“I hope so,” I say, taking a deep breath and thinking of Sarah. Now is not the time to doubt.
AFTER UNPACKING MY SUITCASE, I STOP OFF AT THE BATHROOM, where a dishwater blonde from Tennessee, who introduces herself as “Louise,” is inexplicably scooping up a family of cockroaches to set them free outside. I feel as if I’m witnessing some sort of grotesque circus act.
“If you’re not going to kill them, don’t you think they’ll crawl their way back home?” I ask, watching her shake them off her hands, outside.
“Aw, look at you,” Louise says with a grin. “Already calling this place home.”
Back at the bunk, I’m introduced to the rest of the women designated by God or Jackie Cochran and with whom I’ll be spending the next ten months. There’s Vera Skeert, from Baltimore, who keeps clutching her very big binder as if it’s a flotation device. “That’s a vera big binder you’ve got there,” Murphee Sutherland from Wayne, New Jersey, says with a wink. Vera is worried because she’s spent the last three months singing on scholarship at the Peabody Institute instead of flying. I glance over at Grace, whose brown eyes meet mine. See? They seem to be saying. You’re not alone.
“You’ll be fine. It’s like riding a horse,” says Ana Santos from Chicago.
“Except if you fall, pull your rip cord,” Murphee says, and Vera Skeert hugs her “Vera big binder” even tighter. Murphee has orangey-red hair from a bottle, and Mama would probably call her “a crumb,” but I like her already.
Ana Santos studied art at the University of Chicago (“Mostly still lifes—of food” she says, eating a candy bar) and actually slipped a box of paintbrushes and paints into her footlocker.
Just as I’m doubting there’ll be any free time for that, we’re called out to the flagpole and lined up in formation with all of our classmates to take an oath. According to our commanding officer, Captain Digby, a man with a surprisingly slight physique for such a gruff bark—“If you think you know what you’re doing, think again! If you believe you don’t have more to learn, go home!”—we’ll be up at six tomorrow and running two miles before breakfast.
Then comes the paperwork—signing my life away over and over. Yes, I understand the risks of flight. Yes, I am fully aware that, in the event of disaster, the government will not be paying for my funeral. I’m issued my books for ground school—“Is it okay if I feel like vomiting?” Vera says, balancing the stack on top of her binder—and then, at the next window, a leather flight jacket and sweater, and finally, at the last window, a jumpsuit for flying.
“Size?” the man barks from behind the counter.
“Small?”
“We’ve got forty-four, forty-six, and forty-eight,” he says.
“Forty-four?” I guess, and he hands me an enormous bundle of olive material.
Back at the bunk, Ana shakes out the so-called zoot suit and we crack up at its enormity. We’ve been issued the men’s flight suits, I realize, unfolding my own, which looks big enough to fit Uncle Hyman. Murphee pulls on her own suit and flaps the sagging sleeves at us, like a small child playing dress-up. When she turns around, showing us the billowing material whose crotch ends halfway to her knees, we laugh harder.
“How do they expect us to fly planes in outfits that don’t fit?” Vera asks. “This isn’t safe.”
“Why don’t you complain? See how that works out for you,” Murphee says.
“I wish I had a camera,” I say, still laughing despite my unease. On my five-foot-three frame, I have to roll up the sleeves and cuffs eight times so as not to trip.
“I’ve got one,” Ana says, pulling out her Leica from her footlocker.
We go outside into the blustery cold sunlight and pose in front of the barracks in our comical flight suits—Murphee, Grace, and me in between—as Ana snaps our pictures. Giddy from outfits and maybe even just from being here, I glance over and see Captain Babcock, one of the military instructors, walking by the far end of the building—still close enough for me to catch the disapproval on his face. I wonder then if this is part of my military training: to be presented with absurd expectations and to take it on with a straight face. I can’t help feeling as if, by laughing out loud, I’ve already failed the experiment.
