he was currently fawning upon), then I didn’t blame Georgia one bit for her outburst. If I’d been in her shoes, I’d have probably thrown a grenade, not just a toy airplane.

  “Of course,” Anders remarked knowingly before taking another drink of his Lucky Stripe, “it was all a publicity stunt from the start.” He put down his glass, leaving a long streak of beer foam, like a child’s milk mustache, on his upper lip.

  “Uh,” I said, lowering my head and tapping my lip with my finger. Anders looked confused for a minute but then caught on, wiping the foam from his face with the back of his hand.

  “A publicity stunt? How do you figure?”

  “Well, sure it was! This whole idea of letting women fly airplanes was just publicity, something to make the folks at home feel good, a nice little human-interest story to distract people from the horrors of war. Keep up morale, don’tcha know. It’s not like these little girls do any serious flying. I mean, ferrying planes is just a cakewalk.”

  “Oh, yeah? Is that what you think?” I thought about Georgia and our flight from Arizona to San Diego, how she’d handled that big cargo plane like she’d been doing it all her life, and about the stories we’d shared of stalled engines, frozen wing flaps, and landing blind on runways so thick with fog you couldn’t see five feet in front of you. A cakewalk. Right.

  The drunken aide nodded. “I mean, you’re a pilot, you know what I’m talking about. An airplane is no place for a woman. Am I right?”

  “So, you’re not a pilot yourself?”

  He shook his head and belched. “I went to Langley, but after a couple of weeks the brass decided I was too valuable as an administrator to risk losing me in combat.”

  Meaning you washed out, I thought.

  “That’s when they made me Colonel Hemingway’s aide. It’s a plum assignment. The colonel’s going places. Very well thought of in Washington,” he whispered conspiratorially. “And I’m going with him. Of course, I had a little advantage getting the job. My uncle George is at the Pentagon. He and Hemingway were at West Point, so Uncle George put in a good word for me.” Anders winked as he gripped the handle of his beer mug and took another drink.

  “That’s always the way. Am I right? And not just in the army. It’s not what you know, it’s who you know. I mean
, you must have had somebody pulling for you, or you wouldn’t be here, would you?” A flush of heat and anger rose on my flesh, knowing what he said was probably true but hating him for saying it.

  “And that girl you’re replacing,” he declared, holding up one finger and wagging it at me. “She must have pulled something or someone to get here, if you know what I mean.” He guffawed, pleased with himself. I felt my hand close into a fist. With a lascivious sneer, Anders cupped his two hands in front of his chest. “I mean, did you get a load of the personalities on her? I’d like to get me some of that, I can tell you. Half the guys on base have tried it on with her, but she gives ’em all the brush-off. Yeah”—he snorted—“like you can make me believe she’s not putting it out for somebody. If she wasn’t, she’d never have gotten within five hundred miles of this job. Am I right? She don’t give the time of day to a lower rank, but you can’t tell me she doesn’t have round heels for the fella that’s got enough bars on his shoulders. Am I—”

  But before he could finish, I stood up, grabbed him by the scrawny collar that circled his scrawny neck, and answered his question with a single haymaker directly to the bridge of his nose. It broke with a dull but satisfying crack, and Anders flew backward and fell to the floor unconscious.

  Hearing the noise, the bartender shouted and ran over to see what the ruckus was, but when he saw it was Anders laid out on the floor, he just grinned and said, “Somebody should have done that a long time ago.”

  I dug a dollar out of my pocket, laid it on the bar, and walked out.

  After I got outside I started to wonder if I’d just gotten myself fired, but I didn’t care. I’d have done it again. It was the first time I’d purposely punched another human being since Johnny McCurdle, and the result was just as satisfying, maybe more so.

  As it turned out, either Colonel Hemingway detested his aide as much as everyone else, or Anders had been right and my “connections” made me too dangerous to can, because the next day all Hemingway said was it better not happen again.

  And I think Georgia might have heard what happened, because when I saw her next she was, if not exactly friendly, at least not as frosty as she had been. She let me sit in on her classes, gave me a tour of the base, and a thorough run-down of how to get past the bureaucratic snafus that were peculiar to this operation, and generally did a great job of preparing me to take over in December. I wanted very much to ask her about my letter and why she’d never answered it, but I figured it would be best to wait for her to speak first. Obviously, she didn’t feel the same about me as I did about her, or she would have said something, but I was determined to change her mind.

  It had to happen; it was meant to be. If not, why would we have been brought together in Liberal, Kansas, of all places? I viewed our reunion not as coincidence, but as appointment with destiny. Georgia Welles was meant to be my girl.

  I asked her out to dinner every day, and every day she said no. On Tuesday I asked if she’d join me for Thanksgiving dinner with the family. I don’t know if I’d worn her down, or won her over, or if she was simply overcome by an unexpected wave of holiday spirit, but she finally said yes. I was so surprised that I actually asked her to repeat herself.

  “I’m sorry. What was that?”

  Her eyes smiled. “I said, ‘Yes, I’d love to have dinner with you and your family.’”

