The Secrets of Flight (4 page)

A
ND SO, THREE YEARS LATER IN 1941, IN THE SPRING OF MY
freshman year at the University of Pittsburgh, my double life begins as a secret student of the sky.

T
he Sunday after my birthday everything changed all over again, when I returned to my apartment building after a walk and Gene Rosskemp cornered me in the lobby. “Mary! You gotta taste this!” he said, rather than hello, and then turned on his heel and disappeared down the hallway, past the wall of elevators. I sighed and clutched my purse to my bosom before following him down the corridor, past the nurse's office, and into the communal kitchen, a place I rarely ventured since not only was my own small apartment fully equipped, but the management had recently decided that the mentally ill and the aging were equally appealing tenants. To date, I'd been growled at by grown woman in pigtails and had possibly witnessed a drug deal just outside of the building. I was afraid to so much as heat up a bowl of soup in the microwave without being stabbed to death. Gene, obviously, held no such fear.

As my eyes adjusted to the flickering fluorescent light of
the grimy kitchen, Gene said, “Get a load of this, Mary—homemade cookies, right from the microwave!” He handed me a spoonful of melted goo, which I studied with a raised eyebrow. “For heaven's sake. What's in this?” I asked.

“Dark chocolate. Good for your heart.”

Sampling the sweet bite, I glanced over at the table for a possible seat, which was when I noticed the
USA Today
lying there, specifically the Arts and Entertainment section, which featured a black-and-white picture of three young women and an airplane—its image like a lost memory. I coughed and sputtered on the melted dough.

“That bad?” Gene asked, rescuing the spoon before I could drop it.

“No, it's . . . quite good. Actually.” I wiped my lip, still staring at the Fairchild PT-19, a plane I knew well, back when we were getting our wings. The three women were squinting into the sun: one smirking redhead, one shy brunette, and a short girl with curly hair, all smiling at something beyond the camera, quite possibly their future. They believed it was theirs to design. I picked up the paper, adjusted my glasses on my nose, and squinted at the newsprint. Congress, it seemed, was finally honoring the forgotten female pilots of WWII with the Congressional Gold Medal, “the highest civilian honor.” According to the article, fewer than three hundred Women Airforce Service Pilots were still alive, but relatives were eligible to collect the medals of family members who served.

“
B
RING BACK MEMORIES?”
G
ENE ASKED, OVER MY SHOULDER,
and I jumped. I never even told the writers' group that I'd been a pilot during the war, not even when Gene invited me to go
“flying” one day—model airplanes, it turned out, at a nearby park. As his little foam plane spun through the air above us and Gene expertly worked the controls, proudly showing off his snap rolls and lazy eights from the ground below, I thought,
How can I tell him that I made real figure eights in the sky?
“I mean of the time,” Gene added, and I exhaled.

“It certainly does.” I couldn't stop staring. How young they looked—and so happy, with their faces tilted toward the shimmering unknown. Beneath the three women and the plane was a caption:
Murphee Sutherland, Miriam Lichtenstein, and Grace Davinport, Women Airforce Service Pilots in 1944. Photo donated by the family of Grace Davinport.

So, Grace is gone,
I thought. At my age, when all of my friends were disappearing, I hadn't really expected otherwise. But would the rest of them be there? Murphee and Vera and—

“I saw this a while ago, back when it came out. Guess nobody likes to throw anything away around here. Funny how old pictures are—feels like you might know them, right? But in the summer of 1944, I was in France.”

I studied the girl in the center, squinting into the sun. How naïve she was, thinking she was brave—naïve and reckless and stupid. It was no wonder Miriam Lichtenstein had disappeared in 1945. Yet here she was in a national newspaper sixty-four years later,
identified by name
. What could it mean? I finally turned and looked at Gene, realizing what he'd just said,
Back when it came out
. “Do you mean to say the medals have already been awarded?” I looked at the date of the article, two months ago this week, July 10, 2009.

“Doubt it.” Gene pushed his readers up on his nose and stared at the photo. “Cute girls. I might've even dated one of 'em.”

