“Amelia Earhart, Jackie Cochran, Bessie Coleman ...” I ticked them off on my fingers.
“I mean real people!” she interrupted.
“They are real people. I saw Amelia Earhart give a lecture at Northwestern one day. She talked, and breathed, and drank water, and everything.”
“I mean regular people. People like us. Ever since we were kids you’ve been talking about flying, and you’re not any closer to being a pilot now than you were when we were ten.”
“That’s not true,” I answered. “I’ve already finished my lessons for ground school—”
“Yes, and that took every dime you’d saved. Now you’re broke again. Georgia,” she said sweetly, as though trying to explain something to a not-too-bright kindergartener, “I used to want to be a ballerina, but since my parents could never afford dance lessons, I realized it was never going to happen, and I moved on. You’ve spent all your money trying to become a pilot, and you’ve still never been up in a plane! How crazy is that? How do you even know that is what you want?”
“I just know,” I said. We’d had this argument before, and I was trying my best to keep my tone light and dismissive, but Fran’s doubts were beginning to grate, mostly because I sometimes asked myself the same questions. And yet, and yet ... I did know. Without ever having flown, I knew.
“Don’t you ever think about getting married and having a family?”
There it was. The exasperating question Delia asked me about three times a week, and now Fran was after me, too. My question was, were there women anywhere who thought about anything else? “Oh, for heaven’s sake, Fran. Why should I?” Fran looked positively scandalized, so I reframed my question. “I mean, why now? What’s the hurry? I’m only eighteen years old.”
“Just turned nineteen,” she retorted.
“So what? Frannie, why do I have to get married right away? For that matter, why do I ever have to get married?” I asked as I took a sip of iced tea.
She looked at me blankly. “I don’t understand. Are you saying you want to become a nun?”
Involuntary laughter caused some of the tea to go up my nose. I pulled my napkin up to my face, coughing so hard my eyes started to water. “A nun?” I choked. “Me? The girl who had to stay after class to clap erasers every day for three months because she didn’t know how to say the rosary? If you hadn’t taken pity on me and helped me learn my prayers I’d probably have gotten some lung disease from inhaling so much chalk dust! Even if I wanted to, I’m pretty sure the Church wouldn’t have me. But are those the only choices? You either get married or take the veil?”
“Of course not. I’m just trying to understand you,” Fran said sincerely. “Do you have something against marriage?”
Her eyes searched me, and I felt bad about having laughed. Fran was my best friend. She was just days away from her own wedding, and here I was casting doubt on the institution of marriage. I chose my words carefully. “It’s not that. If I could ever find a man who really cared for and respected me as a person, not just as a potential wife and mother of his children, but really shared my interests and my dreams, then maybe I’d want to get married. Maybe.”
“Richard respects me,” Fran said a little defensively. “And we both have the same dream. We want a home and a family.”
“And that’s great! Richard is a wonderful guy, and I know that you two will be happy together. It’s just that my dreams are a little different than yours. It might take a long time for me to find someone to share them—if I ever do.” Fran furrowed her brow as I went on.
“Look. Delia has spent her whole life wanting one thing—to find a man, any man, and get him to marry her. She’s turned herself inside out trying to be what they want her to be, and the more she does that, the quicker they turn and run. That won’t do for me, Fran. I’ve got to be myself first and last. If someone can love me for that—great. If not, I can live with that. What I can’t live with is the lie of trying to be something I’m not. Does that make sense to you?”
“No,” Fran said and smiled as she picked up her fork and speared a slice of tomato, “but there’s nothing new in that. You’ve always been crazy, Georgia, but I guess that’s what I like about you.”
“Ditto,” I said with a grin and took a bite of my sandwich.
“So this whole convoluted conversation was just to explain why you dress like the ragpicker’s child and won’t use your store discount?”
“I never said I wouldn’t use the discount. I said I don’t use it—not for me, anyway. But there’s no reason I can’t use it for you. Let me know how many of those towels you want. I’ll order them for you today.”
