Silver Wings, Santiago Blue

by Janet Dailey

  Out of the corner of her eye, she caught the flash of something in the sky just ahead of her. Rachel looked up as the AT-17, the notorious “Bunson Burner” flying the lead, exploded into a yellow ball of flowering flame that turned quickly into smoke and fiery chunks of debris.

  “My God.” The whispered words came from Joe Gibbs, her instructor.

  Rachel’s throat was paralyzed; nothing could come out. In silent horror, she watched bits and pieces of burning, smoking debris scatter through the sky while the main core spiraled to the ground—a slow, tortuous death spiral. There was no need to look for parachutes; there hadn’t been time for anyone to bail out.

  Mesmerized by the nightmarish sight of the burning wreckage falling to earth, Rachel stared at it, turning to watch as they flew over it. It had been consumed by flames within seconds. Death had come swiftly to the occupants, maybe right after they heard the explosion or saw the first flames. One charged second of fear, surrounded by fire, and it had been over.

  Sweat ran from her pores, drenching her skin. She was afraid to close her eyes; already she could see engulfing flames leap around her in yellow glee. Rachel started shaking with fear as the first sob rose in her throat.

  “All right, snap out of it, Goldman,” Joe Gibbs ordered harshly. “Pay attention to what you’re doing. You’re way off the beam. What kind of a pilot are you? No wonder you’re always getting lost.”

  His harsh criticisms forced her attention away from the smoke trailing from the crash site. The da-dit, da-dit in her earphones confirmed she had strayed to the left of the beam, but she couldn’t have cared less. She turned an embittered look on her instructor, tears blurring her eyes.

  “That was my friend in that plane.” Her teeth were clenched together in a combination of intense pain and anger.

  “Are you piloting this plane or not?” he challenged coldly.

  “Yes!” Rachel flashed, and grimly turned the plane back on course, locating the beam, while he radioed a report of the accident to the base at Big Spring.

  It wasn’t until later that evening that Rachel remembered Helen’s instructor, Frank Lawson, had been a close friend of Gibbs’s. Likely as not, he’d been yelling at himself as much as at her, but she couldn’t forgive his callousness at that moment, any more than she could forget the fire in the sky.

  Avenger Field was stunned and shaken by the deaths of the two trainees and their instructor. The tragedy transcended the petty feud between the Houston half of the class and the Avenger pioneers. Flying had always been an exciting challenge to them, something of a thrill. On this eve of graduation, they were forced to face the reality that it was also dangerous. Flying might seem a glamorous duty to be performed for the war effort, but they were also risking their lives in doing it.

  That night in the bay, Cappy urged Rachel to tell them what had happened. Rumor had already circulated the base that she had been a witness to the midair explosion.

  When she had finished, Rachel lowered her head and bitterly recalled, “On the flight line, Helen jokingly referred to it as the ‘Bunson Burner.’ We all called it that, I guess.” The cockiness had been knocked out of them.

  On graduation day, the class of 43-W-3 marched by the single-engined Texan toward the reviewing stand where Jacqueline Cochran waited to pin on their wings, while four more classes undergoing staggered training looked on. All women pilots, those in the Army Air Force, in training, or in the ferry division of the Air Transport Command, were now under the sole jurisdiction of the Director of Women Pilots, Jacqueline Cochran, whose offices were located in the newly built Pentagon. Nancy Harkness Love would continue as the Director of the WAFs in the Air Transport Command.

  On August 5, 1943, the women pilots and trainees were finally given an official designation: the Women Airforce Service Pilots. From that day forward, they would be known by their acronym, the WASPs.

  Chapter XIII

  PROUDLY SPORTING HER hard-earned silver wings on the collar of her white shirt, Marty hefted her suitcase and walked away from the taxicab backing out of her parents’ driveway. Detroit had changed. The numerous war plants had attracted thousands of workers to the city, a large number of them “po’ whites” from the South. On the drive from the train station, Marty had noticed the increased number of tents and tarpaper shacks, and the dank basements of houses that would never be built, called “foxhole homes.”

