Conquerors of the Sky

by Thomas Fleming

  “Not if he stays married to you. I can’t figure out what you’ve got on him. It sure as hell isn’t sex.”

  “Really! I know you’ve always disliked me. But I can’t see why you’ve chosen this moment to become completely rude—”

  “Whether I like you or not has nothing to do with it. You’re married to my son. I happen to love him. Last night you entertained Dick Stone, a guy who knew you in England. What do you think went through his head when he saw you?”

  Tama strode into the living room and came back with a framed picture of Sarah and Cliff on their wedding day. She pointed to the slim WAAF and said: “She’s turned into a fat slob. That’s what Dick Stone thought.”

  “This is insufferable!” Sarah cried. “I refuse to listen to another word. Please leave my house this instant.”

  Tama ignored her. “Stone is the sort of guy they’re going to start hiring at Buchanan, if they make it into the next decade. People from your generation, who judge a man by the looks of his wife as much as by his own looks or his ability on the job. Cliff’s got everything he needs to go to the top of this company. But he can’t do it with a fat slob for a wife.”

  “My weight gain is connected to having children,” Sarah said, almost strangling with indignation. “It’s a natural thing. My mother gained weight the same way and never lost it.”

  “And I bet your father’s got a couple of Cassie Trainors in his past—and maybe in his present.”

  “You really are insufferable!”

  “Cut out the Greer Garson act and listen to me. Do you think you’re the first woman who married some guy during a war and then found out he’s not Mr. Perfect? I married Cliff’s father in 1918 when I was sixteen years old. When he came back from France I realized I couldn’t stand the sight of him. He got me pregnant before I got up the nerve to dump him and the Catholic Church.”

  “This is irrelevant. I still love Cliff.”

  “If you were telling the truth you wouldn’t be standing there forty pounds overweight. I’ve still got that letter you wrote me when we both thought he was dead. All that baloney about always remembering his heroism. Not one word about the possibility that he was still alive somewhere in Germany. I figured it out on the spot. You were glad he was dead.”

  “No!” Sarah said, tears of shame mingling with the rage already blurring her eyes. The woman was an uncanny monster. How, where, did she acquire the skill to uncover that secret sin, unspoken, unconfessed, unadmitted to anyone?

  “I want to love him. I try to love him,” Sarah said. “But he makes it so—so difficult. Now—telling me this—you’ve made it impossible.”

  “Whether you love him or not isn’t the point,” Tama said in the same merciless voice. “Your responsibility is to those two kids upstairs. They’re going to have enough trouble being women. You want them to have a failure for a father?”

  “I try to talk to Cliff about the business. He isn’t interested in my opinions.”

  “That’s because you’re about as subtle as a kick in the shins. You want to run him. Meanwhile you’re turning into Margaret Rutherford in front of his eyes. You can’t get a man’s attention with ideas. You want to help Cliff get somewhere? Stop eating. Get down to a hundred and ten pounds and buy yourself some decent clothes. Look like a young executive’s wife. Talk like one. Smile. Tell amusing stories. Charm the socks off guys like Jim Redwood and Adrian Van Ness. You can do it. They like that English accent. They think it’s classy. Especially Adrian. He’s nuts about everything English. He worked in London in the twenties.”

  “I—I don’t know what to say,” Sarah said. “Except to—to—express my astonishment at your utter lack of consideration for my feelings. Now—would you please leave?”

  She turned her back on Tama—something she hadn’t done to anyone since she was five. It was childish but the awful thing was, she felt childish. She felt reduced to the shy stammering creature she had been in grade school by this overbearing woman, so much older, yet still possessing the sheen of youth.

  Tama walked past her to the table and picked up her gloves and purse. “When you calm down maybe you’ll be glad I did this,” she said.

  Tama strolled to the mirror over the sideboard to check her makeup. “You may not think so right now but you can do it. This is America, not England, where you go on doing the same stupid things for five hundred years because that was the way your mother and father did it. In America we believe you can change your life, create yourself. You know what my mother did for a living? She washed clothes for the Anglos in San Juan Capistrano. My father weeded their gardens—when he felt like working. You want to know what it’s like to be Mexican in California? Pick up some dirt and put it in your mouth.”

