The Wright Sister

by Patty Dann

  I have a question for you. Have you ever been drunk? Even with this Prohibition, Harry does seem to drink a lot, and I have been joining him, not as much as he or the men at the office, but I quite like it. Gin. That’s what I like, with some fizzy soda.

  Carrie called and said you did not even want a turkey for Thanksgiving this year but insisted that the vegetable soup from the day before would suffice, and she said you barely ate that. I know she made a turkey, and it was there in the icebox, so I hope it did not go to waste.

  I miss your homemade toffee and the mandolin that I used to complain about. I am sorry if I ever mocked you in any way.

  I hope your hip is not causing too much pain these days. Please let Carrie know if you want me to visit. I shall be there in a flash. And I shall bake you whatever you please. The women here take such pride in their baked goods. I do not object to their fancy cakes, but it is not what I value most in life.

  In haste,

  Your devoted and only sister, K., who is getting plump.

  P.S. I’m sending you some postcards of the Hannibal Bridge, the railway bridge. They’re very proud of it—the first railway bridge to cross the Missouri River! I know how you like bridges, and if Hannibal could cross the Alps on elephants, then you can make this journey!

  P.P.S. Men like women to wrangle among ourselves, calling us suffragettes or suffragists or worse, but whatever the label, my boy, women have the vote now and I vote that you write me immediately.

  December 9, 1926

  WRIGHT SISTER TORN BETWEEN TWO MEN

  Even though my union with Harry is so new, I hope to be as excited to see him each time he enters the room as I am now, and on until the middle of the twentieth century, until I am a truly old woman. “Winter Flight,” indeed, as if I were a hundred years old, but I have not yet gone through the Change. I do not feel old. Maybe because I became “Sister” when I was so young, I always felt that I was old as a child and now am young as an adult when I am Katharine again. I once saw a freak like that at the Ohio State Fair, a child who looked like an old woman, with a wrinkled face and hands, dressed up, sitting on a rocking chair. Orv and Will used to talk about inventing a time machine. They believed without a doubt that someday it would be invented. The fact that I am married makes me think I am actually on such a machine, being born in the horse-and-buggy days in Dayton and now a married woman with an automobile, a Model T, in Kansas City.

  True, I “never was a beauty,” as I heard the Reverend say to the most inappropriate people—neighbors, a friend of his from seminary, and once to a woman’s face that I cannot place. I do need stronger and stronger eyeglasses, and I am not doing handsprings as I did as a child, but I do not feel I am in the winter of my life. At our small wedding party, a woman friend of Harry and Isabel’s looked me up and down and said with a feigned smile, “It is good for Harry to have companionship at this stage of life.” I had to hold my hands tightly behind my back to keep from laughing out loud. Companionship! As if we were old dogs lying by the fire! There have been a few times we have lain by the fire, and we were not clothed. Perhaps I should have told this woman, “Madame, I can assure you, we are more than companions,” but I clenched my teeth and did not.

  At Oberlin there was a girl who had a book of drawings she’d brought back from France, where she had worked as a summer tutor for a family with three children. The father was blind, and each summer he chose a different tutor because he did not want his wife getting “too attached” to the tutor, whether male or female. We laughed at all those drawings at the time, but now Harry and I do all of those positions—well, almost all. In that French book was a picture of some sort of acrobatics on the stairs, a complicated drawing that looked like one would require a trapeze installed in one’s home, that I think neither of us would recover from at this point.

