Herma

by MacDonald Harris

  “PULL UP. EASY AT FIRST.”

  The stick was so hard that Fred was afraid he would break something. He set his teeth and pulled back on it, bracing his feet on the rudder bar. But the Farman was well built and sturdy. It came up out of the dive, the wind screaming insanely, and leveled out at perhaps two hundred meters above the winding river.

  “THAT’S FINE. USUALLY,” yelled Castel-Jaloux, “WE TRY TO PULL OUT A LITTLE HIGHER, BUT IT’S ALL RIGHT AS LONG AS IT’S ABOVE THE GROUND.”

  On a later stall, he showed Fred how to correct for any tendency to roll off sideways, with a simultaneous touch of the rudder and stick in the other direction. Since the conditions of the lessons didn’t encourage conversation in the air, Fred waited until they were on the ground and the engine cut before he asked, “What would happen if we did roll off?”

  Castel-Jaloux climbed out stiffly, pulled his cane out after him, and began limping his way over toward the hangar.

  “The next time we’ll try a vrille,” he said.

  They went up to five hundred again, this time over the open country a little to the west of Lagny. “CLIMB A LITTLE MORE.” Fred watched the altimeter. Five fifty; six hundred. “A LITTLE MORE.” When they were at seven hundred meters Castel-Jaloux yelled, “NOW WE’RE GOING TO STALL AGAIN. THROTTLE AT EIGHTY. CONTROLS CENTER. NOW PULL UP.”

  The ominous descending note of the wind again. The horizon ahead fell out of sight. The Farman slowed, lost its buoyancy, and began to waggle. This time, just as the nose began to fall, Castel-Jaloux shouted,

  “LEFT BANK. ROLL AND PUSH THE STICK FORWARD. NOW.”

  Fred did as he was told. The left wing dropped and the Farman rolled over. The horizon came into view again, but this time it shot up on the left and began rotating crazily. The Farman, its tail up and nose pointed at the ground, spiraled down around the tip of its left wing. The pace increased until it was whirling madly like a stone at the end of a string. The ground below rushed up.

  Fred tried the controls. They seemed to be locked; the stick was jammed over to the left against his knee. Exerting all his strength, he managed to pull it over an inch, but it shook in his hands until he was afraid something would break. He let it go again and it snapped back to the left. The Farman went on down in a sickening spiral. The horizon spun around in a circle, swooping and plunging. Fred felt a cold sweat springing out.

  It was all wrong. Something wrong was happening. The rotation and plunging were so violent that he was whirled around like a fish on a hook, and he could scarcely even keep his wits about him to realize where he was, let alone comprehend what Castel-Jaloux was shouting at him.

  I’m going to die, he thought with absolute conviction.

  “FORGET THE STICK. THROTTLE BACK. CENTER THE RUDDER.”

  Castel-Jaloux was telling him to throttle back and center the rudder, he managed to grasp. The rudder! He had forgotten it in his struggle with the stick. He jammed his feet onto the bar and pushed with all his strength against it, and managed to get it straight.

  “STICK FORWARD.”

  Like a marionette he followed the instructions. To his surprise he found that, although he couldn’t center the stick by pushing it sideways, it would go forward. The Farman came out of its mad pirouette. But it was still diving steeply and at a terrific speed.

  “NOW PULL BACK EASY,” came the calm shout from behind him.

  The control stick, a moment ago his enemy, became his old friend again. It was still stiff, but it no. longer fluttered and it came back when he pulled it. The Farman, rushing toward the ground, gradually pulled up and curved out into a glide. Fred was covered with sweat and he could feel his heart bumping against the leather jacket. He applied a little throttle and leveled out the wings.

  “THAT WAS A VRILLE TO THE LEFT,” shouted Castel-Jaloux. “NOW WE’LL TRY A VRILLE TO THE RIGHT.”

  Fred climbed back up to seven hundred and did this too. Now that he knew what was happening, and what to do about it, it wasn’t quite so frightening. But it still made your stomach feel as though it were going to pull loose from your insides and fly up through your mouth. He came out of the right vrille at three hundred, pulled out of the dive, and banked to turn back toward Issy.

  “TRÈS BIEN,” shouted Castel-Jaloux a little less loudly than usual, as though he were saying it to himself.

