Maiden Flight

by Harry Haskell

  It is ridiculous, when you come to think of it, how the Smithsonian has succeeded in twisting all this. Langley didn’t contribute nearly as much as Lilienthal did. Lilienthal was a much better engineer than Langley, yet he is never mentioned. Langley got his idea of using curved surfaces from Lilienthal. He used them after visiting Lilienthal but never mentioned Lilienthal in speaking of it. Of course, I know exactly what Lilienthal did and what the rest did. Walcott and Abbot don’t know. None of them has ever studied the subject as Will and I did. I don’t think I ought to have to call attention to the points in which Will and I excelled the rest. Our work is all on record.

  Nothing will be gained by belaboring the issue further, especially now that the machine is safely out of sight in England. When the news of its going first became public, though, Kate and I were of two minds whether it would be better to give out the exact wording of my agreement with the Science Museum or let the matter drift along. After all, what difference did it make that I reserved the right to bring the machine back to this country after five years if a proper home could be found for it? At bottom, I expected that it would have to stay in England permanently, and I did not like to open a possibility of a lot more explanations. Even now I don’t expect that the Smithsonian will ever make the wrong right—and I refuse to let them have the machine until they do.

  As a last resort, I let it be known that I was open to keeping the machine in the United States provided the Smithsonian truthfully labeled the Langley plane, published both sides of the controversy in its annual report, and identified the Wright flyer as the first man-carrying aircraft in the world. But the Smithsonian didn’t rise to the bait, even after the president of the National Aeronautic Association called attention to the fact that the Langley machine on display in the museum had no way of being launched. He said you might as well hang up the body of a legless man and label it capable of winning a footrace in the Madison Square Garden races!

  Two distinguished scientists did suggest a revised label that the Smithsonian finally deigned to accept. They dropped out all reference to Curtiss’s Hammondsport trials of 1914 in favor of a bland statement that “in the opinion of many competent to judge,” the Langley machine of 1903 was capable of flight, et cetera, et cetera. Practically the only thing left to criticize now is the expression “competent to judge.” So that is where things stand today. The Smithsonian has come down from the claim that the Langley machine did fly in 1914 to the opinion of some that it could have flown if it could have been launched. Eventually, that claim will go too—but I don’t expect I will be around to see it happen.

  Katharine

  By the spring of 1925, Little Brother was looking more tired and frustrated than ever. His strength and spirit had been pretty severely tried by the Smithsonian’s scheming. I suppose none of us quite realized what a tremendous strain he had been under the last twenty years. Will and he had had to win the patent suits for themselves. No lawyer could handle them all. Sometimes it was maddening to have to let the lawyers talk for them when the lawyers themselves didn’t half understand the fine points in the case. After Will died, I tried to convince Orv that he shouldn’t put so much of himself into the fight. Curtiss didn’t, after all. But Orv would always shoot back, “Yes, and Curtiss loses all the suits too, and I can’t afford to do that.”

  Just as I was coming to my wits’ end, Harry reawakened my slumbering genius for worrying. Something he said about the widows in Kansas City, when he came to Dayton that Easter, made me uneasy. A woman’s eye is awfully sharp when she gets the least inkling of schemes afoot. I can jump at conclusions fifty feet away! I was ashamed of my sect that some of those “vidders” should have such dreadful taste as to be out hunting already. Try as I might to put the idea out of my head, when I heard of Mrs. Kirkwood having him over to meet her friends, and of his going out to a lecture with Isabel’s former nurse, and later his letters in which he spoke of his loneliness and his not enjoying going around alone—well, the whole combination was too much for me. I felt like screaming, “Tell all the matchmakers to go to thunder and please, please don’t let anyone make your future life for you!”

  With Harry’s fine ideas of honor, you see, I was afraid he might slip into something that didn’t really satisfy him just because it was expected of him—or, worse still, that he had decided to drift along and see what happened. I had wanted to say something ever since Isabel died, but I’d always held back. At last I decided that I must tell him how I felt. I wouldn’t for the world have interfered with any of Harry’s private affairs. I only knew that I would have been glad to have a friend suggest a similar thing to my brother if he were to be left alone. How I used to laugh at the thought of Orv marrying. Harry must have laughed too at my grandmothering care of him!

  I won’t deny that my concern for Harry wasn’t entirely disinterested. It came over me that maybe one reason I had thought what I thought and felt what I felt was that I saw a probable end of any—what shall I call it?—active friendship with him. I knew that I would never feel any differently toward him, and I wanted so much that he would never feel differently toward me. For so many years we had helped each other the best we could to weather the storms. But I knew how easily we could lose the chance to express the old friendship. Even so, I told myself that I could get along with that if it meant seeing him have what he deserved—comfort and peace of mind and real companionship.

  Mind you, Harry was caught in a situation that wouldn’t be easy for anyone. Many calamities have befallen very fine people under similar circumstances. As one grows old, one’s powers of adaptation diminish. When we were both young and had nothing and were too inexperienced anyway to look for our own advantage, we could be freer and surer of ourselves when it came to falling in love. But Harry and I were long past that stage in life. I wanted him to have real companionship and thought he might possibly find it someday, but there was no chance of it just then. What he needed, more than anything, was understanding and sympathy and comfort. How I longed to be his fairy godmother and give it all to him!