  Tama dug into her purse for her car keys. “Now my name is Morris instead of Moreno and I’m driving that car out front. I’ve got a five-figure salary and an unlimited expense account and one of the most powerful men in California, maybe in the country, in my life. You may not approve of my morals but it’s a hell of a lot better than ironing shirts.”

  She pushed the dark wave on her forehead firmly into place and smiled at Sarah. Smiled. Sarah could not believe the woman’s effrontery. Tama strode to the white Cadillac convertible at the curb. Sarah wandered dazedly around her house. On the second or third circuit, she passed her uneaten lunch. She dumped it into the garbage. She opened the door of her white American refrigerator and stared at the glowing interior. In the center sat the chocolate pudding.

  She reached out a trembling finger and put a speck of it in her mouth. Tama had it all wrong. Sarah was only trying to make up for those five horrible war years when there was no sugar, no sweets, no pleasures that were not forbidden, sinful.

  She had sinned for England. She had opened herself to Cliff, to the cascades of pleasure he sent surging through her body. She sinned for England and the only sweetness available in a world at war and told herself it was love.

  But it was, it was, it was love. Love was offering, gift, commitment. She had lived all three, she was Elizabeth Barrett Browning plumbing heights and depths, a Bronte heroine clutched by dark desire. Now she was trying to deny it all, get back to Englishness again in suburban Los Angeles. Enjoy afternoon tea and scones and sweets and occasional sex with her preoccupied husband.

  Oh God, oh God, oh God, Tama was right. She was re-creating her mother’s life with a tiny change to make herself feel progressive, modern. She would be more involved in her husband’s business. More participatory. She must have gotten the idea from a Good Housekeeping article on how to live happily ever after.

  Sarah found herself in the living room staring at the portrait of the slim bride in the WAAF’s uniform. Like a daregale skylark scanted in a cage. Was that why Dick Stone had asked her if she still read Gerard Manley Hopkins? He was seeing an English skylark in a cage of fat?

  Sarah went back to the refrigerator and threw the chocolate pudding into the garbage. She poured the heavy cream she used on her fruit desserts down the sink. Out went the whipped cream, the jams. She transferred chocolate chip cookies, macaroons, and other snacks from handy jars to the back of her kitchen cabinet.

  Finally there was nothing left in the cabinets but condiments and canned fruit and nothing in the refrigerator but milk and veal for dinner and salad greens and an array of baby food. She seized ajar of spinach, untwisted the cap, and spooned some of the mush into her mouth.

  “Mommy,” Elizabeth said, wide-eyed in the doorway. “Why are you eating that?”

  “I’m playing a game with myself,” Sarah said. “It’s called growing up. I’m going back to being a little girl like you and then I’m going to grow up all over again. Fast.”

  “That sounds like fun,” Elizabeth said. “Is it an English game?”

  “No. It’s American,” Sarah said.

  HONEYCOMB

  Dick Stone spent the rest of his first week at Buchanan Aircraft acquiring an office in the executive tower and a blond secreta
ry named Regina who helped him requisition some secondhand furniture and a used dictating machine. At Adrian Van Ness’s suggestion he began analyzing the company’s financial records. He also began educating himself in the intricacies of the aircraft business. This meant asking engineers, designers, purchasing agents, and foremen innumerable basic questions. Most people were delighted to explain their sometimes arcane specialties, especially the engineers, who felt no one appreciated them. He listened to endless horror stories of idiocies they had prevented the designers from perpetrating on various planes.

  Late Friday afternoon, Cliff Morris called and told Dick to meet him in Frank Buchanan’s office. The chief designer was in a more cheerful mood. “This fellow swears you’re not one of Adrian Van Ness’s finks,” he said. “He’s persuaded me to introduce you to the Honeycomb Club. Did you pick up any Greek history in your marvelous MBA course?”

  “A little,” Dick said.

  “That’s where the club’s name comes from. From the same story that gave me the name for the Talus—the life of the great Athenian designer, Daedalus. Talus was his nephew. Daedelus murdered him because the boy was on his way to surpassing him. I chose the name for our new plane to remind us how often original ideas are destroyed in the name of the great god profit.”

