by Rand, Naomi;
Muriel paused to sip water. This was another way to still the panic. It was a sizable crowd, the room well past capacity, listeners spilling out into the hallway.
Muriel cleared her throat and finally launched in. “My sister Amelia would be pleased to have her name linked to this particular scholarship. Although she chose not to pursue a medical career, she had a keenly inquisitive mind. A scientific mind, really. Some of you may know about her project in our backyard. Amelia wanted to construct a working roller coaster. Unfortunately, she got only one good fast ride of it before our mother shut the project down. My older sister was also an amateur paleontologist. During an extended summer vacation, she found pieces of a cow’s skeleton bleaching in the sun and set herself the task of finding all the rest. By summer’s end, the entire animal was complete. Plus she’d discovered the cause of death, a broken neck. Amelia theorized wolves had chased it down. It made for a colorful story, but she was clear in her rationale. She always wanted to get to the truth of the matter. That was always Amelia’s goal. To figure out the why, and of course, the how.”
Amelia remembered that cow. Or what remained of it. She’d found stray bones in the field miles from their rented rooms on Lake Okabena. But she hadn’t flown solo during the reconstruction. Pidge was right beside her, working just as hard. It was Pidge who’d found the femurs and a tibia. But now she was talking about Toronto.
“I attended St. Margaret’s College in Toronto, Canada, for a year,” Muriel was saying. “Amelia arrived to spend Christmas vacation. It was at the end of the First World War. Wounded veterans filled the city. There was so much desperation, so much need. When there was someone in need, my sister’s first response was to try and help. Amelia enrolled in a Red Cross course and volunteered at a local hospital. This set her on the track that led to her year spent here, fulfilling pre-med requirements at Columbia.
“Unfortunately, there were financial considerations that made it impossible for her to complete her training and become a doctor. Amelia eventually settled on social work, a career she could work at without an expensive course of graduate study. She might have done that her whole life, but of course she would have deprived you of something marvelous. Luckily for you Amelia was never afraid of taking a risk. When she was offered an opportunity to become the first woman to fly across the Atlantic Ocean, she was well aware of the danger. She had better than even odds of crashing at sea. But Amelia knew it was a chance worth taking to make history. To lead, by example.”
Muriel was making it sound quite heroic. It had been in one way, and of course, wholly selfish in another. She’d left Muriel and Mother behind, telling herself they would learn how to cope if she plummeted to her death. She’d left Winston Manning, too, lying, to extricate herself, lying to get free.
Four years later in that hotel room, he’d demanded an answer. “Why did you marry that man? I hear from everyone he’s impossible. You can’t love him.”
“It’s complicated. And you’re one to talk. You with your child bride.”
“For one thing, she was twenty. That’s not a child. For another, you broke it off with me, not the other way round. I was well within my rights. Why didn’t you tell me? I would never have tried to stop you from going. I would have been thrilled for you. It was the kind of adventure we always talked of having. How could you underestimate me so badly?”
“I might have died,” she tried.
“We’ll all die,” Winston told her. “It’s how we live that matters, isn’t that what we both said?”
He was certain he was right, that he would have urged her to get into that plane and go. He had loved her passion, he argued, loved her for herself, never wanting some outdated notion of what a woman should be. Now they would start again, he insisted. He’d get a divorce. His wife wasn’t able to conceive. There were be no children. Katherine would let him go. She was unhappy, too.
“I doubt your wife would divorce you. She’s a strict Catholic.”
“I can’t go on like this,” he said. “Can you?”
She said the publicity would ruin him. He said, “I don’t care. But apparently you do.”
But she was never really afraid of that. It was what she couldn’t tell him, what she didn’t tell him. Amelia promised she would think about it and so they went on illicitly, meeting when they could and torturing each other when they couldn’t. He pushed her and pushed her and finally she promised that when she got back from the round the world flight they would get the divorces and be together.
Come live with me and be my love.
She’d lied. Or maybe she would have done it. Maybe she would have left G.P. and married him, after all. If he would have had her, once she told him the truth. Lucky I never got back, Amelia thought. As kind a man as he was, it was hard to predict whether he would have forgiven her. The devil was always in the details. She’d been carrying his child when she got into that plane. And she’d known as much.
They say you only live once. That life is a gift. One was true while the other? It was grand, strolling down a city street, reading the faces of the passersby. Just being able to imagine their anonymous lives unfolding, the rooms they lived in, the dreams they clung to. Gazing into a shop window and seeing a mannequin dressed to the nines. There was so much pleasure to be gotten from something so simple. To listen. To touch. To be in awe of the mystery at the heart of this magnificent thing called life.
Courage is the price. Muriel had been right to ask her what it meant. To be honest, she wasn’t sure herself. She’d thought it sounded swell. That was the kind of word she’d used back then, swell. She’d been so young. The public saw her as courageous, risking her life whenever she flew. But it seemed such a small thing when she compared it to what Muriel had lived through, losing a father, a mother, a sister, a husband, a son, and finding a reason to go on. That took real courage.
