The Secrets of Flight

by Maggie Leffler

  In late August and September of 1944, I make two solo cross-country flights, the first from Texas to Delaware in the PT-19, the open-cockpit, wooden plane covered in fabric that we initially trained on, and the second at night, a round-trip from Texas to New York in the AT-6. There is something about hovering over the earth at 208 miles per hour in the dark that makes every thought disappear except the single question: What does the plane want? I feel myself becoming one with the craft, anticipating every rattle in the engine, every dip and spike of the instrument panel, every light in the distance, every cloud in the sky. The constant alertness and repetitive adjustments to stay aloft become almost meditative, so that the sound of the engine is no longer deafening, and the vibrations of the plane nothing more than a hum.

  In October, we are commended for being safe and dependable pilots who fly “the army way” and honored at graduation with our silver wings. We receive our orders with a caveat: in light of the imminent disbanding of the Women Airforce Service in another two months, it’s okay to leave now; we’ve already done a great service to our country. Not one of us, not even Vera Skeert, considers going home early.

  I end up in San Diego, where I spend the next two months test-piloting B-26 bombers, massive, twin-engine aircraft that come back from the Pacific in pieces. Crews patch up the steel fuselage, riddled with gaping holes, overhaul the engine and repair the landing gear, and then leave it to our all-women crew to fly the beasts to make sure they really work. Each time we land at a new army base to deliver “the Flying Coffin,” we are met with bewilderment from our male counterparts, who seem shocked that we can handle two thousand tons of steel in the air—or even, where it’s most crucial, on the landing, where many pilots have stalled out and crashed. Or maybe they just can’t get over the pants. (“You girls should be in skirts,” says a cadet, embarrassed to have accidentally called me “sir” until I removed my helmet. “You try strapping on a parachute over a skirt,” I say.)

  The Soviet Union has invaded Germany, and the United States has landed in Iwo Jima, and soon the soldiers—including Grace’s Teddy, if he can just hang on—will be coming back home. We fly back to attend the final graduation of the last class of women pilots, which takes place on a bright, cold day in December. Sitting in a row between Murph, who’s been towing targets at Camp Davis, and Grace, who’s been ferrying planes from Andrews Air Force Base, I glance at the rows upon rows of uniformed women pilots and can’t believe it’s all coming to an end.

  “Listen up, ladies,” Grace says in a whisper. “You’re all invited to the wedding next summer.”

  “We’ll be there with bells on,” Murphee says.

  “I hope Teddy has some single friends,” Ana says with a grin, leaning forward on the other side of Murph.

  “If I take a train from Baltimore, would anyone be able to pick me up in Des Moines?” Vera asks, her voice doubtful. “Otherwise I’ll have to look for a bus from the train station, and if the church isn’t close to the reception—”

  “Can we worry about the logistics later, Vera?” Murphee asks.

  “Invite Sol,” Grace quietly urges me. “I know that he’ll change his mind. You were meant for each other.”

  At the mention of his name, my face heats up. I never told Grace I was the one who broke it off and certainly not the reason why. “He can’t think about marriage; he has to focus on medical school,” I said, because to admit more would betray him and all that was at stake for his future. Besides, I couldn’t imagine she’d really understand his dilemma, although maybe I should’ve given her more credit. After all, we were, each and every one of us, about to get our dreams snatched away forever.

  Moments later General Arnold takes to the podium, and we crane our necks to see him, a white-haired man, with rounded cheeks and a well-decorated uniform. After giving us a history of how the WASPs came to be, he congratulates all of us for our hard work, for the service we’ve done. Nevertheless, we’ve completed our mission, and the Women Airforce Service is officially over.

  That night, we go out to dinner at the Blue Bonnet and secretly spike our sodas and toast the rest of our lives. Afterward, when the cattle wagon never arrives to bring us back to base, we stumble through the empty streets of Sweetwater on foot, our arms slung over each other’s shoulders, our breaths clinging to the chilly air. Leaning on Grace, I look up at the sky and wish I weren’t fuzzy with rum, because I need to memorize these constellations before I never see them again.

  “I feel like we’re being kicked out,” Ana says, on my other side.

