In short, there was Orv on one side, to whom I owed a great obligation, and there was Harry on the other side, to whom I would owe a greater one if I said or did anything to make him care more for me. I was trying so hard to love him and be a friend at the same time. It nearly broke my heart to have him thank me for my “goodness through it all.” Oh, what an idea!
Harry spoke about our not being young and romantic anymore, but if I were expressing my honest opinion, I’d say we were acting like a pair of headstrong children instead of mature middle-aged folk. To be precise, he was acting like an impetuous twenty-year-old—and I was acting like a hopeless old maid! I hadn’t wanted to marry anyone since I broke up with my college beau. As I got older, I realized that the chance of making even a reasonable success of marriage grew more and more unlikely. But I couldn’t get along with a merely reasonable success—my marriage had to be a very beautiful thing. One minute I was all my years and knew that no ideal can ever be realized; the next minute I had the feelings of a girl and believed that an ideal can be realized—but all the time experience came in to temper my dreams with reasonableness!
Of course, I can never be a girl again—and I’m glad of it. I’ve often thought how nice it is to be past youth and most—not all!—of the perplexities that go with it. It was interesting to be young and now it is interesting to be middle-aged, but really there is no comparison. For one thing, I couldn’t have had a friend—let alone a lover—like Harry when I was young. And I couldn’t have cared so much for him at Oberlin. I didn’t have it in me to love him back then as I love him now. I might have married him thirty-odd years ago if he had wanted me to, though. It would have been so much easier to think of marriage when we were young. Yet even then I was worried nearly sick over the thought of leaving the family without a woman to take care of the things that only a woman can look after very well.
I seemed to be on the verge of an explosion myself—and I had nobody to share it with, nobody to turn to or confide in. None of the family would have understood how I felt—Little Brother least of all. I couldn’t add to Harry’s disquiet, and yet I wanted to tell him so much more than I did. I couldn’t see which was worse—refusing to let him know how very, very dear his love was to me and letting him get over that as soon as possible; or admitting that his love did awaken something way back in my heart, which might come to be something neither of us could manage. I couldn’t see how I could go ahead with that—with the possibility of unendurable pain for us both.
I was just beside myself when Carrie brought in the special-delivery letter saying that Harry had postponed his trip. Such a time as I put in at the breakfast table that morning! Unless Orv is a good deal stupider than I think, he saw that something was wrong. Lies are always a mess. I believe you have to begin younger than we were to arrange for these secret meetings. I was just possessed to talk to Harry, but I didn’t want him to come in any but an open and aboveboard way. It happened that Orv had another trip planned the following week, so I wired Harry to come on Wednesday evening. Then he could stay until Friday and see Little Brother after he got back from Washington. We could never have lived through an evening and a day together with no chance to be by ourselves. Harry was so sweet about it. He said he would feel paid for coming if he could just be alone with me for three minutes so he could hold me close to him and kiss me.
A funny, smothery feeling comes over me when I think back to the night he arrived. It just poured while I was at the station waiting for him. The train was late, and Harry looked so strained when I picked him out in the crowd on the platform. And then I didn’t know what to do with him—any more than he knew what to do with me, I ’spect. But I couldn’t endure his having any more heartache. I was so afraid that anything I did would make the situation worse than it already was. My blessed, blessed boy! He had been so good and so brave and so unselfish and so hurt, and had found out he could have rest and comfort and peace if only I loved him. I was so anxious about him, and I didn’t want to mix up sympathy and love—and all the time I felt as if I couldn’t love anyone because of what it would mean to Orv.
One day, one short day, was all we had to ourselves. Harry was so dear, and I should have been happy—but for some curious reason it nearly broke my heart. My feelings were all jumbled up like a pile of pickup sticks. The last time I saw him, I hadn’t thought of anything more than our dear friendship. I couldn’t talk much about marrying him and living with him, even though I knew that was uppermost in his mind. I felt I would be to blame if I let him think of marriage unless I was sure I could satisfy that longing eventually. Finally, since I had no idea what to say, I just put my arms around him and let him see what he could in my face. I wanted to shut out all the perplexities and love him and have him love me. I couldn’t bear not to go all the way now that I knew he wanted it so much.