“Really?” Fran’s eyes grew wide with delight. “Are you sure? I’ll pay for them and everything. Just let me know how much.”
“I’ll total it up as soon as I get back on the floor.” Minus the monogramming fee that I’d decided to pay for myself—that would be my surprise gift. “Speaking of which,” I said, glancing at my watch, “I’ve got to get back to work.” I wolfed down a last bite of sandwich and pulled some money out of my purse so Fran could pay the bill.
“Say, Georgia.” Fran cleared her throat as I pushed back my chair. “Want to go to the movies with Richard and me on Saturday—and his brother, Martin? He just got a promotion at the factory. Shift supervisor. He’s such a nice guy, and he thinks you’re cute. C’mon,” she pleaded. “It’ll be fun.”
“I’m sure it would, but I said I’d pull an extra shift this weekend. Thanks anyway. Besides, Martin’s just not my type.”
Fran sighed. “That’s what Richard said you’d say.”
“Well, Richard is a smart guy,” I said. “That’s why he’s marrying you. Now, I’ve got to run. I’m late. I’ll call you this weekend.” I picked up my pocketbook and started to leave, but Fran tugged at my sleeve.
“Wait! Richard also said to give you this. I didn’t want to, but he made me promise.” She stuffed a newspaper clipping into my hand. I wondered what in the world it could be, but another glance at my watch showed I was now five minutes late. I shoved it into my purse, waved good-bye, ran for the elevator, and didn’t think about the clipping again until I came home from work that night.
Fumbling around in my pocketbook, looking for my keys so I could open the door to my apartment, I pulled out the newspaper clipping. It was a classified ad from the Waukegan News Record.
HELP WANTED: Experienced waitress for restaurant located next to busy municipal airport. Good pay. Good tips. Uniform provided. Start immediately. Contact Thurman at the Soaring Wings Café, Waukegan, Illinois
Good pay. Good tips. None of that registered in my mind. The words that kept repeating themselves in my mind were “next to busy municipal airport” and “start immediately.” I found my keys, opened the door, pulled the string to illuminate the one bare bulb that lit the room, and started frantically searching under the bed for my suitcase.
Start immediately. How long, I wondered, was the bus ride to Waukegan?
As it turned out, Waukegan was just about forty miles north of Chicago. It was bigger than I’d thought it would be, and pretty. Sitting on the shores of Lake Michigan about ten miles from the Wisconsin border, the town boasted houses in good repair with green lawns and green trees. A nice town, but even if it had been the armpit of the earth, nothing would have stopped me from packing my things, leaving a note for my landlady with what was owed on my rent, and taking a milk-run bus ride to Waukegan in the middle of the night, all in hopes of getting a job I didn’t know anything about.
When I reached my destination, a few streaks of daylight were climbing up from the horizon. It was too early to think of finding a hotel room. I went into the bus depot bathroom to brush my teeth and hair and splash a little water on my face, then dropped a nickel into the slot of an empty metal locker so I’d have a safe place to keep my things until I got the job. You mean if you get the job, a voice of doubt spoke in my mind. I did my best to ignore it but wasn’t entirely suc
cessful. Maybe Fran was right, I thought. Maybe I was crazy. Who picks up in the middle of the night and moves to take a job they aren’t even sure they’ll get, that probably pays less than what they were making before, in a town they never heard of just because the job is next to an airfield? I must be crazy.
Who knew how old that newspaper ad was? What if the job was already filled? It had asked for an experienced waitress, and I’d never waited a table in my life. And I had a more immediate problem. It was five o’clock in the morning and I didn’t even have an address for the café, let alone a means of getting there. There were a million reasons for me to believe this half-cocked plan of mine would fail and only one reason to think it wouldn’t—it was the only plan I had.
I knew I had to fly. I’d run out of ways to make that happen, and this was the only open door I could see. How a waitress job at an airport diner was going to put me on the road to becoming a pilot was beyond me, but something told me that it would. I stuffed my doubts into the locker along with all my other baggage, shut the door tight, and locked the whole mess inside.
