Maiden Flight (5 page)

Isabel slipped away so quietly that we hardly knew she had left us. Shortly before she drew her final breath, I leaned over her pillow and she whispered in my ear, “Father”—we always called each other Mother and Father—“Father, you've been the dearest husband in the world. It's been wonderful, all of it.” That was all. Her courage and cheerfulness put me to shame.

After her years of suffering, Isabel's peaceful death came as a blessed release. But the idea of staying on in the house that we had planned and saved for and built together was almost unbearable to me. It had been hard enough when Henry went away to college and I could scarcely bring myself to look into his old room. Without Isabel's warmth and gaiety, the whole house felt empty and barren. I had a good mind to lock the door behind me, move into an apartment hotel, and start a new life.

The Wrights saw me at my worst when they came to Kansas City for the funeral. And when I passed through Dayton a couple of weeks later, I must have looked as low as I felt, judging from Katharine's solicitude on that occasion. The
Star
's owners had generously insisted on my taking a sabbatical at their expense. Reluctant as I was to travel alone, I did look forward to exploring Europe at my own pace, with no fixed itinerary and no obligations beyond filing an occasional piece for the paper. I was glad to find that Orville's spirits were on the mend as well. He was weighing a proposal to loan the original Wright flyer to the Science Museum in London. Griff Brewer, the Wrights' longtime patent agent in England, had come up with the plan. It appealed to us all as a way out of the standoff with the Smithsonian.

First thing upon arriving in London, I arranged to meet Griff and tour the museum in South Kensington. I had a notion that I could make myself useful by giving Orville a firsthand report on the aeronautical section. My impressions were mixed, and I told him so. Apart from a handful of life-size exhibits—the Rolls Royce plane that crossed the Atlantic, the Chanute glider, and another glider similar to the one Otto Lilienthal had been using when he was killed—all the planes on display, including the Wright flyer, were small-scale replicas. Moreover, the museum catalog mentioned the Wright plane merely as one in a succession, which was right enough but gave no idea of its real significance. Evidently, the Smithsonian wasn't alone in undervaluing the Wright brothers' magnificent achievement.

Katharine and Orville hadn't been abroad since before the war, but they still had many friends in Europe. Practically every city I visited, from London to Berlin, seemed to have an association with the Wrights. The Germans had given them a royal welcome a decade earlier. Reports of Orville's demonstration flights for Kaiser Wilhelm and Katharine's forthright Yankee charm had filled the newspapers for weeks on end. That world, I quickly discovered, had vanished beyond recall. The once-mighty Reich was on its knees in 1923, its economy in shambles. In Düsseldorf I bought a single sheet of letter paper to write to Katharine. My jaw dropped when the clerk told me the price: one hundred billion marks! I shut my eyes and counted out the bills until he told me to stop. Runaway inflation made it impossible to predict how much anything would cost from one day to the next. The entire country felt like an insane asylum.

I breathed a sigh of relief when my train from Munich crossed over the Austrian Alps into Italy. Mussolini's Fascists had restored at least a semblance of order after the war. An old friend of Katharine's and mine, Louis Lord, was spending a year at the American Academy in Rome. Louis teaches classics at Oberlin and knows the Eternal City as well as any man alive. He must have shown me every sight there is to see, down to the last temple, triumphal arch, and aqueduct. But we spent as much time discussing Katharine as Roman antiquities. Louis had heard through the grapevine
that President King intended to appoint her to Oberlin's board of trustees. We agreed that a strong, independent-minded woman was precisely what that hidebound fraternity needed. Whether Mr. King knew what he was getting himself in for by appointing Katharine Wright was a different matter.

On the way to catch my boat in Cherbourg at the end of January, my eye was caught by an etching on display in a shopwindow in Paris. It showed a narrow street in old Rouen, with the great Cathedral of Notre Dame rising up through the haze in the background. I had been hoping to find something to bring home to Katharine, something that would remind her of the happy times she had had with her brothers in France in the old days. That print just fit the bill. In fact,
I was so taken with it that I went back the following day and purchased another copy for myself. It was the next-best thing to being in France together.

All too soon my busman's holiday came to an end, and by the time we made port in Boston, my state of mind was considerably improved. Henry had a break between semesters at Harvard and joined me for a short vacation in New York and Washington. It was then that I first told him about my special interest in Katharine. She
claims she always knew he was in on our little secret, but from what I observed he kept it pretty close to his chest. He didn't even give the game away when Katharine surprised us both by sending him a graduation present that spring. At that point, of course, she had no grounds for suspicion that my feelings toward her had changed. On the contrary, she was worried that Henry might suspect
her
of having an ulterior motive!

