The Secrets of Flight

by Maggie Leffler

  THAT NIGHT, LOUISE’S BUNKMATES TAKE UP A COLLECTION TO send her body home, and we all pitch in what little money we have. We don’t talk about how she wanted to be a vet, or that she thought flying was easier than swing dancing. She’s still very much in the present tense, still scooping up the cockroaches in the bathroom to set them free, because to dwell on her in the past tense means we’d have to dwell on ourselves. We are shaken but silent. I can’t sleep again, my mind awash with plane sabotage and Louise’s flagless coffin. I think of Sarah, lying in a TB sanatorium, and Mama making dress after dress after dress in Uncle Hyman’s store, and of Sol’s face, twisting with worry, despite all the promises for the rest of our lives. Is he afraid to say goodbye because he knows it might be forever?

  The rest of the week goes by and while things are not exactly back to normal, it’s the military, which means the routine is always the routine: marching, breakfast, marching, ground school, marching, lunch, flight line. Planes go up, planes come down, and while I might cast a quick glance over the man servicing my AT-6, I push away the fear before it can disable me, the same way we push away the topic of death at dinner. The truth is, none of us wants to think about things we can’t change. If I worry that maybe I’m next, I’m already done for, so instead I wake up each day and tell myself there’s a reason I’m here.

  On June 26, we’re at the bunk after PT and changing into our flight suits, when Murph rushes in from the field. “They’re shutting us down!” she says, and I stop lacing my boots to regard her standing there. “They’re shutting us down!” she repeats, like a wild-eyed, orange-haired Paul Revere, and there’s a sudden constriction in my chest, making it hard to speak.

  “They can’t do that,” Grace says.

  Murph hands us each a mimeographed paper like a pilot dropping an evacuation flyer—and we are civilians in a town about to be wiped off the map. It’s a letter from General Arnold informing us that as of December 20, 1944, the Women Airforce Service will disband. Effective immediately, the program will no longer take new pilots.

  “What about the petition to Congress?” I say at last.

  “You heard the lobbyists—we weren’t meant to replace them, we were meant to release them for combat,” she says bitterly. “The men are coming home and they want their jobs back. The bill sunk. We’re not part of the military, and we never will be.”

  I imagine this news reaching the house on Beacon Street, as Uncle Hyman reads the paper and drinks his morning coffee—turning redder by the sip—and Mama rinses the dishes. At first she’s annoyed when he begins to read aloud—can’t he see how busy she is?—but then, as he’s pontificating about how women should never have been allowed to fly in the first place, she snatches the paper away and scans the print herself. Disbanded, she sees, and for the first time in four months, Mama exhales. But then I think of Sarah, alone in her dreary room, searching the sky through her hospital window. You’re staying, she says, and in my mind, and it’s an order, not an option. I have six months to fly—possibly for the rest of my life. “I’m staying,” I say aloud, and Murph looks at me with surprise.

  “Aren’t we all?”

  CHAPTER 18

  The Visitor

  In the forthcoming days after my appointment with Dr. Khaira, I approached my gallbladder surgery as if I were awaiting execution. At night, it was all I could imagine: the steel operating room table, my prone body frozen under the bright lights, the sharp instruments slicing me open. It wasn’t Dr. Khaira’s skill that I doubted, only his optimism: whenever I thought of undergoing general anesthesia, I couldn’t imagine ever waking up again.

  So, I went shopping for books to distract me, for a new soft nightgown and sheets, for fat-free frozen yogurt, since I’d promised Dr. Khaira not an ounce of Häagen-Dazs would cross these lips until after the surgery, knowing it could precipitate another attack. In fact, just as I was leaving the little corner store, with my bag of carefully selected, nutritionally tasteless items, Gary the grocer called out, “Oh, Mrs. Browning? You’re a nickel short.” It must’ve been the shock on my face that made him wave his hand and tell me to never mind.

  “No, no, no—you need your money!” I insisted, fumbling in my change purse and setting down five single pennies with shaking fingers. The last thing that I wanted was the charity discount for senior citizens who’d forgotten basic addition.

