Eventually, Ruth was sure, she’d fit in just fine in this tiny beehive of a town which didn’t even have a right side and a wrong side of the tracks that sliced through farmland, with a railroad that was never completed and stopped short just about a mile or so from the train station. There was just a dirt road leading to Clayton from a faraway highway, a road that got lonelier and lonelier the closer you got to the town.
When a traveling preacher found the tiny dot of Clayton on some map of Georgia, Ruth and Claude went down, just like everybody else did, and saw the young, wiry Reverend Huber Jenkins evangelize, proselytize, and charm the crowd into raising a little money for him. Ruth and Claude didn’t have much to put into the hat, but they could offer Reverend Jenkins a hot meal and a night on their sofa.
Reverend Jenkins, who was not much older than Claude, stayed for a week at the Moody house, spending his days talking to Ruth at the kitchen table and drinking burned coffee. After dark, the revivals started and the town came as if the sermons were the premiere of some fancy Hollywood movie. It was the social event of the year.
Ruth enjoyed his company. The truth was, Ruth enjoyed anybody’s company after her suffocating months in Clayton. She told him that she loved to drive and how, in Clayton, there was no long, smooth highway to rip down; there were just bumps and choking dust.
Let’s go for a ride, he said; let’s drive up the dirt road to the highway, maybe take a picnic lunch. Maybe, he said, that won’t make you feel quite so lonesome.
Ruth wrapped the last of the tomato pie for a picnic lunch, and on the highway Jenkins gave Ruth the wheel and sat back and watched the prettiest girl he had ever seen laugh and holler as the wind tossed her brown curls all up and around her head like she was floating in water. When they got hungry, Ruth pulled to the side of the road at the bottom of a hill. She had forgotten forks and plates, so she tore the tomato pie with her fingers, laughing. Jenkins took the pie and ate it with one hand, most of it crumbling down the preacher’s shirt, the other arm slung over his bent knee as he looked over the vista.
“Aren’t you lonely,” Ruth asked as she picked at her own pie, “being on the road, not knowing people in the towns you go to, not having anybody to talk to? Not having any people?”
Jenkins paused.
Whether at that moment Jenkins reached over and held Ruth’s face, kissed her, or simply gave her a smile is unknown except to the two of them. What the rancher from Clayton saw as he herded his cattle was Jenkins jumping up and scrambling into the trees, leaving Ruth sitting on the side of a highway with crumbs in her lap.
And no matter what she said, Claude didn’t believe her when she said it was just a drive, it was just tomato pie; after all, the preacher was packed up and gone by the time Claude even got home and word started trickling out into the street.
It wasn’t all terrible. Ruth’s mama was delighted to get her girl back and said so when Ruth stepped off the train. She got a job at a candy store and wore a pretty pink uniform with a cute little lace hat. At night she squeezed into the double bed with her sister Pauline and let her mind wander over bigger adventures and better things.
* * *
Ruth was visiting her aunt Susan in the Canal Zone when she sat across from Lyle Womack at a dinner party. He was nothing like Claude Moody, Ruth thought. Nothing. He was a good three inches taller, with dark brown hair waving from his forehead to the crown; dark, piercing eyes; and an impressive manner of politeness. He operated a store stocked with leather boots, canvas hats, and mosquito netting for the men working on the canal. The first thing he said to her was “Have you ever been up in a plane?”
Lyle traveled a lot for business, and when Ruth heard he’d been on a plane, her heart just about stopped. When he offered to take her for a ride, she felt as if she had been lifted right out of her skin and was floating, she got so dizzy. He drove them out to a small airplane hangar and held her hand as she steadily climbed into the seat behind the pilot. She jumped slightly in fright when the engine popped to a start and the propeller spun madly in front of them, then laughed. As the plane took off, she held her breath until the plane lifted into the air like a balloon. It was that easy. Ruth’s eyes widened as she stretched her neck to see out the cockpit window, and then it was true: she was soaring.
* * *
She didn’t elope this time; she didn’t have to. Mama and Daddy liked Lyle fine, although they weren’t too happy that her new husband was going to fly her off to a place to live that they couldn’t even get to. Ruth assured them she’d be home all the time, coming back with Lyle when he did business for the electric sign company he had started with his father. And they knew he’d take good care of her. He loved their girl; they could tell.
In Panama, all she saw was rain. She had tried her hardest, but she felt trapped inside her house day after day in the muddy, mosquito-infested Canal Zone. Lyle had more and more business in Florida, so it was a good place for Ruth to live so that Lyle could spend as much time there as possible.
She rented a little white cottage with frilly curtains in Lakeland, Florida, answered a newspaper ad for a receptionist at a dentist’s office and was hired on the spot, due to her engaging, perfectly proportioned smile. Lyle flew in at least twice a month to stay for a weekend and sometimes longer. Ruth was happier anywhere but Panama—and Clayton. He landed at a little strip called Official Dixie Highway Garage, which was simply a small airplane hangar and a runway. It was there, waiting for Lyle to arrive, that she saw the owner of the garage, George Haldeman, hop into a small plane on the passenger side, and a young man Ruth didn’t recognize scramble into the pilot’s seat. In the echoing quiet of the hangar, Ruth couldn’t help but overhear George giving instructions to the fellow on how to start the engine. Within a minute or two the airplane was chugging down the runway, and before Ruth could blink, it was lifting into the air. She felt her excitement build into a powerful flutter in her stomach as she watched Lyle’s plane head down the runway ten minutes later, and then she walked right over to George Haldeman to ask him if he would teach her how to fly.
