by Marino, Andy
“How are the celebrities?” Rob leaned in close. “Pungent, it seems.”
“And never ending. The Countess of Rothes tried to peck off my face.”
“How terrible for you. Heavy lies the crown, eh?”
“I wouldn’t know.”
A pair of yelping Pekingese bounced daintily onboard, their leashes attached to the gloved fist of a fierce-looking old maid trailed by a coterie of pursers bearing luggage. With maniacal insistence, the animals demanded the attention of Hollis’s mother and stepfather.
“Did you hear about our class schedule?” Rob asked.
“I assumed it would be the usual.”
“It is. Except it starts today.”
Hollis’s plastered-on smile wavered. “What do you mean, today?”
“I mean today as in these waking hours we’re currently occupying.”
“We’ve never had classes on launch day before.”
“The Pea’s exercising her authority to hit us where it hurts. She’s been cozying up to Captain Quincy.”
The Pea was Miss Betzengraf, who favored green wool dresses too tight for her short, plump figure. She traveled with the aeronautical families, charged with maintaining a normal schedule of lessons amidst the constant chaos of embarking and disembarking, sky-docking and sky-crossing. A few of their classmates insisted that she was a gypsy from Romania who was constantly placing ancient curses upon her two least favorite students, Hollis Dakota and Rob Castor.
“You know,” Hollis said, his mother’s most recent lecture fresh in his mind, “I think we should try a little harder. Go to some of the classes, at least.”
Rob shot him a squinty sidelong glance, then nodded solemnly. He removed his cap—first undoing the chin strap that kept it from blowing off his head—and held it across his heart. “You speak the sky’s honest truth, Dakota. We haven’t been fair to Miss Betzengraf. We haven’t been fair to our parents. And most of all—”
“I’m not joking. People are starting to take stock of my behavior.”
Now Hollis was quoting his mother directly. Rob arranged his face into a droopy mask of sadness and regret, wiped an invisible tear from his eye, and flung it down to the deck with a dramatic flourish. “We haven’t been fair to ourselves.”
There was a riot of blue and gold as an army of porters rushed past with luggage carts and began dismantling a teetering pile of trunks and boxes dragged aboard by five weary attendants. The dogs transferred their affections to a peacock-feathered handbag. Hollis’s mother and stepfather stiffened their postures. She straightened her dress while he smoothed his necktie.
“Behold,” Rob whispered. “His lordship and the lady Sir Edmund Juniper!”
The Junipers appeared in the shadow of their suitcase mountain. Edmund Juniper was the fourth-richest man in the world and was dressed, as always, like the avid golfer he most certainly was not. (He simply preferred the “fashions of the links.”) Hollis had seen him decked out in plaid shorts for stuffy, unbearable dinners where all the other men wore tuxedos. He also refused to wear sky-boots on the exposed decks, which used to make Hollis’s father agitated, forcing him to fix his spectacles several times a minute. Edmund hailed from an old New York real estate family (the lordship was Rob’s invention) and, as far as Hollis could tell, didn’t do anything except spend his family’s money. According to Rob, this money was very old and arranged in piles.
Edmund strutted over to Jefferson Castor and gave him a vigorous handshake. Then he pulled the cigarette from his mouth and handed it to an attendant who had materialized beside him at just the right moment.
“My whole damn body’s shaking like a leaf!” Edmund said happily, stamping his foot on the deck and visibly unnerving Hollis’s mother and stepfather.
“On behalf of Dakota Aeronautics,” his mother began, “I’d like to welcome you—”
“A ship like this gives off electrical vapors,” Edmund explained, taking her hand, “which I can feel in my toes. Have you met my wife?” He groped the air behind him.
Hollis tried to imitate his mother’s professionalism and held his vacant smile. The newest Mrs. Juniper wore a simple dress that looked light and comfortable, unlike the dense, showy garment Hollis’s mother wore. He figured that when you were as rich as the Junipers, you didn’t have anybody left to impress. Maybe that was why Edmund didn’t seem to care what anyone thought of his domestic arrangement. His divorce had been frowned upon, but high-class reputations had survived worse. It was marrying a nineteen-year-old governess that gave his social circle a case of the horrified gasps.
