"You like English cars, Jack?"
"Yeah, they're swell, but this one is manufactured up in Springfield, Massachusetts, and Brewster, over on Long Island, made the body."
The trip through the streets dazzled Millie, and Bandfield lapsed into silence, entranced that her hand had found its way over to his, enjoying the velvety ride of the Rolls as it headed north past Central Park. He could tell the neighborhood changes by the head-turning the car caused. All the way up Fifth Avenue it went unnoticed. They turned down Lenox and Jack leaned back to shout, "Spanish Harlem," and point to the melange of signs in Spanish.
Interest switched abruptly as they drove up St. Nicholas to Seventh; dark eyes sparkled and glossy-haired heads swiveled to watch the Rolls go by, and he could see admiring gestures from the men on the street.
Past West 132nd it changed. Nobody looked at the car anymore; the streets were filled with flashy cars, horns blowing, filled with white people, scarfs streaming out of windows; some of the vehicles had their tops down, the couples sitting up on the back of the seats, talking and laughing. They ignored the background of littered sidewalks and decaying brownstones that spawled people of all ages into the steps and streets. There was something wrong about them that Bandfield couldn't identify, a strange and hostile quality. He'd not been around Negroes very much, but these all looked different from the few families he'd seen in Berkeley. Then he realized it was the clothing, so ill-assorted, young girls wearing long drab clothes, heavy older women swathed in layers, the men all in strange combinations of coats and pants. He turned to see Millie's expressive face appalled, registering sympathy.
They pulled up to the curb, where a tall coffee-colored man in a tan uniform ablaze with brass buttons opened the door for Jack as he said, "Here we are, Connie's Inn. Everybody always talks about the Cotton Club, but this is where you see the real talent."
The vibrations hit them as they walked down a flight of stairs past a sign advertising "Hot Feet," a revue with 30 Beautiful Brownskins 30. It was a strange riffing jazz that Bandfield had never heard before. Millie had her arm through his, and he could feel her bobbing to the music.
A table was found for them near the line of miniature churches, houses, streets, and tiny stores that served as barrier to the stage. Someone, probably for a theater production, had created a good flat facsimile of a town, with lights winking from different windows, and it served here to conceal the footlights.
The waiter brought setups automatically, and whispered to Band-field to "put his bottle in his pocket, not on the floor." Above them were the "beautiful brownskins," and beautiful they were. Bandfield became so raptly involved that Millie kicked him sharply in the same shin he'd barked getting in the car.
She watched intently, moving to the sound of the music for almost half an hour before leaning over to yell in his ear: "The performers sure look different from the people in the street."
He studied them and saw instantly what Millie meant. They were young, confident, uncompromising. There was no servility in their glances, no sense of inferiority, and they seemed to share a common contempt for the people watching.
Millie was upset. She liked the music, but the contrast with the streets outside was just too great.
"It's just not fair. Let's get out of here—I feel like a creepy peeping Tom."
Bandfield shrugged—he was along for the ride. Frances sensed something, and glanced at Jack, tapping her watch. He signaled the waiter, and whispered briefly to his wife on the way out to the car. Yelling as if he were still inside, he told Bandy: "One more stop—French onion soup at the Brevoort."
The prospect of soup made out of onions didn't excite Bandfield, but the way Millie sidled across the soft leather to sit close to him did. As they rode through the streets, she'd point to people on the sidewalk, unaware of their own poverty, indifferent to the passage of yet another Rolls.
She leaned forward and shouted to Jack, "It's so terrible that most of the colored live like this. I never knew it. We don't have many colored families in Green Bay."
Winter yelled back, "You're right, but that's not the half of it. I'll show you something else you won't find in Green Bay."
He threaded the Rolls through the traffic, turning right on 59th. They went south on Broadway into the glitter of Times Square, then turned right again on 43rd to take them through Hell's Kitchen. It was an industrial slum, a turgid mixing of factories, freight yards, and warehouses that forced the laborers to live nearby in roughly angled, crowded tenements ready to slide into the street.
