The old woman sat across from me in the office of the lawyer in Wichita with her hands folded on a cane, and she did not look like a woman who had flown bombers across an ocean. She looked like anybody grandmother. Her name was Marjorie Dunleavy, she was eighty six, and she had flown for the Women Airforce Service Pilots in 1944. Pam sat on my left with her arms crossed. Rick sat beside her with a legal pad. “Mr. Kuhlman,” Marjorie said to me, in a voice like warm gravel, “your father saved my life twice. Once in 1944. And once the night you were born.”
She told me the first story slowly. In the summer of 1944, she was a twenty year old ferry pilot, delivering fresh bombers from the Boeing plant in Wichita. A foreman named Lloyd Kuhlman, a riveter with big hands, noticed a bad rivet line on the wing of her plane one morning and pulled it off the field. An inspector later found a crack that would have torn the wing off in the air. Marjorie came to find him and thank him. He blushed. He said he had only done his job. She never forgot it, and neither, she said, did he.
The second story was harder to hear. On the night of March 14, 1964, a small plane came down in a wheat field outside Benton in a spring storm. The pilot was a crop duster, a woman of thirty, flying without a medical certificate because she needed the work. My father was driving my mother to the hospital in Newton. Mom was in the back seat of the Ford, in labor, with her sister. He saw the flares. He stopped the car and told her sister to take the wheel. Then he ran into the field in the rain and pulled Marjorie from the burning cockpit.
A blue and white Cessna taking off at 2:15 gave one son the afternoon to bring his sister back to the truth in Wichita.
I gave my terms looking straight at my sister. “Pam, I am not contesting anything. I would like us to withdraw the challenge today. The money in the will was a debt of gratitude, and our father paid it every afternoon at a quarter past two for twenty eight years. Rick, you can take your legal pad home.” Nobody said a word. Marjorie reached into her handbag and took out a photograph, the same one from the file, with two young people in front of a bomber. She laid it on the table between us. “This is what he gave me,” she said. “A life.”
Pam put her hand to her mouth. She had been in the back seat of that Ford, I realized, in the belly of my mother. “He missed the birth,” Pam whispered. “For three hours. Mom always said he got lost.” Marjorie shook her head. She said my father had taken her to the ER in Newton, sat with her until the doctors said she would live, and arrived at the maternity ward at 3:40 in the morning with burned sleeves, to find me already born. He promised her that he would never tell my mother, because Marjorie would have lost her license. She said, “He kept it for sixty years.”
Rick stood up so fast his chair tipped over. He snatched the photograph from the table and lunged for the door, saying it proved nothing, that the whole thing was a story invented by an old woman after money. He made it to the hallway. The grandson of Marjorie, Cole Dunleavy, a tall young man in a flight jacket who had driven her to the meeting and had been waiting quietly in the corridor, stepped in front of him and held out an open hand. “Sir,” he said, “that is a picture of my grandmother. I would like it back.” Rick gave it up.
Pam began to cry, hard, her shoulders shaking. I put my arm around my sister and held her. She said she was ashamed. She said she had thought of the money, only the money, and had never once wondered why a man would watch an airplane for twenty eight years. Marjorie leaned on her cane and said gently that it was a fair mistake. She said every family keeps a few secrets, and most of them are love. We sat there together, three people and a photograph, while the afternoon light came in through the blinds.
The money consequences were simple. The court upheld the will, and Marjorie received the three hundred seventy thousand dollars. She did not want it. She said she had everything she needed, and she told the lawyer to divide it three ways. One part went to a scholarship, one part to Pam, and one part to me. Rick received nothing but a letter from the lawyer reminding him that his challenge had cost the estate eleven thousand dollars. Pam paid it herself, from her own account, and apologized in writing.
In the name of Lloyd, who passed in July, Marjorie and I started the Lloyd Kuhlman Fund. It pays for flight lessons and aircraft mechanic apprenticeships for young people in Sedgwick, Harvey and Butler counties. In the first year we sent twenty three students into the air. A girl of seventeen from Newton, who had never been on a plane, soloed in a Cessna at the Benton airstrip on her birthday. She landed and ran across the grass into the arms of her mother. Marjorie watched with a dry eye. I did not.
Every day at 2:15, the blue and white Cessna still lifts off the Benton airstrip. I stand on the porch of my old house of my father now, in the Kansas wind, with a cup of coffee. Marjorie dips the wing as she goes by, once, twice, and I wave. Sometimes Pam stands beside me. Sometimes my grandson does. The plane climbs into the big sky and turns toward the sun, and I think about a man in a shop apron who watched it, every afternoon, and kept his promise.
