The aviatrix, p.1
The Aviatrix, page 1
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Text copyright © 2021 by Erin Laurel O’Brien
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Montlake, Seattle
www.apub.com
Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Montlake are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.
ISBN-13: 9781542027618
ISBN-10: 1542027616
Cover design by Caroline Teagle Johnson
Dedicated to my own Milly (Dottie) and her Planey (Rhododendron) and all little girls who dream of big futures and adventures
CONTENTS
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Epilogue
HISTORICAL NOTE
GLOSSARY OF 1920S AND AVIATION TERMS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chapter One
Early June 1923
North of Saint Louis, Missouri
“What do you mean, you’re canceling our family’s flying circus this year?” The words tore from Mattie McAdams like shrapnel ripping through the canvas wing of a biplane.
“We’re out of cash.” Her brother Jake looked uncharacteristically sheepish as he helplessly shrugged.
Mattie squeezed her eyes shut as she painstakingly gathered her patience to deal with not one but three older brothers. In her younger years, she would have just exploded. Now, she at least tried for a bit of calm.
“I knew we were having money troubles, but I didn’t know it was that bad,” Mattie finally managed to grind out with an evenness she didn’t feel. Her other two siblings shifted uncomfortably in their hard straight-backed chairs. Beside them sat their family’s star performer, Leo Ward. The flying ace kept his posture rigid, his boyish features as incongruously stoic as always. Yet Mattie thought she caught a hint of guilt in her former friend’s cobalt-blue eyes. Her father, Walt McAdams, attempted a comforting smile, but even with the bill of his ever-present flatcap obscuring half his face, he couldn’t hide his weariness.
“We didn’t want to worry you, Swift,” her father admitted. The old nickname triggered a poignant ache.
Mattie drummed her fingers against the rough wood. Her father had built the dining set from a hickory tree that he’d felled to clear the original airstrip. Normally touching the solid slab gave her a sense of comfort. The furniture was as stout and steady as the man who’d created it. Mattie had expected her pa’s current overprotective behavior from her brothers but not from him.
“We thought we could turn it around, and we didn’t want you to fret,” Otto, her middle brother, admitted ruefully. Like Mattie, he had their mother’s red hair. He tried to smooth his wavy locks with petroleum jelly, but the stubborn strands always escaped. Today, one curl looped over the middle of his forehead, giving him a comically earnest air. Unfortunately, Mattie was not in the mood to be amused.
“Fret!” Mattie burst out, crossing her arms over her hand-me-down shirt that used to belong to her brother Will. “I don’t fret! It’s the lot of you who act like a bunch of mother hens, always worrying about me.”
Her brothers exchanged looks among themselves and then glanced toward Leo. Mattie groaned and beat out an even faster tattoo along a gouge in the hickory wood.
“If we’d told you about the difficulties, you would have tried to fly crazy stunts to bring in an audience.” Will leaned back in his chair, as if his statement explained everything.
In a way, it did. But not how he’d intended.
“Of course I would have!” Mattie jumped to her feet with such force the heavy hickory chair toppled backward. “Flying circuses aren’t as rare as they used to be before the war! We need more dramatic stunts, not less. This was Alfred’s dream. We can’t let it die too.”
Almost unthinkingly, she stopped by her twin’s old chair. The empty one. The one nobody ever used. The one they even avoided looking at. Instead it sat as a dusty, silent monument to their loss. Rarely acknowledged but always there.
A lump swelled in Mattie’s larynx. Swallowing hard against the physical pain, she gripped the back of Alfred’s seat, wishing once again that her twin were still here. He’d understood her. He’d supported her. And he never would have allowed the circus that had permitted both of them to soar through the skies to flop over into financial ruin.
“Mattie,” Leo’s voice came, soft and steady. He rarely spoke during the McAdamses’ discussions, especially the heated ones. The fact that he did so now shocked Mattie as much as it disheartened her. This Leo, this shell of her former friend, would never again champion her desire to perform stunts like he had before the Great War.
“Yes, Leo?” Mattie spoke more sharply than she’d intended, but her frustrations had collided with her old grief, making her raw.
He did not react to her tone—at least not outwardly. But Mattie sensed his momentary pause. As a flight instructor, she’d learned to detect her students’ masked misgivings. Leo had always hidden his trepidations the best, yet somehow, she could still read him the easiest.
When he spoke, his voice was steady, neutral, perfectly balanced despite its hollow ring. “Alfred wouldn’t put you at risk to save his circus.”
A sizzle of rage blazed through Mattie. She was tired, so tired, of being mollycoddled. “I seem to remember Alfred helping me sneak into the hangar so I could take one of the planes out when Jake, Otto, and Will said no. In fact, I also recall you being the designated lookout.”
Leo rubbed the back of his head—the only outward indication that her words had meant anything to him. “We were just kids, Mattie. We didn’t fully understand the risks.”
Mattie started striding up and down the room again, feeling trapped inside the wooden structure, as if the thick overhead beams were prison bars. “My comprehension of physics is just the same as it was then. You forget that I was the one who taught you how to fly.”