  My biggest fear was that Harry would end up disliking me if I kept on talking about these intimate things. Or that he would avoid telling me anything for fear I would read all kinds of things into nothing. It would have broken my heart to bring him uneasiness and uncomfortableness, when I wanted to do just the opposite. It was because in all my long friendship with him I had seen absolutely nothing I could not admire that I had this deep feeling about his future. He was so generous with me—to allow me so many privileges and to put the best possible meaning into what I did and said. Our long, long friendship meant so much to me. I would have been the unhappiest of unhappy mortals if we had lost what was really a prize to us both. There was never any real danger of that happening, of course, but sometimes perverse Fate does try to get the best of such a friendship. Here’s for snapping our fingers under her nose!

  Early that summer I went to Geneva, Ohio, to see my friend Mella’s daughter, Katharine Wright King, graduate from high school. Mella and I have been friends since college. Katharine took special honors—she and one boy, a regular Harry Haskell from the look of him. The boy had a higher average, but Katharine had been in high school only three years and was the youngest in her class. It was sweet to see her so happy and altogether lovely in her simple graduating dress, looking forward to everything with eagerness and a certainty that her dreams would come true. Katharine deserved nothing but the best, for she had a good mind, a fine start in character, and an attractive, winning personality. She wasn’t pretty, exactly, but she was charming—at least to her “Aunt” Katharine.

  All through the ceremony I couldn’t stop thinking of Harry and me at Oberlin and how bright and eager we had been. The Order of the Empty Heart indeed! My girlfriends and I weren’t exactly starved for attention from the opposite sect. When I think how naive I was about accepting Arthur Cunningham’s engagement ring, it makes my heart go down to my boots. Well, the very first thing Mella told m
e when I got to her house was that Harry had sent a book to Katharine for her graduation. And when she said how pleased she was that he wanted to send her daughter a remembrance, there did flash through my mind the least suspicion that he was pleased to be sending it to my namesake!

  Mella, in some way, gave me a little feeling that she had her own thoughts about my frankly confessed interest in and concern about Harry. It was a peculiar look she had when I said I had been writing to him a good deal since he had been alone. She said she had often thought of writing to him, to say she felt sorry for his loss, but lacked the confidence to actually do it. Well, I didn’t know quite how to respond, so I just said, “Harry is safe with me”—thinking that maybe he wasn’t quite safe among all those “vidders” in Kansas City. Ha ha! If I had known what lay in store for me when I went up to Oberlin for commencement that year, I would have turned tail and scampered straight home to Dayton!

  Interlude

  The Explorer,

  Vilhjalmur Stefansson

  Which of us can say when devotion turns into love, tenderness into passion? With Katharine one could never be sure where to draw the line. One minute she was all sweet reason, calmly discussing her “interest” in me, and the next minute she was practically begging me to make love to her. What puzzling creatures women are. I have devoted my life to unlocking the mysteries of the Arctic, but when it comes to the wilds of the female psyche, I’m in uncharted territory. Katharine once said the difference between us was that I had a “thinking heart,” whereas hers was a “singing heart.” Was it really as simple as that? Or was there some deeper mystery in our natures that made our misunderstanding inevitable?

  Katharine has always been something of a mystery to me. Doubtless I am a mystery to her, though I can’t imagine why. The life of a public figure is an open book. Anything I didn’t tell Katharine wasn’t worth telling in the first place. That wasn’t enough for her, however. She accused me of holding things back, of being incapable of intimacy. But I never bargained on intimacy. What I wanted from her was something far more precious: an idealized friendship, a meeting of minds—and, yes, of hearts—but without emotional entanglements and the forwardness they engender. Unfortunately, Katharine’s way of idealizing me was to idolize me. Her insatiable demands finally made it clear that she had mistaken my honest friendship for love, and I had no choice but to pull back. Since then, her letters have been sporadic and measurably less personal. I understand, of course, that she is simply paying me back in my own coin.

  When I first got to know the Wrights, they desperately needed allies in their battle royal with the Smithsonian Institution. Admiring Orville as I did, I was only too happy to take up the cudgels on their behalf. Orville reminded me of the wounded elephant in the little sculpture that Akeley made before the war: he was exhausted and needed the support that Katharine and I were eager to provide. As a close family friend, I stood in for Wilbur in a manner of speaking. Katharine used to hold forth on how her two brothers had differed, always with what seemed to me balanced and impartial praise. I eventually came to feel, however, that she was a bit fonder of Orville. She said she was even “sillier” about him than about me. So although no one could take Wilbur’s place with her, she took comfort in lavishing on me the interest and affectionate sympathy that he had always inspired in her.

  Katharine is one of the warmest and most genuinely sympathetic women it has ever been my privilege to know. But it does her no injustice, in my opinion, to observe that she does not possess what one would call a fundamentally passionate nature. Enthusiastic and excitable, yes, but not passionate. She is far too sensible and levelheaded to abandon herself to her emotions. In fact, for all her “singing” heart, she clearly distrusts passionate love and greatly prefers the gentler kind—call it sisterly love or what you will. Her devotion to Orville is the purest expression of that love. Indeed, there is a question in my mind whether there is room in her life for any other kind of love—or any other man.

