“I think he’d pass a centipede if it solemnly promised never to believe it could fly as well as he does,” Ruth had said of their check pilot. “That’s all he wants. Not to know you can fly, just to know you know your place.”
“Why a centipede?” Marian had said.
“I can always pick out a leg man. I flashed him a bit of mine, called him a hero, now I’m bound for London.”
The way she spoke to Marian was sometimes maternal, sometimes jocular, sometimes flirtatious, always good-naturedly bullying and coaxing and chivvying her along, and though Marian would never have expected to enjoy being treated like a pet, it was relaxing simply to do as Ruth bid her.
In a small convoy with an old destroyer as escort, they first crossed from Montreal to St. John’s, Newfoundland, to wait for a bigger convoy to assemble. Long, slow, warmish days passed at anchor. Marian had sold the Beechcraft, and as she watched planes passing over, bound for Europe, she felt sharp pangs for it. In the evenings, the pilots played cards and drank with the other passengers.
Sylvie-from-Iowa said she was joining the ATA because she’d already met all the men in her town, her county, probably in all of Iowa, and anyway she’d rather fly planes than build them. Zip said she wanted to fly a Spitfire, obviously. And she wanted to be able to say she’d seen things, out in the world. Ruth said, “If you just want to say you’ve seen them, you could stay home and make up stories.”
Zip rolled her eyes. “Of course I want to really see things.”
“Then say that,” said Ruth.
Zip and Sylvie sunbathed on the prow and wrote letters. Ruth, in dungarees, enlisted Marian to help her paint the ship’s railings. The crew, amused, handed over brushes and buckets of paint and then smoked and loitered and watched, commentating among themselves in Swedish until Ruth grabbed them by the arms and forcibly set them to work. On the warmest day, all four of the pilots stripped down and jumped overboard, Sylvie in a swimsuit she’d been smart enough to bring and the rest in their underwear. They held hands, but the water ripped their fingers loose. Marian, kicking up to the surface, fought back a horror she couldn’t explain at the dark steel wall of the ship’s hull underwater.
The convoy, sixteen ships, left without fanfare one evening, steaming east. The first night, the crewman with the best English came around to issue a reminder about the blackout. He stood in the doorway of their cabin, blushing and looking at the ceiling rather than at the women lounging in their bunks, Sylvie tying up her hair in rags, Zip painting her toenails. He pointed at the curtains over the blacked out window and said, “Always keep close. And better this”—he gestured at the cabin door—“open, always, because a torpedo comes, then the whole ship”—he made a motion with his hands like he was wringing out a towel—“and then maybe is like”—he overlapped one flat hand with the other, pressed them together.
“Gets stuck?” said Zip.
“Yes.” He nodded gratefully. “Stuck. If you are inside, then—” He shook his head.
“We’re probably not getting out anyway, but thanks for the thought,” Ruth said from behind her book.
The crewman nodded. “Sleep with clothes on, yes, for fast—” He whistled and sliced a hand upward, nodded again, and left.
When the others wanted to turn out the light, Marian and Ruth went out on deck. If there was a moon, it was hidden behind clouds. In the darkness they could hear the engines of other ships all around but saw nothing. A few times Marian thought she made out a hulking shadow-shape off to starboard, but always it dissolved and reappeared elsewhere, a trick of her eyes. “I don’t like the idea of being stuck in the cabin,” she said to Ruth. “Getting blown up would be one thing, but being trapped and living long enough to know you’re trapped—I don’t like it.”
“Me neither,” said Ruth. “But there’s a sense that if you’re meant to survive, you survive. And if you’re not, you don’t.”
“Easy to say while we’re nice and alive and standing next to a lifeboat.”
“I think we ought to hone our fatalism. Really, what’s the difference between taking your chances on a ship and flying?”
“Flying you have some control over.”
“Not as much as we like to think.”
The second day, fog closed in and stayed for the rest of the voyage. On the eighth night, they slept at anchor, and in the morning, they passed into Bristol Channel. As the ship neared the harbor, Marian and Ruth stood at the rail, watching the upended prows and funnels of bombed ships loom out of the fog at strange angles, blackened and half sunk, sharpening from vague phantoms into ruined hulks and fading away again.