Great Circle: A Novel

by Maggie Shipstead

  She wonders if Eddie could have changed his mind. If he had, he might hold out for quite a while, survive off the supplies in Little America and by hunting seals and penguins. She wonders if he might be hoping she will send help after all, if he had truly been so sure she would not make it. She wonders if he is already dead.

  She regrets the sadness she will cause Matilda and Caleb, and perhaps Jamie’s Sarah, but she thinks they might as well grieve, because she is gone.

  The male sea lions have left for the year, Harold tells her. But the females have gone inland to pup, and she often encounters the animals. They burst roaring from the brush where they have hidden their babies, or they belly-toboggan down the hills on muddy trails, bound for the sea. Harold is conducting a survey of the southern royal albatrosses, and Marian goes with him to count nests and chicks and to hold the massive birds in her arms, one hand wrapped firmly around the bill, while he crimps identifying rings around their pinkish, leathery ankles.

  They tramp all over the island, even in the excoriating winter winds, recording, in total, nine hundred and thirty-eight birds in Harold’s ledger. The birds are ungainly on the ground, easy to catch. The adults are magnificently white with good-humored black button eyes, thick pink bills, wingspans as long as two men set end-to-end.

  When she first arrives, the birds are still sitting on their chicks, but gradually the young ones grow into hungry heaps of white fluff substantial enough to be left alone while the parents go to sea to feed. After their feathers come in, the chicks stand up and stretch their wings in the breeze, and, finally, around the time Marian leaves, the first ones fly away, making teetering, experimental leaps into the wind. Harold says once fledged they will not touch land for several years. They will fly around Antarctica, returning to Campbell from the opposite direction one day to breed.

  Marian’s special purview becomes the sheep. Before the war, farming on the island had been given up as hopelessly unprofitable and the sheep left behind to roam wild. They are hardy and wily, the ones who survived and bred, and she finds herself drawn to them. Swift the dog shares her interest in the sheep, and slowly, with many failures, the two begin to learn how to move them from place to place, just to see if they can.

  In one of the abandoned farm structures, she finds old shearing blades. She patches up a falling-down corral, toils patiently with Swift for days before they actually manage to drive a single sheep into it. John had worked with sheep in his youth and offers suggestions in passing, mostly leaves her on her own. Shearing is hard work; she makes a hash of many a sheep before she gets the knack. There is no real reason to shear the incorrigibly wild Campbell sheep, but it has begun to dawn on her that she will need a skill other than flying airplanes if she is to become a new person.

  After she has been on the island six months, the beards sit her down and say they might have a way to get her to the mainland undetected. “We would have told you sooner,” John says, “but, begging your pardon, we weren’t so sure about you at first.” Harold’s brother, it turns out, is a keen yachtsman and has talked about sailing to Campbell for a visit in early summer, before the annual ship comes in January to bring fresh beards and take away the old ones. She could, perhaps, if the brother is amenable, sail back with him. They hadn’t wanted to ask him over the radio for lack of privacy, so they will have to wait and see what he thinks, if he comes at all. If he isn’t amenable, or she isn’t, well, then, they’ll have another think. “But you’re still sure,” Harold asks, “that you don’t want to be yourself anymore?”

  She is sure, and the brother (who turns out to be even more taciturn than Harold) is amenable, and so after much silent valedictory hand-gripping with the beards, she leaves Campbell Island and reaches Invercargill at last, in January 1951, under sail.

  * * *

  —

  After ten months wearing clothes borrowed from the beards, it seems natural to continue dressing as a man. She feels as she had as a teenager, skulking around Missoula in overalls, hat pulled low, though now her disguise is more convincing, with her broken nose and weathered skin, her rough hands and her shoulders sturdy from shearing.

