“Yes,” Sarah said automatically. She no longer agreed with Susan but it was too exhausting to argue with her.
“Once and for all you have to ask yourself—what, who do you love,” Susan said.
“I’ll do that,” Sarah said.
“The right answer is you love yourself. You are the most important person in your world.”
Susan retreated to her bed. Sarah sat on the couch and watched the sun tip the Sierra’s peaks with fire. Was I ever in love with anyone? she wondered. Was I really in love with a dream of glory, a destiny in the sky? Was I as drunk with the beauty, the terror, the mystery of planes as all the rest of them?
The telephone rang. Who in the world could be calling at this time of day? She walked into the hall to answer it. “Sarah?” Dick Stone said. “Adrian Van Ness died of a heart attack about four hours ago. I think it’s time you came home. Cliff needs you.”
Trailing the extension cord, Sarah stumbled back into the living room and sat down on the couch again with the phone in her numb hand. The fiery light was spilling over the Funeral Mountains. In the nearer distance, it created an aureole around a Joshua tree. The giant cactus seemed to be thrusting its prickly stumps into the glowing air in a silent hallelujah. Or was it a desperate plea?
And you don’t? You don’t need me? cried the ghost of Miss Sarah Chapman somewhere in her married mind. The ghost wanted to shout those words into the phone’s white mouthpiece. But Sarah only sat there staring at the Joshua tree, deciding to let the ghost write the whole story. She would tell it objectively, with the crystalline clarity of the stratosphere, tell it without so much as a whimper of an I, an echo of an ego. She would tell everything she had learned in England and America, in Los Angeles and in the Mojave and on the ridge above Tahquitz Canyon.
“Sarah?” Dick Stone said. “Sarah?”
She would begin with Adrian Van Ness and Frank Buchanan, the original spinners of the web of profit and loss, betrayal and commitment, exaltation and compulsion that became the years of their lives. She would go back to the moment when men first discovered the omnipotence, the wonder, of the sky and began to explore the meaning, the power, of wings. Only by regaining the illusion of innocence could she hope to explain the stunning inevitability of it all.
She would control her rage at the obscenities they committed in the name of their planes. She would not lament the women they mutilated, the lives they twisted and tormented like the metal they bent and hammered into shapes they loved more than their children. She would write of love and hate and despair with the debonair courtesy of the dammed, the irony of the unforgiven, the blank-eyed calm of the angel of death.
The ghost would live in all the tormented hearts and anguished heads with a phantasm’s duplicity, telling the truth the truth the truth about everyone, even about that riven ruin of reproach and regret known as Sarah Chapman Morris.
“Sarah?” Dick Stone said. “Sarah?”
BOOK TWO
BROTHERLY LOVE
In 1912 Americans were dancing the Crab Step, the Kangaroo Dip, the Chicken Scratch, and the Bunny Hug. The slang expressions of the year were flossy, beat it!, peeved, and it’s a cinch. Movies were attracting five million people a day. An eastern Democrat named Woodrow Wilson was running for president. The U.S. Marines landed in Cuba to restore order. Frank Buchanan did not pay much attention to any of these things. He was too busy being the happiest sixteen-year-old in California, working as mechanic and factotum for his brother Craig, the pilot of a bright green biplane called Rag Time.
Craig had thundered up to Frank’s door in his Harley-Davidson motorcar two years before to take his younger brother to the Dominguez Hills air meet outside Los Angeles. His mother had begged Frank not to go. She did not want him to have anything to do with her swarthy swaggering older son, who had defied her exhortations and admonitions practically from birth. In 1905, at the age of eighteen, Craig had gone off to race motor cars, becoming as famous as Cal Rodgers and Eddie Rickenbacker in that daredevil sport.
Frank had found the invitation to Dominguez Hills irresistible. Craig had said it would be the first air show in the United States. Airmen from France and America were going to fly balloons, dirigibles, and planes. It was going to make California famous for something besides orange groves and sunshine.