I rolled up the article and swatted him with it. “I'm quite certain you didn't, Gene Rosskemp.”

“I mean, I would've wanted to,” Gene called after me, as I left the kitchen, still clutching the newspaper.

Back in my room, I methodically locked the dead bolts and then the chain link, before dropping my purse on the table and sinking my creaky joints into the recliner. Then, with trembling fingers, I pulled out the newspaper and stared at the picture once again, at the girl in the center beaming with the joy of someone who is completely oblivious to her own end. “Miri,” I whispered, as tears of disbelief filled my eyes. “Where did you go?”

T
HE FOLLOWING
T
UESDAY, AS WE GATHERED ONCE AGAIN AT THE
Carnegie Library, my tremor was worse than usual. Perhaps it was because Herb Shepherd was inexplicably not present to discuss his own piece, and I had always liked Herb, our poetic voice of reason, who was either dead or severely incapacitated, I deduced, since he hadn't skipped a group in the last ten years. But more than likely, the shaking hand and the flip-flopping of my heart were simply side effects of the girl with the braid, who had shown up again.

I'd decided in advance that if she were present then maybe I would hire her to be my transcriptionist for the memoir I was too afraid to write. And if she were never to return, then it was just as well; life could carry on as usual. After all, why muck about with the past? The story belonged to the pilots in the newspaper, not me, Mary Browning. Except that young Miri had peered at me from the center of the picture and dared me to tell the story. Could I bring her back to life?

As soon as Elyse entered, slouching under the weight of her enormous backpack, I drew in a breath and felt my pen tremble in my hand. The girl was going to make me tell the truth, and she didn't even know it yet.

“Do you think we oughta give Herb a call?” Gene asked, glancing anxiously around the table. “He said he wasn't feelin' so hot.”

“He
thought
it was just heartburn,” the other Jean said, raising her eyebrow.

Then Selena Markmann burst into the room. “Herb's water heater blew up!” she said, breathlessly, flinging her bag down on the table. “His basement is flooded.”

“So . . . he drowned?” asked Gene.

“He's waiting for a plumber, and he sends his regrets. We can mail him our critiques or save them for next week. But, since we're all here . . .” Selena added, with a nervous giggle, before proposing her new “Internet Initiative”: Since the group was getting
younger,
she said suggestively, wiggling her eyebrows in the direction of Elyse, she thought we should “make a pact to go green,” and save on Xeroxing costs by submitting our chapters via email. Once we were all online, we'd be able to contact each other in the event of an emergency, she pointed out.

“I still have a phone. Does no one else have a phone?” I asked. “And, forgive me, but which one of us is getting younger?”

“How many of us have computers?” Selena barked, and all but Jean Fester and myself raised a hand.

I glanced at Jean. “I don't believe Herb has a computer.”

“He does,” said Selena. “This was his idea.”

“Let's leave the decision for a vote when we reconvene in a week,” I suggested. “In the meantime, we need to select some
one to hand out for the next meeting.” It didn't matter whether you were undergoing emergency bypass surgery or were temporarily floating in sewage in your own basement: if you didn't show up, you didn't get another turn to be critiqued until the rest of us had been given a chance to submit.

“I could go,” said a tentative voice, and we all turned to glance at Elyse, shyly raising her hand. “I mean, if no one else is ready.”

Everyone loved the idea—everyone, that is, except for Jean Fester, who asked what a girl would write about these days, when she'd never had her freedom threatened?

A short while later, after the group had dispersed early and I had time to peruse the stacks and select a few novels for my night table, I approached the librarian, a woman in her mid-fifties, who looked at me kindly when I produced the
USA Today
article from my pocketbook, inwardly cursing my shaky fingers.

“A friend of mine flew planes during the war. I'm wondering if she wanted to attend the ceremony how she'd be found—if someone was looking for her . . .” The librarian scanned the article, her eyes narrowed with concentration. “I'm certain she couldn't just show up at Pennsylvania Avenue and expect to be handed a medal,” I added with a laugh.

