The Woman Who Rode the Wind

  And now she could feel the balloon above her lose its tautness and start to sag. The handlebars didn’t want to turn. She craned her head to the right and saw the seam breaking loose, forming a pouting mouth, spewing out the precious gas that kept her from falling. The balloon started to wilt. Wrinkles and pouches formed like skin that had suddenly aged. She looked back, thinking that things couldn’t get worse. But they were. The rudder was jammed.

  Stop it. Stop the panic. Think about what’s going on. Just because you’re 1,000 feet in the air doesn’t mean you can’t think.

  When she was in trouble as a child, her father used to tell her: “Step back and see it as someone else would.” She tried. She saw the cylinder shape of Alain’s balloon as it would look in the distance, doubled in the middle, leaving the two pointed ends high in the air. The rudder, at the back end, had become snarled in the piano wire that connected the bamboo keel to the balloon above it.

  Only one thing to do. Go and free it. Easier said than done. You’ve got to go up there and do it. Take a breath, a deep breath, maybe your last. No, fight that! Put one foot on the bicycle seat, and hoist yourself to the rigging. Don’t look down. Everything is so dangerously small. It will get bigger in a hurry won’t it? Now, up!

  With the keel in both hands, she lifted her feet until they were wrapped around it, and started to inch her way, hand by hand, out the slender spar toward the rudder.

  It seemed everlasting. The dirigible made a huge lazy circle that brought it closer to the Tower. In a few moments it would be over the Seine once more. She recognized the spot where Alain had fallen just as she reached the tangled wire.

  She jerked it loose, and the rudder was free. Then she realized that she was almost upside down, her head facing toward the ground. Her weight at the back end of the airship had acted as ballast, sending the airship up at a dangerous angle. It was strange to be falling and rising at the same time, disorienting, like doing an endless cartwheel.

  Stop it! That way lies madness. Inch your way back toward the center.

  She moved slowly, trying not to kick any of the piano wire supports with her feet as she moved backward. Finally she reached the spot directly above the seat, now terribly far below her.

  At that moment the engine gave one last pneumatic cough and died. The airship had leveled out, and was starting to sink fast. She heard a ripping sound overhead as the seam split completely. The floor of the city was rushing toward her.

  She saw the two pins that kept the bicycle frame and engine attached to the keel, one on either side of her. Instinctively she reached out with her feet, angry now at this thing that was killing her, and kicked at one of them. It came loose, and she realized that Alain must have thought of the same thing. Without the extra weight, the balloon could stay aloft longer.

  She kicked at the other one. It held. She was falling faster. Now is the moment when you live or die. The world came down to an inch of iron pin, and how much strength she could put against it. She kicked again and missed. Falling faster. One more time. Her heel connected and she felt it give. The whole frame plummeted and crashed somewhere below her.

  Now she hung by both arms outstretched to the keel. The balloon, almost completely limp, was tangled in the keel and hanging around her.

  Seven hundred feet below, the earth reached up to drag her down.

  * * *

  On the grandstand where he had hoped to award the medal, President Auguste Pouchet watched the horror unfold above him. Paper flutters from the rockets were all around him; the whole place smelled of gunpowder. Another disaster, another death, another tragedy for France, he thought, and perhaps the final one for him.

  But what horrified him most was the look on Yvette’s face as she stood beside him. It was a look of triumph.

  Chapter Thirty Three: The Last Moment...

  Harding had been sleeping fitfully on a park bench after a bout with a bottle of Romanee-Conti, sleeping until a gendarme tapped him on the shoes with a nightstick to wake him up. The sun was far overhead, and everyone with a place to go was already there. But he had no reason to rush. The contest was over, and, when he thought about it, so was his life.

  He wandered the city. He ate tasteless food. He walked past empty houses with broken windows. They looked like paintings of his soul, he thought. He meandered down the Champs-Elysées, watching the pretty girls who strolled along, chattering with one another. “The beautiful shorthand typists,” he remembered one of his friends calling them.