  Still flustered from my mistake, I rushed from the store, whose bells jangled on the door, before sidestepping an older man on the sidewalk going the opposite way.

  “It takes a bullshitter to spot a bullshitter!” the man called, which made me hurry on, until the same voice said, “Mary Browning, there’s not a damn thing wrong with your foot,” and I whirled around to see Gene Rosskemp standing there. He was wearing jeans and a flannel shirt under his jacket and in his hand was a stick, the end of which contained a stuffed horse’s head. The head was bright white, the mane absurdly pink and purple.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  He waved the horse’s head in the air, streamers and all, and said, “Come on now, pony up. What the hell happened to you? Selena said you left on a stretcher by an ambulance because you stubbed your big toe.”

  “It spontaneously and miraculously healed,” I said, and would’ve tap-danced to prove it, but at this point, having given Gary the grocer the wrong change, I was now officially afraid of the cracks in the sidewalk. Instead, I asked him why on earth he was holding a pony.

  “It’s for the newest member of the Rosskemp clan—we finally got ourselves a little girl! Thought I’d send a gift, although I don’t know how the hell I’m gonna ship this thing.”

  “Maybe you can wait and give it to her when they visit.”

  “Eh.” Gene waved his hand in the air. “They live in California. They’ll never visit. I get a Christmas card each year. Birth announcements. A thank-you letter if I send a gift.” He took out his wallet and then slid out a picture and handed it to me. I peered at the lovely little blond boy wearing a conductor hat and sitting in a large toy train.

  “Beautiful boy,” I said, handing it back.

  “That ‘beautiful boy’ is a professor of linguistics now at UCLA. He’s the one whose wife just had a baby girl. I don’t blame him for not keeping in better touch. His dad and I had a falling-out along the way. Can’t say I exactly know why.” Gene glanced to our right and steered me out of the path of foot traffic and over toward the bench on the edge of the sidewalk. “My grandson does his best to keep me in the loop. And I do my best to make sure they remember me,” Gene added, patting the horse on its head as he sat down.

  It occurred to me then that maybe I was wrong about the writers’ group. It had been ages since I’d listened to the stories between their stories, ages since I’d heard anything but the loud pulse of my own losses and regrets. But they must have been suffering, too, suffering and struggling to find something to feel hopeful about.

  “I know a secret about you, Mary Browning,” Gene said, dropping his voice.

  “Oh?” I said, flushing with fear.

  “A little birdy told me at the last meeting that you flew planes during the war. You acted all impressed with my model airplanes, and you never even told me you were the real deal!”

  “Well, I-I wasn’t acting that day. It was marvelous watching you fly . . .”

  “Aw, Mary, don’t patronize me,” he said, even though I wasn’t. I’d loved feeling the sunshine on my face and the small thrill of standing next to a man who wanted nothing more than to show me his passion. “I was waiting to hear what was wrong with my story, when you didn’t show up the other night,” he added, even quieter then. “Waiting to have my ass handed to me, looking forward to it, really.”

  “I have to have my gallbladder out, and I’m terrified,” I blurted, feeling foolish by my own irrational fear—after all, the other Jean had had her chest sawed open the year before and lived to write horrid prose about it. I plopped down on the bench next to Gene and heaved my packages
onto my lap. It felt good to sit.

  “Oh, I had mine out after the war, and it was no big deal,” Gene said. “These days they just pump you full of gas and slip a tiny camera inside you, snip, tug, and it’s out—piece of cake. Was for me and they sliced me open all the way from here to here.” He drew a long, invisible line across the top right corner of his belly. “’Course, just a few years ago, I started to get some right-sided pain again, right? And I go to the emergency room and they run tests, and after a while, the doctor comes in really shocked—and the last thing you want is to have something that makes a doctor practically speechless, right? And he says, ‘You’re not going to believe this but somebody left a metal clamp inside of you sixty years ago.’ He slaps up an X-ray on the light box and I see with my own eyes, plain as day, the handles. Looks like a pair of scissors! And doc says it must’ve shifted or something, which caused my pain. So, they took me back to the OR to remove the clamp.” He smiled at me. “But that’s not gonna happen to you.”

