for the card, and saw that it was my pilot’s license. “I thought your father had put it away somewhere.”
“Oh, he did,” Ansy answered brightly. “In a file cabinet.”
“You know you’re not to look through his things. Anne, if he found out he’d—”
“Don’t worry. I’m very careful not to leave any evidence behind, like fingerprints. See?” She held up her hands; she wore white cotton gloves, usually reserved for church.
I had to smile; my golden-braided daughter—the spitting image of Heidi—was going through a Nancy Drew phase. “Oh, I see. Well, please put it back and don’t go through his things again. Please. You know how he is.”
“I know. But, Mother, really, this is you?” And she laughed.
“Yes, really, it is. Why are you laughing?”
“Well, because—I mean, really! You, a pilot, just like Father?”
“No, not just like Father, because he’s—well, he’s Father. But after we were married, yes, I learned to fly. Oh, you know all that—the trips we made to the Orient, and so on!”
“No. No, Mother, I don’t.” Ansy’s eyes grew wide, and she stopped laughing. “You never told me.”
“Well, you probably learned about them at school, anyway—didn’t you? When you learned about Father?”
“No, the books only talk about him.”
“Well, I was a pilot, too, and we made some very important flights together. I also happened to be the first licensed female glider pilot in the United States.” I pursed my mouth in that prickly way I had; not sure with whom I was angrier, the historians—or myself, for never sharing this part of me with my children.
“It’s just so strange, to think of you like that,” Ansy continued, laughing merrily. “I mean—look at you! You’re, well—you’re Mother. Father’s the pilot, the hero. You take care of us, and the house, but to think of you up in the air, in your own little airplane!”
“I had one—my own little airplane. A little Curtiss. Your father bought it for me, although mostly we flew together in his plane, which was bigger. Mine was just a one-seater. We left it here when we moved to Europe.” I sat down on the metal kitchen chair, remembering. “Out at the Guggenheims’. I suppose it’s still there. When we moved back, somehow, I just never used it. I had the boys then, and soon you came along. And then the war, and Scott, and Reeve, and—well.”
“When’s the last time you flew like that?” Ansy sat upon the floor, cross-legged, in that fluid, boneless way of the young, and looked up to me.
“I don’t recall. I really don’t. Your father rarely flies like that anymore, either—it’s all commercial airliners now, for the most part. Although I suppose he does some, for the Air Force, for testing, and you know—sometimes he takes you children up. But it’s not like it used to be, back then, when we were the first. We flew all over the country, mapping out the routes that the commercial airliners all take. And we thought nothing of jumping into our plane to fly down to Washington, or up to New England—the way people jump into their cars today. It was what we did. We flew.”
“Yes, but I mean—when did
“Oh, goodness. I don’t know—probably sometime in England, I suppose. I think I did fly solo, once or twice, while we were there. England is beautiful from the air.” I remembered how green, mossy green and rolling, the land was; how sweet the neat little cottages were, the astonishing length of the hedgerows, seeming to cover the entire island in an orderly, if slightly serpentine, pattern.
“Do you think you could do it today? Do you think you’d remember?”
“I don’t know. I suppose it would depend on the plane.”
These days, my instincts were centered around whether or not we had enough milk to last the week; how to light the pilot light beneath the boiler in the basement without risking an explosion; prioritizing the various broken hearts and wild crushes inevitable in a house full of teenagers.
“I doubt it,” I admitted to my daughter, still seated, uncharacteristically eager to listen to me. Of all my children, my namesake was the one who knew, unerringly, which of my buttons to push. “And with the new radar —we didn’t have that, you see, when I was flying. Nor control towers. And of course, there weren’t all these planes in the sky, these big passenger planes. It was a simpler time.”
“But it must have been scarier, too. You were pretty brave then, I bet.”
“You don’t think I’m brave now?” I narrowed my eyes at Ansy, who laughed again.
“Mother! You scream whenever you see a mouse!” Still laughing, she pushed herself up from the linoleum and took the pilot’s license back, carefully inserting it into the envelope. “It’s still pretty strange, though. I mean, it must have been so long ago. Because you’re just a mom now, and that’s all I can imagine you as. That’s all.”
She left, whistling blithely—unaware of the impact of her words.
But I never forgot them. To my children, I was just Mom. That was all. And before that, I had been Charles’s wife, the bereaved mother of the slain child. That was all.
But before that, I had been a pilot. An adventurer. I had broken records—but I had forgotten about them. I had steered aircraft—but I didn’t think I would know how to, anymore. I had soared across the sky, every bit as daring as Lucky Lindy himself, the one person in the world who could keep up with him.
Yet motherhood had brought me down to earth with a thud, and kept me there with tentacles made of diapers and tears and lullabies and phone calls and car pools and the sticky residue of hair spray and Barbasol all over the bathroom counter. Would I ever be able to soar again? Would I ever have the courage?
Did any woman?
Or did we exist only as others saw us? My daughter’s unabashed mirth as she tried to imagine me an aviatrix, winging alone above the earth—I never forgot it. And as I spent long afternoons walking along the snow-white beach of Captiva Island, picking up shells just to put them in my pockets, for I was a person who liked to have the feel of something substantial in her pockets, this was the story I remembered. I saw myself through her eyes, I saw myself through Charles’s eyes, always; I never looked into a mirror and saw myself through my own.
So I did, one evening after a couple of glasses of Dubonnet. I went into the tiny bathroom, and peered into the lopsided mirror above the vanity, and saw myself—a woman. With graying hair, cut for convenience because I had no time for primping. Brown eyes that slanted down at the edges, ever watchful, ever cautious, trying to anticipate my husband’s demands. Olive skin, a bit wrinkled now, even leathery in places, no matter how much Pond’s cold cream I slathered on, because of all those years flying in open cockpits so close to the sun. A slightly prim, pursed mouth, as if always holding something back, keeping something in; grief, I knew. Anger, I very much suspected. But perhaps joy, as well?
Who was this woman before me, her face imprinted with the expectations of others?
I was Mom. I was Wife. I was Tragedy. I was Pilot. They all were me, and I, them. That was a fate we could not escape, we women; we would always be called upon by others in a way men simply never were. But weren’t we always, first and foremost—woman? Wasn’t there strength in that, victory, clarity—in all the stages of a woman’s life?
Or a perfect life. A woman’s life, always changing, accommodating, then shedding, old duties for new; one person’s expectations for another until finally, victoriously, emerging stronger. Complete.
I didn’t finish the book on that vacation; it took me several trips to Captiva during the early 1950s to work it all out, and many months wrestling with it in my writing cabin.
Every time I sat down to write, I closed my eyes and said a prayer before beginning. And I didn’t stop until I was done reassembling myself, piece by piece, on the page—jewels and shells and buttons and Cracker Jack prizes; medals and ribbons and Communion wafers. Swallowed tears that emerged now, twenty years later, as the palest, most translucent of pebbles—I held them up, and could see the beauty of the sun shining through the delicate layers, grateful for them, at last.