  She climbed the porch steps of the rambling two-story house, conscious of the sweltering August heat. A service flag hung in the window, white with a red border and one blue star which signified the occupant had one child in the service. The front screen door opened under the turn of her hand and Marty walked in, the heavy suitcase banging against her leg.

  “Hello! Anybody home?”

  “Who is it?” a woman’s voice answered in imperious demand.

  “Surprise! It’s me. I’m home,” she called in a rasping and happy voice.

  “You aren’t supposed to be here until tonight.” Her mother appeared in the molded archway to the entry hall.

  “I caught an earlier train. Remember that rich girl I told you who lived in my bay? Her family chauffeur was driving her car back to New York and I hitched a ride with him as far as Dallas and managed to catch a different train.” She set her suitcase down by the newel post of the staircase and stood proudly at attention, her chest out and the boat-shaped general’s cap perched atop her short, sand-colored curls. “Well, what do you think of them?”

  Althea Rogers checked the embrace she had been about to give her daughter and frowned. “What?”

  “My wings!” Marty said in exasperation and grasped the collar of her shirt to show them to her mother. “See.”

  “They are very nice,” the small and slender woman said with some enthusiasm, but Marty detected the perfunctory note in it. Age had lightened her mother’s dark hair to an iron shade of gray and she wore it in a matronly bun, long sweeping waves softly framing her face before being drawn back to the nape of her neck. Dark eyes critically surveyed Marty’s attire. “Martha Jane, you didn’t travel in that outfit, did you? Slacks in public?”

  “You know how I hate that name. I wish you wouldn’t call me that,” Marty protested, her elated spirits flattening. “And, yes, I wore this on the train. It’s our uniform, until we get an official one.”

  “Is that right?” Her physician father came into the foyer, tall and ramrod straight, a stern-faced man accustomed to withholding his emotions and not allowing himself to become too personally involved with others.

  “Dad.” Marty hugged him and received a kiss on the forehead. “We’ve been officially named the WASPs by the government,” she went on to explain, “—which is short for Women Airforce Service Pilots. So now you have two children in the service and you can put another star on that flag in the window.”

  “I’m afraid we can’t do that,” he replied with a distantly kind look. “Those stars are supposed to represent those in service in one of the armed services. You’re in a civilian organization attached to the Army but not a part of it.”

  “We will be,” Marty insisted. “Right now we have officer status and all the privileges of rank. If David was home, he’d have to salute me because he’s just an enlisted man.”

  “I wish you could have been here when he was home on leave the last of June. He looked so handsome in his uniform,” her mother declared and took her arm. “Come. I want to show you the pictures we took while he was here. He had so many ribbons and little badges he wore on his uniform—sharpshooting medals and things.” She led Marty into the living room. “The heat was terrible while David was here. Here he was, home on leave, and wanting to go out and have a good time, and Detroit was under martial law with curfews and federal troops patrolling the streets. It ruined his furlough.”

  “I heard about it.” Resentment swelled in her; the conversation was already centering on David and she’d barely been home five minutes.

  “Did your mother write that Da
vid shipped out?” Her father lowered his long, lanky frame into an armchair while her mother sat down on the matching sofa and opened a leather-bound photo album. “The entire Hundred-and-first Airborne Division has been sent to a staging area in England.”

  “I’m supposed to report to Jacqueline Cochran in the Pentagon. A bunch of us got the same orders, so we don’t know what we’ll be doing. It’s kind of mysterious.”

  “I expect David will be going into action soon,” her father said.

  “Look at this photo of David. It was taken the very day he came home.” Her mother lifted the photo album onto Marty’s lap and pointed out the picture. “You can’t see it very well, but we had a big Welcome Home sign strung across the front porch.”

  The pages of the photo album were filled with pictures and her brother David was in the center of every one of them. Bitterly deflated, Marty realized that while Detroit might have changed, nothing was any different at home.

  Surrounded by thick, white carpeting, the black marble tub sat in the middle of the room, filled with hot, scented water and mounded with bubbles. Reclining along the full length of it, Eden let her body go limp. Her hair was piled on top of her head in a mass of sorrel curls, its length sleeked away from her neck to avoid the dampness of the perfumed bubbles.