  “Good Lord,” I whispered.

  “Relax, Mary. The more you worry about shit going wrong, the more you open yourself up to it. Don’t get stuck in your own head. Bad place to be—unless you’re writing or something.”

  “I liked your story very much, Gene,” I said, suddenly reminded. “In fact, it actually surprised me.”

  A smile spread across his face. “Surprised you?”

  “You actually made me care about an inanimate object—a truckload of wine! I cared about whether the wine would make it past the French police. I cared when it looked like the bottles might be broken. I wanted the Seventy-Fifth Squadron to succeed in the great rescue. And when you and your wife shared a bottle on your anniversary? Delightful.”

  “Mary Browning, are you feeling okay?” Gene said, and I could tell I’d made his day, possibly his month. “Is this the bad gallbladder talking?”

  I laughed, until I realized that the woman in a purple tracksuit striding toward us—fists pumping, weights swinging from her ankles—was actually Selena Markmann. She would have kept powering on by if Gene hadn’t whistled like the construction worker that he once was.

  “Mary Browning!” Selena exclaimed, as if I were the catcaller. “There you are! I just had the pleasure of meeting Tyler’s nephew. How wonderful for you!”

  I stared at her. “Who . . . ?”

  “Your grandson Tyler, who works for Microsoft?” she reminded me. “His nephew is visiting. He said he’s a cousin of the twins? Your great-granddaughters?” It was quite strange: the woman sounded utterly serious.

  I blinked. “Oh?”

  “Yes, he’s here. Well, not here here. He’s back at the high-rise. I asked how long he was visiting for, and he said he lives in the area. How nice for you to finally have some family nearby.”

  “Oh, yes. Very nice. My. I had almost forgotten he was coming,” I said, woozily rising to a stand and collecting my packages.

  “Well, he’s up there,” Selena said.

  “He is? Still?”

  “Sitting outside your door on the floor, waiting for you. I gave him the fiction for next week’s meeting. You’ll be there, won’t you?”

  This Tuesday’s writers’ group was exactly one week before my surgery. I would dissect fiction one last time before Satinder Khaira would dissect me. “I’ll be there with bells on,” I said.

  Gene smiled and said, “Thatta girl, Mary. You’ll be horsing around in no time!” he added with a wink, waving around that silly horse again.

  I quickly walked the single block back to the high-rise and then took the elevator to the third floor. Sure enough, in the shadow of the hallway, I could see a boy sitting in the hall, his legs stretched out across the floor, and a laptop open on his knees. I thought of Dave and my scalp began to tingle.

  “Mary Browning?” the boy asked, when I stopped in front of my door.

  “Hello,” I said, eyeing him. He had reddish hair, very fair skin, and a smattering of freckles across his cheeks and nose. “And you are . . . ?”

  “Toby Strickler.” He shut the lid of his computer and scrambled to his feet. “You know my sister, Elyse?”

  “Oh, Elyse! Yes, of course. Come in, come in,” I said, quickly unlocking my door and ushering him inside before Selena could return. “How is she?” I added, after shutting the door and setting my packages down on the counter.

  “I don’t know how she is. She left.” Toby put his backpack on the linoleum floor before sliding his computer onto my kitchen table, right next to my own. I couldn’t help wondering why he was in possession of a laptop computer when his older sister was not. I was about to inquire, when he asked, “So, how do you know my sister?”

  “Well, we met at the library—at the writers’ group. I believe you met Selena, earlier, who is also a member?”

  “Oh, yeah. Here.” Toby stooped down to unzip his backpack and rummaged around until he came up with two packets of collated papers: a short story by Victor Chenkovitch about the Holocaust, which would probably be more uplifting than the next chapter from Jean Fester’s memoir: we were finally at her partial colectomy. Before I could thank Toby, he stood up and added, rather sternly, “You bought my sister a plane ticket to Key West?”

  “Yes. Why?” I asked, startled. “Is everything all right?”

  “Well, she’s fine. But my mom got called into her boss’s office because of it.”

