Herma
Page 66
They broke out of the cover at about twenty-eight hundred meters and went on up to three. It was very cold at that altitude. The wind battered around the cowl and cut like a knife at Fred’s exposed cheeks. After a while he couldn’t feel anything in his face, as though it were anesthetized. Even through the goggles the cold stung his eyes and made them water, and he blinked to clear his vision. Lufbery was on his right and a little ahead. There was no sign of the others. They had settled on a course a little to the south of east; the compass in front of Fred read 110. Evidently Lufbery knew where he was going. Fred could see him clearly only fifty yards or so away, his compact body bent over the stick and his head hunched in to keep it out of the cold. Now and then he turned his head, as if to see if Fred were still there. You couldn’t tell anything about his expression through the goggles.
They were flying above broken cumulonimbus that were dark on their lower sides. A little silver from the east was beginning to tinge the upper edges of the clouds now, lightening the sky above them. Fred felt his fingers getting stiff from the cold and worked them inside the fur-lined gloves. The icy air battering around the cowl cut even through the heavy fur-lined combination. Down below, under the clouds, the land was still dark. He caught a glimpse of a meandering pewter-colored thread in the valley below, the Rhône-Rhine Canal. Crossing it just under him was a set of parallel jagged scratches, as faint as the lines in a hand: the trenches. He didn’t have much chance to study the map in its roller case in front of him because he was flying so close to Lufbery and intent on keeping formation.
Then Lufbery waggled his wings to attract his attention. Lifting his left arm in its heavy clothing, he pointed ahead and to the left. Below, through a rift in the clouds, Fred made out a cluster of buglike black shapes, a dozen or so Albatrosses in vees of three. They were barely visible against the countryside which, under the clouds, was a green so dark it was almost black. At one side and a little behind them was a formation of Aviatiks, recognizable by their narrower, slightly slanted wings and their small tail assemblies. They were moving west toward Belfort with the sun behind them. Over the steady roar of the engine Thénault’s words thudded in his ears. Wait till they turn back to the east. Otherwise it’s suicide.
He nodded, facing Lufbery and moving his head up and down in exaggerated motions. Lufbery’s wings tottered a little again. It was not clear whether it was another signal or whether he was getting ready to roll over and go down. Then unexpectedly they both went into a patch of cloud and everything was white for a few seconds. Fred was afraid of sliding into Lufbery over on his right and drifted a little the other way.
When he came out he was alone. There was no sign of Lufbery. There were more clouds ahead but they were higher and he raced along under them, the gray wisps and tatters fleeting by only a few yards overhead. He banked around to the right to see if he could clear the clouds and see better where he was. Then out of the corner of his eye he was aware of another racing shadow, above him and a little behind. At first he thought it was Lufbery, or a Fokker chasseur from Habsheim. Stretched and wobbling like a shape seen underwater, unsteady in the stiff air, it seemed insubstantial and flimsy. In an effort to elude it, or at least to catch a better glimpse of it, he kicked the rudder bar and slid over to the left again. Then he looked around. It was hard to concentrate with the roar of the engine and the high whine of the wind in the wires, and it was a bad idea to turn your head when you were flying at high altitude and couldn’t see the horizon. But in the instant he looked he knew what it was. His mind spun back to that distant and half-forgotten time when he had first stood before the mirror in the house on Ross Street, the old and tarnished one with many gray splotches in it as though it were the map of an unknown continent. There had been something lurking there, under the surface of the glass. And that dark thing had followed him, it had followed both of them waiting for its moment, it had always been there; he knew that now.
An instant later he flashed out into the diagonal sunlight again. It was crazy! He gritted his teeth and smiled. What he had seen was only the shadow of his own Nieuport racing over the underside of a cloud. He felt quite calm now. It had not really frightened him. A kind of knowledge, the answer to a secret, spread through him and he felt good. He knew now what he was doing, and it was what he wanted to do. It was what she would have wanted too. He was sure of that. He glanced around again but the sky was empty. You couldn’t grasp it; it was only a shadow that fled over the clouds. At the speed of the Nieuport it was gone in a second or two.
He banked left again and came back onto his course. Putting his head out gingerly into the icy blast, he looked down and to the left. Through a larger gap in the clouds he could see them below more clearly. They were almost under him now, in perfect formation in vees of three: twelve Albatrosses and nine Aviatiks. He reached forward and pulled the cocking handle of the Vickers. The Albatrosses had disappeared again, then he caught another glimpse of them through a rift. He rolled over on one side and went down toward them, into the shadow.
* * *
In a work of historical fiction founded on fact, a number of biographical and historical sources must necessarily be utilized. I am particularly indebted to George Painter’s Proust: The Later Years, to Frances Alda’s Men, Women, and Tenors, to Herbert Molloy Mason’s The Lafayette Escadrille, and to Stanley Jackson’s Caruso. The other books consulted are too numerous to mention, and in any case this is not a work of scholarship; it is a fiction into which the events of the real world have been incorporated when necessary, yet invariably altered and transformed. In particular, the discerning reader will notice certain distortions of time, as in the novel of Proust.
Thanks are also due to John Joss for advice on early aviation, and to Alexis Walker for information on vocal technique.
McD.H.
The photograph of Kitty Hawk is reproduced by kind permission of Culver Pictures.
Permission to quote from the following songs is gratefully acknowledged:
“Kiss Me Again” by Henry Blossom and Victor Herbert, © 1915 by Warner Bros., Inc., Copyright renewed, All rights reserved.
“There’s A Long, Long Trail” by Stoddard King, © 1914 by Warner Bros., Inc., Copyright renewed, All rights reserved.
“My Buddie” by Gus Kahn and Walter Donaldson, Lyrics © 1922 by Gilbert Keyes Music Co. (Pursuant to sections 04 (c) and 401 (b) of the U.S. Copyright Law.)
“Minnie the Mermaid” by Bud De Sylva, Copyright © 1930 by Leo Feist, Inc., Copyright renewed, Assigned to Chappell & Co., Inc. (Intersong Music, Publisher) and David Shelly Publishing Co., Inc. for the U.S.A. International Copyright secured. In Canada, Copyright © 1923, Copyright renewed 1951 by Leo Feist, Inc., All rights reserved.
Ray Orphis
1 From September 1985, when he was sixty-four and I was twenty-two, until his death in the summer of 1993.
2 Found at http://www.physics.upenn.edu/~heiney/harris/, a website maintained with evident fondness and quiet pride by Paul Heiney, the elder of his sons.
3 A bent strongly discouraged, by means of regular applications of caustic contempt, in the authorial-intent-disdaining deconstructionist halls of UC Irvine’s English department during the period that I studied there.
4 Without telling me that he planned to do so, Don submitted a draft of my master’s thesis, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, to his agent, Mary Evans, who soon became, and to this day remains, my agent.
DONALD HEINEY (MacDonald Harris was a pseudonym) was born in South Pasadena in 1921. He was the author of seventeen novels, including The Balloonist, The Carp Castle, and Screenplay, all available from Overlook. He taught writing for many years at the University of California, Irvine, and died in 1993.
Jacket art: Paul Bacon, from the first edition
Jacket design by Anthony Morais
Author photograph © Ray Orphis
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MacDonald Harris, Herma