To my disappointment, if not my surprise, Mr. Coolidge showed no more inclination than Chief Justice Taft to take on the powers that be at the Smithsonian. Nor did he rise to the bait at the Gridiron Club dinner that fall, when the newspapermen put on their little skit about the flyer being snatched up by a foreign museum. The leaders in the House, both Republican and Democrat, came up to me afterward and offered to help, but I asked them not to do anything in Congress without letting me know. If there was going to be a showdown with the Smithsonian, I would have to furnish the ammunition, and I didn’t want the thing stirred up in some half-prepared way. I already had my hands full setting up the 1903 machine so it would look the way it did originally when it finally went to England.
It was the Star’s Washington reporter, Roy Roberts, who brought me to the Gridiron shindig. I suspect he wangled the invitation to the White House as well. As Harry was unable attend the correspondents’ dinner, I was obliged to listen to my host sing his praises all evening long—how he was the best friend Mr. Roberts had, how everyone liked him around the office, how he was able get the essential points out of any subject, and so forth and so on. Mr. Roberts regretted that Harry could not be “down east” more, mixing with the people who were “running things.” I refrained from observing that one reason Kate and I liked and trusted Harry was that he didn’t put himself forward and get mixed up with the politicians and opinion makers, the way most reporters do.
We had become so accustomed by that time to seeing Harry pop up every few months that I didn’t bat an eye when he showed up in Dayton at the end of the year. Swes made out that he was “just passing through” on his way home after spending the Christmas holiday with his sister in Cleveland. We had a pleasant visit and saw him off to Kansas City a few days later. I still find it hard to believe that he and Katharine were plotting and scheming behind my back the whole time—after all the three of us had been through together. If you ask me, that sister of mine has a lot to answer for. I honestly believe that Harry and I would still be close friends if she hadn’t come between us—and if he hadn’t come between me and Swes.
Harry
I told the men at the office that I would be spending Christmas with Mary that year. For once it was unnecessary to invent a cover story. I suppose there was some risk involved in showing up in Cleveland on Christmas Eve without giving my sister more than a few days’ notice. But I counted on Mary being so happy to see me that she wouldn’t ask too many awkward questions. In any case, my interest in Katharine was no secret to her. What I didn’t realize at the time was that Mary had actually discussed the prospect of our getting married with Mother before she died. It seems she divined my intentions more than a year before they revealed themselves to me.
I arrived at Hawthorn Hill the afternoon of Christmas Day. I had sent Katharine her package in advance so that it wouldn’t look as if I had planned all along to present it in person. She took some leftover turkey out of the oven and the three of us sat down to a late supper in the kitchen. Afterward we moved into the library to open our gifts. It was the first time in more than thirty years that Katharine and I had exchanged Christmas presents, and I had my work cut out not to show my state of mind to Orville. Katharine created a smokescreen by reminiscing about the copy of Thomas à Kempis’s Imitation of Christ that she had given me at Oberlin. She said she chose it because my missionary people were all so far away and she thought I might be lonely. And all the while I was thinking that with any luck I wouldn’t be lonely much longer.
The Wrights put me in my usual room at the end of the hallway, across from the “blue room” where Katharine and I liked to hold what the young people call petting parties. That first night, after Orville was safely in bed, we tiptoed back downstairs and sat up for a long while talking—and doing “other things,” as Katharine says. She plied me with questions and ideas about redecorating the house in Kansas City. She even asked for an inventory of the furnishings in every room so we could get the wallpapering done and new rugs ordered before she moved in. There was just one hitch: she still couldn’t, or wouldn’t, say when she would be ready to move.
When I came to Dayton that Christmas, I expected we would announce our engagement to Orville together. It had been several months since I proposed, and it didn’t feel right to keep her brother in the dark about our plans much longer. But Katharine had her own ideas. She said she wanted to feel happy about my visit and preferred to wait to break the news after I was gone. If I had known that months later I would still be waiting for her to make up her mind to leave Orville, I might have taken a firmer line. But it went against the grain with me to push her. I cared for her too much to let her go ahead with the wedding against her better judgment and just because she had said she would. There wouldn’t have been happiness for either of us in that.
