Free I Was Amelia Earhart (Vintage Contemporaries) by Jane Mendelsohn Page A

desperately, but I had to agree, we were lucky, in a way.
    After dinner, he plays a composition he’s written for me. He calls it “Perhapsody in Blue.”
    I remember that at around this time he returned to the navigator’s cabin of the Electra, which he had been studiously avoiding. He dusted off the navigational charts, which had rolled themselves up into gigantic cylinders, and the radio, which hung out of the dashboard by a wire. He brought them back to his shack. There he set about figuring out where we had landed, charting a course, and attempting to make contact with passing ships. There was only a tiny amount of gas left, but it was enough to let us dream. I said why don’t we take her for a spin around the block. But in his enthusiasm Noonan convinced himself that we could reach Australia, or New Zealand.
    After dinner, I go to the lagoon. He comes with me. There’s a raft that I built, I like to lie there in the darkness, where my thoughts are more intense because they seem to be taking place on board a dock that has broken off and floated out to sea. But Noonan prefers the wateritself. The stars tilt and wobble on the surface when we enter. It rolls in folds like the back of a dog’s neck. And as we circle each other, our feet skimming the murky bottom, our legs beat languidly and the water slips through our fingers in endless sheets of silk. The lagoon isn’t large, but it’s enormous in the night, like a lake on the surface of the moon.
    But I won’t let him sleep in my lean-to. I won’t let him spend the night. I leave him after we swim and I go to my plane. My once magnificent Electra.

Eight
    E DWIN EARHART . My father—of humble origins, and later, a ne’er-do-well. He’d been poor and had worked for his education. He had tutored more-privileged students at law school, where one of his laziest but kindest pupils had been Mark Otis. Mark had brought Edwin home for his sister’s sixteenth-birthday party, and there, in the wood-paneled dining room of the house on the hill, he and Amy Otis had fallen in love. Years later, when he wandered the business districts of the cities he lived in, intoxicated and abandoned by all desire to persevere, the sight of well-dressed people would remind Edwin of the crystal chandelier that dangled over the Otises’ dining room like a gaudy earring, and the limpid, watery sparkle it cast across the table that first night he came to visit, sending rainbow shards through the long-stemmedglasses and patterning the plates with mad diagrams. Dancing flames from the fireplace made faces in the windows. Mutton and puddings and warm bread were handled like fragile cargo by a regiment of silent maids. Mesmerized by the opulence and order, Edwin had a glint in his eye that gave him a deceptive air of success, and the wine he drank with dinner improved his already good looks. Delicate Amy, her father’s favorite, my mother, looked across the table at him adoringly.
    I was bolder than my mother would have liked: I insisted on running around in my bloomers. But my pluck and mettle delighted my father, an apprehensive man with a cowardly nature who liked to tinker with mechanical things and harbored delusions of intrepidity himself. He taught me how to take apart clocks and bicycles, and later, with only a few illicit lessons in a motorcar, he taught me to drive like a professional.
    In 1903, my father attempted to secure a patent for an invention he’d been working on for years. It was a holder for signal flags at the rear of railway cars, and he believed it to be revolutionary. He worked on it whenever he could, and when he was distracted or nervous he would excuse his behavior by saying, It’s the invention, Meelie, it never leaves me. He kept it a secret, but he managed to convince his daughter that it was the key to their future happiness. Finally, after much arguing with his wife, he went off to Washington, D.C., financing the trip with money that the family had saved to