"Tumbledown town! Twenty years ago, we wouldn't have gotten through here unharmed. I still wouldn't want to walk here."
He didn't stop until they had made a loop back to Broadway.
"It's not only the colored who are poor, honey. I don't understand how the country can have so much wealth and so much poverty all at the same time."
Her mood changed, somehow reassured by the egalitarianism of the poor. They rode in a tired, happy, excited silence the rest of the way to the tree-studded streets and squares of Greenwich Village.
Everyone knew Winter; the doorman at the Brevoort greeted him by name, and they were ushered into the restaurant although it was just after closing time and the chef was gone. There would be no onion soup. Bandfield was inwardly relieved.
"Come on, Bandy, I want you to meet Raymond Orteig, the man who owns this hotel, someone I hope you get to meet again soon. You too, Millie."
The obviously disgruntled waiter sat them down; he left, and there was a strained silence until the passageway to the kitchen erupted in a flurry of waving arms and flying towels.
A short bald man, his smile twice as broad as his pencil-thin mustache, rushed toward them.
"Jack, where have you been? I've thought about sending a search party out for you."
Winter embraced Orteig, his long arms reaching down to enfold him.
"Raymond, you are as charming as always. I have a young friend here who is trying for your prize. Raymond, please meet Frank Bandfield."
Orteig stepped back and gravely looked Bandfield over, then extended his hand.
"Young man, I wish you the very best. I hope that you'll be very careful."
Bandfield felt Millie squeeze his hand.
"It's an honor to meet you, Mr. Orteig. Don't worry about me; I've got a fine airplane."
Orteig's irrepressible smile broke out again as steaming bowls of cheese-encrusted onion soup were brought in, followed by a tray of coffee cups.
"Jack, my thanks for bringing in Mr. Bandfield." He picked up a cup and said, "Let's have a toast to a successful flight."
Bandfield picked up a cup and sniffed it—it was champagne, the first he'd ever seen.
They toasted, his eyes meeting Millie's over the cup's rim. It was a good beginning.
*
Mineola, Long Island/May 17, 1927
WEAF had played "Blue Skies" three times that morning, the radio waves somehow washing through the pouring rain. She stared resentfully at the stack of magazines that Bruno gave her instead of companionship. Every advertisement was alike, and every one was wrong. McCall's, Woman's Home Companion, no matter, they were all run by men to intimidate women. If you used Hinds lotion, brushed with Kolynos, smeared on Odo-ro-no, and swabbed out with Lysol, you might just be worthy to cook a man's supper for him. It was baloney.
Yet Charlotte Morgan Hafner complied. She washed, combed, purified, and sanctified herself to be ready for Bruno and for the lovers he tolerated but would not acknowledge. Bruno's earthy European attitude toward bathing had taken her aback initially, but he had conditioned her, made her accept the fact that pilots were all healthy animals, usually hot and sweaty, their nails smeared with flying's trademark, ground-in grease.
Donald Morgan's long, slender fingers came back to her, always clean, always beautifully manicured, but now just small scattered bones somewhere in France. Her first husband had been an eighteen-year-old sophomore at Princeton and a virgin w
hen they met. She was a dancer of seventeen and was not. She seduced him, and he insisted on marrying her, over his family's violent objections.
Life with Donald Morgan had been far from perfect, but he had valued her, staying with her and their daughter, Patty, even when he was desperately concerned about the rift within his family the marriage had caused. He went to fly with the French to gain enough glory that his mother and father would have to welcome him—and his own family—back. He gained glory enough, but he didn't return, leaving her wealthy but more terribly alone than she had ever been.
There was more than irony in the fact that when she married again, it was to a German flyer, an ace who had actually fought opposite Donald on the Western Front. She had married Bruno Hafner in large part to outrage Donald's parents. Despite the difference in their backgrounds, she and Donald Morgan had seemed to be a genuine pairing, liking the same things, being sufficient for each other. Their sex life, after its tempestuous illicit beginnings, had become routine.
