Great Circle

by Maggie Shipstead

  He hadn’t heard. He remembered Ruth had liked Helen.

  (The first mention of Ruth, made so casually.)

  She shows him into the bedroom, tells him it’s his. She will hear none of his protests. She herself will sleep on the couch. She insists. “You couldn’t fit half yourself on that couch,” she says.

  “I don’t want to displace you.”

  She is already moving away, down the hall. “Come see the war room.”

  * * *

  —

  It had been a small second bedroom when she moved in, and she’d enlisted the landlord to help her carry the bed out to the garage.

  “What if your mother comes to visit?” the landlord had said from his end of the mattress, walking backward. “Or a friend?” He seemed like a nice man. Bushy eyebrows and heavy jowls, a Hawaiian shirt patterned with hula girls.

  “I don’t have a mother,” she’d told him, and he left it alone.

  Maps paper the walls and bury the small dining table her landlord had loaned her. Rolled charts stand dense as bamboo in crates and wastebaskets. There is a general shambles of heaped-up paper: checklists, invoices, aerial photos, notes on winds and weather, inventories, catalogs, letters of advice, survival manuals, correspondence with navy contacts, correspondence with Norwegian explorers and whalers, correspondence with the leaders of the Norwegian-British-Swedish Antarctic Expedition (which will carry fuel for her), lists of radio stations and beacons, correspondence and contracts with Liberty Oil, order forms for airplane parts, addresses and phone numbers of contacts in all the places where they might need contacts, paperwork for visas, scraps and scribbles, and on and on and on and on.

  “Dear God,” Eddie says.

  “There’s an underlying order.”

  “Chaos doesn’t count as its own form of order.”

  A sea trunk resides in the near corner, and she clears papers from its lid, opens it to show him. Brown fur inside, like the humped back of an animal.

  “Are we bringing a dead bear?”

  She extracts a hooded parka, matching trousers, fur boots. “Reindeer. There’s nothing better in the cold. We’ll get you a set to match in Alaska.”

  “Nanook and Nanook take to the skies. By the way, I’ve been studying up on the high-latitude stuff. A guy I knew in the war is in Fairbanks with a recon squadron. He sent me a manual and some charts as long as I promised not to sell them to the Russians.” Eddie wanders over to the largest map on the wall, a Mercator projection of the world with the Pacific centered, the Americas to the right and the rest of the continents hanging heavy to the left. On it Marian has penciled their route.

  “I wanted to talk to you before I inked it in,” she says, following him.

  He makes a noncommittal noise, leans close to study the penciled line, the bits of land it connects. He touches the empty ocean below Cape Town. “They don’t even bother including Antarctica.”

  “I don’t know how you could, really, on a flat map.”

  “Sometimes there’s a sliver of white, isn’t there? Just to remind people it exists?”

  From the mess on the table, she extracts a map of Antarctica, mostly blank, only a few scattered elevations marked, a few patches of mountains. “There’s this.” She swivels around, surveying the room. “I have some better charts somewhere.”

  “I thought you said there was an underlying order.”

  “Sometimes it underlies more deeply than I’d like.”

  Eddie studies the white shape. Finally, he says, “What have you got around here to drink?”

  * * *

  —

  They take gin and tonics outside, brush leaves from the cushioned chaises at the edge of the grass. She pulls a lime from her neighbor’s tree that hangs over the fence, carves slices from it with a pocketknife.

  He clinks her glass. “To friends reunited.”

  They drink. The golden light has gone. She can’t think what to say, where to start. They have never been together without Ruth, and her absence hangs between them, a void but also the thing that spans it.

  “You know,” he says, “I actually have the jitters. Don’t you feel like we’re newlyweds or something? In an arranged marriage?”

  “I was nervous to see you. I didn’t know…”

  “If it would be the same? It won’t be. Nothing is. But now you won’t be rid of me for months and months. How’s the plane?”

  In the spring she had gone to Auckland. She’d walked down a row of six superficially identical war surplus Dakotas, snub-nosed and jungle green, but one had stood out plainly and obviously. She’d recognized it immediately as hers.

  “Some wear and tear,” she says to Eddie, “but nothing major. It was in New Guinea, mostly.”

  “Have you named it?”

  “I wanted to wait for you, but I was thinking Peregrine?”

  He nods, satisfied. “I like it. An hour into our arranged marriage, and already we’re parents.”

  The affection she feels for him is a relief, confirmation that not everything from before is gone or irreversibly damaged. She had not been sure she could trust her memory of how much she had liked him. “Eddie,” she says, “I wanted to thank you.”

  “For what?”

  “For agreeing to come.”

  “I’m flattered you asked.”

  “No, really. I’m grateful. There’s no one else I could trust.”

  “I hope that’s not misplaced. I haven’t exactly been striking off into the unknown lately.” In Florida, he’s been a navigator for National Airlines, cycling between Miami, Jacksonville, Tallahassee, New Orleans, Havana. New York, once in a while.

  “Part of it’s that I trust you to trust me,” she says. “We’ve never flown together, but I don’t think you’ll be the kind to try to take over or treat me like a novelty.”