  After that I just grinned.

  Seeing her sitting in the front seat of the Packard wearing a new dress and fussing nervously with her sleeve, I was grinning again.

  39

  Georgia

  Dillon, Oklahoma—Thanksgiving Day, 1944

  The land around Dillon is flat as a pancake, so I could see the Glennon farm a good mile before we turned into the driveway. It had a big barn flanked by a one-story frame house with a peaked roof and a good-sized porch that must have been a nice spot to spend an evening when the weather was fine. There were flower beds near the porch, filled with bare branches that looked like rosebush canes. And next to the house, surrounded by a swath of protective chicken-wire fencing, was an enormous dormant vegetable garden. It must have been something to see at the height of summer. As we got closer I noticed something else, something that was definitely not to be found on most other farms.

  “Morgan, is that a train caboose next to your house?”

  “Sure is. That’s where Aunt Ruby lives. It’s all fixed up inside. Has a little sitting room and a wood stove for heating and everything. And over there,” he said, pointing to a place just east of the barn, “is an old freight car that’s been made into the biggest henhouse you’ve ever seen. The Glennon chicken and egg business is quite a going concern.”

  I laughed.

  “I’m serious,” he said, mocking offense. “My grandpa hauled home those train cars one day. We remodeled them together—the caboose so Ruby would have a place of her own and the freight car so I could start my own egg business. That was back in the Depression, and let me tell you, if it hadn’t been for the chickens and Mama’s quilts, I’m not sure we would have made it.”

  “Your grandfather must have been a smart man.”

  “He was,” Morgan said quietly. “And a good one. You’d have liked him.”

  “And your mother’s quilts, is she still making them?”

  “Not like she did back then. During the Depression she turned out simple nine-patch designs on a sewing machine as fast and cheap as she could, just so we could scrape together enough to survive. Now she’s gone back to what she really loves, making her special quilts, and all by hand. You’ve never seen anything like it. They look just like paintings and each one takes her months to finish.” Morgan took a right onto the drive that led to the farmhouse. “Here we are!”

  I cleared my throat and reached up to smooth my hair, thinking I should have worn a hat after all. Morgan looked at me, smiled, and reached over to pat my shoulder.

  “Don’t worry,” he said, pulling up in front of the house and turning off the engine. “They’re all going to love you.”

  I started to ask him how he could be so sure of that, but before I could say anything, a waving, smiling stream of people started pouring out of the front door and onto the porch.

  I was introduced to Morgan’s grandmother, Clare, first. Her hair was gray, and her face, with high, prominent cheekbones that made me wonder if there wasn’t some Indian blood in the family, was lined and weathered, but her eyes were bright and intelligent, and her grip was impressively strong. Later, over dinner, she declared she could still lift a bale of hay and carry it from field to farm. I believed her.

  Ruby was next. Morgan had told me about her, how she’d been his mother’s best friend since grade school, how she’d come to live with them when her husband, like so many Oklahomans during the starving dust-bowl years, went west to look for work and how, when he’d been killed in a logging accident, Ruby had just stayed on and become one of the family. It was a tragic history, but you wouldn’t have known it by looking at Ruby. She smiled easily and laughed often. She had a sharp, quick wit and was well informed on matters of local gossip, but there was nothing malicious about her humor. I liked her right away.

  Standing next to Ruby was a broad-faced, sandy-haired man of medium height who I mistakenly took for Morgan’s father, but he turned out to be Pete Norman, Ruby’s “friend.” Paul, I was informed, was still in the house, replacing a tube in the radio that had gone on the blink that morning. I shook Pete’s hand and responded in kind to his shy, “Nice to meet you, ma’am.”

  Then we moved on to the final member of the reception line, a petite, green-eyed woman of about forty whose auburn hair showed not a streak of gray, Morgan’s mother. She took my hand in hers and welcomed me. There was something calm and deep about her gaze, something that told you she had known sadness and survived. Her neck was long and slender, and she held her shoulders square. Morgan had told me about his mother’s crippled leg beforehand, but it was still surprising to see how she tightly clutched a
cane of polished wood in her left hand, and the effort and determination that went into every step she took. No wonder Morgan was so strong.

  “I’m pleased to meet you, Mrs. Glennon. Thank you for having me.”

  “Actually,” Morgan interrupted, “Mama is Mrs. Van Dyver. I forgot to tell you.”

  “Oh,” I said awkwardly, embarrassed by my error and distracted, wondering where I’d heard the name before. “I didn’t realize. I’m sorry.”

  “Everyone calls me Eva,” she said kindly just as a tall, lanky man strode purposefully onto the porch and declared proudly, with a foreign accent, “Eva Van Dyver.” Putting his arm around his wife’s shoulders, he then leaned down to give her a quick peck on the lips and added. “Which makes me the luckiest man in Oklahoma. The radio’s fixed. We can hear some music after dinner.” Looking at my surprised face, he said jovially, “Georgia! How nice to see you again. I knew Morgan was bringing a friend to dinner, but I had no idea it was you.”