Sorrow settled in him, petulant disappointment floating on top. He said, “I should go.”
She didn’t argue but escorted him back through the house. At the front door, they paused. “Please give my apologies to Lewis for not coming to dinner tomorrow,” he said.
“I will.” She paused. “What will you do? Will you join up?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t want to.”
“Of course not.”
“Didn’t the idea of animals being mistreated use to drive you to blind fury? Don’t you feel the same way about people?” She stopped, placed her hand on his arm, ardent, damp-eyed. “We must be brave.”
He saw she was warmed by her sense of her own goodness. Was he, in the same way, seduced by an idea of his own virtue? How could anyone see clearly through the innate haze of self-righteousness? “You wouldn’t even stand up to your father.”
Her hand fell away. “You’d compare that to this?”
“I’m only saying it’s easy enough to tell others to be brave when you’ve always chosen the safest path.”
“That’s not fair. We’re not all as free as you to choose our own way.”
“Choose, yes. You said you wished you were less conventional—well, you could have been, but you chose over and over again to do what was expected. And that’s fine, but don’t pretend someone else made you this way.”
“I don’t!”
“Good!”
They stood glaring furiously at each other. She yanked open the door, and he strode out, donning his hat, hearing the slam behind him but looking resolutely ahead, away.
Out the door, down the street, out of the city. There—he had it, a resolution.
New York City
April 1942
Four months later
A doorman ushered Marian off Fifth Avenue and across a black marble lobby into the custodianship of a brass-buttoned elevator operator who wore a faint smirk as he looked her over. He flung the grate closed, cranked over the lever Marian thought of as a throttle, sent them upward. She wondered what the other pilots had worn when they showed up for their interviews. “Your floor, miss.”
Alone in the hallway she paused to gather herself, smoothing her trousers, adjusting her logbook under her arm. She knocked, and a uniformed maid opened the door to Jacqueline Cochran’s apartment.
Inside and into splendor. The foyer’s floor was inset with a marble aviator’s compass. Along one wall a glass table and case were crowded with flying trophies—globes and cups and spires and winged figures. A mural of famous aircraft covered the walls and ceiling. Marian craned and swiveled as though she were at an air show: the Wright Flyer, the Spirit of St. Louis, Amelia’s Lockheed Vega, a squadron of biplanes, a stray zeppelin, and, of course, Jackie herself winning the Bendix transcontinental race.
In Alaska, in February, Marian had heard from a pilot who’d heard from his sister who flew crop dusters in California about a telegram she’d received from a woman named Cochran. She was recruiting female pilots to join the Air Transport Auxiliary in Britain, ferrying warplanes. EVERY FRONT NOW OUR FRONT, the telegram said. FOR THOSE DESIRING QUICK ACTIVE SERVICE SHORT OF ACTUAL COMBAT BUT INCLUDING FLIGHT EXPERIENCE WITH COMBAT PLANES THIS SERVICE ABROAD SEEMS IDEAL CHANCE.
Marian, panicked she would be too late, had cabled Jackie Cochran directly, giving a truncated explanation of her bush flying, a tally of her hours, a plea for consideration. Warplanes! If they took her, she would fly warplanes, the kind of aircraft she’d seen transiting through Alaska ever since Lend-Lease passed, hundreds of them bound for Russia. An answer tap-danced in along the wires the next day. Come to New York for an interview. If satisfactory, you will proceed directly to Montreal for flight check and from there to England.
The maid steered her across a grand living room where a man was talking on the telephone in clipped, businesslike tones and down a hallway, its walls frescoed with more aircraft. A smartly dressed young woman brushed by, carrying an armful of files. Marian paused to examine a framed newspaper photo of Jackie in a cockpit, holding up a small hand mirror to apply lipstick.
In a bright room with windows open over the East River, Jackie sat behind a white-and-gold desk, half submerged in a lake of papers held down against the warm breeze by paperweights of different sizes and materials: a brass eagle, a hunk of amethyst, a compass. As she stood and reached across to shake Marian’s hand, Marian absorbed her careful blondness, the red silk of her belted dress. She seemed a lacquered and corrected sort of person, a flattering portrait of a woman painted atop that very woman.