On Wings Of The Morning

by Marie Bostwick

  “Come on,” I said, grabbing her suitcase and heading toward the door.

  Georgia’s forehead furrowed in confusion. “Where are we going? Morgan, you’re sweet to want to help me, but I’m not going to impose myself on your family for Christmas. I told you before, I appreciated their kindness, but I’d prefer if we kept our relationship—”

  “Georgia, will you just shut up! For once!” Her eyes grew wide at my outburst, and she started to answer me, but then changed her mind. “I’ve heard that speech two dozen times already and it’s getting stale! In fact, it makes me mad as hell, and you know why?” She shook her head, silent.

  “Because I’m a really nice guy and I’m crazy about you. And I think if you had a lick of sense, you’d see that. But!” I said loudly, giving an exaggerated shrug, “If you don’t like me, then there’s nothing I can do about it. Fine. Your loss. Mine, too, but I’ve accepted that. Just don’t go giving me that speech again, all right? Every time you do, it makes me want to punch something! In fact, the only thing that makes me madder is listening to the high-handed load of bull Hemingway was giving you. Especially after the swell job you’ve done here. Now, shut up and let’s go. Before I change my mind.” I stomped off without looking to see if she was following, but the click of high heels on the linoleum told me she was right behind.

  I walked as fast as I could. She was breathing heavy, trying to keep up and after a couple of minutes she shouted, “Morgan!”

  “What!”

  “Where the heck are you taking me?”

  “Chicago!” I snarled and kept right on walking.

  “Here,” I said, “take the controls for a while. I need a break.” Actually, I wasn’t tired at all, but I knew this would be the last chance Georgia would have for a long time, maybe even forever, to handle a big craft.

  “Thanks.” She smiled as she took over the wheel. I leaned back and opened a bottle of Coke I’d brought along. Georgia’s eyes scanned the horizon, and she adjusted her grip on the controls. I knew what she was doing, looking for that sweet spot, that place where you can feel every shift and shudder of the plane, like holding on to the reins of a horse just so, feeling the life and intent of the animal coming through the lines like electricity through a wire.

  Georgia laughed to herself. “I still can’t believe you just took this plane. This is government property, Morgan. You’ll be lucky if there aren’t a couple of MPs waiting for you when you land.”

  “Naw.” I took another swig of my drink. “I just told Lowell, the head mechanic, that I was taking her up for a little shakedown. She just came out of the shop yesterday. I thought it’d be a good idea to make sure everything’s working tip-top before I let the students take her up, that’s all. Who’d object to that? I think it’s darned nice of me, watching out for the welfare of my students this way. Especially during my personal time.”

  “Hemingway might have some objections if he hears I’m on board.”

  I grinned. “That’s why I offered Lowell twenty bucks not to mention that part to anybody.”

  “Morgan, you’re kidding! You paid him twenty—”

  I held up my hand to stop her protest. “I said I offered him twenty, but after he heard about how Hemingway treated you, he wouldn’t take it. Said you were a good pilot, never griped if you didn’t get your pick of the planes, always had your repair sheets in order, and made your students do the same. He respects you. Lots of the guys do, you know. Not everybody’s like Hemingway and that worm, Anders.”

  “I know that,” Georgia said. “It took a while for some of the men to come around, but once they saw I could do my job as well as anybody, most of them treated me fairly. Don’t get the idea that I’m leaving with hard feelings, Morgan, because I’m not. There are some things I think the military should have handled differently when it came to the WASP, but even so, this has been the best time of my life. It’s been a privilege to serve, and I wouldn’t have missed it for the world. I’m really going to miss it.”

  She was quiet for a moment, thinking. I watched her eyes move back and forth across the horizon, a wistful look on her face, as if logging the moment in her memory. I couldn’t help but think how beautiful she was.

  After a minute, her expression changed, and she returned to the present moment. Her lips bowed into a little smile, and her eyes sparkled. “Did you really knock out that little creep, Anders, because he’d said something nasty about me, or was that just a rumor?”

  I didn’t say anything. Just took another long drink from the bottle of Coke, swallowed, and grinned.

