I Was Amelia Earhart (Vintage Contemporaries) Read online

  Acclaim for Jane Mendelsohn’s

  I Was Amelia Earhart

  “A poetic meditation on freedom and love and flight [that] stands on its own as a powerfully imagined work of fiction.… Ms. Mendelsohn invests her story with the force of fable.”

  —Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

  “Haunting and delicate.… Mendelsohn’s universe is a sensuous and ethereal one.… Her novel is drenched in visual effects [which] continue to dance before the retina after one has read them.”

  —The New Yorker

  “A tantalizing fictional biography of Amelia Earhart … slim and idiosyncratic as its heroine.… The pleasures of reading this book are many.”

  —Philadelphia Inquirer

  “Mendelsohn’s rhapsodic language and shimmering, dreamlike imagery will carry readers along on her voyage into the many mysteries this work contains.… A sensual, intoxicating experience.”

  —Louisville Courier-Journal

  “Conveys a sense of the sheer wonder of flying.… I Was Amelia Earhart contains an alluring element of fantasy for anyone feeling closed in by life. The book is about escape.”

  —USA Today

  “Compelling.… You can’t help admiring the boldness of a novelist who would make fiction of a legend.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “Vividly imagined and complex.… A soaring prose meditation.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  “Exciting.… It’s testimony to the power of the Earhart myth, and to Mendelsohn’s sparkling prose, that the reader is quickly enraptured.… This is entertainment of a high order.”

  —Lexington Herald-Leader

  “Mendelsohn [is] an exquisite crafter of prose.… Brilliant … is not too strong a word to describe what Mendelsohn has done.… Her novel will hold you spellbound.”

  —Newark Sunday Star-Ledger

  “Fascinating.… The prose soars with lightness and imagination.”

  —Winston-Salem Journal

  “Lush [and] mesmerizing … Mendelsohn gives us not so much a stream of consciousness as a stream of dreamlike images to float on.”

  —Hartford Courant

  “Not to be missed … an immediately addicting book.”

  —Harper’s Bazaar

  “Reads like a kind of dream.… Mendelsohn delivers a fantasy from deep within Earhart’s consciousness.”

  —Denver Post

  “Sparely written, almost visionary … a paean to the ultimate escape.”

  —The Christian Science Monitor

  “Elegant and sensuously beautiful.… A psychologically rich portrait of a highly unusual woman.”

  —Booklist

  Jane Mendelsohn

  I Was Amelia Earhart

  Jane Mendelsohn is a graduate of Yale University. Her articles and reviews have appeared in the Village Voice, Yale Review, London Review of Books, and The Guardian. She and her husband live in New York City. This is her first novel.

  FIRST VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES EDITION, MARCH 1997

  Copyright © 1996 by Jane Mendelsohn

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in the United States in hardcover by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, in 1996.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Mendelsohn, Jane, [date]

  I was Amelia Earhart : a novel / by Jane Mendelsohn. —1st ed.

  p. cm.

  1. Earhart, Amelia. 1897–1937—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3563.E48212 1996

  813’.54—dc20 96-4149

  eISBN: 978-0-307-81420-3

  Random House Web address: http://www.randomhouse.com/

  Author photograph © Pierre Dufour

  v3.1

  For Nick

  But in the roar of the wind she heard the roar of an aeroplane coming nearer and nearer.

  — VIRGINIA WOOLF, Orlando

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Part One Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Part Two Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Part Three Chapter Twelve

  Acknowledgments

  THE SKY IS FLESH.

  The great blue belly arches up above the water and bends down behind the line of the horizon. It’s a sight that has exhausted its magnificence for me over the years, but now I seem to be seeing it for the first time.

  More and more now, I remember things. Images, my life, the sky. Sometimes I remember the life I used to live, and it feels impossibly far away. It’s always there, a part of me, in the back of my mind, but it doesn’t seem real. Whether life is more real than death, I don’t know. What I know is that the life I’ve lived since I died feels more real to me than the one I lived before.

  •

  I know this: I risked my life without living it. Noonan once said any fool could have seen I was risking my life but not living it. I had already been flying for a long time when he said that. It was 1937. I was thirty-nine. I was more beautiful than ever, but an aura of unhappiness traveled with me, like the trail of a falling comet. I felt as though I had already lived my entire life, having flown the Atlantic and set several world records, and there was no one to share my sadness with, least of all my husband. Charmed by my style and my daring exploits, the public continued to send me flowers and gifts, but the love of strangers meant nothing to me. My luminous existence left me longing and bored. I had no idea what it meant to live an entire life. I was still very young.