Winston had lived on without her, too. Amelia winced, thinking of how the news might have come over the radio when her plane vanished. Then came the futile search and ultimately, acceptance that she was gone for good. He’d let her go. He’d let that part of himself go. But of course, there was a child. He’d held a baby in his arms and loved her and raised her. How could he have done anything else? He’d been a lovely man. A decent man. The sun rose every day in Medford, and in New York, and on an island in the Pacific, unnamed and unknown, where red tendrils of heat touched everything and made the air glow red, then orange, then a clean crystalline blue.
“There are a host of theories about Amelia’s last flight,” Muriel said. “I have no patience with most of them. My sister was neither a spy, nor a traitor. And she certainly didn’t use her round the world excursion as an excuse to escape her marriage, to disguise herself and live in sin in some other country. Nor is she living under an assumed name up in my attic.”
Amelia smiled. You’d be surprised.
“As a sister she was always with me whenever I needed her to be,” Muriel said. “My closest ally, my dearest friend.”
That was a stretch. She hadn’t been a good sister. She’d kept the most important thing from Muriel. And that horrible conversation they had. At Christmas, Amelia swept in, bearing gifts. Mother pulled her aside, whispering the less than happy news. Muriel was pregnant; how could they have a child? They had no money to spare to raise it with. Besides, their young marriage was already rocky. “Talk to your sister. She’ll listen to you.”
Don’t ask me to do this, Amelia begged, but silently. She did as she was told and went into the kitchen.
Muriel turned. “Meely! How wonderful to see you. I didn’t think you could make it. Look at you.” She took a step back from the hug to give her a once over, “So stylish.”
“You look pretty great yourself.”
Muriel shrugged. They both knew she didn’t. She was worn down, worn out. She and Albert fought over everything. He didn’t want her to work. He didn’t want a career woman. He wanted the opposite of what he’d married, someone demure and p
redictable.
“I’ve heard your news,” Amelia said, rolling up her own sleeves to help. “That was fast.”
“That’s how it is sometimes,” Muriel said softly.
Amelia had no idea how to broach the subject politely. But it was her job. She’d been pressed into service. Or so she told herself.
“I thought you and Albert weren’t speaking to each other.”
“Do you have to be speaking?” Muriel let a rueful laugh slip out.
“You wrote you wanted to leave him. That you were going to come out and stay with me in California.”
Muriel shrugged. “I never liked California. I couldn’t wait to get out of there the first time.”
“But Mother says you haven’t told Albert you’re pregnant.”
Muriel shook her head. Amelia still could have held back. Could have let it go. But no, she plowed right ahead.
“It’s not for him you’re keeping the secret,” Amelia said. “It’s for you.”
“That’s not it.” Muriel lowered her voice. “I just thought it would be better to talk about the baby after we got through the holidays.”
Their heads were close. Passing secrets. “You don’t have to go through with this,” Amelia advised her.
Muriel pulled away and put her hands over her stomach, instinctually.
“I can arrange for it, if you want.”
The expression on Muriel’s face stung. She shook her head, hard.
Yet Amelia continued to press her. “I’m just trying to be practical,” she said.
“I couldn’t do that, Meely. I’ve thought it over. It’s fine in theory, but it’s not for me. Please, don’t bring it up again.” And Muriel swept out of the room.
It was awkward between them all the rest of the day. Only when Amelia was back in her car, driving to the plane, did she let herself break down. And cry. She wiped away the tears, angrily. Yes, she was a little jealous, which was absurd. What had it been anyway, just a mass of cells at that point, nothing more.
On the train to New York, on her way to that pivotal interview with G.P. Amelia felt nauseated. She put it down to nerves. Then, once they’d chosen her, there was so much to prepare for. She could hardly draw breath. It took her ten full days to realize how late she was and note the changes in her body. That was when she used an assumed name and had a test. Yes, she was pregnant. How could it be? She’d been so careful. What bad luck it was. What horrendous timing.
Amelia thought of Winston Manning, and of what he might say. She came up with a thousand different ways of framing it, running through it again and again in her head. And then took the coward’s way out by breaking it off with him and not telling him she was pregnant. It was easier than arguing about it. And she told herself she would quite likely die at sea. He would never be the wiser. If she survived, she’d make up with him. She’d explain everything to him then. If she told him, she was afraid that he’d convince her. That he’d somehow prevent her from going.
When no one really could have done that.
Still, it was the story she told herself. And then she got into that plane. Flew across the ocean. Became “their” Amelia.
You have to make choices. You have to be savage about them sometimes. She’d gambled, and look at all she’d won. Once famous, she couldn’t find her way back. Maybe she didn’t really want to. She couldn’t have a baby and do all the things she suddenly was able to do. She couldn’t get into a plane and fly off when everything that having a child would be, would pull her back to earth. Maybe later on she would see her way clear to doing that, but not yet. She couldn’t do it yet. Not now when she was suddenly their Amelia.
She had to confide in someone. So she told G.P. He knew a doctor. Amelia would come up to his estate in Rye afterwards to recuperate. They’d say she was working on the book about her flight. Sharing that secret was likely part of why she gave in to him and married him. In one way, he did know her better than anyone. He knew what she was willing to do. What she’d given up to do it.