  Then he went into a petite zinc at the corner, rested his elbows on the cool gray stone of the bar, and ordered a pack of Sweet Caporal cigarettes. He looked at the bottles behind the bar, each capped with its own silver siphon, and they seemed to wink back at him in the near dark. He could tell them his life story and they would listen.

  Two trips to Paris, two different women, but two failures all the same. Death and pain. His wife dying, holding his hand, not blaming him, although she should have. Alain Chevrier in flames, falling into the Seine. Poor Bishop, waiting until that single terrible moment to blow his head off. And Mary Ann, hurt and anger in her eyes, telling him the truth about himself. “And the pig got up and slowly walked away.”

  “What did you say?” asked the bartender.

  Harding looked up. He hadn’t been aware that he was talking out loud.

  “Sorry, I couldn’t hear you,” the bartender went on. “There’s too much noise outside.”

  “What noise?” thought Harding. Then he heard it too: the hiss and whoosh and bang of rockets fired close by.

  He looked out the window. Another rocket shot upward, showering sparks. Then another, and another.

  He ran outside and looked up at the Eiffel Tower. There was Mary Ann, 1,000 feet in the air and a quarter mile away.

  He ran toward the Tower, bumping into tourists carrying their new Kodak box cameras and high-hatted gentlemen who were flailing with canes, pushing each other out of the way. Bells were ringing in the churches. Auto horns were blaring.

  Then he too heard the moan. Harding had heard that noise before, and he would never forget it. It was in New York City, when a jumper had climbed to the top of Madison Square Garden, hung from the statue of Diana and her drawn bow, and then done a “Brody,” diving headfirst into the crowd below.

  He ran closer, jumping to see over the heads of the crowd. He saw the balloon double up. He heard the engine sputter, and die. And he watched Mary Ann drop the framework underneath the balloon. It went crashing into a house only a block away.

  Now she was falling from the sky.

  Then Harding saw the skin of the balloon billow out around her as a gust of wind took it. The gust actually forced her up a few feet before it died, and she started to fall again.

  It reminded him of...

  That first day. The day when Alain’s balloon had exploded. But Alain had survived, by spreading the balloon like a kite and riding it down.

  Below what was left of the balloon hung the big drag rope. It was so low that it was bumping the rooftops up the street, coming at him like an invitation.

  He seized it and started to run, pulling it over his shoulder. No good. Not enough weight.

  Then he saw a gang of Apaches, young toughs wearing striped sailors’ jerseys and baggy pants with red sashes, hanging out at the corner tobacco store. They were laughing at him, imitating him, and pretending that they were frantically pulling on a rope.

  “Come on!” he yelled in French. “Help me pull.” He pointed up at the airship falling from the sky.

  There was a second of confusion in their faces, then inspiration. They joined him on the rope, and suddenly it went taut. They ran down the street, knocking people sprawling when they got in the way.

  A butcher’s wagon pulled up alongside. “Jump on back!” the butcher called. “Loop the rope around a hook.”

  Harding leaped on the wagon and snubbed the rope around a meat hook. Inside the butcher’s wagon, ham hocks and open beef sides, their
ribs showing, bumped and rattled against the walls as the butcher whipped his horses to full speed. Harding held onto the rope, feeling the rasp of it against his bleeding hands. He was afraid to look above him. A crowd was running alongside the wagon now.

  The wagon raced down a side street. Then it careened to a stop. Harding went over backwards. Cages of live chickens and rabbits fell on him.

  Ahead was a six-foot-high brick wall. The butcher had made a wrong turn.

  Harding freed the rope from the hook, wrapped it around his waist, and scrambled up the wall.

  When he reached the top, he jumped into a hundred arms that were waiting on the other side. Hands seized the rope and pulled it. Harding was carried above the throng. Then, finally, he looked back.

  He saw Mary Ann, her arms outstretched to catch as much wind as possible, framed against the Paris sunset. The remains of her balloon were transparent through the glow of the setting sun, and trailed out behind her like the gossamer fins of an angelfish.

