“They’ll do,” her mother said, “but somehow I think it might be fun for you to have some high heels for a change.” She turned to the clerk. “Something less bulky, perhaps.”
A few minutes later Rette slipped her toes into the softest kid sandals she had ever seen. They were a lovely red, a muted cherry, and they had slender ankle straps and sling backs.
She walked to the mirror, teetering a little because she was unaccustomed to such high heels; but after a couple of turns she quickly found her balance. “They’re beautiful!” she breathed.
“They’re also expensive,” her mother added, “and completely frivolous and impractical.” Then she looked at her daughter and smiled. “As a matter of fact they’re probably just what you need. I’ve never seen you look more incompetent and feminine in my life.”
Rette laughed out loud, because her mother spoke as though this might be considered a virtue, and the salesman looked utterly confused.
“Are they comfortable?”
“Oh, yes!”
“We’ll take them,” Mrs. Larkin said, and Rette cried, “O Mother, you’re a darling! Thanks ever so much!”
“Thank your father,” retorted Loretta’s mother with a sly lift to one eyebrow. “He pays the bills.”
At home, before lunch, Rette put on a fashion show for Gramp. The old man applauded vigorously. “You look elegant,” he told his granddaughter quaintly. “You’ll outshine Ellen at her own party, you will!”
“Sh!” Rette covered his lips with a remonstrative finger, though she knew it was only loyalty that made him praise her so extravagantly. “Stop teasing me.”
Eating French toast and creamed beef with her mother and Gramp at the little table in the dining-room alcove, Rette felt almost tremulous with anticipation. She couldn’t sit still after lunch was finished and the dishes were washed. She couldn’t find anything to occupy her mind until the clock rolled around from one thirty to three and it would be time to leave for the airport.
Though she didn’t voice the thought, because she knew it would only upset the family, she couldn’t help wondering whether today would be the day.
By two o’clock Rette was so restless that she started for the airport, riding her shabby bike over the familiar route. The sun, summer-warm, beat down on the top of her bare head and crept into the open throat of her striped cotton shirt. There was a humidity in the air, a heat haze that smacked more of July than of May. She thought of the February day on which she had first traveled this road, packed into a bus with half a hundred Avondale High students. Andy Keller had taken her group on a tour of the place—homely, dependable Andy, whom she now called casually by his first name, just as he called her “Rette,” whenever their paths at the airport crossed.
She remembered Stephen Irish’s inspirational speech about flying. “The first time you feel that stick move in your hand will be one of the thrills of your lifetime. And when you come to solo—”
Rette’s heart gave a leap. Very soon now...perhaps today?
Elise was sitting on the railing of the farmhouse porch when Rette walked around the corner of the building. She was leaning back to look through the window at the office clock. Pat, Rette decided, must be late.
The girls exchanged greetings, and Loretta climbed up on the railing to sit beside Elise, leaning against a pillar and hugging one slack-clad knee boyishly with her arms.
“Think you might solo today?” she wanted to ask, but it was an understood thing that students didn’t discuss the big day until it was over. Instead she said, “What did you do your last lesson, besides practicing spins?”
“Slips and forced landings and a few steep turns.”
Rette whistled. “I haven’t done any slips yet.” That meant, probably, that she wouldn’t solo today after all. She couldn’t decide whether she felt disappointed or relieved.
“How many hours have you had now?” Elise asked.
“Almost nine. How many have you?”
“Just nine,” Elise answered. “I thought I must have just about caught up to you.”
“Hi!” came Pat Creatore’s cheerful voice as the screen door to the office banged behind her. “Sorry to keep you waiting, Elise.” She touched Rette’s shoulder. “See you later, gal.” Then she turned to Elise again. “Have you signed in?”
Everything seemed to be in readiness, and Rette watched instructor and student walk together over the turf to the trainer lined up between two Piper Cubs. Pat climbed into the cockpit on one side, Elise on the other, and Loretta couldn’t help being just a little bit glad that Elise wasn’t going to solo today either. But she knew it for a mean and silly sort of pleasure, and tried to still it by reminding herself that it didn’t matter, really, who soloed first.
