I felt the abrupt onset of what can only be described as a hunch. There was something more that could be known, and I wanted to know it. There was something in Adelaide’s document box, and there was something beyond that, out in the void. I felt this like I’d felt the presence of the gigantic snowy landscape while I’d kissed Redwood.
I went back to the living room.
There’s some guy who surfaces every few years to say he’s spotted what might be the Peregrine in satellite images of Antarctica or that he’s found stuff on remote subantarctic islands that might be clues—bits of wreckage or an old lipstick tube he says is Marian’s or some bit of bone he says might be human and might be Eddie’s—and he promises that if people will just send him enough money he’ll go down there and solve the mystery once and for all. He one hundred percent promises he will.
Maybe I was turning into that guy. Maybe I was like the handful of wannabe sleuths who post blurry old photos online they claim are of Marian and Eddie in Australia in the 1950s or of the Peregrine refitted as a cargo DC-3 in the Congo. Maybe I was like the flat-earthers who think Antarctica is an ice wall around the earth’s perimeter and believe the Peregrine was shot down by the air force to stop Marian from discovering the truth. They all had hunches, too. They all desperately needed to feel like truth-tellers, to believe in their breakthroughs and revelations. Maybe I was a crackpot or a charlatan; maybe I was just trying to insert myself into an inscrutable, long-concluded drama.
Or maybe the past had something to tell me.
I sat on Adelaide’s couch and wearily, almost against my will, reached for the box of letters.
The Flight
Where to begin? At the beginning, of course. But where is the beginning? I don’t know where in the past to insert a marker that says: here. Here is where the flight began. Because the beginning is in memory, not on a map.
—marian graves*
New York City
40°45? N, 73°58? W
April 15, 1948
0 nautical miles flown
Matilda Feiffer, nearly seventy, ten years a widow, walks at a clip along Forty-Second Street. She wears all black, not to mark her widowhood but because she likes the severity. Narrow black skirt, nipped-in black jacket with an enamel brooch of a leopard on the lapel, black pumps, black beret over steel gray bob, enormous round glasses with heavy black frames. One bony hand, flashing with rings and bracelets, holds a tiny frothy white dog against her chest.
When Lloyd died, no one had been more surprised than Matilda to learn that her husband had left her not only the entirety of his fortune but also as much authority over his businesses as he could bequeath. To freely do with as she sees fit.
Clifford, her second son, an incompetent, had been the only one to rant and rage, perhaps because he knew he was the least deserving of the four living Feiffer boys. Lloyd, more sentimental than she, had let Clifford be at least nominally in charge of their shipping interests, which, even well insulated from real power, he’d made a hash of. So she had fired him as soon as she could. She hadn’t put him out on the street, of course, but had given him a great deal of money, warned him there would be no more, and encouraged him to go abroad somewhere and embrace a life of relatively economical debauchery. （She suspected Lloyd had left her in charge partly because he’d known she would do the things he could not bear to.） Clifford had moved to St. Thomas and married a Caribbean girl and had three children with her, but Matilda refused to give him the satisfaction of being scandalized.
Henry, the oldest and brightest of her sons, had already been a vice president of Liberty Oil before Lloyd’s death. This was by far their largest company, and she’d left well enough alone. Forty-six now, he was married to a woman Matilda didn’t disdain and had four sons of his own.
Bless Henry.
Robert, third in line, also worked at Liberty Oil. He was neither brilliant nor burdensome, was polite in company but did not shine, had never married though he was forty-three. She suspected Robert might be a queer.
Next would have come Leander, whatever sort of man he might have been if not for diphtheria.
Then there was George, dear Georgie, the baby, grown from the dark soil of her grief for Leander, only twenty-four when Lloyd died, her only son to go to war, now finishing up his doctorate in geology at Columbia, married to a nice girl and with two children. Her gratitude he’d survived the Pacific felt as boundless as the cosmos. She could not have endured losing another son, and the war had killed Lloyd, she knew. Germany had invaded Poland in September 1939, and he’d died days later, at seventy-four, of a heart attack on his way to work. Matilda suspected his heart simply couldn’t withstand the magnitude of fury he’d felt at his father’s country.