by Tom Miller
I couldn’t think of what to say.
Neither could she. But Missy Pitcairn seemed to be enjoying the scene.
“Lt. Col. Yvette Rodgers, of the United States Sigilry Corps,” Pitcairn said, “may I present Robert Weekes, of Radcliffe College.”
Lt. Col. Rodgers licked her lips. “I wouldn’t have believed it unless I saw it,” she said. “Rachael warned me. A man, self-taught, all natural ability and raw power.”
“Ma’am,” I said, not quite understanding. “My whole life I’ve wanted to fly R&E. I had all of your—”
“A rescue flier? Don’t be ridiculous. A man’s place is on the ground. In the army. A man in R&E would be an abomination. Not in my Corps.”
I couldn’t tell where my bruised ribs left off and my broken heart began. Addams had warned me from the very first. And Gertrude. And Dar. And yet, still.
“Ma’am,” I said. I gave her a nod, intending to go home and find a private corner in which to curl up and die.
“Well, I’d take him for my Corps,” Pitcairn said from behind me. “And since I’m flying in this war and you’ve sat out the last three, I think I get a say. Give me a card.”
“Sigilwoman, you’re being impertinent,” Lt. Col. Rodgers replied.
“Impertinent nothing,” Pitcairn said. “Somebody give me a pen! What are you carrying for paper there, Mr. Weekes?”
I tore the paperback cover off Life and Death on San Juan Hill and gave it to her.
“I, Sigilwoman First Class Melissa Pitcairn,” she pronounced as she scrawled the words on the cover’s blank side, “hereby recommend Robert Weekes as an outstanding flier and invite him to present himself for testing in the USSC at his first convenience. Is that close enough?”
• • •
Mayweather and the Cocks had reserved us a table at Tippler’s to be charged to their accounts. The sportsbooks were paying out on the time-honored principle of “as they landed,” which had earned the small group of people stupid enough to bet on Weekes to finish third an enormous sum of money.
Even before we could sit, the waiters brought out snails in butter, frog legs, and three vintages of champagne. Mother and Gertrude, who’d both served in France and had fond memories of the cuisine, tried to top each other with their recollections of the little bistros in which they’d first tasted coq au vin and cassoulet and calf’s liver with onions; they were delighted at Mayweather’s suggestion that they order for the table. Essie devoured a leg of lamb. Dar tucked into duck à l’orange. Angela took the lead on the desserts—clafoutis and croquembouche and sweet wines.
I was ravenous but could eat nothing. I wanted to sit alone with my arms over my head and weep. An invitation. It had happened. Not how I would have wished, but it was real. Gertrude had assured me it carried the weight of law.
“Boo-bow?” Dar was asking Vivian.
“No, Boo-ber! Everybody in Billings still calls him that. They won’t even recognize ‘Robert’ in the paper.”
Brock and Essie were shaking with laughter, too, but for an entirely different reason.
“So, Sacramento hired her on the spot!” Brock roared. “Said she must be just like her auntie if she taught the two of you as well as that!”
“What will they do when they find out Rachael can barely fly?” Essie asked.
“God knows, but I’m not taking her back!”
I pulled myself to my feet, wincing. “I want to go.”
“Oh, sit down and enjoy yourself!” Angela said. “That’s how a celebration works.”
“Don’t give that appalling old woman another thought,” Gertrude said. “She was a terrible commander in Cuba and everyone knew it.”
“She inflated her totals,” Mother said. “If Rodgers evacuated a dozen wounded in her entire career, I’ll eat my hat.”
“Claimed a thousand,” Gertrude clucked.
“One thousand seventy-eight,” I corrected, having read that part innumerable times.
“Were you there in ’98?” Gertrude asked Mother.
“In ’97,” said Mother.
Gertrude clapped her hands. “Oh, I do remember you. You were the one who killed all those Spaniards outside Havana. Wasn’t that you—‘It’s not a turkey shoot if the turkeys shoot back!’ ”
“Certainly one of my more memorable days in uniform,” Mother demurred.