  Fred, his face still damp from sweat, drifted in over the hangars and came to a slightly bumpy landing. When the engine came to a stop Castel-Jaloux got out with his cane, walked a few feet away from the aeroplane to a patch of grass, and vomited. He came back saying calmly, “I am subject to airsickness.”

  They walked away toward the hangar, going slowly because of Castel-Jaloux’s stiff leg.

  “It was an Austrian named Bernstein who found out how to recover from a vrille,” he remarked matter-of-factly. “Before that, everybody who went into a spin was killed.”

  That was the last of the lessons. Fred soloed in the Farman and flew it a half-dozen times, always following the same route out past Vincennes to the valley of the Marne and banking around to turn at Lagny. “Don’t fly over the city,” Castel-Jaloux told him again. “It’s full of valuable monuments.” He seemed to have a vision of Fred crashing in through the roof of the Louvre and destroying the Mona Lisa. Fred was getting a little bored with the Farman. It was a very steady aeroplane, ideally suited as a trainer, but it was slow and not very maneuverable. Besides he was getting tired of the Marne valley. He had his own private vision in which he circled the Eiffel Tower in a sleek monoplane, of the kind depicted on the picture postcards sold in rue de Rivoli, while young women in fashionable pastel gowns looked up admiringly.

  “How about the Blériot?”

  “The Blériot?”

  There were two Blériot monoplanes on the field at Issy, an early model with an Anzani engine, and a new XI-2 powered by an 80-horsepower Gnôme, mounted on the nose of the craft ahead of the pilot. On both machines the fuselage was covered to a point just behind the pilot, and from there an open framework extended to the tail. The linen of the XI-2 was doped a bright silver.

  “I personally don’t trust monoplanes,” said Castel-Jaloux. “It is impossible to brace a single wing properly.” It was exactly, Fred remembered, what Kinney had told him in San Francisco. Still, Blériot had crossed the English Channel in the thing, and the XI-2 was an improved model. On top of the wing, just in front of the pilot, was a short stubby mast to hold up the guy wires.

  “People always imagine the wings are going to break off upward, because they hold the aeroplane up,” said Castel-Jaloux. “But if you hit some turbulence, the wings may break off downward.”

  Thus the upright strut with the wires extending to the ends of the wings. The thing seemed well designed and was sturdy enough. It would climb to three thousand and do a hundred and twenty kilometers an hour in level flight. However it had a short air time, only a half an hour. Blériot had barely made it across the Channel.

  “I’d like to try it,” said Fred.

  “It’s two hundred an hour.”

  The Farman had only been a hundred and twenty, and this was a smaller and lighter machine. “It’s the risk,” said Castel-Jaloux.

  “That is, a hundred for a half an hour.”

  “C’est ça.”

  Fred handed over the hundred. Castel-Jaloux always demanded payment in advance for the solo flights. Before, when they had flown in the two-place Farman, he had allowed Fred to pay afterward.

  Castel-Jaloux didn’t even hang around to check Fred out in the Blériot. Fred got into the unfamiliar cockpit and strapped himself into place. He identified the instruments, checked the controls, and waggled the stick, looking around to see if the ailerons worked. The mechanic pulled the prop around a couple of times, then Fred switched on and the Gnôme caught. The mechanic pulled away the chocks. He was off.

  The Blériot took to the air more quickly than the Farman; it was light and had intoxicating power. It was also far more re
sponsive. In flying the Farman you simply trundled along like an omnibus, and if you wanted to turn it would go where you pointed it. But the light Blériot was more like a bicycle; a moment of inattention and it was doing something on its own. It seemed to want to arc, bank, pirouette, and swoop like a lark—so that, where in the Farman you flew for the most part in a straight line, in the Blériot he found himself constantly tempted into acrobatics. On impulse he curved left over the Parc de Vincennes with its grim château and continued banking in a climbing circle. When he came out of it, instead of turning back eastward toward the Marne, he continued on north around the edge of the city.