  Passion

  Harry

  The explosion, as Katharine so indelicately calls it, had been building a head of steam for months. Sooner or later it was bound to burst. I don’t wonder she was “dumbsquizzled” by my blowup; it took me by surprise as much as her. She’s right: I was acting more like a callow youth than a hard-boiled newspaperman. Never in my life had I felt so worked up and out of control. In my experience, “overmastering passion” was the stuff of romantic poetry and novels. Once I began to tell Katharine how many years I had loved her, ever since our time at Oberlin, and how eager I was to share my life with her, the words came gushing out like molten lava from a volcano.

  It was what she said about the scheming widows in Kansas City and the likelihood of our paths leading in different directions that lit the fuse. Despite her protestations of innocence, I have a notion that she deliberately brought the situation to a head just to see what I was made of. Not that I’m entirely innocent myself. All that bellyaching about how lonely I was after Isabel died was sure to stir up her mothering instincts. I see that now. And I may have been ringing her bell just a bit when I went on and on about chaperoning Miss Farmer to those country-house parties—as if for one moment I would have seriously considered leading Isabel’s sickroom nurse to the altar.

  Then again, my escape may have been narrower than I care to think. Katharine hit the mark when she said I needed to be rescued. Miss Farmer had me in her sights. She planned to let me drift along like the heartsick widower that I was, plying me with tea and sympathy until I was too weak to resist. Then, if I tried to extricate myself, she would create a scene and make me feel that I had put her in an embarrassing position. Katharine and Dick Sutton saw what was afoot sooner than I did. When he told Katharine with tears in his eyes that it was all settled between Miss Farmer and me, and that he didn’t understand why on earth I didn’t “camp on the trail,” Katharine knew full well that she was the game he wanted me to bag.

  One way or another, I was pretty much a wreck by the time Oberlin commencement rolled around in 1925. I had shed thirteen pounds and was so overwrought that I could hardly concentrate on my work. I wrote to my old professor Raymond Stetson and asked what he thought I should do. With his profound knowledge of psychology, the Prof would surely have some insight into my feelings for Katharine. I should have known better than to turn to a lifelong bachelor for advice in an affair of the heart. As I recollect, he suggested that I dream up some sort of conversational pitch and send it to Katharine in a letter. That was about the craziest idea I had ever heard. It sounded to me a good deal as if, not knowing about such things himself, the Prof had copied it from a novel.

  I had tried the literary approach before, as an underclassman at Oberlin, and it didn’t get me far. I was a bashful youth with little experience of girls outside of my parents’ small missionary circle. One year I got up the courage to invite a nice young woman to the Thanksgiving class party. Immediately, I began to worry whether I would be able to think of anything to say to her. To be on the safe side, I made an outline of what I might talk about and decided on a general discussion of Dickens’s novels as offering possibilities. The evening passed pleasantly enough, but I never got another date with the young lady in question. I was in no hurry to repeat my mistake.

  After I rejected his first proposal, the Prof counseled me to make a beeline for Dayton and get things settled face-to-face before I suffered another “attack.” That struck me as a more promising strategy. Knowing that Katharine had gone to Oberlin for a trustees’ meeting, I sent her a long letter by regular mail and two more by special delivery, suggesting a discreet rendezvous at a big hotel in downtown Chicago. We were both getting a little old for such lovers’ trysts. On the other hand, as the Prof put it, I owed it to Katharine to let her “deal with the impossibilities” as she saw fit, in full possession of the facts. He dismissed my qualms about trifling with her happiness. “The only way to live is to risk being unhappy,” he said, “and I’d rather be unhappy wit
h the person I loved than as contented as a cat by the fire.”

  The idea of meeting me in Chicago without telling Orv offended Katharine’s sense of propriety. She proposed instead that I come to Dayton a week later, while her brother was out of town, on the pretext that I was passing through on newspaper business en route to Washington. Apparently my campaign of love letters and telegrams was having an effect. It was not quite the one I intended, however. Almost at once Katharine was assailed by doubts. She had been unwise to be so affectionate and intimate with me, she wrote. Couldn’t we remain just friends? I don’t know how I had expected her to react, but I was definitely taken aback by her claim that she was in a state of shock and hadn’t understood in the least what I was “hinting” at.

  Hinting? I had all but professed my love for her on any number of occasions. Is it conceivable that she had no inkling of how I really felt—that to me she was worth more than all the rich old “vidders” in Kansas City lumped together? And couldn’t she see how she had been blithely leading me down the garden path with her motherly concern and pledges of undying friendship? Whether her own moves were as calculated as mine had been is another matter. It may be that she is genuinely unaware of the effect she has on the opposite sex. The Prof says she is one of the few women of whom he would be willing to admit the possibility of such artlessness, so I suppose I must consider it too. After all, how else to explain her behavior toward me—and toward Orville?