by Rand, Naomi;
“I don’t want to trap you,” he said firmly. “I want a partner, not a slave.”
“Then you think marriage equals slavery.”
“I think you think that it can be. Though I don’t think it would be with me.”
“You give yourself a great deal of credit.”
He smiled at her “I give you a choice.”
Happy. She had never been happier in her entire life. “I choose you.”
THE ENGINES ROARED. Her fellow passengers seemed decidedly unimpressed. Many had shut their eyes, feigning sleep. Their calmness was an affront. Her body coiled as it always did on takeoff. Up in the cockpit, the captain would be ticking off the list one last time with his hand resting on the throttle, and then he would pull it back. This plane was a thoroughbred. Urged forward it gathered momentum and here, here it came, the metal body lifting powerfully and that perfect moment when gravity was defied and the earth fell away.
They were aloft.
A remarkable ship; no lurching or stomach curdling drops as it rose to cruising altitude, only mild dips, then responding slight adjustments. No wonder it was possible to ignore all of it, to doze, read a newspaper, open a briefcase. The engines on this jetliner were evidently powerful. Amelia had an urge to climb back over the hull of the ship when it landed and examine one close up. Better yet, she would shadow a mechanic as they took it apart, then lift a wrench, slip on coveralls, and put it back together herself.
One of the uniformed women announced, “Ladies and gentlemen, we have reached our cruising altitude and the captain has turned off the seat belt sign. You are free to move about the cabin.”
The result was immediate. Passengers unbuckled themselves. They rose and lined up for the toilets. The uniformed women came round with offers of pillows, blankets, and reading material. Amelia chose Life and Time and set them next to her on the empty seat. She made her way to the flight deck and found the cockpit door ajar. Inside the captain and co-pilot were working, surrounded by instrument panels.
“Can I help you?” It was the woman who had greeted her at the door, Amelia read her name on the tag, “Tammy.”
“I was wondering if there was a way to get a tour of the cockpit?”
“I’ll see if I can get you inside when we land.” Tammy pulled the curtains shut against inquiring eyes. “Where are you sitting? Okay. Now don’t y’all worry, I won’t forget.” She beamed a smile that said the conversation was officially over.
From her seat, Amelia spotted a clearing in the cumulus clouds. Below the plane, snow covered fields and houses. They flew at a much higher altitude than she was used to; everything down below looked model sized.
“Can you put your tray down, please?” Tammy requested. Amelia saw the man across the aisle flipping a small lever. She did the same and down it fell to her lap. “Here you go, darling.” The food was packaged separately; a hard roll, a tin of cling peaches, and a main course. “It’s Salisbury Steak,” Tammy told Amelia. They’d had the same dish at the Horn and Hardart Automat; more expensive than chicken, it was a treat you could only afford once in a blue moon.
“Tea, coffee, soda?”
Amelia chose coffee. It was served in a cup shaped container made of some odd, water- tight material. The fork and knife were also unfamiliar, not metal, perhaps a type of polyethylene? She began with the steak, trying to cut it using the knife. But the meat resisted. Fine. She lifted the entire piece to her mouth, using her teeth inelegantly, and then tried the bread. Dollops of cold butter quivered atop the soft filling. It was doughy and tasteless, but she was hungry. Down the gullet was another of Grandmother Otis’ favorite expressions. Amelia sipped on the coffee. It was watery, truly puerile. Still, she finished it and requested a refill. Then came dessert, the slices of fruit both sugary and cloying. But it was the same as eating a meal after a long hike up a mountain. The quality of the food was beside the point.
Across from her, Tammy was talking with the male passenger.
“How was it last night?” he asked.
“Not bad.”
The man had loosened his tie. His cheeks were florid, his nose bulbous and veined. He nursed a whisky. “You find trouble, I know you girls.”
“Oh, no we don’t. We’re good.”
“What fun is being good? You should have come over to my place.”
“Now, Frank, you know I couldn’t. Why, I’m a married woman.”
“I’m a married man.”
