Surviving Amelia

by Rand, Naomi;

  “Sssh!” The man across the table set his finger to his lips.

  This was a library, a bastion of contemplative thought.

  Amelia nodded. “Sorry,” she whispered.

  She took a deep breath and opened the next book. In this one, the author took her mother apart. No longer a strong-willed woman who had bucked convention, first by marrying a man her parents disapproved of, then sticking with him. Gone, the Amy who raised her daughters to always think carefully about their choices and know that they were capable of being anyone and doing anything. That mother had sewn them bloomers instead of skirts, encouraged them to play sports and read the classics. That mother had ridden in planes and trains and as a passenger in Amelia’s own car, racing up unpaved mountain roads high in the Rockies, the two of them shrieking together as they rounded hairpin turns. This version of Amy Otis Earhart was unrecognizable, a needy, clinging wreck of a woman. After her eldest daughter disappeared, she made her disappointment and anger into a public spectacle, complaining about her son in law, G.P. , and how he was cheating her out of her daughter’s fortune.

  “Please!”

  The man glared, then stood, and took his work to a quieter corner. Amelia opened the next book. It was about her, or rather the writer’s vision of her. “Amelia was in the right place at the right time.” According to this idiot, she was G.P.’s pawn. She’d been putty in his hands. First as her promoter, then as her husband. “Her resemblance to Lindbergh sealed the deal. Putnam saw her and knew he could use her.” This so called biographer combed through the details of the last flight from Lae to Howland. There were copious radio transmissions sent from the Itasca. Odd, since she’d never heard a word from them. She’d assumed she’d flown off course and was out of range. Yet they’d heard her, transmitting. The writer believed, “Earhart was not up to this sort of flight. She was not a skillful pilot.” Thank you very much. Amelia checked the sources and wasn’t surprised to find Elinor Smith’s name. Her nemesis was finally getting her say, now that Amelia wasn’t around to contradict her. Elinor had always been jealous, believing herself a better pilot and more worthy of attention. She was the main source for the book. No wonder the writer believed “the around the world flight was an elaborate and ill-conceived publicity stunt.”

  “Trash!” she exclaimed.

  G.P.’s book Last Flight was next. It was the book she was supposed to write. She’d sent cables back from each port of call. He’d cobbled it together, after the fact. And done it in his maddening style, revising her copy and adding his unfortunate flourishes. Her writing was always clear and to the point. His was verbose, the prose style florid and overwrought. “Fate willed otherwise,” G.P. told his readers. He painted a pretty picture. In it, Amelia predicted her demise. It was like a movie, perfectly imagined. According to him, she’d said, “It’s a very big ocean, so much water.” They were words she’d never uttered. She fully intended on coming back in one piece and taking advantage of the promise she’d extracted from him. “It just seems that I must try this flight. I’ve weighed it all carefully. With it behind me life will be fuller and richer. I can be content. Afterward it will be fun to grow old.” Not with him. They’d had a different conversation in their own living room. February in California brought a cold, clean rain. She’d said her piece. She’d told him she was done, after this. Once gone, he’d managed to twist it round, appropriating her.

  “Ugh.”

  G.P. who she’d married in 1931, was dead. The other biographies said as much. If it was true, then there was no point in trying to set the record straight with him. Anyhow, there was nothing that man liked better than an argument. He was such a force of nature. It was hard to imagine that the world went on without him. They’d had their differences, but she had loved him. It wasn’t passionate, but it was real love. A lump in her throat, next, she’d tear up. Amelia took a deep breath. This wasn’t the time for sentiment. There. She was calmer. She reached for the next book. The Search for Amelia Earhart would present factual information. There would be maps. Charts. An analysis of where they’d looked. And how they’d missed finding her. According to the newspapers Franklin had sent the entire Navy out.

  Wrong. The book had nothing to do with the physical search. The author believed the Navy had been sent on a wild goose chase. The President was the one who was at fault. He’d sent her on a secret mission. She’d flown off course on purpose, spying on the Japanese, and gone down near Mili Atoll. There, she and Fred were captured by the army and summarily executed. The writer had testimony from the natives to that effect.

