One morning Stef and I had to ourselves, and he insisted on telling me the whole Wrangel Island story from start to finish. We were interrupted a good deal, and the whole thing made me so sick anyway that I didn’t care. But I think I made some impression on him about his recklessness in spending the money of people who couldn’t afford to contribute to his schemes. I told him I was afraid of his ambition; that he had done enough remarkable things for one man; that, with his fine abilities and personality, he had a lot ahead of him if he would be content to devote himself to quiet, solid work. Ha ha! Stef took my grandmotherly advice very well—and went on doing just as before, I suppose.
I have no illusions as to my influence with Stef, but on that occasion I actually believe I made him uneasy—a thing he had never been before—about owing money to everyone and his uncle. I put it on the ground of his own interest. I tried to make him see that he couldn’t afford to have a reputation for unreliability, no matter what the excuses were. It was a miserable business. I couldn’t go back on Stef even if he was wrong. But I wouldn’t pretend I thought he was right. All in all, it has been the most puzzling experience in friendship I have ever had. Stef and I are really attached to each other. Yet everything has conspired to make us as different as day from night. Sometimes I want to sit down in the middle of the floor and cry. What unreasoning and unreasonable creatures we women are when our feelings are involved!
Those few days with Stef in the house were a strenuous time for sure. After it was all over, I begged him to destroy all my letters to him, as a Christmas present to me—but I fully expect he didn’t honor that request either. For crying out loud, what could Griff Brewer have been thinking of—to let Stef have $1,250 of our money for the relief expedition to Wrangel Island, without so much as a by-your-leave! At the end of the day, Griff was out nearly six thousand dollars and we forty-five hundred. Orv and I did not offer to share Griff’s loss with him. It was high time he learned that Stef was an expensive luxury as a friend. I often get out of patience with Orv because he is so overscrupulous in money matters, but how thankful I am that he is, as I see what grasping for a few pennies does to people.
As I think back over my whole early experience with Stef, it was not a natural friendship for me. I can’t see now how he could have had any reason for being a special friend of mine. I’m sure he must have found me insufferably stupid, and we hadn’t other things in common to make up for that. It was a very great loss to me, for, as he expressed it once himself, I had given him an “idealized friendship.” Stef wasn’t the only one with stars in his eyes. I thought he was something altogether different from what he was. Never in my life have I so misread anyone. I didn’t have it in for Stef—I just saw that there was no substance to one of my dreams.
I am not especially unsophisticated about people, and yet I am so inclined to idealize and idolize the few that I am really attached to. I should know better—but living with nothing but hard realities is a bitter business. Harry understood all about such things—that is why I could speak to him about my feelings for Stef. I’ve never felt any need to idealize Harry. He has none of Stef’s shortcomings—his ambition, his recklessness, his fear of “entangling alliances.” He has made his way all right without a brass band. Harry prides himself on being a rationalist when it comes to religion, but he isn’t vehement or vulgar about it. And he doesn’t scoff at tradition the way Stef does. I do think Stef would be an entirely different kind of person if he had grown up in the wholesome surroundings Harry had as a young man.
I often think about what it is that makes some people really superior, and I have come to believe it is capacity rather than anything else. I suppose character and originality enter into that—I am not sure—but at any rate it is something more than ability. I have great admiration for the kind of people who always hold something in reserve, with whom you never strike bottom. Harry is one of those special people—I never fear I’ll get to the bottom of his love—and Orv, of course. Time was I would have said Stef was special in that way too, but not anymore—I got to the bottom of him long ago! This great capacity impresses me to the point of awe. I am so lacking in that very thing, and the special friends I have had the luck to make have so much of it, that I have grown self-conscious and timid—sometimes, not always!
