“Don’t you have a chain of command?” Dick asked.
“Sure,” Cliff said. “Most of the time someone’s trying to wrap it around some other guy’s throat and pull it tight. This is a man’s business, Dick. You’ve got to learn to talk back, fight dirty, play rough.”
“Are you still in sales?”
“There’s nothing to sell. I’m a project manager on a new plane. It’s the damndest thing you’ve ever seen. All wing and no fuselage. If it flies I’m a hero. If it crashes I’m a bum.”
They rocketed off the freeway down a ramp to a broad boulevard, where the traffic moved much slower. Eventually they reached Cliff’s ranch house in a development that rambled up and down a half-dozen hills. It looked like a transplant from Long Island or Westchester—except for the palm trees on the streets and the mountains looming in the distance.
“Here’s your home away from home,” he said.
As Cliff helped carry his bags up the walk, a beaming Sarah Morris opened the door. “Dick,” she said in her low liquid voice that brought back the years in England. “How good to see you.”
Cliff dumped his share of the bags in the hall. “You two behave yourselves while I try to calm down a couple of designers who want to assassinate half the engineering department,” he said, heading back to his car.
Sarah had gained over forty pounds and looked much too matronly to keep a lothario like Cliff Morris happy. Dick dismissed that unpleasant thought as she led him into a living room full of inexpensive furniture. “I see you’re reading The Young Lions. What do you think of it?” she asked.
“It’s ten times better than The Naked and the Dead. I especially liked the German side of the story.”
“I agree on both counts. I hoped Mr. Mailer would teach me a bit about the American male, a mystery I need to penetrate. I’m afraid all I learned were naughty words.”
“Do you still read Gerard Manley Hopkins?”
“Hopkins?” For a moment she looked blank. “Oh, that poor old Jesuit. No. How did you know I ever read him?”
“You—you mentioned him to Cliff—the night we met. The first night.”
She gave him a peculiar look. Did she remember where and how she had mentioned him to Cliff?
“‘Like a daregale skylark scanted in a cage,’” he said.
Sarah’s eyes came alive. “‘Man’s spirit in his bonehouse, meanhouse dwells.’ Yes. Yes. I remember how much I used to love that passage. I don’t remember mentioning it to Cliff.”
She made a wry face. “I can’t imagine ever reciting poetry to Cliff. It’s a sad commentary on how quickly romance vanishes, I suppose.”
She served him tea and scones covered with an inch of butter and another inch of raspberry jam. The tea was deliciously strong, brewed in the pot as only the English make it.
“I don’t know why we revolted because you taxed this stuff. I would have paid gladly,” Dick said.
Sarah nodded, pleased. She stirred in some milk and sugar. “It must have been very painful—getting divorced.”
Dick shrugged. “The worst part is wondering how you got involved in the first place. How you could have made such a dumb mistake.”
There was a painful pause and Dick wondered if Sarah was applying the words to herself. He changed the subject to California. How did she like it? She struggled to be enthusiastic but ended up saying she had many acquaintances but few friends.
Her daughters awoke from their naps. Elizabeth, the three-year-old, was a little beauty. Dick felt a pang at the sight of her. If he had stayed with Nancy, would they have had a child like this?
Eventually Cliff came home and banged Dick on the back and told him Adrian Van Ness was looking forward to meeting a guy with an MBA. Buchanan was having a tough time right now like the rest of the industry but the coming decade was going to be stupendous. This hot air contradicted most of what Cliff had said in the car driving from the airport. Was he sorry he had told the truth the first time? Or was he talking for Sarah’s benefit? If so, he was wasting his breath.
Gone was the adoration with which Sarah had gazed at Cliff at their wedding, just after he had volunteered for another twenty-five missions. Her tight mouth made it clear she was all too familiar with Cliff’s tendency to talk big. It made Dick feel better about his decision to flee Nancy Pesin. Was seeing, knowing too much, an enemy of love?
Dinner was pleasant. Cliff talked sports, Sarah talked books. Dick was able to keep them both happy. He wondered what they would have said to each other if he were not at the table.