So I assured Katharine that there was plenty of time to think it over. If she finally decided she couldn’t leave her brother, even for the part of each year we had talked about, I would do my best to live with it. After all, I could hardly ask less of myself than I was asking of Orville. All the same, I believe Mr. Stetson got it about right when he said that Katharine’s making herself indispensable to her brother was partly a game, a way of making herself feel useful. Deep down, he told me, she knows that Orville could dispense with all that indispensability. She could dispense with it too—or perhaps not. Sometimes I wonder if Katharine doesn’t need Orville even more than he needs her, to give her a sense of doing vital work.
What a tangled web we had woven for ourselves. Orville could have brushed it away in an instant if he had chosen to. He could have taken the high road and said, “I don’t want to be the occasion of one of these fine martyring devotions,” and wished his sister well in her new life. Unfortunately for all of us, he had come to depend on Katharine’s unstinting devotion, and she seemed bound and determined to play the martyr.
Katharine
The moon shone all the time Harry was here—a bright, Christmassy moon, like the Star of Bethlehem, streaming through the windows in the “blue room” while we spooned like a pair of young lovers. I hardly slept a wink those three nights. How sweet it was to have Harry so close to me and to give something of myself to him. We snuggled together in the big chair and he slipped his hand down where I love to have it and held it against me. It was so good to feel it there. It seemed to stop a sort of aching. Harry was so dear—so dear! I wasn’t afraid of anything with him. I knew he would never be anything but delicate and that we would never get common with each other, no matter how completely we let the bars down.
That Christmas would have been perfect bliss if only I hadn’t been so uneasy in my mind about Orv. Try as I might, I couldn’t force myself to tell him about Harry and me—and I will never, ever let him know how long ago I decided to move to Kansas City. That’s one secret I will guard to my dying day. I started several times to talk to him about being married, but I couldn’t get anywhere when I saw the look on his face. It’s what I call his “little boy look”— the pathetic, appealing look he always gives me when anything hurts him. It nearly breaks my heart. I couldn’t bear to make trouble for him, for I knew that he would be so absolutely alone without me.
Harry tries hard to sympathize, but he simply can’t imagine how inseparable the relation has been between Orv and me. Up to now, our interests and our friends have been together always—just exactly as much as a husband’s and wife’s are. It felt like the most natural thing in the world to be wearing the solitaire ring that he gave to me when I graduated from Oberlin—as if I was “his girl.” Orv is like a boy in some ways—like all men, I think. He has worked so hard, risked so much, accomplished so much. Just at the time Harry asked me to marry him, Little Brother had a wearing, hard fight on his hands and needed me more than ever. It was wonderful to be needed, in a way, but at the same time I felt as if I were in chains—and I wasn’t sure I had the strength to break loose.
How can I ever explain all this to Harry? Hi
s feelings about his sister can’t be compared with Orv’s feelings about me. They haven’t lived together all their lives, shared everything all their lives, enjoyed everything together, endured everything together. It wasn’t just Orv who depended on me—I didn’t know how I would ever be satisfied away from him. He never went anywhere without me, except for some affairs for the men. He never considered anything without asking what I thought about it, just as any good husband would do. Always everything that interested Will and Orv interested me, and they took up all my interests in just the same way.
But what if I’m wrong? I might be mistaken, and that’s a fact. What if Orv doesn’t need me as much as I think he does? I can only judge his feelings by my own. I hardly know what I would have done if he had told me that he planned to marry someone and was going somewhere else to live. I can just imagine what Orv must have thought of my proposing to go off—at this stage of the game. On the other hand, I sometimes wonder if he didn’t suspect something and wasn’t much disturbed by it. It seems unlikely that he had plans of his own, but maybe he hadn’t thought of marrying because we had each other, and if I left him, he would find someone else.