  “Because Elyse went to Key West? I’m sorry; I don’t follow . . .”

  “My little brother was sick, and Mom needed Elyse to watch him. I could’ve stayed home all day, but Mom didn’t trust me to be in charge for ten hours. And my dad wasn’t around, and Mom didn’t have any help, so she canceled this really important deposition again and got in trouble with her boss.”

  “I see. Well. Goodness, I’m awfully sorry.” I pulled out one of the kitchen chairs, intending to offer it to the boy, but sank into it myself, since he seemed intent on standing, hands on his hips.

  “Mom was really mad at Dad because she thought he bought the tickets for Elyse, but he said he didn’t know anything about it. Mom said she didn’t believe him, because Elyse told her the tickets came from him, so they got in a bigger fight, and now they’re getting a divorce.”

  “Oh, dear.” I massaged my head.

  “And, you know, she’s under age eighteen. She can’t just go flying off to—wherever,” Toby said, playing an excellent mimic of his mother, I presumed.

  “Excellent point, sir.” I thought of myself, long ago, leaving home for the sky, and how my mother and Uncle Hyman had said more or less the same thing. “As I understood it, your grandmother is very ill.”

  At least that got his shoulders to drop. “Mom doesn’t really know what’s going on.”

  “And how did you figure out that it was I who bought Elyse the tickets?”

  “I hacked her email,” Toby said with a shrug. “She has the easiest passwords. And there was a confirmation email from Travelocity. It had your name and address, and the price of the tickets and everything.”

  “My credit card number, too?” I asked, alarmed.

  “Just the last four digits.” He was watching me, waiting now, but I wasn’t sure for what. “So?” he prompted.

  “So . . . ?”

  “So, why would you pay a thousand dollars to send my sister to Key West?”

  That made me laugh, because really, how could I answer that? It was, indeed, a very good question. Because she looked like my sister Sarah? Because she reminded me a little of me? Because I had quite a lot of money and no one to spend it on? “I guess the best answer is that I can afford it. And it seemed like a good idea at the time. Perhaps I may have overstepped my bounds.”

  “Just seems like a lot to spend on airfare. During hurricane season.”

  “It is a lot of money. But there are times to save and times to spend.” I sighed. “Is your mother aware that I was the one to send Elyse to Key West without consulting her?”

  “I didn’t t
ell her yet.”

  “I see. Well . . .” I searched my brain for something I might offer the boy to keep his mouth shut, until the answer struck me: “Would you like to go visit your grandmother in Florida, too?” A flicker of confusion crossed his face, followed by a slow smile, and then a laugh of obvious disbelief. It was a lovely sound, and I knew, in that moment, he wouldn’t tell a soul.

  “Elyse is in big trouble. I don’t want to be in big trouble, too.”

  “No, of course not, you’re very right. You’re a bright young man. You can’t just . . . as you pointed out . . . come and go as you please.” I hesitated and then asked him what he wanted from me.

  “I don’t really know,” he finally said. “I just want things to go back to normal.”

  I nodded in complete understanding. Since old age had settled upon me, I’d been feeling the same way. “Is there anything I can do?”

  “Do you have any food?”

  And then it was my turn to laugh, as I creaked to standing and headed over to the kitchen cabinet, which I flung open so he could see my selection of cereals. He picked Honey Bunches of Oats. With tremulous fingers, I handed him the box and then went to retrieve a bowl from the drawer and milk from the fridge. Toby thanked me politely and took a seat across from me. I sat back down and watched him, watched his furrow of concentration as he steadied the milk and then the smile as he crunched on his first mouthful. Then I leaned on my hands and watched him some more and thought that his mother did not know what she was missing.

  “Where does your mother think you are right now?” I asked finally, once he was halfway through the bowl.

  “Piano. But I called up and canceled this morning, so my teacher isn’t expecting me. Then I walked over.” Toby reached into the box with his fingers, grabbed a handful of dry cereal, and crunched on that, too. I wanted to figure out how I could possibly help, but instead I found myself asking about Selena Markmann. What could have possibly given her the idea that Toby was related to me?