  41

  Georgia

  Chicago, Illinois—December 24, 1944

  It was a wedding only Delia could have arranged, with pink sweetheart roses in the middle of winter, a hoop-skirted bridal gown (and though the hoops on the maid-of-honor dress were smaller, I still swore revenge), a red-velvet wedding cake under white frosting, punch made with ginger ale and Luzianne tea. It was just so entirely Delia, and, of course, that’s what made the whole thing so perfect—right down to the groom.

  I’d always thought that when Delia married, if Delia married, it would only be because she’d finally cornered some hapless midwesterner into saying “I do” before he caught on to her moonlight-and-magnolias routine, but I was wrong. In the end, Delia had chosen carefully and, for her at least, well.

  Colonel Nathan Bedford Prescott III, fifty-something, handsome, tanned, and wearing a light-colored suit, who looked more like he was ready to take a stroll down the tree-lined boulevards of Charleston than the wind-swept, snow-banked sidewalks of Chicago, was not an actual colonel.

  “It’s an honorary title, of course,” Delia tittered as she introduced me to her intended on the night I arrived.

  “Of course,” I murmured, trying to keep my face convincingly blank. “I’m pleased to meet you, Colonel. Congratulations.” I reached out to shake his hand and was a little surprised when the colonel bowed formally, lifted my hand to his mouth and brushed it with his lips.

  “The pleasure,” he said in a southern baritone as smooth and golden as good Kentucky whiskey, “is entirely mine. Your mother has told me so many lovely things about you, Georgia.”

  “My mother?” Shocked, I stared at Delia and whispered out the side of my mouth, “You told him about ... you know?”

  “I did. I told him about you. About Florida and Earl. Everything. I love Nathan. If you love someone you should be honest with them, even if it means you might lose them. But”—she smiled—“I didn’t lose him. Nathan was just thrilled to learn that he’d be your step-daddy. Weren’t you, Nathan?”

  “Indeed, I was. Never having had children of my own, you can imagine how pleased I am to have so lovely and accomplished a young woman as yourself for my stepdaughter, Georgia. And it is with equal pleasure that I accept your kind congratulations.”

  I started to acknowledge his kindness, but the colonel contin-ured without taking a breath. “When I arrived in the cold frontier to establish my business less than a year ago, I had not thought to find so fair a flower of the South in such a climate, and yet, there she stands! A hothouse rose! Fragrant and rare, a flower fully blown, blooming amidst the bare branches in the bleak midwinter! And better than all this, she has agreed to be mine! Oh, yes! I accept your congratulations with all joy and all humility, for surely there is no more fortunate man on the face of the earth than I.” He ended his speech with another bow, this time to his bride, who sighed and held her hand to her breast.

  “Oh, Nathan! I do love you so!” Apparently forgetting I was even in the room, Delia moved forward, as if ready to embrace her groom, but I interrupted.

  “So, Colonel, you have a business here in Chicago?”

  “Yes,” he replied politely, though I could see it took some effort for him to take his eyes off his beloved. “A school. The Prescott Institute for Illustration and Art. I am the founder and headmaster.”

  “Really?” I was a little taken aback to find that the col
onel had an actual job. At first glance, I’d taken him for a snake-oil salesman. “So you’re an artist? How interesting.”

  The colonel smiled gently and shook his head. “No, no. You misunderstand. I am the founder and headmaster of the institute. My role is administrative, seeing to the admissions, finances, facilities, hiring and firing of staff ... that sort of thing. While not an artist myself, I certainly consider myself a patron of the arts.”

  “Nathan is a natural-born businessman,” Delia reported proudly. “The institute only opened a few months ago, yet he has already enrolled thousands of students!”

  “Thousands! You must have a large staff, not to mention a huge campus.”

  Delia beamed and said, “No! That’s the beauty of it! Nathan runs the entire thing out of his apartment with just some help from a secretary to help with correspondence and such. But after the wedding, I’ll quit Marshall Fields and take her job. Nathan is going to make me the dean of Student Affairs and Administration!”

  “You don’t have a campus, or a teaching staff?”

