Lindbergh's face crinkled into a grin. "How about coming to town with Mother and me? We could have some fun. We're driving in at about six."
Lindbergh saw Bandfield hesitate and thought that it was because he was short of money. Actually, Bandfield had met Lindbergh's mother, and had found her overpowering, too domineering to spend an evening with. Her arrival had spurred the attention of the reporters, and Lindbergh spent a great deal of time with her. Yet the field was boring and he might never get to New York again. Lindbergh pressed him.
"Look, Jack Winter's invited us out to dinner. He's a stockbroker, a friend of my backers in St. Louis. He told me to bring along anybody I wanted, especially if he's crazy enough to fly. He buys airplanes like Heinz buys pickles, and I'm sure he'd like to find out about yours. How about it?"
"You're on—is what I'm wearing okay?"
It wasn't even close, but Lindbergh said, "Sure. I'll pick you up at eighteen hundred—six o'clock, to civilians like you."
Even the tabloids could get only so much mileage out of Peaches Browning, gangland slayings, and mysterious women in black who claimed to be married to Rudolph Valentino, so the little band of airmen clustered on Long Island turned into a journalistic mother-lode. The newspapers seized upon aviation everywhere as grist for their mills; a safe arrival was noticed, but an accident got two-column headlines. If a really lucky reporter could find a wife who had witnessed her husband's fatal crash, there were lead stories for two days.
As a result, Roosevelt and the adjacent Curtiss Field became magnets for tourists. Where before no one but pilots or mechanics could be found there now surged hundreds of onlookers during the week, thousands on the weekends. Security became a problem for the flyers as well as the crowd. One man, intently peering into his camera, unable to hear the warning yells of the crowd, had backed comically step by step into the idling propeller of an Eaglerock biplane. The shattered propeller sliced off the tail of his coat and his pants, sending his wallet in an arc to land on the wing of a Jenny. One more step and he'd have been a true half-ass for life, a candidate for the Keystone Komedy hall of fame.
The crowds were generally well-mannered and benign, but their curiosity and their numbers caused damage. Fingers somehow poked their way into the fabric of the ordinary transient planes staked out on the flight line, and finally, to keep the strangers out, guards had to be posted around the hangars where the various race planes were housed.
The guard at Bandfield's little hangar nodded as Murray Roehlk laid his enormous shoulder to ease the door open. Murray was shaped like a Packard radiator: square, sharp, and sloped-shouldered. He was five and a half feet tall, and almost that wide, his bulk emphasized by a suit cut to hide shoulder holsters and conceal his disproportionately long arms. They hung gorillalike yet ended in delicate tapered hands that could fix anything from carburetors to altimeters. Hafner was a demanding employer who kept most people at their distance, but had gradually gained an equally high regard for both Murray's ruthlessness and his intelligence. Rhoades handled the airplane mechanics, the engine, and the controls, but Murray did all the instrument work.
As Hafner focused more on building airplanes, Roehlk had begun to take over the arms sales. Murray didn't like dealing with foreigners too much, but he got a kick out of dealing with the gangsters. Hafner had always provided the best guns at the lowest prices, earning a reputation in the underworld that served him well. Murray knew he was good with the mob, selling them all the tools of the booming bootleg trade, from Thompson submachine guns to hand grenades. He liked the responsibility and the associations, though they left him little free time for his hobby, building his own radio sets.
Inside the hangar, Murray fumbled until he found the switch. A dozen goosenecked lamps hanging from the rafters blinked on, illuminating the gleaming blue Rocket. Hafner and Fokker followed Roehlk inside.
"Lieb Gott—what a ship!" Fokker was a tough competitor; he pursed his lips in envy, seeking as he always did something to complain about. "Look, they're using a plywood monocoque body, like on the old Albatros."
Hafner ran his hand over the fuselage, a smooth plywood oval streamlined from nose to tail. The high cantilever wing, also covered in plywood, was melded to the fuselage with a deep, sinuous fillet. On his Bellanca, the landing gear was fastened to the wing and fuselage by a wild interconnecting jumble of struts. A single streamlined surface connected the landing gear to the Rocket's fuselage. The windscreen faired the fuselage contours into the leading edge of the wing in a smoothly flowing curve.