5
Georgia
Waukegan, Illinois—June 1940
“Georgia!” Thurman hollered as he slapped two steaming plates onto the counter and then hit the order-up bell with a force that made the clapper ring flat. “Scrambled on two! Let’s try to get ’em out there while they’re hot.”
“All right already!” I said as I handed him another order. “Sheesh! Why are you so grouchy today? What’s the matter? Have a fight with your wife or something?”
“Very funny,” he growled. Thurman was single. After his girlfriend, Margot Pfeffenhauser, threw him over in the eighth grade he’d decided that all women were more trouble than they were worth and sworn never to marry. He was pushing sixty, and it was beginning to look like he was going to keep his vow. “I don’t want customers complaining their eggs is cold and me having to make the order again just because you ain’t gettin’ the lead out.”
In the five months I’d worked at the Soaring Wings I’d never had a customer send back food because it was cold. Undercooked, overcooked, or badly cooked, yes, but never because I hadn’t served it quick enough. I was about to remind Thurman of this when he interrupted me.
“He’s here again. Table six.” Thurman scowled and jerked his head toward a corner table where Roger Welles was sitting, pretending to examine a menu he’d probably memorized weeks before. I didn’t blame him. Thurman was glaring daggers at him, and flimsy as it was, that menu was the only shield he had handy.
“I finally get a new waitress trained, and every stray dog in town starts hanging around the place,” Thurman grumbled. “Knew it was a mistake to hire you. I shoulda hired Lucille Grant instead. She’s got bunions and a bad back, but she’s ugly,” he said longingly. “Nobody’d be loitering in my restaurant, nursing cups of coffee, taking up space from good paying customers trying to start a conversation with Lucille, that’s for sure. This is the last time I hire a pretty waitress, I swear.”
“Aw, gee, Thurman. That’s the nicest thing you ever said to me.”
He muttered something undecipherable and sucked his teeth. “Get his order and then get back to work. We got other customers. Real customers.”
I delivered the scrambled eggs to the Fosters, an elderly couple that came to the Soaring Wings every Tuesday morning to have their breakfast while they watched the planes take off and land. We had a lot of regulars like that. The planes were as much an attraction as the food. Actually, they were more of an attraction than the food. Truth was, Thurman wasn’t much of a cook, but the prices were cheap, the portions were large, and there was plenty of entertainment to be had just by looking out the window. Waukegan wasn’t exactly a bustling airfield, but any diner who came into the Soaring Wings was likely to see a couple of takeoffs and landings before the dishes were cleared. A lot of that air traffic came from the flight school.
Roger Welles was the school’s owner and principal flight instructor. In fact, he owned the whole airfield. Ever since I’d waited on him, about two weeks after I’d started working at the café, Roger quit bringing his brown bag to work and ate lunch at the Soaring Wings. Some days, like today, he had his breakfast there, too. And he always sat in my section.
He was quite a bit older than me, about thirty, and good-looking in a rugged, outdoorsy kind of way. His face was tanned and lined, but he had a boyish twinkle in his eye, and, like a boy, he blushed when he got flustered. I knew he liked me—that was pretty obvious after he started showing up for lunch every day—but I figured he was just a guy on the make, so I didn’t encourage him. But as he sat there day after day without pushing himself on me, I started to think he was all right. One day I returned his smile, and we chatted for a couple of minutes while I took and served his order. The next day we talked again, and pretty soon it got to be a regular thing.
I’d known he was a pilot right off because he always came in wearing his flight jacket, but it was a few days before I learned he was also an instructor. Little by little, I told him my story, how I’d come to live in Waukegan and why. Since then, he’d been after me, pushing me to go flying with him and saying he’d be glad to give me free lessons.
