Maiden Flight (8 page)

The explosion, as Katharine so indelicately calls it, had been building a head of steam for months. Sooner or later it was bound to burst. I don't wonder she was “dumbsquizzled” by my blowup; it took me by surprise as much as her. She's right: I was acting more like a callow youth than a hard-boiled newspaperman. Never in my life had I felt so worked up and out of control. In my experience, “overmastering passion” was the stuff of romantic poetry and novels. Once I began to tell Katharine how many years I had loved her, ever since our time at Oberlin, and how eager I was to share my life with her, the words came gushing out like molten lava from a volcano.

It was what she said about the scheming widows in Kansas City and the likelihood of our paths leading in different directions that lit the fuse. Despite her protestations of innocence, I have a notion that she deliberately brought the situation to a head just to see what I was made of. Not that I'm entirely innocent myself.
All that bellyaching about how lonely I was after Isabel died was sure to stir up her mothering instincts. I see that now. And I may have been ringing her bell just a bit when I went on and on about chaperoning Miss Farmer to those country-house parties—as if for one moment I would have seriously considered leading Isabel's sickroom nurse to the altar.

Then again, my escape may have been narrower than I care to think. Katharine hit the mark when she said I needed to be rescued. Miss Farmer had me in her sights. She planned to let me drift along like the heartsick widower that I was, plying me with tea and sympathy until I was too weak to resist. Then, if I tried to extricate myself, she would create a scene and make me feel that I had put her in an embarrassing position. Katharine and Dick Sutton saw what was afoot sooner than I did. When he told Katharine with tears in his eyes that it was all settled between Miss Farmer and me, and that he didn't understand why on earth I didn't “camp on the trail,” Katharine knew full well that she was the game he wanted me to bag.

One way or another, I was pretty much a wreck by the time Oberlin commencement rolled around in 1925. I had shed thirteen pounds and was so overwrought that I could hardly concentrate on my work. I wrote to my old professor Raymond Stetson and asked what he thought I should do. With his profound knowledge of psychology, the Prof would surely have some insight into my feelings for Katharine. I should have known better than to turn to a lifelong bachelor for advice in an affair of the heart. As I recollect, he suggested that I dream up some sort of conversational pitch and send it to Katharine in a letter. That was about the craziest idea I
had ever heard. It sounded to me a good deal as if, not knowing about such things himself, the Prof had copied it from a novel.

I had tried the literary approach before, as an underclassman at Oberlin, and it didn't get me far. I was a bashful youth with little experience of girls outside of my parents' small missionary circle. One year I got up the courage to invite a nice young woman to the Thanksgiving class party. Immediately, I began to worry whether I would be able to think of anything to say to her. To be on the safe side, I made an outline of what I might talk about and decided on a general discussion of Dickens's novels as offering possibilities. The evening passed pleasantly enough, but I never got another date with the young lady in question. I was in no hurry to repeat my mistake.

After I rejected his first proposal, the Prof counseled me to make a beeline for Dayton and get things settled face-to-face before I suffered another “attack.” That struck me as a more promising strategy. Knowing that Katharine had gone to Oberlin for a trustees' meeting, I sent her a long letter by regular mail and two more by special delivery, suggesting a discreet rendezvous at a big hotel in downtown Chicago. We were both getting a little old for such lovers' trysts. On the other hand, as the Prof put it, I owed it to Katharine to let her “deal with the impossibilities” as she saw fit, in full possession of the facts. He dismissed my qualms about trifling with her happiness. “The only way to live is to risk being unhappy,” he said, “and I'd rather be unhappy with the person I loved than as contented as a cat by the fire.”

The idea of meeting me in Chicago without telling Orv offended Katharine's sense of propriety. She proposed instead that I come to Dayton a week later, while her brother was out of town,
on the pretext that I was passing through on newspaper business en route to Washington. Apparently my campaign of love letters and telegrams was having an effect. It was not quite the one I intended, however. Almost at once Katharine was assailed by doubts. She had been unwise to be so affectionate and intimate with me, she wrote. Couldn't we remain just friends? I don't know how I had expected her to react, but I was definitely taken aback by her claim that she was in a state of shock and hadn't understood in the least what I was “hinting” at.

Hinting? I had all but professed my love for her on any number of occasions. Is it conceivable that she had no inkling of how I really felt—that to me she was worth more than all the rich old “vidders” in Kansas City lumped together? And couldn't she see how she had been blithely leading me down the garden path with her motherly concern and pledges of undying friendship? Whether her own moves were as calculated as mine had been is another matter. It may be that she is genuinely unaware of the effect she has on the opposite sex. The Prof says she is one of the few women of whom he would be willing to admit the possibility of such artlessness, so I suppose I must consider it too. After all, how else to explain her behavior toward me—and toward Orville?