At midnight, in bed in the guest room, Dick listened to the rising wind. A Santa Ana, Cliff Morris had called it. A weird California phenomenon that swept down from the mountains and across the deserts with near hurricane force, hurling cars off highways, blowing roofs off houses. Tomorrow the weather would be hot and sticky.
Dick found himself remembering his father’s distress when he appeared at his parents’ house in Rego Park the night of the cosmic no. On the stairs going up to his old bedroom, his father had seized his arm. “Why such bitterness?” he cried. “It is something I’ve done?”
Dick almost tried to explain one last time. A new metaphor flared in his mind. The last mission over Berlin. Leaping from the doomed bomber. It was a kind of birth—like a butterfly from a burning chrysalis. But it would have been futile. He could not talk frankly to the rabbi. He had become a professional advice giver, a spokesman for Jewishness.
He looked past his father at his mother and was shaken by what he saw there. Her face was sad but her eyes said: go. In a flash he saw deep into his parents’ marriage. She did not want him to be a secular replica of this pompous man she no longer loved. How did she know that Saul Stone, the articulate boy she had fallen in love with one teenage summer in Bradley Beach, New Jersey, would become a verbose Reform rabbi?
In another flash, Dick saw the evolution. His grandfather had abandoned his Orthodox faith for the glory, the power of modern culture, in particular the German culture into which he had been born. His son, reacting against the father as sons have a way of doing, had doubled back to Reform Judaism, trying to hold the old and the new together. His son had repudiated him—for what? Was it for another faith, Americanism? Maybe freedom was a better name.
Dick drifted down into sleep in the middle of these thoughts and dreamt he was flying through the darkness on a gigantic arrow, to which he clung with total desperation. A hand was seizing his shoulder, trying to tear him off. He fought with amazing fury to resist it. “Wha—?”
Cliff Morris was shaking him awake. “Hey, Navigator. You got a telephone call.”
“Your mother gave me the number,” Nancy Pesin Stone said. “I just want to tell you one last time what a rotten no good son of a bitch you are.”
A fugitive from Jewish wrath and pain, Dick Stone was almost afraid to meet Adrian Van Ness the next morning. What if he turned out to be an anti-Semite? He could hear Sam Pesin chortling, his father mocking him with his compassionate smile.
To Dick’s immense relief, Adrian Van Ness was exactly what he imagined a Protestant aristocrat would be like. Urbane, unhurried, he slouched in the big leather chair behind his desk, wrinkles of quizzical surprise on his forehead because Dick had recognized the paintings by Klee and Matisse on his wall. “I picked them up in Paris in the twenties. You’re the first person who’s even known they were serious paintings,” he said.
Cliff Morris squirmed and said nothing. Dick smiled, pleased at being recognized as a fellow member of the shadowy brotherhood of the elite, those with superior taste, judgment, wisdom. He was only a novice in this undefined unrepresentative band. But he was eager to grow in wisdom and age and grace.
“We could use someone with an MBA to bring a little order out of our chaotic accounting methods,” Adrian Van Ness said. “Basically we spend money on developing new planes and take in money for planes we’ve sold and add things up at the end of the quarter to see how we’re doing. That frequently leads t
o rude shocks. For your first assignment, I want you to take a look at one of our biggest, riskiest projects, the X-Forty-nine, also known as the Talus.”
“What is it?”
“Some people call it a flying wing. I call it a headlong catastrophe,” Adrian said, his hooded eyes flickering toward Cliff.
“Why don’t you stop it?”
“You’ll find out the answer to that question by going to see the man who’s designing the thing.”
A surly Cliff called Frank Buchanan’s secretary, who reported he was in the wind tunnel studying some aerodynamic problems in the Talus. “Let’s go meet the rest of the big shots,” Cliff said.
They found Buzz McCall on the factory floor conferring with a foreman. They had to talk above the rattle of rivet guns, the shriek of metal cutters. “You’re the navigator?” Buzz yelled.
“That’s right,” Stone shouted.
“Now you’re going to play cost cutter?” Buzz bellowed. “Come see me tomorrow in my office. We’ll discuss the next layoff. Then you can go explain it to the union.”
“We’ve got some pretty tough unions in the garment industry,” Dick shouted.