* * *
Ruth had been taking flying lessons with George for several months when she saw the beauty contest advertised in the paper; it was a stunt to promote some sort of hot dog or soap, but who cared? The prize was fifty dollars for first place, and that would pay for a lot of time in the air. To Ruth, it was almost as if she had met her very own spirit up there; she’d never had such moments of exhilaration and excitement anywhere else. She had found a bubble of remarkable happiness. When she wrote to Lyle that she was thinking of learning how to fly, he couldn’t have been more thrilled, and said that once she got her license, she’d be able to fly over and visit him, and that was bully, wasn’t it?
She had been spending most of her weekends with George, learning to read the instruments, practicing takeoffs and landings, and mostly just gliding above Lakeland in tranquil silence. Her biggest accomplishment was a weekend when Lyle was home and she was feeling a bit stifled, not being able to head out to Dixie’s, when he suggested that he’d like to see her fly a plane herself.
With Lyle sitting behind her and George next to her, she took off without issue, a fine, smooth lift into the air and up into the horizon like a bullet. She turned around to see her husband beaming and smiling at her, and that made her giggle. He patted her on the shoulder while George suggested that she show off some of the barnstorming tricks he had taught her. Ruth laughed, then dove the plane lower, lower, until it was one hundred feet off the ground. She pulled the steering column toward her quickly and shot the plane up. It was the kind of dip that would push a stomach into the throat of any passenger not expecting it, and was sure to produce terrified gasps. If Lyle was frightened, he didn’t show it, and kept the smile on his face until they landed back at Dixie’s—his stomach very much still in his throat.
* * *
On the night that Lindbergh landed in Paris, the seconds passed tediously for Ruth. Each contestant took
one last walk and spin before the judges with her best smile, best side, best everything. She strutted up toward the front of the stage, her left hand on her hip, her right swinging confidently. She gave herself a little bounce in her step, and in front of the judges she stopped and dipped her shoulder the tiniest bit, then winked.
When the first-place winner was announced, Ruth was surprised and delighted. She put her best shining smile on as the bulbs of the cameras popped and flashed and she accepted the cheap little crown and an armful of flowers from the master of ceremonies.
“May I present our first-place winner, Miss Sudsy Soap, Ruth Elder!” the master of ceremonies barked into the microphone. “What will you do with your prize money?”
“Well,” Ruth said as she stood on her toes to reach the microphone stand, “Charles Lindbergh landed in Paris a little while ago, the first man to fly across the Atlantic. I’m going to use my prize money to become the first woman to fly across it!”
The crowd erupted into deafening cheers, applause, and whistles, some of them—most of them, in fact—not sure of what they had just heard. But the pretty little girl in the bathing suit with the tiara on her head had just mentioned Charles Lindbergh, and, well, that was good enough for all of them.
CHAPTER FOUR
SUMMER 1927
Elsie Mackay’s aviator’s certification photo.
Courtesy Royal Aero Club Trust
Elsie Mackay was finishing breakfast and about to go to a fitting for Effie’s wedding when her father slid the front page of the Times over to her, which announced that Charles Lindbergh had flown across the Atlantic and landed in Paris earlier that morning.
Elsie was speechless. Someone had finally done it. She knew of several skilled aviators who had tried unsuccessfully, but this man—he had done it. A pilot had actually made it. Elsie scanned the article for details: “. . . in the air for more than thirty hours . . . flew alone . . . had a single-engine airplane . . .” This was amazing, she thought to herself. She never realized it was possible. She found herself smiling as she looked up at her father.
“That man,” Lord Inchcape said, placing a stubby, determined finger on Lindbergh’s picture, “is nothing but a fool.” He folded his napkin, slapped it on the table, and pushed out his chair. “Insolence at its finest. People are going to die following what he’s done,” he said sternly, then walked out of the room.
Elsie exhaled, then shook her head. She studied the article again: “. . . single-engine plane . . . roar of the engine above . . . thousands cheering wildly . . . soldiers with fixed bayonets holding them back . . . ‘Well, I made it,’ Lindbergh said . . . The plane had landed in the pink of condition . . . American hero . . .”
This was fantastic, unbelievable, stupendous. Her mind raced in a thousand different directions; she could not focus on one thought for more than a second. She took a deep breath and closed her eyes to clear her head. She opened them after several moments, her palms flat on the surface of the table, and looked ahead.
“This is it,” she said to herself. “This is it.”