  And the whole city, it seemed, was pulling her to safety.

  “My last vision of her will be like my first,” Harding thought. “In flight.”

  Chapter Thirty Four: Père-Lachaise Cemetery—July 19

  Mary Ann spent the night in an elegant hotel, the kind that had brass rails under each step to keep the carpet in place. There was no shortage of money now, and after all those dark nights in the bilge of a boat, she felt that she deserved it. But the telephone in her drawing room never stopped ringing and messages were constantly being left at her door: three proposals of marriage, numerous offers to go to the theater or be in the theater, even a telegram from Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show.

  Reporters crowded outside and every couple of minutes flowers arrived from somewhere. Since she was a mere woman, “protectors” had emerged from all over France to help her manage her million francs. When President Pouchet announced that he was “her best friend,” she knew that it was time to leave.

  She decided to catch the late train from Gare du Nord that same evening and travel to the coast, where a liner would carry her back across the Atlantic. But before she left, she had to pay a last visit to a real friend. She settled her bill, slipped out the back entrance of the hotel, and took a cab to the eastern outskirts of the city.

  When Mary Ann got out in front of the high gates with their winged hourglasses, she wished that she had asked for directions. Père-Lachaise was a city in itself; 106 acres full of stone houses and statues all crowded together and, like the other city surrounding it, also in turmoil. Monument piled on monument up the steep hillsides, and the hills, in rebellion against carrying all this weight, had bulged out as if they were threatening to release their cargo of the dead.

  Some of the mausoleums were cracked, scarred and open. Old men sat outside their family tombs, white heads resting against iron doors that were ajar, as if they could hear the call of dead wives and lovers and were waiting to get in.

  She knew the place that she was looking for would be at the highest point, near the grave of Honoré de Balzac, so she threaded her way through the narrow lanes, always choosing the path that led up. As she climbed higher, the only sound was the white gravel crunching under her shoes.

  The cemetery became more peaceful and open, with grass and trees surrounding the larger plots. Some of the graves had little wooden crosses topped with cupolas, looking like small churches, often with a picture of the departed tacked onto the cross. She wondered what Alain’s grave would look like.

  As she came closer, she was disappointed. No marker, no mourners. Did anyone remember that he was alive only four days ago? Then, with shock, she saw that someone was on it. She gasped, and the creature raised its head. It was only a cat.

  “You can pet it if you like,” said a familiar voice.

  She thought for a moment that it was Alain. But the voice was real; it was Harding’s. He was standing off to the side, leaning against the gnarled trunk of an oak tree.

  “This place is full of cats,” he went on. “They like the warm earth of the fresh-turned graves. Of course, if you want to, you can believe what the Egyptians said about cats—that they take the spirits of the dead on to their new life.”

  “I never had a chance to say thank you for saving my life,” she answered. “When I felt that pull on the rope I knew that it was you. And when I came down and everyone got done hugging and kissing me they all told me the story about the crazy American and the butcher’s wagon.”

  “I wasn’t alone,” he reminded her. “There were hundreds of people pulling on that rope. In the end it felt like the whole city was flying with you. I never saw people so happy.”

  “I looked for you but you never came,” she said, her voice more hurt than angry. “So I thought and thought, and finally I knew that if I was going to find you anywhere that you’d be up here.”

  “Yeah,” he nodded, staring at the mound of earth, “I needed to say goodbye to my better self."

  "He was the better part of all of us," she said.

  “Look,” he said, pointing to a pile of bouquets, small gifts and messages in front of the grave. One envelope had a monogrammed “M” on it. “We’re not the only ones who said goodbye.”

  “Should I open it?”

  “I think that he would have wanted you to.”

  She read: “‘To my son. May the earth be lighter for you than the air itself. H.M.’ He must have come here just before the end on the night that he died.” She took Harding’s hand, holding it tightly over the grave. “I want you to come back with me.”