The wild, heart-stopping ride I took that never-to-be-forgotten weekend started out tamely enough. I arrived in Oberlin on Thursday for the trustees' meeting and checked in as usual at the Park Hotel. No sooner had I begun unpacking my bags when the telephone rang. The operator had Harry on the line from Kansas City.
He was all at sixes and sevens—some hopelessly twisted story about a letter he had written but had had second thoughts about sending. It wasn't like him to be so addled. I thought at first that I had touched something deeper than I had intended on the “vidders” situation and that was what had set him off. But then I saw that it was something else altogether—something much,
much
deeper—and all of a sudden I didn't know how to talk to him.

What, I asked myself, could have happened to make Harry feel so differently toward me? I dimly remember saying that I wished we could go on just as we had always been. Then I got the telegram saying that he had mailed an “important letter” and two more by special delivery. And—this was the kicker—he proposed that we spend Sunday morning alone together at the Blackstone Hotel in Chicago talking things over! I was with my friend Kate Leonard, having a nice, quiet chat—and just like that my whole world was turned topsy-turvy. There I sat, rooted to the spot, with Kate sitting in my room while I opened and read the telegram about coming to Chicago. With my heart standing still, I tossed it over onto the dresser and said, in answer to Kate's kindly anxiety, that I might have to leave before I had planned, but that it was nothing serious. I was getting to be a gifted fibber already!

Telling a little white lie for Kate's benefit was one thing, but the thought of not being completely straight with Little Brother was more than I could bear. I couldn't bring myself to go to Chicago to meet Harry when I would have had to do it in an absolutely secret way. Mind you, there was nothing
wrong
with a pair of old friends meeting like that—but if it had ever come out, Orv simply wouldn't have understood. He never interfered with what I did, but I always liked to tell him, just as he told me all such things. I knew I couldn't
live with a secret of that kind preying on my mind. Orv didn't know anything about what Harry and I had been writing to each other, and he would have thought I had been very unwise to do what I had done. Only I didn't
know
I was doing what I had done!

On Friday afternoon, after the trustees' meeting, Frannie Lord and I popped into Tobin's drugstore for an ice cream. We had been making small talk for five or ten minutes when suddenly she blurted out, “Katharine, I have been thinking—you
will
forgive me, won't you dear—but I have been wondering why
you
can't do something about Harry. You and he and Orville belong together some way or other!” Well, I never batted an eye, even though I had already had Harry's letter telling about the unsent letter—the contents of which I had partly guessed, though it didn't come till the next morning, but I had had the telegram saying it was coming, and so on. What could I possibly say that wouldn't give the game away? So I just kissed Frannie to assure her that she hadn't offended me by speaking so freely.

Sure enough, all three of Harry's letters arrived as promised on Saturday morning. I collected them at the front desk of the hotel just as I was about to sit down with Mr. Stetson to have a long talk about Orv's “situation” with the Smithsonian. Then who should show up but Harry's missionary sister! Quick as a wink, I stuffed his letters into my pocketbook, where nobody could spot the telltale handwriting, and tried to compose myself. Whereupon Mary proceeded to take a letter out of
her
handbag—a letter from Harry's son, who had spent the past year studying abroad. And there we sat, the Prof and I, two most interested people—one of whom was struggling valiantly to keep her thoughts from wandering—listening to an account of young Henry's adventures in Europe!

After her reading was over, Mary got up and excused herself, and Mr. Stetson and I were finally free to broach the subject that was on both our minds. Because I wasn't sure how much Harry had already told him about our friendship, I made a guarded comment about how strange it was that Harry still didn't seem to be getting settled down, nearly two years after his wife's death. The Prof replied that
he
didn't think it strange in the least—from which I naturally deduced that he knew a good deal more than he was letting on. I was slightly self-conscious to begin with because I knew the letters buried in my handbag were sure to tell
why
Harry hadn't settled down. I consider my sitting there calmly with his sister and Mr. Stetson as positively heroic. And all the time there was poor Harry in Kansas City waiting anxiously for a telegram that wasn't being sent!

Before I got a chance to call the Western Union, I had another cable from Harry suggesting that he spend part of the following week with me in Dayton. This was a new fly in the ointment. Quick thinking was clearly in order. Orv, I knew, was due to receive an honorary degree that week from the University of Pennsylvania. He planned to leave for Philadelphia on Tuesday for Wednesday, the day of the award ceremony. From there he would go on to Washington for a meeting and return home Friday morning. That gave us our window of opportunity. To be absolutely safe, I told Harry to come to Dayton Tuesday evening and stay only through Wednesday. It wasn't like me to keep things from Orv, but I had no choice. I wouldn't for anything have worried him so just then. I was a bit unsettled myself, I fear!