"What do you think, Herr Fokker?" The two always reverted to their correct wartime relationship, as if to reject the informal American style.
"This must be twenty-five miles an hour faster than any other plane on the field. The wing is just like mine, looks like the same airfoil even. He can make it to Paris in thirty hours or less."
Hafher said nothing, but knocked his fist against the smooth metal cowling. "It might overheat. I'd rather leave the cylinders uncovered."
Fokker shook his head. "No, they've done this right. He'll win if he gets off when the others do."
Hafner's eyes met Murray's as they walked out the door, and he whispered an aside: "I still think it will overheat."
Later on the afternoon of the sixteenth, Bandfield stood in the foul-smelling latrine using a rough red shop rag as a towel. He shrugged with disapproval at the image peering out of the cracked sepia-toned mirror, edged at the top with a "Chew Red Man Tobacco" sign. He was tired after too many days of eating in airfield cafes, too many nights without sleep, too many times without a chance for a decent bath or even a wash. He walked into the operations lounge and flowed onto a battered couch, letting his wiry frame spread out. He ran his fingers through hair weeks overdue for cutting, realizing that his clothes were wrinkled and he didn't have a tie. His regret that he'd accepted Lindbergh's invitation faded as he automatically listened critically to the sound of an engine being tested outside. Bandfield had earned his college expenses by knowing what engine noises meant. Hadley had helped him fix up a repair truck that carried all his tools and parts, and taught him to be an intuitive mechanic, one to whom the engines spoke their own language. He'd worked his way through Berkeley fixing cars, mostly Model Ts but sometimes more sophisticated foreign cars, and he found himself making more money on the Cal campus than his dad did back home. His dad had been his hero, a romantic figure crusading for just causes, like the plight of the farmers and lumbermen. His dad was always for the laboring man—as long as he didn't have to put in ten hours a day laboring. On the campus, Bandy's native politics were viewed as radical and inconsistent with the good living he was making with his repair truck. A horn sounded outside the operations shack, and Lindbergh bounded in the door, carrying a gray tweed coat and a green-striped tie. "I thought you might want to borrow these—Jack Winter said he'd take us somewhere fancy."
*
Manhattan/May 16, 1927
Fancy in Salinas had been the Country Club Inn; Bandy had never dared set foot inside. His heart tumbled when he found out that fancy to Jack Winter was the Waldorf Astoria. He'd been quite comfortable on the ride in, listening to Lindbergh's serious discussions with his mother on how he was to behave in Paris. He'd gawked at the tall buildings on their walk from the garage up 34th Street to the rambling twin buildings that formed a hotel so fabled that they'd heard about it in Salinas.
The gorgeously decorated Peacock Alley, the Waldorf's multicolored showcase for the celebrating rich, more than lived up to its name, and his eyes fastened on a glittering passage of laughing, confident young women borne on the arms of equally happy young men in evening clothes. He felt a constriction in his loins when he saw, in the window of a diamond-bright jewelry shop, the collar of his borrowed tweed coat riding up around his plaid flannel shirt, pushing his tie askew. He was glad it wasn't a full-length mirror, for he knew that the bottoms of his wrinkled black pants were riding an inch above his high-top brown shoes.
; It was like a movie trip down death row, a brilliantly lit struggle to get to the point of execution. The noise was deafening, a constant ripple of laughter and chatter, of fleeting names he'd never heard, places he'd never been. He had to steel himself not to turn around and catch the ritzy-looking couples pointing at him and grinning.
The walk became a jelly-legged nightmare as he straggled beside Mrs. Lindbergh and Slim, his feet, suddenly feed buckets, flopping in wide arcs to left and right. He was an ambulatory contradiction, the clownish focus of attention of a crowd of rich bastards, not one of whom would look at him. He hated them all, began to hate the Lindberghs, who didn't seem to see them, and most of all he thought he hated Jack Winter, the man waiting at the entrance to the restaurant, standing at the top of the little flight of stairs carpeted inches deep in luxury.
