by Patty Dann
When we landed, Sonya was waving from her motorcycle like the Queen of England. Then I posed smiling in the breeze in front of the Stearman like it was my prize horse, while she took several shots.
As we walked away from the machine, covered in dust, Sonya proposed to Flo an arrangement. She posed that if I tutor Flo in French, because she wants to move to France to be with her fiancé and be a flying instructor there, then it will be an even exchange.
At first Flo was silent and took out a piece of gum, popped it into her mouth, and chewed very slowly. She offered me a piece, and I accepted, but frankly I would have eaten a live toad at that point.
Flo finally put out her hand to shake mine again.
“A deal,” she said.
I cannot wait to go up again, although Flo calls it “taking off.” I will insist that she teach me how to take off and land, the whole kit and caboodle, as Orv would say. No secrets now.
Sonya has another friend with a darkroom, and I can’t wait to develop the pictures myself.
When we parted, she slapped me on the back and said, “I think you’re part bird. Yes, Birdwoman Wright.”
I do not know when I will tell Harry or Orv.
October 15, 1928
Dear Orv,
Harry brought me a new phonograph record by Buddy DeSylva, Lew Brown, and Ray Henderson. I’d love to listen to it with you. Aren’t the lyrics to “The Best Things in Life Are Free” great? Or “swell,” as Harry likes to say? They say the moon belongs to us, yes indeed!
You would have loved our ladies’ literary society at Oberlin, Litterae Laborum Solamen (LLS). “Literature is a solace from troubles”! Although I imagine you would say going up in our flying machine provided you with that.
K.
P.S. We started a group at Oberlin called the Order of the Empty Hearts—perhaps we should have included you.
P.P.S. Harry just brought home a Steinite seven-tube radio. He is of two minds about the radio. He loves to hear music, but he is afraid the news reports will put newspapers out of business.
November 10, 1928
Dear Orv,
Well, it seems people in this country really do not like Catholics, and so Hoover it shall be. I was proud to vote. Although I longed to ask what you thought of what he said when he accepted the Republican nomination in August. “We in America today are nearer to the final triumph over poverty than ever before in the history of any land.” I do not think so, Orville Wright. I do not think so at all.
Honorably,
Katharine W. Haskell
November 21, 1928
DAY AFTER SECOND WEDDING ANNIVERSARY
Harry took me to see Charlie Chaplin in The Circus! It was a grand movie. It first played at the start of the year and he saw it with men from the office. Thankfully when it appeared again, he invited me! I screeched when he was in the cage with the lion. Harry just laughed. I had a great time and longed to share it with Orv. This great joy and sorrow make me feel pulled apart. Perhaps I should be in the circus myself: “Lady pulled apart, live in the big tent . . .”
December 4, 1928
Dear Mr. Wright,
Mr. and Mrs. Harry Haskell request your presence for Christmas Eve meal and a two-week stay of the holidays and a celebration of the glorious New Year.
RSVP by December 15.
Sincerely,
Sister
December 21, 1928—Winter Solstice
Dear Mr. Orville Wright,
I cannot help but wish you a merry Christmas and a happy 1929, and also, as is our Wright tradition, I must say may you have clear skies.
Finally, I have my wits about me. If you do not respond by telephone, Harry and I are going to visit you, not now, but in the spring, when the roads are clear and the weather is “sweet,” as you would say. And this time we’re going to march right up to the door. And not just a visit in the spring. No, I told Harry that I will not be spending another birthday apart from my brother. We will be joining you up at the lake for a week in August as well. I do not know if Harry will be able to get off from work, and of course it depends on the news of the day—the cucumber days of August, as our European friends say—but you and I shall be together, for your fifty-eighth birthday and my fifty-fifth. This will be the tradition. I am taking command of this ridiculous situation.
Ridiculously yours,
The Wright brothers’ sister
P.S. I am determined to be a leader here as I was in Dayton, but I am hesitant to toot my own horn. You watch, Orville Wright, soon you shall be reading about the Wright sister!
P.P.S. Although it is winter, I am thinking of how we like to lie in the sun like turtles on the dock. Next summer, mon frère, next summer!
January 1, 1929
I was looking through Harry’s set of encyclopedias and there’s a whole section on the Wright brothers. It reads: “To solve the control reversal problem, the Wright brothers made the rudder movable, so its position could be coordinated with the wing-warping.”
That is what it says. But that is incorrect. That is what I did. Not the Wright brothers. The Wright brothers’ sister. The Wright sister. That’s what I solved.
January 7, 1929
Dear Orv, Orv dear,
Harry bought me the most magnificent camera, a brand-new Rolleiflex, as a Christmas gift. Would you like one as a late Christmas present?
He has taken a number of pictures of me seated on the bed without my glasses! And I have taken some of him. I shall send you pictures, not those of course, but in the springtime when I go up again. I haven’t told you, but I’ve been taking flying lessons. Yes. The camera is a wonderful design. I will be able to simply look down into it and see the whole world.
