Maiden Flight (20 page)

First Will, then Reuch, and now Swes. Three of us gone before their times, and two left to tell the tale. Would I have done what I did if I had known Kate was going to die so soon? I guess I'll never know. In hindsight, that letter from Harry's sister should have tipped me off. He had written to her before Christmas to say that Swes was in bed with the flu and a 103-degree temperature. Mary Haskell was quite upset, understandably, but there was more behind her letter than that. I have a notion that Kate's illness gave her an excuse to ask me for something. She seemed to want me to grant Harry a kind of absolution. Here, let me read the letter and you can judge for yourself:

“I may be all wrong,” Mary writes, “but I kept on wondering—You see when I have written to ask Harry whether he was forgiven for taking away Katharine, he did not answer, and I did not repeat the question, only wondered. When Harry called me to Kansas City in '26 to tell me of this prospect, I thought I had never seen him so happy—the only sorrow being that his gain was your loss.
But he said, ‘Katharine will just have to commute between Dayton and Kansas City.' He also remarked, ‘Of course, Katharine's being sorry for me has much to do with her marrying me.'

“Before our Mother died we spoke together of the possibility of that marriage and Mother said, ‘She will never leave her brother!' But you see it is true that Harry was more alone than almost any man, because all the rest of the family were missionaries and our interests became so far apart—and our sympathies. Perhaps dear Katharine reasoned it out that if she married Harry she could spend lots of time in Dayton and so make you both happy, but of course if she were not married, she couldn't go freely to Kansas City and so couldn't help Harry much.

“Is not love blind sometimes in its reasoning? I felt dreadfully about the dilemma myself, but then I concluded that Harry too is a human being, and if God had pity on him in giving Katharine this love to him, would not the great Father in some way make up the loss to her brother—even tho it be to show him the difference between the finite and the infinite?”

Mary meant well, I expect, but she jumped to the wrong conclusion. She assumed my quarrel was with her brother and not with Kate. Harry is a good man, an honorable man. Anyone could see how broken up he was when his first wife passed away. God knows he is entitled to all the happiness he can find in this vale of tears. But I know of no law of man or nature that says his loneliness as a widower should rightfully take precedence over mine as a brother. Family comes first with the Wrights. That is why I never married. That is why I can never forgive Kate for leaving me. And that is why I had no choice but to shut the door behind her and get on with my own life.

Mary's letter was an omen. No sooner had I gotten back from Washington at the end of February than Lorin came over with the
news that Swes had contracted pneumonia and her life was in danger. I knew then and there that I would have to swallow my pride and go to Kansas City. In fact, I went out and bought my train ticket that very day. Lorin pressed me to come with him immediately on the overnight train, but I froze up. I couldn't seem to make myself do what I knew had to be done sooner or later. Finally Lorin said nobody in the family would ever speak to me again if I didn't go to Kate's bedside, the way she came to mine after the accident at Fort Myer. That was no idle threat, you can be sure. I packed my bag and wired Harry to expect me the next afternoon.

By the time I arrived at the house, the death watch had already begun. There was nothing the doctor could do except keep Kate sedated and comfortable. And there was nothing any of the rest of us could do—Lorin and I, Harry and his boy—except gather around her bed and wait quietly for the end. Swes woke up for a moment or two before she died and recognized me, or so Harry said. Perhaps he was just being kind—that would be like him. Only then did it hit me that Kate and I never said good-bye.

We returned on February 13 from my operation at the Mayo Clinic and were planning a trip abroad for my recuperation. Katharine had a cold but had recovered and had started out shopping for her clothes. On Thursday, February 21, we engaged passage on the
Roma
sailing the ninth of March. On Friday morning, she had a severe chill without any warning—no cold, no head symptoms, no cough. I had her go to bed at once and sent for a doctor and nurse. Her temperature shot to 104 that day. Dr. Bohan
suspected pneumonia, but could detect none of the characteristic symptoms—no coughing, shortness of breath, or pain in the chest.

Monday he was able with the stethoscope to get the localization of pneumonia in the bottom of the right lung. But she began Sunday night having chills, and Dr. Bohan told me he was disturbed because that indicated complications and infection outside the lung. Tuesday she almost collapsed, and we were thoroughly alarmed. After that she was out of her head most of the time and didn't realize how sick she was.

By Friday the pneumonia was clearing up. But the infection had entered the blood stream, and it was a general infection that overwhelmed her. That morning, though still irrational, she asked for Lorin, and I called him immediately on long distance. He arrived Saturday morning. Friday afternoon a telegram from Orville said he would arrive Saturday afternoon. When Lorin came we were able to rouse her for a moment. She smiled and said, “Why, it's Phiz,” and then drifted off. When Orville arrived she was still weaker. I asked her if she knew him, and finally she aroused and said, “Of course I do.” But that was all. She was unconscious until her death Sunday evening.

