A Perfectly Sound Woman

Chapter One: The Honest Witness

The crank arm from Peter's bicycle lay on the breakfast table between the milk bottle and the sugar bowl, snapped clean through at the pedal boss, and Ellen Carter had already been looking at it for twenty minutes when her son came downstairs in his socks.

"You didn't throw it out," Peter said.

"Why would I throw out a witness?"

He climbed onto the chair and knelt on it, the way he did when he wanted to be taller than the table. He was seven, with his father's straight brown hair and a cowlick that no amount of water would defeat. Ellen pushed the broken piece toward him, fracture face up, and slid the little brass magnifier across the oilcloth.

"Tell me what happened to it."

Peter squinted. "It broke."

"That's the ending. Start at the beginning."

He bent low. The morning light came sideways through the kitchen window and struck the broken metal at just the right angle, and Ellen watched his face change, the way it always did, from a boy looking at junk to a boy looking at a story.

"There's lines," he said.

"What shape?"

"Like — like when you throw a rock in a puddle."

"Rings. Good. They're called beach marks, because they look like the lines the tide leaves. Where do they start?"

He turned the piece toward the window, frowning, and put his fingernail on the edge. "Here. This little dent."

"That's a nick. Probably from the day you dropped the bicycle on the curb outside Mrs. Pomfrey's. That nick was the start of it. Every single time you stood up on the pedals to get up Fountain Hill, that crack opened a thousandth of an inch and closed again, and you never knew, and I never knew, and the crank never told anybody. But it was keeping count. Metal always keeps count."

"Then it got tired," Peter said.

"Then it ran out of count," Ellen said. "Nothing is tired. That's just a word men use so they don't have to do arithmetic."

He laughed. He had a good laugh, loud for his size.

"Peter." She tapped the table. "What's the rule?"

He recited it the way other children recited grace. "Steel and aluminum are the only honest witnesses left. They can't lie and they can't be talked out of it."

"And what do you do with a witness?"

"Listen to it."

"Eat your eggs."

The stairs creaked. Richard came down already in the white shirt, the black tie loose around his collar, the four gold stripes waiting on the chair-back where he'd hung the jacket the night before. He was thirty-eight and looked less than that everywhere except around the eyes. He kissed the top of Peter's head, then Ellen's, and poured himself coffee without sitting down, which was how she knew he intended to start it up again.

"Chicago and back, then a night in Pittsburgh," he said. "Three-twenty-two tomorrow, home by six."

"Mm."

"Ellen."

"Don't say it in front of the boy."

"I'm not going to say anything in front of the boy." He drank. "Peter, go find your shoes."

"They're on my feet."

"Find the other ones."

Peter went, taking the magnifier with him, which Ellen allowed. She stood and started stacking plates in the sink so she wouldn't have to hold still.

"It was worse yesterday," Richard said behind her. "Climb-out from Indianapolis, we were light, maybe four hundred under gross, and at about eight hundred feet the right side started up. It comes up through the pedals first. You feel it in the balls of your feet before you see it anywhere."

"Buffet," Ellen said. "It's a forty-four-seat airplane with a straight wing and four thousand horsepower in front of it. It's supposed to make noise."

"It isn't noise. I know noise. This is a shiver with a beat to it — about four a second — and it's only ever on the right, and it's only ever in the first thousand feet, and it's getting longer. It used to be two seconds. Yesterday it was seven."

"Did you write it up?"

"I have written it up eleven times in fourteen months," Richard said, without heat, which was worse than heat. "You know what the sign-off says? Ground check normal. Ground check normal, Ellen. They tie the airplane to a concrete floor and rev it and tell me nothing's wrong with it in the air."

She turned around with her hands wet. She loved him. She wanted to be fair. She was also very tired, because she had been up until one with a failed hoist chain from the Springfield yard, and because she had spent eleven years being the only woman in a building full of men who said things with their whole chest that they could not support with a single number, and she had made a kind of religion out of not becoming one of them.

"Richard," she said, "you fly a beautiful machine and you feel everything it does, and that's why you're good. But pilots feel poetry. Engineers measure facts. Nobody has brought me a fact."