On the green mesa between Compton and Long Beach, a crowd of 20,000 swarmed off the big red Pacific Electric Railway cars to see the most miraculous sight in history—men flying through the air. The planes were the main attraction. Balloons were old stuff and dirigibles had been wobbling through the California sky for several years. One had raced an automobile from Los Angeles to Pasadena in 1905 and won.
Frank watched easterner Glenn Curtiss begin the festivities with a flight in his gleaming yellow biplane, the Golden Flyer, which had won the world’s first air meet in Rheims, France in 1909 with a top speed of 46.5 miles an hour. The Flyer had a tricycle landing gear and a sixty-horsepower “pusher” motor that purred away behind the pilot’s back. The crowd roared with excitement as Curtiss circled the field at a height of fifty feet, flying over a half mile and making a smooth landing in front of the grandstand.
Other pilots took to the air in similar machines. They soon demonstrated that flying was not only marvelous—it was dangerous. For reasons no one seemed to understand, planes suddenly slipped sideways out of the air or plunged to the ground nose first. The organizers of the meet did not let these accidents stop the show. Ambulances rushed to haul the fliers from the wreckage of their planes, the mangled struts and wires and fabric were towed out of sight into a nearby ravine—and another plane was in the air, dazzling the spectators again. Only the next day did they learn in the newspapers that the crashed flier was badly injured—or dead.
The star of the meet turned out to be a Frenchman, Louis Paulhan. He performed sharp banks and dives that made Curtiss and other fliers look timid. In eleven days of flying before crowds that totalled 176,000, Paulhan won 14,000 dollars in prize money.
“That does it, kid,” Craig said. “From now on we’re in the plane business.” With his usual magnificent self-confidence, Craig introduced himself to Paulhan and soon learned the secret of his acrobatic skills. “It’s those hinged sections on the wings. He calls them ailerons,” Craig said. “They keep the ship steady in a turn.”
Craig paid Paulhan five hundred dollars for a week’s flying lessons. This gave him a chance to inspect Paulhan’s plane and discreetly sketch the design. At night Craig gave lessons of another kind to the Baroness von Sonnenschein, a statuesque blond Viennese who had traveled to America with Paulhan’s party. She liked Craig’s lessons so much, she rented a cottage in the Malibu Hills and let Paulhan go back to France without her.
Craig and Frank went to work on building an imitation of Paulhan’s plane. Frank took a course at the Los Angeles YMCA to improve his woodworking skills and did so well he personally carved the laminated walnut propeller the day before they rolled the plane out of Craig’s Santa Monica garage. Rag Time had a wingspan of thirty-three feet. The hickory and ash struts were covered with green pegamoid, a fabric made of calico treated with celluloid. Craig had improved the rudder controls and widened the ailerons to give the ship added stability. They put a sixty-horsepower motor developed by a San Francisco automaker behind the pilot’s seat and Rag Time was ready to fly.
The Baroness was naturally the first passenger. She cried out in French and German as Craig zoomed over the ocean and dipped and banked and dove to within inches of the whitecaps. Later Craig told Frank the exclamations were identical to those he heard at midnight in the cottage in Malibu.
Frank found Craig’s attitude toward women confusing. He often came back from a visit to the Baroness and described in vivid detail what they had done, while Frank worked on Rag Time. Then Craig would drink a cup of coffee to sober up, take off his coat and say: “That’s all they’re good for, kid. The rest is yak-yak.”
Craig completed Rag Time’s mai
den flight with a perfect three-point landing. Frank helped the ecstatic Baroness descend from the passenger seat. Craig winked and said: “Get aboard, kid.”
Down the grassy meadow they raced to soar above the horizon as Craig pulled back on the control stick. Up up they mounted against a strong headwind until the entire coast—the great headlands of Palos Verdes, the flat undulating shore of Long Beach and San Pedro, the wooded crests of the Santa Monica Mountains and the scattering of houses and business buildings called Los Angeles were visible in one magnificent sweep.
It was not simply the vista, it was the sensation of riding the wind that made Frank Buchanan an instant convert to the air age. Flight created a lightness, a happiness in his body and mind that seemed exactly like his mother’s description of the soul’s journey to the realm of peace and light after death. It was heaven on earth, divinity within the grasp of living men!