It wasn’t until Harry went abroad that I came to appreciate what a truly superior person he is. His letters brought back my own experiences in Europe, and I could see that it struck him much as it did me. I loved the strangeness of hearing people speak our language when they were so obviously foreign. And the place names delighted me—Stoke Poges, for instance. Isn’t that quaint? I went out there on a lovely day with an English wine merchant named Frank Hedges Butler. We walked across the fields to the church, and afterward we “butted in” at the old Penn Manor House, where the painter Landseer lived. We wound up by making the rounds of Mr. Butler’s various clubs—such as a mere woman could be admitted to—and finally saw the skating at the Princess’s Skating Club, where Mr. Butler fished out celebrities of all sorts for me to meet. Oh yes, that was a day to remember!
When Harry wrote about exploring Rome with Louis Lord, I “flashed back” to my first visit there with Will and Orv. It was the spring of 1909 and the city was packed for the beatification of Joan of Arc at St. Peter’s Basilica. We had to go around to eighteen hotels before we found one that would take us in. A miserable, uncomfortable place it was too. The waiters in the restaurant were so dirty that I could hardly eat a mouthful of food. One day the boys and I went to see the Pantheon. Then we took a long walk and stood on the hill overlooking the Roman Forum and looked up in the guidebook all the things we could see. We walked around past the palaces of the Caesars to where the Circus Maximus used to be, over through the Arch of Constantine, and back to the Colosseum again. All the fine old ruins, straight out of my history books—another dream come true!
And France—how I do adore that country! I’ve always thought I would feel at home in Le Mans, among Will’s friends. The boys and I didn’t have nearly enough time to sit back and be tourists. We never got to Nîmes or Avignon or Carcassonne, or any of the other important cathedral towns. How does the poem go? Tout le monde a son Carcassonne—“Every man has his Carcassonne.” Each of us has some goal, sometimes near at hand, that he simply can’t reach. When Harry and I get to Europe, we are going to see all the places I missed, starting with Rouen. I’ve been longing to go there ever since he brought us that lovely etching of the cathedral. I hung it in a place of honor in the “cold storage room” at Hawthorn Hill, facing the Muse of Aviation sculpture that the Aero Club of Sarthe presented to the boys. Harry and I have the selfsame picture in our dining room—and it makes me homesick every time I pass by!
Harry’s letters from abroad were a joy forever. They were the first love letters anyone ever wrote to me—if only I had had the wit to see it! A regular storybook lover he was. He cared a good deal for my letters too, he told me. How queer it is to remember that I used to feel uneasy about corresponding with him—as if I were some sort of temptress, a white-haired, bespectacled Circe. Isn’t that the limit? After Isabel died, the very act of writing made me feel closer to Harry. It was all I could do for him at a time when I wanted very much to do something. I had come to realize that Harry needed me in a way that Stef was incapable of. I told Stef that one reason why Harry and I were such devoted friends was that we sometimes needed each other, whereas he could never need me for anything. In fact, I don’t believe Stef could ever need anyone—not in the way I mean.
Harry seemed needier than ever after he got back from Europe—which is no wonder considering all the troubles that had been heaped upon him. It was on that visit to Hawthorn Hill that he came within a whisker of sweeping me up passionately in his arms. Fancy that! He confessed it to me later, after we had officially become lovers. And to think I used to believe that Harry was all head and no heart! I hated like the dickens to see him go off with Orv to catch the train that time�
�but Stef and I had things to thrash out between us, and we could hardly talk freely with Harry under the same roof. Orv’s presence was trying enough! I survived the ordeal as fine as silk, barring a mild thumping in the back of my head and a few other disabilities. But I wouldn’t want the combination of Orv and Stef in the same house very often.
One perk of becoming an Oberlin trustee was that it gave Harry and me a readymade excuse to be by ourselves from time to time, without giving Orv reason to worry. Of course, that was long before Little Brother knew there was anything to be worried about. I was still in the dark about Harry’s intentions myself—not that he was trying awfully hard to keep them secret. At the trustees’ meeting that November, for instance, I was talking on the telephone at the Park Hotel one morning when he and Professor Stetson unexpectedly came into the lobby. I can’t think why I hadn’t told Harry about the meeting—maybe I had—but anyway I was surprised to see him. I was even more surprised when he admitted that he had planned to come to Oberlin to visit his mother at precisely the time when he knew I would be there. That was just the last straw!