I am so cold right now though, so there is no flying around. I cannot even bear to go outside. For some reason the fire at home seemed warmer, or at least I knew how to warm myself up. I feel like I am living in an icebox except when I am in Harry’s arms.
I have been calling you repeatedly on the telephone. Even if you just picked up the phone and shouted, “Hold the wire,” as you did last time, I feel we would be making progress. But in this case, that ringing feels like I am there with you as it rings. Do you sit by the phone? Do you pretend you don’t know who it is? And that time you picked up the phone and I said, “Dearest Orv,” and without saying a word you hung up—unconscionable. I think that is the only word I can use.
I confess I have some photographs of you taken with that camera you built for me, and I have always known you would not like them, but I shall never show a soul.
Sincerely yours,
Swes
January 28, 1929
TRUTH BE TOLD
I have been reading the letters of Vincent van Gogh to his brother Theo. He seems to capture the beauty of the sky even though he never flew.
I longed to have a child since I was five years old. One August morning I was helping Mother make raspberry jam, and the whole kitchen seemed to be pink. She wiped her hands on her apron and said, “Someday you will be doing this with your daughter,” and even then I did not quite believe her. It is good to be an aunt to Lorin’s children, but still it is not the same. We rarely see them. They are busy with their own lives. If the Reverend wasn’t always after me to have “modest feminine manners,” perhaps I would have been braver, but my brave time is now. And I have even tried cigarettes, with a cigarette holder!
I do think he was strict with the boys, but they were expected to go out into the world, or at least have a name in the world, if not be fully in it.
The year after Mother died, fourteen years before the boys made history, I think the boys and I were all in a trance for a few weeks about our loss. But then there was the incident, and the boys were certainly in a trance after that. Reuchlin and Lorin were out of the house, but Orv (almost eighteen) and Will (twenty-two) were still home, years before Kitty Hawk. We were all doing what we had to do, what was expected of us. We were an obedient flock.
And t
hen our world changed for the three of us, the afternoon Orv, Will, and I had all gone inside and saw what the Reverend was doing in his study. Grief can make you act improperly, even a reverend, I suppose, but after what we saw, we three stood pale, outside in the hot summer sun. At first Orv and Will and I stood looking stricken around the bicycle the boys had been working on. Then Orv and Will started wrestling with each other on the ground in a way I had never seen them do before. I pulled them apart, and suddenly Will was hammering so hard on a piece of metal I thought he was going to kill someone. Now Orv was screaming at him to stop. Will pushed Orv away, and then I was there with both of them, and the sheets were blowing on the line like it was a normal day, but it was not.
And it was because of what we had all seen. The Reverend was often working in his study, and we always knocked before we entered, but—and this point is a blur—but one of the boys, or both, bumped against the door as we were going back outside with our lemonade. There was the Reverend, naked—his flesh looked so white—on top of a woman in all her pink flesh, on the floor when the boys tumbled in. When all three of us fell into the door. If I had to diagram it, I’m not sure I could do it justice, but there was no doubt the sight was such a shock. I believe the Reverend was wearing his shoes, naked except for his shoes.
But it was those strange sounds from both of them, not little murmurings, but animal groans—from both of them? Of that I am not sure, but the sounds stayed with me for so many years. The Reverend did not practice what he preached.
Only now at fifty-four do I know what those sounds are. But then we were horrified. We could all see the Reverend’s face, with his eyes shut like he was not long to this world. We slammed the door shut and ran out to the yard. That’s what we kept saying out in the yard, “like he was dying.” We started trying to guess who it was.
“Her breasts were young,” gasped Will.
“There was a strange smell,” said Orv.
It was certainly the first time I heard my brothers say the word “breasts,” which was said more in that yard with the bicycle than ever before or since by the boys. We could not figure out who she was, but then we did not talk about it again after we made the pact. Not speaking about it was part of the pact.
It was like wind shear, which can happen at any altitude. I never heard of it happening inside a house, but it did that day, that fast change of wind, vertical or horizontal, that can cause a crash. Wind shear happened at 7 Hawthorn on that day.
It went so long not being spoken about that sometimes I wondered if it actually happened, if I had just made it up. But I know it did happen, so I am finally speaking about it now, or at least writing it in my marriage diary. Even though we vowed never to tell anyone what the pact entailed.
It was Will’s idea to get the needle. Orv ordered me to go back inside and get a large needle from Mother’s sewing basket, one of the ones we later used for sewing the muslin wings. And matches.
I hurried into the kitchen, covering my ears for fear of hearing more sounds.
When I returned to the yard with the needle, Orv commanded, “Burn the needle.”
I held the needle as Will struck the match against the flint at the corner of the house, then passed the end of the needle through the flame.
Will forced Orv and me to prick our fingers; all of us in that July heat, with our fingers bleeding, rubbing and rubbing them together. First Will and Orv rubbed their bloody fingers with each other and then they rubbed mine. There was blood dripping on the bicycle and also on my dress, which I had to scrub later with lemon juice that stung my finger, and then I had to wash my dress twice.