Rette watched Elise as she S-taxied neatly to the east-west runway and headed about into the wind. She took off, climbed to five hundred feet, and made her first 90-degree turn in the traffic pattern. Well, Rette thought, that’s that.
Climbing down from the railing, she walked across the porch and turned her attention to a Seabee monoplane that was being gassed up close to the hangar. Stephen Irish came out on the porch after a few minutes and looked the Seabee over too.
“That job has a water rudder, you know,” he told Loretta. “Ever see one?”
Rette said she hadn’t, and Irish went on to explain that it was synchronized with the air rudder and operated by the same controls. “Come on down,” he suggested. “I’ll show you.”
For the next ten minutes Loretta was absorbed in her mentors explanation of how an amphibian operates. She didn’t see Elise’s trainer come in for a landing, then turn and taxi back to the head of the strip. Rette was walking back toward the office, deep in conversation with Mr. Irish, when she came face to face with Pat Creatore.
“Where’s Elise?”
Pat jerked her head toward the sky. “Up there.”
Rette shaded her eyes with her hand and looked upward, squinting against the sun. Sure enough, the little Cessna was just flying the down-wind leg of the airport pattern. It made her stomach do double flips to realize that Elise was up there—alone.
With so little fanfare, without blowing of trumpets or wringing of hands, it had been accomplished. Pat must simply have got out, after Elise finished a landing, and walked away.
Stephen Irish was looking at the sky too. “That Carter Wynn’s daughter?”
Pat nodded.
“How many hours has she had?”
“Nine.”
“In a Cessna? Not bad,” Mr. Irish murmured. “Must take after her old man.”
“She’s a pretty cool customer,” Pat told him. “Mild on the surface but quick to catch on, like her dad, and very smooth in her reactions.”
“Smooth is a good word,” said a voice behind Rette, and she turned to look into the laughing eyes of the young flying instructor called Eric. He seemed to know what was happening, because he looked over Rette’s head and spoke to Pat.
“You think the little gal’s safe up there alone?”
There was a general laugh, and Stephen Irish said: “Probably as safe as you were on your first solo, son. Most of us just muddle through it, I guess.”
“Elise won’t muddle,” Pat said confidently. “She’s O.K.”
Rette had a sudden feeling of obligation to tell Jeff Chandler that Elise was making her solo flight. He’d want to see her come in. She excused herself with a murmured, “I’ll be right back,” and dogtrotted to the lunchroom door, where she told the news to Jeff.
Fortunately there were no customers at the counter, and he followed Rette out to join the group scanning the sky. The Cessna was quite a distance away now, a mere spot in the blue air above the ridge of trees that outlined the low hills beyond the airfield.
“Isn’t she flying sort of low?” Jeff asked.
“It looks low from here,” Pat said, as the plane dropped out of sight behind the trees, “but that’s because of the ridge. You just wait a sec. You’ll s
ee her come out on the other side.”
But though Jeff stood with the rest for a full two minutes no silver plane reappeared.
At first everyone was simply stunned. Rette, like the rest, couldn’t believe the evidence of her own eyes. Without realizing it, she started to walk forward, as though by getting closer to the ridge beyond which Elise had disappeared she could see better—could see well enough to bring her into view.
“Something’s happened!”
Afterward Rette couldn’t remember who said it, but the realization seemed to hit everyone at once. Stephen Irish reached in his pocket and threw a set of car keys to Eric.
“Take my car and go by the road with Pat I’ll get the wrecker and call a doc.”
For several seconds Rette stood stock-still. She was experienced enough by now to know some of the dangers of the air. Elise had been flying low when last seen. Too low perhaps? Low enough so that when she tried a tight turn she might have stalled and spun in? For an instant Rette closed her eyes, then opened them to see Pat and Eric running around the farmhouse toward the parking area, while Stephen Irish and Jeff had momentarily disappeared.