THAT NIGHT, I AM COMING BACK TO THE BUNK FROM THE SHOWers when I look up and am awed. At Avenger Field there are no lights of the city, and no steel mills, either, so the void of space looks more like a blue-black velvet curtain, studded with diamonds. It’s the loveliest thing I’ve ever seen. Taps plays at ten o’clock, but the lights are out sooner this evening due to the high winds rustling the power lines, so I write my sister by flashlight, before tucking my pen and paper into my footlocker and crawling into bed.
The wind stops. I listen to the sudden stillness, eerily quiet, except for the sound of crickets and waiting.
The important thing is that I have arrived.
CHAPTER 11
Confessions
Elyse’s arrival at the writer’s group on Tuesday night was marked by a minor commotion. In the single week since we’d seen each other last, she had acquired some new clothes, that is to say, clothes that other girls her age were commonly wearing: fitted jeans with a jersey shirt and clunky suede boots that looked perfect for space walking. She looked like my sister Sarah masquerading as a twenty-first-century teenager.
“Elyse, my word!” Selena Markmann gaped beneath blue-black bangs, the first to notice the girl ambling into the conference room. “You look so grown up.”
“Whoa,” Gene Rosskemp added, surveying her new look. “Who’s the lucky guy?”
“Huh? Oh.” Elyse pulled out a chair. “My aunt just took me shopping.” She may have shrugged coolly but the little smile, playing at the corners of her mouth, gave her away.
“Whoever he is, be careful.” Jean Fester held up one of her red pens like a can of Mace. “Give him the milk, and he’s not going to want to buy the cow.”
“I always say, you gotta let the guy taste the milk, so he knows if the cow’s worth payin’ for,” Gene said, and then laughed loudly and slapped his knee.
“Both of you, please. Leave her alone,” I said, and finally, Elyse made eye contact with me before sliding two packets of typed papers in my direction: one titled “The Telegram” and the other, “Sweetwater.” Just to see my own words typed on a page made me feel as if the oxygen had been swept from my lungs.
“Here are your chapters,” Elyse said, and I quickly shoved the pages beneath Herb Shepherd’s story. I hadn’t even envisioned my vignettes as chapters; I certainly hadn’t considered giving them titles.
“Mary Browning, are you finally writing something for us?” Victor Chenkovitch asked, with his hands folded on his big belly as he leaned back on the special chair cushion he’d used ever since his back surgery.
“Heavens, no,” I said, feeling my cheeks flush.
“It’s a memoir,” Elyse said, and when I stared at her, shocked, she said, “Well, it is.”
My heart clanged at the betrayal. Hadn’t I mentioned it was a secret? Unless . . . I hadn’t.
“I volunteer Mary to submit for next time,” Herb Shepherd said, and I suddenly despised him for the perpetual crumbs in his mustache.
“Yes, do, Mary,” Selena said. “I can’t wait to hear all about your time as a New York editor.”
I exhaled, berating myself for the little white lie that had slipped out when I first met Gene Rosskemp in the mailroom all those years ago—reinventing myself in a single moment—and the lies that had followed since, creating less a tangled web than a dark, muddy grave. Mary Browning as a New York editor? Small potatoes. They didn’t know about the four babies I’d lost, or that I never wanted the war to end because the day they said I had to stop flying I thought my life was over, or that the last time I spoke to my son Dave we argued, and it was all my fault. And why should I have told them? So I could feel the catch of loss in my throat in the one place I felt blissfully forgetful? I wanted to be happy for just a little w
hile. They didn’t know that the thing I missed the most was not my penmanship, which used to be lovely, or my husband, who was also quite lovely, but in fact was my future. So many promises and hopes I had for myself were wrapped up in tomorrow, and the greatest loss of all was not having more to look forward to.
“Then see how it feels when we rip you to shreds,” Jean said, still waving around her red pen, now a bloody scalpel. Honest to God, I’d never seen her smile like that, her craggy yellow teeth reminiscent of a ghoul’s.
“Maybe she just wants to get through the first draft,” Gene said, rescuing me, and I looked at him gratefully.
“Yes, I’m not really sure where it’s going yet . . . but eventually, yes . . .” I demurred. “But let’s get back to the task at hand. Herb’s piece is up for discussion. ‘The Steel Mill Summer’—a lovely title.”