Flight lessons! For free! I was so tempted to say yes, but I couldn’t do it. It was too big a gift and too big a debt. I liked Roger, but it was clear that his feelings for me were more than just friendly. Accepting such a generous gift was bound to give him the idea that he could expect something back from me. I’d spent enough time watching Delia to know that any man who shows up at the door with flowers, or candy, or an invitation to dinner is expecting to get more than a smile and a thank-you in return—even when that man was as nice as Roger Welles. And as much as I wanted to learn to fly, there were some prices that were too high to pay, even to catch hold of my dream.
“Coffee, Roger?” I already knew the answer but asked anyway as I filled his cup to three-quarters and checked to make sure there was enough cream in the pitcher. Roger liked plenty of cream in his coffee, no sugar.
“Thanks.” He took a sip. “That’s good. Can you bring me a number three, Georgia?”
I nodded and wrote on my order pad. “Bacon crisp. Eggs over medium. Wheat toast with extra butter. Is that all?”
“Just one more thing,” he said. “Come flying with me. Oh, come on, Georgia. You know you want to! Nobody puts themselves through ground school just to expand their mind. It took you two years to save up enough money just for that.
“I’m a pilot. I know what it’s like. You want to get off the ground so bad you can taste it, so bad that you’re willing to sling ten thousand plates of hash trying to save up enough money to get your wings. And here I am, offering you the chance because I know what it’s like to need to fly, but you keep giving me the brush-off!”
“I can’t, Roger.”
“Why not?”
“I told you. I just can’t,” I said firmly, but then, seeing the disappointed look on his face, I softened my tone. “You’re sweet to offer, Roger. Really. But I can’t let you do it. It’s too much.”
He was quiet. He knew there was no point in arguing with me.
“Now, is there anything else I can get for you?”
“No. Just keep the coffee coming, please. I need it this morning.”
I gave his cup a warm-up. “You look tired. Late night?”
“Yeah. I was up half the night trying to untangle my books.” He sighed and rubbed his hand over his face. “I tell you, Georgia. I’m a good pilot and a good teacher, but I’m no businessman. The girl who used to keep my books got married and moved to Carbondale, and I haven’t been able to find anybody to replace her. I’ve been trying to do them myself, but I can’t make heads or tails of it. I don’t know who I owe or who owes me. And don’t even talk about the tax man.” He groaned. “If I can’t get my books straightened out they’ll audit me for sure.” Roger took a deep draught from his coffee cup and looked up at me.
“What? What are you grinning about?”
“Roger, I’ve got a business proposition for you.”
For every two hours I spent working on his books, Roger would give me one hour of flying lessons. It was a perfect arrangement for both of us. Roger wanted to make it a one-to-one trade, arguing that my time was just as valuable as his, which was sweet, but I wouldn’t go for it. Bookkeepers come a lot cheaper than flight instructors, and I wanted to be very certain that Roger looked at this as a business deal, not a favor. I didn’t want to be beholden to anyone.
After getting off work that night I headed over to Roger’s office and started trying to untangle his books. And, believe me, they were a tangle.
“How long is it since your old bookkeeper left?” I asked as I opened yet another shoe box full of loose receipts and began separating them into piles for personal, business, and unknown.
“About six months,” Roger answered, a little chagrined. “Pretty bad, is it?”
“You’ve got yourself a mess here, for sure.” I sighed. “But it could be worse. Your old girl had a pretty good filing system worked out before she left. If we can just get all these loose papers organized, I’ll be able to get you straightened out before your taxes are due. Now, you said you’ve got an employee?”
“Yeah, Stubbs Peterson. He’s my mechanic. Been with me since I opened. He’s not much on looks and is cranky as all get-out, but he knows more about plane engines than anybody alive. He was a real find. He worked in California until a couple of years ago. Could be working anyplace in the country and for more money, but he’s from here originally. When his father died and his mother got sick he came home to take care of her. There aren’t a whole lot of jobs in aviation around here, so when he came by looking for work I snapped him up. I couldn’t run the place without him. Do you know, he actually met the Wright brothers?”
On Wings Of The Morning Page 5