by Mark Dunn
“Do we not owe that to your father for everything he has done for us, my darling?”
Roland Wilmer had started his career as a teacher of the deaf. He had worked alongside the famed teacher Sarah Fuller, who had taught Helen Keller, among many others. Mr. Wilmer had used his familiarity with the needs of the deaf and his scientific background to start a business that specialized in ear trumpets, ear tubes, acoustic table urns, and other devices that assisted the hard-of-hearing. Most recently he had filed for patents and begun developing hearing aids that employed electrical amplification. The business was destined to grow and thrive, especially under the shrewd stewardship of Wilmer’s son, Darius. But for the present, Carrie’s older brother, a hydraulic engineer, was helping to build the Panama Canal. “I appreciate very much what Father has done for us,” said Carrie, thoroughly chastened.
“I know you do,” replied Mrs. Wilmer, before placing a delicate kiss upon her daughter’s forehead.
Not another word was exchanged between mother and daughter, and Mr. Wilmer did not raise the matter with Carrie.
Saturday came—the day of Carrie’s much-anticipated wedding. The February sky, typically cinerous and dreary, was powder blue with hardly a cloud in sight. Even without the foliage that served as natural adornment to St. Mary’s Episcopal Church in Newton, the Federal Style meeting house was the chromo-perfect picture of New England simplicity and charm. Inside, the high box pews and square columns of the colonial sanctuary were festooned with smilax berries, the altar graced with white Easter lilies and white and pink rhododendrons. Pots of hothouse azaleas were distributed generously.
In one of the bedrooms of the rectory, Carrie’s toilette was being prepared by her mother and her bridesmaids in a giddy, fussy pinwheel of activity. Roland Wilmer stood in the doorway not quite believing that the little girl he had once bounced upon his knee was now the beautiful young woman who stood radiant before him. Roland had spared no expense in giving his daughter all she desired, including the dress both she and her mother had sought from the finest couturière in Boston: a princess-style gown of white satin, trimmed with point lace. Atop Carrie’s head was a pompadour large enough to hold a lengthy tulle veil and orange blossoms that replicated the blooms in the lace upon her shoulders and her silver brocade shoes.
Carrie caught her father’s eye and the two smiled at one another. But a different look passed between her parents—a look of only slightly disguised apprehension. Mr. Wilmer shut the door and proceeded to another room, assigned to the groom and his attendant groomsmen. He opened the door to find his potential son-in-law arrayed in a species of sartorial splendor that perfectly complimented the look of his bride. Standing before him in Prince Albert frock coat over a gleaming white Marseilles waistcoat, his pearl gray cravat tied with perfection in the puff style, Scott demonstrated that it wasn’t merely a prodigious knowledge of salted and frozen fish that defined him; he also knew how to dress well, especially when it counted.
“I’m wondering if I might have a word in private,” said Roland.
“Skidoo, fellas. The old man wants to give his soon-to-be-son-in-law ‘the talk.’” The four young men, two of whom had been playing mumbletypeg with a pocketknife upon the rectory’s wooden floorboards, took their hasty leave.
“I’ll save you the breath, Mr. Wilmer,” said Scott, slapping a hand on Wilmer’s shoulder. “I promise to love, honor, and yes, even to obey your remarkable daughter.”
“Goodhue, I don’t want you to marry her.”
A stunned silence. Then,
“You’re joking. But you aren’t, are you?”
Wilmer shook his head. “I won’t beat around the bush, young man. I know what you’ve done.”
“What have I done?”
“Don’t sport with me. You have a bastard child.”
Scott looked about for a place to sit down. There were hymnals stacked upon a chair. He removed them. “You may wish to sit down, as well, Mr. Wilmer. This may take a moment.”
Roland cleared a chair for himself and pulled it over to Scott.
“The maid was in the employ of my father. Did your private dick tell you this? Did he tell you that the woman died in childbirth?”
“He did not, but that makes your crime all the more reprehensible. Where is your child now?”