“But what about the main character? This ‘Bert’ guy? I had real a problem with his likability,” Selena said.
And we were off.
AFTERWARD, I FOUND ELYSE SITTING AT ONE OF THE STUDY CARrels hidden between the bookcases and laid a fifty-dollar bill next to her pencil. She looked up at me in surprise. “Take it. It’s yours. And I’ll need my Dictaphone back,” I said.
It was exactly the opposite of how I’d imagined sharing my story, yet ever since she and I had started talking, memories would pour out of me at odd hours. Since Elyse didn’t have compatible equipment, I lent it to her for the transcribing.
“Oh, right. Sorry,” Elyse said, and I watched as she scrabbled around in her pack on the floor until she came up with the little recorder. “I wanted to ask you—how come you didn’t use your real name?” she asked, and my eyebrows shot up in surprise.
“On the tapes,” she said, standing up and handing me the Dictaphone. “I mean, it seems kind of weird that your Jewish parents would name you after the mother of Jesus.”
I startled and glanced around, as if one of Hitler’s informants might be hidden in the stacks or, worse, Victor Chenkovitch, who’d actually suffered in a concentration camp and would surely resent my desertion. It was true; I couldn’t bring myself to say Miri Lichtenstein’s real name aloud. It made her—me—too vulnerable. So I stuck with Mary.
“I mean, you might not think anyone will ever read it, but lots of people could be interested in your story, and frankly, it just doesn’t sound authentic,” she said. “Do you want to bring a tape to the next group or should we meet on the weekend again?”
“I think—I will likely need to take a step back from the memoir.” I nodded to myself. Definitely, pull back, before it’s too late.
“O—kay . . .” Elyse’s forehead crinkled. “You never said it was a big secret. The book.”
“Well, now you know.” My hands were clasped in front of me. “I’ll need my tapes back, too.” Just watching her dig around in her pocket before dropping the miniature tapes into my palm one at a time like dice, I couldn’t help noticing the fit of her new jeans. “You’re nearly unrecognizable today.”
“It’s just jeans and a shirt and some boots,” she said with an exasperated sigh.
“If they’re comfortable, by all means—”
“I don’t see what the big deal is. It’s easier not having people look at me like I’m a freak all the time. I prefer blending in,” Elyse said.
“I understand—that desire. Truly,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
She stared at me for a long moment, as if debating whether to gather her things and bolt or believe me.
“What happened to your family?” she asked, and I startled again and searched the stacks, but we were still completely alone. “I’m right, aren’t I? You changed your name and your religion?”
“That’s a complicated question, my dear,” I said, and she waited. “And this is probably not the time or the place for a complicated answer.”
“So, let’s go to a coffee shop or something,” Elyse said. “I have another hour until my mom picks me up.”
The sudden laugh that burbled out of me surprised us both. She actually thought I’d feel safer baring my soul at a Starbucks.
“I WAS NEVER ESPECIALLY RELIGIOUS, AT LEAST, NOT IN THE WAY my parents were,” I said, back at my apartment, the best place I could think of for a cup of tea and conversation such as this one. “And I felt insecure knowing that just across an ocean, scores of girls exactly like me were being murdered simply for being Jewish.”
“I thought no one knew what was going on until the end of the war,” Elyse said, reaching for noodle kugel, something I’d been in the mood for last night and baked, never dreaming I’d have company to share it with.
“Oh, we knew—maybe not the extent of it. But there were more than whispers about the mass extermination of Jews. So, from the time I was in my early teens, I was frightened knowing it was only by luck of our geographic location that we weren’t marched away at gunpoint.”
“When I read The Diary of Anne Frank, I felt that way, too—like it was only chance that I was born here and now. I’m half Jewish,” she added, her mouth full of kugel. “My mom’s side.”
“And how were you raised, may I ask?” I said, helping myself to seconds. The spoon shook, scattering clumps of noodles on the tablecloth.
“On a little of both, but not enough of either.” Elyse shrugged. “What’s Dave say about your history?” she asked, and I blinked. “That’s your son’s name, right?”
