The Wright Sister

by Patty Dann

  This afternoon I went downtown and joined the Women’s League and met some smart women, so I am not totally lost.

  August 24, 1927

  Dear Orville,

  I received a letter that alarmed me. It had quite a circuitous journey, with the original letter sent to Oberlin, to my attention, which they forwarded to me from Ohio.

  It was from a young woman named Rochelle, who claims she is the daughter of my classmate—you know beautiful Sonya, the Jewish girl who left college because she was with child. We all thought she had ended the pregnancy, but here was this young woman writing to me, and she was, or is, asking for money.

  I want to tell you more about Rochelle. A few days after I received the letter from Rochelle, she showed up at the back door, in a silvery flapper dress and broken-down shoes. I did not check, but I believe she was not wearing undergarments. She asked for food and she smelled not a little of alcohol. She is staggeringly beautiful, not a description I would use often, and there is something about her dark eyes that makes you feel as if you should take care of her, put your arms around her. And she has enormous breasts, not something I usually speak of either. We sat at the kitchen table. I shooed out the disapproving maid (whom I now refer to as Mrs. Crossbottom), and we sat there as she ate two full plates of the noodle and cheese dish I had made the day before. You know the one you like with the extra cheese in large chunks. (Mrs. Crossbottom of course had told me this was not healthy for “Mr. Haskell,” but he seems quite healthy in all departments.) Rochelle told me about going to France in 1918, to help the troops—when General Pershing asked women to “provide amusement and moral welfare.” I fear she provided more amusement than moral welfare, and she still feels that selling her body “is what the Lord put me on the earth to do.” She told me this after I said I would try to help her, perhaps get her a job at the library. She is not a dull girl, but her eyes became vacant when I suggested this. She asked me several times between very quick mouthfuls of noodles and cheese whether I wanted to attend a séance with her and communicate with anyone. I quickly said I had no such interest, but she said I should think about it. I do not know why the occult has gained such popularity, and I must say it makes me uncomfortable.

  On another note, did you get my parcel of gingerbread, with extra slices of ginger the way you like it?

  I long to be in France today with our French friends, but the tomatoes are ripe here, and Harry and I spent the morning barefoot in the garden! We brought a saltshaker out there and stood like animals eating tomatoes and shaking salt. But you never liked to have bare feet, I know so well. Even those photographs of you at Kitty Hawk, so proper with your shoes polished and tightly laced!

  Do you need more zigzag stockings? I will continue to knit them and send them every month, but please let me know if you need more. I know how you wear them to shreds from all that pacing around. Carrie says that you are pacing more than before, which I hardly think possible. Sometimes she thinks you are barely sleeping two hours at night, with all your back and forth. Mint tea with lemon would help your nerves. I know you are not fond of it, but too much agitation is not good for anyone. Do you have any new inventions up your sleeve? I have always felt so honored that you tell me first and that you always listened to mine.

  Lovingly,

  Swes

  P.S. I’m glad I took one of the bicycles with me. Knowing you built it gives me pleasure. A man took a picture of me riding the other day. If you see a photograph in the papers with the headline THE WRIGHT BROTHERS’ SISTER RIDES OFF INTO THE SUNSET, you’ll know why.

  August 25, 1927

  ONE MAN, TWO WIVES

  Isabel and Harry were occasionally our guests at home in Dayton when we were young. But I was far too involved with the boys, raising money, traveling with them around the world, to honestly ever think of men in an amorous way. And the Reverend was clear that this was not in the stars for me.

  I told Harry that I would like to paint a picture of him and me holding hands with each other, but then on either side, he would be holding hands with Isabel and I would be holding hands with Orv. Harry said, “Be my guest,” and shook his head. I have not embarked on such a painting, but I did bring my watercolors with me as well as my drafting pens.

  When Harry returns from visiting Isabel’s grave at the cemetery, he leaves his gardening tools and muddy boots at the kitchen door. He has invited me to go with him, and if I were a better woman I would have, but I am not.

