Maiden Flight (18 page)

A year or so ago, Anne McCormick came marching into the house to have it out with me. She wanted to discuss Kate and thought she knew me well enough to talk me around to her point of view. Nothing doing. I told her the same thing I told Harry when he informed me of their engagement: it was on account of Kate that I refrained from getting married thirty years ago. If she had not made it as plain as day that she didn't want Ullam and me to run off and leave her, and insisted on staying home and looking after us, I would have gone out with the girls like any other fellow my age. Anne just laughed and said that was about as flimsy an excuse as she had ever heard. She said I was simply making myself unhappy and hurting Katharine without any real reason. Hurting Katharine, for pity's sake! As if I was the one who skipped out on her and not the other way around.

I am well aware of how the situation
looks
to other people, most particularly members of my own family. What not a single one of them seems to understand, or even care to understand, is how it
feels
to me—how Kate's betrayal gnaws away at me day after day, how it turns my heart to stone and makes me never want to trust a living soul again. Swes wasn't just my sister, she was my friend, my partner, my protector, my better half. Only Kate knew everything I had been through—the accident, Will's death, the patent suits, the sciatica, the battle with the Smithsonian, the relentless pressure to write the book and prove what never should have needed to be proved. Only Kate understood how much it has cost me all these years to stay the course and stand on principle. Now it seems principles are all I have left to stand on.

A few weeks after my set-to with Anne, Miss Beck and I finally got the flyer packed up and shipped it off to London. It took the two of us working together the greater part of a year to make it ready to be displayed in public. Griff sent newspaper clippings about the opening of the new exhibition galleries in South Kensington last spring, with King George and Queen Mary and the cream of the British aviation world in attendance. From all reports it was an impressive show, but I have no regrets about staying home. In fact, now that machine is finally off my hands, I feel like a man who has been released from prison after serving a long sentence at hard labor. I have even dismantled the laboratory so I can no longer put in time playing there. Who knows, I may yet get down to writing the history of the development of the aeroplane. If I have to do it without Katharine's help, so be it. The Wright flyer may be a museum piece, but Orville Wright is not ready to put himself on the shelf—oh no, not quite!

Anne McCormick came straight to us from speaking with Orv. To hear her tell it, she did her level best to talk sense into him, but it was no use. His defenses flew up at the first sign of trouble ahead and she didn't get anywhere at all. Ordinarily, Little Brother is the most reasonable of men—except when he decides to be
unreasonable
. There isn't a blessed thing that anyone can do when he once makes up his mind on a course of action—or inaction either. I've battered my head against
that
particular wall so long that it's more or less permanently black and blue! I saw no point in pursuing the topic any further, so instead Anne and I got to work rearranging
the furniture in our living room. Shifting tables and chairs around is a whole lot easier than getting Bubbo to budge.

Griff sent us photos of the flying machine hanging in its new home in the Science Museum, looking as good as new—
and
correctly labeled at long last! It almost hurts me to admit it, but maybe it's for the best the flyer left the country after all. The fight with the Smithsonian has been a wearing, wearying, heartbreaking thing to go through for all these years, and I am glad for Orv's sake that the ordeal is over. As a matter of fact, I have quit worrying about the Smithsonian. I don't imagine they will correct their past misconduct, but if their attitude changes and the machine
can
come back home, all right. The main reason I want it back is because I think it made Orv feel very depressed to send it away. Several friends who visited him about the time it was ready to go said that he was depressed—noticeably so.

I could have put the whole wretched business out of my mind long ago without batting an eye if it hadn't been for Mr. McMahon pestering me about the series of articles he's been writing on the boys for
Popular Science Monthly.
Orv won't like that one bit. He
always complained that McMahon's approach was too personal and chatty—he said so in as many words, in fact, the first time we rejected his book many years ago. But Mr. McMahon seems incapable of taking no for an answer, and I was too much of a lady—or maybe too much of a coward—to turn him away. Anyhow, he spent a couple of weeks at our house in Kansas City gathering material for his new manuscript. He was evidently under the impression that I could—or ever would—persuade Little Brother to change his mind. Ha!