Craig was soon flying Rag Time all over California, winning prizes at other air meets, including a second show at Dominquez Hills in 1911, where he picked up 450 dollars as the best novice flyer. At that show, the organizers had added something new to the excitement. They staged a mock bombing raid. A detachment of national guardsman hunkered down behind some earthworks and Craig and another pilot dropped smoke bombs on them. The soldiers ran out and surrendered.
The extra seat they had added to the plane was a moneymaker. After William Randolph Hearst took a ride with Louis Paulhan and reported it in his newspapers like the Angel Gabriel announcing the second coming, hundreds of people were eager to fly at five dollars a head. Few pilots were more popular than Craig. With his racing car driver’s peaked hat perched sideways on his head, a big cigar clamped in his mouth, he was the essence of heroism on the ground and in the air.
So here it was, 1912. They were on the way to an air show in San Diego. As they climbed aboard Rag Time, Frank said: “Can we stop in Santa Ana and see Mother?”
“How many times do I have to tell you to put that crazy woman out of your mind once and for all?” Craig said.
That was not easy for Frank to do. He had spent his boyhood defending Althea Buchanan from the ridicule of her neighbors and his friends. She never sought the messages that came to her in the night, voices of guardian spirits who told her of forgotten wars and evil conspiracies in the blank centuries before history began in books. The English-born pastor of the Church of the Questing Spirit said she was one of the rare few who could communicate directly with the world beyond the grave. But outside the tiny circle of true believers in the church, her gift had brought Althea Buchanan little but scorn and heartbreak.
Craig flew Rag Time above the coast highway, telling Frank to get over his “momma’s boyitis.” They were going straight to San Diego. But Frank knew they had to land for gas somewhere. When the village of Santa Ana appeared on the left, he grabbed Craig’s sleeve and pointed to it. Cursing, Craig banked over the town and circled the Buchanan ceramics factory, with its beds of blooming flowers between the office and kiln. He landed in a grassy field just beyond it.
Althea Buchanan manufactured plates and pitchers and platters portraying Spanish days in old California. She had no training as a painter. Her designs were primitive but the colors were vivid and the expressions on the faces of her Mexicans and Indians emanated an innocence that Anglos found irresistible. There was scarcely a house in the Southwest that did not have at least one of her creations.
She had come to the sleepy town in Orange County just after Frank was born in freezing Kansas. One of her guardian spirits had told her to seek warmth and sunshine for the infant or he was doomed. Her husband, delighted (according to Craig) to find an excuse to split up, declined to accompany her. She had taken ten thousand dollars from him and headed for California with her two sons, confident that her guardian spirits would guide her when she arrived. They had told her to found the ceramics factory and she had done so with astonishing success.
Althea hurtled toward Frank and Craig, her cheeks streaked with dirt, her red hair cascading in all directions beneath an immense sun hat. Behind her trooped the twenty Mexicans who did the hard labor at the furnaces. Althea was only four feet eleven and at fifty still had the complexion of a sixteen-year-old. Her perpetual youth sharpened the aura of unreality that always surrounded her.
“What is it? Where did you get it?” she cried.
“It’s a plane, Madam,” Craig said. He always treated her with mocking courtesy, no matter how much she abused him.
“It’s beautiful,” she said, making a wide circle around Rag Time. “Does it have a soul?”
“It’s a machine, Madam. Machines don’t have souls.”
“I’ve seen a creature like it in a dream,” she said. “Galdur, the tyrant who ruled Palestine a thousand years before the Jews came there, used it to conquer Atlantis.” She glared at Craig. “You were born under the same dark sign. You’ll turn this into a death machine!”
She whirled on Frank. “Have you given up your great ambition—to worship this evil thing?”
Frank blanched. She was talking about the project to which he had vowed to dedicate his life until Craig took him to the Dominguez Hills air meet—to prove scientifically the survival of the soul after death.
“I’ll never give it up entirely, Mother. But flying is so marvelous. You can’t believe how wonderful it is until you try it. Why don’t you let Craig take you for a ride?”
