Great Circle: A Novel

by Maggie Shipstead

  That’s right.

  What if you learned to fly an airplane? he says. You could cover big distances faster.

  She has never considered flying, but something about the idea begins to gnaw and nibble at her right then. She wonders aloud, Could I fly a plane?

  Of course you could, he says so firmly she has no choice but to believe him. She recognizes then that he will be essential to her. He is an external font of self-belief.

  To him, she is another undervalued commodity, an asset to be picked up cheap and made mighty.

  He is already married, but so what.

  The first time she goes up, the flying bug bites. The bug swallows her whole. This is it. This is away.

  * * *

  —

  Still looking out the window, Jackie said, “Do you like New York?”

  Grateful to be released from talk of her husband, Marian said, “I’m not at home in cities.” Anchorage and Nome and Fairbanks had swelled with the war but were still just frontier towns. Since Pearl Harbor, there’d been blackouts at night. Everyone in the Territory was on edge.

  “Is this your first time here?”

  “No, I was here years ago for my honeymoon. Only for a few days.”

  Jackie regarded her curiously but seemed to decide against probing further. “All right, listen, if you go to England, you’ll have to sign an eighteen-month contract with the ATA. Are you prepared to do that?”

  “Sure.”

  “Yes?”

  “Yes.”

  “The job won’t be cushy.”

  “I wouldn’t know what to do with cushy.”

  “Still, I have an obligation to tell you it’ll be dangerous. Long hours, bad weather, rationed food and fuel, trigger-happy antiaircraft gunners, beat-up planes that might fall apart in midair. No radio. Germans buzzing around looking for something to shoot down. Barrage balloons all over the place. Your ship could even be sunk on the way over.”

  Marian hadn’t thought about the crossing. “Has that happened?”

  “To plenty of people, but none of my girls. Yet.” She peered at a page in the logbook. After more flipping, she closed the book, held it out to Marian. “Are you up for it?”

  Marian reached to take back the book. “Sure.”

  “That’s a yes?”

  “Yes.”

  One manicured finger tapped the desk, the brown gaze lingered on her. “Clothes aside, the brass is concerned our girls be of the highest moral character.”

  “All right.”

  “They’re petrified of embarrassment. Some of the men who’ve gone over already behaved badly. So the girls have to be impeccable. There’s no room for error, none at all. When people expect you to be common, you have to work twice as hard not to be.”

  * * *

  —

  Floyd helps Jackie get her cosmetics business off the ground. Company motto: Wings to Beauty. He helps her get her physical self off the literal ground, too. She makes her debut on the air racing scene in 1934, showing up at a starting line in Suffolk, England, one of twenty flyers bound for Melbourne. A sputtering engine sets her down in Bucharest, but she reappears the next year in Burbank, California, for the start of the Bendix. Amelia Earhart is first to depart, just before five a.m. into a dangerous, thickening fog. The pilot in front of Jackie crashes on takeoff and is killed. Burned. While the wreckage is being cleared, Jackie calls Floyd, divorced now and her fiancé, and asks what she should do.

  Logic would dictate the safe choice, he says, but logic shouldn’t always outweigh a powerful emotional urge. It’s a philosophical question. (She has not yet told him about Robert Jr., certainly not about the man burned in the woods so long ago.)

  So?

  So you have to decide for yourself.

  The answer is away. But away in the plane? Or from the plane? She takes off, but when she circles high to escape the fog, her engine overheats and forces her down again.

  In 1936, she and Floyd marry, buy the fourteen-room apartment overlooking the East River where Marian will one day come for her interview. They pick up a country house in Connecticut and a ranch outside Palm Springs. They buy a building in New York and establish an orphanage—really!—for the city’s barefoot and gimlet-eyed future Jackies. They help pay for Earhart’s 1937 circumnavigation attempt, the flight on which she and Fred Noonan disappear, though Jackie says she’d had doubts about Fred finding Howland Island, had warned Amelia to no avail.

