Mabel Beck read in her bed and looked over at her bed stand. The clock ticked. She was now fifty-eight years old, and she heard the freight train down by the station. It was almost nine at night. Mabel looked at the silver-framed picture. Orville Wright was there. He would be there when she went to sleep and when she first awoke. She had kept all his letters and would carefully hide them away in the nook over the stairwell. She had the memories of her life with the man she loved, and she had the letters he had written to her for safekeeping. The nephews who were the executors of the estate of Orville Wright kept calling, but she just hung up on them.

They wanted the letter. Well, she hoped they could find it. Mabel would never help those men. They had all turned against Orville when he was alive, and now they wanted to get their grubby, mendacious hands on his last bequest. She lived alone with her sister, and nobody moved anything.

Judge Love of the probate court would have none of this. He had ordered Harold Miller, executor of the Wright estate, to get the letter. The entire history of aviation now resided with this tight-lipped, brusque woman who since Orville's death had stayed in her home and saw no one. Mabel was used to turning people down. She had met Lindbergh when he had come to see Orville a month after he had flown across the Atlantic. She had been there in the laboratory when he told Orville about how his wings were icing up over the Atlantic when he was twenty-five and it was 1927 and his plane was whining in the fog. He went lower and lower until he was skimming the tops of the waves. The ice began to melt off the wings, but he could barely keep his eyes open. He said he was flying with a compass, heading due east and hoping to stumble onto Europe, if he didn't end up in the icy Atlantic. He said when he took off, he had barely cleared the telephone wires with his heavy, fuel-laden plane.

Mabel had wondered how Orville appeared to the Lone Eagle. Lindbergh had driven with Orville to his home. Lindbergh was just one year old when these two brothers went to Kitty Hawk and solved the riddle of flight that allowed him to stretch man's grasp of the air across the ocean. People were already gathering on the lawn of Orville's mansion when they heard that Lindbergh had come to visit him. It was fitting that he should visit the surviving inventor of the plane. Mabel imagined that Orville seemed more like a lord to the young flier than merely a man who had stretched the boundaries of human existence by cracking the code of flight.

More people were on the lawn, and some had come up on the porch. Years later, Orville Wright's sister-in-law Ivonette recalled the pandemonium of Lindbergh's visit to her brother: “Soon the front lawn was crowded, then the side lawns and hillside at the back. It was not a crowd but a mob, pushing and shoving, trampling the flower beds and bushes, climbing trees, all clamoring for a look at Lindbergh. When the people came up on the porch, the occupants of the house took refuge on the second floor. But the mob persisted, demanding at least of a glimpse of their hero.”1

Orville approached Lindbergh and asked him if he would mind stepping out and waving to the crowd. Lindbergh had made a promise to financial backers for no more appearances, but he gave in when Orville expressed concern that the mob might enter the house. The two men stepped out on a portico and waved. People marveled at how tall and slim Lindbergh was, and how short Orville Wright was in comparison. The two men then stepped back inside, and Lindbergh left in a chauffeur-driven car.

The phone was ringing. Mabel put down her book. God. Who invented it, anyway? Alexander Graham Bell. Another man who would never get the time of day from her if he had been alive. One of the many who had turned against her lover, her totem, her raison d’être. And now the phone. The phone. So many had called after the death of Mr. Wright. It was ghastly. The family had come to pick his bones now that he was dead. She had made it her life's work to keep those selfish relations away from Orville. The family probably was working for the Smithsonian people who wanted the plane back, and they were the ones who had caused Mr. Wright's death with their duplicity, their lies, and their treachery. Mr. Wright had been correct in sending the Flyer to London. He had told her to ship it off, and she had made the arrangements. It was safe in a place where they respected what he and his brother had done. Not like these American men of greed and lies.

Ms. Beck hung up. She took pleasure in the squawk, and then the phone rang again. Boys and men were all the same to her. She picked up the receiver and dropped it again. Ms. Beck rubbed her hands together, sat down, and picked up her knitting. They wanted the letter. It was valuable. Just like the letter she had received from Teddy Roosevelt congratulating Orville on his plane after he had flown in a Wright plane in 1910 with pilot Arch Hoxsey. “Bully!” is what he said when he landed. “Bully!”2

Mabel smoothed the covers. The bedside clock ticked. Where did time go? She glanced at the picture of Orville Wright, then turned out the light. Mabel Beck pulled the covers up to her shoulders and looked at the picture. The silver frame glowed in the moonlight; the man with the bushy mustache smiled through the darkness.

“Goodnight, dear,” she murmured.