Bishop Spencer of Grace and Holy Trinity Cathedral conducted the Episcopalian service at the house on Monday afternoon, and we all left for Dayton that night. I felt that as Katharine had so long been identified with Dayton, she would like to be buried there. The funeral took place at Orville's on Wednesday. President Wilkins of Oberlin and Professor Stetson were there, as were various members of the Wright family, several of Katharine's old college friends, and the McCormicks. So she finally was reunited with her loved ones. The homecoming came too late, but Katharine would have enjoyed it, I feel.

Orville was cordial and sympathetic toward me and invited me to visit him. Before I left Dayton, he told me that Katharine had died
for him three years earlier and that he had gone to Kansas City on my account, not hers. But I think he deceived himself. Obviously, he did not go on my account. He went because he could not bear not to—and his action is more significant than his own explanation of it. As I see it, in going to Kansas City he finally admitted defeat in one of the important attitudes of his life. His attitude had changed; he had been obliged under the tragic event to abandon his fixed position. So while he insists that he was not defeated, the facts are against him.

It is still hard to realize what has happened. But in accepting life we accept its dangers, and the only thing to do is to go on and do the best we can. I believe Katharine had two interesting and happy years in Kansas City. They were wonderful years for me. We had the same interests and tastes, and our home life was perfect. She was the most vital, radiant spirit I ever knew. Now she rests where she belongs, beside
her father and mother and brother in the city she left under such unhappy circumstances. “Home is the sailor, home from the sea, and the hunter home from the hill.”

In the end Sterchens did come home, though not in the way either of us would have wished. Harry and I escorted her body from Kansas City on the train, and she was buried the next day on top of the hill in Woodland Cemetery, between Will and the plot I've set aside for myself. Phil Porter, the rector of Christ Episcopal Church, conducted the service. The house was filled with floral tributes—that would have pleased Kate, with her love of flowers—and aeroplanes from Wright Field strewed roses over her grave as Reverend Porter read the last rites.

So many letters of condolence arrived over the next few weeks that I despaired of responding to each of them personally. It was easier to recite the conventional formula than to find words of my own: “Mr. Orville Wright acknowledges with grateful appreciation your kind expression of sympathy.” Until then, I don't think I fully realized how many friends Kate had all over the world. Old Colonel Lahm wrote from Paris that he “never heard any woman more generally spoken well of, by those who knew her.” The Oberlin trustees issued a citation praising her as “intelligent, devoted, unselfish, courageous, inspiring.” The Kate I knew and loved was all of those things, and more. Griff was his usual tactful self. “Don't worry to write,” he said. “I understand.” Does he really understand, I wonder? For that matter, do I?

Harry passed through Dayton again on his way home from Europe in June. He and Kate had planned to travel together, but in the event, young Henry took her place. Harry had bounced back from his surgery and seemed in good spirits. He had lunch with Lorin and dinner with me at Hawthorn Hill. I made it clear that he would be welcome here at any time. By a curious coincidence, I ran into Stef a few days later at the St. Louis convention of the Aeronautical Section of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. We had a good talk, and he seemed relieved to hear that, as far as I was concerned, there had never been any ice between us.

I often think back to the many times Harry and Stef stopped here, before I knew or even suspected anything about my sister's feelings for either of them. Life was a good deal less complicated in those days, or so it looks to me now. Of course, none of us can predict the paths our lives will take. I foolishly imagined that Kate and I were on a safe and steady course; the truth was we were flying straight into the eye of the storm. I have no one but myself to blame. Any man
who has piloted an aeroplane as often as I have ought to know that human nature is no less fickle and treacherous than Mother Nature.

My big mistake was to assume that Kate was in control of her actions and emotions. I've always thought I was in control of mine, but now I'm not so sure. I guess Kate had to do what she had to do, the same as I did. Neither of us was wholly the master of his own fate. As a man of science, I have been guided all my life by the laws of physics. The phenomena I deal with in my work are measurable and predictable. In the laboratory I can set the parameters of an experiment and compute the results with a high degree of confidence. But if I have learned one thing over the years, it's that life contains too many variables for us to be absolutely certain about anything. In the last analysis, there is no accounting for the human factor. It is always easier to deal with things than with men, and no one can direct his life entirely as he would choose.

 

Orville Wright lived quietly in retirement at Hawthorn Hill for nearly two decades after Katharine's death. His housekeeper, Carrie Kayler Grumbach, and his secretary, Mabel Beck, continued to serve him faithfully. Family members say he never spoke of his sister, though he did refer to her on at least one occasion: in a letter written toward the end of his life, he once again denied that she had played any role in the invention of the airplane. Not for many years would the “Wright sister's” crucial contribution to her brothers' work, and to Orville's well-being, come to be widely recognized.