  Perhaps Harry will plant flowers for me someday. Although I would like to be laid to rest in Woodland Cemetery, with Mother and the Reverend and Will. Dayton should be my final resting place. But sometimes I don’t want to be near the Reverend ever again.

  August 26, 1927

  CRAZED WOMAN LONGS FOR BABY

  I still long for a baby. I well understand that at my age that is absurd, although I did read in one of the tabloids I saw at the pharmacy that a woman gave birth at fifty-seven! So perhaps anything is possible.

  I love Harry, and when he handed me Isabel’s key to the front door, on the chain with the little silver rose on a stem, I know it was difficult for him, but nobody forced his hand.

  I have the freedom to write, as finally we do have the freedom to vote. Many people still treat me like a child—Mrs. Crossbottom, for instance. If I make a simple slip of the tongue calling the modern refrigerator the icebox, she chastises me as if I am a fool. I wish to tell her what it is to be at the birth of the invention of manned flight, but I hold my tongue and say, “Yes, of course, refrigerator.”

  My hands are far more often smudged with carbon paper than most women’s and perhaps more than Harry would like, but as he has ink in his veins, he never complains. Once, after we had made love in the afternoon rain—this was before we were married—with the shutters wide open and only the screens protecting us from all of nature, I screamed out first in delight and then again when I saw the sheets stained with purplish ink, when I thought I had some terrible disease.

  I’m assuming Orville has read the letters, but only God knows. How can one not open a letter addressed to oneself? Carrie keeps in touch with me by post and telephone. I understand Mrs. Crossbottom here is not my confidante, and I am as polite as I can be to her. I understand that she is the one who changes the sheets and she is used to working for Isabel, so there is nothing I can do. She has been “with the family” for a long time. I do not know if Harry and Isabel continued to make love toward the end of their marriage, and of course I would never ask. But the look the maid gives me when she carries our sheets to the laundry room is not kind.

  I feel remarkably lucky that my stepson, dare I say that word, does not despise me or think of me as a wicked stepmother. In fact, today he said he was happy his father had found love again.

  August 27, 1927

  AGITATED WOMAN SEEKS SOLACE

  Apparently when Harry Jr. was just a two-year-old, when Harry came home from work he would eagerly ask, “What’s the news, Papa?”

  Harry Jr. is extremely well educated. He graduated from Harvard in 1924 and is cultured in a way I do not think is common for a man. He almost seems European to me, yes, that is what I would say about him: a sweet young man, a lover of music and the arts.

  The Kansas City Star is the religion of the house. Definitely our religion now. We do not say prayers every day the way we did in the Reverend’s home, although I do silently before each meal, including one for Orv to not be insane. Harry Jr. was at our wedding and even asked me to dance, which I did, with everyone watching. I am certainly glad there were no newsreels of that! I tried not to step on the poor young man’s feet, and I had to remind myself that his father and I had a marriage license and we were not doing anything illegal. As we danced to “Sleepy Time Gal” I had to say over and over to myself, “I did not kill Isabel; I did not kill Isabel.”

  Harry was in the class of 1896, two years ahead of me, although he is just a few months older than I am. I had things to attend to at home. The
re were always things for me to attend to at home, the Reverend made certain of that. Mother had died in 1889. And as he told me repeatedly, “Girls who are free with their charms will meet their match with the devil.”

  Thank goodness I am younger than Harry by a few months, because the ladies in Kansas City would have words about that if I were a minute older than he. I can barely tolerate the chatter as it is, even though it is not as if we just bumped into each other at the corner grocery store. I shall always feel privileged to have attended Oberlin, the first men’s college to allow women and the first college to allow Negroes. Just as we all studied together, on music nights we sang and played instruments together. Harry was always very modern about rights for women, and he was outspoken about racial injustice. A group of us would go for endless walk-and-talks through the Ohio fields. We’d say, “Let’s go for a walk-and-talk,” as if it were one word, and there was always a smart and lively group who joined in. I replay those animated arguments about politics and the future of our nation as I sit in the empty tub. We would quote lines of William Wordsworth and Walt Whitman as if we knew them personally. The men and women would walk arm in arm, so confident and excited about the new century. We all believed there would be a thrilling time ahead. We had no idea there would be a horrifying war. Those walk-and-talks formed me as much as life with the boys shaped me at home. The “W Boys,” we called those brilliant poets. Now when I am agitated about Orv and feel I should be home in Dayton caring for him, I recite the poem “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud.”

