Pearl Harbor.
Martha had felt since her first flight that if you’d once flown a plane
you’d never go to war, never want to, never see the point. Not only
because all those borders and their checkpoints and barricades would
be invisible or imaginary looked down on from above but also because
flight itself was better than fighting. She knew well enough that war
delighted men who could fly. She knew about the fleets of bombers over
London, so merciless; the Stukas that strafed the retreating British at
Dunkirk, the planes that shot up the lifeboats of sinking enemy ships:
you could think by 1942 that flying itself arose from an evil impulse
344 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
and ought to be banned. But she loved it, and her love, like any love,
seemed to her innocent. She couldn’t argue it and wasn’t going to try.
The great thing about the CAP was that you got all the fuel you
could use, though sometimes the supply itself was low. After all she
and her fellow CAP pilots were helping to protect the nation. She never
herself got to go out on coastal patrol and hunt for German subs (or
sink one, as one heroic or lucky CAP pilot had done), but still she was
showing what women could do in the war effort, and also, by the way,
what Jewish people (as her mother always named them) could do, take
that, Hitler, and all of them.
Silly, and she didn’t need an excuse, but she took the ones she was
offered. She flew packages and medical goods and government docu-
ments and ferried officials and searched for lost hikers all that summer,
and then in the fall, she got a telegram: it was one sent to every quali-
fied woman pilot that could be identified, and it invited her to become
a pilot with the Women’s Air Ferry Service.
Yes she’d go. She could go back and finish college when this was
over. If she washed out, well, she’d go back to the CAP program, or go
rivet things or weld things. She wasn’t going to go read Shakespeare
and Milton now, no, Daddy, not now. She convinced him and he con-
vinced Mother, or Mother at least in the end didn’t say no.
The week before she was to take the train south (she’d wanted to
drive the Austin down but Daddy nixed that and got her a roomette)
she stayed home every night and had dinner with her parents and her
brother and her grandmother, helped her mother paste photographs in
a family album and label the black pages with white ink, such beauti-
ful handwriting she had, and she had lunch in the city with her father
and drank a Manhattan and let him take her shopping to buy simple
strong outfits they imagined would be suitable for her training (she’d
send them home when eventually uniforms were issued them—she
lived in those and her rumpled fatigues and a couple of skirts and
blouses).
Her last evening before heading south she spent with her brother
Norman, playing cribbage and joshing and drinking a cocktail Norman
had invented that was so nasty you couldn’t have more than one, it was
more a joke than an intoxicant. Norman rolled up to the little bar in
the library and pretended to know exactly what he was doing.
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 345
“Creme de menthe,” he said, flourishing the Mae West–shaped
bottle. “White of egg. Muddle the lemon with sugar.”
“Oh stop, Norman.”
“You’ll love it.”
He turned the chair to face her, with the huge murky drink in hand.
“To you,” he said. She took it from him and picked up his too; he
needed both hands to move the chair through the room and down the
little ramp that led to what Daddy called the card room. He locked the
brake and with her help went from the wheelchair to an easy chair he
liked, in which he usually spent much of his day.
“I like the mustache,” she said. “It’s so handsome.”
Norman was an inordinately good-looking man, Martha thought,
and everyone else did too, and a vestigial vanity about it had continued
even after the polio, when (Norman said) good looks were about as
much use to him as another ear. His thick black hair fell over his brow
like Gable’s, and the new mustache was like his too.
“You’ll write,” he said.
“Of course.”
“Long letters. Every day.”
“I might be a little busy.”
She didn’t mind the job of writing her life for Norman. Even when
there wasn’t much life. In fact it was easier when there wasn’t much to
say. Setting out on an adventure, in aid of the nation, to fly planes in
the company of other women with nerve and skilclass="underline" that was going to be
harder, she could see that already, but she’d do it, she’d brag, she’d tell
all, and not a touch of sorrow for him, not a touch of it. That was the
agreement, never spoken. She could feel condemned down deep inside
her that she could fly when he couldn’t walk, she could feel that it was
wrong in her to feel joy in any movement or possibility whatever when
she sat with him here: but she knew also never, ever to show it.
“So any news?” she asked.
“No news, Martha.” He smiled the smile that always came with
that answer, and sipped his concoction. “Oh. This.”
He put down his drink and made his way back into the wheelchair
and across the rug to a table by the window flanked with shelves and
drawers where his coin collection was housed. There were more albums
in his rooms upstairs, but the trip upward in the clanking lift was one
346 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
he took as infrequently as he could. He’d told Martha that making all
that noise was as embarrassing as loudly passing wind in public.
“Here,” he said. He took, from a stiff envelope addressed to him
and sent from Mexico City, a small envelope of glassine. From that he
removed and dropped into her hand a heavy coin of gray silver.
“Just arrived,” Norman said. He often showed her his new acquisi-
tions—reading history and novels and this collection were what he
did—but this coin seemed to evoke not the usual enthusiasm but a kind
of melancholy in him. He let her finger it for a moment and then took
it back, to tell her (as he always did) its story.
“A Spanish milled dollar,” he said, “1733, see? Reign of Philip the
Fifth. That’s the arms of Spain. This is a nice piece, and maybe was
never circulated. Look on the obverse.”
The other side of the coin said Vtraque Vnum and showed a pair
of pillars with a scroll between them. Martha tried to remember her
Latin. “And both one?”
Norman nodded, not bad. “Actually ‘the one and the other.’ Mean-
ing the two worlds, East and West, Spain and the New World. But look
closer at the pillars. Here.” He picked up a Sherlock Holmes–style
magnifying glass from the table and gave it to her. “Look at the little
scroll. Can you read that?”
“No.”
“It says Plus ultra, ” Norman said. He lifted his head, tossed back
that falling lock of shining hair. “It means Even farther. Even farther,
Sis.” He put the cold coin back into her hand and closed her fingers
over it. “Keep it with you,” he said. “Go even farther. Just write.”
She wrote: she didn’t write that her first training base had no fire equip-
ment, that they’d had no insurance, no hospital anywhere nearby, and
they’d gone up in whatever planes were available and not always
brought them down in one piece, partly because the mechanics dis-
liked the idea of women flying their planes and pushed the checkout