With automatic desire for action, Rette followed Pat. Uninvited, she climbed into the car after Eric had already shoved it into gear. Pat edged over to make room but she didn’t speak. Ignoring the ten-miles-an-hour speed rules posted in the airport area, Eric careened down the rough driveway and into the empty road.
“Moon Creek Road’s the shortest,” Pat said briefly. “There are fields beyond those trees, you know—part of the Juergens’ farms.”
Wind whipped Rette’s hair straight back as they raced along. Looking toward the airport she could see the wrecking car start out, cutting across an edge of the field, bumping and swaying on the rough terrain. Every minute that passed seemed like an hour. Her chest ached with tension and fear and she kept trying to swallow a rough lump in her throat. Like Pat, she kept sitting forward to scan the sky, hoping against hope for the reappearance of the little plane, but knowing in her heart that the time when Elise should have been gliding in for a landing had long since run out.
“She’s so coolheaded,” Pat murmured after a while, as though she were talking to herself. “I never sent a student up to solo in whom I’ve had more confidence.”
Neither Eric nor Rette seemed able to find anything comforting to say. Rette was thinking of all the ready-room stories she had heard of light planes spinning in from low altitudes. Height and speed—these were the two safeguards of the flyer. The words “low” and “slow” spelled DANGER in capital letters.
But Elise knew that. Elise must have seen, too, the newspaper story about the Claremont boy, who, in spite of all his training, apparently couldn’t resist the almost uncontrollable impulse that sometimes follows a pilot into free air. Like scores of his brothers, he dived at and zoomed above his own home, only to spin in from five hundred feet and end up, nose down, in a mass of twisted metal.
What was it Pat had been saying just the other day? “In nearly 70 per cent of fatal accidents the airplane spins out of a turn and hits the ground with the motor running normally.”
Rette shuddered, and clutched the door of the car as Eric took a corner as fast as he dared. The airport was on their left now, and they were traveling at right angles to it, far ahead of the wrecking car and its crew.
“But why would she spin in?” Rette asked out loud.
“She wouldn’t,” Pat said, frowning. “She’s got too much sense.” Pat thumped her knee with her fist as though determined to convince herself. “Elise wouldn’t lose her head. She wouldn’t! I know.”
“Take it easy, Pat.” Eric spoke with a calmness the two girls appreciated. It made them both grab hold of their self-control. The car was now approaching the ridge of trees, black against the haze. In a few seconds, Rette thought, we’ll see what lies on the other side.
But the ridge was much broader than it looked from the airport. The car raced along the edge of a wood for several hundred yards before the ground dropped off to sloping fields again.
Pat flashed a glance at Rette, her eyes puzzled and stormy, then strained forward to see past Eric and the wheel.
“Look!”
Suddenly Rette felt Eric slap on his brakes, and loose stones from the macadam road ground under the screaming tires. Raising herself up by her hands so that she could see over Pat’s head, Rette looked, but all that met her immediate gaze was a cow munching grass behind a post-and-rail fence.
Then she saw Elise!
Elise was climbing the fence a scant fifty yards from the cow, which now and then raised its head and considered the girl soberly. Elise was jerking at her skirt, which had apparently caught on a blackberry bush, but she wasn’t looking at the skirt. Not until she recognized the occupants of the car did her eyes leave the cow, and her whole expression was one of apprehension and mistrust.
Eric skidded to a stop and got his long legs from under the wheel with astonishing rapidity, while Rette and Pat tumbled out on the other side of the car.
“Is that thing a bull?” were the first words Elise spoke.
They were so anticlimactic that Rette started to laugh hysterically, not really knowing whether she wanted most to laugh or cry. Pat, quite efficiently, was disentangling Elise’s skirt, and Eric was pumping the survivor’s hand in joyous jerks by the time Rette rounded the hood of the car.
“Where’s the plane?”
“Back there.” Elise indicated a rise of ground at the extreme edge of the oblong field, in the very shadow of the ridge of trees. The Cessna looked trim and tidy and, as far as Rette could see, completely unhurt.