He looked at her for a moment. Then he set the cup down on the counter, carefully, and picked his jacket off the chair.

"That," he said, "is the coldest thing you have ever said to me."

"I didn't mean—"

"I know what you meant." He shrugged the jacket on and became, in one motion, Captain R. L. Carter, Chappell Airways, and the argument was over because he had somewhere to be. At the door he looked back. "Bring me a strain gauge, then. Bring me anything. I'll wire it to the spar myself."

"You'd need a flight test order and Corliss would have to—"

"I know what I'd need." He softened, a little, because he could never hold it. "Tell Peter I'll bring him the thing from the Pittsburgh airport. He'll know which thing."

The screen door banged. She heard the Buick start, and back out, and go.

It was the last real conversation they ever had, and for the rest of her life Ellen could recite every word of it, including the ones she had not said.

The materials laboratory at Corliss Aircraft occupied the north end of Building 14, past the heat-treat bays, behind two doors that never quite shut because the building had settled six inches since 1943. Ellen had worked there since she was twenty-four. She was thirty-six now. She was the only woman in the building who was not a typist, and she had learned, in the way one learns a foreign language, that this fact was a permanent condition of the air, like humidity.

Her bench was under the north windows, because north light does not lie either. On it that morning sat a crane hook from the Cincinnati river works that had dropped nine tons of pig iron through a barge deck. Two men from the insurance company were coming at eleven to be told it was the rigger's fault.

Maxine Ellis set a cup of coffee by Ellen's elbow, black, no sugar, the way Ellen had drunk it since 1944.

"Spectrograph's warm," Maxine said. "I ran your hook. It's 4140, right in spec, nothing funny."

"Thank you." Ellen didn't look up. "Look at this with me."

Maxine leaned in. She was forty-one, thin, with reading glasses on a chain and hands that could load a sample with tweezers while carrying on a conversation about her sister's divorce. She had run every emission spectrograph, every hardness traverse, and half the metallography in that laboratory for six years, and her job title was Assistant, Grade 3, and there was no grade above 3.

"Beach marks," Maxine said. "Coming off the inner radius."

"How many?"

"Can't count them from here."

"Nineteen thousand, give or take. It started at a grinding burn from when somebody dressed the radius after forging." Ellen tapped the glass plate beside her. "It cracked for four years. It failed in a second. The rigger will be blamed for the second."

"Will you let them?"

"No," Ellen said. "I'll make them look through the eyepiece. They hate that."

Maxine laughed and went back to her spectrograph.

At eleven, Ellen made the insurance men look through the eyepiece. At noon, Howard Whitman put his head around the door and said, "Carter, my office, ten minutes, bring the good camera," and she went down the corridor with the Speed Graphic under her arm and felt, as she always did, a small private warmth.

Whitman had hired her in 1946 out of the wartime training program, over the objections of three department heads, when her entire qualification was two years of war work, a night-school degree, and a demonstration in which she had identified the failure mode of four unlabeled samples in eleven minutes flat. He was sixty now, silver and square, with a way of listening that made you feel like the most sensible person in Ohio. He had said, in front of the whole department at the Christmas dinner of 1952, that hiring Ellen Carter was the best appointment he ever made.

"The Air Force people want photographs of the turbine disk," he said. "Yours, not the photo lab's. Theirs look like weather maps."

"I'll do it tonight."

"Good girl." He said it absently, and she let it go, as she had let it go for thirteen years. "How's Richard?"

"Flying."

"Chicago run?"

"Chicago, then Pittsburgh."

Whitman smiled. "Best short-haul airplane in America, and your husband's got the left seat in it. There's a certain symmetry." He tapped the framed photograph on his wall: the first Skylark 220 coming off the line in 1954, forty-four seats, two big Allison turboprops, a straight high-aspect wing, and a banner that read THE SAFEST NAME IN SHORT-HAUL.

"He says the right wing shivers on climb-out," Ellen said.

She would remember, later, that she had said it lightly. That she had said it the way you pass on a joke.

"They all say that," Whitman said. "Pilots are romantics. Get me those photographs."