by Tom Miller
One thing to talk politics and quite another to throw oneself right in the thick of it.
“Would you?” I asked. “Run?”
“I’ve thought about it,” she said. “When I was fifty years old or something. But I could try for the House of Representatives when I turn twenty-five. I could work as Josephine’s aide, see if I can stand the sliminess, and then in ’22 . . . Well, Rhode Island has three seats.”
“I ought to move to Providence so I can vote for you.”
“Yes! That’ll make two votes. I’m not counting on my mom. ‘Not a woman’s place,’ she says. But if you’re talking about moving . . . God, how do I say this without sounding pushy? Would you ever consider Washington? I mean, yes, try for the Corps, but if that doesn’t work? You’re thinking about an arrangement, right?”
“Addams said so, too. But I don’t even know how to start—”
“Nancy Durstman,” Dar said. “Her father has an office in Washington. He could find a job for the flier who pulled his daughter out of the river. Not glamorous, maybe, but just for a year. And we could see each other every day. Or every night? Tell me you wouldn’t want that?”
• • •
I spent the next few days trying to imagine myself as helpmeet to Congresswoman Hardin. Well, why not? When my Contingency year ended, I could find more useful work in Washington, maybe as a municipal philosopher or hospital flier. It was too soon to think about it and yet—
“Pay attention!” Gertrude shouted at me as I landed after steaming past on a speed run. “That was much too long between redraws. Even the slowest girls from Trestor College will make three hundred miles an hour. There will be eight fliers in your event and right now you’re shaping up to finish last by eight minutes. In a thirty-minute race. That’s a crushing loss. That’s humiliation! A man who loses that badly I don’t want for my Corps. We have to get you faster.”
Gertrude was putting me up three, four, five hours a day. Almost no one else was flying, as Boston’s version of January was only slightly less crippling than Montana’s. But my old lady knew every trick—petroleum jelly around the edges of the goggles to prevent windburn, two layers of gloves with recirculating smoke in between, a hot water bottle in your neck protector.
As promised, Addams had put a curtain up in the storage room, giving me my own changing area. Gertrude had been incensed that I would walk away from a fight, but had nevertheless permitted me to use it, much to everyone else’s relief. And the custom harness, for which she and Brock had drawn up plans, finally arrived from Northwest Aero. It was a beautiful brown leather and feather-steel piece that fit me perfectly. So, at least I was suffering in high-quality tackle.
“I need your full concentration,” Gertrude insisted. “At two hundred seventy-five miles an hour, you’ll be competitive. If your landings are sharp enough, you might even beat one of the girls.”
“How fast was the last—”
“Two thirteen.”
“That’s great! That’s as fast as I’ve ever done. Professor Brock says I can expect another twenty miles an hour from conditioning. When those spiral regulators come in, that’s twenty more.”
“Are you so lovestruck you can’t do arithmetic? That’s still too slow. If you lost just—”
“Oh, don’t start with that again!”
“You came back from Christmas up four pounds! One pound a week until the Cup would buy you another twenty miles an hour. And then you’ll have a chance.”
I made a noise from the back of my throat.
“Think about it before you tuck into dinner tonight. In the meantime, which direction are you flying today?”
North to St. John’s, west to Niagara Falls, or south to Washington—the farthest points I could reach flying full out for two hours and then return home from before dark.
“Washington,” I said, and rechecked my rigging.
• • •
“Oatmeal, without milk or sugar, and one piece of fruit,” Dmitri advised. “Vegetables, raw or steamed, as much as you like, but never fried. Lean fish or chicken. Water to drink, no beer or wine. Brown rice and brown bread in small quantities. No white rice, white bread, potatoes, cakes, pies, pudding, chocolates, heavy cream, red meat—”
“This sounds awful,” I said.
“Finishing so far in last place that the medal ceremony is already over when you land sounds worse.”
I resolved to try it for a while. By the end of the first week, I was down one pound.
“Adequate,” Gertrude pronounced. “You’re in it for the long haul. Looking to the future, I’m also going to start flying you left-handed.”
“You’re kidding,” I said. “How will that make me any faster?”
“It won’t. But assume for a moment that all this works and you get to test for the Corps. They’re allowed to ask R&E fliers to demonstrate proficiency flying with their off hand. I’ve never seen it done, but if I decided to fail you, that’s how I would do it.”
“Jesus. I’ve flown left-handed about ten seconds in my whole life.”
“It doesn’t need to be pretty. You only need to fly a single, credible one-mile pass. So, starting today, you’re a part-time lefty. You brush your teeth left-handed. Notes in class—with your left. Soup spoon—left. We’ll do ten passes a day. Start real high, in case you have a hiccup.”
• • •
I didn’t kill myself flying southpaw, but I made a credible attempt at cutting my throat shaving left-handed.
“Darling, you’re slashed to ribbons!” Danielle said when she saw my face. “This is madness! Diets and left-handed and four-hour flights. This is a bitter old lady who’s hazing you.”
“It’s working,” I said. “I’m getting faster. A little.”
“To what end? When in your life, outside of the Cup, will you ever have to fly that fast?”
