Wilbur Wright: A Private Life

Time Anchor

It is May of 1912. I am in the upstairs bedroom at 7 Hawthorn Street, Dayton, Ohio, where we have lived since my father brought us to this house when I was a boy. I have the typhoid. The doctor has stopped pretending otherwise and I have stopped needing the pretence. The fever comes in the afternoon and loosens its grip in the small hours, and it is in the small hours that I take up the page.

Orville sat with me for an hour this morning and did not say what we both know. His breathing is the steadiest sound in the house. Katharine brings broth I cannot keep down. Father reads to me when he thinks I am asleep. The wagons on Third Street start before five and the city goes about its ordinary business as cities do while men lie upstairs dying of ordinary infections.

I write because the public story of flight is already beginning to shorten itself into something clean and false, and the shortening will not wait for me to answer it later. Orville can defend the record after I am gone. He cannot defend it from where I am lying now. These pages are for the part of it I alone can say, and I shall say it while the hand still obeys.