This was the same. The men in the cockpit, the women caring for the passengers, la plus ca change. If this world was her own invention, why hadn’t she put women in the driver’s seat? Why hadn’t she reversed the roles and made men refill the coffee cups and give out the blankets?
Even my imagination fails when it comes to imagining that, she decided. Because this must be a dream, if it’s not, what is it?
Trying to figure that out made her head hurt. She looked out the window and saw below an endless triangulation of roads and bridges with cars rushing headlong across them. They were approaching the outskirts of the city. New York City, the place where things had begun for her, first at Columbia and then again years later, on May the tenth, in the year of our lord one thousand nine hundred and twenty eight.
There was a plan afoot, a group spearheaded by Amy Guest who had bought a plane, assuming she’d be the one to go in it. Her family had other ideas, so they were searching for another woman pilot to send across the Atlantic. When Amelia got the phone call, she assumed it was a bad joke. It was a phenomenal idea, proof that women could do exactly what men could. Then, it turned out they were dead serious. She was invited to New York. She would have to meet with the promoter G.P. Putnam. She knew who he was, knew that he was Lindbergh’s publicist and publisher.
That man, Putnam, made her cool her heels for over an hour. By the time she was let inside, she was more than a little annoyed. Did he think he was the pope? “You’re Miss Earhart?” Then he proceeded to lecture her about who he was and how he’d made Lindbergh, Lindbergh. Charlie this, and Charlie that, and how Charlie could write his own ticket, all because of G.P. Putnam. If you believed him, you’d have believed that the world famous pilot had done nothing but sit there, while Putnam worked the controls.
Finally, she couldn’t bear it. “Do you ever stop talking about yourself?” she’d demanded.
“About myself? How do you mean?”
“Don’t you want to know something about me?”
“You’re an amateur flyer. Not that it matters. You won’t be doing any flying. I’m sure the others have explained that you’ll be sitting on a crate in the back of the plane.”
“What did I come down to New York for then? You could have said all this over the phone.”
“I wanted to look at you,” Putnam said. “Now I have.”
And that was all. She was being dismissed. Amelia got up, steaming, but he wasn’t done with her. Not quite. “You’re not entangled with anyone, are you? You’re not engaged?”
“How on earth is that your business?”
“Because you have a better than even chance of dying on this flight. If I do decide on you, I don’t want to hear that someone has talked you out of making the trip. There’s a great deal of expense involved, and a lot of publicity. I don’t want to waste my time. ”
“Why would I have come all the way down here if I wasn’t willing to go?” she demanded.
“Women are such changeable creatures.”
“And men are such idiots.”
He’d laughed. But Amelia didn’t. She’d hated him. She strode out of the office, muttering under her breath. He caught up to her, took her in a cab to the station. The whole trip there, they barely spoke a word to each other. She was stewing. It had been a fool’s errand. Why on earth had she come? It was just a publicity stunt. The man was impossible, cynical, overbearing, puffed up with self-importance. The nerve of him, saying that he’d made Lindbergh! As if! Telling her that he wanted to look her over. She wasn’t a priz
e Guernsey. He probably expected her to knit a sweater in the back of the plane while they ferried her across the Atlantic. Then he’d sell it at auction.
On the way down from Boston, she’d been beside herself with excitement. The importance of all of it! It hardly seemed real, but still she fantasized. A woman making this flight would make history. Then, the meeting was delayed. And the man was impossible. But as the train wended its way north again, her bad temper dissipated. Can’t see the forest for the trees? That was what came to mind. Putnam had irritated her, then enraged her, and that had made her forget what she wanted most. Oh. She so regretted losing her temper. Why couldn’t Amelia have just let him talk? Men loved to talk, loved hearing the sound of their own voices. She’d blown her chance, why was she always so damn impulsive?
THE PLANE DIPPED. There was the emerald city.
“Ladies and gentlemen, the captain has put on the no smoking sign. We ask that you fasten your seat belts. Make sure your tray tables are put away and that your seat backs are in the upright position as we make our final approach to La Guardia.”