“And you must be young Master Dakota.”
Mrs. Juniper was standing before him, offering an alarmingly pale hand which dangled at the end of her arm, palm down. Was he supposed to kiss it? She smelled like honeysuckle and had very white teeth. It occurred to Hollis that she was only six years his senior. And married to a stout old man.
“I am the … young master,” he agreed—at the same time wanting desperately to kick himself. Young master, Hollis? Really?
He could sense Rob’s internal quiver as his stepbrother stifled laughter. And suddenly Rob’s hand was holding Mrs. Juniper’s as he brought it to his lips and kissed it gently.
“Clarissa Juniper,” she said. When Edmund turned to collect her, she gave Hollis a small bow. “We are very much looking forward to spending time on your uncrashable ship. It’s all anyone is talking about.” The newlyweds walked off, arm in arm.
“I hadn’t realized it was your ship,” Rob said.
“Oh, shut up.”
“Whatever the young master wishes.”
Rob nodded at a hawklike patrician thudding his cane along the deck with every step. Hollis scoured his brain for the man’s identity. His mother gave him little pop quizzes from time to time, as it would soon be his job to know every important passenger by his or her face.
“Colonel something-or-other,” Hollis said.
“General,” Rob corrected. “Swallowtail Ovaltine the Fourth.”
Making up first-class names was a reliable source of launch-day entertainment, but right now Hollis was vaguely annoyed that he couldn’t think of the man’s actual title. Behind the colonel/general with the percussive cane, a plump little boy was showing a sweat-drenched steward a card trick. The steward pulled a card from a fanned-out deck. The boy screwed up his face, bit his lip, and closed his eyes. Finally he exclaimed, “Three of diamonds!”
The steward reluctantly turned the card toward the boy and said, “So close, sir—king of hearts. I’m sure that was your next guess.”
“It was!” the boy said, snatching the card. “You threw me off, that’s all.”
“You are a wonderful and mysterious magician, sir,” the steward said wearily.
“I know.” The boy handed the steward the pile of cards in his hand. “Please arrange these carefully on my night table.”
“Yes, sir.” The steward sighed and clicked his heels together before pocketing the cards and rushing off to attend to the boy’s parents.
“He really does seem like a wonderful magician, that one,” Rob said.
“The true young master of this voyage,” Hollis agreed. “So what time’s our first class supposed to be?”
“Dakota, you can’t be serious.”
“I am serious. Except…”
“Ah. I knew you’d come around.”
“We do have to meet up with Delia.”
“Delia!” Rob exclaimed, as if he’d just now remembered the name of their friend. “So I’m not worth it, but when Delia enters the picture, you’ve once again conveniently forgotten the location of the classroom.”
“I have that stuff she wanted me to bring her,” Hollis said.
“What stuff?”
“Electrics. Wires. Junk. I don’t know.”
“For a bomb.”
“Not for a bomb, Rob.”
“She’s an anarchist. I always suspected.”
“She is not. She’s just
, you know, Delia.”
“Either way,” Rob said. “It’s yes sir, no sir until after lunch, right? All Ps and Qs. Then we accidentally get lost on the way to lessons.”
An immaculately groomed hound sniffed its way across the deck, clearing the lane for a young couple and their twin daughters. Dr. and Mrs. Jacob Wellspring. Hollis was proud of himself for the speed of his face-to-name association. And their children … but before he could think of the girls’ names, his mother was calling out, “Junie! Jessie! How wonderful of you to join us!”
One of the girls ran over and curtsied. Hollis watched his mother oooh and ahhh at the stupid bow in Junie or Jessie’s hair, air-kiss her pudgy cheeks, and make a theatrical fuss over how pretty and grown-up she looked. Jefferson Castor beamed, placing a hand on his wife’s waist. Their eyes met. Hollis was struck by something he had never considered: his mother could be planning to have a child with Castor. A new baby to unite their fractured families. His collar suddenly felt like it was choking him. He took a deep breath and tried to reassure himself. She’s still Lucy Dakota. She kept my father’s name.
