by Patty Dann
Lovingly,
Sister
P.S. Have you been reading news of this most dreadful tornado in St. Louis—72 dead and 550 people injured? I have been charting the daily winds here, and I think our next task is to create an aeroplane to survive such force.
October 17, 1927
WOMAN OF THE HOUSE
Harry drinks so much Coca-Cola it drives me mad. The Reverend never let us drink soda pop, and I agree with him on that one. Although once, after Mother had died, I saw him in town drinking a soda pop outside the post office. He had sent me on some errands, and I came around the corner and saw him there like some kind of teenage boy with a straw in his mouth. I was so shocked, I retraced my tracks, and when I returned to the post office, he did not have the Coca-Cola bottle in his hand, just the straw hanging out of his mouth like a cigarette, in a not very reverendly sort of way. He said, “Tardiness is not becoming, Sister,” and that was that, as if it were I who had transgressed.
October 18, 1927
MOLLUSKS AND THE MOON
Last night I made Orv’s favorite meal for Harry. I am fairly certain it would be ill advised to tell such things to a husband, although I have no experience and have not spoken to other women about this. I made beef stew, tomatoes and basil from our garden, baked potatoes with gobs of whipped butter, and then I made Orv’s favorite apple cobbler. Harry is a rational man. He does not understand why Orv does not speak to us, but he, unlike me, simply accepts it. “Humans are complicated beings,” he has said on more than one occasion when I start one of my tirades, and then he often snaps his newspaper and holds it in front of his face the way men do and keeps on reading.
Today I shall make the chicken and corn dish both boys enjoyed so much. Once, after two portions of my apple cobbler, Orv put down his fork and said, “Sister, I believe that one day if we fly to the moon, your apple cobbler should be served!”
At which point Will said, “Yes, and you could eat it with a piece of cheese from the surface of the moon!”
I felt our giggling would never stop, until Orv stood up from the table and swished his napkin from his lap and said so seriously, “Young man, the moon is not made of green cheese or any kind of cheese, and someday I will prove it to you!”
I loved when Orv called Will “young man.”
I have a confession to make. The smell of Scotch makes me want to pull Harry by the hand and race upstairs to our bedroom. I think there is much to learn from teetotalers, and yet, people who enjoy liquor seem to weather the struggles of daily life with a bit more gaiety. I am, of course, speaking of liquor in moderation. I think a stiff drink might calm Orv as much as when I endlessly read to him from the Encyclopedia of Mollusks that he frequently insisted upon. Not that a mollusk fact isn’t soothing once in a while . . .
The view from the first time I went up, after Orv tied back my hair, scolding me that it could get caught in the wings . . . I loved it all. Perhaps I should become one of those skywriting aviators. I know Orv would not approve, saying it is “making the commercial out of the sublime,” but I would write to him in the sky above Dayton: COME VISIT, ORV! DON’T BE A THICKHEAD!
Orv once told me, while sitting in his “thinking chair” in the den, that going up made him think God “knew what he was doing when he chose where he would perch.” Just now I had the image of a carnival worker who uses one of those mallets to hit the thing—what is that thing?—that speeds the puck up to the top and rings a bell. That sudden soaring is how I felt the first time Orv took me up.
October 19, 1927
KATHARINE WRIGHT STEPS OUT SOLO
Today I took a magnificent bicycle ride and sat for an hour reading Wordsworth under the shade of a copper beech. Orv, Will, and I rarely agreed on anything, but the copper beech, especially in autumn, is and will always be our favorite tree.
But now it is night, and once again I am sitting in the bathtub. It’s a grand tub, my favorite place in this house, but it is not enough. I am not sure about this “till death do us part.” I have left my suffragist soul back in Ohio, the way Peter Pan lost his shadow, and I am determined to regain it.
October 22, 1927
Orville,
Did I tell you about the eighty-year-old twins I often see at the post office? They dress identically. I have no idea which is which, but they are so friendly to me and call me “Mrs. Wright Brothers’ Sister,” which I find most amusing. I think they know I feel like I’m a twinless twin without you.
And of course I know you felt like a twinless twin without Will. We Wrights all have active imaginations—from Mother’s side of the family—and I want you to know I don’t want you to be ashamed of any of your imaginings.
Love,
Katharine
P.S. Lorin visited with his wife last week. They say they have visited you and wanted to know if I wanted to go with them next time, and they did not have kind words about our estrangement, precisely your abandonment of me. Curiously, I found myself coming to your defense, as I have always done in the past. I want you to know that, always.
P.P.S. I am not getting all the mail forwarded, so I am not keeping up on the latest legal wrangling. Please advise.
October 24, 1927
FULL DISCLOSURE!
It is pouring rain to beat the band. I hope Orv remembers to wear his galoshes, although he doesn’t like putting them over his shined shoes.
Sometimes I wake up in the morning and, as I put on my spectacles, I imagine Harry as a young man with bright eyes and I’m a young woman with firm breasts, but what I see is Harry, a somewhat fit man in his fifties, grabbing for his spectacles at the same time. When I was director of the Young Women’s League in Dayton, nobody would have pointed to me and said, “That woman who still looks like a schoolteacher will marry when she is more than a half century old.”