They do say that no man is a prophet in his own land—for sure that applies to Orv. When I read in the paper about Emil Ludwig, the German historian, naming him as one of the four greatest living Americans—in the company of Thomas Edison, Jane Addams, and John D. Rockefeller, no less—I couldn't keep from smiling, for all my pride. It wasn't Ludwig's recognition of Orv's accomplishment that tickled me so much as the words he chose to describe him: “The sublime quality in Wright is, after all, not lightning flash of genius; it is the immensity of perseverance, the sure faith in reaching the sought-for goal, and the courage to rise again and again.” Bubbo's “immensity of perseverance”—ah yes, no one knows more about
that
than I do!

I might have foreseen that dispatching the flyer to England would solve none of my problems. Not only did it fail to put a damper on my dispute with the Smithsonian, it dragged the controversy right back out into the open. The papers retailed that stale old story for weeks, as if it were breaking news. First the secretary of the Smithsonian would put out an official statement, then the reporters would come around badgering me for a comment, which brought forth another statement from the Smithsonian, to which I felt obliged to respond. On and on it went, like an infernal merry-go-round that left us right back where we were when it all began.

I bear Dr. Abbot no ill will. He seems a thoroughly decent and fair-minded man, and naturally he bears no responsibility for the actions of his late, unlamented predecessor. Indeed, no sooner had Dr. Walcott died than Dr. Abbot let it be known that
the Smithsonian was desirous of mending fences and bringing the flyer back to the United States as soon as possible. The resolution the Board of Regents adopted at his behest all but conceded that Will and I had been in the right from the very beginning. I had an amicable conversation with Dr. Abbot at the Carleton Hotel in Washington. He told me that the whole country was with me in the dispute, offered to change the label on the Langley machine, and agreed to sign any statement so long as it did not vilify the Smithsonian Institution.

While I am, of course, gratified that Dr. Abbot and his colleagues are prepared to let bygones be bygones, as far as I'm concerned it's a case of too little, too late. Unfortunately, the Regents' resolution did not touch upon a single point that has been at issue during the controversy and did not clear up any of the discussion as it has been waged through the years. The statement showed that there had been no change in the attitudes and methods consistently adopted by the Smithsonian ever since the Hammondsport trials in 1914. It was merely another clever use of words. It certainly did not correct the false propaganda that has been put forth in an attempt to take credit for what Will and I did and give it to Langley.

In my view, the misstatements that have been repeatedly promulgated in the Smithsonian's various publications are a much more serious matter than the wording of the label on the Langley machine. As I told Dr. Abbot, if one wishes to continue to believe that Langley's aerodrome was “capable” of flight in 1903, in spite of all evidence to the contrary, he has the privilege of doing so. But no one has a right to lead others to this belief through false and misleading statements, and through the suppression of important evidence. When last we spoke, I expressed regret that
the Smithsonian had not seen fit to make a full and unbiased statement of the controversy, and we left it at that.

We are thus no further along than we were four or five years ago, when Kate was busy rallying the troops and Dr. Walcott's minions were digging into the trenches in preparation for a long siege. I don't know but that the only way of settling the issue is through a congressional or some other impartial investigation. But somebody else will have to lead the charge now that Swes has taken herself out of action. I have neither the strength nor the will to soldier on alone.

I gather Orville said about the same thing to Anne McCormick that he did to me. There was nothing definite, but his feeling that Katharine wanted to keep house for her brothers and did not want them to marry deterred him from “going out with the girls” and so prevented his forming any attachment that might have led to marriage. The fact is, I suppose, that his concentration on his work prevented any social activities on his part, and Katharine was making them so comfortable that he was not driven out to find somebody to make him a home. I suspect the idea that there was an implied obligation on her part not to leave him because he did not set up a home of his own has become an obsession with him. But I am convinced not merely by Katharine's recollection but also by the recollection of other members of her family that he is wrong.

