by John Crowley
committed suicide not two years later. And still we do not fly.” He lit
his cigar with care; he seemed, to his elder son, to be standing on the
far side of a divide that Hendryk would himself one day have to cross,
because he could just now for the first time perceive it: on that far side
there was enterprise, and failure; possibility and impossibility; cigars,
power, and death. “It may be, you know,” he said to the boys, “that we
may one day solve the problem of how it is that birds fly, and bats; and
at the same time, in the same solution, prove also that we can never do
it ourselves. How tragic that would be.”
Of course the problem was solved, it did not exclude mankind, and
Eudoxe Van Damme lived to see it solved, though by then he was
largely indifferent to a success like that.
In the days after the Great War, when the Wright brothers planned
joint ventures with the Van Damme brothers, ventures that somehow
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 27
never came to fruition, the Wrights used to talk about how they had
played (“experimented” they always said, those two didn’t play) with
those rubber-string-driven bats that Hendryk and Jules were sending
aloft, at the same time, not far from the Wrights’ Ohio home. The
Wrights, though, weren’t simply marveling but trying to figure out
what caused the bats to behave so differently at different sizes. The
machines, as willful and pertinacious as living things, as liable to fail-
ure, beating aloft in the summer twilights.
It was odd how many pairs of brothers had advanced the great
quest. So often one luminous brave gay chance-taker, one careful wor-
ried pencil-and-paper one, issuing warnings, trying to keep up. The
Lilienthals, fussy Gustav and his wild brother Otto, who not long
before the Van Damme brothers watched the Avion III not fly, killed
himself in a man-bearing kite: Gustav was absent and thus had not
done the safety drill he always did. Hiram Maxim had a brother,
Hudson, who resented and plotted against him. The Voisin brothers.
The Montgolfiers, for the matter of that, back in the beginning. The
Wrights: Wilbur the daredevil, so badly hurt in a crash when careful
Orville had not been there to watch out for him. Never the same after.
And the Van Dammes.
Henry sometimes wondered if there was something about brother-
hood itself that opened the secret in the end. For what the Wrights
learned, and learned from gliders, and from M. Pénaud’s planophores
too, was that a flying machine, so far from needing to be perfectly and
completely stable, was only possible if it was continually, controllably,
un stable, like a bicycle ridden in three dimensions: an ongoing argu-
ment among yaw, pitch, roll, and lift, managed moment to moment by
a hand ready to make cooperation between the unpredictable air and
the never-finished technologies of wood, power, and wire. It was a
partnership, a brotherhood. There never was a conquest of the air. The
air would not let itself be conquered, and didn’t need to be.
Madame Van Damme, née Gertie Pilcher of Toledo, died of peritonitis
aboard the Bulgarian Express on her way to meet her husband in Con-
stantinople. The train was passing through remote country when she
was taken, and a decision had to be made whether to stop the train and
take the woman by carriage to a local hospital that would be unlikely
28 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
to treat her properly even if it could be reached, or race forward as fast
as the tracks could be cleared to Philippopolis, where an ambulance
would be waiting. Her own last words, before she lapsed into fevered
nonsense, were a plea that they not put her off into the forest and the
night, and though that could be discounted, no one—the conductors,
the porters, the medical student found on board who had diagnosed
her burst appendix—felt capable of contradicting her. She died just as
the brakes were applied at the station approach, the cry of steel on steel
and the gasp of escaping steam accompanying her passing spirit. The
two boys, who had been put in another compartment after kissing
their mother’s hot wet cheeks, awoke at the sound.
It seemed somehow appropriate to them, in the years that followed,
that their education in motion stopped with their mother’s death. They
began then to be enrolled in stationary schools, where they studied the
same things every day along with other boys. There were no more Ber-
liner discs delivered to their train compartment or waiting for them at
the desks of hotels; their father’s letters became less frequent though
not less loving, as he spent more and more time resting at resorts and
spas where nothing ever happened. The boys began their studies
together, both committed to science and engineering, but soon drifted
apart; Jules the better scholar of the two, chewing through difficult
curricula at great speed and asking for more, Hendryk preferring
friendships, sports, reading parties in the mountains.
Then in 1904 Jules went to Germany to study energetics with the
great Boltzmann at the University of Vienna. Hendryk left school and
took up his father’s enterprises, trying (he understood later) to reawaken
his father’s passions by asking to be educated in his business, insofar as
it could be learned—Eudoxe Van Damme had apparently continually
flouted in his actual dealings the principles he tried to teach his son,
indeed this seemed to be the greatest lesson, but one that could only be
grasped after all the others had been learned. Still merry, still beauti-
fully appointed, Eudoxe Van Damme resisted his son’s attempts to
interest him in new adventures: his heart had died on that station plat-
form in Bulgaria and would not be awakened.