  Through slitted eyes, she saw the maid enter, an older woman with muddy gray hair who didn’t appear entirely comfortable in the starched, black uniform. She approached the marble bath, raised by two steps onto a platform.

  “Your drink, miss.”

  With a motion marked by languor, Eden removed the glass of iced Scotch from the proffered tray. “Thank you.” She couldn’t recall the maid’s name. In her absence there had been almost a complete turnover of servants in her parents’ Manhattan apartment. She took a sip of the aged liquor and felt the velvet fire burn her throat.

  “Miss?” The maid continued to hover by the tub, and Eden unwillingly opened an eye to acknowledge her. “There’s a gentleman to see you. What should I tell him?”

  “Tell him I’m indisposed and to call later. No, wait!” Eden lifted the glass of Scotch in a detaining gesture. “Who is it?”

  “A Mr. Steele, miss.”

  “Ham?! Show him in,” she insisted, instantly delighted at the thought of seeing her faithful suitor again.

  There wasn’t much about Hamilton Steele to make her heart beat faster, but he was a dear friend. She ignored the maid’s stiffnecked disapproval as the woman withdrew from the spacious bath. Eden took another drink of Scotch and savored its smoothness going down.

  Scant minutes had passed before the maid returned with the scion of a New York banking family in tow. Conservative to the core, Hamilton Steele was dressed in the requisite dark pinstriped suit and silk tie. Wire-rimmed glasses snugly hugged his head, their thick lenses magnifying his shrewd but kindly eyes. Short of stature, he was trimly built despite his staid life style and forty-plus years, revealed by his fast-thinning hairline. Eden laughed at his briefly disconcerted expression when he saw her lounging in the tub full of bubbles.

  “Ham, darling, come in.” The hand holding her drink gestured toward the dainty brass chair in the corner of the bathroom, its cushioned seat covered in white velvet. His hesitation was momentary before he turned to give his hat to the maid. “When the masseuse comes, have her wait,” Eden informed the maid, then cast an amused glance at Hamilton. “Would you like something to drink, Ham?”

  “No. I think not.” He watched the servant leave the bathroom, then with a hitch of his trousers he sat on the delicate chair to face the marble bath. Recovering his aplomb, he managed a touch of wry humor. “My grasp of history may be faulty, but I don’t believe ladies have entertained gentlemen callers in their boudoirs—let alone their baths—since before the Victorian era.”

  Eden laughed in her throat and sank a little deeper into the tub, luxuriating in the sensation of bathing in scented bubbles and nearly two feet of hot water. “If you only knew how I have fantasized about this moment after six months of lukewarm showers,” she murmured. Then, in the middle of a sip, “I nearly forgot to thank you for the flowers. They were waiting for me when I arrived yesterday. It was especially nice since neither Mother nor Father was on hand to welcome me home.”

  “I’m sorry. If I had known, I would have picked you up at the station.”

  She gazed at him across the frothy clouds of bubbles, aware he meant it. It was funny how time had a way of altering the memory of a person. His dark hair was thinner than she remembered, although it was artfully combed to conceal the encroaching baldness. At the same time, she’d thought of him as being shorter, when he was actually the same height that she was. The gold-wire glasses gave him a very studious look, but she had forgotten the way his eyes could sometimes twinkle. For all his staid character, he was a good man. She could certainly do worse than marrying him. Eden almost laughed out loud when she realized what she was thinking.

  “If you had really wanted to be thoughtful, Ham, you would have had a case of the best Scotch in New York waiting for me,” she declared. “You can’t know how I’ve missed all this. I’ve already warned Father that I intend to make the most of my leave. I’ve earned myself some time on the town and I’m going to have it. The theater, the best restaurants, the fanciest clothes—and dancing until dawn.” On the last, she lifted her glass in a salute to her plans. “No more jukebox music, Texas bootleg, or stew!”