  “No,” he says quietly, “I wouldn’t.”

  The marine layer is coming in. She is chilled, but she swirls the ice in her drink, sips. “Actually, I didn’t think you’d say yes.”

  “To coming with you?”

  She nods. “Why did you?”

  “I didn’t have anywhere better to be.”

  “Come on.”

  “It’s the truth. First I tried going home to Michigan, then I tried Chicago, then I went down to Miami. Nothing’s been quite right.” He splashes more gin into her glass, then his. “Maybe I’m just restless. Don’t tell me you got back from the war and settled right in.”

  “No, I wouldn’t say so.”

  * * *

  —

  In a way, she had deserted. Two months after V-E Day, in the summer of 1945, she’d ferried a plane to France, and instead of hopping a taxi plane back to Britain, she’d hitched a ride into Paris, gone on from there. The ATA didn’t need her anymore, anyway. She’d brought her little nest egg from saving and smuggling, the bills hidden in her rucksack and about her person. She drifted east into Germany, walked and hitched through pulverized areas populated by scarecrow people and the charred corpses of tanks and trucks, through towns and villages, even cities, that appeared untouched. Soldiers in tattered uniforms walked along roadsides and families carting all their possessions. The zones of occupation had yet to harden, and she went all the way to Berlin, watched kerchiefed women clearing rubble.

  From Germany she’d gone to Switzerland, idyllic in its undisturbed neutrality, resplendent by then in autumn colors. She’d spent the winter in Italy, crossed the Mediterranean, spent a year making her way down the length of Africa through deserts and jungles, along wide, muddy rivers.

  She took up with a man in Bechuanaland. One evening, in the Namib Desert, they watched a line of desert elephants walk along the rim of a sand dune. The animals and the sky behind them were red with dust. Marian found herself relishing the prospect of making camp, having a drink
and a fire, going to bed with the man. From the sweetness that ran through her, she knew she had emerged from the war. She wasn’t free of it, but she never would be.

  She made her way to Cape Town, caught a ship for New York. When they sailed, she stood on deck looking to the south, in the direction of Antarctica, marveling that the only thing between it and her was water.

  * * *

  —

  “It took me a long time to come back,” she says to Eddie, “but that’s another story. When I finally did, I went to Missoula to look for a friend, and instead I found Matilda’s letters. They’d kept them at the post office.” There had been a letter from Sarah in Seattle, too. After she’d read that Jamie had a daughter, she’d folded the papers up again and pushed them away, shocked by the force of her grief. She’d been in Caleb’s cabin. He was, of course, the friend she’d come looking for, but he’d been gone to Hawaii for months. No one knew if he planned to return.

  “So your body came back,” Eddie said, “but your mind was already running away again.”

  “I don’t know if I’d call this running away.”

  “What is it, then? Why do the flight?”

  “Everyone wants to know why. I don’t know.”

  “Come on.”

  If they are extraordinarily lucky and also don’t make anything except the best possible decisions at all times, they will complete what they are setting out to do. Or they will fail. Or they will die, which is different from failure. There will be a last smashup against some mountain somewhere or a hard flat of sand or a cracked and jumbled glacier or, most likely, the surface of the ocean that kills with its hardness and then softens and swallows, hiding the evidence. Sometimes she thinks she has invented the flight as an elaborate suicide. Sometimes she thinks she is immortal.

  She drinks. “All right. Here’s the best I can do. When Matilda asked what I wanted, the first thing that came into my head was this…vision of flying over the poles. Every time I thought of it, I felt a burst of nerves, like there was a live wire I kept touching. But—and I’ll only ever admit this to you—when I wrote and told her what I wanted, I never expected her to agree. And now I actually have to do it.”

  Carefully, he says, “You don’t, though. Not really. You could change your mind.”

  “No, I can’t. You could—and I would understand, truly. But I can’t.”

  “You can. Matilda could sell the plane.”

  “I’m not worried about Matilda. It’s the live wire. It’s still there. Maybe it’s more like a cattle prod. I want to do the flight, but I dread it. I’m always thinking about what could go wrong. So much could go wrong, and now I’ve roped you in, too.”

  “I have free will. I didn’t have to come.”

  “But—” She doesn’t know if she wants him to exonerate her or confirm her guilt. “After what happened to Ruth…”

  She wants to say she couldn’t bear it if something happened to him, too, but of course their fates will be hitched together. If something happens to him, she probably won’t have to bear it because she will also be gone.

  He sets down his drink. “Let’s say this right now and then leave it as an established, mutually understood fact. We can’t have it hanging over us, and, anyway, this is the truth. Marian, Ruth’s death wasn’t your fault. I’m not saying this to be kind. I’ve given it a lot of thought. I’ve even let myself blame you at times, but the blame wouldn’t stick.”

  “If she’d stayed in England—”

  “She might have crashed a different plane or died in a car accident or gotten hit by a buzz bomb. Plenty of people did that last year. You can’t know what would have happened. Look, she was a grown woman. She made her own choices. If you thought you might cause a death every time you disappointed another person, you’d be paralyzed. Do you know how many men accidentally got their friends killed in the war? How many people died because of random, casual choices?” She is looking across the patchy little lawn. Everything seems unnaturally still in the fog. Eddie says, “I’m going to make it a condition of my services as a navigator that you take my line on this. I loved her, too. And I’m telling you to let it go. Okay? Say okay, and we won’t talk about this anymore.”