Buzz looked at him if he had just confessed he was an embezzler and went back to talking to the foreman. “Don’t let it bother you,” Cliff said as they retreated to the office side of the building. “He treats everybody that way.”
The treasurer, a big easygoing man named Thompson, welcomed Dick as an ally. “It isn’t easy to track costs in this crazy business,” he said. “You’ve got to prorate guys selling planes at the Twenty-One Club in New York and birdbrains on the assembly line connecting hydraulic controls backwards. Then there’s Tama’s stable. That’s one we’ve got to cover under miscellaneous. And the Honeycomb Club. That’s ten feet under miscellaneous, in never-never land.”
Thompson grinned at Cliff as he said this, apparently presuming he had already explained all this to Dick. Outside the treasurer’s office, Dick asked for the explanation. Cliff wryly told him how Tama’s stable of willing women employees helped sell planes.
Welcome to the United States of America, Dick thought, recalling his repugnance when he escorted Pesin Baby Wear buyers to whorehouses in Harlem.
“And the Honeycomb Club?”
“We’ll let you see that for yourself one of these nights when Frank’s in the mood.”
Cliff hoped Frank Buchanan would join them for lunch in the company dining room. But he stayed in the wind tunnel. Dick met a half-dozen lesser designers and as many engineers. He was amazed by the acrimony flickering between the two groups. He was even more amazed by the amount of Inverness Scotch everyone consumed. Dick’s first taste brought tears to his eyes. He had no intention of swallowing another drop until Buzz McCall wondered if all Jews were timid drinkers. Almost strangling, Dick matched him belt for belt.
“Believe it or not, eventually you get to like the swill,” Cliff said.
After lunch Dick wobbled through routine security and physical examinations. Security chief Hanrahan only seemed interested in whether he had any Communist relatives. Owlish Kirk Willoughby, the company doctor, wanted to know if he had been to the Honeycomb Club yet. When Dick said no, he asked him to send him a memo on his first impressions. He was collecting opinions.
Cliff called to report Frank Buchanan had finally emerged from the wind tunnel. Five minutes later, Dick sat in the chief designer’s cluttered office listening to him sneer: “An MBA? What does that stand for? Master of bullshit? Nothing personal, but I have a rather low opinion of so-called business schools. I don’t think they can teach you anything helpful about making planes. I’ve never gone near a university. Neither has Jack Northrop or Ed Heinemann, the best designer at Douglas. Can you explain why this uncanny gift should suddenly manifest itself in the human race?”
The man was everything Adrian Van Ness was not. Passionate, sincere, childishly enthusiastic. All traits Dick Stone, the rationalist, considered dangerous, although he had adored them in his grandfather. But it was one thing to enjoy passion and enthusiasm in a professor of literature at the City College of New York and another to approve them in a man who was supposedly in business to make money.
“Stop and think about it for a moment,” Frank Buchanan continued. “Our teachers were two self-educated mechanics who ran a bicycle shop in Ohio, Orville and Wilbur Wright. Can you imagine anything more unlikely—except the story of the Savior being born in a manger?”
“I don’t happen to believe in the Savior,” Dick said.
“I don’t either, in any literal sense,” Frank Buchanan said. “But you can’t be Jewish and not believe in some of his ideals. They’re all in the Old Testament.”
“I’m sorry,” Dick said in a softer tone. “My father’s a rabbi but—he didn’t persuade me.”
“Maybe I can, before we’re through,” Frank said. “I was brought up to believe all the great religions reflect the same spiritual truths. Reading poetry taught me everything in the material world is an emblem, a shadowing forth of a spiritual world. That’s what makes the plane so important. In spite of the way we’ve already abused it, I still think it can become a symbol of our ascent to a new spiritual synthesis.”
Dick Stone cleared his throat. He was not here to discuss metaphysics. “That’s very interesting. Mr. Van Ness wants me to review the Talus’s costs and do an analysis of them. Estimate future outlays, that sort of thing.”
“You can’t do it. We’re building a plane, Stone, not an automobile or locomotive!” Frank roared. “We don’t know what she’ll run into up there in the sky. You’ve flown. Don’t you remember days when the plane got thrown all over the horizon? When she shuddered and yawed and groaned like a man on the rack?”