  In 1938, Jackie wins the Bendix. In 1939, she sets a women’s record for altitude, two national records for speed, one intercity record. Prizes and trophies accumulate. She volunteers as a test pilot. In September of that year, after Germany invades Poland, she writes to Eleanor Roosevelt suggesting that, in the event of war, women pilots might be put to use domestically. Supportive flying. Feminine flying. For example, they could deliver trainer planes from factories to bases, freeing up men.

  The first lady thanks her for the suggestion. Yes, if we go to war, we will need women to help, she writes. But exactly how women are utilized will be for men to decide.

  * * *

  —

  “It’s the flying I’m interested in,” Marian said. “If I wanted to run around, I could have done it in Alaska. Mostly I’ve wanted to be left alone.”

  “Mostly. All right. Well. Just don’t go hinting to anyone that you have more hours than are in here. Everything needs to be by the book. And in the book. Understood?”

  “Sure. I mean, yes.”

  When she laughed, Jackie pulled her chin inward, compressing her flesh. Marian warmed to the flaw. “You’re a quick study. Like me. Once you get to Montreal, the ATA will want you to get checked out before they take the trouble of shipping you over. My advice: Be nice to the check pilot. He’s the sort that’d rather see you in the kitchen.”

  Marian said, “He’d be disappointed by what I cooked.”

  * * *

  —

  June 1941. Jackie wrangles her way into flying a Hudson bomber across the Atlantic from Montreal to Scotland. Male ATA pilots in Montreal don’t like the idea. Not so long ago, people got parades for flying the Atlantic. When word gets out about Jackie, the pilots threaten to strike.

  Okay, okay, say the bosses. She’ll fly, but a man will take off and land.

  When Jackie shows up for departure, the Hudson has been drained of antifreeze and the oxygen system is set up wrong and the special wrench for turning on the oxygen has gone missing. Jackie fixes things, buys a new wrench. The life raft is gone as well, but since it probably wouldn’t be much help anyway, she leaves without it. When they stop to refuel in Newfoundland, the wrench vanishes again; someone breaks a cockpit window. She buys another wrench, patches the window with duct tape. They make it across the ocean just fine, Jackie at the controls until she sets up the final approach and relinquishes her seat.

  * * *

  —

  “My secretary will sort you out with the hotel in Montreal where we’ve put the other girls,” Jackie told Marian. “And you need to get some new clothes. Today. The ATA will fit you for uniforms in London, assuming you pass, but you should have a traveling suit and a few dresses. Most of the time you can probably get by with slacks—not those you’re wearing. Nice slacks. And you’ll need a few blouses, and a pair of pumps and some plain oxfords.” As she spoke, she jotted a list on monogrammed stationery. “Don’t overdo it, though. Some of the girls have brought along steamer trunks full. Do you have money? I could send my girl with you to shop.”

  “I have money.”

  “I’ll call my woman at Saks. She’ll be expecting you. Ask for Mrs. Spring. She’ll take you to the hair salon, too, Antoine’s. They know me there.” She stood. “Good luck.”

  Marian stood, too, shook hands.

  “I’ll see you over there, if you go,” Jackie said.
“Behave yourself and don’t crash any planes without good reason, and you’ll be fine.”

  At the door, Marian stopped, turned back. “If you don’t mind, I’d rather keep it between us that I’ve been married. Is that all right?”

  Jackie gave her a long look, a small nod.

  * * *

  —

  After Jackie returns from Britain, she dines with the Roosevelts, again pitches her idea about using women ferry pilots. Maybe we’ll start looking into it, the president says.

  Her staff combs through thousands of files, comes up with a hundred and fifty experienced pilots. But the generals say they have more male pilots than airplanes at the moment. And how should they be expected to house a handful of girls on air bases where there are hundreds, maybe thousands of men? Chaos would ensue. So: No. The answer is no.

  For now, they say, see if the Brits want your girl pilots.

  The Brits want everything and everyone they can get. In London Jackie sets herself up in luxurious digs, rents a Daimler, parades around in a mink coat. The ATA doctor, she learns, is planning to strip her girls naked during their physicals, and she says absolutely not, digs in about it—a confusing creature to her British counterparts, seemingly both crass and a prude. (Back in the cotton mill, sometimes punching and kicking hadn’t been enough.)