Orv got home Friday morning, and by lunchtime poor Harry was so wrung out that he had to lie down for a rest. It was just too bad to waste all that time before his train went. Why, oh why didn’t we talk more? So many things I wanted to tell him and have him tell me. All the dear things he said to me—and all I didn’t say to him—kept coming back to haunt me. I could see how hard it was for him too to go off in that way. He wanted, just as I did, to have one more chance to hold each other very, very close and forget everything else. How safe I felt in the circle of Harry’s arms! Some way his being there and the things that happened, the memories left with me and so on, had rather cut off the past and even the future. I’d be a pretty stupid companion if I were like that for very long!
After Harry left, I sank into another one of my black times. Everything worried me—Harry and all his problems, Orv and all his problems, myself and all my problems. I couldn’t sleep for days on end. It seemed to me the Smithsonian business was hopeless, that anything I could do would be wrong and would make someone unhappy, that I was nothing but a troublemaker and should have foreseen what my dear friendship with Harry was leading up to. It was plain enough that he had given the subject a great deal of thought! If Orv’s eyes had been sharp, he would have seen in the expression on Harry’s face when he said good-bye to me something different from anything he’d seen before.
Harry
My furtive visit to Dayton, while Katharine’s “little brother” was away on business, was meant to clear the air between us. Instead, the fog settled in thicker than ever. As much as I wanted to help Katharine find out what was in her heart, I couldn’t possibly ask her to do what she thought she shouldn’t do. The one thing I was burning to discuss—marriage—was the very subject she seemed determined to avoid at all costs. I tried reasoning with her. I argued that she had her own life to lead and that Orville wouldn’t have hesitated to leave her if he had taken it into his head to marry. But Katharine reasoned right back at me. She pointed out that Orville didn’t want to leave her and had planned their lives with a view to sharing everything with her. I departed in a deep funk, convinced that we had reached an impasse.
I did take away one small shred of consolation, however: Katharine and I would see each other again in a month’s time. She and Orville had invited me up to their summer “camp” on Georgian Bay in Canada. I had heard about Lambert Island for years and was curious to see the place that meant so much to them both. Katharine insisted on taking precautions to avoid arousing her brother’s suspicion. She urged me not to write too frequently in advance of my visit. It would be awkward, she said, if there were five letters waiting for her every time they called at the village post office. I was to avoid sending telegrams and address all my letters on the typewriter. And from time to time I was to write a chatty “business” letter that Katharine could share with Orville, to show him we had no secrets. To keep tongues back home from wagging, I was to put it out that I just happened to be coming near the bay on my way east. With luck, nobody would check the timetable and find out that there was only one train to and from Toronto each day.
At the appointed hour, Katharine and Orvill
e met me at the little station in Penetang and took me out to the island on their motor launch, a distance of some ten or twelve miles across open water. I recognized the compound immediately from the snapshots Katharine had sent me. We pulled up at the dock alongside the boathouse. The main dwelling with its inviting screened porch sat on top of the hill, with two smaller cottages and various outbuildings scattered among the rock outcroppings. All the buildings were painted the same light green and were unfinished inside. Orville had jury-rigged a pull cart, using old airplane tires, to haul luggage and other cargo up from the jetty. I had one cabin to myself, Orville slept in another, and Katharine had her bedroom just off the enclosed porch in the main house.
I’ll say one thing for the bay: it hasn’t been overadvertised. It is about the loveliest place I have ever seen. The Wrights made me feel at home straight away. They even had the daily Star delivered by mail. Orville had had the happy inspiration of decorating the cabins with works of art reproduced on the covers of our Sunday magazine. Twice a week we rode into Penetang to pick up supplies and letters. And each day we took the launch to a nearby island and brought back three quarts of fresh milk, which we bought off an Indian family. Orville wasn’t a milk drinker, so Katharine used his share to make cottage cheese. She insisted on serving my favorite breakfast of shredded wheat biscuit laced with fresh cream. Now that’s my idea of roughing it!