“If we crash, you can nag me for all eternity,” Craig said.
“Your pride will be your undoing, Craig. You’ll meet the same fate as your ur-soul, Gath.”
According to the Church of the Questing Spirit, every person in the world was an emanation of a handful of primary ur-souls, some of them evil, others good. The world was in perpetual conflict between these agents of light and darkness. If, as in Craig’s case, his ur-soul was evil, it required extra effort to achieve the light. Effort he of course declined to make.
“In the meantime, Madam, I hope to enjoy myself,” Craig said. “You should see how excited this death machine makes the girls in Long Beach. Frank is finding that out too, right?”
“Just—by observation,” Frank said, blushing the color of his mother’s hair.
“Abominable!” Althea cried. “He’s a child of light, an emanation of Mana, the noblest of the ur-souls. That’s why I brought him to California. So he would thrive in sunlight. If you corrupt him, you’ll wander among the galaxies for ten thousand years, I warn you. Not even Gath will consider you worthy of rebirth.”
Craig laughed. He picked up Althea and announced he was going to give her one of his “Long Beach kisses.” Althea punched at him furiously. “I won’t accept your affection. I no longer consider you my son.”
Craig kissed her anyway and set her down with a jolt. Frank saw he was angry. “I knew this was going to be a waste of time,” he said. He climbed back aboard Rag Time. “Let’s get on to San Diego, kid.”
“Frank, I beg you. Don’t let him seduce you with this evil creature,” Althea said. “The spirit should soar without man-made wings! This will only swell men’s pride and folly.”
Craig was in the pilot’s seat, adjusting his goggles. Frank hesitated, in torment. On one side was adventure, heroism, on the other side, the life of the spirit, the exploration of its mysteries.
“Let’s go, kid,” Craig said.
Suddenly Frank was almost as angry at his mother as Craig was. Couldn’t she see he was a man? Craig was right. She was trying to make him a momma’s boy for the rest of his life. Women were dangerous.
He spun the prop and leaped into the passenger seat. In a moment they were in the air, climbing to five hundred feet. Frank watched his mother dwindle to a speck in the green field where for a moment she had seemed so formidable.
The air meet in San Diego was a big success. Craig won four thousand dollars in prizes. His bombing routine was the hit of the show. He used giant firecrackers that went off with a big bang. That night Craig urged Frank to join him
and Muriel Halsey, an actress who followed him everywhere in her white Du-senberg touring car, for a night on the town. (The Baroness had returned to Vienna “haxausted,” according to Craig.) Muriel said she would find him a girl.
Frank shook his head. He was feeling guilty about making his mother unhappy. She had warned him against drinking liquor. She said it was dangerous for a child of light. She also warned him against women who did not match his emanations. They could destroy his spiritual gifts.
Craig returned to the hotel room around 1 A.M. with two Mexicans. Half asleep, Frank heard only snatches of the conversation. It had something to do with bombing and revolution and a town named Los Banyos. There was laughter, the clinking of glasses.
Craig shook Frank awake at dawn. This was unusual. The day after a meet, they usually slept until noon. At the air field, they gassed up Rag Time and took off into a splendid sunrise. “We’re heading south!” Frank shouted, pointing to the Pacific, which was on their right.
Craig nodded. “Mexico!” he shouted. “We’re going to war!”
A civil war had been raging in Mexico for several years. In a half hour they were over the border, flying across a barren, rocky landscape. In another hour they landed in a field not far from a camp with a half-dozen tents and hundreds of horses tethered in rows on wires stretched between posts. Soldiers rushed up to them firing rifles and pistols in the air. The two Mexicans who had visited the hotel room appeared, smiling broadly. With them was a big-nosed sweaty man wearing a white sun helmet.
“I have six bombs for you,” he said in a thick German accent. “The fuses are set to explode on contact. Do you understand?”
“Jawohl,” Craig said.
The German examined Rag Time with great interest. “We have better in Germany,” he said.
Conquerors of the Sky Page 4