Winter and his wife were both smiling broadly. As the three of them approached, the pair seemed to grow in size, Winter's faultlessly cut evening clothes blossoming to block out the light behind them, his patent-leather hair glistening as brightly as his patent-leather shoes. His wife, dressed in a low-cut orange silk dress and a matching turban, was simply, starkly, beautiful. An orange-tipped white fringe, a feathery python, curled around her neck and down her arms, seeming to caress her with a life of its own.
Bandfield glanced from one to the other, speechless, wondering what on earth they were making of him, this country bumpkin from the West. Winter, his diamond studs holding their own in a fierce competition with the chandelier, pumped Lindbergh's hand while his wife and Mrs. Lindbergh exchanged near-miss kisses. Winter's dazzling grin plainly said that Bandfield was dressed well enough for him. Mrs. Winter, straight out of a Woodbury's soap advertisement, pressed his hand, murmuring her name, Frances, which he promptly forgot.
And with her name went all of his concerns about clothes, place, and time, for from behind Winter emerged a shy young woman, looking as desperately anxious as Bandfield felt. He had had many girlfriends, had made love to many women, and had almost been engaged once. But he had never been prepared to be poleaxed, to feel himself fall irrevocably in love with any girl before he had even learned her name.
"Millie, I believe you know Mrs. Lindbergh. May I present Charles Lindbergh and Frank Bandfield? Gentlemen, this is our niece, Mildred Duncan."
She held out her hand, and Bandy said, "I'm really glad to meet you," in a tone that made everybody believe him.
Winter's laugh was joyous and genuine. "Frank, Millie is gaga about flying, and I wanted her to meet you both."
As the Lindberghs and the Winters watched, Millie flowed naturally toward Bandfield amid the crackle of ice breaking, hesitantly offering her arm for him to take. Their mutual embarrassment slipped from them like the red slips from the sky after sunset, and they became instantly at ease with each other even as they forgot the others. Winters winked at Lindbergh and took his mother by the arm, and they went to eat, shepherded to their table by a headwaiter whose fawning would have sickened Bandfield had he noticed.
Bandfield stepped back before they sat down to really look at Millie. She was molded into a blue chiffon dress, its soft flowing lines broken at top and sides by knotted white scarfs. He had never seen anyone more lovely. The room became multidimensional. The one that counted was the hot earnest level where he learned all about Millie. On the next level were the Lindberghs and the Winters, who tried in vain for a while to include them in their general conversation. Winter wanted to find out about Bandfield's airplane, but after getting a few short yeses and nos, gave up. The third level was the room, filled now with friends, including the snooty waiter who was asking him what he wanted to eat.
He hadn't looked at the menu.
"What are you having, Jack?" he asked, anxious for a clue so that he wouldn't order something too expensive.
"Oscar does the best steak tartare in the world."
He turned to the waiter. "Oscar, I'll have the same. And make mine well-done."
The waiter paused and looked at Winter.
"Make mine well-done too, please, filet mignon style."
Bandfield turned back to Millie. She was smiling fondly at him, as if he'd just done something clever. He felt it must have been the adroit way he handled Oscar.
"What did you order?"
"Lobster. We never get it in Green Bay."
He exulted in the animation of her face; every word seemed to have a counterpart expression in her eyes and on her lips.
She went on, "What do you eat in California besides oranges?"
"Abalone, the best seafood in the world, better than lobster even." It was a guess—he'd never tasted lobster, and had abalone only once. "You dive down in the water, and use a tire iron to pull the abalone off the rocks. Then you pound it thin and fry it."
"Do you fry the rocks or the tire iron? Sounds just like our snipe hunts." She looked at him to see if he had taken the bait. "If you come out to Wisconsin, we'll get you on one. You can be the bag man—he's the most important." They laughed, not certain who was kidding whom.
"Sure, sounds great. And if you come to California, I'll introduce you to all the movie stars." He wondered at what he was saying; her humor had elevated his own, got him joking as he rarely was able to do with a stranger.
The thought of Hollywood obviously appealed to her. "I really want to go there. I'd love to see a movie star." She hesitated, not sure if she should confide in him. "Did you see Son of the Sheik? I couldn't believe it when Valentino died." She caught herself, shifting to less revealing ground.