  Her avowal eased the concerns that had been bothering him while she’d been away. The glamour and excitement associated with flying had not supplanted her love of life’s creature comforts. What he lacked in virility and charm, he made up for in patience. He had weathered her affair with the chauffeur and that dalliance with the impoverished Italian count, and other would-be lovers who didn’t have his staying power. Always, she’d come back to him. Hamilton Steele was confident that she would ultimately marry him.

  If basically she was selfish and spoiled, she was also a caring woman. Hamilton understood that, just as he understood that her dream of a grande passion still lingered, whether she acknowledged it or not. He could have told her that was all so much romantic nonsense. He was older, by some eighteen years, and wiser, so he knew.

  A sound, lasting marriage was founded by two people of similar backgrounds and tastes, such as they shared, with differing personalities to spice their joint existence. Her outgoing, uninhibited nature kept him from becoming too dull and un-adventurous, while his stability prompted her to be more circumspect about her behavior. They were a good match—his maturity and experience, and her vitality and youth.

  “I am so glad to hear you say that, my dear Eden.” Hamilton reached inside the jacket of his suit to remove the small envelope from the inner breast pocket. “Because I happen to have two tickets for this evening’s performance of Oklahoma! The critics have been giving it rave notices, and I was hoping to persuade you to accompany me tonight.”

  “Ham, you darling! Of course I will. And afterwards we can have dinner at Twenty-One or maybe the Stork Club, then to the Copacabana, the Latin Quarter … Who’s at the Wedgwood Room? We could go there. I want to visit them all!” Eden finished with a rush of enthusiasm.

  His gaze slipped from her face, distracted by the tantalizing glimpses of her milk-white body. A patient man he might be, but a saint he wasn’t. It was impossible to sit calmly and view her growing nakedness without being stirred by it, nor could he affect nonchalance.

  “I hate to inform you on this point, Eden, but your … cover of bubbles is dissolving,” he murmured discreetly.

  “Poor Ham.” She laughed at his demand for modesty, but acquiesced to it. “Fetch me another drink while I climb out of the tub.”

  Nearly every night of her leave, Hamilton Steele escorted Eden somewhere—to the blacked-out district of Broadway or the garishly plush nightclubs with their elaborate floor shows. He ignored the crowds of shirt-sleeved war workers, flush with their big paychecks, sitting in front-row se
ats, and the multitude of servicemen crowding the dance floors at the clubs, fully aware they cut a more dashing figure than he did.

  As long as he was willing to pay scalpers’ prices, he could obtain tickets to any show in town, and a hundred-dollar bill would get him the best table at any nightspot. They were sitting at one such table, surrounded by two-inch-thick pile carpeting, velvet-covered walls—the ones not studded with mirrors—and satin drapes, all the extravagance and waste an escape-hungry public could want.

  “It stank.” Eden sipped at her twelve-year-old Scotch while she offered her opinion of Moss Hart’s Winged Victory. “God help us if our combat pilots are as brainless as the ones in that play.”

  “I could sympathize with the wives,” Hamilton ventured. “Especially when one of them complained that all her husband talked about was flying.”

  “Are you implying that I do that?” she asked innocently.

  “My dear, you have talked of little else. I probably know as much about the idiosyncrasies of an AT-6 as you do,” he replied dryly. “For someone who has complained as vociferously as you have about the hardships you endured, you show a remarkable affection for it. If you hated it as much as you pretend, you would have quit.”

  “I loved it,” Eden admitted. “Sand, sun, and all.” With a rare bit of honesty she added, “Of course, I knew it was only temporary, too, which added to the feeling of adventure.”

  “That’s true.” Hamilton relaxed.

  “You don’t like to fly, do you?” She studied him with a sideways glance.

  “If man were meant to fly …” He didn’t bother to finish the obvious thought. “Let’s find another subject to discuss tonight.”

  “Such as?” Nothing interested her as much, so she looked away, seeking a diversion. Her eye was caught by a tall, willowy blonde just emerging from the backstage area by a side curtain. Without the familiar flight togs, it was a full minute before Eden recognized the glamorous woman. “Rachel!” She blurted out the name, their sometimes less-than-cordial relationship momentarily forgotten in the surprise of seeing a fellow flyer.