“As far as I was concerned, it did that every time we flew,” Dick said.
“I know what you mean. I flew in World War One and I was terrified every moment. The peacetime sky isn’t quite as deadly but it’s full of mysteries. Forces that reveal themselves in new ways every time we challenge them in a different airplane. That’s why you can’t worry about costs, you can’t start whining about budgets. By the way, can you fly?”
“No.”
“Take my advice and learn. It will help you deal with a lot of people in this business, especially our chief of production, Buzz McCall.”
Dick found himself confused by the mixture of hostile and friendly signals in this encounter. “Mr. Buchanan,” he said. “I promise you that nothing in the job I’m going to do will interfere with your goals.”
“You shouldn’t make promises like that when you’re working for Adrian Van Ness,” Frank said.
His bitterness shook the reassurance Dick Stone had felt in Adrian Van Ness’s office. The sky was the not only place where they were exploring mysteries. There seemed to be almost as many loose inside Buchanan Aircraft.
MOTHER KNOWS BEST
The doorbell rang just as Sarah Chapman Morris was sitting down to lunch. She was ravenous. Perhaps it had something to do with nursing. She remembered overeating when she nursed Elizabeth. On her plate was a ham and cheese sandwich—double slices of both with mayonnaise and lettuce on well-buttered white bread. For a side dish she was finishing up some macaroni left over from dinner. For dessert there was chocolate pudding she had made for the children two days ago; it should be eaten before it spoiled. She asked Maria, her Mexican maid, to answer the front door. It was probably some magazine salesman.
Into the dining room stalked her mother-in-law with a huge pink rabbit. “Oh, isn’t that sweet,” Sarah said, jumping up to kiss her. “Can I give you some lunch?”
“I never eat lunch,” Tama said. “How’s the baby?”
“Just fine,” Sarah said. “Would you like to see her?”
She put the macaroni in the oven and they went upstairs. In the nursery Elizabeth was playing mother with Margaret, who now weighed ten pounds and was thriving. Liz was pretending to read a copy of Winnie the Pooh. Tama gave her a perfunctory k
iss and picked up Margaret. “She’s looking more and more like Cliff,” she said.
The baby’s hair was dark and she did seem to have Cliff’s fine nose. But she had the Chapman family’s blue eyes. Sarah decided not to point this out. Lately she had begun trying to conciliate her mother-in-law.
Tama put Margaret back in her crib. “Maybe I’ll have a cup of coffee,” she said. “Black.”
Sarah served the coffee, rescued the macaroni and resumed her lunch. She sliced the sandwich and licked some oozing mayonnaise off her fingers. Tama sipped her coffee and said: “Do you know where Cliff spends a lot of his time these days?”
“He’s been awfully busy with this experimental plane—”
“He spends it with a redhead named Cassie Trainor. He met her on the plane the night after Margaret was born.”
Sarah tried to read Tama’s expression. Was she mocking her? Sympathizing with her? The wide dark eyes were opaque, the heavy-boned, strong-jawed face expressionless. Sarah suddenly remembered Amanda Van Ness’s visit, a year ago, when she told her all the women at Buchanan Aircraft were humiliated. Was this some sort of initiation?
“How do you know this? Did he tell you?” Sarah said, all interest in food gone.
She had wondered more than once if Cliff was faithful. They did not make love nearly as often as they had in England during the first year of their marriage. It was an impossible subject to discuss with your husband. It was also impossible to check up on a man who had a hundred excuses for his absences. She knew from her own experience that everyone in the aircraft business worked horrendous hours. She had barely seen her own father when he was involved in designing a plane.
“Of course he didn’t tell me,” Tama said. “I had security check him out. Dan Hanrahan and I are old friends. He runs security checks on my girls all the time.”
Although she knew how Tama’s girls helped sell Buchanan’s planes, her casual reference to them shocked Sarah. The woman had no shame! But Sarah was much too absorbed by Tama’s revelation about Cliff to give the girls more than a passing reproach. “Why are you telling me? Wouldn’t it be better if I didn’t know?”
Conquerors of the Sky Page 34