It’s a queer thing about love. Everybody knows the more you love, the more you can love. I loved Harry more because I loved Bubbo so much, and I guess I loved Bubbo more now that I loved Harry so much. Sort of a polygamist attitude—the more, the merrier! Sometimes I had a wild hope that we could all be together—that maybe, some day, Orv could come and live with Harry and me in Kansas City, and then I’d not have a trouble in the world. I could do everything they both wanted. I could be with Harry alone a lot and still not make Orv feel left out. Little Brother is so companionable, so quiet and gentle—surely, I told myself, Harry wouldn’t mind.
Living as a threesome never would have worked, of course. It was just another one of my fairy-tale schemes. On top of everything else, the Star was put up for sale in early 1926, and it seemed probable that Harry would not want to stay on in Kansas City after the paper changed hands. We had spoken once or twice of the possibility of his moving east to do his writing. If he did want to try his luck in Washington or New York, I was in favor of making the change sooner rather than later, while he was still in his prime. I had always thought the Star might be bought by someone with such an entirely different idea of a newspaper that Harry wouldn’t be interested in staying with it. But that didn’t matter. We weren’t dependent upon any place or anyone for our real happiness, as long as we had each other.
Harry
It was beginning to feel as if we were all characters in a drawing-room comedy—or perhaps a Shakespearean tragedy would be closer to the mark. There Katharine and I were, two star-crossed lovers, young at heart but growing longer in the tooth with each passing day. We couldn’t even call ourselves masters of our own fates: my happiness lay in Katharine’s hands, and our happiness lay in Orville’s. Then, just as we were all hunkering down for a long, hard slog, the future of the Star was suddenly cast to the winds as well. I can still picture the scene at the office when we got the news of Laura Kirkwood’s death that February. Everyone knew what that meant: her father’s great creation, the “Daily William Rockhill Nelson,” would be consigned to the auction block and all of us on the staff would be sold down the river, like chattel.
Against the odds, the paper won a new lease on life. Mrs. Kirkwood was less fortunate. She had everything to live for, but threw it all away on drinking, horse racing, and high living. So much for the privileges of the leisure class. Toward the end, Mrs. Kirkwood seemed to have lost all interest in life. Somehow she had persuaded herself that her husband had stopped loving her. It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that she deliberately drank herself to death in that hotel room in Baltimore. And to think that only a few months earlier she had been trying to throw me together with one of her widowed lady friends. I expect I should be grateful to her. After all, it was her well-intentioned matchmaking that finally pushed me into Katharine’s arms.
Katharine was all for cutting my ties to Kansas City and moving east, or even living abroad for a time. But I had invested too much of my life in the Star to walk away without a fight. A few men on the paper reckoned we had a shot at buying it from the Nelson estate. The other bidders had deep pockets, but we pooled our resources, secured a bank loan, and pulled it off. Katharine practically begged me to let her put in some of her own money. She had a sizable nest egg that her brother Will had left her, as well as some property and other investments, all more or less safe and sound. But I wouldn’t hear of her taking such a gamble with her life savings. As she often reminds me, money is important in its place, but its place isn’t above everything else.
Katharine seems content to be cutting our pattern according to our cloth. But it’s no use denying that in the eyes of the world she took a step down when she came to live with me in Kansas City. I almost hated to disabuse her of the illusion that Colonel Nelson had left me a small fortune in his will. I was making less than ten thousand a year when we were married and had nothing in the bank to speak of. Katharine once told me that Orville was worth some five or six hundred thousand dollars. They both lived comfortably on his savings, had a large house and servants, entertained lavishly, and traveled as much as they cared to. Who was I to ask her to give all that up and leave one of the most distinguished men in the world to become the wife of an obscure midwestern newspaper editor?