Then there was the time when Orv sat next to Harry’s sister at lunch. We were all Mr. Stetson’s guests at the Faculty Club, and Mary Haskell told my brother that I reminded her of Harry’s favorite cousin—the one who unwittingly did me a favor years ago by insisting that Harry must on no account become a missionary—more than any lady she knew. I took that as a high compliment coming from Mary, who is a missionary herself. What I didn’t realize was that Harry and Mr. Stetson were in cahoots—or that I was the innocent prey they were pursuing! Harry says he owes more to the Prof than to any other person for starting him to thinking while he was at college. I guess I owe the Prof a debt of my own—for helping steer Harry through the labyrinth of the female heart!
Mr. Stetson calls me the “lady trustee” and likes to pretend I intimidate him—ha! We know each other too well to have any illusions on that score. I may look fierce sometimes, but I’m meek enough at heart. In point of fact, the Prof is one of the most perceptive people I know. He told me some lovely things about Harry’s work in Kansas City in the years when I didn’t have any contact with him. I suppose it was inevitable that my casual friendship with the Prof would set tongues wagging in a small town like Oberlin. From what I hear, Mary was responsible for spreading the rumor that Harry and Mr. Stetson were “after the same girl.” Can you beat that? “So you see,” I said to my future husband, “your little sister isn’t so innocent and unsuspecting as you thought!”
Orville
I confess I had my suspicions about Stef even before the Wrangel Island business blew up in our faces in the fall of ’23. Up to then I had done my best to be agreeable, knowing how attached he and Kate were to each other. But the news reports of the incident left me no alternative. Kate showed me a letter that Harry had sent her from London, and I was glad to see that he sized Stef up in just about the same way I had come to think of him—as someone who sincerely believed that he was a special pet of the gods. Even Kate had to admit that his conduct toward me in that matter showed that he was not to be trusted.
Things had looked very different two years earlier, when Stef launched his first expedition to the island. In those days he could do no wrong in our eyes. He impressed both Kate and me as a romantic adventurer straight out of the pages of Robinson Crusoe. And Wrangel was his very own Island of Despair. Nobody could have been more taken aback than I was when Stef announced his intention to colonize it in the name of King George. The ship’s crew was ludicrously small—three American sailors and one Canadian, plus an Eskimo cook—and they were woefully unprepared for the harsh conditions they encountered above the Arctic Circle. A year later, when it proved necessary to send fresh supplies, I loaned Stef three thousand dollars to outfit a relief ship. But ice prevented the Teddy Bear from getting through to the island, and no further attempt was possible until 1923.
That summer, while Kate and I were at the bay, Griff Brewer decided to raise money for a second expedition through a public subscription in England. Imagine my surprise when I learned that the biggest contributor to the Wrangel Island Relief Fund was the British Wright Company. The board of directors had blithely voted to give my money away and notified me after the deed was done. Both Griff and Stef betrayed my trust in the most inexcusable fashion. But their underhanded scheming came to naught. By the time the second relief ship reached the island, the white men were all dead. Only the Eskimo cook and her cat had survived. A few months later, a Russian crew arrived and planted the Soviet flag on the island. In the end, those men’s lives had been sacrificed for no nobler cause than to feed Stef’s insatiable ambition.
It goes without saying that I wanted nothing more to do with the man after that. But Stef was still Kate’s friend, and I couldn’t very well not invite him to Dayton for the twentieth anniversary of the first flight. He and Mr. Akeley came from New York for the ceremony at the National Cash Register Hall. Stef was one of the featured speakers, following Governor Cox. The poor governor was so anxious to do well that he did his very worst. He didn’t get any of his facts straight but soared and soared into the stratosphere until at last he ran out of steam and sat down. After that sorry performance, it was a relief to listen to a scientist who actually knew what he was talking about. The gist of Stef’s remarks was that Will and I had made the world round a second time because the aeroplane can go east or west right over the poles. He said people had grown accustomed to thinking of the world as a cylinder and not as a sphere.
