Maiden Flight

by Harry Haskell

  And another thing: Miss Beck never badgers me about the book. Everyone else harps on about it every chance they get. To hear them tell it, you’d think I had a sacred duty to write the blasted thing. For pity’s sake, can’t they see I’m not a writer? Thank goodness for Georgian Bay. There, at least, I can put their infernal nagging behind me. Kate and I used to hole up on Lambert Island for weeks on end, just the two of us, without a care in the world. People up there take us as they find us. It’s a simple life—no dressing up, no dinner parties, no worrying about appearances. Something always needs fixing—the boathouse, the dock, the water pump, the outboard motor. Yes sir, tinkering is the life for me. When you come right down to it, machines are a whole lot simpler than human beings. More reliable too.

  Swes looked forward to going up to the bay as much as I did. Yet even when we had the island all to ourselves, there she would sit hour after hour at the big table in the main cabin, writing those interminable letters to her friends. If you ask me, she might just as well have stayed home in Dayton and saved herself the postage. Hawthorn Hill is a regular open house. Family, friends, tradesmen, reporters, even total strangers—everyone seems to feel they can drop in unannounced practically any day of the week. Sometimes my home feels more like a hotel than a man’s castle. I ask you, why did we go to the trouble of moving out of the city in the first place if it wasn’t to get away from all that?

  It was Kate that visitors generally came to see, of course. She was the gregarious one. I was just the man of the house, doing my best to keep my head down and stay out of trouble. You might say we complemented each other in that way. No wonder people used to take us for husband and wife. It was a good life we had too, a comfortable life. How was I to know that Kate wasn’t as contented as I was? Oh, she talked about becoming a schoolteacher again, but she had no reason to go back to work. With the money Will left her, she had an income of her own and could do whatever she set her mind to. Anyhow, running this house is a big enough job. I gave her a liberal allowance, a housekeeper, a cook. What more could any reasonable woman ask for?

  As for marriage, I took it for granted it was out of the question for both of us at our time of life. A few years ago, mind you, I might have allowed my head to be turned. I met some mighty attractive young ladies when I was a frisky pup. There was no lack of temptation—or opportunity either—in Washington and Paris. Ullam and Swes got pretty worked up about that, as I recall. They made up their minds that I was easy prey for female predators and needed their protection. But they had no call to worry. Whenever the reporters tried to catch me out by inquiring why there was no Mrs. Wright, I would firmly set them straight. “You can’t have a wife and a flying machine too,” I said. That generally satisfied their curiosity.

  Not all of us are cut out for the married life, after all. Stef, for instance—you can hardly imagine him being tied down to a wife and home, now can you? With Harry it’s a different story. I saw right off the bat that he was the kind of man who needed a wife to come home to at night. Kate and I often observed that Isabel and he seemed to be made for each other. A sad, sad business that was, to be sure. There is no getting over the loss of someone you love more than life itself. I learned that lesson when Will died. At least he didn’t suffer long before he passed away. Isabel and Harry weren’t so fortunate. The way he looked for a while during her final illness, it was nip and tuck which of them would wear out first.

  Katharine

  The last time we saw Isabel was a few months before she died, in the late winter of 1923. She was pretty much skin and bones by that time, and all but blind. Orv and I had given her Stef’s new book, Hunters of the Great North, for Christmas, and Harry had been reading it aloud to her. They both seemed wonderfully courageous to me—but Harry has never gone in for heroics. Isabel and he were simply trying to do the best they could, he told me. Beneath his brave exterior, I could see that he was taking it very, very hard. In fact, I thought he might be on the edge of a breakdown. For the first time he couldn’t keep the tears out of his eyes when he was alone with me. As the Bible says, “The heart knoweth its own bitterness.” Was there ever anything truer? I have thought about that a good deal since I left my family and friends behind in Ohio and Little Brother shut me out of his life. We do, all of us, have to live alone, mostly.

