I Was Amelia Earhart (Vintage Contemporaries) (2 page)

I wish I had a piece of chocolate, I say, out loud, above the roar of the engine.

Clouds gather beneath me. Gauzy, insubstantial ribbons of cloud veiling the green sea. Then endless
stretches of extreme whiteness uninterrupted by sea. I travel through valleys of unformulated cloud dissolving and recovering itself. After a while it begins to take shape again, weightier hills of lather rolling down to nowhere, breaking up into islands of pinkish white, separated by sudden shocks of blue.

I like to lose myself in the beauty of the sky, but today I seem unable to fall in love with my surroundings without being yanked back to the gravity of my predicament. I’m a practical escapist, and every movement of my mind, each digression from dream to reality and back again, is a faithful expression of my character.

Weaving in and out of the strange clouds, hidden in my tiny cockpit, submerged, alone, on the magnitude of this weird, unhuman space, I feel as if I’m not alive
. That’s what I want, that feeling. I want this dream of death I’m passing through.

Once, when I was a little girl, my father took me for a ride on a roller coaster. The day was breezy and crowded, with lots of starched puffy clouds in the sky. We were at a fairgrounds, and as I waited in line I heard a band playing off in the distance. When my turn finally came, I allowed my father to help me into the wooden
car. I felt the touch of his large hand and the dryness of his wide taut palm. I allowed him to lift me into the rickety seat. After strapping me onto the bench, he climbed in next to me. Well, he sighed, this is going to be fun. He showed me how to clasp my hand around the safety bar, letting me know with a gentle but nervous smile that if I needed to, I could hold on to his arm. By then the four double seats behind us had been filled, and the operator was cranking up the machinery. As the ground beneath me started to move, I recognized that I was experiencing sensations I had never felt before. Making our way up the narrow track, I watched the spectators down below me grow smaller and smaller. It was a strange state: I couldn’t tell which was moving, myself or the world. But when the ride picked up speed and I could feel the wind against my face—I saw my mother and my sister in a blur of light, balanced on a strand of my hair—I knew it was myself and not the world that moved, and this cataclysm of perspective changed my life.

I always hated wearing goggles. But I wear them when I have to, and that day, the last day, the day the sky is flesh, I’m wearing goggles, and a leather skullcap, and a scarf around my neck. I put on the goggles only when absolutely necessary, and I never put them on before I get into the cockpit and I take them off before I climb out of the hatch. Ever since I’ve been famous, which has been a long time now, I’ve taken great care with my personal
style. I wear my hair short, I like it that way, and I smile with my lips closed, the way G.P. taught me. After I flew across the Atlantic and became famous, G.P. decided to mold me into a star. He told me how to eat, how to speak, how to dress, how to smile, with my mouth closed, for the cameras. He told me not to wear hats with feathers or brims, but I ignored him whenever I could.

On the plane that day, I’m wearing my typical uniform of brown leather pants and a white silk shirt. I’ve been flying for weeks, with only a change of clothes, but still I look fashionable. No one wore leather and silk with as much glamorous nonchalance. The look is my own, I invented it for myself long before I met G.P., when I was first learning how to fly. I wanted the other pilots to take me seriously, but I was a society girl. A fallen socialite, from unexceptional circumstances, but still they were skeptical of me, and I wanted desperately to impress them. This was the time in my life when I cut my long, golden hair until it was short and then I curled it. It was also the time when I bought a leather coat, to fit in with the crowd at the airfield. I slept in it the first night I bought it, because I loved it and because I wanted to break it in. Then I splattered it with oil, on purpose, to make stains.

In the cockpit, next to my head, hangs a bamboo fishing pole which reaches back into the navigator’s
cabin. It’s a makeshift telephone, used to pass messages back and forth between pilot and navigator. We installed it in Miami and it served us well, back in the days when we were communicating. Now it shivers gently in time with the plane’s fluctuations, and points like a shaky, accusing finger toward the rear cabin.

Back then, a plane was called a ship. There were still cabins, and a sense of voyaging. There was a reverence for flight because it was so dangerous. People lost themselves. There was no safety.