I thought of the last time we spoke, the way he shouted at me before I hung up on him. “Dave doesn’t know,” I admitted, and I watched as her thick eyebrows dropped.
“For real?” Elyse asked.
“He was brought up Lutheran.” I hesitated. “And I always made him wear a gold cross outside his shirt collar, even after he complained that boys don’t wear necklaces.” This reminded me of the awful afternoon when he disappeared in a line at Yankee Stadium as a young boy, ending up in the custody of a security guard.
“Mama, what exactly does it mean to be Jewish?” Dave asked me later in the car, once we’d been successfully reunited and were on our way home. I stared at him in the backseat through the rearview mirror. He was cheerfully swinging his legs and wearing Thomas’s perpetually inquisitive expression, even at the age of five. “The security guard asked me.”
“The security guard . . . did what?” I repeated, startled.
“When I asked if I could buy his bottle of pop off him for a penny. He said to the other guard, ‘Will ya look at this kid, trying to chew me down?’ Then he looked at me and did that thing where you close one eye and said, ‘You’re not Jewish, are you?’ I said I didn’t think so, and then he laughed.”
“Next time, just say, ‘no,’ you aren’t Jewish,” I’d said, bristling. In the moment I’d thought it was at Dave, for having what I so desperately wanted to protect—his innocence. But beneath the ripple of irritation was a tide of rage at the security guard for using a slur in front of my child.
“And what does it mean if you chew somebody down?” he went on. “Like you chew them up into tiny bites—”
“That man was ignorant, and I don’t ever want to hear you speaking that way,” I’d said, glaring at him in the mirror. “Let’s leave it at that.”
“But you never told me, what’s it mean to be Jewish?” Dave had asked again, and then my fury was replaced by guilt.
“How could you not tell him?” Elyse asked.
“It never really—came up . . .” But it did, of course, because from then on, I pushed him out the door and into the world wearing a cross. Every afternoon, he’d return with it in his backpack, until the day he said he lost the necklace in the creek.
“What made you ask?” I picked up my teacup with a tremulous hand.
“I don’t know.” Elyse’s voice grew strangely glum, as if she knew about the breach between Dave and me. “I guess because everyone keeps things from me and when I find out, it makes me so mad that they think I didn’t deserve to know. Like, Mom didn’t tell me that my grandma is sic
k. Seriously sick. Deathbed sick.”
I set down my cup.
“Grandma went to the doctor about an itch, and it turns out she’s got cancer. Which is just so hard to believe because, well, Grandma looks really young, and she’s in great shape—or at least, she was. She moved away a long time ago; my mom only let us visit her once in five years.”
Disheartening news aside, I couldn’t help but feel relieved by the shift in topic—for now, at least, my betrayal was forgotten.
“How old is your grandmother?” I asked, and Elyse shrugged and pushed her plate away.
“Maybe . . . sixty-eight?”
“Well, she is young,” I said. “What does your grandmother say about her condition?”
“Every time I call her, her boyfriend Ray answers and says she’s resting. I don’t know what’s going to happen next,” Elyse finally said quietly.
I wanted to reach out and give her hand, clenched into a fist on top of the table, a reassuring squeeze, but refrained, for fear it would make both of us uncomfortable. It occurred to me then that it had been years since I had been touched by another human being who wasn’t under the direct auspices of a Hippocratic oath. “What’s going to happen next is that you must visit your grandmother,” I decided.
“I can’t right now.” Her eyes, meeting mine, flashed with sudden panic. “I have to wait. I have to wait until she tells me to come. I’m not just gonna barge down there.”
She was afraid. Of course, she was afraid. “Well, when you’re ready to go, you must go,” I said. “And if you can’t pay for it, I will.” The words were sprung from my lips before I even realized what I was offering. For heaven’s sake, she wasn’t even one of my great-granddaughters. But, then, why not spend the money?
“What about your memoir?” she asked, and when I hesitated, she added, “I think we should keep going. And when we’re done, you should give it to Dave. It could be your apology.”
Tears filled my eyes, threatening to spill over. “Some things . . . aren’t worthy of forgiveness.”
The Secrets of Flight Page 10