  “No,” he replied, without a trace of embarrassment. “Ours is a correspondence school. Our instructional methods were developed years ago by a friend of mine, Guillermo Puccini, a fine artist in the Italian tradition, who sold me the rights to his syllabus. Art, of course, is a timeless study, and the Prescott Institute for Illustration and Art teaches the classic methods, so we have no need for instructors, especially these so-called ‘modern artists’ with their wild ideas and nonexistent technique. Thus, we are able to maintain the purity of our curriculum,” he explained with every appearance of sincerity.

  “I correct all the lessons myself and grade them according to a standard system of points developed by Guillermo. Each lesson arrives monthly, in a simple, easy-to-follow format and is available to persons of talent across the country, whether they reside in the bustling borough of Brooklyn or the most isolated hamlets of the western plains, and at a cost that is less than a tenth of the tuition of a conventional art school.”

  My first instincts were right, I thought, smiling to myself. He is a snake-oil salesman.

  Now that I thought about it, I remembered seeing advertisements for the Prescott Institute on the backs of matchbook covers and some of the less reputable magazines. The ads were littered with testimonials from satisfied alumni who purported to be making their living as professional artists, thanks to the instruction they’d received at Prescott. And the admission process was easy! All you had to do was complete a picture of a boy (guided by a system of grid lines to help you out), send it to the “Admissions Department” along with your two-dollar application fee, and the institute would score your drawing to see if you had “the talent it takes to become a professional artist or illustrator!”

  I wanted to ask Colonel Prescott how many applicants got turned away, but I was pretty sure I knew the answer. In the eyes of the Prescott Institute, anyone who could pay the application fee had the talent to become a professional artist or illustrator. Still, Nathan didn’t seem like a malicious con man, just a hopeless romantic. Like Delia coming to believe her invented southern-belle past, the colonel actually seemed to believe he really was providing a service. And maybe he was. For two dollars a month, he sold people a little piece of a dream. Well, maybe that was all right. Maybe, when they filled in the grid on the back of the matchbook application, that’s what they’d been looking for in the first place.

  But no matter how questionable my new stepfather’s profession, when I saw the way he looked at Delia and the way she looked at him, I knew that some things were certain: Nathan and Delia were very much alike and very much in love.

  The wedding itself was small, just fifty guests in attendance. There were a few people from the neighborhood, but most were friends of Delia and Nathan that I hardly knew. However, the ceremony was lovely, as was the reception at Delia’s apartment.

  Not really having anyone to talk with, I was more than happy to take charge of the punchbowl. Sister Mary Patrick, my old teacher from St. Margaret’s, came to get a glass of punch, and we chatted for a bit.

  “Ah,” she sighed wistfully as she downed the last of her punch and peered at Delia and Nathan, who were standing across the room, surrounded by well-wishers. “They look so happy together. Your sister’s a darlin’ woman. It’s happy I am to see she’s found the right man at last.”

  “So am I,” I said and meant it.

  She wished me well and went off to visit with Father Kearney, who’d performed the ceremony. Before long, Delia broke away from her admirers and approached the punch table.

  “Georgia, you’re an angel to take care of this! But you haven’t even had a piece of cake yet. Why don’t you take a break and get something to eat?”

  “Maybe later, Delia. I’m not all that hungry.”

  Delia frowned. “No, I’ve noticed that you haven’t had much of an appetite since you got here. Is something wrong? You can tell me.”

  For an instant, I entertained the idea of telling Delia everything: about Morgan and our last flight together and how he’d hefted my bag out of the plane and reached to help me down, and how, when I’d taken his hand, it felt like an electric current was running up my arm. About how I’d leaned forward, coming inches from kissing him full on the lips and wrapping my arms around his shoulders, but had caught myself at the last second and given him a quick peck on the cheek instead, thanking him for the ride and walking away without looking back. Part of me wanted to tell Delia all of it, but I didn’t. There was no point. It was too late now.

  “I’m fine. Just a little tired maybe. I probably should go soon. I thought I’d sleep at Frannie’s tonight.”

