17
Finn didn’t know the first thing about President Taft, other than he lost a bitter three-way race against Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson in the last election.
“Why isn’t he relaxing on a yacht somewhere?” Finn asked as they stepped out into the bustle of Fifth Avenue. “Isn’t that what rich people do after they retire?”
“I don’t think he’s that rich,” Delia said. “Maybe he just likes working.”
Either way, Finn didn’t want to walk into a meeting with a former president, looking like someone who’d dropped out of school to work in a fish cannery. “Let’s go get a cup of coffee, and you can tell me about him.”
He bought a copy of theNew York Journalfrom a newsboy, folded it under one arm, and offered Delia the other. Just because he didn’t have much schooling was no excuse for not knowing anything about the world. He needed to do a better job keeping up with events.
His good intentions faded once they took their seats at a table in a café, where he opened the newspaper. “Hey, I know her,” he said, gesturing to a photo of Blanche Scott, who looked dazzlingand daring as she posed alongside an open-frame biplane. “We trained together in Hammondsport.”
It was where Finn had learned to fly and where he’d gotten a job with the Curtiss Aeroplane Company, first as a janitor, then as a technician. As part of his salary, Finn got paid in flying lessons by Glenn Curtiss himself.
Curtiss was a pilot and engineer on his way to designing the world’s best airplanes. In 1907,Scientific Americanannounced a huge prize for the first person whose airplane could fly a kilometer. Curtiss needed money to design the innovative airplane, and when Finn asked Delia to use their kite-shop money to help fund the plane, she had refused. She wouldn’t even hear him out. While he tried to explain how his cut of the prize money would be enough to pay her back tenfold, she still wouldn’t budge.
Delia’s opinion of his life in Hammondsport had always been a sticking point between them, and even now she frowned as she leaned closer to examine Blanche’s photograph in the newspaper.
“Does she usually wear that much makeup?”
He shrugged. “Blanche was always a looker. You should have seen her when she wore her skintight flight pants and crawled into the cockpit. The sight was awe-inspiring.”
Delia settled back in her chair. “While I was slaving away in the cannery, you were ogling female pilots?”
He shouldn’t have said anything. Delia was always afraid he’d meet someone else when he moved to live in Hammondsport. Trying to reassure her was exhausting and fruitless. It was why he never mentioned Blanche before today.
“Dee, I was so busy working two jobs and dreaming of our kite shop that I was too dog-tired to go chasing after other women.”
“And yet you found enough energy to sneak down to New York in the middle of the night to steal three hundred dollars.” Her voice was sharp enough to cause other people in the café to glance at them.
He lowered his voice to a fierce whisper. “How often have Itried to repay you, Delia? We could have opened our kite shop if you had only trusted me.”
“You stole my money to gamble,” she accused.
“I didn’t steal your money—Iborrowedit,” he said tightly.
“Borrowed?” she scoffed. “Is that what you call gambling with my life savings?”
“Ourlife savings,” he corrected. “There was twelve hundred dollars in that Mason jar, and I earned most of that.”
“But three hundred of it came from me, and it was for the kite shop and the dream of getting us out of the Lower East Side. It wasn’t for you to gamble on an unproven airplane.”
Finn folded the newspaper closed and tried to speak calmly, to lower the temperature. “Delia, we would never have gotten out of the Lower East Side on fish-cannery wages. Do you know how much it costs to buy the kind of place we dreamed about?”
“So you stole from me.”
He opened his mouth to again deny the accusation, then closed it as the details of that night flooded his mind. They’d kept their savings in a Mason jar that was locked up in Sister Bernadette’s office. After Finn moved to Hammondsport, he still came back to the city every weekend to see Delia.
Except for the weekend he came for the money. Delia was too scared to ever take a risk, and he’d come to his wits’ end. The only way to break their stalemate was to proceed without her. He waited until after midnight to head to the orphanage and climbed the trellis outside Sister Bernadette’s office window on the second floor of the building. Night-blooming jasmine coiled around the trellis, and gummy petals stuck to his skin. Their cloying fragrance was nauseating as he climbed the trellis.
Sister Bernadette was too trusting. She kept her window cracked an inch, so that the scent of jasmine would drift into her office. Finn wiggled his hands into the opening and lifted the sash. He crawled inside, racked with guilt and hoping his mother wasn’t watching from heaven.
The Mason jar was in the nun’s bottom desk drawer. Finn’s hands shook a little as he unscrewed the jar’s lid; the metallic scraping sounded loud in the silence. He took every bill in the jar, leaving Delia a note saying that their money would be invested in the airplane contest, and he promised to pay her back soon.
The reek of jasmine clung to his clothes the entire way home. To this day, Finn hated the smell of jasmine. Even now, whenever he felt guilty about something, that haunting scent seemed to materialize out of thin air.
He could smell it right now, and it angered him. He stood from the café table and faced Delia. “Forget about lunch. Let’s go to the bank, and I’ll pay you back right now.”