Inside the cabin there’s a man passed out with his face on an open map. His head lies in the Pacific like a dark eighth continent, and his long arms wrap around the ocean as if he were a sweetly uncoordinated god trying to scoop it up. His blue-black hair swings forward over his face, strands of it sticking to his forehead and neck. After a month on the road, he needs a haircut. His grease-stained coveralls, pulled taut over his bent knees, reach only as far as his midcalf, revealing underneath the navigator’s illuminated table his coarse, curly leg hair, his dark-blue socks, and the untied shoelace on his brown left shoe. Next to his right foot lies an empty bottle, a last swill of coppery liquid puddled inside. Every now and then he kicks it in his sleep and sends the glass rolling
away and then back again. As it rolls, the puddle of liquor remains miraculously still.

He is a former Pan American Airlines navigator, a master mariner unlimited, and a certified first-class Mississippi riverboat captain. We are not lovers. We have never been lovers. We could not have been further from being lovers unless we had never met. Neither one of us finds the other attractive. We are handsome and beautiful in timeless ways—I with my boyish grace and open expression, he with his deep eyes and slow smile. But to me, the navigator is the least manly of men. He is persnickety, easily frightened, and irresponsible. To him I embody the most unfeminine qualities: I am dogmatic, demanding, and impolite. I am impatient and unkind when frustrated. I swear. And I have not one self-sacrificing, maternal bone in my unwomanly, muscular body.

I’ve had lovers. I’ve had a husband. My husband proposed to me six times before I would accept. And then, when I finally did accept, I wrote him a letter asking him to promise to let me go. Let me go in a year if I’m unhappy, I said. It sounded so grave, but I was only being practical. The idea that we would be bound together irrevocably seemed ridiculous. But I was not in love.

•

I remember the first time I met my husband: I couldn’t stand him. He was arrogant. He held the door open for me with his whole arm.

He was interviewing me for a job. The job was to be the first woman to fly across the Atlantic. The plane was going to be flown by a man, but they wanted a woman to sit in the plane, to make the record, for publicity purposes. They wanted me as baggage. I knew I could fly the plane myself, but I had to accept their terms. I wasn’t going to have a career as a pilot any other way. I wasn’t rich. Most of the other women flying planes were wealthy.

As my future husband pointed out to me, if I went, and if the flight was successful, there would be other opportunities. He glanced at his gold watch. He was a man who understood opportunity. Sometimes it seemed as if he had invented the very idea.

He was right, of course. Later, I flew the Atlantic myself. Then the Pacific. But the first time, I just went along for the ride.

He was the son of a wealthy publishing family. He was used to having his way, with men and women. He had a kind of studied New York charm, which I hated. If I had to say what it was about him that made me marry him, I would say that it was his persistence, not his charm. I admired his determination, but his was a transparent, demanding, foolish charm. He had a way of monopolizing attention that made him appear desperate,
more so than he really was. But I can’t complain, really. Sometimes he did it for me.

Only much later did I realize what I had done by marrying him. I didn’t blame myself, but I realized that I had surrendered to the whims of men—even I who had been so bold and independent, even I who had taken on the humiliating task of sitting in the back of an airplane like cargo when I knew perfectly well that I could fly it myself better than the so-called pilot in the cockpit—I realized that I had surrendered so easily because I had been, despite my most vigilant efforts, infatuated with the men who made the rules. Sitting in my future husband’s office, listening to the drone of his comfortable voice, I felt an infinite rush of sympathy for him. I knew he was hidden, even from himself, and I wanted to be the only person who really knew him. Later, this realization made me suspect that I had loved my husband. Selfishly, but at least I had loved him.

His name was George Palmer Putnam.

He helped me into a taxi after the interview, his umbrella shielding me but not himself from the rain, a drop of water hanging gallantly off his nose. Then I drove off to the train station, through the park at the gentlest point of dusk.