* * *
Elsie had begun working on the design of the first-class staterooms on the Viceroy of India at her father’s company, the Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company. It was to be P&O’s most extravagant, most luxurious, and largest cruise ship to date, and a monumental project, with the ship—Britain’s first turbo-electric—launching in a year and a half. She had a lot to prove—not only to her father but to everyone who had questioned his nepotistic choice of handing her such a delicate and paramount job. The Viceroy of India was seen as the key to lifting P&O out of a recent and significant net loss for the company, the success of which was now largely in Elsie’s hands. She was so occupied at P&O, she hardly had any time to devote to flying and hadn’t been up weeks. Lately, with Effie’s wedding forthcoming and the numerous pressures at P&O, it seemed to be the only thing that could possibly soothe her spirit. Although it was years ago, she couldn’t help but remember her runaway marriage to Dennis, how enchanted those months seemed, and how she grieved when it all spoiled.
She did her best to shake her thoughts off and think of something more likable. She had made good on her plans to buy a plane, and found a de Havilland DH4 that was absolutely perfect. An open cockpit, two-seater biplane that had been used as a bomber in the war, it was a sensible plane for flying above London or for a quiet spin over the countryside. She didn’t need much more than that. She often flew alone, and she liked it that way; even though she had officially been one of the first women to gain her pilot’s license in Britain, it was hard to convince the nonbelievers that a woman could handle the controls of a plane just as easily as the steering wheel of a car. It never seemed to matter that as a part of her pilot’s test, she had to ascend to 5,000 feet and then make a perfect landing three consecutive times in a plane with a 360-horsepower engine, or that due to her exacting skill as a pilot she was elected to the advisory committee of the Air League of the British Empire not long after. Elsie had become well respected in the community of pilots, although that would never be enough to coax her father into the passenger seat. Mother, Margaret, and Janet also declined, although Kenneth was always game, and she delighted in sharing what exciting solitude she had found in the air. Effie agreed to go once, although her screams started a moment after takeoff and didn’t stop until she was in the rear of her car with her driver spiriting her away from anything with wings.
Elsie was unafraid. In fact, she doubted she could ever be afraid again after Dennis left and never contacted her again. What she once knew to be lovely and absolute had crumbled into something bleak and hopeless. She was still a girl then. Now, at thirty-five, there was very little else left in the world that could scare her.
* * *
As the wedding frenzy built by astounding measure day by day, there was nowhere Elsie wanted to be more than up in the DH4, the only sounds the hum of the engine and the roar of the wind. But her duty was with her sister and family, making arrangements, checking lists. She was truly excited for Effie, who had matured from a silent, opinionless girl to a young woman who was beginning to form ideas of her own, even if she screamed like a ninny when her feet left the ground. Getting married to Eugen Millington-Drake, a diplomat, was a perfect match. Father had approved.
Her father wasn’t born of remarkable lineage or of any title; he was James Lyle Mackay, the son of two Scots from Abroath, a simple fishing port where his father was a master mariner. On the occasion of his eighth birthday, he was allowed to accompany his father on a trip; twice he fell overboard and almost drowned. The blackness of the water had remained with him since, the dark and the quiet seeping in, pushing in, grabbing hold. Two years later the Atlantic swept his father into the sea; those waves, he knew, were fiercer than any other and held no mercy for any sailor. When his mother died, he was twelve and had two younger siblings to look after; he left school and worked for a rope and canvas manufacturer. In the years to come, he would deny his fear of the sea and travel to India, representing the British India Steam Navigation Company. He sent for his wife, Jane, a childhood friend, and the first four of his children were born in Calcutta, far from the fishing village he had known as a child. With years of hard, dedicated work, he became the chairman of the Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company, a cruise line that was a fierce competitor of Cunard and White Star. It was there that he’d been able to keep Elsie closer to him. With her remarkable eye for detail and comfort, he had hired her as his chief interior designer and was helping P&O approach a whole new market.
He asked that Elsie be paid out of his own salary, although his faith and confidence in his daughter’s abilities could not be challenged. She was an asset, and learned quickly; when she initially came aboard P&O, she studied engineer’s blueprints, developed an understanding of how the ship worked, and even became a bit of a mechanic herself to help her understand the life of a vessel as a whole. When Elsie embarked on anything, she took
it in fully; her choices were to reach an expert level or abandon the thought altogether.
Elsie never did anything halfway.
* * *
Effie’s gown, of pearlescent cream-colored silk, was the finest from India, and Millington-Drake stood even taller than usual as her stately husband. Lady Inchcape retired upstairs before the wedding ball was over, and it fell to Elsie to become hostess.
She was a child the last time she saw Princess Anne of Löwenstein-Wertheim-Freudenberg—Lady Anne Savile until she married Prince Ludwig of Germany, who disappeared a year into their marriage and was suspected of being a German spy in the Spanish-American War. He was killed when an American soldier accidentally shot the prince in the side after he was bluntly told by an orderly, “You have already given us some trouble by hanging around the firing line, and we will have no more of it. And I am talking to you specifically.”
It is sad to die immediately after being yelled at. While somewhat tragic because he had insisted on being such a pest, the prince’s irritating death freed Princess Anne to flit around Europe and spend her life being a guest. Now, at age sixty, the princess hadn’t aged a bit since the last time Elsie saw her. Her deep-auburn hair was not striped with one strand of grey, her skin was unlined, and she retained her slim, graceful figure.