The Wrights led a quiet, simple life on the island. No “fancy togs” or other luxuries were permitted to spoil the rustic atmosphere. They both needed to put the workaday world behind them for a few weeks. Katharine asked me to bring the manuscript of a book I was working on, but we never got around to discussing it. In fact, we didn’t do much of anything that required mental or physical effort. Day after day we rocked on the porch, read our books and newspapers, foraged for wild blueberries, and bathed in the pure, ice-cold water of the bay. A few nights, after dinner, Orville brought out a deck of cards. The Bishop would have turned over in his grave to see his two well-brought-up children playing a spirited round of poker at the kitchen table. We placed bets with matchsticks and used regular poker language. None of the niceties of the polite bridge game for us.
Orville got special pleasure out of taking his guests on long boat rides to view the sunsets over the bay. I must have been a satisfactory audience, because Katharine said she never knew him to be so anxious to show anyone Go-Home River, Honey Harbor, and all the other places they liked. Orville’s launch had an aviation motor so powerful that the boat occasionally seemed to leave the water and take to the air, skimming over the tops of the islands. Every now and then the motor seemed to fall to pieces, but Orville would patiently dive in with some heavy wire and a pair of pliers, collect the pieces, put them together, crank up, and on we went. I never had had the opportunity before to watch a distinguished inventor at his relaxations. It was a fascinating experience.
It was just as Katharine had described: Orville is a completely different person up at the bay. I can still hear him singing in the distance as he tinkered away at one of his pet projects. He is constantly designing, building, or repairing one thing or another—Katharine says the natives think he is a little “touched” to work so hard when he doesn’t have to—and he prides himself on doing it all without special tools. His reconstruction of the water system at the compound to give a direct pressure line connected with the hose—to fight fire, as he said, or maybe just to amuse himself sprinkling water—was especially impressive. Ah, them were the days!
With so many agreeable distractions, it was easy to forget that no progress was being made in resolving Orville’s dispute with the Smithsonian. The label on the Langley machine still made the patently false claim that it was capable of flight. I was of the opinion that a congressional investigation would be a good deal of a farce. The influence of the Smithsonian was too pervasive. What was needed then, as it is now, was a detailed account by Orville of the state of aviation at the time he and Wilbur took it up, of their own laboratory work, and of the way they applied it in actual flight. Such a book would settle the matter once and for all. But he never will write it unless he has somebody cooperating with him to spur him on. I know it, Katharine knows it, and deep down Orville knows it too.
Orville
Once word got around of my decision to ship the flyer to England, my days of peace and quiet were numbered. You would have thought I was public enemy number one. What really got my goat was the way certain individuals who had not lifted a finger to defend me from the Smithsonian’s scurrilous attacks now had the cheek to accuse me of being selfish, shortsighted—even un-American, for pity’s sake. Senator Norris, for one, was furious at the prospect of the machine going out of the country. Earl Findley of the New York Times told him why I was doing as I was, and how all my dealings with Secretary Walcott had led nowhere, but even then he refused to back down. “That old man won’t always be there. He isn’t the Smithsonian Institution.” That’s easy for Norris to say—he isn’t in the Smithsonian’s line of fire.
Katharine and I had always planned to get up a good, fair, clear statement of the situation when the machine was ready to be sent. It would have recalled Will’s and my early experience with the government, the years of trouble because of government patronage of patent infringers, the years of endurance with the unfair treatment of the Smithsonian. We would have told how, in spite of early snubbing by the Ordnance Department and the chance to sell the machine abroad, always the US government was excepted, in every exclusive contract proposed; how we kept still about all the rest and hoped the matter would be cleared up when there was a chance to know the facts; and how, even now, the offer to the Science Museum in London is restricted so that if there is a change, the machine can come back where it belongs.