  “That’s because we are,” Murph says, slurring slightly. “You heard General Arnold. ‘Each and every one of you is ordered to leave the premises by December twentieth.’”

  “Everything we’ve been through, and everything we’ve risked has been for nothing,” Vera mutters.

  “Not for nothing,” Grace says. “The men were always going to come home one day.”

  “I just really thought—we’d proved something,” I say.

  “We did, damn it,” Murph says, sending the line of us off-kilter when she lurches forward.

  “I hate goodbyes,” Ana says, with a strange, barking sound, and when I look over I realize she’s not laughing at all, but crying. And then we’re all hugging each other in the road and promising to keep in touch forever, promising we’ll never forget what we did, even if everyone else does.

  Three days later, we’re scattered back to our old lives: Murphee Sutherland back to waiting tables in New Jersey, Ana Santos back to painting still lifes in Chicago, Vera Skeert back to training for the opera in Baltimore, and Grace Davinport back to Iowa, to finish planning her wedding.

  I land at the Sixth Ferrying Service Detachment in Pittsburgh, realizing as the wheels of my plane touch down that this is it—the AT-6 may go up again but not with a woman in the cockpit, and certainly not with me. Still reeling, I get a ride from the airport to the looming TB sanatorium on Leech Farm Road. Except that it’s closed to visitors when I arrive, and Sarah’s nurse sends me away until tomorrow. So I take the trolley back to Squirrel Hill and then walk to Beacon Street from Forbes Avenue. Still wearing my dress blue uniform, I catch smiles and waves from neighbors shoveling snow and children playing hockey on the icy streets, which makes me grin and wave back, despite the ache of loss inside me. Never have I felt so American and simultaneously betrayed. How could the lobbyists have rallied against us? Why couldn’t General Arnold have done more to make us part of the military?

  I’ve been home for all of ten minutes, sitting in the kitchen with Mama as she kneads the challah, when she tells me that she’s glad I’m back, because they desperately need another seamstress in Uncle Hyman’s shop.

  “I can’t replace Sarah,” I say, glancing through the window at the gaggle of blond children playing in the alley. Is it possible that in the ten months since I’ve been gone the family next door has added more children to their impossibly large brood? They’re everywhere, laughing and screaming and swinging their hockey sticks. “I’m terrible with sewing.”

  “If you can be taught to fly, you can be taught to sew.” Mama’s hands move quickly over the dough, pushing, pulling, and pounding.

  “Maybe there’s something else I can do to earn money . . . something at the airport . . .” Even as I’m saying the words, I can’t really imagine it. What would I do—become a Pan Am stewardess after I’ve flown a B-26 bomber? And besides, I’d have to become certified as a registered nurse first, which means more school.

  “Miriam, your flying days are over,” Mama says, and the words feel sharp and heavy in my chest.

  My niece bursts in through the back door then and stops short when she notices me at the kitchen table. “Come in and get warm, Rita. Take off your coat. Not on the chair; put it on the hook. And say hello to your aunt,” Mama says, as my niece paces through her orders, never taking her big brown eyes off of me.

  “Hi, Aunt Miri.” She comes to stand in front of me, a smile playing at the
corners of her mouth. Rita has dark braids and eyes and though her wrists look like twigs you could snap, I can tell she’s strong and scrappy. “Do you like flying planes?” she asks, and I nod. “Are you ever afraid of falling from the sky?”

  “Never,” I say automatically, and she smiles. “Was that you outside, playing street hockey in the alley?” I add, pinching her cheek, still pink from the cold.

  Rita grins and tells me she just likes to watch the big kids. “Want to come upstairs and see my doll?” she adds, tugging on my arm.

  “I would love to see your doll,” I say, letting her pull me to a stand.

  “It was her mother’s.” Mama’s voice is terse as she washes the flour off her fingers.

  “Her name wouldn’t happen to be Caroline?” I ask, and Rita gasps in surprise.

  “Take off that uniform,” Mama says at my back, and I exhale. “You’re home now.”