  Except, she’d never been sent to scout out the Japanese Army. Franklin had never asked her to do anything like that. She, as a pacifist, would never have agreed. The theory was laughable. The writer claimed her remains were dug up after a Second World War, this a war where the Japanese were part of something called the Axis, fighting America and its allies. Her bones had been shipped back to Washington and were hidden away in a vault, presumably beside Judge Crater’s own.

  Amelia sighed. Why had she come here? What did she hope to discover? Amelia Earhart Lives was next. With trepidation, she cracked it open. This writer believed she’d been captured by the Japanese, but survived to turn traitor. She was someone infamous, a Tokyo Rose. Apparently this was a radio personality who chided Americans and the world in English for taking up arms against Japan. The writer was, of course, male. He’d gone to great lengths to provide documentation, including photographs of her after the war. She was apparently a woman named Irene Bolam who lived in New Jersey and unfortunately enjoyed a limited reputation as a flier. The man insisted Irene was Amelia. When a man claimed something was true, how could a woman dare to disagree with him?

  It was absurd.

  Muriel’s book came next. Courage is the Price. Amelia steeled herself.

  The dedication read, “To all who knew and loved Amelia and to all who want to know her, this book is offered gratefully in her memory.”

  That was actually quite sweet.

  Muriel began with family history, the oft-told story of great grandmother seeing George Washington. She described how Father and Mother met and fell in love, how they married, producing their small family. On to Muriel and Amelia. Yes, the details were off. That rollercoaster in the backyard had been something they’d both wanted to build. They’d been complicit, gathering the lumber in secret. And the dialogue was original. She’d never said those words. But Muriel had captured the essentials. Plus, she was circumspect; more than that, kind. Especially when she described Amelia’s own mistakes, like the time she talked their mother into investing the last of her savings into that disastrous mining operation. Muriel painted a picture of an Amelia who was brave, selfless, a good friend, someone who did her best to balance fame and family duties. She was busy; still, she never forgot them. Not even after all the record shattering flights and business deals, the fame, the fortune, the adventures, her teaching job at Purdue, her married life in Los Angeles. Muriel wrote that they’d always kept in touch.

  Amelia winced. The truth was a little more complicated. Wasn’t it always? Even yesterday Muriel had been doing her best to defend her, albeit from herself. This world was truly Dickensian. She had to wake up. Wake up and get back and fix everything. This couldn’t be the ending.

  Amelia rushed out of the library. What to do now? First things first, she’d go back to Medford. She’d ring that doorbell and confront Muriel and get her to believe in her. In who she really was. She’d tell her the truth. Muriel deserved that much.

  Pulled roughly backwards, by unseen hands, Amelia turned and blinked and realized she’d walked straight out into traffic. Horns blared at her. A car had been inches away from running her down.

  “Lady, are you trying to kill yourself?” the man asked.

  She was about to agree and thank him when she saw his crooked smile. Recognized that and the stray lock of blond hair that always threatened to fall into his eyes. There, those eyes, sparkling with humo
r and good will. Winston Manning. Young again. Shifting the backpack onto his right shoulder, saying, “You’re one lucky woman.”

  He walked away from her.

  She’d let him leave once before.

  How cruel she’d been. How purposely cold when he’d asked her why. She’d told herself it was necessary, that she was being brave for both of them.

  Courage is the price.

  It was a young girl’s folly, that poem, a young girl’s vision that courage was the currency used. What she’d done to Winston Manning hadn’t been courageous, it had been purely expedient. Amelia had known it then. She knew it now.

  “Wait,” Amelia called out, rushing to catch up to him.

  11

  Sam

  November 1980

  “THANKSGIVING’S ONE OF those crazy American naming things, right? I mean, who’s the one giving the thanks? The turkey? The Indians?” Kim threw this out to Sam as Sam polished the last line of Kim’s term paper.