The engines revved. The plane dropped over the water and the landing gear whined. Amelia heard the click and felt the familiar tug as the wheels locked into place. They flew low to the ground, sweeping close to the automobile traffic. Then they were over the runway and the plane landed with a bump. The brakes were applied, hard. Her body tilted forward. They slowed, taxiing into the terminal and coming to a stop.
“On behalf of Captain Miles and our entire flight crew we want to thank you for flying Eastern Air Lines.”
People rose, eager to disembark. As she got to the front, Tammy caught her arm. “You thought I forgot, didn’t you?” Tammy was as good as her word. Amelia was escorted inside the small cockpit. She tried to spot something familiar. There were the control yokes and the throttle quadrant, the landing gear selector, the airspeed and pitch trim indicators, and right between the captain and copilot’s seats an array of engine monitoring gauges.
“It’s incredibly complicated. Way too much for poor little me,” Tammy said.
“I doubt that,” Amelia told her.
Tammy laughed. “Aren’t you nice.”
Not really, Amelia thought. Nice isn’t an adjective anyone has ever used to describe me. But Tammy was done, ushering her out.
La Guardia airport looked like Logan, with its newspaper kiosks, snack bars, and a line of yellow taxis waiting for fares.
“Where to?” the driver asked.
Across the river and through the woods . . . swept back, even as she was hurtling forward.
“The Hotel St. Georges.”
The driver gave her a quizzical look. “Ten dollars extra to go to Brooklyn.”
Amelia knew a lie when she heard one. She looked through the partition that separated them. Was it for his protection or her own? His license had a photograph and a number of who to contact if you had a complaint about service. “Mr. Abner Rice, is it? I can call and verify the charge.”
“The charge for what?”
“That it’s standard to pay ten dollars extra to go to Brooklyn.”
“Go ahead, lady. Feel free.”
“I’ll just jot down your number.”
“No one’s taking you to Brooklyn without paying more,” he said.
She saw a uniformed policeman directing traffic.
“Perhaps I’ll just speak to him,” she said, pointing. “I’ll tell him you’re committing highway robbery.”
He grunted. “Jesus, lady, bust a guy’s balls, why don’t you? Everyone knows you can’t get a fare back from Brooklyn. Why pick my cab? I have all the luck.”
But the taxi pulled out.
Luck was not the right word for it. Some things just happened. Take this cab. It had been first in line. She’d gotten in. There. Done. Was it luck that she’d offered resistance to being overcharged? She couldn’t have been the first. She would hardly be the last. Yes, he had to make a living but she also deserved fair treatment. Everything in life was a negotiation, Amelia thought. This was only a skirmish in what was the larger war. Each battle, won or lost, was a way to move forward towards your goal, that table where the treaties were signed and sealed and peace finally declared.
Yet that was the truest misconception. There was never an ending to it, never real peace found until you drew your final breath. Life was about the war, not about the peace. What the driver didn’t know was that she would feel guilty and over-tip him to compensate for standing her ground. The scales tipped one way, then back again. The numbers on the meter flipped over. They merged with the steady stream of Manhattan bound traffic. There was the island, packed with majestic buildings, brimming with electric light. Her driver paid the toll. They rode across a Tri-borough bridge. She knew of no bridge connecting Queens to Manhattan, yet the evidence was under their wheels, the roadway clacking.
G.P. had chosen her after all. “I knew you were perfect,” he said after her photograph was front page on every newspaper in the world.
“You couldn’t have,” she insisted.
“Of course I could have. I’m prescient.”
G.P. Putnam was the sort of man who never imagined himself wrong about anything. He told her he had picked her because she looked so much like Lindbergh. He knew that if he styled her hair a certain way and dressed her accordingly, she would catch on. It was simple for him, a matter of genetics and timing and, of course, economics. What he didn’t know was what she’d done before getting on that southbound train, cutting her hair purposely short and styling it just so. Choosing to wear pants instead of a skirt. She’d had the idea before he did. She’d seen what he’d done for Lindbergh. She’d helped him see what he’d wanted to see in her. She hadn’t expected to lose her temper. That was the only surprise. Yet, in the end, even that helped her cause.
