A whisper: “Yes.”
“Did you fly here from Alaska?”
“Yes.”
“In what?”
“A Beechcraft 18.”
“How long did it take?”
“Nine days.”
“Not a speed record, then.”
“There was some weather, and I stopped to visit my brother in Oregon.” Poor Jamie, cornered by his own goodness, trying to talk himself both into and out of joining up. What should I do? he’d said. She said maybe he could get a job making recruitment posters. She wanted him safe.
“In Alaska, you must be used to weather.”
“I’m used to it being awful.”
“Good. The Brits aren’t teaching ATA pilots to fly on instruments, so you’ll have a leg up. There’s lots of cloud and fog over there, and it comes on you quick.”
“Why aren’t they teaching them instruments?”
Jackie poked at a stack of papers. “They say because they want the ferry pilots to stay within sight of the ground and not be tempted to go over the top. It’s wishful thinking. The climate there is pernicious.” She paused briefly to let Marian admire the word. “You get caught out, and then what? Even if you know what you’re doing, it’s hazardous. You’ve heard of Amy Johnson? The English girl who flew to Australia? She was flying for the ATA and had plenty of experience on instruments, and she still got stuck above the cloud and baled out and drowned. I don’t mean to scare you. You’d have heard about it anyway before long.”
“I know lots of pilots who’ve died.”
“Me too. By the way, if you get over there, don’t tell the Brits I was complaining. They think I complain too much. But in my opinion, not teaching instruments is a waste of airplanes. And pilots. They say safety’s the reason for it. I think it’s more about ex— What’s the word? More about being fast and cheap. What’s that word?”
“Efficiency? Expediency?”
“Expediency! That’s it. I’m always learning new words. I collect them. What sort of schooling did you get?”
“Only to eighth grade.”
“But you know words.”
“I read a lot as a kid.”
For the first time, like a lighthouse newly lit, Jackie emitted a gleam of fellow feeling. “So you’re like me. An autodidact. That means you’re not afraid to work.”
“I like to work.”
“Do you know, I bought my own Model T when I was fourteen? With money I made doing hair.”
* * *
—
By eleven, Bessie Lee Pittman is cutting hair, rolling and pinning and plaiting it. She has a way with beauty, with improvement. Respectable women come in through the shop’s back door, embarrassed by their vanity, while the prostitutes, the fancy girls, march in the front. Bessie Lee likes the fancy girls, the stories their madam tells about distant cities.
She doesn’t tell Marian, or anyone, this part of the story: Fourteen or so, she comes up pregnant, marries the father, Robert Cochran. The baby stays with the Pittmans in Florida while she moves to Montgomery, buys herself that Model T with money made from doing permanent waves. But is being a beautician enough? For her? For little Robert Jr.? She trains to become a nurse, takes a job with a doctor in a mill town. In the light of an oil lamp with a corncob wick, she extracts a baby from a woman laboring on a too-familiar straw mattress. Three other children are lying on the floor. There’s no clean blanket to wrap the baby.
No, this is all wrong. This must not be her life.
Robert Jr., playing in the Pittmans’ backyard, four years old, dies in an accident. A fire. He’s buried under a heart-shaped headstone. Jackie erases him from her story of herself, can’t bear not to.
Away, away. She must get away.
Twenty years old, divorced, Jacqueline Cochran arrives in New York City, gets herself hired at Antoine’s beauty salon in Saks Fifth Avenue. Monsieur Antoine, Antoine de Paris, the original celebrity stylist, has a flair for the next big thing. He’d invented the shingle cut and a charmingly gamine coif as short as a boy’s that he gave to Coco Chanel, Edith Piaf, Josephine Baker. He likes Jackie and her strict lipstick and resolutely powdered nose, the whiff of sawdust under her expensive perfume.
Every winter she travels from New York to Antoine’s Miami outpost, driving her Chevrolet in one long go, picking up hitchhikers for company. In Miami there are speakeasies and jazz bands and casinos, swanky supper clubs, cocktails, and long white beaches. You wouldn’t know there was any Great Depression from Jackie’s silk stockings, her gold compacts with little round mirrors that show only her a bit of herself at a time. But none of it is enough. None of it lasts. Curls go limp. Oil seeps through the powder. Up in the Panhandle there’s still that grave marked by a heart. The night sky presses on the roof of her hotel, on the palm trees in its gardens and the flamingos sleeping under them. The wish to break free persists, but break free from what? The gilded life she has so laboriously constructed around herself? Away, away, but to where?