The other twin hung back, making some kind of inscrutable face.
“She looks like a little schemer,” Rob said.
The girl pulled a toy pig from her pocket and twisted its curlicue tail until a tinny melody filled the air: “Pop Goes the Weasel.”
Hollis shuddered inwardly. He didn’t like that toy one bit, although he would have been hard-pressed to explain why. Voices of the boarding passengers seemed to rise in pitch, an onslaught of nonsense syllables grating against his nerves.
“You ever seen a mulberry bush?” Rob asked.
Hollis and the little girl locked eyes for a moment.
“I wish she’d quit it with that pig.”
* * *
LATER, AS THE SUN crept past its highest point, the boarding ramps were withdrawn into the empty sky-dock. Hollis watched the last of the first-class passengers—a group of single men who’d made a big show of waiting until women, elderly folks, and families were aboard—cross the deck and disappear down the Grand Staircase beyond the bar. From there, they would disperse into a labyrinth of thickly carpeted corridors and funnel into their staterooms, where they would remain until the ship had safely launched.
Hollis and Rob followed their parents through the shade of the overhanging sundeck in time to see the final passenger make his way down, ushered by a patient steward. They rested for a moment, silently basking in the splendor of the Grand Staircase, which had been designed to evoke the sumptuous interior of an Italian prince’s villa. De’Medici, Hollis thought. Or maybe da Vinci. His brain was scrambled from the day’s forced chatter. It was a prince who favored solid gold, at any rate—the railings alone looked as if they weighed several tons. Hollis wiped his forehead with his sleeve. Jefferson Castor mopped his with a monogrammed handkerchief.
“One of these days, I’m going to hire a substitute family to stand in for us as the welcoming committee,” Jefferson said. “We’ll put out an advertisement for look-alikes, or some such. One more clammy handshake from a perfect stranger, and I’ll abandon ship.”
Hollis almost chimed in—same here!—but caught himself before he could give his stepfather the satisfaction of a shared moment.
“You were positively charming, Jeff,” Hollis’s mother said as she collapsed into a bulky, overstuffed sofa that reminded Hollis of Miss Betzengraf. “The passengers value the personal touch.” She nodded at Hollis. “On the other hand, you looked like you were ready to stick your head in the propeller.”
Jefferson knelt and helped his wife pull off her steel-lined boots. He placed them in a cubbyhole beneath the sofa and retrieved a pair of soft white slippers, then waited until she’d curled and cracked her toes before sliding them onto her feet.
“Thank you kindly.”
Jefferson stood and rested his long fingers on his son’s shoulder. “Rob, give me a hand with a bit of last-minute scheduling, and we can watch the launch from my office.”
“Top flight,” Rob said without much enthusiasm.
“Or the prop tower,” Jefferson offered.
Rob shrugged. His father was chief operating officer, which mostly seemed to involve writing letters, reading contracts for supply shipments, and handing envelopes to people. To Hollis and Rob, this was scarcely more exciting than one of the Pea’s droning lectures.
“Catch up later,” Rob said. Hollis joined him in studying the frescoed walls that lined the staircase while their parents kissed good-bye. Then he watched Rob and Jefferson get smaller as they crossed the deck.
Hollis’s mother took him by the elbow. “Now you may join the lady on the bridge.”
Hollis was speechless. No one but his mother, the captain, and the navigational officers were allowed on the bridge. Supposedly not even Jefferson Castor, although Hollis didn’t know of a crewman who would stop him. The bridge was crammed with the sensitive machinery that stabilized the ship, along with the eighty-phone switchboard that connected the flight crew with the propeller technicians in the tower and the lift engineers belowdecks.
Hollis tried to make words come out of his mouth. “Bridge…,” he managed. “Here? The ship’s bridge?”
“Well I’m not referring to the architectural marvel in Brooklyn,” his mother said. “Unless you’d rather spend the afternoon in the stateroom, helping the maid dust the drapery.”
