Faint voices downstairs. She slid out from under the covers, eased around the door, monkeyed down along the banister to avoid the squeaky spots in the stairs. Wallace and Trixie were sitting on the porch, beyond the yellow splash of light from the kitchen. Marian crouched near an open window.
“Where’d all the stuff in that cottage come from?” Trixie was asking. “Felix was quite intrigued.”
“Those were my brother’s things,” Wallace said.
“Should I conclude he was some kind of explorer?”
“In a way.”
“Is he dead?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think so. Marian likes to go out there to read.”
“She’s sweet on Felix,” Trixie said. “Dear thing. It’s cute, really. Although I’m afraid she thinks we’re rivals.”
“It’s that she doesn’t have a mother. She doesn’t know how to be around women.”
“Women love Felix—your girl isn’t the exception. I get weary, trying to fight them off.”
“He seems devoted enough, not that I know anything about it.”
“He is, I suppose. Enough.” The rasp of a match. A whiff of smoke. “Say, it must have been strange to have kids dumped on you out of the blue. How long have you had them?”
“Since they were babies.”
“You’re good for taking them.”
“No. Dutiful. If I were good, I would have—I don’t know. I don’t know what I would have done. Paid more attention. Been better.”
“I’d have left them on the church steps. In a reed basket like Moses.”
“Ah,” said Wallace. “I think Moses was left in a basket among the reeds.”
“Either way, I would have found some reeds.”
Marian’s skin prickled as though with sunburn. She went stealthily back up the stairs, heaping recriminations on herself for never before having considered the magnitude of her father’s imposition on Wallace. How could she have been so stupid? How could she not have realized Wallace didn’t want her and Jamie? Only because Wallace was too kind to let on. She got into bed and looked out at the lit window of the cottage. Tears came, but she blinked them back. For as long as she could remember, she had planned to leave Missoula as soon as she got big enough, but now her resolve was tugged into trim, made taut like a sail.
* * *
—
In the morning Wallace drove them all to the field, and after the Brayfogles pumped air into the planes’ tires and topped up the water in their radiators, the three Graveses watched Felix’s Jenny bump across the badger-holed grass, Felix flying from the rear cockpit and Trixie riding in front. As they flew low over downtown, Trixie climbed onto the bottom wing and leaned out, gripping the rigging wires and shouting down through a megaphone in her best carnival barker’s voice about the Flying Brayfogles! Today only! Lindbergh special only $4.00 a ride! Come on up! Aerobatics at two! Parachute jump at two-thirty!
After they came back and landed, Trixie told Marian to get in the front cockpit of her plane for a ride. “Couple of gals aloft together,” she said, more to Wallace than to Marian, who was doing a poor job concealing her disappointment over not going up with Felix. Trixie wore a leather cap and goggles, but Marian was bareheaded, fully exposed, as she wished to be.
* * *
—
By the time Lindbergh landed, he had spent thirty hours and thirty minutes in the air and been awake for fifty-five. To keep from falling asleep, he’d flown low enough over the ocean to feel the salt spray. The waves had risen out of the dark like furrows plowing themselves up from a black field.
He had circled, confused, over the airport at Le Bourget. Bright winding tributaries of light flowed out from the yellow lake of Paris, surrounded what should have been a deserted patch of grass, shut up for the night. Cars, of course. A hundred thousand people had driven out to Le Bourget to see him land.
Just after Felix and Trixie concluded their show with Felix’s daring parachute jump, word of Lindbergh’s safe arrival reached Missoula. Felix had landed and was gathering his parachute when church bells rang and sirens sounded. The crowd at the airfield stirred, murmured about Lindbergh, but no one knew for sure until a man tore up in a runabout, sounding his horn and shouting, “He’s landed! He’s landed in Paris!”
People embraced; they threw hats and handkerchiefs. In France, the crowd at the aerodrome had nearly pulled Lindbergh and his plane apart in their mad adulation, thousands of people all reaching for the tall man, the salt-crusted wings.