“An orphanage. But she isn’t my child.”
“You expect me to believe this?”
“I do. I expect you to believe it—though you are never to let this fact escape your lips—when I tell you that the bastard child’s father was my own father. When the maid became pregnant, a rumor began to be circulated among the servants that it was I who was responsible, because I used to give the maid a bit of flirting attention from time to time. We—my father and mother and my two sisters—we let the rumors stand. We decided that should word ever get out, I would take the fall for my father. I would take the fall, Mr. Wilmer, because the damage to my reputation would be far less onerous than that which would come to him, especially as he planned to put himself before the Massachusetts General Court as a candidate for the U.S. Senate in 1906. I had never intended to marry, Mr. Wilmer. It was the bachelor’s life for me, sir, though I must emphasize that I would never, could never live the sexually degenerate life which you ascribe to me by your accusation. Of course, I didn’t foresee that someone as wonderful as your daughter would come along and steal my heart as she did.”
Roland Wilmer shook his head. He could not contain his skeptical and cynical nature. He was forever fearful that his laboratory might become infiltrated by industrial spies working for Mr. Alexander Graham Bell, whom he believed had a larcenous nature, since there was widespread contention that Bell had appropriated from Mr. Elisha Gray crucial details of sound transmission which facilitated his invention of the telephone.
“You will have to do better than that, Goodhue.”
“I’m prepared to give you the proof you require. That is, should you wish to see it. Latch the door behind you, sir, and I’ll show you the reproductive wound I sustained with the Rough Riders in Cuba. It impedes my ability to sire any children, bastard or otherwise.”
Roland cleared his throat with a nervous cough. “You’re being serious.”
“Dead serious. Give me just a moment to unbutton this fly.”
“No, no, no. That won’t be necessary. Does Carrie—does my daughter know this?”
Scott nodded. “Her love for me far exceeds her desire to bear her own children. We have already taken the first steps toward adopting the child my father sired. We intend to love her as if she were our very own daughter.”
“I regret, Goodhue, that I grossly misjudged you.”
“It is water under the bridge, sir. Shall we shake hands on a pledge to put all of it behind us?”
The men shook hands with a hardy pump and Mr. Wilmer opened the door. His wife was standing on the other side. Taking Ada into his arms, he said, “All is well, and I will explain everything to you after the ceremony.”
“But all isn’t well with Carrie. She’s decided that she doesn’t want her father to give her away.”
“Though I have only been looking after her best interests?”
“She sees only antipathy to the man she loves. Will you talk to her?”
It was fifteen minutes past the time that the ceremony had been scheduled to begin. The wedding guests, comprised of members of both the Goodhue and Wilmer families, along with friends, business colleagues, and employees of the various businesses owned by those families, were growing restless in their boxes. The groomsmen were playing mumblety-peg again despite flustered interdictions by the rector, and Miss Sarah Fuller, famed teacher of the deaf, was allowing her own impatience to reinvigorate her defense of her friend Alexander Graham Bell, her peroration being ill-received by those associates of Wilmer’s who sided with Mr. Gray in the historic controversy regarding the invention of the telephone. “And for the record,” Miss Fuller held forth, “Mr. Bell did not famously say, �
�Mr. Watson, come here. I want you.’ What he said, in point of fact, was, ‘Mr. Watson, come here. And bring Miss Fuller with you!’”
Roland Wilmer sat with his daughter in the little bedroom in the rectory. Carrie was weeping upon his shoulder. “I have asked for your forgiveness, my darling daughter. Will you give it to me?”
“You are quick to find imperfection in others, Father. I agree that no man or woman who has ever walked this planet is without some blemish—”
“Save our blessed Lord Jesus,” interjected the rector, who had stepped into the room to offer religious counsel as needed, but more pertinently to remind the bride and her father of the time.
“But my dear Scotty’s blemish is in his nether region and it was a bullet put there by a Spaniard in the heat of battle.”
Mr. Wilmer nodded as the rector tapped upon his pocket watch.