  Since Isabel had always been interested in Stef, I took the opportunity to tell her about the time I met Fannie Hurst at one of his artistic shindigs in New York. Such a clever woman Miss Hurst is. I don’t care for her novels myself—if you ask me, she can’t hold a candle to Dorothy Canfield or Hamlin Garland—but I can understand why Stef finds them amusing. He has decidedly unconventional tastes—in both books and people! Orv and I hadn’t had the pleasure of his company much since he retired from active exploration. Bubbo hated to see Stef become a full-time lecturer—he said it would inevitably lead him into the use of professional tricks for creating interest. If only Stef weren’t such an incorrigible go-getter. In my opinion, he would be well advised to stop talking and writing and do something!

  I had no idea how reckless Stef’s ambition was until the Wrangel Island episode flared up in the newspapers that fall. That was a real eye-opener, for Orv and me both. The worst of it was, the tragedy could easily have been avoided if Stef hadn’t been so irresponsible. It was entirely as a result of his negligence that four men perished in a misguided attempt to claim that godforsaken island for Great Britain. By the time the rescue ship finally cut through the ice, only the crew’s Eskimo seamstress and her cat were left to tell the tale. Although Stef didn’t actually accompany the expedition, he came in for a stiff dose of criticism—every ounce of it thoroughly deserved, in my opinion! Little Brother thought his behavior was unforgivable. One half of me did too—the other half couldn’t help sympathizing with Stef and wishing I could be something to him in his predicament.

  Orv and I had just gotten home from the bay that September when a telegram arrived from Harry telling of Isabel’s death. Naturally, we set out for Kansas City at once. Without giving it a second thought, I tucked into my bag a special copy of The Friendly Arctic that Stef had given me to use as a guest book. Owing to a typesetter’s error, only the first few pages were printed; the rest were blank. Stef had written a personal message on the flyleaf: “I hope many good friends will write their names in this book, and that you will always value mine as somewhere near the top.” Dear Stef—so many vain wishes I had about him! Some way that blank book is a perfect picture of our friendship, with all its promise and all its disappointment.

  I finally got around to asking Harry to sign his name when he came to Dayton on his way to Europe, a week or two after Isabel’s funeral. My heart fairly skipped a beat as he leafed through the book, page by page, looking for a space to write in. I was on tenterhooks for fear that his eyes would fall on Stef’s inscription and he would suspect something. Doesn’t that beat all? There was nothing to suspect, nothing whatsoever. Stef and I were never more than good friends—were we?

  Harry

  Isabel slipped away so quietly that we hardly knew she had left us. Shortly before she drew her final breath, I leaned over her pillow and she whispered in my ear, “Father”—we always called each other Mother and Father—“Father, you’ve been the dearest husband in the world. It’s been wonderful, all of it.” That was all. Her courage and cheerfulness put me to shame.

  After her years of suffering, Isabel’s peaceful death came as a blessed release. But the idea of staying on in the house that we had planned and saved for and built together was almost unbearable to me. It had been hard enough when Henry went away to college and I could scarcely bring myself to look into his old room. Without Isabel’s warmth and gaiety, the whole house felt empty and barren. I had a good mind to lock the door behind me, move into an apartment hotel, and start a new life.

  The Wrights saw me at my worst when they came to Kansas City for the funeral. And when I passed through Dayton a couple of weeks later, I must have l
ooked as low as I felt, judging from Katharine’s solicitude on that occasion. The Star’s owners had generously insisted on my taking a sabbatical at their expense. Reluctant as I was to travel alone, I did look forward to exploring Europe at my own pace, with no fixed itinerary and no obligations beyond filing an occasional piece for the paper. I was glad to find that Orville’s spirits were on the mend as well. He was weighing a proposal to loan the original Wright flyer to the Science Museum in London. Griff Brewer, the Wrights’ longtime patent agent in England, had come up with the plan. It appealed to us all as a way out of the standoff with the Smithsonian.