B
Y 1937
, at the tender age of thirty-nine, she was the loneliest of heroines. She was more expressive around the eyes, and no movie star seemed as mysterious as she or wore leather and silk with such glamorous nonchalance. But she felt as though she had already lived her entire life, having crossed the Atlantic solo and set several world records, and she had no one to share her sadness with, least of all her husband. Her husband, G.P., her business manager. He’s the husband who made her famous, who devoted himself to her, even when she hated him, even when he hated her back. She needs him so that she can fly, so that she can escape from him, so that she can escape from the very people who worship her.

•

Thirty-nine. I have been famous for a long time, and I am still dependent, on the world, on G.P., on my unhappiness. But I want to fly. I want to fly around the world. The flight around the world contains within it everything inside me, all the life and all the death. I want to take the life and the death that is inside me and make something of it. But I’m tired, and careless now. And my husband, who wants me to do it for the money, doesn’t see that my carelessness will kill me. Or maybe he does. I leave the details up to him. I want my dream, but I am so tired. I tell him I want to go alone, that I don’t want a navigator, but he insists on it and we argue. I tell him that instead we should put a signal on Howland Island, that I won’t find it without a signal. He ignores me when I say this. He keeps eating. He places his knife on the side of his plate and he keeps chewing.

The great heroine is preparing to land. She’s coming into the airfield, bracing herself with the usual aplomb. Her ship makes its way through a furrowed landscape of white, and for several minutes visibility is completely obscured. Then she sees him. On the dusty tarmac surrounded by flat gray hangars, a man in a hat stands waiting for her. His tie lifting, lifting higher as she lets down her wheels. He takes off his hat when the wind picks up, as if he were taking it off for a funeral. Pulling his pant leg up before he bends his knee, he climbs onto
the wing when she stops the plane and reaches his hand out to her when she emerges.

The Miami
Herald
is here, he says.

Hello, G.P., she says.

She pulls herself out of the hatch and stands on the wing. She loosens her silk scarf. On the tarmac three men in summer-weight suits and pale fedoras are walking toward her.

That was some landing, one of them says.

Did you think you were going to have a crack-up?

I certainly smacked it down hard that time. She climbs down from the wing.

Is it true that you’re planning an around-the-world flight?

I’ve tried that already, haven’t I?

Yes, but we heard you were planning another.

The best-laid plans, gentlemen.

On the ground she is holding her husband’s hand. He nods to the reporters, who step aside. A photographer crouches to take a picture. It is still early morning but the sun is blinding. They pose for a moment and then walk on.

Although secretly she fears that she is getting old, which she is for a woman pilot, she continues to plan death-defying journeys. But she compensates for her increasingly disturbing lack of optimism by projecting an
image of unflappable calm. She is not only America’s most beloved female flyer, she is also its most brilliant undiscovered actress. Still, and this bothers her although she pretends that it doesn’t, her shameless love of danger and the cavalier way she has relinquished her so-called feminine duties have won her slightly less respect and affection than she deserves.

That night we have dinner at the hotel. It’s one of the new hotels along the water, low and pink, with ocean-liner curves. The radio plays a song called “Harbor Lights,” and the Four Cadets are singing. I’m very tired and eat with my head down. G.P. is talking to the airport manager who has driven us to the hotel. During the meal I say something about putting a signal on Howland Island, and G.P. ignores my remark. He keeps eating. I stop eating and stare at my plate and when I don’t look up he lowers his fork. The airport manager licks the sauce from his spoon. Then G.P. pulls on his cuff as if it will prove something and says, If we put a signal on Howland Island, the book won’t sell out by Christmas.

He makes me write. He makes me write for magazines and columns in newspapers and he makes me write books about my flights. I wrote earnest poetry in high school, but he isn’t interested in my poems. He doesn’t
realize how difficult it is to write. Later, Noonan will read one of my books. He will say to me, As a writer, you’re a good pilot.

But G.P. is smart and the books sell very well and the money enables me to fly.

Upstairs I sit outside on a small terrace that is painted candy-colored pink. A breeze blows over from the ocean. I slip off my shoes and feel the painted cement smooth and grainy underfoot. I ride my mind on the waves for a while, just listening to their murmur.