  Fixing her awkward syntax was Sam’s penance. She hadn’t told her Bio teacher about the fleeing fruit flies; instead, she’d gone and cribbed the results and gotten an A for her trouble. Kim was her biggest competition for the Amelia Earhart award. Even if she hadn’t cheated, Sam felt Kim deserved to win more than she did. As a boat person, Kim had had her own run-in with American benevolence. Her father was a Colonel in the South Vietnamese Army. When it became clear the North Vietnamese would breach the city, the Americans abandoned Saigon, leaving most of those who’d supported them to their fate. Her father had paid handsomely for passage on a boat across the South China Sea. Then the engines failed and they ran out of food. The crew decided it was time to throw the weakest overboard. Kim’s father staged a successful revolt. He was the sole reason many of Kim’s friends and neighbors in Flushing were alive today.

  Kim Nguyen was a puritan. She didn’t drink or get high. She liked things to be stable and controlled. Sam understood. Kim had been twelve years old on that boat. What she’d witnessed had been brutal and terrifying.

  “The committee will like her story better,” Lucy warned Sam. “They’ll feel guilty and decide that they can make up for American imperialism by doing right by her. And you’ll have been part of the reason. You shouldn’t be helping her write those papers. To win you have to be merciless.”

  “It’s fairer this way,” Sam said.

  “You doing her work for her is fair?”

  Sam shrugged. She couldn’t bear to tell Lucy what she’d done. Lucy admired her. Besides, if she didn’t tell anyone, she could pretend it hadn’t happened.

  “Let someone else write the papers for her,” Lucy insisted. “She might get a B.”

  “I don’t write them, I edit them,” Sam said.

  “Oh Sam, don’t kid a kidder.”

  Oddly, revising papers for Kim had turned out to be a lucrative business. Kim sent friends to Sam who paid handsomely for her services. Right now, Sam was working on a musicology paper for Sascha, a Russian émigré. He had told her how his Russian passport was stamped with the word “Jew.” There, he had had no opportunity to get ahead. “Here, it is all greatness,” he said. Sam liked him, but even more she enjoyed revising what he’d written for his Music elective, on John Coltrane’s Giant Steps. The paper reminded her of Michael. She’d slipped out with Lucy the next morning, leaving him wrapped in a blanket on the couch. Her note read, “Thanks, it was fun.”

  It was so unbelievably lame. Fun?

  Since that night, Sam had had a recurring nightmare. In it, the junkie with the gun mowed them down in order. First Michael, then Lucy, then Sam. She woke drenched in sweat.

  “What do you give thanks for?” Kim asked, interrupting her reverie.

  Sam had an answer. Being alive. All three of them had made it through that night. She was grateful for that. Of course, Kim was grateful because she’d gotten through worse than an encounter with a strung out junkie. But she was referring to the holiday.

  “I give thanks to the Indians for giving us the food that enabled my predecessors to survive, live long, and prosper, and infect those same Indians with diseases that ravaged them, slaughtering them, taking their country away. That’s American generosity at its finest.”

  “Yes, the names Americans use. You know what they called it when they sprayed herbicides in Vietnam? Trail Dust.”

  Trail dust. A little dust kicked up by the horses. America ruled the earth and ruined much of it, yet Kim and Sascha still came here. They still bought into the myth of America as the one place on earth where everything was possible. They weren’t wrong. It was that sort of place. You still could become anyone here. Though it helped immensely if you were white and upper middle class or better than that, rich.

  Look at Amelia Earhart, though. She’d reinvented herself. She’d been an ordinary girl from the Midwest, a failure until she was almost thirty, a social worker in Boston with a hobby, flying planes. Then overnight, she was the most famous woman in the world. It was more than either she or Kim expected. All we hope for, Sam thought, is a career; this scholarship would obviously help us in the most basic way. Not having to pay back those loans, for example. It’s simply a means to an end.

