Marian hadn’t thought about the crossing. “Has that happened?”
“To plenty of people, but none of my girls. Yet.” She peered at a page in the logbook. After more flipping, she closed the book, held it out to Marian. “Are you up for it?”
Marian reached to take back the book. “Sure.”
“That’s a yes?”
“Yes.”
One manicured finger tapped the desk, the brown gaze lingered on her. “Clothes aside, the brass is concerned our girls be of the highest moral character.”
“All right.”
“They’re petrified of embarrassment. Some of the men who’ve gone over already behaved badly. So the girls have to be impeccable. There’s no room for error, none at all. When people expect you to be common, you have to work twice as hard not to be.”
* * *
—
Floyd helps Jackie get her cosmetics business off the ground. Company motto: Wings to Beauty. He helps her get her physical self off the literal ground, too. She makes her debut on the air racing scene in 1934, showing up at a starting line in Suffolk, England, one of twenty flyers bound for Melbourne. A sputtering engine sets her down in Bucharest, but she reappears the next year in Burbank, California, for the start of the Bendix. Amelia Earhart is first to depart, just before five a.m. into a dangerous, thickening fog. The pilot in front of Jackie crashes on takeoff and is killed. Burned. While the wreckage is being cleared, Jackie calls Floyd, divorced now and her fiancé, and asks what she should do.
Logic would dictate the safe choice, he says, but logic shouldn’t always outweigh a powerful emotional urge. It’s a philosophical question. （She has not yet told him about Robert Jr., certainly not about the man burned in the woods so long ago.）
So?
So you have to decide for yourself.
The answer is away. But away in the plane? Or from the plane? She takes off, but when she circles high to escape the fog, her engine overheats and forces her down again.
In 1936, she and Floyd marry, buy the fourteen-room apartment overlooking the East River where Marian will one day come for her interview. They pick up a country house in Connecticut and a ranch outside Palm Springs. They buy a building in New York and establish an orphanage—really!—for the city’s barefoot and gimlet-eyed future Jackies. They help pay for Earhart’s 1937 circumnavigation attempt, the flight on which she and Fred Noonan disappear, though Jackie says she’d had doubts about Fred finding Howland Island, had warned Amelia to no avail.
In 1938, Jackie wins the Bendix. In 1939, she sets a women’s record for altitude, two national records for speed, one intercity record. Prizes and trophies accumulate. She volunteers as a test pilot. In September of that year, after Germany invades Poland, she writes to Eleanor Roosevelt suggesting that, in the event of war, women pilots might be put to use domestically. Supportive flying. Feminine flying. For example, they could deliver trainer planes from factories to bases, freeing up men.
The first lady thanks her for the suggestion. Yes, if we go to war, we will need women to help, she writes. But exactly how women are utilized will be for men to decide.
* * *
—
“It’s the flying I’m interested in,” Marian said. “If I wanted to run around, I could have done it in Alaska. Mostly I’ve wanted to be left alone.”
“Mostly. All right. Well. Just don’t go hinting to anyone that you have more hours than are in here. Everything needs to be by the book. And in the book. Understood?”
“Sure. I mean, yes.”
When she laughed, Jackie pulled her chin inward, compressing her flesh. Marian warmed to the flaw. “You’re a quick study. Like me. Once you get to Montreal, the ATA will want you to get checked out before they take the trouble of shipping you over. My advice: Be nice to the check pilot. He’s the sort that’d rather see you in the kitchen.”
Marian said, “He’d be disappointed by what I cooked.”
* * *
—
June 1941. Jackie wrangles her way into flying a Hudson bomber across the Atlantic from Montreal to Scotland. Male ATA pilots in Montreal don’t like the idea. Not so long ago, people got parades for flying the Atlantic. When word gets out about Jackie, the pilots threaten to strike.
Okay, okay, say the bosses. She’ll fly, but a man will take off and land.
When Jackie shows up for departure, the Hudson has been drained of antifreeze and the oxygen system is set up wrong and the special wrench for turning on the oxygen has gone missing. Jackie fixes things, buys a new wrench. The life raft is gone as well, but since it probably wouldn’t be much help anyway, she leaves without it. When they stop to refuel in Newfoundland, the wrench vanishes again; someone breaks a cockpit window. She buys another wrench, patches the window with duct tape. They make it across the ocean just fine, Jackie at the controls until she sets up the final approach and relinquishes her seat.