With Hafner, everything had changed. They had few interests in common except their joint business ventures and a driving, almost obsessive sexual communion that seemed to flare endlessly. It was a passion for which she was both grateful and ashamed. She and Bruno had a basic rutting appeal for each other that had dominated their early relationship, a mindless need for endless coupling that left them thirsty and exhausted but rarely satisfied. They could go from a bitter argument over finances to a tousled tumble on the office floor in an instant. A simple touch was enough to set them off; Bruno laughingly compared them to mating mooses.
The heat of their loving didn't impair their enjoyment of others, and they had soon reached an unspoken tolerance. Yet they returned to each other, time and again, their mutual sexual needs providing a basis for their continued business success.
But now she was lusting for another man, pressing her pubis against the dresser's edge in rhythm with the fast-stroked brushing of her shingle-bobbed hair, concentrating on the coming pleasure. In a box on the dresser were yesterday's purchases from Bonwit Teller. She'd bought a $24 corset for half price and picked up six pairs of chiffon stockings for under $4. She had a dozen corsets and plenty of stockings, but the lean days when she was a chorus girl were still with her, and she hated to pass up a bargain.
"God, I'm hot. I wish to hell he would call." She tried to remember whether Bruno had said whether he'd be back for supper. The tickets on the dresser were for tonight's performance of Hit the Deck; he would probably want her to meet him in New York. It was one of their few points of difference. They had already seen the show, but he enjoyed the inevitable visit to the young show girls backstage. She'd have preferred to see Harry Langdon at the Roxy. It didn't matter. Tonight she'd watch whatever it was in a warm, satisfied glow.
Tossing the brush aside, she examined herself critically in the mirror. A bulge around the middle reminded her of her third obsession: chocolate. Well, she couldn't stop eating chocolates, so she would just cut down on her drinking.
It was difficult being older than everyone she ran with. Bruno never let her forget the difference in their ages. In return, she never let him forget the difference in their bank balances. He was making plenty of money, but spending it wildly; when he needed capital, he always turned to her.
She whirled away from the mirror, vowing to lose a few pounds this summer; until then the bulge could be suppressed by a corset. She ran her fingers over her firm, large breasts, grateful for the abundant pleasure they provided. She was damned if she would strap them down. There was no way she could have a boyish look, and when it got down to basics, men preferred a woman with curves, no matter what the fashion magazines said. She peered into a hand mirror, patting makeup to cover the small lines around her eyes.
I'm wasting time, she thought. Charlotte dressed quickly, trying to forget how bored she was with practically everything but sex and flying. Six years ago, her marriage had been a lifebelt; it was turning into a penance. Hafner's appeal was eroding into a solely sexual one, helped only by his letting her take a decisive role in the business. The problem was that she didn't like dealing in surplus armaments, working with sleazy characters from around the world. It was particularly bad because poor old Murray, the chauffeur, was always slavering after her, like a hound dog in heat. Bruno trusted him completely, and insisted that he be in on everything.
Roosevelt Field, with its ever-changing mix of strange airplanes and strange men, was a godsend. She got to fly three or four times a week, and viewed the various pilots as a Whitman's Sampler of sex. A few, like Lindbergh and Byrd, were aloof, but most of the pilots played the game very well. Some, like Acosta, were almost too aggressive. She actually liked them to be a little stand-offish, to let her seduce them. God knew she didn't need much seducing herself.
She grabbed her helmet and a leather jacket. "An hour of flying and an hour of loving—that ought to do it."
*
Roosevelt Field, Long Island/May 17, 1927
Bandfield was amazed at how much he liked rich people when he got to know them. In California, he'd donned a defensive armor of derision about wealthy people, contending always that he didn't need money to be happy, while they, of course, did.
Jack Winter had changed all that. He was only forty, many times a millionaire, and obviously capable of a good time under any circumstances. He had inherited money from his father, who had made a fortune in timber, first in Wisconsin and then in Washington, before coming back to live the good life on Long Island. Bandfield laughed when he realized that Jack Winter's father was exactly the kind his own father had hated and had organized labor unions against.
