The Secrets of Flight

by Maggie Leffler

  Cradling my doll Molly and peering out the window, I waited in our room until, eventually, Sarah ran across the backyard in the fog. I saw her scrambling up the planks Papa had nailed to the twisty trunk of the apple tree. Then she climbed higher and her long legs disappeared inside the branches. I put Molly on the night table next to Sarah’s copy of The Secret Garden and tiptoed downstairs. Unlike the workaday week, when Papa was out peddling crops from our half-acre garden, he was reading in the front room and smoking his pipe. I loved the smell of his pipe and just knowing he was home, relaxing—unlike Mama, who hit him with a dish towel and yelled, “Up! Up!” if she found him in his chair too long.

  In the kitchen, Mama was braiding the challah on the counter. I could smell the meaty cholent in the oven. When her head whipped around, I was already crouched under the table. “Sarah?” Mama called. “It’s time to help! Miri, come and set the table!” she added, yelling over her shoulder. Then she walked out of the kitchen with an exasperated sigh.

  As soon as she was gone, I ran out the door and into the backyard. By then it was so foggy that I could barely see the apple tree on the edge of the yard. I thought of the evening when the mist rolled in so low and white that Papa called me into the backyard at dusk. “See, Miriush, now you can say you’ve stood in a cloud,” he’d said. It felt the same that night, too, the hazy moisture on my face, as I felt my way up the planks and crawled into the tree.

  “Mama’s looking for us,” I said, making my way higher until we were both completely shrouded by branches.

  “Sh,” Sarah whispered. “Let’s see what happens.”

  All at once I realized this was as far as we were going; this was the adventure.

  In the distance, the roar of a faraway plane grew closer, but I couldn’t see it, despite the slowly lifting mist. Minutes passed that seemed like hours, and shadows began to lurk in the grass and the trees turned purplish. Through the window, I could see tiny flames flickering: Mama had lighted the candles. Still, no one came outside to get us.

  I glanced back, away from the house, and saw a man falling from the sky. I blinked. Not fifty feet from my back porch, he landed without so much as a thud, like in a dream. Sarah inhaled, as she grabbed my hand and sat up straighter. Together we watched his parachute spread out on the field, watched him stumble, roll and lie still, and then, after a moment, he untangled himself from the mounds of white material, got up, and started walking. I squinted at the ghost in the fog wearing a flight suit and prayed that he wasn’t squashing Papa’s blueberries. “Come on,” Sarah said, climbing down. The ghost kept walking right into our backyard and seemed headed straight for our back door, until we both jumped down out of the tree, startling him. It wasn’t until the man gasped that I knew for sure he was real.

  Somewhere in the dark, there was a high-pitched careening sound followed by a sudden, shuddering explosion. The pilot looked back, over his shoulder, and then at the lights of my house. “Are your parents home?” he asked Sarah, and she nodded, as I took him by the hand.

  “There you girls are! Who is this?” Mama shrieked when we got inside, and we all got to hear the story of how the pilot, having lost his way in the fog with an empty tank, jumped from the plane. The fact that his blond hair and face were covered in blackish grit was nothing short of glamorous to me. He smelled like motor oil and cut grass.

  Mama gave him towels, and the pilot, whose name turned out to be Charlie, washed up and joined us for the Shabbos meal. When Mama closed her eyes and sang the blessing, I snuck a look at the pilot, bowing his head, and then at Sarah, who was staring at him, unabashedly. She caught me looking, and we both smiled.

  That night, Charlie slept on the sofa in the living room and the next morning Papa took me along to the crash site in the field a couple of miles away, so that the pilot could extract the mail from his plane and send it on by train to New York. On the car ride, Charlie told us that he first wanted to fly when he was my age. He saw an air show and was hooked.

  “Were you scared last night—before you jumped?” I asked him, and he shook his head.

  “Maybe for a minute. I just didn’t want the plane to land on anyone.”

  “Looks like you did all right,” my father said, pointing to the twisted pile of metal still smoking in the field miles from our house.

  Driving back, I was still thinking about the pilot emerging from the fog with the calmness of an angel, when I said to my father, “Papa, when I grow up, I want to fly, too.”