On October 24, 1942, the Smithsonian Institution published a brochure entitled
The 1914 Tests of the Langley Aerodrome
. The document amounted to an official retraction of and apology for the Smithsonian's longstanding insistence on the precedence of
Samuel Langley's ill-fated flying machine. Although he had finally been vindicated, the surviving Wright brother characteristically refused to gloat. In late 1948, eleven months after his death of a heart attack, the original Wright flyer was finally repatriated from London, in accordance with Orville's wishes. Today it occupies a place of honor in the Smithsonian's Air and Space Museum.

Harry Haskell sailed for Europe with his son in April 1929. Two years later, on a trip to Italy with his third wife, he commissioned a copy of a bronze statue by Andrea del Verrocchio for a fountain that he intended to donate to Oberlin College in Katharine Wright Haskell's memory. Depicting an angel boy cavorting with a dolphin, it graces the entrance to what is now the Allen Memorial Art Museum. Every year on Katharine's birthday Harry sent money for flowers to be placed on her grave, and every year on the anniversary of her death he reread her love letters.

In his remaining years, Harry wrote two books on Roman history and won two Pulitzer Prizes for his editorials in the
Kansas City Star
. He stayed in touch with Orville and with younger members of the Wright clan, to whom he was fondly known as Uncle Harry. In 1948 the family asked him to write a book based on the brothers' scientific papers, but he reluctantly declined, pleading poor health. “I have a feeling that Katharine would have liked me to do it if I could,” he wrote. “She was so proud of Wilbur and Orville and of their great achievements.”

Harry Haskell died in 1952.
The Papers of Wilbur and Orville Wright
, a definitive record of the brothers' scientific work, appeared the following year under the editorship of Marvin W. MacFarland. Orville never got around to writing his own book about the invention of the airplane.

Harry, how can I tell where affection leaves off and love begins? I haven't thought [about] your loving me or my loving you until you overwhelm me. Give me a little chance,
please
, and let me talk to you. I don't
know
you, as you are now. I don't see that I could ever leave Orv but let me talk to you. It just
breaks my heart
to have you send such a telegram. “It's all right. Please don't worry” etc. Of course it
isn't
all right and, of course, I
will
worry. So I have sent you an answer and asked you to come—but I don't know myself to
what
I have asked you to come. Don't come if you will be more upset that way. Please, Harry, don't care so much—and please
do
! (Katharine Wright to Harry Haskell, June 15, 1925)

I have been thumping off letters for brother [Orville] till I am black and blue in the face. We are hopelessly swamped with correspondence. What do you do with your letters? I am beginning to get interested in getting the letters out of the way 'cause Sister is thinking about hanging onto brother's coat-tails when he starts for “Yurp.” In fact I made a visit to the dressmaker's today, prospecting a little. I suppose I shall have to have one good dress but I can't
go your pace on social functions. (Katharine Wright to Wilbur Wright, December 7, 1908)

I haven't done a lick of work since I have been here. I have to give my time to answering the ten thousand fool questions people ask about the machine. There are a number of people standing about the whole day long. . . . I find it more pleasant here at the Club than I expected. The trouble here is that you can't find a minute to be alone. . . . I have trouble in getting enough sleep. (Orville Wright to Katharine Wright, August 27, 1908)

The water covered over half the city. At our Third Street office the water was about ten to twelve feet deep in the street, but did not quite reach the second floor. On
Hawthorn Street it was about eight or nine feet deep and stood six feet on the first floor. Most of the things downstairs were ruined. We saved a few of our books and several small pieces of furniture. We might have saved almost everything had we had more notice, but Katharine and I overslept that morning and had to be out of the house within one half hour of the time we were up. (Orville Wright to Griffith Brewer, April 22, 1913)

Since I got back from Lambert I have felt my handicap in not having Dr. Dick's [a mutual friend in Kansas City] gift for description. If I had, Kansas City would know by this time that we went out sailing in a launch with an aviation motor so powerful that occasionally the boat left the water and took to the air, skimming over the tops of the islands. Ah, them were the days! I hope your busted back isn't going to keep you and Katharine from making that Western voyage this fall. (Harry Haskell to Orville Wright, September 25, 1925)

When I went to D[ayton] last June, do you remember I told you I wanted to help you find out what was in your heart. I haven't changed since and I couldn't possibly ask you to do what you thought you shouldn't. You know that you don't have to decide right away. There is plenty of time to think it over. I know your feeling for Orv, dear. If you finally decide you can't leave him—even for the part of the time I have talked about, it will be all right dear. I'll do my best. I love you, K whatever happens. (Harry Haskell to Katharine Wright, undated telegram)