“I used you for twenty years as an example of the wrong thing to do. Someone takes a shot while you’re landing, go to full power and wave off. Or land hard. But never—”
“Return fire?” Ma finished.
“Well, you can hardly blame me, teaching a lot of green recruits. I only hope I would have had the guts to do what you did. I think your son takes after you.”
“I’m sure of it,” Ma said.
• • •
Mother and I spent a few minutes alone before she rode the transporter chain home Sunday morning. I admitted to her for the first time how many months I’d spent working toward R&E. I didn’t know what to expect—ridicule, anger, pride.
Instead, Mother struggled to find her voice. “That Detroit girl thought she was doing you a kindness,” she told me. “And I can see how much you want it. But it won’t happen. They’ll humiliate you, fail you, and send you home.”
“Radcliffe has a connection, a brigadier general—”
“No, Robert. If she tries to take you, it’ll be her last day as a corpswoman. A one-star general doesn’t have the pull to do it. They’ll cashier you both.”
“But they’re short fliers! I can do the work. I would be good at it. Tell me I would be good at it!”
Mother wiped her eyes. “You flew better yesterday than I ever have. But if you’d offered me a man of your caliber on my most shorthanded day in Manila, I would have said no. It would destroy morale. It would be impossible.”
I sat there like a boxer who’d been knocked out and was too stupid to fall.
“If you love Danielle, take the job in Washington,” Mother said. “Protect her and comfort her. When you’re surrounded by that much danger and wickedness, sometimes the love of a good man is all that keeps you sane. Your father did as much for me. Danielle is a woman of quality—you can tell it from the first minute. She’ll need you. And we’re going to need her.”
• • •
Sunday night, Dar held an ice pack against my bruised ribs while I lay facedown on her bed.
“I don’t know how else to say it,” she told me. “It’s going to sound so selfish. But don’t go, Rob.”
“It’s just to test,” I mumbled into her pillow. It had her familiar smell of jasmine and lavender. “The worst they can say is no.”
“No. The worst they can say is yes. Yesterday, I watched you come within a half second of dying for a bronze medal. You think you’ll risk less when it’s a wounded soldier?”
Dar pulled the ice pack off.
“It’s R&E,” I said. “It’s about saving lives. Doing good.”
“The Corps isn’t what you want it to be,” she said. “Not anymore. It’s about the generals getting their names in the paper so they can move up the ranks. They take obscene risks with the girls for their own glory.”
She dried my skin and rubbed liniment into the bruise. I gritted my teeth and hissed.
“Half the hoverers in France get smashed to pieces every year. Half of them, Robert. You want me to wait for you? Your best gal? Watching the message board every night, crying into my tea? Flip a coin—heads he comes home whole, tails in pieces. You would do that to me?”
She was yelling.
“It’s not that simple,” I said.
“It’s exactly that simple! You came for my blessing. I’m saying no.”
She sat me up and helped me into my shirt—it hurt too much to reach behind my back.
“Promise me, Robert.”
37
K. F. Unger: It’s never mattered that I can’t do it. What the heart loves, the will chooses and the mind justifies.
D.
Priscilla Conway, “Ten Male Philosophers Explain How They Settled on Sigilry,” Detroit Defender Sunday Magazine, October 31, 1935
I DIDN’T LEAVE MY room all day Monday.
I sat with Pitcairn’s introduction and my bruised chest and hopelessness. Unger brought me a sandwich for lunch. Another for dinner.
I poured the sand out of my message board. I didn’t want to hear congratulations from one more person. I didn’t want advice from one more well-meaning idiot. I’d dreamed of doing this my whole life! It wasn’t fair of Dar to make me say I wouldn’t.
Essie came by in the evening with a bag and harness—a McCoule rig with torso extender, a merely adequate substitute for the custom suit, which I’d returned to Steven Brock. She’d padded the rib straps with cotton gauze.