  “You will then,” he said, and I looked at him and smiled. “Matuka sheli,” he added, brushing my cheek with the back of his hand.

  When we got home, Mama met us in the driveway, holding a letter from Papa’s stepbrother, Uncle Hyman. He needed us to move to Pittsburgh now; there was no putting it off or he would fill the positions at his shop with someone else.

  “Jobs for both of us and a real community,” she said, and Papa sighed. I told Mama that Papa said I could fly, and she gave Papa a sharp look.

  “When she grows up,” Papa said. “If she wants.”

  “I want,” I said, jumping up and down and clapping. “I want, I want, I want!”

  “Oh, Rina,” Papa said to my mother, when she threw up her hands. “Let her dream. Who’s it gonna hurt?”

  BUT NOT EVEN TWO YEARS LATER, IN THE WINTER OF 1930, PAPA was dead, along with my visions of flight. We’d moved to Pittsburgh by then, to the land of steel and honey, according to Mama, where we wouldn’t need a Hebrew teacher to drive over once a week from Hazelton, because there was a Jewish school right in our new neighborhood. I remember walking back from the playground that day, how the house on Beacon Street was bustling with people, including the rabbi and all the men from the synagogue except for Papa, who I later found out was in the long box in the living room surrounded by all the little chairs. “There was an accident,” Mama said and nothing more. It was eleven-year-old Sarah who explained in our beds that night that he’d slid off the third-story roof while chipping away at an ice dam after breakfast. I hugged my doll and whimpered with fear, until Sarah whispered in the dark that we must be strong like the Spartans of Greece, who never cried. At eight, I didn’t know much about ancient Greece or what these Spartans had against crying, but from then on, I learned how to squeeze my face closed and let myself soundlessly shudder, imagining my tears deep inside, dripping off my organs.

  All at once, Papa disappeared from our daily conversations, as if he never existed at all. At first I thought it was because Mama felt guilty for having ordered him to fix the leaky ceiling in the first place. Later, when I was ten and she married Papa’s stepbrother Hyman, I wondered if she was always in love with him, a man whose neck hung over the collar of his shirt and whose face turned red at the slightest provocation. Later still, at thirteen, I noticed the way Mama and her lady friends gathered around the kitchen table to drink tea sweetened with jam and talk and talk, artfully avoiding topics of tragedy in front of the person to whom the catastrophe had struck. When I asked Mama about these conversational omissions, she told me that no one wanted to be reminded; no one wanted to risk crying and never being able to stop. I understood then that pain should only be briefly experienced in private, never to be mentioned again.

  I cataloged all the things Papa missed—like the first blizzard of the winter, or the first Yom Kippur without him, or my first piano recital, or, when I was sixteen years old, the first country to be invaded by Nazi Germany—Czechoslovakia, followed by Poland and then Denmark, before Norway, Belgium, and Holland, and eventually France. He also missed his first daughter’s marriage, but then again, it seems we all did.

  THE MORNING AFTER SARAH’S ELOPEMENT, AS MY MOTHER CONtinues her restless pacing, I’m lost in a daydream of myself piloting an open cockpit plane—wearing a leather bomber jacket and a white scarf, tied jauntily around my neck—when Mama says, “You’ll take a secretarial course and learn bookkeeping.”

  I look up, feeling disappointment crashing all over my face.
“But . . . what about flying?”

  “Flying?” Mama repeats, as if I mean trapeze artist. “Miriam, please. Be practical. I’m offering you an opportunity. The least you could do is show some gratitude.”

  Then she stalks out, leaving me alone with my guilt and some unnamable disquiet: Sarah. If she really is married now, I’m the only one left. What difference will a degree make if my world matches my mother’s? At the sound of a tree branch scratching against the kitchen window, I glance over and sigh. Maybe she’s right. Maybe my dream should’ve died when Papa did.

