* * *
—
“My secretary will sort you out with the hotel in Montreal where we’ve put the other girls,” Jackie told Marian. “And you need to get some new clothes. Today. The ATA will fit you for uniforms in London, assuming you pass, but you should have a traveling suit and a few dresses. Most of the time you can probably get by with slacks—not those you’re wearing. Nice slacks. And you’ll need a few blouses, and a pair of pumps and some plain oxfords.” As she spoke, she jotted a list on monogrammed stationery. “Don’t overdo it, though. Some of the girls have brought along steamer trunks full. Do you have money? I could send my girl with you to shop.”
“I have money.”
“I’ll call my woman at Saks. She’ll be expecting you. Ask for Mrs. Spring. She’ll take you to the hair salon, too, Antoine’s. They know me there.” She stood. “Good luck.”
Marian stood, too, shook hands.
“I’ll see you over there, if you go,” Jackie said. “Behave yourself and don’t crash any planes without good reason, and you’ll be fine.”
At the door, Marian stopped, turned back. “If you don’t mind, I’d rather keep it between us that I’ve been married. Is that all right?”
Jackie gave her a long look, a small nod.
* * *
—
After Jackie returns from Britain, she dines with the Roosevelts, again pitches her idea about using women ferry pilots. Maybe we’ll start looking into it, the president says.
Her staff combs through thousands of files, comes up with a hundred and fifty experienced pilots. But the generals say they have more male pilots than airplanes at the moment. And how should they be expected to house a handful of girls on air bases where there are hundreds, maybe thousands of men? Chaos would ensue. So: No. The answer is no.
For now, they say, see if the Brits want your girl pilots.
The Brits want everything and everyone they can get. In London Jackie sets herself up in luxurious digs, rents a Daimler, parades around in a mink coat. The ATA doctor, she learns, is planning to strip her girls naked during their physicals, and she says absolutely not, digs in about it—a confusing creature to her British counterparts, seemingly both crass and a prude. （Back in the cotton mill, sometimes punching and kicking hadn’t been enough.）
In 1953, over a Mojave salt flat, Jacqueline Cochran will be the first woman to break the sound barrier. In 1964, in an F-104G, she will reach a speed of 1,429 miles per hour, faster than any pilot ever.
But back to 1942, when twenty-six American pilots, Jackie’s girls, crossed the Atlantic from Montreal to Liverpool, and Marian Graves was among them.
Montreal
June 1942
Two months after Marian met Jackie
Marian had not known Montreal was on an island, nor had she ever been anywhere where people spoke a language other than English. The sky over Dorval Airport had a fairground atmosphere, snarled with long buzzing ropes of engine noise, crowded with aircraft coming in from factories or leaving for Europe or wavering through touch-and-gos with student pilots. B-17s passed among single-engine trainers like whales through schools of fish. The larger bombers and transports would head up to Gander and then right across to Ireland or Britain. The smaller fighters and trainers might be taken apart and loaded on ships or they might fly the ice-cube route: Newfoundland, Greenland, Iceland, Britain. A pageant of uniforms was ongoing in the city, the significance of the different colors and insignias at first illegible to Marian.
Tiger Moths and Piper Cubs circled and circled the field, trainees at their controls. A season of mass chrysalis: men to pilots. The war demanded more of everything.
After three weeks in which she managed to snatch only five hours of flying, Marian checked out in a bright yellow Harvard trainer, its landing-gear doors hanging down like jaunty spats. The cockpit smelled of hot metal and rubber and an elusive acrid note that she had come to think of as the odor of flight itself. The check pilot, an American, was, as Jackie had warned, skeptical of women flyers. “But needs must,” said one of the other girls staying at the Mount Royal Hotel. A couple of them had bought the check pilot a beer, with good results, so Marian did the same, dug out a bright smile, did her best to concoct flattering questions that got him talking about his close scrapes and heroic saves before chronic headaches had sidelined him from the Army Air Corps.
A doctor poked and prodded, weighed and measured, took her blood, asked a series of oddly detailed questions about her menstruation. “No flying,” he said, “during your menstrual period, as well as three days before and three days after. It’s regulation.”