Maiden Flight (11 page)

That first trip to the bay convinced me once and for all that Katharine and I were made for each other. Being together on the island seemed to light a special spark, like two pieces of kindling that blaze up together. Everything Katharine said and did—and everything she
didn't
say—told me in no uncertain terms that she felt the same way toward me as I did toward her. By the end of my stay I thought we had come to a mutual understanding about getting married. But she was still playing hard to get. It wasn't until I joked about suing her for breach of promise that she finally consented to an engagement. Even then, she insisted that I make her a proposal in writing!

Popping the question to my college sweetheart was a snap compared to the hoops Katharine made me jump through. Isabel and I were so young and innocent. My brother Ed had offered his fraternal advice about the rituals of courting and marriage, but to me the prospect of “going with” any girl seemed far off. Sometimes I actually dreaded it, for fear that the girl I fell in love with wouldn't care a jot for me. And what should I expect, I asked myself, when there were so many other boys who took class parties in stride, always knew the right way to act, and could talk with girls by the hour and never stop to take a breath? Upon surveying the field, I made an inventory of myself and concluded that I was lacking in most of those desirable qualities.

So I could hardly believe my luck when Isabel told me she loved me. We were both such kids when we got engaged at the beginning of my senior year—Ferdinand and Isabella, my sister used to call us. Mind you, Katharine has a point: we were all children in those
days. And yet one is only as old as one feels. To hear Katharine tell it, anyone would think she had at least four or five years on me. In fact, we are closer in age than Isabel and I were—less than six months apart. In some ways we have more in common than Isabel and I did too. Our backgrounds, experiences, and interests are remarkably compatible. If only I had had the wit to propose to her when we were at Oberlin. But I didn't, and it's no use crying over spilled milk.

Isabel and I were engaged four years before we got married. Katharine and I were in a hurry to make up for lost time and waited only one. But no year ever passed so agonizingly slowly. Katharine insisted on keeping our plans under wraps until she worked up the courage to talk to Orville. That was completely unrealistic, of course. It wasn't long before a number of our mutual friends saw through our charade. One day in the fall of 1925, after I got back from the island, Katharine had Anne McCormick to lunch at Hawthorn Hill. Anne surprised her by asking if she thought I would ever remarry. Before Katharine could think of a suitably diplomatic reply, Anne said, “I suppose you would really be sorry if he did.” To which all Katharine could think to say was “Um”!

In short, the cat had one paw out of the bag already, and the longer Katharine dillydallied about bringing Orville into the picture, the shorter the odds were that he would learn about our engagement from somebody else. Either way there was no telling how he would react. Katharine swore up and down that she would find an opportunity to talk to him in her own way and her own time. All I could do was to be patient.

After Harry departed that summer, the Deeds had us up to their camp near Hudson's Bay. Kate wasn't especially keen on the idea. She joked that the Deeds were so formal that they had to outfit on Fifth Avenue just to go up into the woods. But there was no way of wiggling out of the invitation gracefully. Besides, the Canbys were going to be at the camp too, and we always enjoyed Frank and Bertha's company. In the end, it turned out to be less of an ordeal than Kate feared. One morning she and I escaped, just the two of us, and paddled around Marshallito Island and up the creek to Muskrat Lake. There was nary a sound but the note of a bird, rarely, and the dip of the paddles. It was a beautiful day, clear and crisp and warm in the sun. That excursion alone made the trip worthwhile.

The Deeds were such gracious hosts that we felt almost ashamed to be so eager to get back to our humble abode on Lambert Island. From their camp to the nearest railroad depot was a journey of two days by canoe. The first part passed without incident, but as we were leaving the last portage, I hurt my back while trying to pull up a small fir tree to bring home with us. The pain was so intense that the Canbys had to practically carry me back to the cabin. All night I lay flat on my back, unable to move, and next morning I could hardly dress myself without help. Fortunately, Frank had brought a small pneumatic mattress that made the train ride bearable. By the time we got to Toronto, I was able to walk the couple of blocks to the Queen's Hotel for breakfast, using Kate as a crutch.

It was thanks to her we had another little adventure on the way home from the bay in September. George France had ferried us to Penetang in his dory. We arrived ten minutes before the train was due to depart, but for reasons best known to herself, Swes insisted on collecting the mail. She appealed to the stationmaster, who promised not to let the train leave without us. He hailed the express man with a horse and wagon, Kate hopped in, and they went galloping up the street to the PO. I watched in amazement as she jumped out over the wheel, rushed in to get her armful of mail, jumped in over the wheel, and back down the street they came dashing again—in the nick of time to catch the train. It was a most ridiculous performance, a
sort of wild John Gilpin ride, but everyone had a good deal of fun out of it, Kate most of all.