“I just want to— I need to do this. I need to do it as well as I’m able. And if it doesn’t work, then I did the best I could and I can hold my head up.”
“You can already do that, love. Before I met you, I never would have believed a man could do what you do. A thousand women here agree. I wish you’d take more pride in that instead of chasing a fantasy.”
Slapping me would have stung less.
“I don’t mean to nag,” she said. “But Nancy? Have you talked with her? Would you? Please?”
An arrangement.
“Dar, this is the reason people say terrible things about Contingencies! The Contingency Act was supposed to send philosophers where they were needed, not to whichever insurance firms slip the regional board an envelope stuffed with cash.”
“You earned it, Robert. You risked your life to save hers. I love you for wanting to come by your position cleanly, but you’d be the only Contingency playing by the rules.”
• • •
So, on the first of February, I sat in an overstuffed leather chair, freshly scrubbed and suited, equipped by Unger with a navy blue bow tie shot through with silver threads, facing Michael Durstman, president of the fourth largest insurance company in America.
“Such a pleasure!” Durstman boomed. “I’ve heard so much about you! Nancy thinks the world of you!”
I rose to shake his hand and fell back on the briefing that Mayweather had given me. The most vain, self-important, unphilosophical plutocrat you’ll ever meet. Flatter him from the first word. And when I’d complained that I was no good at that sort of thing, Don’t say anything that’s more than half-true. Make the other half the sweetest lie you can think up—imagine the most ingratiating thing I would ever say, double it, and add ten. At the end, hit him with a “You can count on me!” and get out fast.
“Nancy’s a sharp flier, one of our best,” I intoned, trying to match his bluff jollity. This about a girl I’d had the pleasure of coaching for all of seventy-five seconds as she missed a well-lit landing field and plunged into the river.
“That’s a credit to you,” he said. “She never showed the
slightest interest in flying until she went to school. A little adventure while you’re young, eh?”
“Just a little!” I agreed.
“And those fancy regulators from Denver, tell me the truth—are they any good?”
The spiral-cut regs that he’d bought us from Denver Custom Instruments were still on back order. DCI was making a fortune manufacturing rifles—less time to cast high-end philosophical equipment.
“Best in the world, sir!” I said. “We’ll thrash those common women from Detroit in the General’s Cup, just see if we don’t.”
“That’s the spirit! It’s good to see a man in a philosophical field. Bringing masculine discipline to the feminine art.”
“Nothing to it but hard work,” I tried.
Durstman had to consider that a moment too long, but decided it was an admirable sentiment. “Now, Nancy tells me you’re in need of a position. Of an arrangement. Well, I say if Uncle Sam is willing to send me a talented young fellow and pay his wages, I’d be a fool not to accept. What job classification will you put down for?”
“Hoverer,” I said.
“Yes, hmm. And which of our offices do you think just might have a terrible need for such a thing?”
“Washington, DC.”
“How to make it work . . . We have quite a few dignitaries who visit, foreigners. You’d strike a very imposing figure in a company uniform. Fly them to the hotel, to the office. Very memorable.”
He rubbed his chin. “Too memorable, perhaps,” he mused.
“Have to respect that some types just don’t have a modern sensibility,” I ventured. “Why, I might prefer a carriage, too.”
“Hah! I’m sure of it. As a courier, then! Documents between the offices. Sensitive stuff. How long for you to fly Washington to Boston by way of New York City?”
“Flew it just last week,” I said, which covered the half-truth. “Two hours if I stop for a cocktail.”
“If he stops for—hah! Two hours, though, splendid. You’ll be a great asset. I shouldn’t tell you this, but we do a lot of insurance contracts for arms shipments, vital work for the war. We need someone we can trust.”
Mayweather couldn’t have scripted it better. I stood and extended my hand as if Durstman had just offered me the job. “You can count on me, sir.”
• • •
“Oh, thank you,” Dar said, as she kissed her way up one of my shoulders, across my neck, and down the other. “Thank you, thank you. I know Durstman must have been an ass, but we’re going to have so much fun in Washington. You’ll love it, you just don’t know it yet.”
She ran her lips over a ticklish spot in the middle of my back and I sang out.
“No?” she asked.
“In a minute.”
I got up and folded my suit jacket, which I’d left rumpled on the floor.
“How’d your meeting go?” I asked.
Senator Cadwallader-Fulton had passed along intelligence to Dar that the Trenchers were planning a national gathering in Boston. Dar had felt that Radcliffe ought to organize against it and had gone to Addams for permission.
“Really well,” Dar said. “Addams says if she can’t stop me, she may as well help. The Trenchers are doing a parade in all their regalia a week from Saturday. We decided that’s when I should stage the counter-protest. Addams will send a few of her men to watch the crowd. If you can get Mayweather and the Cocks to turn out and maybe we get Harvard’s chapter of the Benevolent Society involved . . .”
She kissed me on the back of the knee and discovered an even more ticklish spot.
“Oh, this is going to be fun!” she said.
• • •
Over the next week, Dar went to every student group, club, and professional organization she could think of, rounding up women.