  Right now, I am sitting up in my bed, our bed, which was once Isabel’s, covered with white down comforters, looking out at a yard full of bare-limbed maple trees. I do take delight in the dance of sunlight on the trees, and if I squint, I can pretend I live in a tree house. Harry and I play a game of running up and down the stairs to greet each other. We whistle to each other, and the other always answers back, a conversation in song, as Harry says. Harry says that he and I are not human at all, but birds. Both Orv and Harry love birds, so I know Orv will be friendly again. We entertained Harry and Isabel at the house, for goodness’ sakes. Will was the best whistler in our house, although I wouldn’t say that to Orv’s face. As close as those boys were, the competitive spirit was evident even in which boy dressed the quickest (it was also Will). My mind is darting all over the place, like the milkweed pods we used to blow on as children, as I try to find my bearings in this house. We all used to run up and down the stairs at home in Dayton. Once, Orv and Will fashioned a kind of pulley with a toboggan that banged horribly to send things up and down—not made for humans, although we had our go at that. The Reverend certainly never let us slide down the banister the way other children did, but once outside, we had complete sovereignty over that yard, which was full of the boys’ clutter of bicycles and machines.

  Many times, since I left Dayton, I have picked up the telephone and slowly dialed 0 for the operator to call Orv. I cannot control my longings and myself. And many times, I have heard the Dayton operator’s voice and I feel I am almost home, hearing that accent that of course a Frenchman would not hear as being Daytonian, but I know clear as day is not a Kansas City twang. “And what number would you like? And who is calling, please?” the operator always says, because people in Ohio are polite. I have rudely hung up on the kind operators each time. I don’t think I have ever hung up on anyone in my life before, or slammed a door, or certainly thrown a vase. That is Orv’s department.

  But long-distance telephone calls are expensive. Sundays are the best, and station-to-station is cheaper, but then we have to pay if anyone answers. I usually call person-to-person and ask for Orv, and I don’t have to pay unless he comes to the phone. Still, my longing is such that sometimes I call station-to-station and at least have a chat with Carrie, with hopes that she can unbend Orv’s mind. Harry doesn’t like the bills, but he knows it helps keep my sanity. As he says with a grin, “No man wants an addled bride.” And I did bring some money of my own to this marriage.

  I made a chart today, diagramming the Reverend’s house at 7 Hawthorn Street, then the big house, and now my house in KC, as they call it. Three homes, run by three men, and I have drawn a picture of each man, the Reverend, Orv, and now Harry, at the top sitting on the roofs of the houses. And then I drew a tightrope between the big house to the drawing of our house in Kansas City. Tomorrow I shall draw myself as well, walking the tightrope, carrying a parasol, walking very carefully.

  December 22, 1926—Winter Solstice

  Dear Orv,

  Rejoice on this hallowed day. I feel close to you even though six hundred miles separate us. I had a delightful conversation with Carrie, who says you plan to be with us at some point in January of the New Year. I know you are not one for holidays, so any time in January will be fine. We shall keep the fires going to keep your sensitive feet warm. You are welcome to stay as long as you like (forever!). I shall begin making preparations.

  In anticipation of your visit. Merry Christmas and happy 1927. May this year be full of clear skies!

  K.

  P.S. I have been thinking recently that Mother was never in an automobile, let alone an aeroplane, and to think Ford sold his first automobile just months before Kitty Hawk. Too much change, Orv, too much change.

  P.P.S. Do you still think of yourself as part of the “Wright brothers”? I wish we could have had walk-and-talks with those other famous boys, like the Smith brothers from Quebec. I have a bowl of their cherry cough drops by my bedside. And then there was poor Vincent and his brother Theo. I wish I could have given Vincent some of these cough drops. I always felt I could have helped that boy. I was almost sixteen when he took his own life. I remember
us all reading about it some years later when his paintings had become famous, and I cannot remember if it was you or Will who said, “Another poor minister’s son.”