When the librarian finally looked up and smiled, I decided I must be wrong: she was not a day over forty-five. She just needed to smile more often. “Your friend must be amazing,” she said.

“Not really, no. Just . . . an ordinary woman doing her part.”

“Let's see what we can find out,” the librarian said. I followed her over to a nearby cluster of desks, each one with its
own computer. She pulled up a seat for me and then plunked her bottom down in front of the screen. “Okay if I drive?” When I nodded, mute, she started typing words onto a blank page marked with a rainbow of colored letters: Google. After a considerable amount of tapping and clicking, she landed on a university website. “Here we go. It looks like some folks at Texas Woman's University are verifying who the pilots were.” She scrawled down a number on a small square of paper and handed it to me. I looked at the number and then back to her face. “I bet if your friend called this phone number, they could help.”

“And if she doesn't have a birth certificate or other forms of identification? I'm fairly certain she said everything was destroyed in a fire.”

“Oh, they have their ways. I'm sure if she just told them her name and Social Security number, they'd be able to verify that she was there.”

“Of course. You're right. Thank you. I'll . . . pass this information on.”

So, it was over before it had begun. Of course it was over. Had I really expected that I could just show them a black-and-white picture from the paper taken sixty years ago and expect them to recognize her? Did I even want Miri to be found?

On the way out of the library, I tossed the phone number in the garbage and then reached for the banister to steady my way down the steps, only to find Elyse sitting on the last two, down by the sidewalk on Forbes Avenue. Just coming upon her like that, lost in thought and looking like Sarah fiddling with her shoelaces, made my tremor start up again.

Elyse glanced over and smiled. “Hey, Mrs. Browning. My
mom won't be here for another hour. I should probably study, but the weather is so nice . . .”

“How about a cup of tea somewhere?” I suggested, forgetting that young people today only drink coffee. She hesitated, as if she were already committed to staying in that very spot of cement. “I have a business proposition to discuss with you,” I added, deciding in that very moment.

We settled on Panera Bread across the street, which certainly wasn't the old-world charm I was looking for.

“So, tell me a little about your novel,” I said, once we were sitting down in a booth by the window. I had already purchased our tea and Danishes and was still struggling to get the sugar packet into the cup without spilling it all over the table. Finally, I gave up and decided I like my Earl Grey bitter.

“The plot sounds stupid if I say it out loud,” Elyse said, taking a sip from her mug.

“The best stories sound stupid when you say them aloud,” I said. “Let's have it anyway.”

“It's . . . well . . . there's this mom, Larissa, who kind of travels around, falling in love and getting pregnant by men in different countries, but she always leaves the baby behind, right after it's born.” She set down her cup. “So, these four half sisters—Eliona, Anastasia, Cordelia, and Mathilda—end up at the same boarding school in London.” She met my eyes. “Stupid, huh? Maybe it would be better if there were only two sisters?”

“It's a perfectly fine plot,” I said, and her hunched shoulders dropped. “Look at
Ballet Shoes:
this archeologist stops collecting fossils and collects three babies instead who must earn money by dancing after he disappears for sixteen years.
It's just as far-fetched, but it works, as long as you can make your reader believe it.
But,
” I added, holding up a finger, “you haven't answered the single most important question.”

“You mean, like, hasn't Larissa heard of birth control?” Elyse asked.

“No!” I said, accidentally raising my voice. “What
passion,
what
pursuit,
keeps her traveling so much that she can't possibly stay to raise her babies? What does Larissa have her heart set on?”

Elyse blinked at me, as if, in all her fifteen years, she'd never felt an aching desire to be anyone else, anywhere else, with someone else.

“I'll have to think about it,” Elyse said, her voice thoughtful and intrigued.

“Well, think about it.”

As she stared off somewhere over my left shoulder, there was a hint of a smile on the corners of her lips. Finally, she shifted her gaze back to me. “So, what's this business proposition?”

“Ah. Well. As you can see I suffer from a bit of a tremor,” I said with a laugh, even though nothing about the tremor was funny to me. “It is quite hard for me to write these days, and I've been looking for someone to type my memoir.”