  “Hey, Frank, be careful,” Cliff said. “That’s my god you’re bad-mouthing.”

  Frank smiled and continued his explanation. “Daedelus and his son Icarus were our first fliers. They fled to Crete after murdering Talus. King Minos made them virtual slaves, creating buildings and machines for his nation. Daedalus decided to escape and he designed wings for himself and Icarus.

  “He gave the boy the first aerial advice. Fly the middle course between the sea and the sun. But Icarus, like many a pilot since, became drunk with the exaltation of flight. He soared into the upper air, where the sun melted the wax on his wings. They fell off and he plummeted into the sea, atoning for the murder of Talus. Isn’t it marvelous the way these old myths contain fundamental spiritual ideas? Contrary to appearances, you don’t get away with murder or anything else in this life.”

  Again, Dick was struck by Frank Buchanan’s resemblance to his grandfather. He had heard the same passionate rendition of Faust, Till Eulenspiegel, the Nie-belungenlied from him. He made the stories meaningful in the same way, linking them to history and experience.

  Buchanan shrugged into an old flight jacket. He summoned two designers about the same age as Dick and Cliff. Sam Hardy was short, thin and scholarly looking. Jeff Hall was angular and wry. They trooped downstairs to a battered prewar blue Ford. Sliding behind the wheel, Frank headed west through the gathering dusk to the coast road, continuing to talk about Daedelus. “Like the fliers of today, he was a worshipper of Aphrodite, the goddess of love. In Sicily he designed a temple in the shape of a golden honeycomb for her on the promontory of Eryx. You’re about to visit the California version of the shrine.”

  Buchanan swung onto a two-lane highway that wound between steep-sided hills. “Topanga Canyon,” Jeff Hall said. “The Greenwich Village of Los Angeles.”

  “Where I’d be living if I wasn’t married to the Nightstalker,” Sam Hardy said.

  They turned into a narrow dirt road with thick woods on both sides and rocketed up an almost vertical hill into a parking lot. Before them in the glow of concealed searchlights sat a building with a distinct resemblance to an airplane hangar. Swinging doors spun them into a lobby that was painted gold; the walls and ceiling were scalloped like the inside of a honeycomb. A slim smiling redhead strolled toward them, wearing nothing whatsoever.

  Stone stared in disbelief. Nothing! Not even a G-string.

  “Hello, Frank,” she cooed and kissed Buchanan on the cheek. “And Cliff—I hope you’re not mad at me for saying no the other night.”

  Cliff patted her smooth tan rump. “You know how to fix that, Madeleine.”

  “Too late,” she said, strolling away with Frank Buchanan’s flight jacket. “Billy said he’s going to have ‘private—keep out’ painted right here.” She pointed cheerfully to where Cliff’s hand had been a moment before.

  Everyone laughed. Dick thought Cliff’s jollity was forced. They sauntered into another gold-scalloped room where about two dozen mostly crew-cut men were drinking at a long bar and at scattered tables. A shapely brunette, also wearing nothing, was plinking out “The Darktown Strutters Ball” on a baby grand. Moving around the room carrying trays of drinks were a half-dozen other women, redheads, blondes, brunettes, each beautiful enough to land a long-term Hollywood contract, all of them in the same costume. Redoubling the dreamlike quality was the way none of the drinkers was paying the slightest attention to them.

  “I remember the first time Buzz took me here, when I came back from Germany,” Cliff said. “I thought I was dead and in some sort of flyer’s heaven.”

  “We better explain the rules to Dick,” Frank Buchanan said. “The club is dedicated to Buzz McCall’s cherished belief that there are only two things worth doing, flying and fucking. The latter is not permitted on the premises. However, none of the girls works two days in a row. They’re always available for late-night appointments, or matinees the following day. Presuming you strike their fancy as much as they strike yours.”

  “Where do they come from?” Dick asked.

  “From all over the country,” Cliff said. “Most of them are trying to get into the movies.”

  “A doctor checks them every week, so you don’t have to worry about catching anything but hell from your wife if she finds out where you’ve been,” Sam Hardy said.

  “Do they get paid?” Dick asked.