  In 1953, over a Mojave salt flat, Jacqueline Cochran will be the first woman to break the sound barrier. In 1964, in an F-104G, she will reach a speed of 1,429 miles per hour, faster than any pilot ever.

  But back to 1942, when twenty-six American pilots, Jackie’s girls, crossed the Atlantic from Montreal to Liverpool, and Marian Graves was among them.

  Montreal

  June 1942

  Two months after Marian met Jackie

  Marian had not known Montreal was on an island, nor had she ever been anywhere where people spoke a language other than English. The sky over Dorval Airport had a fairground atmosphere, snarled with long buzzing ropes of engine noise, crowded with aircraft coming in from factories or leaving for Europe or wavering through touch-and-gos with student pilots. B-17s passed among single-engine trainers like whales through schools of fish. The larger bombers and transports would head up to Gander and then right across to Ireland or Britain. The smaller fighters and trainers might be taken apart and loaded on ships or they might fly the ice-cube route: Newfoundland, Greenland, Iceland, Britain. A pageant of uniforms was ongoing in the city, the significance of the different colors and insignias at first illegible to Marian.

  Tiger Moths and Piper Cubs circled and circled the field, trainees at their controls. A season of mass chrysalis: men to pilots. The war demanded more of everything.

  After three weeks in which she managed to snatch only five hours of flying, Marian checked out in a bright yellow Harvard trainer, its landing-gear doors hanging down like jaunty spats. The cockpit smelled of hot metal and rubber and an elusive acrid note that she had come to think of as the odor of flight itself. The check pilot, an American, was, as Jackie had warned, skeptical of women flyers. “But needs must,” said one of the other girls staying at the Mount Royal Hotel. A couple of them had bought the check pilot a beer, with good results, so Marian did the same, dug out a bright smile, did her best to concoct flattering questions that got him talking about his close scrapes and heroic saves before chronic headaches had sidelined him from the Army Air Corps.

  A doctor poked and prodded, weighed and measured, took her blood, asked a series of oddly detailed questions about her menstruation. “No flying,” he said, “during your menstrual period, as well as three days before and three days after. It’s regulation.”

  “Sure,” Marian said. (The other girls had warned her about this idiocy, so she’d been prepared to keep a straight face and blandly agree, as if obeying wouldn’t mean being grounded half the time.)

  Mostly her job was to wait. Jackie’s girls had been crossing the Atlantic just four or five per ship so they couldn’t all be blown to smithereens by the same torpedo. In the meantime they hung around the airport and the Mount Royal. Usually Marian drank at night in the hotel bar with the other pilots, the Atlantic ferry boys and Jackie’s girls. She wasn’t used to so much company, and while the others grew more boisterous as they drank, she got quieter, sat nodding along with the conversation. At some point she couldn’t anticipate until it was upon her, she would get up and leave without saying good night.

  She especially wasn’t used to the company of women. Yes, the girls all loved to fly and wanted to take this chance to get out and do something, and most were basically all right, but they tended to have only ever lived with their parents or perhaps in a ladies’ dorm at college or perhaps with a husband. She had hoped she would feel more like she belonged than she did. She told them little about herself. (“Aren’t you the mysterious one,” said a girl whose father had bought her a plane for her sweet sixteen.)

  Thank goodness for Ruth.

  Ruth Bloom. From Michigan. She’d arrived two weeks after Marian, and they’d met in the lobby of the Mount Royal, Marian pushing in through the revolving door still in flying clothes, Ruth at the front desk in a blue dress and pumps, her hem on the short side. The beat-up brown suitcases at her feet gave her away as a flyer with their patchwork of gum-backed stickers advertising aircraft manufacturers and air races. She spotted Marian at once, called out, “You must be one of Jackie’s girls.”