  THAT NIGHT, I’M IN THE PARLOR LISTENING TO THE RADIO BY myself when FDR’s voice comes over the airwaves. Uncle Hyman is still at the shop, and Sarah has already left with her things for the North Side, but I imagine Papa by my side, his blue eyes growing wide with wonder, as the president proclaims there will be a brand-new, federally funded Civilian Pilot Training program designed to build up the pool of available pilots. When FDR explains the four-month course will be offered through participating colleges, giving twenty thousand college students an opportunity to fly, I see Papa slapping my knee and exclaiming with glee, “Here’s your chance, Miriush!”

  Upstairs, Mama is on her knees, scrubbing the bathroom floor. When she doesn’t stop to even wring out her sponge for a full five minutes, I say to her back, “I’m sorry for being ungrateful. I really do want to go to college.”

  She hesitates for just a moment before resuming her toil. “I already talked to Hyman about it. He says there’s no point when you can learn bookkeeping on the job,” she replies, her face turned toward the base of the toilet.

  “But I want an education,” I say again, and Mama finally twists around and looks up at me, her hazel eyes strangely vulnerable. “I’ll get my secretarial degree,” I tell her. “I promise. Please, Mama. Give me a chance.”

  AND SO, THREE YEARS LATER IN 1941, IN THE SPRING OF MY freshman year at the University of Pittsburgh, my double life begins as a secret student of the sky.

  CHAPTER 4

  Three Women and a Plane

  The Sunday after my birthday everything changed all over again, when I returned to my apartment building after a walk and Gene Rosskemp cornered me in the lobby. “Mary! You gotta taste this!” he said, rather than hello, and then turned on his heel and disappeared down the hallway, past the wall of elevators. I sighed and clutched my purse to my bosom before following him down the corridor, past the nurse’s office, and into the communal kitchen, a place I rarely ventured since not only was my own small apartment fully equipped, but the management had recently decided that the mentally ill and the aging were equally appealing tenants. To date, I’d been growled at by grown woman in pigtails and had possibly witnessed a drug deal just outside of the building. I was afraid to so much as heat up a bowl of soup in the microwave without being stabbed to death. Gene, obviously, held no such fear.

  As my eyes adjusted to the flickering fluorescent light of the grimy kitchen, Gene said, “Get a load of this, Mary—homemade cookies, right from the microwave!” He handed me a spoonful of melted goo, which I studied with a raised eyebrow. “For heaven’s sake. What’s in this?” I asked.

  “Dark chocolate. Good for your heart.”

  Sampling the sweet bite, I glanced over at the table for a possible seat, which was when I noticed the USA Today lying there, specifically the Arts and Entertainment section, which featured a black-and-white picture of three young women and an airplane—its image like a lost memory. I coughed and sputtered on the melted dough.

  “That bad?” Gene asked, rescuing the spoon before I could drop it.

  “No, it’s . . . quite good. Actually.” I wiped my lip, still staring at the Fairchild PT-19, a plane I knew well, back when we were getting our wings. The three women were squinting into the sun: one smirking redhead, one shy brunette, and a short girl with curly hair, all smiling at something beyond the camera, quite possibly their future. They believed it was theirs to design. I picked up the paper, adjusted my glasses on my nose, and squinted at the newsprint. Congress, it seemed, was finally honoring the forgotten female pilots of WWII with the Congressional Gold Medal, “the highest civilian honor.” According to the article, fewer than three hundred Women Airforce Service Pilots were still alive, but relatives were eligible to collect the medals of family members who served.

  “BRING BACK MEMORIES?” GENE ASKED, OVER MY SHOULDER, and I jumped. I never even told the writers’ group that I’d been a pilot during the war, not even when Gene invited me to go “flying” one day—model airplanes, it turned out, at a nearby park. As his little foam plane spun through the air above us and Gene expertly worked the controls, proudly showing off his snap rolls and lazy eights from the ground below, I thought, How can I tell him that I made real figure eights in the sky? “I mean of the time,” Gene added, and I exhaled.

  “It certainly does.” I couldn’t stop staring. How young they looked—and so happy, with their faces tilted toward the shimmering unknown. Beneath the three women and the plane was a caption: Murphee Sutherland, Miriam Lichtenstein, and Grace Davinport, Women Airforce Service Pilots in 1944. Photo donated by the family of Grace Davinport.