Orville
No sooner had Harry left that Christmas than Kate started acting on edge again. Once or twice I feared she was close to breaking down. She even paid a department store bill with the wrong check—that wasn’t like Swes at all. When I questioned her, she dismissed it as “just some trouble in my upper story.” Ha! The constant stream of letters from Kansas City—two or three a day sometimes—should have opened my eyes sooner. But the bits that Kate read out loud to me sounded innocent enough. One day she had her nose buried in Harry’s essay on the founder of the Star. The next thing I knew, the paper was for sale and the staff was moving heaven and earth to raise the money to buy it. Swes even talked about chipping in some of her own savings. She said it would be a safe investment—in the newspaper and her sweetheart both, no doubt!
Harry has been a friend to us through thick and thin, but he never was as hard-boiled as Kate made him out to be. No, he needs a woman’s companionship and support as much as any fellow does. The signs were staring me in the face all along: the stacks of letters and telegrams; the flowers he sent every year on Kate’s birthday and Valentine’s Day; the surprise visits when he just “happened” to be passing through town. It’s not as if it was the first time my sister had turned a man’s head. Young Lieutenant Lahm was mighty chummy with her when I was laid up in the hospital after my accident. Gentlemen admirers were forever giving her boxes of candy or bouquets or fancy tea sets. That ornithologist fellow, Frank Chapman, inscribed several of his books to her. And then there was Stef, always showering her with presents—books, pictures, even sculptures.
Swes is a handsome and intelligent woman, beyond a doubt. I don’t wonder that men like Harry and Stef are attracted to her. No man could ask for a better friend, a better helpmate, a better, more loyal sister. Love is a different proposition, however. Willie Baxter learned that lesson soon enough when he lost his heart to Lola Pratt at the tender age of seventeen. You have to hand it to Booth Tarkington—he understands a thing or two about relations between the sexes. Follow your head, not your heart, and you won’t go far wrong, that’s always been my motto. If Will and I had frittered away our time chasing skirts, I reckon I would still be selling bicycles down on South William Street.
Katharine
I was sure crazy after Harry went away that Christmas. I can’t imagine now how I got into such a state. My thoughts were like the monkey’s tail, going around and around. I was in such a peck of trouble and such a peck of happiness, all mixed up together, afraid to enjoy the happiness that Harry offered because of the specter of Orv in the backg
round all the time. The harder my darling boy pressed me to make up my mind, the more confused and frantic I got. I was in the vicious circle—not free to love him as I might, not free not to love him. I almost despaired of finding a way out.
Harry will never know how my conscience fought with my feelings. I had finally begun to realize what our loving each other meant for Orv. The thought of what was coming stabbed me day after day when I thought what the house would be to Little Brother without me there. I dreaded what I had to go through—and what he had to look forward to. The tears were very near the surface all the time. Even if I had known what to do about Orv, I would have had bad moments over making the plunge into marriage, because I knew there would be no going back. Whichever way I looked, a door seemed to slam shut in my face.
To make matters worse, the fate of the Star was hanging in the balance, and Harry’s future along with it. I had long felt that the life of the paper, under the old management, was very uncertain. And I was as full as Harry was of utter amazement at the selfishness of the Nelson family. Most people who do big things, as Mr. Nelson did, are very selfish. But not to leave so much as a penny to any of the people who had worked with him and for him—for him, in the sense of devoting themselves wholeheartedly to his plans and profit and pleasure—that was cruelly selfish. Imagine deserting the men who had been with the paper so long and made it what it was, especially after not letting them have any credit before the public.
Thinking only of one’s family is a very common weakness. It was disgraceful for the name of Mr. Nelson’s son-in-law to appear at the top of Harry’s editorial page—as if he had the least thing to do with what went into it. As close as our family has always been, I have less and less admiration for “family spirit.” No doubt Mr. Nelson thought his daughter would outlive all of his old associates—at least the years of their activity in any work. Laura Kirkwood was naturally a fine woman, but someone with her lack of self-control should not have been in the position of running a newspaper. She had grown too used to the loyalty and ability of the staff to get its true value. Harry was devoted to the Kirkwoods, but if you ask me, they owed a good deal more to him than he did to them.
Maiden Flight Page 12