  She goes north into the country around Mount Cook and gets a job as a high-country shepherd. She keeps to herself, which is easy to do, living in a hut on the side of a mountain, tending to unruly bleating masses of Merinos. They aren’t as skittish as the Campbell sheep, nor quite as hardy, but they are by no means docile. She gets better with sheepdogs, better at shearing, though she is never especially quick. She speaks little, doesn’t complain, can hold her drink, and so is respected. From the beards she’d picked up a passable Kiwi accent that gradually becomes second nature; any oddnesses she explains away by saying, truthfully, that her mother had been American. Later, some people will claim they’d had suspicions about her sex, but at the time none are voiced, not directly. Certainly she takes some ribbing for her slightness—Twig, they call her in the shearing shed—but her broken nose and her pilot’s squint and the scars on her face from frostbite and the rocky Campbell shore give her a tough look. She’s never had much in the way of a chest, nothing a hard band of elastic and a couple layers of shirts can’t hide. She calls herself Martin Wallace.

  She believes she deserves to be isolated and unknown, that loneliness is a fitting punishment. But time weakens her resolve. Her self-recriminations grow softer. She has been a shepherd for three years when a photo of her (face obscured by shadow) happens to appear in a Queenstown newspaper, and on impulse she cuts it out and sends it to Caleb. Sitting-in-the-Water-Grizzly, she writes, wondering if he will remember the story he’d once told her. She can’t bring herself to write down the bald truth, prefers to leave things up to chance. She has, in some ways, begun to lose any rigid idea about what constitutes truth. She catches herself remembering Eddie falling into a crevasse, though it had not happened. Or perhaps it had, later. What she is really remembering is her own foot popping through the snow, being balanced between a white nothingness and a black one.

  Caleb comes to see her for Christmas in 1954, and an aperture is opened between her two lives. When she meets his ship in Auckland, it is her first trip to the city since she’d departed for Aitutaki with Eddie, and so the circle is finally closed, without fanfare, five years after she’d begun it. With Caleb, for two weeks, she returns to her body. There is no question, as there never has been, of him staying, but there is equal certainty he will return.

  She’d told him, in Hawaii, that she envied how he’d found a place that quelled his restlessness. She had not thought she would ever find such a place for herself, but in New Zealand, she does. Perhaps her peace is inherent to the land, or perhaps she has simply exhausted herself. She longs to fly an airplane again, but she doesn’t long to see over the horizon. And she feels she must make sacrifices in atonement for her survival, for leaving Eddie. She will not fly. She will not know Jamie’s daughter.

  * * *

  —

  The presence of her own book on her shelves is a dark joke. She had never quite intended to write it, and yet there it is, in its mustard dust jacket. If she had succeeded, if all had gone according to plan and they had landed triumphantly back in Auckland, she would never have let it be published as it was. She had left it behind in Antarctica as a gesture of defiance, a marker of her existence, like a stone cairn. But then she had neither succeeded nor died.

  In the years before the logbook was found, she seldom thought of it. Then there it was in a newspaper photograph in 1958, in the gloved hands of an ice scientist doing research at Little America III. She’d been shocked and frightened by the prospect of stirred-up publicity, of her photo being printed and reprinted, of everyone being reminded that Marian Graves had once existed. For years she worried that someone might recognize her after all, but, as it turned out, no one did. She was greatly changed, and also she had settled in a corner of the world where people didn’t pay much attention t
o things like lost American lady pilots.

  When the book was found, she had wondered if Eddie would be, too. She’d wondered if there was any possibility at all he might still be alive after eight years, though surely even if he’d managed to feed and warm himself, he would have been broken by the solitude, the extremity. The question was irrelevant, though—he hadn’t wanted to survive.

  What were his last days like? How many of them had there been? Did he live until winter? Did he fall in a crevasse after all? His body wasn’t inside Little America or the scientists would have found it. If it had been her, she would have done what he said he would do: walked in the winter night far away from camp and lain in the snow, under the stars and the aurora. Or maybe not—it is not lost on her she had twice failed to choose death. She’d written in her logbook that her life was her one possession. She had kept it; she had wanted it.

  In 1963, the crew of a navy icebreaker will catch sight of buildings smushed like sandwich filling in the middle of a tabular iceberg drifting three hundred miles from the Ross Ice Shelf: Little America III, its bunks and Victrola and frozen dog turds and corn on the cob, all gone out to sea.

