In Missoula, when he’d lost track of things, he’d been tormented by the knowledge that Sarah Fahey’s life was continuing without him, that she would go to UW and meet a boy and get married and do all the things she was going to do anyway if he’d never shown up at all. In bed with Geraldine, he feels a vague sense of triumph, as though by making love to a different woman he is taking some abstract retribution. But this feeling is even more impolite than the absence of love, and Jamie tries to quash it.
What Sarah needs is forgetting.
Geraldine tells him she is thirty, and he thinks he believes her. Somewhere around there. She’d inherited the house from her mother. There are three boarders besides Jamie: an older man who is a retired teacher, a young man apprenticing with a tailor, and a single woman around Geraldine’s age who works in an office and is always winking conspiratorially at Jamie. He is beginning to understand he is attractive to women. Aren’t you a tall drink of water, said a woman in dungarees picking up a large order of clay from the art supply store where he works, and when he’d asked, blushing, what that meant, she’d said, You’d be just the thing on a hot summer day. Later he’d seen her again at a lecture put on by the Boar Bristle Club, asked around a bit. Her name is Judith Wexler. She’s a sculptor.
Sometimes he worries Geraldine doesn’t always remember he is just eighteen. Or, when he detects a trace of the maternal in her solicitous fussing, he worries she thinks of him only as a boy.
But unease might be part of love, he speculates.
Dear Jamie,
I’m writing this from inside a stand of yellow aspens, where I came walking with no intention or expectation of meeting anyone, in fact with the purpose of being alone, when who should appear but Caleb. He’d tracked me with the same stealth he uses on the elk but kindly didn’t shoot me. Not much to report except that I’m fine. Barclay won’t let me fly, but I hope that will change. I have to hope. Anyway, please don’t worry about me.
Have you spoken to Wallace? I have, and he seems well enough. I’m glad you won’t be following him to the doctor in Denver. Fresh starts, I suppose, are possible.
Please keep writing, even if my replies are as anemic as this one. I’m not myself right now.
* * *
—
It’s 1933.
Elinor Smith, the teenage daredevil who flew under New York’s bridges, marries at the age of twenty-two, quits flying not long after, disappears from the scene. （Quits flying, that is, until her husband dies in 1956. She will make her last flight in 2001, age eighty-nine, nine years before her death.）
The pilot Wiley Post has one eye and a Lockheed Vega named Winnie Mae. He flies around the world—alone, the first to do it alone—in under eight days with eleven stops. A northerly route: New York, Berlin, Moscow, a string of muddy towns in Siberia and Alaska, Edmonton, New York again, not technically a great circle but undeniably a big one. Post has two innovations on his side: a newfangled radio compass and a rudimentary Sperry autopilot. He can home in on radio beams to find his way, snatch catnaps in the cockpit. Still he is so desperately tired.
Amy Johnson and her husband, Jim Mollison, fly west across the North Atlantic against the prevailing winds, aiming for New York. They crash in Connecticut but survive. （In 1941, transporting a training plane to RAF Kidlington, Amy, thirty-seven years old, will get lost in bad weather, bale out over the frigid Thames Estuary, and either drown or get sucked into the propeller of the boat that tries to rescue her, her body never found.）
Bill Lancaster, an English pilot, crashes in the Sahara trying to break Amy’s record to South Africa. His wrecked plane and dry brown twist of a body will lie undisturbed and undiscovered on the empty sand until 1962. Every day the turning earth lifts him to meet the dawn. Elsewhere, the world will destroy itself, rebuild.
Hitler bullies and bargains his way to the chancellorship. When he gives speeches, his head snaps back as though his own words are punching him in the jaw.
According to the Treaty of Versailles, Germany is never again allowed an air force, but German pilots have been training in secret in the Soviet Union. （Not Stalin’s best decision, this particular helping hand.） Others are trained under the thin guise of civilian sports clubs, hearty young Aryans soaring in gliders through the fresh Alpine air.
More and more planes are built, other flying machines, too. Airships. Autogiros. Flying boats. Records are made and broken for distance, speed, endurance, altitude. （Marian hears little of this, as she seldom sees a newspaper at Bannockburn.）