  February 1, 1927

  BIRTHDAY TWINS

  To share the very same day of birth—August 19, in the heart of midwestern summer—although we are of course not really twins, is to share a soul. Surely Orv must still feel that in some part of his brain or being. We were told repeatedly as children by the Reverend, and twice by fortune-tellers we met on our American and European travels, that because we were born on the same day, then our bond is sacred. He was born in the small house at 7 Hawthorn in Dayton, and I was born on Orv’s third birthday, in the same house, where the boys later raced their bicycles and tinkered with their inventions. Will had been born four years before Orv, but not on our birthday. He had one of his own. People in town just called them the “Bishop’s Boys.” We had two older brothers, Reuchlin and Lorin, but it felt like they were of another family and the public was not interested in them. There was a whole noisy world in that small house, as if we lived in a magnificent melon of music and laughter and an explosion of ideas, even with our weary sorrows. The Reverend was not an easy man to live with. Outside the house he was revered, as the word “reverend” suggests. Some men are different at home. I would not dare to utter that aloud if he were still alive, but I do feel free to write it here. As I try to make sense of this strange situation, I realize it is not true that I do not know a single person who was cut off from her family at her choice of husband. There was a girl at Oberlin, Mary, whose parents refused to speak to her because she married a man of the Jewish faith. I remember being so stunned at the time that a family could be so mean. This was in the 1890s, last century, as the young folks say, but still. I just couldn’t believe one’s own family wouldn’t attend a wedding or even speak to you again for finding love. It was I who consoled her and even attended the wedding. If our lives were a novel, one would say this was some kind of foreshadowing, but this is true life. Mary’s wedding was in a very ornate dance hall. In fact, the ceremony itself had to be outside, because Jewish law said the vows had to be made under the sky! So we all marched outside after the sun set on Saturday and they got married under a canopy held up by some strong, handsome men. How wonderful to say one must get married under the sky. Will and Orv would have liked that, I should think, but I don’t recall that they showed much interest when I told them at the time. Mary changed her name to Rachel and converted to her husband’s faith. She spent hours poring over Hebrew texts in our house at college. I found it quite fascinating. And how we all loved the notion that she was supposed to make love with her husband on the Sabbath. I think the only surprising (I won’t even say shocking) thing to me, a reverend’s daughter, was that their Sabbath was on Saturday. The idea one is supposed to make love on a certain day was something I found quite titillating. I was happy to be there for my friend. Only one other member of our class was there, our friend the beautiful Sonya Rose, who is also Jewish, who left soon after because she was with child, but nobody from Mary/Rachel’s family was there, not one soul.

  Tomorrow night Harry is taking me to a jazz club, my first! Orv and I never went to such things, and of course the Reverend would not approve. “The sins of the father” is all I can say at the moment. The sounds in the house on 7 Hawthorn were music, laughter, and some screams. I could not identify all the sounds, the little murmurings, from the Reverend’s room.

  (I graciously resigned from Isabel’s book group. I much prefer reading books on my own, without the chitchat. And there are only so many times one can listen to a woman look over her glasses and say, “Isabel was always such an important part of this gathering.”)

  Later on February 1, 1927

  SPINSTER NO MORE

  It has been more than two months since I became Mrs. Harry Haskell and I cannot recall my last real conversation with Orv, nor can I remember the last time I held my beloved mother’s hand. The ponds are frozen solid now, and Harry said this weekend we shall go ice-skating, which I’ve always loved!

  There was nothing untoward or flirtatious when Harry first arrived on the island. After all, Orv had signed off on his visit. I wish I could recall, because there’s even a chance that it was he who suggested to me that Harry visit us. It was not Orv who usually made social engagements, but life at the lake was different. In any event, no invitations were made unless Orv approved them, and he was as unpredictable as he was firm in his choices.

  Orv had a system, as he did with most things. He liked to hear my suggestions at breakfast, so that if I proposed a guest come to the island over pancakes, which I might have done with Harry, then he always told me at dinner whether he approved. If he did, he would simply say, as he had done with Harry, “What day is Harry Haskell arriving?” and then I knew to make the invitation. Orv would also write it on an index card he would then catalog in his special filing system along with the previous years’ calendars.

  As the three of us walked the paths in the summer air, Orv mostly wanted to talk about birds, his birds, meaning the meticulous notebooks in which he recorded every bird he ever saw and the other ones full of his beautiful drawings of their wings along with his computations.