  “What are you talking about?” Delia said, looking offended. “You’re going to stay here tonight, aren’t you? It’s Christmas. You should be with your family.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Delia, it’s your wedding night. I’m sure you and Nathan would like your privacy. You don’t need me hanging around.”

  “Don’t be silly! Of course, you can stay here tonight. You can stay here every night. In fact, that’s what I came over to speak to you about. Nathan and I have been talking. You know, we need a bookkeeper for the institute. You could live here, at home, and work for Nathan. Now that you’re finished with all this flying nonsense, I think it’s just a perfect solution for everyone! We’ll just be one big happy family—you, your daddy, and I!” Delia smiled and opened her hands wide, as if she were handing me a beautiful gift.

  I took a deep breath and counted to ten silently.

  “Delia,” I said slowly, trying to keep my voice even and my emotions under control. “That’s a sweet offer. Really. And Nathan seems like the perfect man for you, but he’s not my daddy. As for this flying ‘nonsense,’ I’m not done with it. I’ll be going back to Waukegan tomorrow night to try and salvage what’s left of my business.”

  “But that’s silly, Georgia. Waukegan’s not your home. You can’t tell me that you ever thought of it that way.”

  “No,” I admitted. “I never did. To tell you the truth, I’m not sure I’ve ever had a home, but if I did, it’s in the air. That’s what I’m going back to.” She looked hurt, and I felt a stab of guilt. The last thing I wanted to do was hurt her feelings, especially not on her wedding day.

  “Would it be all right if I came down to see you next weekend? Or maybe you and Nathan could come to Waukegan and see me. If the weather warms up, I can take you for an airplane ride.” Delia smiled and nodded, and I gave her a kiss on the cheek. “Say good night to Nathan for me. And congratulations—to both of you.”

  42

  Morgan

  Dillon, Oklahoma—April 1944

  The house was quiet. Mama sat at her quilt frame with her back to me, engrossed in her work. I stood just inside the door and watched her for a moment as she outlined the unfurled petals of a peony with tiny stitches, her needle rocking back and forth in rhythm with the tune she was humming. It took a minute for her to se
nse my presence.

  “Morgan!” she exclaimed, looking over the tops of the reading glasses she’d recently begun wearing for close work. “This is a nice surprise! I wasn’t expecting you until Sunday.”

  “I know. One of the guys let me borrow his car, so I thought I’d come out and see if I couldn’t wrangle myself an invitation to dinner.”

  “Oh, I think we can probably make room for you,” she teased. “We’re having a nice lamb stew with some of the spring peas and new potatoes, but it’ll be a while until dinner. It’s Paul’s day off. He went for a walk. Ruby drove into town to buy some trim for her wedding dress, and Grandma went with her. They won’t be home for a couple of hours. Do you want a piece of pie to tide you over?”

  “No, thanks. I had a big lunch.”

  Mama tipped her head to the side, sizing me up with her mother’s eagle eye. “How are things?” she asked. “Anything happening at the base?”

  “Nothing new. Actually, things are kind of winding down. We’ve got three classes in the pipeline to graduation, but there’s a rumor they won’t be sending any new trainees. Everybody expects the war to be over any day now, so there’s not much point in training a new bunch of pilots. Guess I’ll be out of a job before too long.”

  “Well, thank heaven for that. We’ve lost too many good boys in this fight,” Mama said.

  “Yes,” I agreed. “Every time I see a new class graduate I’m proud, but I worry about what will happen to them in combat. Still, it seems funny to think of it being over. The only thing I’ve done in my adult life is fly for the military.”

  “Do you have any thoughts about what you’d like to do after the war?” she asked. Then, with a studied casualness that made me know this was what she’d been leading up to from the beginning she asked, “Do you hear anything from your friend, Georgia?”

  I smiled. Mama always could read me like a book. “Not really. She sent me a note thanking me for flying her to Chicago. I wrote back, just a ‘how are things’ note, but she didn’t answer for quite a while. Last week I got a letter from her. She didn’t say so directly, but I get the feeling that things aren’t going too well with her business. The fellow who was running it for her while she was flying sounds like he’s a good mechanic, but not much of a businessman.” I shrugged and walked over to Mama’s quilt frame and took a look at her newest creation.