“Radcliffe’s branch of the Women’s Home Defense League keeps going on about how they’ll be ready to deploy anywhere in the country to fight the Germans within an hour,” Dar complained, “but this is four meetings now to persuade them to send a few girls a couple miles down the street.”
But the League, at length, would attend.
Wellesley College and Vassar arranged to send contingents. I signed up the Cocks and the Threes, while Jake threatened or cajoled most of the rest of the aerodrome into going. Astrid’s fiancé would bring Harvard’s chapter of the Benevolent Society. (“Husbands, brothers, sons is their motto,” Astrid chuckled. “Really, it’s Liam plus a few awkward boys who want to meet women. They’re the least philosophical men you’ve ever seen—they’re adorable.”) The Greater Boston chapter of the Benevolent Society also volunteered. (“All husbands and definitely not adorable,” Dar said. “We’ll be glad for the extra muscle.”) The Hoverers Union would send women from the docks, the Transporters Union from the arena.
All of it went through Dar.
“How did I end up in charge of this mess?” she grumbled, cycling through her various message boards. “And look at this! No, they may not bring signs that read DEATH TO TRENCHERS.”
I would have lent more of a hand, but Gertrude kept me occupied at the aerodrome: four-hour flights, flare and settles while carrying sandbags, left-handed passes.
“If you punch someone Saturday—” Gertrude said.
“With my left,” I replied.
“Can’t have you breaking your good hand.”
Brock was less pugnacious about it: “Your best behavior, Robert.”
She and I were meeting weekly to talk strategy. Brock had flown in the Cup for Detroit in ’89, winning all four events as a seventeen-year-old freshman. No one had managed it before or since.
She was plotting my top speed on a piece of graph paper.
“I would have expected at least another eleven miles per hour by now,” she said. “But all my projections are for women. It’s hard to know which curve to put you on.”
“Do men improve slower?” I asked.
Brock shrugged. “I have no idea. At any rate, we have to think about other ways you might gain an edge.”
The long course was a hundred-mile rally, loosely inspired by the flying postal carriers. Every ten miles, you landed and picked up a twenty-pound sandbag, until you were carrying nine bags at the end.
“At the first few checkpoints, everyone will secure the bags straight to her harness,” Brock explained. “There’s less drag and it permits faster landings. But, damn if an eighty-eight-pound little girl doesn’t hate the idea of trying to land, much less walk, carrying twice her body weight in cargo. So everyone resorts to a belly bag by the last few landing zones.”
Essentially, you put your cargo in a sack attached to a twenty-foot line with a pulley and dropped it to the ground before you set down. It saved your knees and back the stress of landing with the extra weight.
“But that comes with a price,” Brock said. “You can’t streamline as well, so you’re slower in the air. You can’t flare, so landings take longer. Then even more time to reel the bag in and out. But a hundred and ninety-pound flier . . .”
“You want me to carry all of them,” I said. My knees ached at the thought of hitting the ground with nine twenty-pound sandbags.
“It’s no worse than taking a heavy passenger,” Brock said. “You’ll save a couple minutes on the landings alone.”
“How many did you carry when you flew in the Cup?” I asked.
“Six,” she said. “If I’d taken nine—and I think I could have done it—I would still have the course record.”
• • •
I asked Dmitri to adjust my gym workouts.
“How do you carry the bags?” Dmitri asked.
“You have empty sacks attached to your harness,” I explained. “You pull a toggle to open the sack, drop the sandbag in, and then cinch it shut. The bags are about two foot by one foot.”
“You have to reach around to your back to secure some of them?”
“Four in front, five on the back,” I answered.
“That’s a difficult
motion. So practice it five hundred times.”
I couldn’t argue with that—it was the same as my philosophical answer for everything.
“Plus you’ll have to be able to walk carrying all that weight when you land. So, squats, running up hills, weighted vest . . .” He began devising a schedule.
“You’re coming to the march tomorrow, right?” I asked him.
“Oh, wouldn’t miss it! There’s nothing like a good protest.”
• • •
“He’s bringing a couple Russian friends with him,” I told Dar that night.
“We’ll be glad to have them,” she replied, lost among her preparations: the pot of black paint, a hundred sheets of heavy cardboard, sticks, and a stapler; refinements to the list of songs to be sung to keep our spirits up; note cards in case she was called on to say some words. “They wouldn’t— I mean no Communist slogans, right?”
“I believe his people were on the other side,” I said. “Are you sure I can’t make a few of those for you?”
“I want the lettering to be consistent. What sounds better: Our Rights and No Less or No Less Than Our Rights?”
“Umm, maybe the first one. I thought everyone was supposed to bring her own.”
“Some of them will forget.”
I watched her work, her brow furrowed, mouthing the words to her speech.
She sent me back to my apartment at one in the morning, still waiting for the paint on the last batch of signs to dry. I came back a few hours later with breakfast and found her slumped over her table reading a prayer book, her eyes half-closed.
“Robert, it’s going to be a mess,” she mumbled. “If this turns into a repeat of the last one, if people get hurt—it’s half of Radcliffe. I’m putting them in harm’s way. Me.”