Winter's father had inspired in Jack a tremendous admiration for Teddy Roosevelt, and Winter talked admiringly to Bandy of the need to embrace, the vigorous, sporting life as every man's goal. It was implicit that he really meant every rich man's goal, but Bandy didn't comment.
Winter had volunteered for the Air Service in mid-1918, lying about his age, but had been rejected when he failed to pass the eye exam. Frustrated, he returned to business, and by following his dad's advice to always go opposite to what the mugs were doing, made a continuous fortune in the stock market, in good times or bad.
Jack and Frances were obviously genuinely fond of Millie; no one had said anything, but Bandy guessed they couldn't have children of their own by the way they doted on her, treating her more as a daughter than a niece. Surprisingly, they extended the same care to Bandfield as well, either because they liked him or because they liked Millie liking him.
Back in California, Bandfield had never had any personal knowledge of anyone who lived as well as Jack Winter. The morning after they had met, Winter had taken Bandy and Millie down to his marble-columned brokerage, complete with murals of the colonists buying Manhattan from the Indians. He explained the operation of the market, and it didn't surprise Bandfield when Millie seemed to know all about it; she was one smart cookie. It all made sense to Bandfield, except that he couldn't understand why anyone would spend his life doing it.
He understood everything that afternoon when the Rolls carried them to Winter's house on Long Island, a long rolling gray field-stone with a private airstrip, a dock, and a ten-car garage tucked discreetly back behind the tennis courts and swimming pools.
Frances had dragged Millie off to gossip about the family, and Winter brought him into the library. Bandfield was amazed to see the walls lined with a complete series of Jane's All the World's Aircraft, as well as hundreds of books on flying. Winter wouldn't let him browse, however, and instead pumped him for all the aeronautical engineering knowledge he could. He was particularly interested in the streamlined cowling and wheel covers on the Rocket.
Winter wasn't an engineer, but the conversation confirmed his first impression that Bandfield knew what he was talking about. The two of them hit it off, and within two hours were planning to form a company to build the Roget Rocket in volume as soon as he got back from Paris. Lindbergh had said ea
rlier that Winter was a good amateur pilot who had made enough money in the stock market to risk it in aviation.
The fact that Winter was buying the first Lockheed Vega showed his good judgment. It was being finished for him on the Coast. In the meantime, he wanted to buy a Loening amphibian to round out his private fleet of aircraft, and he asked Bandfield to help him learn to fly it.
"I'll put you on the payroll today, a hundred dollars a week, plus twenty dollars an hour for every hour we fly together."
Bandfield could only nod in agreement; most doctors didn't make a hundred a week. He was afraid that if he spoke he would break the magic spell.
Two days before, Bandfield wouldn't have accepted a free cigar, but that was before he realized that Millie was the most important thing in his life. He realized that he was going to need clothes and money to be with her, and Winter was the only source for either. Despite Winter's wealth—or, Bandfield grudgingly conceded, perhaps because of it—he was extremely easy to talk to, and very anxious to learn.
The plaid shirt and black pants were long gone. Jack had set up an appointment with Grover Loening to talk about buying an airplane, and without any embarrassment at all told Bandy, "You're going to need some new clothes."
They were almost the same size, and Bandy had been taken by Winter's valet to a dressing room the size of his house back in Salinas. George, the genial English valet, kept calling Bandfield "sir" as he laid out suits, shoes, sweaters, and all the accessories from the inexhaustible closets.
George was carefully folding the clothes into a trunk when Winter interrupted them. He led Bandfield out the French doors of the house and down a flagstone walk bordered by beds of roses picked out in early-blooming alyssum and pansies, until they reached the garage, a converted carriage house that sparkled like a hospital. They walked past the convertible Rolls, a Duesenberg, a Cadillac phaeton that Bandy would have killed for, and a series of stiffly formal older foreign cars. Winter was impressed that Bandy could identify the Minerva, and promised to let him drive the Isotta-Fraschini and the Hispano-Suiza.
Trophy for Eagles Page 6