“You will then accept the fact that your own father is also merely human. Your mother as well.”
“I will.”
As the bride and her father were waiting in the vestibule, Roland Wilmer leaned over to whisper a question into Carrie’s ear: “Have you any idea who sent the anonymous letter aspersing the character of your fiancé?”
“We may never know it, Father,” replied Carrie, “but Scott wonders if it may not be one of his Harvard Porcellian Club brothers to whom he owes a great sum of money. Scott is indebted to a large number of gentlemen and to some men who could not be characterized as gentlemen at all.”
“Whatever is the reason for the debt, my darling girl?”
“My fiancé gambles, Father. Poker, baccarat, faro, fan-tan, hazard. It is a mania with him. When he wins, all is happiness and joy between us, but when he loses—especially when he loses quite dramatically—I must soothe his troubles with loving kindness and tender mercies, the poor, poor dear.”
The bride came down the aisle, followed by a six-foot train, her expression incandescent, rapturous. The man who accompanied her looked deathly pale, and the smile upon his lips seemed hardly sincere at all.
1908
Volant in North Carolina
“I’m too damned old for this,” said the first man.
“Quit your belly-aching, Jimmy,” said the second.
“Belly-aching is the very thing,” said the third. “Are we belly-crawling all the rest of the way, Salley? If I’d known this would be a possibility, I’d have packed my truss.” The third man then took out a handkerchief and blotted his sweating forehead.
“It isn’t much farther,” said the young man named Salley. “Look up and you’ll see the tree I climbed to make my first observation.”
Salley’s four male companions, three of them newspaper and magazine correspondents, the fourth a fifty-one-year-old news photographer from Great Britain named Jimmy Hare, looked up.
Although it was a tree of average height, the imposing sand dunes that surrounded it seemed to dwarf it by proximity. Upon this isolated, narrow strip of seashore the sand hills swallowed up the entire landscape—both figuratively and literally. The men chanced upon large clusters of pines that all but disappeared under the glistening white mounds. Reaching this spot had been an adventure for the group, four of whose members had come all the way from New York City. Only Bruce Salley could claim a local connection and that was putting it broadly, this “string-man’s” beat stretching all the way up and down the Virginia and North Carolina coastlines.
Upon assignment by their respective editors—each of them skeptical men who refused to take Salley’s word on what he had seen with even the smallest grain of Atlantic Ocean salt —the newsmen had made their way over from Elizabeth City, and then by one-lung motorboat had chugged across the Pamlico, Albemarle, and Roanoke sounds, finally reaching the quiet village of Manteo on the island of Roanoke—an island which, for over three hundred years, had been haunted by the tragically unresolved fate of Sir Walter Raleigh’s lost colony. These intrepid reporters set out from the village the next morning to discover for themselves if what Salley said he had seen was true and verifiable.
At the break of dawn they had climbed into the open launch that would take them to the Outer Banks. There they hiked ten miles over sand dunes that exacted an enervating toll with each sunken step. They established their day camp about a half mile from that which they had each come to see on behalf of their respective employers.
“I don’t get the reason for all the cloak-and-dagger, Salley,” said a reporter named Hoster, who wrote for the New York American. “You said yourself that you didn’t stay hidden. You said that it wasn’t any time at all before you were chin-chinning with them just like old friends.”
Salley nodded from behind his field glasses.
“Then they had to have known that others would come after you. Men with more impressive credentials. Men with cameras that don’t lie.”
“Unless, of course, you’re taking pictures for Hearst,” interjected a reporter named Ruhl, with Collier’s Weekly.
All the men laughed except for Hoster, who had a habit of never disparaging his employer, even when that employer was six hundred miles away.
Salley handed the binoculars to Hare, who was happy to take up something lighter than his bulky press camera. The thickly mustached Brit enjoyed a private laugh. As a young man, he’d walked away from an apprenticeship with his father, a successful camera manufacturer, because of a frustrating reluctance on his father’s part to make smaller, handier cameras. This one was small—but it wasn’t small enough. He also worried that his fragile lenses were becoming scratched from all the blowing sand. When it came time to take the photograph that would make history, he wanted a perfect print.