Jules worshiped Herr Professor Doktor Boltzmann, fighting to be
admitted to his classes, never missing one of his public lectures. He
wrote to Hendryk: “B. says the problem of flight will not be solved by
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 29
endless experiments, nor will it be solved by work in theoretical
mechanics—the problem’s just too hard. He says it will be solved by a
clear statement of principles, and a new formulation of what is at stake.
But that’s as far as I follow him.”
Perhaps to fend off Hendryk’s attempts to bring him back into the
world, Eudoxe Van Damme decided that his older son too needed more
mechanical and technical training, and found a place for him at the
University of Manchester. Hendryk agreed to go, if he could work in
one way or another on the problems of heavier-than-air flight. The solu-
tion to the problem—which in Hendryk’s mind would, when found, lift
his father’s heart as well as the world’s—was about to be reached in
America, in fact in the boys’ dimly remembered home state, though for
a long time Europe didn’t hear about it, and when told of it wasn’t con-
vinced. At Manchester the engineering course was both practical and
theoretical, there were both workshops and seminars, everyone talked
physics and machine
tools equally, and in the summers you could go up
to the kite-flying station at Glossop on the coast and build huge kites to
sail the cold sea winds. The great topic was how to power a man-bearing
kite with an engine, and there was much discussion of the pretty little
French Gnome engine—those were the days when engines, like flying
machines, were so different from one another they went by names.
There were Americans and Germans at Glossop, flying the kites devel-
oped by the American westerner and naturalized Britisher Samuel Cody,
a kinsman (so he asserted) of Buffalo Bill. A German-speaking young
man whom Hendryk befriended flew Cody-type kites by day and
worked on the equations for a new propeller design by night. “He is
called Ludwig,” Hendryk wrote to Jules. “Though it seems his family
call him Lucky, so I do too, though it annoys him. In fact he is Austrian
not German, a family of rich Jews. He too wanted to study with
Boltzmann. He’s told me he envies you. How strange that you have gone
to Vienna to study while I befriend a Viennese here! We talk about
flight, language, mathematics—he talks and I listen. He has two broth-
ers—no—he had two brothers, who both committed suicide. Imagine.
He told me this after many glasses of beer and has not since spoken of
it. Write to me, Jules, and tell me how you are.”
That summer the Wrights brought their flier to France, and after
that there could be no longer any doubt. The great race of the nations
30 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
had been won by the least likely of them, the one whose government
and armed forces had invested next to nothing; won by two bicycle
builders without university degrees. At Glossop the students and pro-
fessors pored over the report and the photographs in L’Aérophile, but
Hendryk’s new friend Lucky seemed to lose interest in the pursuit of
further advances; Hendryk worried for him. It was as though he felt an
equation had been solved once and for all. He put aside his kite models
and his propeller design. He told Hendryk that on an impulse he had
written to Bertrand Russell at Cambridge to ask if perhaps he could
study philosophy there. If he was accepted, he said, he would be a phi-
losopher; if he proved to be an idiot, he would become an aeronaut.
Hendryk got him to apply for a patent on his propeller design, thinking
he might put some Van Damme money into its development; he shook
Lucky’s hand farewell at the train station.
What the young Austrian had seen as a conclusion, Hendryk Van
Damme knew to be a beginning: he felt that sensation of elation and
danger and glee that comes when an incoming sea wave, vast heavy
and potent, lifts you off your feet and tosses you shoreward. He had
had no letter in months from his brother, not even in response to the
Wright news; then came word at the university that the great Boltzmann
had committed suicide, no one knew why. Still no letter for Hendryk
from Jules. Hendryk left Manchester the next week, caught the boat-
train from London, thinking of the pilots of the purple twilight cross-
ing the narrow seas one day soon, surely soon now, and in Paris
boarded the express for Vienna. At the last address he had for his
brother he ran up the stairs and knocked on the door, but the concierge
below called up after him to say that the young Dutchman was gone.
Just as Lucky had never after spoken of his brothers, Henry and
Julius never after spoke of the succeeding days. How Hendryk searched
the city for his brother, growing more alarmed; sat in the Schönbrun
park fanning himself with his hat (he was already running to fat and
worried about his heart) and thinking where to look next; tracing,
from the bank his brother used and the engineering students at the
university, a way to a certain low street in the Meidling district, and a
desolate room. Jules had descended there because he had no money,
because his father had sent none, had sent none because Jules had asked
for none, because he had ceased to answer his father’s letters. Hendryk
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 31
found him shoeless and shirtless on his bed, in his cabinet only a vial
of prussic acid he was unable (he told Hendryk later that night) to
muster the energy to open and swallow.