The worst was Sunday morning, when I came in from commencement exercises and found that heartbreaking telegram from
Harry—“It's all right. Please don't worry,” and so on. Of course it
wasn't
all right, and of course I
would
worry. So I sent an answer and again asked him to come—but I didn't know myself to
what
I had asked him to come. I felt I had done something horribly wrong in letting the situation get out of hand. I had given Harry so much advice about not getting involved in entanglements that I, in my superior wisdom, thought he wasn't quite ready to go through with. Why hadn't somebody given
me
a little advice? Everything I had tried to be and do my whole life seemed to be tumbling down around me. I felt doubly to blame because I couldn't change my feeling for Harry—but it would have been even worse if I could!

It was all so unreal, like a waking nightmare. I scarcely recognized the person who was walking around Oberlin in my shoes. Harry seemed almost like a stranger to me as well. All of a sudden he had become a different person, with this overwhelming feeling for me that I hadn't suspected. That curious sense of unreality about him was one of the most paralyzing things about the whole experience. Not until I got back home Monday night and had a chance to take a good long look at his photograph in the privacy of my own room did he become his old familiar self again. I could have shouted for joy! There he was, gazing calmly at me out of the picture frame, the same as he had always been. Out of my wild desperation, out of all the fog and commotion of the past few days, I suddenly found a certain measure of clearness and peace. I was myself again too—for a brief spell, at least.

Kate generally was dog tired when she got back from one of her trustees' meetings. This time, though, she seemed uncommonly listless and fidgety. I couldn't put my finger on the problem—she just couldn't settle down. Naturally, I assumed it was the Smithsonian's latest piece of chicanery that had upset her. They had offered another half-baked proposal for changing the label on the Langley machine without coming straight out and admitting that it was physically incapable of ever getting off the ground. That so-called compromise was unacceptable to me, of course, and I needed Katharine's advice on a statement to give out to the newspapers. Then there was the article the editor of
Liberty
magazine had written about me, which I had asked him to submit for her approval. What with one thing and another, it was close to midnight by the time we went up to bed.

First thing the next morning, while we were sitting at breakfast, Carrie came into the kitchen and
said the Western Union was on the line with a telegram for Katharine. She got up and went into the telephone closet to take the call. When she got back, she announced casually that Harry would be coming the next night.

“He is?” I said. “How does that happen?”

“Going east,” she said.

“Going to Washington?” I asked, thinking I might arrange to meet him there.

“No,” Katharine answered, a little too eagerly, I thought. “New York.”

My curiosity was piqued. Still, Harry did do a good deal of traveling in connection with his newspaper work, and he had gotten into the habit every so often of dropping in to see us on short
notice. Despite Kate's peculiar behavior, there was nothing out of the ordinary about his visit as far as I could tell. I was about to leave for Philadelphia and wouldn't be home until the end of the week. So I said I was sorry I couldn't stay to greet our guest and went back to reading the morning paper.

It seems I wasn't quite myself that day either. Upon boarding the afternoon train, I was chagrined to discover that I had come away from home without my tickets or my wallet. I didn't even know who was supposed to meet me in Philadelphia. There was nothing to be done but get off at Xenia and turn back with my tail between my legs. I caught the next train back to Dayton and walked over to my office on North Broadway to finish up some work. From there I rang up our neighbors, the McCormicks, and they came to pick me up in their motorcar.

Carrie had gone home for the day, and the refrigerator was empty. So Frank and Anne roused Katharine, who was upstairs napping, and the four of us headed out for a bite to eat. When we returned, the telephone was ringing off the hook, and Kate dashed down the hall to answer it. It was the Western Union again—two telegrams in one day!—this time with the message that Harry had postponed his trip and wouldn't be coming the next day after all. To my surprise, Swes seemed more relieved than disappointed by the news. The thought crossed my mind that she had been playing me for a fool all day long. But it was such a preposterous idea that I put it out of my head.

In any case, I had more pressing matters to deal with, what with the Smithsonian situation and the latest flap over the flying machine being sent out of the country. Harry would have been the least of my worries, even if I had realized what he and Kate were
up to. A week or so later I was called to Washington for a meeting, and this time Swes took care to remind me to check my pockets. When I got back to Dayton, who should I find waiting for me but her future husband!