  I am writing this in very small print now, for it seems ungrateful to say this less than a year into my marital state, but I am weary of being the Wright brothers’ sister and I am weary of being Mrs. Harry Haskell. I feel wings growing from my heart. I must make a name for myself.

  How?

  August 28, 1927

  FIRST KISS AT FIFTY

  Although my first kiss with Harry was indeed through the screen door at Lambert Island up in Georgian Bay, Orv might say Lambert Island’s great claim to fame was the “hot-potato incident,” not because I kissed my future husband there. It is true that on cold summer nights there, I would try all kinds of things to warm the bed for Orv. Hot rocks and, yes, hot potatoes. The potatoes work well, if you put them in the fire for a while—and then of course the next morning you can cook them further and scramble them with eggs. But on the night of the hot-potato incident, I had become distracted by my reading. In fact, I was rereading Madame Bovary in French from my college days, and the timer did go off—one of the ones Orv had devised with the bell that sounded a bit like a rooster if your imagination was very keen. The short version of it is that I wrapped the potato in a towel, placed it at the foot of Orv’s bed, and he woke up “covered in mashed potatoes,” as he said, which wasn’t precisely true, but there was laundry to be done, by me.

  Lambert Island is where Orv and I were happiest, with its simple cottages and boathouses, and no young men from the press with their large cameras, banging on our door. The peace of the lake, and the birds, and that cool northern air are idyllic. Once, on one of our walks by the lake, bundled up with two wool sweaters each and our binoculars around our necks, Orv said, “I hope the birds do not mind sharing the sky with us, sister. I hope we have not created a kind of hell in their sky.”

  The most important feature of our magical island was that Orv rarely had one of his spells there, until he threw the vase. If he was restless, as he was in the hot-potato incident, he would take the rowboat out for a vigorous row, or pace on the front porch, or arrange and rearrange the cans in the pantry, but not much more. Although there was no question, he was worse after Will died in 1912. We all were. How could we not? (Our older brother Reuchlin died in 1920, but it felt like he had left the family years before, and although it now seems wrong, we did not cry.)

  One morning up at the lake I was awakened by screams, which I later learned was because of a contraption Orv was working on, a device. It was supposed to make ice, but he never could get it to work. The kitchen floor in the cottage was often full of puddles from his attempts. On this morning I thought he was having some kind of attack, appendicitis, or he had been injured.

  I threw on my robe and ran to the kitchen. And there he was, yanking the ice machine and cursing, which he did on rare occasions, definitely more so since the Reverend had died. I shouted at him, but he did not respond, which was not uncommon, and when he finally yanked the contraption off the floor, he insisted on dragging it out of the house, still not speaking to me. I ran after him, as the geese lifted off the lake in the fog. When he got to the dock, he dragged the contraption out to the end, then hurled it into the water. I caught up with him, and there we stood, watching it sink, and neither of us saying a word.

  I then pulled him by the hand, and we walked silently back up to the kitchen, where I made him stack after stack of pancakes, which he drenched in syrup from the cans that Canadian guests always seemed to bring.

  I made breakfast for Harry this morning, and there was a moment, when I placed a spatula piled with pancakes on his plate and he looked up at me, that I thought, “This is the happiest I have ever been.”

  Later on August 28, 1927

  FOOLISH PRESS

  If Will had lived, how would things have been different?

  Frequently the press got them confused, although Orv usually sported a mustache and Will was clean-shaven. Orv said that was why he wore his jazzy socks, “to help the foolish press.” I do not recall when he first requested that I knit him a pair. I never questioned the task. I never questioned a lot of things. I have one sock done now for another pair. Perhaps I should send him the one. He always can use a spare.