The house felt mighty good to come home to that time, with a nice, warm bed to sleep in, a needle shower to soothe my aching back, and my special reading chair to relax in. The first night Kate and I sat up in the library, catching up on the news and talking over some items that had come in my mail. Kate had a thick pile of her own correspondence to deal with. As a rule she preferred to type her letters on the Hammond machine I gave her for Christmas a few years back. But lately she had taken to staying up after I switched off the light, writing letters in longhand at the desk in her room. One evening that fall I found her studying some drawings of Harry's house that the postman had brought. A few days after that an album of photographs came from Kansas City.

She and Harry were as thick as thieves, and I—I was as thick as a plank!

Our wedding day may have been put off indefinitely, but that didn't keep me from fantasizing about living in Harry's house and imagining how it would be when I was its mistress. After Orv and I got back from the bay that summer, I asked Harry to draw me a rough sketch of the layout of the two main floors, so I could start to plan a little. Later he sent some snapshots of the inside that young Henry had taken. I needed to refresh my memory because it had been some time since Orv and I had seen the house when we went out to Kansas City for Isabel's funeral. I had forgotten about the dry stone wall that encircles the property, like a pretty New England homestead. In my mind's eye I was already laying out a little flower garden in the backyard, beneath the library window. Cut flowers for the table are one of my extravagances!

Some way flowers always put me in mind of Mother. Pop and I used to plant flowers at her grave in Woodland Cemetery, and I made a pressed-flower album in her memory. Come to think of it, I must have been working on that very album the first time I visited Kansas City, when I went out to help Reuch and Lulu make ready for their first baby. I was still a child myself. Ever since I can remember I have been playing nursemaid to
somebody
. If it wasn't Lou, it was one of the children, or Mother and Father, or Will and Orv. It seems to be my calling in life! Everyone expected me to drop everything and rush home from Oberlin when Little Brother had his typhoid attack, same as they expected me to quit my teaching job and run off to Europe with the boys. And what thanks have I ever gotten for my pains? The more you do for a family, the more they take as a matter of course.

If only Orv didn't hate so to be read aloud to—it would have made it ever so much easier for me to work up a proper bedside manner. That's one thing Harry and I never tire of, reading to each other. Luckily,
our tastes in literature run pretty much along the same lines—always excepting that insufferable smarty-pants Mr. H. L. Mencken. I can't fathom why Harry considers him such hot stuff. If you want my honest opinion, he's the worst go-getter imaginable. It's a queer thing—Orv and I see eye to eye on practically everything under the sun, but when it comes to books and reading and such, we might as well live on different planets. Sometimes I think Little Brother's idea of romance comes straight out of the pages of Booth Tarkington's
Seventeen—
and mine, I daresay, comes from
Middle Aged Love Stories
by Miss Josephine Bacon!

Dear, sweet Orv—he was utterly oblivious to my feelings for Harry. How blind he was, so unsuspicious of us both. Surely it must have been obvious. Are all men so unobservant? Perhaps they are. After all, it was easy enough to keep my college romance with Arthur Cunningham a secret from the family. And no one was the wiser the time Pop's friend, the elderly temperance preacher, made a pass at me in our parlor on Hawthorn Street. I was so innocent about being friendly, and he was terribly bright and interesting. The first thing I knew he was altogether
too
interested in me. I ought to have kept him from coming out, but I let things drift on until I finally came to my senses and sent him back to his hotel. I swore that was the last time I would ever let myself get wound up with a married man!

Will always said how glad he was that I was on hand to keep an eye on the young ladies who fluttered around Orv like butterflies wherever he went. Bubbo would have been quite a catch in his
salad days. Now that I'm safely out of the way, I can easily imagine that some older woman has had ideas about him. But I guess he can look after himself well enough if it comes to that. Little Brother has a positive phobia where most members of my sect are concerned. He can be perfectly charming and talk a mile a minute in mixed company—but put him alone in a room with a woman and he clams up as tight as Silent Cal!

Barring Kate's sudden addiction to secretiveness, our lives that fall went on much as before. In October I was called to Washington to testify before the president's Aircraft Board, and Mr. and Mrs. Coolidge invited us to luncheon at the White House. At the appointed hour, we and four other guests were ushered into their private dining room. True to form, the president said very little at lunch, though he was sociable enough. He asked me a few questions, Kate made two or three innocuous remarks, and that was that. After the meal we retired upstairs, the men to the library and the women to the drawing room. Almost as soon as we sat down, Mr. Coolidge jumped up, announced that he was going to the baseball game, and excused himself. The rest of us took the hint and called for our coats.