Katharine was in her bedroom when I reached Hawthorn Hill, and she fairly flew down the stairs to greet me, as if I had been gone a year instead of only three or four months. A few minutes later Stef joined us. Katharine had alerted me in advance that our visits would overlap, but she assured me that she and I would have plenty of time to talk one-on-one. Normally, Stef and the Wrights constituted a kind of mutual admiration society. On this occasion, however, the tension in the air was almost palpable. From something Katharine let drop, I gathered it had to do with the Wrangel Island tragedy I had read about in the London papers. Whatever the reason, she was visibly unsettled by Stef's presence. The very thought of his visit was a nightmare, she had written me, and my being there would help immensely.

Toward me Stef was his usual hale-fellow-well-met self. But his relations with Orville were unmistakably strained. Katharine explained that her brother had been somewhat touchy on the subject of Stef ever since the news about Wrangel Island came out in the fall. And she herself had clearly run out of patience with our intrepid explorer friend. Katharine was determined to give Stef a piece of her mind and impress on him how reckless and unprincipled his behavior appeared to others. Her stern tone and the steely glint in her eye made me almost pity the poor fellow. The perils of
an Arctic voyage are as nothing compared to the fury of a woman whose trust has been betrayed.

My memories of that visit are crystal clear, not only because Katharine seemed especially pleased to see me but also because it was the first time she had taken me into her confidence about Stef. Always before when we had spoken of him it had been in connection with his or Orville's scientific work, the Smithsonian controversy, or some equally impersonal topic. Now Katharine seemed positively eager to open up to me and share her sense of disillusionment. That she liked and admired Stef as a friend came as no surprise, but up to then I hadn't realized how deeply she had become involved with him on an emotional level. Nor was I accustomed to hearing her voice her most intimate feelings so freely and forcefully.

Little by little, as Katharine let down her guard, my own defenses began to crumble as well. One afternoon, she and I were setting off for a stroll in the woods above the house. A few pieces of firewood had fallen off the veranda, and we both knelt down instinctively to toss them out of our way. As my hand brushed against the sleeve of Katharine's coat, I was seized by a sudden impulse to throw my arms around her. The force of my emotions caught me by surprise, and only in the nick of time did I manage to control myself. Katharine stood up and started to walk, apparently none the wiser, while I fell into step behind her, quaking like an aspen leaf.

The winter sun was lowering when I happened to glance out of my bedroom window and saw Harry striding up the drive in that brisk, boyish way of his. “Four months in Europe have worked wonders for my dear friend,” I thought. Harry had given a talk at the Oberlin Faculty Club the day before and looked mighty pleased with himself. Apparently, his observation that the Germans in the Ruhr Valley were not so oppressed by the French occupiers as had been reported in the American press made some impression on the Oberlin outfit.
It was absolutely the first time that anything pro-French had been so much as
mentioned
in that setting!

I can understand why people like to hear Harry talk on European problems and such. He has so much judgment, and he sees the fun in pretenses and schemes and so on. When I get clear to the depths and decide that there isn't a bit of sense in the world, it does me good to see what influence a little real character does have, after all. More than anything, though, I was relieved to see Harry looking so much less on a strain. When he came through Dayton on his way to England, he had a look on his face that stayed with me long after he was gone. At first I thought I had said something that hurt him—brought up some painful memory—and I could hardly go on talking. Later I saw that it couldn't be the things I said, but the expression would come and go. That nearly finished me, seeing him go off that way.

With all the physical and emotional stress he had been under for the past few years, I was worried sick about him traveling in Europe without a companion. And when he wrote from Paris about suffering from nervous chills and being unable to sleep,
all my maternal feelings came rushing out in full flood. I know only too well how draining such an affliction can be. My nerves have always been prone to acting up at the least sign of trouble, ever since I was a little girl. When Harry marched up to our front door, I saw immediately that the rest and change had done him a world of good—although a little voice told me that it would not be strange if it took more than five months after Isabel's death to get back to himself again.

As a matter of fact, I was in such a tight box myself that I could hardly concentrate on Harry's problems for two minutes straight. Was it fate or sheer serendipity that brought him and Stef—the two men I cared for most in the whole world, apart from Orv—to Hawthorn Hill at the very same time that winter? The situation was the least bit
difficile
—for me more than for either of them, I daresay! Stef and I were determined to have a good long talk and get past all the misunderstanding that had come between us in December, when he and his friend Mr. Akeley had come to Dayton for the big celebration. What with Stef's lame excuses for the Wrangel Island fiasco and the politicians' high-flying speeches, the truth was murdered enough that day to make one weep. Orv and I were both glad that the twentieth anniversary of the first flight came only once in a lifetime!

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!”