  The Reverend was the most stoic of us when Will died. I do not know what Mother would have done if she had lost Will while she was alive. The Reverend was the only one among us who did not cry. I served him his tea that night after dinner, and all he said was “The Lord taketh away.”

  August 29, 1927

  CORRESPONDENCE LEADS TO CONJUGAL LIFE

  When Harry’s wife died—first wife, I must always remember to say about Isabel—I did send a condolence letter to him. We were taught to send condolence notes as children by our mother and so it was. I kept a bottle of black ink and a box of thick cards on my desk for such too-frequent occasions. I took the ink and stationery with me here to Kansas City with my stamps.

  Harry did respond to my condolence note, but our correspondence was as chaste as the wing of a lark, until that cool afternoon when he visited the island. Writing to Harry after the death of Isabel was the proper thing to do. I never intended more. It was beyond my wildest dreams to think that I would ever marry Harry, that I would touch him naked. I was not fond of the word “spinster,” but that was what I was called for years, when the press did not make the mistake of calling me Orv’s wife! I grew to accept the title of spinster. It is true I did much of the sewing of those wings, but I was never a spinner on a spinning wheel. I am quite competent in sewing, although it is not one of my greatest attributes. Indeed, I would much prefer to be known for work for women’s rights. And let us be honest, Orv and Will were always better seamstresses than I. And, as history continues to surprise us, they turned out to be the spinsters.

  I was accustomed to the boys’ ways and never scolded them for their quirks. There was once something in the French press about neither of the boys speaking a word at a dinner in their honor but went on to say that they both “made themselves known.” I forget the French expression for that, but it was crystal clear what they were saying. I always knew that it was my task to make conversation wherever we traveled. Orville once said I was their “front man.”

  August 30, 1927

  THE OTHER WRIGHT BROTHERS

  The one brother I might contact if the ship went down is Lorin. He is not a soul mate, but neither he nor his wife and children have scorned me. I sometimes wonder why Reuchlin and Lorin left the nest so easily and married at expected ages, while
Will and Orv never did.

  I must get books for Lorin’s children next time we visit. An empty-handed aunt is of no use.

  August 31, 1927

  Dear Orville,

  I must ask you a question. As you see I ask you questions from afar I would not dare have asked if we were at home together. Here goes, as the kids say. Were you angry that I was the one who went to college? It is curious, I admit, and I do think the Reverend would have sent you if you had wanted to. If Will had been able to go to Yale as planned and not been horribly injured on the ice, perhaps you would have been accustomed to being without him at a younger age, but then perhaps you would have never gone up.

  I was thinking of the one time you took the Reverend up and he was so excited, but he was also frightened, I could tell that. Afterward he was very quiet, almost humbled, if I may say. I could see he was a scared man, scared for his own safety but also for yours. We rarely saw that protective side, but that day I did. We never spoke of that flight. Did you talk? Did you feel forced to take him up? We were all concerned we might lose one another.

  I’m not sure why you and Will were one little unit, and Lorin and Reuchlin were another. I wonder if Mother ever spoke of those tiny twins, Otis and Ida, who died in infancy, before you were born. It is Carrie who told me about them once while we were picking bits of silk out of the corn. Maybe it’s just something women speak of. We were sitting on the back steps. We had shucked a dozen ears. I had corn silk in my hair, and Carrie reached over to take a strand from my braids, and she started to cry. I had never seen her cry, and when I asked her why, she kept shaking her head, but when I asked her again, she said quietly, “On account of the twins.” But that was that. “We have more corn. You know how the boys can eat” is all she said. It is hard to imagine I could have had a sister in that house. Now that I think of it, everybody in the family had a partner—even the twins—except for me. Now that Reuchlin is gone, I regret I was not kinder to his wife, but Lulu seemed so different from us with those hats. We never were really around people like that, but there are women who enjoy shopping as if it were a profession. I don’t mind going into the shops when I need something, but in truth I find more amusement in a hardware store than in one of the ladies’ boutiques. I do like the post office as well, but if I never had to go into a clothing store, I would dance a jig.