  He pulled his hand away and stepped back. “I have another grave up here,” he reminded her. “My wife.” He was staring through the trees at the horizon, facing the city. The hazy sky made it look like an Impressionist painting. In the distance, lined up with two church spires—like the back and front sights of a rifle—was the Eiffel Tower.

  “It’s so beautiful,” she said. “It’s a shame he never made it.”

  “But you did,” Harding reminded her.

  “What’s going to happen to us now?” she asked, not sure that she wanted to know.

  “Nothing has changed. The French are angry and afraid. The Germans are arrogant...and greedy. In 10 years we’re going to see another war, and it’ll be worse than last time. That city down there will be destroyed, or at least changed forever. And there will be a lot of holes up here filled with men like Alain.”

  “No,” she said, shaking her head. “I mean, I believe you. But what’s going to happen to the two of us?”

  Harding looked at her, unwilling to commit to anything. “I didn’t know that there was an us,” he said. “You can go anywhere you want. For you the whole Twentieth Century is waiting. They gave you the million francs, didn’t they?”

  “Yes. Yvette Meurthe had to hand it to me personally.”

  “I wish I’d been there to see that. So, you’re a rich woman now. You have more money than Bishop ever had.”

  “Not as much as you think. First, I gave the captain and his wife a lot of money to fix up the Bethanie. It was the least I could do. Then, I redeemed all the tools and musical instruments in the pawn shops so that the workers could have them back.”

  Harding nodded. “That’s what Alain would have done.”

  "When I get back home I'll probably give the rest away."

  "Don't be in a hurry," Harding cautioned. "Money can't buy you happiness, but poverty will purchase a lot of misery. I know …"

  Both of them stood there, staring down at the grave. Finally, she broke the silence. “You’re not going to leave me, are you? You can’t. I love you.”

  When he looked up his eyes were glistening, and she realized with shock that he was trying not to cry, that all the emotion he had once put into painting, and then hidden in a bottle, was there for her to see.

  “I was afraid that you were going to say that. I’ve got a confession to make. I knew that you’d come here too, and I wanted to see you one last time...” br />
  “No...” she started to say, but he held his finger to her lips.

  “Hear me out. The thought of being your summer hero and marching across Europe having adventures is very appealing. And you know that I love you. I’ve loved you ever since the day that I watched you fly off that mountaintop. But the best gift I can give you is to go away. I’m going to keep moving, because somewhere beyond the river Jordan, I’m going to have to wrestle with my dark angel, and I don’t know who’s going to win.”

  “But I need you...”

  “I thought about that too,” he broke in. “I remembered Leonardo and his birds and what he did with them. And let me tell you something about yourself. You don’t need me. You’ve got a gift, a strange, naïve innocence that protects you, that makes you lighter than air. There’s a whole world of people out there who’ll tell you that you can’t win, but you don’t know any better, so you just go ahead and do it. You may lose that innocence someday...and you probably will. But it’s a gift, and I’m not going to be the one who destroys it.”

  He reached across the grave and grabbed her by both arms, almost hurting her with his intensity. His face contorted as if he only had a few seconds to speak.

  “Listen, I don’t believe that there’s much good in mankind—or in me. But there was that moment when I was pulling on that rope and thousands of arms were holding you up in the sky. I looked around, and you were coming down through the sunset, and it was as if we were all flying together, the whole city, the whole damn world. It was as if Alain and Meurthe and your father and all the others who had died before had come back and reached up to save you. And I thought, maybe for just that one moment we had found that place Alain was talking about, the Region of Fire. You brought it down to earth for us. And here I was, promising myself that I wasn’t going to do this again...”

  He lifted her chin and kissed her. The kiss was soft this time, a mere brushing of the lips, but its warmth traveled down her upturned neck and floated through her. And in that kiss were all the world’s possibilities, waiting to be born.

  “Goodbye, Marianne,” he said, and walked away.

  It took a second for her to realize that he was really going, threading his way among the cupolas and gravestones and little metal water pumps.