“But—”
“What happened?”
“My gosh, how’d you ever manage to land her?” Question piled on question, as Elise jumped down from the fence to the edge of the road and her friends crowded around.
“I was trying to do everything just right,” Elise explained, looking at Pat almost apologetically. “It was nearly time to throttle down for my landing glide, and I thought everything was as smooth as could be expected, when all of a sudden the engine just stopped.”
“Did you have your carburettor heat on?”
Elise nodded. “I’d just put it on.”
Eric looked at her severely. “Are you sure?”
“Positive. It’s still on. You can look.”
Pat and Eric looked at each other. “Sounds like carburettor ice to me,” Eric said.
On the far side of the ridge of trees the wrecking car jounced into sight, spotted the Cessna, and roared toward it. Pat jumped up and down on the road, waving a scarf and calling to attract attention, and the car changed its course and rattled toward them, disturbing the feeding cow, which lumbered hastily out of the way.
Stephen Irish jumped down from beside the driver and picked Elise up in his arms and hugged her. “Boy-oh-boy,” he said with youthful gusto, “am I ever glad to see you!”
Jeff, keeping with unexpected shyness to the background, looked glad too. Like Rette, he couldn’t seem to tear his eyes away from Elise’s heart-shaped face. Perhaps they were both afraid that she was a mirage that would dissolve into thin air.
Again there were exclamations, questions, and Elise’s soft voice presenting the same explanation. “I knew I’d never make the airport so I just had to take the chance that my glide would bring me down about here.” She looked behind her. “Lucky it was a good big field.”
“Lucky too,” put in Pat, “that winter-wheat crop had just been harvested.”
Elise smiled ruefully. “It was bumpy enough.”
Stephen Irish stepped over to the driver of the wrecking car and sent him to check the Cessna. “Bring the report back to the office,” he told him. “Jeff and I will ride along with the rest of this crowd if we can all pile in. Both of us have got to get back to our jobs.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Elise Wynn was the toast of Wings Airport and, Rette felt, properly so. She was as proud of
Elise’s feat as she would have been of the achievement of a sister. And she felt for her an admiration and affection that was surprising and a little breathtaking. In it not a trace of jealousy remained.
“When a student pilot can make a successful forced landing on a first solo, it’s something!”
Pat Creatore had put it succinctly for all to hear. Everybody had to congratulate Elise. Everybody had to pat her on the back or wring her hand, or even hug her, as Stephen Irish had done. Everybody had to repeat the story, confirmed by the wrecking crew, that because the Cessna’s heat control was on the fritz, the carburettor had iced up and the engine had simply quit. Everybody had to tell the tale about Elise and the “bull”, convulsed with laughter that a girl who had so competently conquered one of the great hazards of the air should immediately afterward become weak-kneed at the approach of a farm animal.
Elise went up again on the same afternoon of her forced landing. “After you fall off a horse, isn’t it best to climb right back on?” she asked Pat Creatore. “I’m game if you are.”
Rette took her lesson an hour late, and she and Pat reviewed all the maneuvers they had practiced, including slips and forced landings, for thirty-five minutes. Stephen Irish nodded to Loretta when she came through the office to get her logbook. He had been looking at the wall calendar, and he turned from it to ask a question.
“When’s your Commencement, Loretta?”
“Two weeks from today.”
“You’ll be sure to get your solo flight in? This thing hasn’t upset you?”
Rette grinned and shook her head. “I wouldn’t miss getting that diploma of yours for anything I can think of,” she said.
“At-a-girl!” Mr. Irish looked approving. ‘Wait till you see it!” he teased her. “It’s worth working for.”
It occurred to Rette, as she stood there, that Elise was qualified to get hers today, along with the verification of her student flight certificate. “Mr. Irish.” She took a step forward. “I have an idea.” She hesitated, as though she were thinking it out, then continued, “Why, couldn’t you give Elise her diploma at Commencement too?”
Betty Cavanna Page 15