  Marian understands that no one can ever absolve her. She says okay.

  It was a simple thing, in the end, to begin.

  —marian graves

  Whenuapai Aerodrome, Auckland, New Zealand, to Aitutaki, Cook Islands

  36°48ʹ S, 174°38ʹ E to 18°49ʹ S, 159°45ʹ W

  December 31, 1949

  1,752 nautical miles flown

  The slow predawn glug of fuel into the tanks, the walkaround, the checking of checklists, the coughing start of one engine and then the other, the roaring run-up, the heavy acceleration into lift. A circle over the aerodrome’s intersecting triangles of runways and taxiways, dipping the wings. Matilda Feiffer on the hangar’s apron, waving with both arms beside the gaggle of newspaper reporters and photographers she’s summoned, shrinking to nothing. She’d appeared one day without warning as Marian and Eddie returned from a test flight, was waiting at the aerodrome with a cameraman to document their landing, drum up some newsreel publicity. They’d stood grinning awkwardly beside the plane while the camera rolled, then Matilda had taken them to dinner at her hotel in Auckland.

  The city spreads to the south as they rise; bays and inlets eat away at the long northern finger of the North Island. Farms gridded off by belts of alders and eucalypts pass below, low green mountains, the shore with its wide ruffles of surf. Then water, only water.

  They leave on New Year’s Day, but they will cross the dateline on the way to the Cook Islands, returning them to 1949. They each bring only a small valise, soft-sided to save weight. Eddie will get winter things in Alaska, and additional Antarctic gear has been shipped ahead to South Africa. Marian’s reindeer suit is stuffed behind one of the auxiliary fuel tanks that occupy the fuselage.

  The plane is silver now, its jungle-green paint stripped away to save five hundred pounds of weight, its glass windows switched out for Plexi, its artificial rubber fittings swapped for natural, which won’t crack as easily in the cold. A hundred other changes. (“It’s really very chic,” Matilda Feiffer had pronounced upon seeing the plane’s polished silver skin.)

  Light winds. Harmless clouds strewn loosely as spilled popcorn. Eddie moves between his desk and the cockpit and the Plexiglas astrodome, taking his sights and making his calculations with the leisurely assurance of a tennis pro lobbing balls. He traps the sun in the sextant, hands up notes with course adjustments, plucking first Norfolk Island out of the empty blue, then Nadi in Fiji, then Apia in Samoa. Lagoons like turquoise amoebas. The bits of land scattered across the Pacific are so sparse that the existence of each island seems startling, perplexing, almost worrisome. How did this wind up here all alone? What will become of it?

  They had done an earlier shake-out flight to the Cooks, and he knows this tract of ocean already, has a feel for it that runs deeper than the course plotted on his chart in pencil. He knows the airplane and its deafening drone and its gasoline reek. He knows the shape of Marian’s elbow and knee visible through the cockpit doorway. He pencils his neat log of figures, updating the distance they’ve covered, the time they will arrive. Distance equals speed multiplied by time. Time equals distance divided by speed. He feels the lines of latitude sliding underneath like the rungs of a ladder, watches the whitecaps through the drift meter, measuring the difference between where they are going and where they mean to go. That’s where life is, that wedge of discrepancy.

  * * *

  —

  The dealership, right in the middle of Raleigh, had been easy enough to find. Halliday Cadillac said the big revolving sign.

  “I’d like to try the blue one,” he’d said to Leo. “The coupe.”

  “Very well, sir,” Leo said. “Please wait her
e, and I’ll go get the keys.” Bruce Halliday was Leo’s father-in-law.

  Everyone in Stalag Luft I had nearly starved in 1945, would have if not for the trickle of Red Cross parcels. As the boom of artillery lumbered closer and closer from the east, the Germans had made the kriegies dig trenches and foxholes. There had been rumors these would be their graves.

  Then, an American voice over the loudspeaker one May morning before dawn: How does it feel to be free, men? The Germans were gone; the Russians were three miles away. They’d all rushed out of their barracks. Eddie had found Leo in the midst of the commotion, bear-hugged him and whispered that he loved him. Leo hadn’t seemed to hear.

  The Russians were wild and drunk and came in wagons piled high with looted linens and china and silver. They went from house to house, taking what they wanted, smashing portraits of Hitler with their rifle butts. They had girls with them who put on dancing shows for the kriegies.

  “I’m out of a job,” Leo had said, watching three Russian girls in short skirts spin and spin on a makeshift stage while a man played a concertina, clapping their hands, winding the kriegies’ howl of longing around themselves like thread around spools.

  “More for me,” Eddie said.

  Leo had given a perfunctory smile. “You don’t think they’ll let us keep this up, do you?”

  “Who’s they?”

  Leo had looked perplexed, made a vague gesture encompassing the whole world beyond the partially torn-down prison fence and the demolished guard towers.