“I like a woman with spirit,” he’d said.
Do you have a fiancé? She didn’t. Not a fiancé. No lover. No man at all who would hold her back.
Liar.
Sitting on a milk crate in the Friendship, Amelia had known what could happen, she could plummet into the ocean like so many others had done before her. She, Slim, and Bill strained to see where they were. Below they spotted an ocean going liner. Then nothing. It had been over nineteen hours. Then it was twenty. The plane flew lower, trying to conserve fuel. Finally they saw the fleet of fishing boats. They’d made it all the way across the Atlantic.
An ocean lay between the woman she’d been and the one she would become. Was it luck? Courage? Or the confluence of a thousand separate events beginning with her birth, and ending in Burry Port, Wales? Whatever it was, it had threaded together to make this penultimate moment. Stepping off the plane, Amelia had believed she finally knew what she was meant for.
14
Sam
November 26-December 8 1980
WHEN SAM WOKE up the morning after Thanksgiving, Lucy was gone. Breakfast with Brooke consisted of a bowl of dry Cheerios and an earful of Brooke’s unbridled elation. The prodigal son had returned to the fold.
“Your brother is thinking of applying to school again,” Brooke said. “Columbia. Up by you.”
“Really? I don’t see him going there.” A kind way of saying Columbia would not take him. Win had flunked out of Williams his first year and then tried the University of Santa Cruz for half a semester. He hardly seemed Ivy League material at this point.
“There’s no reason to sound so negative about it. They’d be lucky to have him.”
“Bye, Mom,” Sam said. And she flew out the door. Back to Barnard and her dorm room sanctuary.
But the weekend passed without any sign of Lucy. No calls. No letters. Not even a postcard. Sam was getting a little worried, although she knew Lucy had to be with Dusty. Still, Monday came, then Monday evening. By which time Sam was moving from acceptance, through anxiety, right to annoyance.
It was Tuesday, at five forty seven p.m. when Lucy waltzed in, looking only a little abashed. “
I’m sorry, I should have left you a note. I should have called to see how you were.”
“You should have,” Sam agreed. And left it at that.
“I thought you’d figure out I was with Dusty.”
She had after all. There was no real harm done.
Lucy blushed, dropping two full shopping bags on the floor. She flopped backward onto her own bed. The clothing she wore was new and elegantly hip, tight black jeans and a navy camel hair jacket boasting an oversized metal zipper and Nehru collar.
“You’ve been busy.”
“Dusty wanted to go shopping. He insisted. I told him it was crazy.”
And more than a little unnerving; it was as if Dusty were paying for her favors. But Sam wasn’t going to mention what was obvious to both of them. She could read Lucy’s embarrassment.
“I didn’t want to buy anything. But he talked me into it. He’s really pretty persuasive. I don’t even need new clothes. I tried to explain why it felt wrong to me, and he said that I could return all of it and give the money to charity. It was so ridiculous when he put it like that. I felt like I was in one of those old movies, and he was David Niven,” Lucy said.
“Not Cary Grant?”
“David Niven, for sure. He’s so dapper and breezy and oddly sentimental. Every time I thought I was making myself clear to Dusty, he’d turn it around and put it on me. ‘But don’t you like that sweater? Didn’t you say you wanted a shirt like the one that girl was wearing?’ I tried explaining what I meant but he twisted it and by the end I was so exhausted, I just gave up.”
“The lawyer in him is strong,” Sam said.
Still, it was a tasteful assortment of jeans, shirts, and jackets. She’d done well for herself. Like Holly Golightly, Sam thought. Which made Dusty well, no, not George Peppard.
Life wasn’t like a movie. It didn’t have tidy beginnings, middles, and ends. “Dusty is basically a good guy,” Sam said, leaving it at that.