  Ruth was short and busty with strong, plump calves and a small but solid waist, a shrewd sort, gregarious, mischief wrapped around her like a feather boa. Her husband was in navigator training in Texas, she said. He was hoping for heavy bombers. She and Eddie had met in a government-sponsored civilian pilot training course open to undergraduates; not enough men had signed up so there’d been room for her—at least, there was once she’d made it clear she wouldn’t leave anyone alone until she was let in. Eddie had joined up right after Pearl Harbor, washed out of pilot training, got slotted as a navigator instead. Ruth said she couldn’t just sit around twiddling her thumbs while he was off doing his part. She’d gotten the telegram from Jackie, and so here she was.

  “Are you married?” she asked Marian.

  “No.”

  “Ever get close?”

  Marian looked away. “No.”

  “I’m nosy,” Ruth said without apology. She studied Marian. Something about the appraisal reminded Marian of Miss Dolly’s girls. She half expected Ruth to start putting lipstick on her. But Ruth’s air of barely contained mirth, her confidence in Marian’s friendship from the first instant of their acquaintance, reminded her of Caleb, too. “You’re striking,” she said, “even though you’re trying hard to hide it.”

  Marian ran a hand over her hair, which had been tidied in the Saks salon but was flat now from the helmet she wore while flying the open Harvard. She had been instructed to grow it out at least into a bob. “I try not to stand out.”

  “But you draw attention by making yourself so plain. You must have worked out that much.” A small soft hand darted up and grasped Marian by the chin. Obediently, Marian allowed her head to be turned from side to side as though she were a horse for sale. Ruth seemed to be suppressing a smile. “Bashful,” she said.

  “Not really,” Marian said, pulling free.

  Ruth’s smile broke out fully. “If I buy you a drink, will you tell me everything I need to know about this place?”

  * * *

  —

  They finally left Montreal in midsummer, four of them together in a cramped cabin on a small Swedish freighter: Marian and Ruth and Sylvie-from-Iowa and a girl from California who went by Zip. Marian had tried to conceal the depth of her happiness that she and Ruth would travel together and begin their training together because she wasn’t sure how important any particular friendship should be in these times. But Ruth must have been pleased, too, because she’d clinked her beer against Marian’s and
said, “Thanking my stars we won’t be wrested apart, Graves.”

  Marian hadn’t seen Caleb or written to him for the better part of a year. Jamie hadn’t heard from him, either, didn’t know if he’d married the schoolteacher. Her silence wasn’t out of anger; she was trying not to meddle. She’d always kept a distance from him, really, afraid of what would happen if they put more weight on their long, old love than it could bear. With Ruth, she feared overstepping, taking their friendship too seriously, but mostly she felt a pleasure in her company that was tender and heady, almost embarrassing in how much it resembled infatuation. Not only did Ruth understand, without need of explanation, how Marian felt about flying, but she understood what it meant to be a woman who flew, all the frustrations and indignities, the skepticism that buffeted like a headwind.

  “I think he’d pass a centipede if it solemnly promised never to believe it could fly as well as he does,” Ruth had said of their check pilot. “That’s all he wants. Not to know you can fly, just to know you know your place.”

  “Why a centipede?” Marian had said.

  “I can always pick out a leg man. I flashed him a bit of mine, called him a hero, now I’m bound for London.”

  The way she spoke to Marian was sometimes maternal, sometimes jocular, sometimes flirtatious, always good-naturedly bullying and coaxing and chivvying her along, and though Marian would never have expected to enjoy being treated like a pet, it was relaxing simply to do as Ruth bid her.

  In a small convoy with an old destroyer as escort, they first crossed from Montreal to St. John’s, Newfoundland, to wait for a bigger convoy to assemble. Long, slow, warmish days passed at anchor. Marian had sold the Beechcraft, and as she watched planes passing over, bound for Europe, she felt sharp pangs for it. In the evenings, the pilots played cards and drank with the other passengers.

  Sylvie-from-Iowa said she was joining the ATA because she’d already met all the men in her town, her county, probably in all of Iowa, and anyway she’d rather fly planes than build them. Zip said she wanted to fly a Spitfire, obviously. And she wanted to be able to say she’d seen things, out in the world. Ruth said, “If you just want to say you’ve seen them, you could stay home and make up stories.”