For all those times the boys and I talked about the press as if they were the enemy . . . to think that now I share the sheets with one of them. The press are not the enemy, they are just an extremely curious lot. In some ways they are like inventors, like explorers, always pushing to see what is around the bend. Harry gets jolly and talks more than usual when he drinks, and while he becomes more affectionate with me, he also tells me stories about his life before, and sometimes it is too much.
I think perhaps it is the journalist’s mind—“Full disclosure,” he calls it. The facts, always the facts. For instance, we were sitting at the table looking out at the bird feeder at dusk, and we heard the geese flying south for the winter, and he said, “I remember when Junior [that’s what he called his son] was young and the geese passed, and he would run around the yard flapping his arms, saying, ‘I want to go with them! I want to go with them,’ and Isabel and I laughed and laughed.”
I wanted to cry out, “And Orv and Will did that as well, but they did really fly!” I confess I did once mutter that under my breath, as I’ve heard that story several times, but I don’t tend to make a practice of it. It would not help our union. I think I still have some very old-fashioned ways. I learned as a child that men don’t want to hear about other men.
As I am writing I am smelling the peppermint scent of Mother’s hair, because Harry uses the very same shampooing soap! I can see Mother standing in the front yard picking Queen Anne’s lace and black-eyed Susans for the table. I must have been ten years old.
And I can see her when she took me inside and sat me down at the kitchen table, which she often did when she had something serious to say. She had been teaching me to make biscuits, those ones Orv likes with extra butter and dill.
“Katharine Wright,” she said. “Katharine Wright, you must never beat a man in anything. They don’t like it, and it is not seemly, even though girls are frequently better at things than boys. That Elizabeth Painter who lives down the road has been beating her brother in badminton, and her mother is not pleased.”
There was another thing she told me after the biscuits were in the oven and I’d brushed all the dough and crum
bs from the table and swept the floor and washed the dishes. We sat at the kitchen table again and she said, “Now, Katharine Wright, as you are my only daughter, you will be in charge if I leave this earth early. You know the Reverend is not an easy man.”
Did she know she would leave us so young?
I’m sorry, I’m meandering here, but although I try to keep some thoughts to myself with Harry, I have gotten it in my head to purchase one of those Sears kit houses, which could be built with no memories of Isabel. You simply send a check and a truck arrives with all the wood and nails and even young men to put it together! Of course, Harry would never do such a thing, but I like the idea of a kit arriving as if it were some kind of dollhouse, but human size and starting fresh. Perhaps someday there will be kit aeroplanes from Sears as well, and not just ones for children!
Yesterday we visited friends of Harry’s, very bohemian. When they asked if I wanted a drink, they brought me lemonade in a jelly jar! And when one of them had to go to the toilet, they’d wink and say, “Have to go iron my shoelaces!”
October 25, 1927
CENSORED
Last night I thought I’d lost my marbles.
I was in the same lovely claw-footed bathtub where I am now, but I was bathing in hot, soapy water. I was staring at the tiny hexagonal white tiles on the floor, with black lines that are so hard to clean, the exact tiles as we have in our bathroom in the big house in Dayton. First, I was daydreaming of when Orv and Will built the tandem, and we’d take turns on it riding down the street, Orv in the front, steering like a mad scientist. They even fashioned that map stand, because Orv said, “A proper cyclist needs to have a map at all times. Maps and globes are man’s greatest gifts,” to which I always added and still add, “And women’s too.” Orv also said it would be a good project to mount a globe on the handlebars. I have never seen that.
And then, while I was in the bathtub, I was recalling Harry washing my hair outside in the yard this past summer. I bent over in front of him. It was so hot, and he sprayed me with the cool water from the garden hose. He washed my hair with his peppermint shampooing soap out in the sunlight, and there I was out in the garden, bent over, smelling like Mother. I was looking through my half-closed eyes, careful not to get soap in them, and it was almost as if there were stained glass between the branches of the maple trees, the way the colors lit up. The cardinals were dashing around in their red coats, and I thought I could never be happier.
But then, after the tandem bicycle thought and the washing my hair in the yard thought, there was Harry J. Haskell, really standing next to me, in the bathroom, fully clothed by the tub, without knocking! I was looking up at him, perhaps the way a child would, and he took the bar of soap from my hand and began to wash my breasts.
October 27, 1927
Dear Orv, Orv dear,
I long to tell you what marriage is really like. Of course I can’t tell you about all marriages, but my marriage is like a dance, where my partner holds me close as we dance around the room, then at times spins me out so our hands barely touch, and I twirl and twirl, not knowing if I will ever manage to get back to him, but then I do, so far I always do, but it’s more unpredictable than any dance steps I know. I can feel so close to Harry, and then . . . and then . . . I feel I will leave him forever.
Yours truly,
K.
P.S. Perhaps marriage is like having a permanent houseguest, although in this case it is I who is the houseguest!
P.P.S. Harry asked me if I thought you and Will just forgot to find women to marry.