“The bridge,” Hollis said one more time. He’d just bungled the simple act of tilting a vial of dirt. Maybe the delicate nerve center of the ship wasn’t the best place for him to be. But his mother laughed and handed him a pair of shiny black shoes. Of course he was going to the bridge. She’d have him examined by some Austrian head doctor if he refused. And despite his nerves, Hollis wanted more than anything else in the world to see the bridge of the Wendell Dakota.
He yanked off his boots so fast he almost removed his feet at the ankles, then laced up his shoes with trembling fingers.
“There’s something I want to make very clear first,” his mother said. “You have Miss Betzengraf at three. If I find out that you’ve skipped lessons again, I’ll hire her as your personal tutor, and you’ll spend all day in her stateroom, conjugating Latin verbs until we dock in Southampton. I don’t care what Rob Castor does—you’re a Dakota. You have to think for yourself sometimes, you know.”
3
THE GREAT BELLY of the Wendell Dakota hung in the sky like the scoop of a pelican’s beak, and the bridge was its glass-walled smile. This long mouth spanned the entire bow—two hundred feet, according to the blueprints tacked up in Hollis’s mother’s office—and curved around the port and starboard sides, where it became an indoor observation deck.
The center of the bridge was devoted to the ship’s wheel, which looked just like the wooden wheel of a sailing ship but was—much to Hollis’s amusement—purely decorative. Radiating out from the wheel was a maze of blackboards and easels displaying bumpy topographical maps and blue sky-charts with names like ATLANTIC CORRIDOR and ARCTIC PASSAGE. Beyond them, aisles of sprawling, rattling machines exhaled smoke through a web of metal pipes that pierced the ceiling like an overgrown church organ. Sky Captain Quincy, a gruff, white-haired man whose nose was perpetually crimson and whose mouth was frozen in a scowl, barked orders to officers scrambling back and forth between machines.
The black sheep of a New England whaling family who took to the skies in a fit of youthful rebellion, Arthur Quincy had a reputation for getting his airships to their destinations ahead of schedule. Besides his formidable glower, decades of pipe smoking had turned his voice into a combustion engine. Hollis had never seen him have to repeat an order.
Two of the captain’s attendants lowered shades to cover the floor-to-ceiling windows. Hollis supposed that harsh, unfiltered sunlight wasn’t conducive to reading gauges and instrument panels. Out of courtesy, the attendants left the window near Hollis and his mother unblocked. He lost himself in the view. The vastness
of the sky made even the most terrible problem seem unimportant. He imagined the stubborn pile of dirt scattering into tiny grains, skimming the curved surface of the earth on the horizon, disappearing from the back of his mind forever.
A patch of wispy fog drifted up past the window.
“First cloud I’ve seen today,” Hollis said.
His mother shook her head. “It’s smoke from the shipyard.” She nudged Hollis closer to the glass, which broadened his view to include more of the earth. With his nose pressed against the window, Hollis looked down across the grid of factories leaking dark streams of smoke. Long hangars pointed like splayed fingers across the New Jersey lowlands toward hazy Manhattan. Here and there, the skeleton of an unfinished airship poked halfway out of a hangar or rested in the dirt.
It was an ugly stretch of landscape that reminded Hollis of the other shipyards sprawled outside Philadelphia and Boston. He couldn’t help but picture the day they would grow together, forming a single, massive blob of soot-stained architecture. He wondered if it would be in his lifetime. His mother seemed to read his thoughts.
“Hollis, everything you see down there is what makes this flight possible.” She gestured toward the empty sky. “We take what we need from the earth because one day—a day that maybe you will get to see—we won’t need her anymore. Your father used to say that the skies were the end of one kind of manifest destiny and the beginning of another.”
“I remember.”
Sky Captain Quincy stopped giving directions to his men, and the sudden absence of his gravelly baritone was jarring. Hollis watched as the captain huddled with two senior officers beside a chart labeled GULL MIGRATIONS. Quincy’s right hand pressed the receiving piece of a telephone into his ear. A long cord snaked across the floor to join the nest of coiled wire at the base of the switchboard.
His mother lowered her voice. “Have you heard Jefferson’s imitation of Captain Quincy? The inflection isn’t quite there, but the scowl…”