  Eddie, too, wherever he was, would eventually be calved into the Southern Ocean inside an iceberg, would sail north aboard his grand funeral barge, a pyre that would not burn but melt. He would end in the ocean after all, but he must have known that.

  Caleb comes to New Zealand a second time. They argue about money. He wants her to take all the royalties from the book. Finally she convinces him to keep forty percent. With her new fortune, moderate though it is, she is able to shift her identity once more. She goes away to the North Island for the better part of a year, becomes a woman again, calls herself Alice Root. What documents she needs, she gets from a forger in Auckland. When she is ready, she returns to the South Island, buys her farm, makes a go of it. She trains horses and sheepdogs. She hires the right hands. She is one of the first to use a helicopter for mustering—the land is rugged; the sheep find their way to places that would take full days to reach on foot—and allows herself the indulgence of learning to fly it.

  Early on, she occasionally encounters someone from her shepherding days, and usually they do not recognize her, or not confidently enough to ask, but to those who say she reminds them of a man called Martin Wallace, she admits, almost casually, that, yes, she had been posing as a man for a time because she’d needed the work and wanted to learn the ropes of sheep farming. Some are outraged; others, after brief astonishment, manage to admire her pluck. Gradually, word spreads through the sheep community and everyone knows. Though a few prudish souls refuse to do business with her and do their best to spread vituperative rumors, by then she is well established and independent enough to suffer no important ill consequences. There is a long history of women disguising themselves as men in order to be soldiers or sailors, even pirates. Who was to worry too much about one lonely shepherd?

  Lambs born, lambs sent to slaughter, sheep shorn, prices of wool. In the late sixties, adventure cruises to Campbell Island come on offer, and in 1974, she and Caleb go. As the ship enters Perseverance Harbour, she points out where she had been dashed against the rocks, where she had walked along the hillside before finding the beards. He sees the seals and the penguins. There are still sheep on the island then, though in the eighties the last of them will be culled except for a handful brought to the mainland for genetic study. They are so very hardy, so tough. She and Caleb sit together in the tussock grass among tourists in anoraks and watch groups of young royal albatross preen and show off, wings spread, calling out with their pink bills pointing at the sky. It’s called gamming, she tells Caleb, a word for when whaling ships used to pull alongside each other at sea for a chat.

  She is sixty years old.

  She shows Caleb the direction she had last seen the Peregrine flying, the horizon over which it had passed and, somewhere, unseen, crashed into the ocean. And so she returns to another beginning, closes another circle.

  She is pleased, when she is old, not to have a string of descendants to worry about. The world will do as it will without any of her blood. When she learns you can look people up on the internet, she looks up Adelaide Scott and discovers she is an artist. She thinks Jamie would have been pleased.

  Caleb comes for the last time when she is seventy-five. A few years later he writes to tell her that he is ill. He will not, he says, say goodbye.

  Her heart flutters in her chest sometimes. Her bones are brittle. Gravity seems greedier than before, eager to tip her to the ground. The final smashup. In her will, she includes a bequest to a woman, her farm manager, who has worked for her longer than anyone else. The farm manager has always wanted to go to Antarctica, and Marian will leave her money for a trip to the Ross Sea, along with a request that, somewhere south of Campbell Island, she scatter Marian’s ashes from the ship.

  Marian can imagine the plume of herself riding the westerly wind over the Southern Ocean, the bits of teeth and bone sinking at once, a gritty gray film settling on the surface until the chop mixes her in. But she doesn’t know what will happen to the part of her that is not her body. All the times she has brushed against death, she’s never given much thought to what might come after. Now she considers it. She supposes there will be nothing. She supposes each of us destroys the world. We close our eyes and snuff out all that has existed, all that will ever be.

  But if she could choose, she would ask for lift. She would want to rise from her body and have it be like when she’d first gone up with Trout, as though she were being held aloft by pure possibility, as though she were about to see everything.

  Acknowledgments

  This is the third novel I’ve written with my editor at Knopf, Jordan Pavlin, and my appreciation and admiration for her inimitable blend of radical openness and incisive rigor only grow with each passing book. Paring down an unwieldy thousand-page manuscript into this slender wisp of a thing was not an easy process, but I couldn’t have wished or hoped for a better companion and guide.