  Following the line of the old fortifications, he flew along with two green patches drifting by on his left, the Père Lachaise cemetery and the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont. A little farther on, tempted by the dazzling white domes of the Sacré-Coeur on the horizon, he turned in and flew directly over the city, crossing the Gare du Nord and the Grands Boulevards. When he came up to the Sacré-Coeur he flew around behind it only a hundred meters above the housetops, so that the Butte Montmartre cut off the view of the city to the south. Castel-Jaloux can’t see me, he thought with the pleasure of a misbehaving boy.

  The Gare St.-Lazare, the Parc Monceau. After the circle over Vincennes he couldn’t resist another spiral around the Étoile; the cartwheel of streets with the Arc de Triomphe in the center seemed to be designed exactly to circle an aeroplane around, even though it was conceived by Haussmann who never saw an aeroplane. He leveled out. Ahead was the river, and beyond it the Champs de Mars and the Eiffel Tower.

  The Blériot was a joy to bank and turn. Fred pushed the stick and rudder bar back and forth rhythmically, and the machine swung along in a series of graceful swoops like a lark at twilight. The Eiffel Tower rushed up ahead and to the left. Although black from the distance, at close range it had a tawny brownish tinge to it like the limbs of a lion. He was flying at two hundred meters, and the top of the Tower was a hundred meters higher. In the complex upward-arching structure there were platforms at three levels, successively smaller as the Tower tapered. At the top a large tricolor flag floated in the breeze. Below, the four great curved legs were planted in the city like the roots of some Gargantuan tree. The thing was immense, dwarfing the tiny figures of the people on the three observation platforms. He could almost have flown the Blériot through the giant graceful arches of the legs at the bottom, he thought.

  When the Tower came abeam on his left he cut in, the stick against his left knee and the rudder bar angled. The Blériot dipped its wing and went into a tight circle. The Tower with its intricate iron fretwork was only a hundred meters or so away. Banking to the left as he was, he could clearly see the white tablecloths set for lunch in the restaurant on the second level. A curious waiter gazed out, a napkin over his arm. Above, at the third-level, a tourist peered at him through a pair of binoculars.

  He looked down. All Paris was turning under him in an enormous circle, as precise as though drawn by a geometer’s compass. In the middle, turning with it, was the Tower. He had a feeling of dominance, of exultation. It was as though the great iron mast were the axis of the world, which now spun to his command. It was the biggest thing in Paris and he had seized it and made it his own, so to speak, through catching it in the loop of his effortless and agile flight.

  He was not sure whether he had gone around only once or completed more than a full circle. Slightly disoriented, he straightened out into level flight again. The Tower dwindled away behind. He looked down onto the pavement where the two avenues crossed under the iron structure. There were no young ladies in pastel gowns, only a nurse with a pram looking up at him. Presumably the baby was looking up too, but it was too tiny for Fred to tell.

  Crossing the river, he found himself flying over the Bois de Boulogne. He glanced at his watch. He had been in the air almost a half an hour. He came out over the Seine again where it made its great loop around the suburbs. Here he cut along under the bluff of St.-Cloud, below the level of the houses on top of the escarpment. He still had the feeling he was hiding from Castel-Jaloux. He was a bad boy, he thought.

  At the Pont de St.-Cloud he banked left and went into his glide. It was a perfect approach. The housetops fled by smoothly under him, the river came up ahead, and beyond it was the green field at Issy. He touched down perfectly on the grass, wheels and tail skid simultaneously. The Blériot waggled and bumped as it slowed. When he applied the power to taxi, however, the engine spluttered and stopped. He was out of gas.

  He was at the extreme edge of the field. It was a long walk back to the hangars. As he approached he saw Lefebre, the mechanic, getting out the small Renault truck to tow the Blériot back across the field.

  Castel-Jaloux was leaning against the hangar propped on his cane.

  “What was the menu?”

  “The menu?”

  “At the restaurant,” said Castel-Jaloux, “on the second level.”

  Fred took the Métro back into town and let himself into the apartment with his key. He dropped the kit bag with his goggles and helmet in it, and took off the leather jacket and threw it onto a chair. He glanced at his watch. Twelve forty-five. Herma had a rehearsal at two.

  In his own room he stripped off the rest of his clothes and went naked into the bathroom. Who should take the bath, Herma or Fred? This question was always a minor perplex. It hinged in Fred’s mind—and he was not particularly fond of baths—on the matter of whether—that part of him that disappeared when he became Herma—had recently been contaminated by any special event. If so, it needed a rinsing off. But this (he realized with a mild surprise) had not taken place for quite some time now. Perhaps he ought to … well, he had other things to consider now.