  First thing upon arriving in London, I arranged to meet Griff and tour the museum in South Kensington. I had a notion that I could make myself useful by giving Orville a firsthand report on the aeronautical section. My impressions were mixed, and I told him so. Apart from a handful of life-size exhibits—the Rolls Royce plane that crossed the Atlantic, the Chanute glider, and another glider similar to the one Otto Lilienthal had been using when he was killed—all the planes on display, including the Wright flyer, were small-scale replicas. Moreover, the museum catalog mentioned the Wright plane merely as one in a succession, which was right enough but gave no idea of its real significance. Evidently, the Smithsonian wasn’t alone in undervaluing the Wright brothers’ magnificent achievement.

  Katharine and Orville hadn’t been abroad since before the war, but they still had many friends in Europe. Practically every city I visited, from London to Berlin, seemed to have an association with the Wrights. The Germans had given them a royal welcome a decade earlier. Reports of Orville’s demonstration flights for Kaiser Wilhelm and Katharine’s forthright Yankee charm had filled the newspapers for weeks on end. That world, I quickly discovered, had vanished beyond recall. The once-mighty Reich was on its knees in 1923, its economy in shambles. In Düsseldorf I bought a single sheet of letter paper to write to Katharine. My jaw dropped when the clerk told me the price: one hundred billion marks! I shut my eyes and counted out the bills until he told me to stop. Runaway inflation made it impossible to predict how much anything would cost from one day to the next. The entire country felt like an insane asylum.

  I breathed a sigh of relief when my train from Munich crossed over the Austrian Alps into Italy. Mussolini’s Fascists had restored at least a semblance of order after the war. An old friend of Katharine’s and mine, Louis Lord, was spending a year at the American Academy in Rome. Louis teaches classics at Oberlin and knows the Eternal City as well as any man alive. He must have shown me every sight there is to see, down to the last temple, triumphal arch, and aqueduct. But we spent as much time discussing Katharine as Roman antiquities. Louis had heard through the grapevine that President King intended to appoint her to Oberlin’s board of trustees. We agreed that a strong, independent-minded woman was precisely what that hidebound fraternity needed. Whether Mr. King knew what he was getting himself in for by appointing Katharine Wright was a different matter.

  On the way to catch my boat in Cherbourg at the end of January, my eye was caught by an etching on display in a shopwindow in Paris. It showed a narrow street in old Rouen, with the great Cathedral of Notre Dame rising up through the haze in the background. I had been hoping to find something to bring home to Katharine, something that would remind her of the happy times she had had with her brothers in France in the old days. That print just fit the bill. In fact, I was so taken with it that I went back the following day and purchased another copy for myself. It was the next-best thing to being in France together.

  All too soon my busman’s holiday came to an end, and by the time we made port in Boston, my state of mind was considerably improved. Henry had a break between semesters at Harvard and joined me for a short vacation in New York and Washington. It was then that I first told him about my special interest in Katharine. She claims she always knew he was in on our little secret, but from what I observed he kept it pretty close to his chest. He didn’t even give the game away when Katharine surprised us both by sending him a graduation present that spring. At that point, of course, she had no grounds for suspicion that my feelings toward her had changed. On the contrary, she was worried that Henry might suspect her of having an ulterior motive!

  Katharine was in her bedroom when I reached Hawthorn Hill, and she fairly flew down the stairs to greet me, as if I had been gone a year instead of only three or four months. A few minutes later Stef joined us. Katharine had alerted me in advance that our visits would overlap, but she assured me that she and I would have plenty of time to talk one-on-one. Normally, Stef and the Wrights constituted a kind of mutual admiration society. On this occasion, however, the tension in the air was almost palpable. From something Katharine let drop, I gathered it had to do with the Wrangel Island tragedy I had read about in the London papers. Whatever the reason, she was visibly unsettled by Stef’s presence. The very thought of his visit was a nightmare, she had written me, and my being there would help immensely.