  “Plenty. It all comes out of the membership dues,” Frank said. “The company pays the money directly to the club, just like the oil companies do for the stuffed shirts at the California Club.”

  “That’s the most exclusive club in L.A.,” Cliff explained.

  “It’s all a tribute to the cost-plus contract, one of the noblest inventions of the mind of man,” Sam Hardy said.

  “What are you drinking, boys?” asked a throaty voice. Dick Stone looked up into a pair of coned breasts, topped by luscious dark red teats. There was a woman’s face above these charms, of course, with a strong-boned, western look. But in his state of shock Dick could think only of anatomy.

  “We’ll all have the usual, Cassie,” Frank Buchanan said.

  They drank Inverness at a deadly rate. Dick became more and more detached from reality. Frank Buchanan asked Cassie for a pencil and paper. He and the two young designers began sketching revised versions of the Talus. At first it resembled a boomerang, then a V-shaped projectile. Then the wing swelled and merged with a fuselage, creating a bat-like shape. The engines, eight of them, were on the back of the wing.

  “The idea is to put most of the plane in the wing. Or most of the wing in the plane,” Frank said. “It will take time to figure out which way to go.”

  A rotund totally bald man with a black cigar clenched in a corner of his mouth slapped Frank on the back. “Now what crazy goddamn thing are you cooking up?”

  “A plane that flies without engines. On wish power,” Frank said. He introduced Moon Davis, Buchanan’s chief test pilot. With him was Harry Holland, introduced as the second best designer at Douglas, which, Frank added, smiling broadly, “wasn’t saying much.” Holland had lines like crevasses in his face, making his gray crew cut even more incongruous. “Seriously, Harry, why didn’t you put the wings where the tail is on the DC-Six? You could have added a hundred knots to its airspeed.”

  “Because Don Douglas would have kicked my ass into Long Beach Harbor if I suggested it,” Holland said.

  “You’re a slave to a tyrant, Harry. Rise up. You have nothing to lose but your paycheck.”

  “I didn’t have the nerve to start my own company, Frank.”

  “I didn’t have the brains to keep mine.”

  Hours seemed to pass. Dick kept seeing Cassie’s coned breasts, forgetting who the
y belonged to, wanting to touch them, until Cliff whispered: “You want to play halfsies with her? There’s more than enough to go around.”

  “Sounds good,” Dick said, even though he did not really think so. He wanted to make his own selections. He eyed the other women. A brunette with soft rounded breasts reminded him of Nancy Pesin. That made him feel guilty for a moment. But too much was bombarding his senses to give guilt or any other emotion a chance.

  The conversation swirled around planes of all sorts: World War I Spads, helicopters, bombers. Buchanan and Holland insulted each other’s taste in fuselages, wings, tails. Buchanan drew a sketch of a Douglas airliner, making it look like a drunken bumblebee. Holland retaliated with a sketch of the Buchanan Excalibur that turned it into a flying dinosaur.

  “At least we’re not as bad as those myopic bastards at Boeing,” Frank said, “Have they ever produced a decent-looking plane?”

  Never, everyone agreed. Boeing had never produced a decent-looking plane and never would because it rained too much in Seattle. Their brains were waterlogged. Only Lockheed was admitted into the fraternity of aviation geniuses. Occasionally they produced a passable plane like the P-38. Frank even conceded Kelly Johnson, Lockheed’s chief designer, knew more about tails than he did. They drank a toast to Alexander Kartveli, Republic’s chief designer, for the P-47, which Frank pronounced the best fighter of the war. Dick noticed they did not drink to any engineers, salesmen, or company presidents.

  Dick was close to passing out when they finally hailed Cassie to order dinner. While they read the short menu, Cliff told Cassie that Dick was famous in New York as the man no woman could satisfy. “Now, that’s a challenge,” Cassie said.

  Dick smiled drunkenly at her. It was all unreal. Six weeks ago he had been living a conventional life. He was a husband, supporting a wife, planning a family, moderating his desires like a good middle-class citizen and dutiful son. A single word had sent him hurtling across the continent to this lotus land where there seemed to be no limit to desire and satisfaction. It was so free it was scary.