Orv was the one who said quietly and harshly in a voice I had never heard before, “We will make a pact. None of us shall ever marry. None of us shall ever do what that man did. None of us shall sully our mother’s name. From this day forth that man is the Reverend.”
And then he said we all had to hold up our bloody hands to the sky and say amen, which we did, waving our hands up to the blue sky in the heat.
It was I who went inside again, dripping blood as I went. The boys did not go inside until I called them for dinner. I got rags from the bag of torn linens from under the sink we used for cleaning and wrapping wounds. I brought makeshift bandages back outside for the three of us.
All day we walked around with our fingers swathed in stained rags like red flags.
But the four of us, including the Reverend, were at our places at the dinner table that night as if it were a normal day. If it had been a play, we were all in our proper places. The director would not have had to reprimand us, but nothing was the same again.
The Reverend did not question our bandaged fingers, and of course we did not say a word to him. It was Carrie’s day off that day. It was I who served the meal, a tomato and beef stew that we all pushed around our plates. There was no dessert served or asked for that night.
January 29, 1929
CENSORED
I have been thinking more of the boys seeing the Reverend that way, on that woman. Now, of course, after what I have done with Harry, a widower, I understand it differently. I long to know who the woman was, and yet I do not ever want to know.
February 18, 1929
Dear Orv, Orv dear,
When I was a member of LLS—you remember, the ladies’ literary society at school, Litterae Laborum Solamen, “literature is a solace from troubles” . . . you mocked me, and I would like you to apologize for that.
I think I need to make zigzag socks for myself, as I am freezing.
Shiveringly yours,
Sister
February 18, 1929
I’ve caught a ridiculous cold, Orv, and I feel a bit feverish. I keep thinking of my friend Margaret—you liked her—and that trip we took to the St. Louis Exposition. It feels long ago, for the centennial of the Louisiana Purchase, all ancient history now. That was the first time I had an ice-cream cone and pink fairy floss, as we called it then, and I am missing her. I keep thinking that if I hadn’t insisted that we try “every new-fangled food,” she might not have fallen ill. I miss her terribly. I am upstairs in bed now. I miss everyone terribly.
Love,
Katharine
February 21, 1929
I am listening to Helen Kane singing “I Wanna Be Loved by You.” I do not know where Rochelle is, and where is that baby? Where is baby Psalm?
Please visit soon.
K.
February 23, 1929
Orv,
I cannot stop coughing. I long to use the camera out in the snow. Right now, it sits by my bed like a patient friend. The Reverend always told us that if we were good brethren here, we would have no problem in the hereafter. Al Jolson’s “When the Red, Red Robin Comes Bob, Bob, Bobbin’ Along” is in my head.
Do you know, dear Orv, that with so many people flying these days, that some married couples think it is wise to take separate flights, so that if there were a crash, their children would not lose both their parents. But you and I, we were never blessed with children, so that does not apply. If you don’t think it is too macabre to say, I should not mind dying with you, and doing so after a magnificent flight, or in the midst of a magnificent flight, simply “flying off into the sunset” would be just fine.
K.
February 23, 1929
Dear Orv, Orv dear,
Did you like being called L’homme oiseau, “Bird Man”? I think they called Will that more than you, but then we all started using it. I am thinking a lot about the one time we swam naked in a pond in Dayton. I cannot remember how old we were, only that we had always done that, like slippery fish, and then suddenly, one time we seemed to be too old.
February 23, 1929
CONFUSED
There was a flapper at the jazz club, and she came right up to me and kissed me on the lips, and when she pulled away, she said, “There’s more where that came from, sister!”
I am getting confused.
I was thinking again about when Dr.
Russel, the Reverend’s friend, came to visit at 7 Hawthorn Street and he grabbed at my breasts. If there was one time I wanted to throw a vase, that was it, at his head, and sometimes I wish I had screamed out instead of silently going to the kitchen afterward and doing chores as if it were a normal evening. It was not. I do not like handsy men.
I long to be back as director of the Young Women’s League of Dayton, although I am no longer a young woman.
February 24, 1929
Dear Orv, Orv dear,
A Winter’s Tale
I beseech thee, I am not able to write much. My fingers are cold. I am wearing gloves, which make it cumbersome to write. I am cold inside my bones. Is that possible?
In France, remember how we almost died—when our passenger train collided with a freight train—how strange it would have been if we died in a railroad accident rather than an aeroplane. I am trying to recall all that we have done. It is the only way I can realign my wings.
I took French lessons while you boys flew. I met King Edward VII of England and King Alfonso XIII of Spain. And the balloon ride to a mountain.
Lovingly,
Swes
February 25, 1929
PRAYERS
A tragedy has happened. Rochelle jumped off the Hannibal Bridge with baby Psalm in her arms. The river was full of sharp shards of ice, and they probably died instantly in the freezing water. They say they will wait until spring to find the bodies. I cannot breathe. Harry was the one who told me. He had stayed late at work, to write the story and I think for fear of telling me. Sonya telephoned weeping and said she does not know where she is going. I am coughing and coughing.