  Toward me Stef was his usual hale-fellow-well-met self. But his relations with Orville were unmistakably strained. Katharine explained that her brother had been somewhat touchy on the subject of Stef ever since the news about Wrangel Island came out in the fall. And she herself had clearly run out of patience with our intrepid explorer friend. Katharine was determined to give Stef a piece of her mind and impress on him how reckless and unprincipled his behavior appeared to others. Her stern tone and the steely glint in her eye made me almost pity the poor fellow. The perils of an Arctic voyage are as nothing compared to the fury of a woman whose trust has been betrayed.

  My memories of that visit are crystal clear, not only because Katharine seemed especially pleased to see me but also because it was the first time she had taken me into her confidence about Stef. Always before when we had spoken of him it had been in connection with his or Orville’s scientific work, the Smithsonian controversy, or some equally impersonal topic. Now Katharine seemed positively eager to open up to me and share her sense of disillusionment. That she liked and admired Stef as a friend came as no surprise, but up to then I hadn’t realized how deeply she had become involved with him on an emotional level. Nor was I accustomed to hearing her voice her most intimate feelings so freely and forcefully.

  Little by little, as Katharine let down her guard, my own defenses began to crumble as well. One afternoon, she and I were setting off for a stroll in the woods above the house. A few pieces of firewood had fallen off the veranda, and we both knelt down instinctively to toss them out of our way. As my hand brushed against the sleeve of Katharine’s coat, I was seized by a sudden impulse to throw my arms around her. The force of my emotions caught me by surprise, and only in the nick of time did I manage to control myself. Katharine stood up and started to walk, apparently none the wiser, while I fell into step behind her, quaking like an aspen leaf.

  Katharine

  The winter sun was lowering when I happened to glance out of my bedroom window and saw Harry striding up the drive in that brisk, boyish way of his. “Four months in Europe have worked wonders for my dear friend,” I thought. Harry had given a talk at the Oberlin Faculty Club the day before and looked mighty pleased with himself. Apparently, his observation that the Germans in the Ruhr Valley were not so oppressed by the French occupiers as had been reported in the American press made some impression on the Oberlin outfit. It was absolutely the first time that anything pro-French had been so much as mentioned in that setting!

  I can understand why people like to hear Harry talk on European problems and such. He has so much judgment, and he sees the fun in pretenses and schemes and so on. When I get clear to the depths and decide that there isn’t a bit of sense in the world, it does me good to see what influence a little real character does have, after all. More than anything, though, I was relieved to see Harry looking so much less on a strain. When he came through Dayton on his way to England, he had a look on his face that stayed with me long after he was gone. At first I thought I had said somet
hing that hurt him—brought up some painful memory—and I could hardly go on talking. Later I saw that it couldn’t be the things I said, but the expression would come and go. That nearly finished me, seeing him go off that way.

  With all the physical and emotional stress he had been under for the past few years, I was worried sick about him traveling in Europe without a companion. And when he wrote from Paris about suffering from nervous chills and being unable to sleep, all my maternal feelings came rushing out in full flood. I know only too well how draining such an affliction can be. My nerves have always been prone to acting up at the least sign of trouble, ever since I was a little girl. When Harry marched up to our front door, I saw immediately that the rest and change had done him a world of good—although a little voice told me that it would not be strange if it took more than five months after Isabel’s death to get back to himself again.

  As a matter of fact, I was in such a tight box myself that I could hardly concentrate on Harry’s problems for two minutes straight. Was it fate or sheer serendipity that brought him and Stef—the two men I cared for most in the whole world, apart from Orv—to Hawthorn Hill at the very same time that winter? The situation was the least bit difficile—for me more than for either of them, I daresay! Stef and I were determined to have a good long talk and get past all the misunderstanding that had come between us in December, when he and his friend Mr. Akeley had come to Dayton for the big celebration. What with Stef’s lame excuses for the Wrangel Island fiasco and the politicians’ high-flying speeches, the truth was murdered enough that day to make one weep. Orv and I were both glad that the twentieth anniversary of the first flight came only once in a lifetime!