To my disappointment, if not my surprise, Mr. Coolidge showed no more inclination than Chief Justice Taft to take on the powers that be at the Smithsonian. Nor did he rise to the bait at the Gridiron Club dinner that fall, when the newspapermen put on their little skit about the flyer being snatched up by a foreign museum. The leaders in the House, both Republican and
Democrat, came up to me afterward and offered to help, but I asked them not to do anything in Congress without letting me know. If there was going to be a showdown with the Smithsonian, I would have to furnish the ammunition, and I didn't want the thing stirred up in some half-prepared way. I already had my hands full setting up the 1903 machine so it would look the way it did originally when it finally went to England.

It was the
Star
's Washington reporter, Roy Roberts, who brought me to the Gridiron shindig. I suspect he wangled the invitation to the White House as well. As Harry was unable attend the correspondents' dinner, I was obliged to listen to my host sing his praises all evening long—how he was the best friend Mr. Roberts had, how everyone liked him around the office, how he was able get the essential points out of any subject, and so forth and so on. Mr. Roberts regretted that Harry could not be “down east” more, mixing with the people who were “running things.” I refrained from observing that one reason Kate and I liked and trusted Harry was that he
didn't
put himself forward and get mixed up with the politicians and opinion makers, the way most reporters do.

We had become so accustomed by that time to seeing Harry pop up every few months that I didn't bat an eye when he showed up in Dayton at the end of the year. Swes made out that he was “just passing through” on his way home after spending the Christmas holiday with his sister in Cleveland. We had a pleasant visit and saw him off to Kansas City a few days later. I still find it hard to believe that he and Katharine were plotting and scheming behind my back the whole time—after all the three of us had been through together. If you ask me, that sister of mine has a lot to answer for. I honestly believe that Harry and I would still be close friends if
she hadn't come between us—and if he hadn't come between me and Swes.

I told the men at the office that I would be spending Christmas with Mary that year. For once it was unnecessary to invent a cover story. I suppose there was some risk involved in showing up in Cleveland on Christmas Eve without giving my sister more than a few days' notice. But I counted on Mary being so happy to see me that she wouldn't ask too many awkward questions. In any case, my interest in Katharine was no secret to her. What I didn't realize at the time was that Mary had actually discussed the prospect of our getting married with Mother before she died. It seems she divined my intentions more than a year before they revealed themselves to me.

I arrived at Hawthorn Hill the afternoon of Christmas Day. I had sent Katharine her package in advance so that it wouldn't look as if I had planned all along to present it in person. She took some leftover turkey out of the oven and the three of us sat down to a late supper in the kitchen. Afterward we moved into the library to open our gifts. It was the first time in more than thirty years that Katharine and I had exchanged Christmas presents, and I had my work cut out not to show my state of mind to Orville. Katharine created a smokescreen by reminiscing about the copy of Thomas à Kempis's
Imitation of Christ
that she had given me at Oberlin
.
She said she chose it because my missionary people were all so far away and she thought I might be lonely. And all the while I was thinking that with any luck I wouldn't be lonely much longer.

The Wrights put me in my usual room at the end of the hallway, across from the “blue room” where Katharine and I liked to hold what the young people call petting parties. That first night, after Orville was safely in bed, we tiptoed back downstairs and sat up for a long while talking—and doing “other things,” as Katharine says. She plied me with questions and ideas about redecorating the house in Kansas City. She even asked for an inventory of the furnishings in every room so we could get the wallpapering done and new rugs ordered before she moved in. There was just one hitch: she still couldn't, or wouldn't, say when she would be ready to move.

When I came to Dayton that Christmas, I expected we would announce our engagement to Orville together. It had been several months since I proposed, and it didn't feel right to keep her brother in the dark about our plans much longer. But Katharine had her own ideas. She said she wanted to feel happy about my visit and preferred to wait to break the news after I was gone. If I had known that months later I would still be waiting for her to make up her mind to leave Orville, I might have taken a firmer line. But it went against the grain with me to push her. I cared for her too much to let her go ahead with the wedding against her better judgment and just because she had said she would. There wouldn't have been happiness for either of us in that.

So I assured Katharine that there was plenty of time to think it over. If she finally decided she couldn't leave her brother, even for the part of each year we had talked about, I would do my best to live with it. After all, I could hardly ask less of myself than I was asking of Orville. All the same, I believe Mr. Stetson got it about right when he said that Katharine's making herself indispensable to
her brother was partly a game, a way of making herself feel useful. Deep down, he told me, she knows that Orville could dispense with all that indispensability. She could dispense with it too—or perhaps not. Sometimes I wonder if Katharine doesn't need Orville even more than he needs her, to give her a sense of doing vital work.

What a tangled web we had woven for ourselves. Orville could have brushed it away in an instant if he had chosen to. He could have taken the high road and said, “I don't want to be the occasion of one of these fine martyring devotions,” and wished his sister well in her new life. Unfortunately for all of us, he had come to depend on Katharine's unstinting devotion, and she seemed bound and determined to play the martyr.