The Park Avenue doctor explained the procedure. How he would use dilation and curettage. She knew what that meant. He said there would be bleeding afterward. She should keep an eye on things. “I’ll be fine,” she said to him. And she was. What was done was done.
But then there was that horrible conversation with Muriel. Muriel was only defending herself. Muriel who could never understand why it had hurt so much, hearing her own sister say those words.
20
Sam
January 5 1981
“I’M SO PROUD of you,” Katherine said, giving Sam one of her patented air kisses.
Brooke grabbed her next, stifling her in a bear hug. “Look at you! Just look at you!”
Win offered a high five.
Lucy beamed.
“That speaker wasn’t half bad,” Katherine opined, turning to Brooke. “You should have brought the book to show her. She would have found it amusing.”
“Mother, please,” Brooke said, flushing.
“What have I done to you now?”
“You really were wonderful,” Brooke told Sam, pointedly ignoring her mother. “And to think, you never wanted to perform at all.”
“It was just a little speech,” Sam said. The truth was, she’d been shaking like a leaf. Standing in front of the audience, she couldn’t make out one face. She’d gone snow-blind from anxiety.
“We ought to go over to the bar and commandeer some tables,” Win said. “You’ll love this place, Grandmother, you can boast to all your friends how you’ve been slumming.”
“But this isn’t going to take the place of me giving you a little party,” Katherine insisted. “I must show you off, darling. Don’t say no.”
Sam pictured herself standing in the huge living room of that overheated apartment with the museum worthy paintings and antiques, every single thing breakable and dear. Her grandmother’s friends were all society people who barely knew she existed. She blanched.
“No, Grandmother,” Win said firmly. “Sam’s not going to let you give her a party and please, don’t ask Sam again. Now come along and behave.”
Katherine bristled. But Win smiled a charming smile and shook his head as if she were a bad tempered child. He set his finger on his lips. There was something funny in how he did it, and something else, a confidence that Sam didn’t expect. It stopped their grandmother in her tracks. Win lifted Katherine’s coat off the chair and held it for her to slide her arms into. It was a long black mink, the kind that became a legend most. Grandmother Katherine was a legend, at least in her own mind. Even though she wore heels, Sam towered over her grandmother. Katherine was older and gaunter than she had remembered. It made her feel oddly powerful and thus magnanimous.
“I guess I’ll have to make do,” Katherine said, grudgingly. She gave Sam a pleading look but Win winked, took Katherine’s arm, and moved her away.
They were going to the West End Bar. Sam couldn’t quite imagine what Katherine would make of it. How had Win managed that? But it wasn’t only Win who’d come to her rescue, Lucy was now escorting Katherine, chatting away gaily to her.
“Did that just happen?” Brooke asked. “Did she just give up without a fight?”
Sam nodded.
“Your brother is amazing.”
“Yes,” Sam agreed, “What book was Grandmother talking about?”
“It’s not important.” Brooke was buttoning her coat.
Sam gave her a searching look. “Mom, come on.”
“All right. I sold it. So sue me.” Brooke shrugged.
“Sold what?”
“Dad gave me a copy of Amelia Earhart’s autobiography with a personal inscription in it.”
“Why did you sell it?”
“I was broke. Your father had dumped me. We were stuck in court, fighting over child support, which he refused to pay. My dad was dead and the trust fund he’d promised me dried up because your grandmother decided that I needed to stand on my own two feet and learn a les
son. So I took everything that had any value, and I sold it. Rings, earrings, necklaces went first, but then I got desperate. I looked for other things to sell and there was that book. I got a hundred dollars for it, enough for a couple of meals.”
“Oh, Mom,” Sam said and hugged Brooke. “I’m sorry.”
“You have nothing to be sorry for,” Brooke told her. “I’m the one who should apologize. I haven’t been much of a mother.”
“That’s not true,” Sam said.
“It is. I should have listened when my father told me not to rush into getting married, but I was in love and pregnant with Win. He said he’d help me raise the child on my own. He said that your father wasn’t capable of that sort of devotion.” Brooke sighed. “Your grandfather told me your father wasn’t a serious man. Those were his exact words to me. When your grandmother heard about it, she went ballistic.” Brooke gave her a wry look, and Sam nodded. She knew exactly how Katherine could get, especially with her only daughter.
“How could he tell me such a thing?” Brooke said, mimicking Katherine’s intonation. “How could he imply that it was acceptable to raise a child out of wedlock? In other words, what would people think?” Brooke shrugged apologetically. “In the end I did what she wanted. But I suppose it wasn’t her fault. I wouldn’t have listened to my dad anyway. I needed to get married. I needed to think that this was real love. I was always so romantic. Luckily, Win was an easy baby. He did everything right on schedule. I think your dad liked the image of himself having a son, raising a son. But that was when he was doing well and getting work.”
“So it was having me that ruined everything?” Sam demanded.
“God no.” Brooke reached out, as if to physically reassure her. Sam shook her head, refusing. “Look darling, this was all before you even came along. Win was three when he decided to leave me the first time.”
