A Book That Is a Prison of Novels

 This story has quite a large number of women who had an impact on the life of Ace Mathews, the main character in the story. Most of the story is centered around the relationship between Ace and Maggie. Because of Ace, Maggie leans how to fly and she becomes a leading American female pilot. She inherits her father’s business and uses it to go into the aircraft business. Instead of building airplanes, she develops a market for buying and leasing planes.

Most of the women in the story really do deserve their own novel. There is Miss Castor, the woman who runs the orphanage where Ace spent his first sixteen years of life. Miss Castor never married. She spent years taking care of her sick mother. There was a brief period when it looked like she might marry. There was a history teacher at the local high school. He was also a poet who was working on a series of poems about the Civil War. His name was Mr. Mathews. Mr. Mathews was fond of calling on Miss Castor on Sunday afternoons. They would sit on the front porch and drink lemonade while he read his latest Civil War poem to her. When the Spanish-American War came along, he volunteered and went to Cuba where he died of food poisoning.

Then, there is Daisy, the wife of the man named Farmer. One day, a righteous horse kicked Farmer in the head and killed him. Daisy sold the farm and moved to Chicago. There’s a story, for certain.

Maria is a mature Cuban woman who is in business. She brought in rum from Cuba during the years of prohibition. People did not go blind from drinking her rum. She had stiff competition from an organization if Miami. She did know how to keep the alligators fat and happy.

Rochelle was a young, French woman who was a close friend of Ace. She was a photographer who was working hard to become an artist with the camera. She made a portrait of Ace. She sold it to a magazine. This was the first time the French police could see the face of a man they knew was moving diamonds to Amsterdam by flying over their heads. Rochelle left Ace for a man named Armand. He promised to make the photo into an expensive art print. He did so, and Maggie bought one of the prints.

Then, there was June. She was the wife of a man named Virgil. He had been a mechanic who serviced Ace’s squad in World War I. June and Virgil lived on a farm in Georgia which Ace had purchased for them. June was fond of the farm, but Virgil had an itch to take his mechanical skills to Daytona down in Florida. Ace used the farm as a refueling point on his travels at that time between the northeast and Miami. He had used the same system in France where he had farmers willing to let him use their pastures as landing strips for refueling.

We must make note of the Countess. She called herself a countess and so did other powerful people in Paris. She was a Vietnamese woman who was married to a man who would have been a count in other times past. He had business interests in Hanoi, and he stayed in Hanoi. The countess lived in Paris. She had interests in Paris. What a woman named Lady did not teach Ace about women, the countess did. Lady was a stripper in a circus tent show. She was a close friend of Ace when he was being billed as “The Dare Devil Boy Aviator.”

Without these women Ace would not be Ace. Each of these women surely deserves her own novel.

• Uncategorized