Leo moved his hand even more vigorously against his scalp, causing the chestnut-brown strands to stand up. Fortunately, he didn’t use the popular brilliantine, or his hair would always look an unruly mess.
“I’m not denying your skills as a pilot, Mattie, or that you showed me how to make a bird soar. I still admire what you can do in the air. That hasn’t changed. But I’m not the same fellow who used to pull pranks with you and Alfred before the war.”
No. Leo wasn’t. Very little of the handsome, athletic man before her now reminded her of the scrawny, rawboned kid who’d turned up one day at the flight school offering to do odd jobs in return for her teaching him how to fly. But he’d filled out during his time overseas and now had the muscles to complement his height. But the greatest change hadn’t been physical. Although Leo had always been quiet, he’d returned even more withdrawn. His rare laughter had become a mere wisp of a memory, and worse, he seemed to have assigned himself as her personal protector.
“No,” Mattie said, her voice as jagged as her emotions. Long-buried angry words bubbled forth from Mattie, brought to the surface with the pain of watching her twin’s dream die too. “You’re not the boy I taught to fly, Leo. That boy would have allowed me to properly honor my brother in the airplane procession dedicated to Alfred’s memory. He wouldn’t have ratted me out and got me grounded from the flight.”
“Swift, it was Jake who made the decision not to let you take the stick that day, not Leo.” Mattie’s father broke into the conversation. He rubbed one finger against his chin, his expression more haggard as he once again assumed the role of peacekeeper for their rowdy family.
“Leo was right to tell me that you intended to do a stall maneuver during the memorial service.” Jake folded his arms over his broad chest, ever the oldest sibling.
“But it was Alfred’s signature move and his favorite one!” And it was Mattie’s too. She loved pitching the nose of her plane toward the sun and climbing ever skyward until the magnificent machine slowed to the point where it no longer had sufficient air moving over the wings to maintain control. The craft would stop midair, flop to its side, and begin a glorious, mad spin toward the earth, like a maple seed caught in a tornado.
“It’s a dangerous stunt, even for a man,” Otto said. He was the sibling who looked the most like Alfred, but he had even fairer skin, which tended to flush at the slightest provocation. Right now, he looked redder than a fresh tomato straight from the garden. “You’re our sister, and we don’t want to see you hurt.”
Mattie stopped midpace. “Why is it that if I want to do something, it is nonsense, but if you boys do the same thing, it is bravery?”
“Mattie, you’re a girl.” Will sank his hands into the front of his scraped-back locks, causing the strands to break loos e from the petroleum jelly holding them in place. He’d be rearranging his coiffure as soon as he caught sight of himself in the mirror.
She placed her arms akimbo. “So?”
“You should be doing girl things, not purposely stalling your Jenny.” Will tugged on his forelock again, making it even more bedraggled.
Mattie held back a frustrated cry and instead channeled her disgust into a particularly cutting look that she first leveled at the youngest of her surviving brothers and then the older two. “The three of you always say you don’t want me risking my neck, but when it comes to performing your own tricks, you have no problems risking your manly ones.”
“Stalling a plane is disorienting to every pilot.” Leo spoke quietly, unlike her hotheaded brothers, his voice so annoyingly reasonable. “I saw more than one ace crash that way during the war when he used the maneuver to fool the enemy into thinking that he’d been hit.”
Mattie threw her hands into the air as she returned to striding through the room. “I always maintain my focus. If you all planned more stunts like that for me, we wouldn’t have the problem drawing crowds. Think of the publicity we could get with a female headliner! I could take over Alfred’s old role instead of Leo.”
Will scratched his temple, breaking more strands of red hair free from their greased confines. “I don’t reckon that a girl flyer would have more draw than a war hero, especially one with Leo’s popularity.”
At the reference to his fame as a daring balloon-busting pilot, Leo cleared his throat uncomfortably and went back to rubbing the back of his head. Mattie knew that he didn’t like the attention he still received from his exploits in the Great War. Even the national papers covered his career. Only her knowledge of Leo’s patent discomfort kept Mattie from angrily striking back at Will’s comment.
“Children,” Mattie’s father interjected, his voice calm yet unyielding as he pushed back on his cap. “This bickering isn’t doing anything but stirring up ill will. It’s not going to fix the matter at hand.”
“I am trying to offer a solution to make the circus more popular so that we can save it,” Mattie protested.
“Mattie, we don’t have enough funds to pay for the fuel to get to our second tour stop,” her father admitted as he removed his hat entirely and molded it in his hands. “If we don’t find sources of steadier income, we’re going to lose the flight school too. We’re about to default on the loan.”
Not the flight school. Not the place that held so many memories, where sometimes she swore she could still hear Alfred’s voice when she worked by herself repairing an engine. Not the airfield where she’d first taken to the skies and later executed her first loop. Not the home her father had built himself, where they’d received the news of Alfred’s fatal crash. Not the hangar where the best photograph of her twin hung beside his war medals.
“We can’t let that happen.” Mattie forced the words through suddenly numb lips.