“Everyone says you might not go tomorrow,” Essie said.
“I told Danielle I wouldn’t,” I said.
Even Essie, naïve as she was, understood what that meant.
“I’m leaving at six,” she said. “You can meet me at the aerodrome.”
Flip a coin. Heads you come back whole.
I took a quarter and flicked it to set it spinning on the common room table. I caught it between my fingers before it came to a stop. I spun it again and caught it. I spun it and caught it and couldn’t sleep. I had to tell her.
I primed my message board to write Dar and then had an attack of cowardice.
I spun the quarter and caught it. Spun and caught.
Unger came out at five in the morning. He sat beside me and said nothing. Watched me spin my quarter.
“I can’t do it,” I said hollowly. I didn’t look up from my hands. “She’ll never forgive me.”
“As hard as you’ve worked, I’ll never forgive you if you don’t.”
I met his eyes.
“I love her, Fred. And it would be perfect—a little apartment in Washington and protest and pass laws. We would do good in the world. We’d be happy.”
“Yet you want to travel three thousand miles to fight in someone else’s war and probably get killed.”
I raised my hands in supplication. “What’s wrong with me?”
Freddy gave me a sad smile. “The same thing that’s wrong with me. I should have been an engineer or a mathematician or a chemist. Me, with one sigil in my entire life. But I’m in thrall to it and so are you. You’re called. If you don’t answer, you’ll lose the better part of yourself.”
I spun the quarter.
Unger slapped his hand down and took the coin away.
“Do you need help dressing?” he asked.
Unger helped me shave, did up the buttons on my skysuit, buckled the straps on my harness. I could manage the pain, as long as I didn’t thrust my chest out or reach backward.
He clipped my bag into place. “You have to tell her. You should do it right now.”
“Not by message,” I said.
“Then I’ll go talk to her.”
“It should be me,” I said. “In person. As soon as I get back.”
Unger walked me down to the street. “Do me proud. And try less hard, my friend.”
• • •
I met Essie at the aerodrome. No one saw us off. We flew west to the arsenal at Fort Putnam, where the Corps held its tests.
A couple dozen sigilrists presented themselves alongside us, most of them quite young. The Corps allowed women to join at sixteen (or seventeen for overseas service). Looking at the borrowed tack and ill-fitting skysuits, I imagined most of them were desperate for a job or to flee a bad situation. No different from my mother in ’71, but not the experts one hoped to see applying to the US Sigilry Corps’ most elite unit. They’d all watched the Cup or heard about it. They looked at Essie with awe—she’d beat the two fastest fliers in the world—and at me with disbelief.
The flight officers took a couple hours to put us through the same maneuvers that would have earned a Two at the aerodrome. A few of the young women were borderline competent, but the rest were raggedy neighborhood fliers. The officers dismissed two-thirds of the company. Those of us remaining proceeded through the world’s easiest slalom—no one allowed to fly faster than fifty miles an hour—map-reading exercises, knot tying, and an angle and tuck landing carrying a hundred-pound dummy.
The flight portion of the test ended with a one-mile speed trial. The Corps had no minimum cutoff, we were told, but we should fly as fast as we were able. Essie, though not rigged for racing, made 380 miles per hour on her pass to applause and murmurs from the handful of remaining girls.
“Weekes!” the flight officer called.
I launched, came around to pick up speed, and dropped into the course.
I was tired. My ribs were throbbing. I had the sun in my eyes. I didn’t have my racing suit. It hardly mattered.
Hand down.
I made 348. No one clapped.
The corpswomen timing me were arguing with one another. I approached for a landing but they waved me off.
“Problem with the watch,” one of them called.
I went around a second time and hit the course hard. Not quite as good as the first, but strong. Again the timekeeper waved me around.
But even my third pass didn’t satisfy them.
“Left-handed, please!”