  UNPACKING MY DUFFEL IN MY ROOM, I FEEL AS IF I AM COMING back from another planet and touching earthly objects once again. The carpet is pinker than I remember, the painting of a little girl dressing her doll over the bed childish and quaint. How is it possible that I left only ten months ago, when everything feels so different? The first thing I do is take a bath, and afterward I stare at myself from many angles in the mirror, wondering if my future has already been written or if someday, sometime, I might bloom again. Without flying and without Sol, it doesn’t seem possible, which is probably why, an hour later when I am across the dinner table from Cousin Tzadok, and he is smiling at me with kind brown eyes and saying with his thick German accent, “Welcome home, Little Bird,” I remember how he drove me all the way to Indian Town Gap and think, Maybe I could love you.

  Despite Mama’s orders to hang up my uniform forever, I wear it the following day when I go to visit Sarah alone. Outside, sycamore trees extend their leafless branches over the sidewalk that leads to a hulking brick building. Treading carefully on the ice, I think, Well, isn’t this collegiate? Inside the building, where the patients and nurses whisper in the corridors rather than speak, I pretend that this is actually a library, or a convent—anything but a TB sanatorium.

  At the end of a sea-foam-green hallway, I find Sarah lying in bed, propped up on two pillows, wearing a white nightgown. The room is empty except for her bed, a desk with a washbasin, and a chest of drawers. At least the tall windows still manage to fill the room with light.

  “You’re back! Oh, Miri, you’re back,” Sarah says, and I’m startled by her hazel eyes, how big and hollow they are, but on her lovely face is the same wide smile.

  “I’m back,” I say miserably.

  “What happened? Mama said the women’s airforce disbanded,” Sarah says, and I love her for exactly this: thinking of me right now when we should only be worrying about her.

  “It’s over,” I say, shaking my head. “They don’t need us anymore.”

  “But what about the petitions to Congress?”

  “The men lobbied against us. They didn’t even let Jackie Cochran speak at the hearing. General Arnold did all he could but . . .” I shake my head. “He had to go fight a real war.”

  “Oh, Miri, I’m so sorry. I loved your letters. I reread them again and again. It made me happy to know you were out there living, while I’ve been stuck in here. Is that all for me?” Sarah adds, nodding at the clutch of books and cards and papers—all the news of the outside world—in my hands. I awkwardly hold out newspapers from Mama, and the cards Rita made out of construction paper, which makes Sarah’s eyes well with tears when she opens them.

  “Oh, I miss her. You can’t understand how it’s killing me to be here,” she says, and it’s true, I don’t entirely understand, but the evening before when I hugged Rita, and she touched the buttons on my blazer and beamed up at me, I felt a surge of longing that wasn’t for the sky.

  “Well, at least you’ve got a nice view,” I say instead, nodding at the huge windows facing the street and the snow-covered lawn.

  “Don’t,” Sarah orders, which makes me look away from the window and stare at her. “Don’t pretend it isn’t horrible.”

  “I’m sorry,” I say, pulling up a chair by the bed. I want to reach for her hand, but I’m still afraid. Mama told me she’d been coughing up blood the day they took her away.

  “All I can do is lie here, or sit up and read. This week I’m allowed to wash and sit up for an hour. Last week, they collapsed my lung, to give it some rest, and I had to take all my meals in bed. I look for you in the sky, though,” she confesses with a sheepish smile. “Whenever I see a plane, I imagine you’re the one flying it.” She shifts in bed, her hand moving up to her lower ribs. “Tell me about Sol, Miri. I never understood why it ended between you two just because he left for New York.”

  I let go of the breath I’ve been holding since touching down in Pittsburgh. “He changed his name to get into medical school.”

  Sarah’s eyebrows knit together, and at first I think she didn’t hear me.

  “He’s not Solomon Rubinowicz anymore,” I say. “For the next few years, he’s Thomas. Thomas Browning. Which is not that unheard-of, I suppose—authors use pseudonyms to get published. And when Tzadok came through Ellis Island, he changed his name to Jack.”