On the other hand, Orville had every reason to reject Dr. Abbot's overtures out of hand, well intentioned though they undoubtedly were. I said so in an editorial I wrote at the time.
The Smithsonian's attitude is all too typical. It has long been fashionable in scientific circles to sneer at the Wright brothers as “two clever mechanics,” the “bicycle repair men” who used the work of real scientists to construct a plane. The great difficulty seems to lie in the prejudice and class feeling of the professional scientific bunch. I fear they regard the Wrights as outsiders who had no business to invent the airplane and so
didn't
invent it. Where that feeling exists, evidence to the contrary is almost futile.

The facts are that the scientists working in aviation at the end of the last century were all in a blind alley. The Wrights had to sweep aside most of their work and start anew to solve the problems of flight. Not until Dr. Abbot is prepared to make a frank confession of the misleading reports put out by his predecessor will Orville consent to bringing the Kitty Hawk plane back from England. It seems little enough to ask, but clearly the Smithsonian considers the stakes unacceptably high.

I can't help feeling that there is a lesson in all this for Orville, if only he could see it. What miracle will it take for him to own up to his own mistakes and allow Katharine back into his life?

Why should it be that I am so incurably interested in other people's weddings? I 'spect it's because my own wedding was such a let-down—not the ceremony itself, of course, that was perfectly lovely, but all the dear little things that
should
have led up to it. I spent months dreaming about being married and making plans—the way all women do, I imagine, regardless of their age or particular circumstances. There were guest lists to be drawn up, announcements
and invitations to be engraved, gowns to be ordered, music and flowers and food to be arranged—and in the end everything fell by the wayside in our mad rush to get the ceremony over and done with. Harry didn't mind so much—or if he did, he didn't show it—but it was different for me, especially since I'd been waiting thirty years for the right man to pop the question!

I'd have given a good deal to be at my nephew Bus's wedding in Dayton last June. I was interested enough to go, for sure, but it wasn't possible, not with things as they are between Little Brother and me. So I stayed home and tried to picture Bus and Sue and the rest of the family, and how pretty the little church must have looked decorated with all those pink climbing roses. We heard from various sources about how Orv helped the newlyweds escape from the reception at her parents' house. A natural-born conspirator he is! Life is all a game to Little Brother. Some way he reminds me of Peter Pan, the boy who never grew up. No wonder he stayed a bachelor—he wasn't cut out to be a husband, and that's a fact. Even Griff says it was probably a good thing that Orv was stopped from marrying thirty years ago—Harry and I roared over that!

The plain truth is that Orv was free to marry any time he pleased. No one was standing in his way—certainly not sister Kate! He would have had his pick of the young ladies too.
My friend Agnes was “Orv's girl” when we were young—at least we were all convinced
he
was sweet on
her
, even if she didn't necessarily return the favor. No doubt plenty of others were in the running, including a few I may never have known about. Why, there even was a rumor that he was once engaged to Mrs. Barney! Not much likelihood of that, I should say. According to Carrie, when that French “vidder”
came to Hawthorn Hill last summer, prospecting for a husband, he and Miss Beck sent her packing as quick as a wink!

One way and another, I seem to be living in Dayton a good deal of the time these days. Here's a fine howdy-do! Before I was married, I could hardly wait to move to Kansas City and set up house with Harry. I actually used to worry over whether we could live through the happiness of being together! I imagined we would laugh a good deal and have long, serious talks and try to get the universe settled as it should be. And then we'd wind up not caring about anything but just each other, and we'd talk and talk endlessly about the dear little things that we both love to talk about. We'd mix in a lot of things that young people don't have and don't know about and can't appreciate as we can. The last of life
is
the best, I believe.

It all seemed like another dream waiting to come true, and now that it
has
come true, what do I do but fritter away my time worrying about Orv and wishing I could be with
him—
and be something to him—back at Hawthorn Hill. That never can be, of course, but home is such an ideal place when you are far from it—as I know from experience.