I offered up a prayer of thanks to the Great Mother Flier in the Sky—Gertrude had predicted it exactly.
I extended my right hand in a fist so that there could be no doubt and reached across my body with my left to hold the regulator. My ribs screamed.
Even after five months, I didn’t have fine sigil control as a lefty. My sigil came slower, less neatly. At one point, my lines slipped and I had to redraw to avoid losing altitude. Not terrific, but still faster than everyone but Essie with her good hand. I was breathing heavily by the time I set down.
“What did they do to you?” Essie whispered as we regrouped.
“Problem with the watch,” I gasped.
“No there wasn’t.”
I shrugged. Of course there wasn’t. But what was I supposed to do?
Essie helped me out of my harness and we waited for the interviews that would conclude our day. Each woman was led into an outbuilding where she answered questions from a couple of corpswomen. Most of them lasted a quarter hour. Essie’s lasted two minutes and I could see her trying not to grin as she exited.
That left just me. The flight officers huddled and then disappeared into the building. I stood in the late-morning sun for another half hour. Finally they reemerged.
“We are not to proceed without Gen. Blandings to grade the interview,” one said, more to the others than to me.
“I thought she was in France!” said another.
“She was supposed to be at the Boston arena on the eight o’clock service. I sent a detachment. They can’t find her.”
They turned to me. “You can either wait or go home.”
I waited another hour on my feet. Half-asleep and sweat-soaked. Dar would have figured out what I’d done. I should have sent Unger.
My eyes blinked open at a sudden motion from the east. A hoverer streaking in, making three hundred with an overseas duffel on her back, a flare and settle so crisp it made my best effort look like a wrinkled mess. She shouldered her bag and double-timed it to the outbuilding. The flight officers ran out to meet her.
“Ma’am!” one of them cried. “I had four women at the—”
“Well, they failed to find me, dear,” Gen. Blandings said. She wore a workaday combat skysuit that looked as if she’d lived in it for the past week. She was short, plump, and frowny, like someone’s less favorite grandmother.
“Our transporter in Greenland balked her glyph,” Blandings said, explaining her tardiness. “It took them hours to clean up.”
She looked at me and stopped short. “Oh, Mother Mary, that’s him? Absolutely not. Waste of a trip.”
The officers glanced at one another, before the most junior one asked, “So, shall we forgo the interview and
you’ll sign—”
“Oh, as a formality, then, if you prepared questions.”
They led me to the outbuilding, where there was a small table and chairs. The general took out her knitting.
“Well, commence!” Blandings ordered.
Her compatriots began innocently enough by asking about the origins of my interest in the Corps. I spoke about my mother, my work at the aerodrome, my hopes of doing good in France.
“Are you a homosexual?” they asked next.
That threw me. Possibly they asked it of everyone, Sapphism allegedly being more common in the Corps than among philosophers at large. Or, they might have held to the old belief that swishy men could move more quanta (which had never been borne out scientifically, according to Unger).
“No,” I said.
“Then how do you expect to control yourself in close quarters with thousands of women for months at a time?”
If it had been Mayweather being grilled instead of me, it might have been an appropriate question.
“With all due respect,” I answered, “I’ve lived in close quarters with a thousand women for the last year without incident.”
The questions continued in like fashion: What would I do if I had a field commander who wouldn’t allow me to bunk with the rest of the unit? What would I say to a squadmate reluctant to fly with me because of perceived or actual deficiencies in my abilities? How would I rank myself against female fliers in general? Against the fliers that morning? If I were a wounded soldier being evacuated, would I choose a male or female corpswoman?
The general didn’t ask anything. She nodded off several times. Even when she was awake she didn’t seem to care what I answered. Her attention was on her knitting. And, I realized, on my hands.
Finally, she waved for a stop. “More than sufficient, thank you. For form’s sake, I ought to ask one, too. Can you show me his—”
She popped on a pair of pince-nez glasses and peered at a form with my statistics from that morning’s tests.