  He stood before the mirror concentrating. People develop more willpower—their wills get stronger—as they get older. Besides, he had more practice now. It took only a minute or two. Although with his wristwatch off (it was necessary to take everything off) he had no way of measuring the time precisely. He focused his concentration at the exact center of the image in the mirror.

  An inward and upward, slipping, viscous sensation. There it went—it diminished and grew shorter. Bah! And that noise—the little strangled glug at the end—it wasn’t really pretty. Still it was a relief to have the ugly thing out of sight. Herma opened the taps to turn the hot and cold water into the tub.

  Then all at once something gripped her from inside, a sudden cold clutch. It was like a memory from another life, a previous incarnation. The sky outside seemed dark, perhaps a thunderstorm. Paris often grayed over in this way, to brighten again in the sunlight only a few moments later. But it was not that.

  Still naked, she went into the salon and looked out the window to the south. The sun shone brightly. There were only a few clouds over St.-Cloud, leaving shadows on the greenish bluff. She still felt queer. It was not that the premonition was unpleasant. In fact, the frightening thing about it was that it was—attractive. A shadow, a vague chill inside, a reminder of mortality. It was sexy, as Caruso said. But Art and Life, the great truth suddenly struck her, were not the same. At the Opéra, Death was only a song, a shift to the minor mode, a catch in the voice. In the air, hurtling through the sky in a fragile and fallible machine, it was a sharp reality—something concrete and hard—iron and aluminum, sharp edges, deadly weights that could sever and crush the human flesh that had set them into motion. The little coldness still hung there below her breastbone, a kind of vacuum. She went into her own room for a piece of letter paper and wrote on it.

  “Please, for God’s sake, Hell take you, will you be careful of yourself? Not only because, if you should cease to exist, I would too, like that Chinese emperor who existed only because a butterfly was dreaming about him. But also because …”

  She was about to write “… because I am fond of you.” But that was not what she had meant to say. What had she meant to say anyhow? She tore up the note and threw it into the wastebasket, then she went back in
to the bathroom. The tub was almost overflowing. She turned the taps off and slipped into the tepid, soothing, and forgetful water—Lethe.

  Yet this little hollow feeling under her chest—not a dream so much as a kind of hunger, a temptation to do something that she knew was forbidden (but what?)—persisted, for days and even weeks. In fact, it had been there for a long time, she realized; perhaps it had always been there. She didn’t particularly find it unpleasant; in time it grew familiar, a kind of companion. It was possible that, even though Art was not Life, this little dark place inside her enabled her to sing certain parts better, with a deeper resonance—a moving shadow in the voice—that would not have been there otherwise. Caruso sang the betrayed Pagliaccio with deeper feeling, perhaps, after his beloved Ada had left him for another man. “Out of our great sorrows we make little songs.” Who said that? Some poet; Lloiseaux had quoted him. Yet what great sorrow did she have? No one had deserted her, her career swept forward and upward with irresistible momentum, and her Wednesdays were constantly more successful. Only now and then did she have the notion that if she looked out the window she might see the little silver monoplane scudding over the rooftops, circling around the Eiffel Tower, and then slipping away under the bluff of St.-Cloud toward Issy. It was a simple hallucination, probably harmless. And anyhow, as she told herself, Fred never flew in the afternoon.

  A Viennese dream doctor, the same one who had discovered that love was a sickness, contended that sometimes a person might imagine he were two people inhabiting the same head, arguing with each other, or coming and going successively as though they lived in the same apartment but came there only at different times. But, if it were a madness, it seemed to be a harmless one. And wasn’t it an equal madness to be Herma and yet at the same time to imagine you were Antonia—to shed tears, real tears, for a mother who was only a portrait on the wall? And even that not a real portrait of a real mother, but only something contrived by a clever scene painter! Herma, waiting in the wings, feels for the little valve in the center of her emotions that will, in a moment, enable her to well out convincing signs of grief, while at the same time engaging in a difficult and intricate trio. A little moisture appears immediately; the lighted stage blurs. Too soon! She turns the valve back a little and the tears are temporarily stanched.