  My gratitude to my agent, Rebecca Gradinger, is both deep and wide. Her friendship, advocacy, patience, and collaboration have all been essential to my work and life for many years now. Also at Fletcher & Co., thanks to the one and only Grainne Fox, a cherished beacon of non-nonsenseness, and to Melissa Chinchillo, Christy Fletcher, Veronica Goldstein, Liz Resnick, and Brenna Raffe. Much love and many thanks to Michelle Weiner at CAA.

  Thank you to my mother, this book’s first and most devoted reader, whose belief I wore like a splint during difficult moments. Thank you to my brother, Matthew, still and always a pilot though he no longer flies, who looked at a map with me almost seven years ago, grimaced at the route options for a north-south circumnavigation in 1950, and suggested the C-47. Thank you to my father for his staunch pride and his list of typos and to my uncle Steve for his soul-warming eagerness to read and his wholehearted embrace of Marian when he did.

  I am grateful to have come to Knopf during the era of the late and legendary Sonny Mehta. I am grateful, also, to be present for the beginning of the era of his worthy successor, Reagan Arthur. Thanks to Paul Bogaards, Emily Reardon, Sara Eagle, Ruth Liebmann, Cameron Ackroyd, Nicholas Thomson, Cassandra Pappas, Kristin Fassler, and Ellen Feldman. Kelly Blair designed a beautiful jacket that everyone fell in love with immediately, an impossible feat. Sheepish apologies and ardent thanks to copyeditor Karla Eoff and proofreaders Annette Szlachta-McGinn and Susan VanOmmeren.

  Thank you to Jane Lawson at Doubleday in the U.K. for her warmth, energy, and insight and to Bill Scott-Kerr at Transworld for his confidence, as well as to Tabitha Pelly, Ella Horne, and Laura Ricchetti. Thank you to Jo Thomson for the epic cover design.

  I have been fortunate enough to work with many brilliant magazine editors who have taught me an enormous amount about writing and sent me on far-flung travel assignments that have informed both my experience of the world an
d the creation of this novel in essential ways. Thank you to Jesse Ashlock, Lila Battis, Jeffries Blackerby, Erin Florio, Deirdre Foley-Mendelssohn, Jacqui Gifford, Pilar Guzman, Alex Hoyt, Chris Keyes, Thessaly LaForce, Michelle Legro, Peter Jon Lindberg, Nathan Lump, Alex Postman, Julian Sancton, Melinda Stevens, Flora Stubbs, John Wogan, and Hanya Yanagihara.

  During the time I spent drafting and editing Great Circle, I was fortunate to receive crucial assistance in the form of fellowships, residencies, and a visiting writer gig from the National Endowment for the Arts, Brush Creek, Bread Loaf, The Arctic Circle, and the University of Tennessee. I was also lucky enough to happen to be hanging around the Museum of Mountain Flying at the Missoula airport one afternoon when two guys were going up for a spin in a 1929 Travel Air 6000 and invited me along. I have sadly lost their names, but I remain thankful for that serendipitous and immensely helpful flight.

  I would like to express my thanks to the Hoover Institution at Stanford for safeguarding the papers of many female World War II pilots, including American ATA flyers Ann Wood-Kelly, Roberta Sandoz, and Jane Spencer. Access to their letters was invaluable to me. My research efforts were also aided by the Montana Memory Project and Brian Lanker’s PBS documentary They Drew Fire, where I first encountered the wartime Aleutian paintings of William F. Draper. I consulted too many books and other resources to list, but a handful of crucial texts include Aloft: Thoughts on the Experience of Flight by William Langewiesche, Spitfire Women of World War II by Giles Whitell, The Flying North by Jean Potter, Little America and Alone by Richard E. Byrd, Those Wonderful Women in Their Flying Machines by Sally Van Wagenen Keil, Spreading My Wings by Diana Barnato Walker, The Stars at Night by Jacqueline Cochran, Lindbergh by A. Scott Berg, Fly the Biggest Piece Back by Steve Smith, and Antarctica by David Day. All errors are very much mine.