“That’s why I am going to take a job with the US Airmail Service designing mail routes,” Otto said, his skin now flushed in fierce resolution. “It’ll bring in steady dough.”
“I’ve signed on to be an airmail pilot,” Will added as he patted his hair in an attempt to fix the mess he’d made. “Jake is going to be a mechanic on the ground like he was during the war.”
“I’m looking for a job as a test pilot,” Leo said. “I’ll make sure to send money back to help keep the flight school afloat.”
An incongruous mix of frustration and gratitude filled Mattie. Of course Leo would have chosen the most dangerous option, even if it also was the most lucrative.
“Where does that leave me?” Mattie asked, pausing between Leo’s chair and her father’s.
Her father reached up to pat her hand reassuringly. “You and I will run the flight school. It’s about time we started offering classes in the summers again.”
Of course she would be stuck here in Missouri! Just like she’d been during the war. Oh, she’d tried to join as a pilot, first in the French Lafayette Escadrille and then in the US Army Air Corps, but neither country had wanted a female aviator, no matter how talented.
“You can work on your radio designs,” Leo offered.
Tinkering with gadgets and engines was Mattie’s second love. Lately, she’d been trying to figure out how to harness radio signals to improve communications. But too much frustration pumped through her to allow her to concentrate on anything engineering related.
“Just so I can receive another rejection letter from a manufacturer?” Mattie bit out. “No one is interested in a woman’s designs, and they are even less inclined to hire me.”
That was the crux of it. Unlike her brothers and Leo with their military backgrounds and sheer maleness, she was unemployable in the professions that she excelled at.
Suddenly, the pressure of everything—losing the business, losing her main opportunity to dance through the skies, losing her tight-knit family, losing Alfred’s dream—became too much for her. She needed to escape.
“But perhaps you are right,” Mattie added. “Perhaps my designs will produce the miracle we need. It is, at least, one thing that I can try. I need time to think things over, and I do my best considering when I’m tinkering.”
Mustering a smile that she didn’t feel, Mattie nodded toward the assembled McAdamses and Leo and then ducked out the door. She had just started down the long covered passage that connected the main house to the hangar when she heard her name—soft and low, but no less intense for all its quietness. Even if Mattie hadn’t recognized Leo’s voice, she would have known who had followed her. They’d always been able to anticipate each other’s moves.
“Don’t do anything foolish, Mattie,” Leo said as soon as she turned toward him. At first, he looked as stiff and impassive as ever, except for the slightest tightening of the muscles around his mouth. Mattie opened her mouth to lambast him, but then she saw it: a flicker of concern in the blue depths of his eyes and maybe, just maybe, the slightest tinge of fear.
He knew she wasn’t going to tinker, but to fly. It appeared, though, that he didn’t intend to peach on her to her brothers for once. She appreciated his discretion but not his concern.
“I won’t, Leo,” Mattie said wearily. “I might not be like you and lay out my flight path as if I were General Pershing planning troop movements, but I know what I’m doing. One of these days, I’m going to prove that to you.”
Leo nodded stiffly. His Adam’s apple jerked as he visibly swallowed. He’d spread his feet apart, his hands clasped behind his back, his muscular chest puffed out. She’d dubbed it his war-monument pose, and she knew he assumed it whenever he felt uncomfortable. Eons ago, before the War to End All Wars, she would have teased a laugh out of him. But she hadn’t tried for years, and she doubted that she could even coax a slight smile.
“Thanks for keeping my secret this time, Leo,” Mattie told him softly just before she turned and opened the door to the hangar.
Mattie breathed in the familiar scent of Rockol engine oil, grease, and gasoline. The clink of gears, the rattle of chains, and the pump of pistons had been the background sounds of Mattie’s childhood. She still loved watching cold, motionless pieces of metal suddenly transform into something almost alive. But even those marvels could not compare to taking flight. She’d never forgotten the rush she’d felt the first time the wheels had left the ground and the plane had pitched its nose straight into the wide blue sky. She’d begged her father to stay up longer, and he’d managed to hold the old-fashioned, kitelike bird aloft as long as he could. Ever since that day, she’d been absolutely air mad.
Walking past the worktable tucked away in the back of the hangar, Mattie headed instead to the Shaker peg rack that held their gear. Alfred’s still hung next to hers where he’d placed it after his last flight before leaving for France. Mattie could still remember Alfred laughing as he’d flung the leather strap of his goggles over the cylindrical piece of wood. He’d promised to write home to her about all his adventures. “I won’t leave anything out, Matt. I promise. Gosh, I wish you could come with Leo and me. With us three flying in formation, we could chase the Jagdstaffeln back to Germany in no time.”
But she hadn’t been there at her brother’s side on the Western Front. Even now when she woke in the middle of the night or when things got too quiet in the workshop, she’d wonder if her presence could have made a difference. Maybe she would have managed to waggle her wings to signal to her brother that he was going the wrong way. Even if she’d just been a ground mechanic, perhaps she might have developed a better navigation or communications system that would have alerted her brother to his fatal confusion before it was too late.