  So, the sky.

  It’s the only sky that I can remember, the only one that speaks to me now.

  I’m flying around the world, there’s nothing but sky. The sky is flesh. It’s the last sky.

  I remember: I’m flying around the world. I’m flying over the Pacific somewhere off the coast of New Guinea in my twin-engine Lockheed Electra, and I’m lost. I watch the sky as it curves and swells, and every now and then I think I can see it shudder. Voluptuous, sultry in the naked heat, it seems to me to be the flesh of a woman. But then suddenly the light illuminates a stretch of more masculine proportions—a muscular passage of azure heft, a wide plank like the back of a hand—and I have to acknowledge, although I hate to admit it, the bisexuality of nature. I purse my lips a little when I realize this, and scrunch my nose up to rearrange my goggles. My eyes and my eyes reflected in the windshield hold the sun in them, and it burns. I blink and reach one arm directly overhead. My fingers grasp a dial. Out of the far corner of my field of vision, I catch a glimpse of the underlying sea. Thinking to myself that this might be the last day of my life, that I’m hot, and that I am hungry, I adjust the dial and lower my arm. The sea is dark. It is darker than the sky.

  This is the story of what happened to me when I died. It’s also the story of my life. Destiny, the alchemy of fate and luck. I think about it sometimes, under a radiant sun. The tide laughs. The light swims. I watch the fish-skeleton shadows of the palm leaves on the sand. The clouds ripped to shreds.

  Today when I think of my former life, I think of it as a dream.
In the dream I am another person. In the dream I am the most famous aviatrix of my day, a heroine. I am Amelia Earhart.

  Part One

  One

  AS FAR BACK as she could remember, she always wanted to be a heroine. She settled on her vocation in the nickelodeon, where bathed in the mechanical shadows of earthly stars, she fell under the spell of Cleopatra and Joan of Arc, their silent swoons and voiceless battle cries calling her off to distant lands. Even before she understood what a heroine was, she knew that she wanted to be one. Not on a screen in a dusty old vaudeville house, but out in the real world. The painted goddesses ruling countries and fighting wars weren’t at all like the women she knew. The women she knew did what men expected of them. Heroines, they did whatever they wanted. They smoked cigarettes on horseback under silken skies. They carried guns and had a multitude of lovers. She was seduced by the vision of an imaginary world where women led extraordinary lives, and when the picture was about factory workers or men kissing their secretaries, she snuck behind the stage and played checkers or penny poker with the manager’s one-handed son.

  Sometimes my thoughts are clearly mine, I hear them speak to me, in my own voice. Other times I see myself from far away, and my thoughts are ghostly, aerial, in the third person.

  When I was very young, six or seven, I already wanted to die. I already had the dream. I wanted to escape, to go higher, to leave my body, and this made me seem ambitious, greedy for life. When I was young, people hated my greediness, but they enjoyed it too. A little girl filled with desire is a beautiful sight, ugly, but very beautiful.

  My father gave me a gun for Christmas, against my grandfather’s wishes. It was a .22 caliber rifle. I used to hunt for rats in my grandparents’ barn, the milky winter light falling down between the rafters, scraps of hay dust floating like lazy planets. I’d lift my rifle slowly, like a cowboy on the plains, and press my eyelashes up against the barrel. When you shoot a rat, it falls over in a soft heap. I liked the look of a dead rat, so peaceful.

  •

  The sky is flesh. I’m flying around the world. A fine perspiration laces my face and neck. It begins to seep down my back. Twisting my left arm around behind me, I locate a can on a shelf. I grab hold of the screwdriver and steadying the can in my lap, I poke two holes through its metal skin. When I poke the holes, I hear a tiny pop, like the release of a toy gun. Inside the plane, the mindless roar of the engine plays a dull accompaniment to my snack. When I finish the juice, I put the can back on the shelf and lick the last drops of salt from my lips.

  This is what’s happening: I’m flying over the Pacific somewhere off the coast of New Guinea in my twin-engine Lockheed Electra, and I’m lost. This is my predicament. I fiddle with the radio the way I have fiddled with it so many times before, only this time I receive nothing. I look down at my fuel gauge and my eyeballs tremble rapidly as they follow the small, significant movements of the indicator. My radio is useless, I’m running out of gas, and I’m suffering from dehydration and fatigue.

  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.