Henry was right, that there was an industry to build; right that he would
not win his share in it without his brother by his side, to keep his craft
in trim. It wasn’t surprising that all his life from that time on Henry
Van Damme thought of suicide as the enemy, a universal force that
Freud had discovered (such was Henry’s understanding of what he’d
learned of Freud’s ideas, beginning that year in Vienna); nor that, close
as it was bound to brotherhood and to death, flight nevertheless seemed
to him to be the reply, or the counterforce: suicide was the ultimate
negation, but flight the negation of negation itself.
The doctors at the brand-new Landes-Heil und Pflegeanstalt für
Nerven- und Geisteskranke where Jules was treated would not explain
to Hendryk and Eudoxe what Jules suffered from, though they took
grave credit when it passed. Jules wouldn’t say what had occurred
between him and the doctors: he would only say that whatever had
been so wrong with him was now all gone forever. The brothers were
from then on inseparable in business, their contrary qualities making
them famous, nearly folkloric, figures in the capitalism of the new cen-
tury, its Mutt and Jeff, its Laurel and Hardy, its Paul Bunyan and
Johnny Inkslinger. Henry, so big, so ready for anything—he loved
speedboats and race cars, ate what the press always described as Lucul-
lan feasts, married three times, walked away from the crash of his first
Robur clipper singed and eyeglass-less and still grinning—was a match
made in the funny papers with unsmiling lean Julius, his eternal hard
collar and overstuffed document case, a head shorter than his brother.
When Van Damme Aero received the 1938 Collier Trophy for
achievement in aeronautics, Henry was seated at the luncheon next to
the President; he watched as the President lifted himself, or was lifted,
to a standing position to deliver a brief, witty speech in Henry’s honor.
Then an aide seated right behind the lectern, sensing that the President
was done almost before his peroration was finished, half-rose and
unobtrusively put a cane into the President’s hand, and helped him
again to his seat, slipping the locks of his braces while everyone looked
32 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
elsewhere or at the President’s radiant grin. He lifted his old-fashioned
to Henry, who raised his glass of water in response.
“Mr. President,” Henry said, “I believe you would enjoy flying.”
“I couldn’t do it,” the President said, with dismissive modesty, still
grinning.
“You sail, don’t you, Mr. President?”
“I do, and I enjoy it. Always have.”
“Well, air is a fluid. Managing a craft in the air is in many ways the
same.”
“You don’t say.”
“I assure you.”
It wasn’t really so—after all a boat skims the surface of one fluid
while passing through another that is fluid only in a different sense—
but at that moment it seemed true to Henry Van Damme. It seemed
important to say.
“The controls require a lot of foot power, as I understand,” the
President said mildly, affixing a Camel in a long cigarette holder.
“A technical detail, easily altered.”
“Well.” He tossed his head back, that way he had, delighted in him-
self, the world, his perceptions. “I shall put it to my cabinet. I’m sure
they’ll be happy to see me barnstorming come election time. You build
me a plane, Mr. Van Damme, and I will fly it.”
“Done, Mr. President.”
Henry spent some time with his engineers, designing a small light
plane, neat as an R-class racing yacht, that could be controlled entirely
by hands, and delivered it to the White House two months before Pearl
Harbor. When Henry and Julius flew to Washington in 1942 to propose
what would become the Aviation Board—the great consortium of all
the major aircraft builders to share their plants and workers and skills
and even their patents among themselves so as to build a fleet of planes
such as the world had never seen, and in record time too, as if there
were any relevant records—it seemed not the time to mention that pretty
little craft. Henry was more tempted to prescribe some remedies he
knew about for the weary and hard-breathing man who brought them
into his office and spoke with undiminished cheer to them, before turn-
ing them over to the appropriate cabinet secretary. Henry said later to
Julius in the washroom: The man’ll be dead within the year.
3
Glaive,” said Julius.
“ ‘Glaive’? ” Henry asked. “What the hell is that?”
Julius consulted the papers before him. The vice presidents
for Sales and Employment waited for the brothers’ attention to
return to the actual subject of the meeting. “It’s a kind of poleax,” he
said. “Like a sword on a stick.” He waved an imaginary one before
him, striking down an enemy.
“I don’t know,” Henry said, lacing his fingers together over his mid-
riff. “Let’s not give it a name people have to look up.”
Julius shrugged, to say he had sought out the possible names Henry