  But on this day, at 3:30 p.m.—I know because I’d just checked the clock in the hall—Orv was in the study reading his book of North American birds, writing in the margins as he always did, with the pencils he insisted I sharpen (although not too much, but just enough), when the kiss happened. Harry’s lips pressed up through the cold mesh. That first kiss was the first time I felt shot through with sensations I had never known from a man’s touch before. When I had gone up with Orv—that was what Orv called flying, “going up”—that was similar. Then too I felt the rush of the sky and the land pulling away from me at the same time, almost like the ocean pulling away as you stand on the sand. Going up and having Harry inside me are two very similar sensations.

  February 2, 1927

  ROCKING THE BOAT

  I am trying to figure out how I ended up in Kansas City! When I cannot sleep, which as I say is every night, I think of my husband’s arms, the way they wrap around me in the morning, and then I reach for him and cannot believe he is still there. But I want to recall that first kiss, for it seems so recent.

  We, Orv and I, had been spending summers at Lambert Island, “the island,” as we called it. The other three seasons we were at the big house in Dayton. Carrie was always with us.

  How did Harry and I tumble into love? How was it possible? I never saw my brothers fall in love with anything but their beloved machines. I had no experience in the ways of the heart, either a man’s heart or my own. They say that widowed men often cannot live on their own, but I have not read the research on the effect of a sister leaving her brother to wed.

  The Reverend never showed an inclination to remarry after Mother’s death, although there were neighbors and parishioners delivering more covered dishes than we could have eaten, even with our icebox. But there were strange foods I had never seen before, women visiting, scenting our kitchen with unfamiliar perfumes.

  A woman with unnaturally large eyes brought beef and noodle covered dishes every Sunday after services for several months. I saw the Reverend standing at the icebox once, red-faced, spooning the cold casserole, and his trousers were unbuttoned, but I silently withdrew up the stairs, and he did not see me. There were several nights, after the condolence callers had retreated, that I just scraped the food out back for the birds and raccoons.

  I admit I was ill at ease, trying to imagine what Orv would say, when Harry asked me to marry him. I was always “on my toes” with him, but it was a more heightened “on my toes”–ness than ever before. I do not recall that there was even a formal marriage proposal. Harry and I were out in a canoe on the lake one blowy afternoon, just the two of us, which did not happen much because Orv always seemed to be with us. I do not recall where Orv was. Harry was at the stern. I was at the bow, an
d at one point I paddled and feathered the way I had learned from Orv, and I turned to look at Harry and he was just sitting there grinning, with his paddle on his lap. That was the moment we both knew that we had to be together. In that moment I also knew Orv would be alarmed by any change in his daily life. He is someone who would have a fit if his polished left shoe was placed to the right of his right shoe in his closet.

  Tomorrow morning, when Harry leaves for the paper, I am going to take a long walk in the snow.

  February 3, 1927

  WRIGHT SISTER OR MRS. HARRY HASKELL?

  The six hundred miles between Dayton and Kansas City have sent Orv over the edge, but he was over the edge before that. I did not move to Kansas City right away. There were many months. He had time to adjust, although I am having trouble too, as I feel like an Ohio woman in my bones. The house is full of books and papers and passions that Harry shared with Isabel and now shares with me. There are still photographs of Isabel and Harry together throughout the house, a picture on the mantel of them with their son sitting on a pony when he was little. We both understand we cannot take away the stories of our lives before we wed. Harry came to me with his stories, and I came to him with mine, but sometimes the green-eyed demon attacks me, and I am overcome. When I watch Harry take off his shirt and hang it on the bedpost before we are together, or after lovemaking, when he is stroking my back, I want to scream, “Did you do this with your darling Isabel? Did you hang your shirt just so on the bedpost? Did you stroke her this way?” But I don’t. I sigh and try to think of other things, like when I used to go up with Orv in the plane and he tied my skirt around my legs so it would not blow or get twisted, or when we were in Paris and it was not only my brothers who received invitations from royalty to go on boat rides on the Seine. The jealousy wells up and I put the pillow in front of my mouth so I do not scream at Harry. I know jealousy is a sin, and I know it is one of mine far too often for a woman with my education.