Wings

“Give her a chance, Pat.” Nick was trying to calm him down again, but it was useless. “Please. Just let her show you her stuff. She deserves that. And next year, I'd like to put her in the air show.”

“You're both daft, is what you are. Two brazen fools. What makes you think she wouldn't kill herself, and me, and you, and a dozen other people at the air show?”

“Because she flies better than anyone you've ever seen there.” Nick tried to stay calm, but he was losing control slowly. Pat was not an easy man, and this was a very volatile subject. “She flies better than Rickenbacker, for chrissake. Just let her show you.” But he had uttered the ultimate sacrilege this time, in invoking the name of the commander of the 94th Aero Squadron. Nick knew he'd pushed too far, and Pat stalked off and left them, and went back to his office. He never looked back at them, and he never said another word to his daughter.

She was crying openly by then, and Nick came to put an arm around her.

“Christ, your father is a stubborn man. I'd forgotten how impossible he can be when he gets something in his teeth. But I'll get him yet on this one. I promise.” He gave her a squeeze and she smiled through her tears. If she had been Chris, her father would have let her show him anything at all. But not now, not ever, not her, because she was a girl. It was so unfair, but she knew that nothing would change him.

“He'll never give in, Nick.”

“He doesn't have to. You're eighteen. You can do what you want, you know. You're not doing anything wrong. You're taking flying lessons. So what? Okay? Relax.” And very shortly she'd have her own license. She was more than qualified for it. When Pat had started flying in 1914, he hadn't even needed a license to fly then.

“What if he throws me out of the house?” She looked terrified and Nick laughed. He knew Pat better than that, and so did she. He made a lot of noise, and he was limited in his ideas and beliefs, but he loved his children.

“He's not going to do that, Cass. He may make you miserable for a while. But he's not going to throw you out. He loves you.”

“He loves Chris,” she said glumly.

“He loves you too. He's just a little behind the times, and stubborn as hell. Christ, sometimes he drives me crazy.”

“Me too.” She smiled and blew her nose, and then she looked up at Nick with worried eyes. “Will you still teach me?”

“Of course,” he grinned, looking boyish and full of mischief, and then he pretended to look at her sternly. “And don't let everything I said go to your head. You don't fly like the leader of the great 94th,” he scowled at her, and then grinned. “But you could be better than he was one day, if you'd clean up some of those turns and listen to your instructor.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Go wash your face, you look terrible… Ill see you at the airstrip tomorrow, Cass.” He smiled at her. “Don't forget, we have an air show to prepare for.” She looked gratefully at him, as he strode away, wondering what it would take to bring Pat O'Malley to his senses.

He had certainly not come to them that night when he refused to say a word to her at their dinner table. He had told Oona what she'd done, and her mother cried when she heard it. Pat had convinced her long since that women were not constitutionally or mentally cut out to fly airplanes.

“It's just too dangerous,” she tried to explain to Cassie later that night in her room. With her sisters married and gone, Cassie had long since had her own bedroom.

“It's no more dangerous for me than it is for Chris,” Cassie said through tears again. She was exhausted from fighting with them, and she knew she'd never win. Even Chris had said nothing in her defense. He hated getting into arguments with their parents.

“That's not true,” her mother countered what she'd said. “Chris is a man. It's less dangerous for a man to fly,” her mother said as though it were gospel truth, because she'd heard it from her husband.

“How can you say that? That's nonsense.”

“It's not. Your father says that women don't have the concentration.”

“Mom, that's a lie. I swear. Look at all the women who fly. Great ones.”

“Look at Amelia Earhart, dear. She's a perfect example of what your father says. She obviously lost her direction, or her wits, somewhere out there, and she took that poor man with her.”

“How do you know their disappearance wasn't his fault?” Cassie said persistently. “He was the navigator, not Earhart. And maybe they were shot down,” Cass said sadly. She knew she wasn't getting anywhere. Her mother was completely convinced of everything her husband had always told her.

“You have to stop behaving this way, Cassie. I should never have let you loll around at the airport all these years. But you loved it so, and I thought it would be nice for your father. But you have to give up these foolish dreams, Cassie. You're a college girl now. One day you'll be a teacher. You can't go flying around like some silly gypsy.”