Now that Kate has taken herself out of the picture, I hardly see how that job will ever get done. There is no one else I can trust to do it right, no one else who knows the full story of what Will and I put up with all those years. Just think: it’s been a quarter of a century since we took the machine up at Kitty Hawk. The 1903 flyer is a piece of history now. I saved it from the flood and preserved it and patched it back together again—and all for what? So it could be put on display in a British museum! Two or three years ago, before Swes ran off and got married, I still had a sliver of hope. But I was worn to a frazzle after the long, hard fight. It seemed every time I turned around I bumped into a reporter asking for a comment or a politician lecturing me on my patriotic duty to keep the machine in the United States.
The twenty-fifth anniversary of the first flight is over and done with—and good riddance. I’ve had my fill of speeches and awards and parades and brass bands. All I crave now is to get away from it all. If it wasn’t the middle of winter, I’d shut up the house and head up to the bay tomorrow. A day on the island never fails to set the world to rights. Kate and I fell for the place the moment we laid eyes on it. Course, I saw right away that it would take a lot of work to make it as comfortable as it is now. Back then it was just a bunch of shacks sitting atop a barren rock out in the middle of nowhere. A Canadian gent had built the main cottage for his bride, but she took one look at their new home and hightailed it back to civilization. Kate, I’m glad to say, was made of sturdier stuff.
Scipio, our dear departed Saint Bernard, loved to splash around in the water and sun himself on the rocks. After Father and he died, Kate and I would stay up north for weeks at a spell with just ourselves for company. Visitors were welcome, so long as they were tolerably self-sufficient and not overly particular about the accommodations. Harry fit in nicely, I’ll say that for him. He was always good company—able and conscientious, with not a bit of conceit. I remember meeting him at the train in Penetang. He had come straight from Toronto and still had that nervous, jumpy look about him that people get when they’re in the big city. It took him a few days to fall into the rhythm of island life. Every day he looked a little more rested, and by the time he left he was fully restored. The bay h
as that effect on people.
Visitors or no visitors, Kate and I observed our daily routines. I had my chores and hobbies to keep me occupied, while she read, wrote letters, tidied the house, and fixed meals. In the long summer evenings, when the dusk lingers long past bedtime, we would sit on the porch with Harry and talk for hours, the way we used to do at Hawthorn Hill. I took him around in the motorboat to see our favorite spots—past Franceville, through the Freddy Channel, past Whalen’s store, the McKenzies and Williams places, and so on. We saw some beautiful sunsets out on the bay. Sunsets on the island remind me of the ones we used to have at Kitty Hawk. The clouds light up in all colors in the background, with deep blue clouds of various shapes fringed with gold.
Harry stayed with us two weeks, and not once during that time was the Smithsonian’s name so much as mentioned. We could hardly avoid reading reports of the controversy in the newspaper, but there was an unspoken agreement that no serpent would be allowed in to poison our island paradise. So we cheerfully put the unpleasantness out of our minds and got about our business. Kate and I generally went our separate ways at the bay, just as we did back home. Some days we hardly set eyes on each other from dawn to dusk, save for mealtimes. And Harry couldn’t have been easier to have around. For once, I was genuinely sorry to see one of our guests depart. He had begun to feel almost like a member of the family.
Katharine
It nearly made my heart stop beating to think of being with Harry at the bay. I wasn’t at all sure we could carry it through without letting Orv see any difference from the past. I had a dreadful time acting unconcerned and casual about his coming. At the last minute I had a crazy idea about not being able to invite him to the bay after all, but it was just the result of my supersensitiveness and guilty conscience. What can have been the matter with me that I blew around so like a weathercock? I was deathly afraid I was doing the wrong thing to let Harry come and to assume that I loved him. And I don’t know how I would have survived if he had repeated one of the off-color stories he picked up in Sinclair Lewis’s so-called Sunday school class in Kansas City. Little Brother never could appreciate that vulgar brand of humor!
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