October 28, 1927
COLLEGE WOMAN WORRIES ABOUT HAIR
Yesterday, before Harry got home, I was looking in the mirror and I saw so many gray hairs that I pulled them out with tweezers and threw them out the window to help the wrens weave their nest. Sonya says I should use a hair dye and that women cannot afford to have gray hair. That’s what she said. I think I can afford it. And Harry has not mentioned it. He even says sometimes I am beautiful! But with these women with bobbed blond hair and I with my hair in a bun that birds can use to make nests, do I have a chance?
October 29, 1927
Dear Orville,
I am shaking. Harry hasn’t spoken to me all day. He had to “cover” another lynching outside the city line. When he came home, he walked upstairs, then immediately downstairs, and went out back and got sick in the garden.
I shudder, although this country does not need another shuddering woman. I would like my legacy to be more than a sister to you boys, as proud as I am of our work, but I want to be a soldier against evil, like Emmeline Pankhurst. She said, “Trust in God. She will provide.” But she also emphasized, “Deeds not words.”
The same year you boys first went up, she founded the Women’s Social and Political Union, but of course you had other things on your mind at the time.
Rochelle has written to me again and she is with child, and I have been giving her money, from my account. This is what I am doing. She told me yesterday that her baby’s father is a Negro man she loves very much. She is due in two months, although she is not the most reliable source for anything. She came here last week, when Harry was downtown, looking so swollen and tired. I do not need to tell him about what funds I use. I shall cover the hospital.
The Reverend always said that mankind was essentially evil. Do you remember that one time he said that? And you said quietly, “Perish the thought that Father Wright is not always right.”
The Reverend raised his hand to strike, but he did not strike that time.
Yours truly,
Your sister, K.
October 30, 1927
WOMAN WALKS ALONE
Yesterday I took a magnificent autumn trek and walked 5.8 miles, according to the pedometer Orv and Will made for me years ago. As I was returning home, with my knees a bit weary, I passed a young man with tattered clothes, begging in the middle of the street just around the corner. I beckoned to him, because I didn’t want him to get hit by an automobile. As I dropped a coin in his cup, I looked into his eyes, and I could imagine him when he was a baby, in a tiny baby outfit, clean and warm, somewhere in America. The man smiled at me, tipped his scruffy hat, and said, “May I present myself. I am Theodore,” and he gave a little bow, tipping forward with a graceful bend of his waist.
I said, “I am Katharine with an a,” and in that moment, as I bent my head to him, I felt a sensation strong as the Canadian lake wind, a rushing through me, and I knew that soon I was going to align my wings.
At Oberlin we learned about Christine de Pisan, who lived from 1364 to “sometime after 1429”—that’s what our professor told us. Supposedly she was the first female to earn her living by the pen. Harry has asked me if I want to write a book about Orv and Will, but I know if I did, I would lose Orv’s trust completely, if that hasn’t already happened, because I would have to tell the truth, the whole truth, so help me God.
We were at a cocktail party yesterday when a woman came right up to me, not a flapper, but a woman with her hair up the way I wear mine, and also spectacles. I thought she might talk about a novel she had just read, so I extended my hand eagerly.
But she did not recommend a novel, although she was an educated woman. What she said, although softly, was as distinct and dramatic as if it were written in the sky.
“Dear,” she said, “are you acquainted with A Midsummer Night’s Dream, by William Shakespeare?”
“Yes, of course,” I said in earnest. “Of course I love that play. We read all of Shakespeare at Oberlin. It was required.”
And then she leaned in closer, and for a moment I thought, at last, I had a new friend.
“Of course,” I repeated. “As Titania sleeps, Oberon sprinkles magic love juice in her eyes so that when she wakes up, she will fall in love with the first creature she sees. When Titania wakes up she sets her eyes on Bottom, who has been recently transformed into a donkey.”
This new woman, who turned out not to be a friend, then sa
id, “Well, we in the book club believe that Harry was Titania after dear Isabel died. And you, my dear, are the donkey.”
I did not throw my cocktail—a gin and tonic—at her, although I longed to, and perhaps Orv would have if he were here. I just laughed. Something has shifted within me. These women can no longer hurt me. Later that night, when I told Harry in bed, he laughed as well, held me close, and said, “Well, a fine-looking donkey, if I say so myself!”
Harry has a beautiful copper-colored globe in his study, the kind of globe we have at home, where we traced our flights and our imagined flights as we spun it around. And once, when Orv was waiting for my strawberry-rhubarb pie to cool, he marched over to the globe, spun it, and shouted, “If that pie isn’t ready soon, I think I shall eat the world!”
Right now, the air is filled with that beautiful scent of burning leaves. I disliked how the Reverend would make us rake and rake them until our arms ached, but I loved the smell of the smoke and the rough burlap we picked them up with. I loved when Will told me to lie down on the burlap and then Orv piled leaves on top of me. It was not an intelligent thing to do, as the leaves were a bit wet, and I was the one who had to launder my clothes of course, but that feeling of the burlap beneath me and the leaves on top of me, looking up at the blue October sky, with the boys singing one of their crazy songs about the moon . . . it was the cat’s meow, as the kids say.