Stef is a splendid talker, but actions speak louder than words. When he returned to Dayton after Christmas, I read him the riot act. He actually had the good cheek to tell Katharine he was glad in a way that the Teddy Bear had not gotten through the ice in 1922, because the Canadian government had not yet taken responsibility for occupying Wrangel Island. Kate reminded him that in his letter asking me for money, he had emphasized that lives might be at stake. That embarrassed him for once! Yet even then Stef continued to defend everything he had done. From his point of view, his schemes were so important for the advancement of science that he was justified in carrying them out at all costs. I was more than ever convinced that Kate was unwise to trust Stef a bit. Either he lacked conscience or he simply had different ideas of right and wrong from ours.
I was still reeling from Stef’s behavior when I discovered that Griff—of all people—had gone back on me in an unbelievable way in connection with the sale of British Wright. As he well knew, I was anxious to wind up the company’s affairs and prevent anybody from peddling our patents in Belgium and Italy. British Wright had already lost thirty-five thousand dollars over the past five years. Griff actually expected to use up all the remaining funds—between twenty-five and thirty thousand, half of which was rightfully mine—on his own salary and expenses. He was planning to travel to Alaska to make sure that the one surviving white man and the ten or twelve Eskimos still stranded on Wrangel Island in the wake of the various relief expeditions could return to the mainland, if they wanted to. As Kate observed, between enjoying grandstand plays and liking to travel, Griff’s “duty” would have been very clear to him and very expensive to us.
By a stroke of sheer luck, the deal for British Wright fell through at the eleventh hour, so Griff was beaten at his own little trick. Swes and I even wound up getting more than seventeen thousand dollars out of the company. We had been prepared for years to have that all used up by Griff, and it would have gone that way without protest on my part if he hadn’t gone a little too far in contributing my money to Stef’s plans without my knowledge. The whole business left me sick to the stomach. I arranged to have the sale of my stock in the company taken care of through the bank. I knew it would hurt Griff’s feelings, but I was in no mood to let him handle any more of my affairs.
Still, I never can stay mad at Griff for long, not after everything he has done for us—not least making the arrangements for sending the flyer to London. I had about reached t
he end of my rope with the Smithsonian when he came up with his proposal, and I jumped at it. In fact, I was all ready to start reassembling the machine for shipment when, as luck would have it, my back gave out again. Something seemed to snap while I was bending over the washbowl in the bathroom, and I realized too late that I had neglected to put on my supporting belt. The ensuing attack of sciatica put me out of commission for weeks. It was more than a year before I had the strength to get back to work on the flyer—and another four years before it finally went on display at the Science Museum. Five years! Why, it didn’t take Will and me that long to invent the confounded machine in the first place.
Katharine
Between Orv’s busted back, Harry’s loneliness, and getting my feet on the ground as an Oberlin trustee, I had my work cut out for me in the early months of 1924. At least I could make Bubbo’s life easier by doing things around the house, even if I was a miserable failure at making progress on the book. But Harry was so far away—and so very, very vulnerable. I knew all about the things he found so dark and forbidding when he returned to Kansas City as a widower. I loved him for that—for all the loyalty and devotion, and for all the heartaches too. Will’s death had affected me the same way. A kind of numbness came over me, and I was unable to sleep for weeks on end, until at last I got so worn down that the doctor had to be called in. And later turning my back on Orv and all my Dayton friends—oh yes, I know what it’s like to feel alone and bereft!
It comforted me to know that young Henry would be spending the summer at home with his father. They have always been the best of friends. But Henry was planning to go abroad in the fall for a year of postgraduate study, and I dreaded it so for Harry. He would need companionship more than ever when his only child was gone. I bucked myself up with the thought that writing an account of his travels in Europe on his sabbatical would keep him from brooding on his troubles. I told him that we sorely need a book or two, now and then, that has some sensible, unaffected ideas. That cheap bunch of New York “intellectuals” that I fear Harry admires somewhat are so far beneath what he has always been that there is no comparison to be made.
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