  Kim was spending Thanksgiving Day in the library studying for her Bio and Chem midterms. Sam wished she could do the same but Brooke would have had a cow so she was going to Brooklyn, sucked back into the primeval swamp. The only good part was Lucy would be with her, riding shotgun.

  BROOKE’S APARTMENT WAS on the third floor of a building a few blocks away from the Jay Street/Boro Hall subway stop. She opened the door and called out, “Mom, it’s me.” There was no response. The apartment was dark, the proverbial cupboard bare. Brooke’s bedroom door was flung open, the room an unalloyed mess. Thankfully, no corpses were in evidence.

  Sam backed out to find Lucy admiring the photographs on the hallway walls. She and Win had dubbed this, “the palace of Brooke.” Young Brooke framed by her parents’ clapboard summer house in Bar Harbor; teenage Brooke, languid and lean, snapped on the couch of the five bedroom apartment on Museum Row on Upper Fifth; and thespian Brooke as Juliet, Maria of West Side Story fame, and Auntie Mame. Brooke with her father Winston Armstead Manning II, who had been devilishly handsome, he of the sharp chin, blue eyes, and streaks of salt and pepper gray in his hair. He’d exuded confidence, that man. Brooke gazed adoringly at him in all the photos. But on it went, Brooke touring as Hedda Gabler, as Maggie in A Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Brooke out in La La Land with her pals Dennis, Warren, Roman, and Mick.

  “Your mom knows everyone,” Lucy said.

  “She claims to.”

  “I’m impressed,” Lucy said.

  “That’s the point.”

  Lucy laughed. “You’re too much.”

  Sam shrugged. It depressed her, being here. A pile of dirty dishes was stacked up in the kitchen sink. On the counter there was a loaf of rock hard Italian bread, an open jar of jam, and a melted stick of butter. Home life was just as she remembered. Sam squished a roach without blinking.

  “We could leave. I can pretend I forgot what day it was.”

  “You’re not being serious,” Lucy said.

  “Half serious.”

  “We can’t do that.”

  “I know.” But if only they could. If only she knew how to run, how to run fast and far. Amelia Earhart had done it, Sam thought. She’d had a mother, a sister, even an old boyfriend who’d wanted to marry her and turn her into a hausfrau. She’d gotten up the nerve and gotten into a plane, and look at what she’d become.

  One flies away, the other doesn’t.

  She was the other, staying close, staying put, just in case.

  The living room held the evidence of her mother’s long lost loves, Larry’s Afghani rug, two leather couches from Jean Paul’s old loft apartment, and pentagonal paintings, courtesy of Ricardo, whose palette favored day-glo orange and neon green. Brooke’s men all left tokens behind. Sam thought of it as a barter system: let me go, an
d you can keep this. But it was also possible that they just decided to run and didn’t have time to gather their belongings.

  Only one had left nothing tangible behind, no paintings, no furnishings, no books, no clothing. Dear old dad. Oh wait, he’d left his kids. They were two animate trophies.

  Lucy dropped onto the couch. The remains of a joint lay in the ashtray in front of her. “Look at that,” Lucy said.

  Sam was glad she’d omitted the obligatory “cool.” Sam’s other friends loved Brooke. This apartment had been the hangout spot in high school. Everyone said they wished her life was theirs because her mom was such a blast. Brooke preferred rock to Bach. Brooke knew famous musicians. Shit, she’d even slept with some of them and snorted coke off their chests. And Brooke was willing to listen to their problems, Ms. Tea and Sympathy offering them her sage wisdom. Their parents were so rigid! They wished their moms were more like hers.

  No, you really don’t.

  Sam never told them why. She let them fall in love with Brooke. Not Lucy too. Please, not Lucy, Sam thought. Couldn’t she keep one friend, just for herself? She had tempted fate by bringing her here. Lucy wouldn’t be able to withstand Brooke’s seductive need. “Let’s go,” she said, grabbing Lucy’s arm.

  But, just then the front door swung open.