"Do you like baseball?"
They were running the conversation together, each eager for the other to talk, each with too much to say. He felt at ease, expansive, and didn't worry much about which fork to use.
"It was the only sport I played in college. I lettered in my junior and senior years."
Mrs. Lindbergh watched with approval as Bandy and Millie submerged themselves in animated conversation, oblivious to the others. She was content to have Charles talking to the safely married Frances while she chatted with Jack.
Bandfield was bragging about his airplane when she asked, "Did you know Uncle Jack is giving me flying lessons?"
Unbelievably, her stock soared. A woman pilot!
"How do you like it?"
"It's fine, except I get sick all the time."
"You'll get over it. It's just nerves."
They went on at machine-gun pace until the shrimp cocktails arrived. They fell into a rhythm, eating the shrimp alternately, one talking while the other chewed.
He found himself telling her about his repair truck and the college guys. "They thought I was some sort of ragged gypsy, coming around with a truck with the sides rolled up. But I'd soup up their Model Ts, hang a Miller downdraft carburetor on one, an Iverson head on another, and they'd get a little speed out of it. Pretty soon I had to put them on a list. It got so busy I was even getting bribes to give people priority."
"Bribes!" she said in mock horror. "And what did your parents think of your taking bribes?"
He turned serious—it was a sore point. "Dad didn't take it so well. He was sort of a rebel, always reading Marxist literature. He even joined the Communist Party, honest! Every year he'd go off somewhere, up in the Northwest, in the woods, rabble-rousing. Somehow my making money rubbed him the wrong way. One day he just up and left, no word to anybody. I couldn't figure it out."
He was silent, and she reached over and squeezed his arm, sending his pulse soaring. Her own life was so protected; she couldn't imagine her father leaving the family.
The floodgates were open. "It killed my mom. She loved him so, even if he was hard to live with. She never admitted that he was gone for good, but she was never again the same. When she got sick, she was glad, glad to die and stop missing him."
The plates were cleared, and Bandy stared in amazement as the waiter ran a little silver roller brush across the white-on-white linen tablecloth, gobbling up the crumbs. He slid his butter plate over the s
tain from the French dressing he'd spilled.
By the time the steaks were served, he thought he was in love. He knew it when she leaned over and asked, "Can I tell you something personal?"
He nodded, anxious, and she said, "Don't look now, but your fly is open. I noticed when you came in."
From anybody else, the comment would have generated a lifetime impotence. Instead, it cemented their relationship, bringing them closer as he fumbled with the buttons underneath the table.
There wasn't even a dip in the conversation.
"I knew Slim in flying school, you know. We crashed, had a midair, and they threw me out. I used to think it was terrible, but now I know it was the best thing that ever happened to me."
She took his lead eagerly. "Why?"
"Because if I hadn't, I wouldn't be here, and I wouldn't have met you."
The food was wonderful. Bandy glanced around the room and realized theirs was the only table that was dry. Everywhere else people were busily engaged in beating Prohibition's dry laws by pouring drinks out of bottles wrapped in brown paper bags.
Refusing coffee, the Lindberghs excused themselves. Winter took Millie and Frank's combined distress at parting in a glance and said, "Slim, I want to show Frances and Millie some of the nightlife, and we need Bandy along for protection. I'll see that he gets back to the field."
Lindbergh walked with Bandfield out to the lobby. "Be careful, Bandy—this isn't Maria." He winked and poked him in the arm. "See you tomorrow."
Jack had asked to have his car brought around; when it pulled up at the curb, Bandfield for the first time had his eyes forcibly torn from Millie.
He'd seen the car advertised in the Times. It was a Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost, a convertible with a rumble seat the size of a swimming pool.
"Hop in. We're off to Harlem."
He helped Millie climb up the little step at the side of the rumble seat, steadying her as she struggled to get her skirt-encumbered leg over the coaming, stealing a glance at her ankle and calf. He put one hand on the edge of the rumble seat and bounded in, striking his shin smartly on the edge of the retracted convertible top but masking-the pain.
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