  So, Grace is gone, I thought. At my age, when all of my friends were disappearing, I hadn’t really expected otherwise. But would the rest of them be there? Murphee and Vera and—

  “I saw this a while ago, back when it came out. Guess nobody likes to throw anything away around here. Funny how old pictures are—feels like you might know them, right? But in the summer of 1944, I was in France.”

  I studied the girl in the center, squinting into the sun. How naïve she was, thinking she was brave—naïve and reckless and stupid. It was no wonder Miriam Lichtenstein had disappeared in 1945. Yet here she was in a national newspaper sixty-four years later, identified by name. What could it mean? I finally turned and looked at Gene, realizing what he’d just said, Back when it came out. “Do you mean to say the medals have already been awarded?” I looked at the date of the article, two months ago this week, July 10, 2009.

  “Doubt it.” Gene pushed his readers up on his nose and stared at the photo. “Cute girls. I might’ve even dated one of ’em.”

  I rolled up the article and swatted him with it. “I’m quite certain you didn’t, Gene Rosskemp.”

  “I mean, I would’ve wanted to,” Gene called after me, as I left the kitchen, still clutching the newspaper.

  Back in my room, I methodically locked the dead bolts and then the chain link, before dropping my purse on the table and sinking my creaky joints into the recliner. Then, with trembling fingers, I pulled out the newspaper and stared at the picture once again, at the girl in the center beaming with the joy of someone who is completely oblivious to her own end. “Miri,” I whispered, as tears of disbelief filled my eyes. “Where did you go?”

  THE FOLLOWING TUESDAY, AS WE GATHERED ONCE AGAIN AT THE Carnegie Library, my tremor was worse than usual. Perhaps it was because Herb Shepherd was inexplicably not present to discuss his own piece, and I had always liked Herb, our poetic voice of reason, who was either dead or severely incapacitated, I deduced, since he hadn’t skipped a group in the last ten years. But more than likely, the shaking hand and the flip-flopping of my heart were simply side effects of the girl with the braid, who had shown up again.

  I’d decided in advance that if she were present then maybe I would hire her to be my transcriptionist for the memoir I was too afraid to write. And if she were never to return, then it was just as well; life could carry on as usual. After all, why muck about with the past? The story belonged to the pilots in the newspaper, not me, Mary Browning. Except that young Miri had peered at me from the center of the picture and dared me to tell the story. Could I bring her back to life?

  As soon as Elyse entered, slouching under the weight of her enormous backpack, I drew in a breath and felt my pen tremble in my hand. The girl was going to make me tell the truth, and she didn’t even know it yet.

  “Do you th
ink we oughta give Herb a call?” Gene asked, glancing anxiously around the table. “He said he wasn’t feelin’ so hot.”

  “He thought it was just heartburn,” the other Jean said, raising her eyebrow.

  Then Selena Markmann burst into the room. “Herb’s water heater blew up!” she said, breathlessly, flinging her bag down on the table. “His basement is flooded.”

  “So . . . he drowned?” asked Gene.

  “He’s waiting for a plumber, and he sends his regrets. We can mail him our critiques or save them for next week. But, since we’re all here . . .” Selena added, with a nervous giggle, before proposing her new “Internet Initiative”: Since the group was getting younger, she said suggestively, wiggling her eyebrows in the direction of Elyse, she thought we should “make a pact to go green,” and save on Xeroxing costs by submitting our chapters via email. Once we were all online, we’d be able to contact each other in the event of an emergency, she pointed out.

  “I still have a phone. Does no one else have a phone?” I asked. “And, forgive me, but which one of us is getting younger?”

  “How many of us have computers?” Selena barked, and all but Jean Fester and myself raised a hand.

  I glanced at Jean. “I don’t believe Herb has a computer.”

  “He does,” said Selena. “This was his idea.”

  “Let’s leave the decision for a vote when we reconvene in a week,” I suggested. “In the meantime, we need to select someone to hand out for the next meeting.” It didn’t matter whether you were undergoing emergency bypass surgery or were temporarily floating in sewage in your own basement: if you didn’t show up, you didn’t get another turn to be critiqued until the rest of us had been given a chance to submit.