If that time ever came.
“They don’t want the press around,” explained Salley. “They haven’t removed all the bugs from the new model. You remember what happened to Langley’s aerodrome back in ’03.”
Ruhl nodded and snickered. “As I recall, the Washington Post said the craft slid into the Potomac like a handful of mortar. Oh, was that harsh!”
Ruhl laughed until he lapsed into a noisy smoker’s cough that threatened to betray the secret press encampment.
“I’m only saying,” resumed Salley, whose youthful earnestness betrayed his appreciation for being treated as an equal to these more established and seasoned men of the American press, “that Langley’s well-attended aeronautical debacle is probably the reason that nobody paid much attention to the reports coming out of this little patch of sandy wilderness. After all, the brothers’ first flight took place hardly a week after Langley’s flying machine received its well-financed bath.”
“If, that is, you are among those who believe that such a flight ever took place here,” qualified Ruhl through his muffled hacks.
Unfortunately for the newsmen, each hoping for the scoop of the century, that first day was a bust. All the sand and the stealth and the New York Herald correspondent Byron Newton’s near-death encounter with a slithering, dauntless copperhead had been for naught. At the other camp—the one under surveillance—there had been activity of a sort. The machine was brought out of its shed and there followed hours of tinkering, and then the twin propellers were made to turn, each glistening tauntingly in the bright sunshine, and as the five men of the press waited eagerly in their minimally concealing blind, the machine sat decidedly immobile upon its wooden skids and its specially built monorail and nothing else of note occurred. Before the onset of dusk and the hampering darkness, the quintet gathered up their supplies and made their long, laborious, grumble-inflected trek to the boat that would return them to their inn at Manteo.
The next day: a virtual reenactment of the day before.
The third day seemed equally unpromising. By midmorning, with the prospect of continued aeronautical stasis, Salley was lambasted by his colleagues for what surely must have been faulty eyesight and then excoriated over what surely must have been faulty memory and finally condemned for having been catalytically responsible for all of their pre
sent tribulations by virtue of his very birth. Each of the newsmen wondered to himself if the brothers who had invented the fantastical machine had been made well aware of the newsmen’s interloping presence and were therefore waiting until their permanent departure before perpetrating anything historical upon these windy dunes. Or was all of this exactly as the world press had snidely surmised? Was it not the Paris edition of the American paper, the Herald (to which Bruce Salley had earlier sent his fervent eyewitness dispatches), that said in early 1906, “They are in fact either flyers or liars. It is difficult to fly. It’s easy to say, ‘We have flown.’”
The answer to all of these questions came in the form of a sound—that of spinning propellers. Rather than the clanking clatter redolent of a grain reaper, being the sound that had earlier broadcast itself from the vicinity of the rotating blades, there now came a crisp rat-a-tat-tat—the rataplan becoming sharper in tone as the blades spun faster and with greater assurance. Now, as Salley’s companions looked on, first with spiritless half-curiosity, and then, suddenly, with full, unbridled anticipation, the men witnessed exactly what the youngest and least experienced among them had already seen with his own eyes several days earlier and had tried to convey, had tried to put forth with the same convincing detail that characterized the accounts of that select handful of privileged men and women who had seen it, too—had seen that which Orville and Wilbur had done and done repeatedly ever since that first blustery day in December of 1903, when history was made and then promptly and roundly ignored. This newly privileged crop of correspondents watched as the Wright Brothers’ flying machine glided smoothly and quickly down its monorail track. They heard shouts of encouragement as it lifted itself up into the air, as its white wings caught the angled light of the morning sun and shimmered, as Wright Flyer III defied the gusting wind and rose thirty, forty, then fifty feet into the air. And then Jimmy Hare, in his thickest, most theatrical cockney brogue, cried “My Gawd!” and snapped a picture that all the world would later see and take as proof.