  “They gave Tzadok a new name.”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “They forced him to assimilate. You have a choice.” Even as Sarah’s voice becomes softer, it grows more insistent, and her breaths are becoming rapid. “Doesn’t Sol know what we’ve been fighting for? If he becomes one of them, then Hitler wins.” When she starts to cough, I shudder and glance away.

  “He’s not becoming anything but a doctor. And I miss him. I’ve missed him every day for the last five months,” I confess.

  She finally stops coughing and lies back to look at me. “Our ancestors died for their names, Miri. Sol may not understand that, but you do.”

  But how can it be wrong to hide behind a name when the only reason we haven’t been tortured and murdered ourselves is by luck of our location? Only I can’t possibly ask this question of someone who meets her own suffering every day and has no ability to run away.

  “Listen to me, Miri. You can’t live in fear about the possibility of what they might do to you,” she says, and tears prick my eyes, because she’s right—for all my bravery in the sky, I am a coward. “I need you to raise Rita,” she adds.

  “You’re going to get better,” I say.

  “Promise me you’ll stay who you are, and raise her the way she was meant to be raised.”

  “I will, Sarah. Of course, I will,” I say.

  “Promise,” she orders. “I can’t have you running back to Sol—or whatever alias he’s going by.”

  “I promise,” I say, and it feels like the truth. Again and again, when I think of this moment, of Sarah’s face and my words and the way we are holding each other’s gaze like it is a covenant in itself, I know it has to be the truth.

  THE WINTER OF 1945 DRAGS ON UNDER PITTSBURGH’S SOOT-filled skies that turn the snow black and leave my hopes carbon-crusted. The heater is broken in Tzadok’s old jalopy—has been broken since the war began, and can’t be fixed until they start making car parts again—so each morning when he picks me up to ride to Uncle Hyman’s East End shop, Tzadok tucks wool blankets around my lap and knees. “Smile, Little Bird,” he always says, and each morning when I make the corners of my mouth turn up for him, it feels like a mechanical exercise. In January, Grace writes to say that Teddy has been killed in action, and I tamp down my tears for the wedding that would’ve been, for our reunion lost, and for my own hopes killed in action. Despite the tragedy, despite the fact that the sun won’t shine again, the papers are full of heartening news from the war front. The Soviet Union has liberated Warsaw and Auschwitz and marched on toward Berlin; meanwhile, the United States begins bombing Japan, first Kobe, then Tokyo, and when the Soviet and the American troops meet on the River Elbe in Germany in April 1945, we know we are c
losing in on the end.

  It quickly becomes apparent that I can’t so much as make a straight hem or iron a mended dress without burning it, so Uncle Hyman moves me over to the bookkeeping, where I work side by side with Tzadok going over the numbers. He seems to want to make me happy, that much I can tell. One day, he asks me what I miss about flying, and because I can’t bring myself to say the power, the exhilaration, I simply tell him “the view.” So, after work, he takes a detour to Mount Washington—or at least, he tries, but before we reach the top, the engine in the car overheats and we hold up traffic as we wait for it to cool down. “Maybe after the war, when I have a better engine, I’ll take you,” he says after turning around, and I don’t tell him that we could just as well have taken the incline, because I realize this is his grand romantic gesture, and I’m uncertain if I want to be present for its execution. I spend the winter trying to convince myself that when Tzadok smiles, his angular face is actually quite attractive, and maybe, just maybe, if he has to kiss me then I can get used to that, too. For the first time in my twenty-three years, I’m intent on marrying, because otherwise, I may be bound to the house on Beacon Street forever.

  At night I try not to think of Sol’s lips on my wind-chapped cheeks, or the Texas sunshine making me squint, or cloud islands billowing in the bright sky. I am restless and depressed, aching to be free, until more and more news leaks about the horrors of the concentration camps, bodies upon bodies upon bodies, and I realize that I am not a prisoner at all but simply an ungrateful child who wants too much.

  One night, when Tzadok and I are bent over the books in the back room of Hyman’s shop, going over the inventory and the payroll, I turn my face up to him, willing him to look into my eyes. Finally, shyly, he puts his pencil down and kisses me. The kiss is fumbling and awkward but really not so bad, I think, reaching up to caress the bones in his face. Maybe I can convince him to grow a beard.