Then, for a reason that she could not have explained, she suddenly caught up the gown and half slip, and removed her panties, tossing them in a puddled heap of nylon on the bed with the discarded bra.
Earrings. Perfume. A dab at the ears, another at her bosom. More lipstick, pale enough for decency, but dark enough to suggest--intensity. A string of pearls, lovely iridescent things, caught up with a shortener. And the little ermine cape, borrowed from her mother. Another pirouette and downstairs.
She had expected to find Ellis waiting. It was traditional. She was only five minutes late, because she was not yet sufficiently acquainted with the tradition to realize its utilitarian aspects. But Ellis was not there. Not at nine five. Nor at nine fifteen, nor at nine thirty.
She sat waiting in the living room, choking on the impatience that crowded her throat. She though of calling Ellis. But wouldn't he have called her if he wasn't coming? And wouldn't she look a little foolish calling Ellis' house and asking where he was? This particular Friday evening wasn't vital. This was no more than one of the regular Friday night dances that would be held at the Country Club all summer. Looked at like that, it was hardly important at all.
But something, somewhere inside of Irene, had been waiting for this particular evening.
The dress was new. Her mother had gone with her into New York last Saturday and they had picked it out. But the dress could not explain what made the evening different. Nor could the date with Ellis. She had been going with Ellis for absolutely months now. All this last semester of the senior year they had been dating regularly. Movies. Parties. Expeditions to Manhattan. And for the summer ahead they had planned other things. Beach parties. A trip, with some other kids, to the Tanglewood music festival in the Berkshires. There was nothing new to be expected of the evening. A little dancing. A little drinking. A little necking as they rode home together under the pale June sky.
Yet there was something different that had been going to happen, something as inevitable as the coming of summer, as certain as the slow turning of the earth that brought morning. But the inevitability and the certainty were gone, because there was no sign of Ellis.
Irene took a cigarette from the humidor on the sideboard with an irritable gesture and then peered toward the road, as though she could speed Ellis' arrival.
If he wasn't coming he ought, at least, to have called. He had to call. Ellis wouldn't just stand her up. What they had between them wasn't that casual. Maybe Ellis saw it differently, though. Maybe he thought of it as just high school dating that would pass away with next week's graduation.
She left the window and went out on the veranda. She walked to the right, out of the range of the light from the living room windows, and looked out into the night.
The county road lay, an imaginary line, to the left. It was invisible in the warm darkness, but when a car traveled it, the headlights made a little glow for almost a minute before the car itself appeared.
There was no glow now. Only an orange haze that floated over the airport and was here and there starred with red lights blinking on antenna masts. Farther off, directly in front of the house, was the skyglow of Montaugan, a remote, lowlying bank of luminosity that was almost eerie over the flat Long island landscape. Still farther out was the intermittent flash of the Montaugan Point light, alternating a pinpoint of red with a diamond flare of blue white.
Then she saw a glow weaving in along the road. The cones of luminescence jarred up against the sky as they topped a rise, then dropped down out of sight. The engine sound still did not penetrate the shrilling of crickets, and the deeper note of a frog somewhere by the inlet. It had to be Ellis. She couldn't let him find her waiting like this. She went back into the house. In the hallway she saw her father coming downstairs.
He said, "Going out?"
She nodded her head happily, "Yup. Ellis is just coming up the road now."
Ivan turned off and went into the study. At the doorway he looked at her approvingly. "Um-yum," he said. "Have a good time, kiddo."
He closed the door. Irene waited for the sound of the car on the drive. She peered out into the darkness. Early fireflies sparked over the lawn. There was no sign of the car lights. The glowing cones, were missing. Not on the road. Not on the drive.
She went back to the porch and looked off to the left. There they were--receding into the darkness.
She looked at the tall grandfather's clock that rocked out the hours in the front hall. It said ten five. Ellis couldn't be this late! He would have called or something. He ... The doorway into her father's office was open and she could see him sitting behind his desk. The green desk lamp lent a sinister glow to his face as he leaned back in his chair and drew steadily at his pipe.
She went to the doorway and stood for a moment. He was unconscious of her presence.
Irene said, "Daddy ...?"
He started, and turned to face her.
"Reenie," he said, "don't bother me right now. I'm pretty busy."
"But, Daddy ..."
"I said, not now."
She slammed the door between the office and the study as she went out.
IVAN CARTER
The possibility that Dolores might some day be unfaithful to him had never occurred to Doctor Ivan Carter. Perhaps, he thought now, it was because he regarded Dolores as too strong emotionally to be caught in normal passions.
Now that he allowed himself to think about it, the fact of catching her--practically in flagrante delicto--came to him as a terrible shock. It was seeing a goddess fall, or witnessing a change in the procession of the equinoxes. It was more than that. It was painful. Yet, in another way, it humanized Dolores, made her like the girl he had wanted all that time ago--eighteen years; holy jumping christ! Eighteen years!
Horribly, it occurred to him that he did not want her to sleep with another man, no matter how detached they had become these recent years. He thought then of the sensual passions of which she was capable, of the intense, heated writhings of her beautiful body that had been, for so long, his alone. He thought of the violence, the agony of excitation, that came into her at the touch of his hands--that used to come into her.
And then he thought about the money. The goddamned money.
It hadn't started off like that. Not eighteen years ago. He had set up practice like anyone else. Lor had refused to take money from her family. Then her parents were killed in the train wreck, and there was all the money.
Year after year, the fermenting money had disintegrated them. And what was his practice now? Big deal! The Ivalor had been bought with Lor's money, and the Ivalor II, and the Ivalor III. And the house.
Little by little, Ivan's actual practice had gone. All right, consulting surgeon to the Montaugan Hospital. All right, a couple of minor contributions to the technique of thoracic surgery. A few papers. One or two private patients a month. But it was nonsense. The income was pocket money. There was no pressure to earn money, no pressure to work. In back of everything was Dolores, a benevolent dispensing machine. You put in respectful attention, and out came money.
The worst of it was that tonight--tonight of all nights-- Ivan needed money. The bill for the spring overhaul of the Ivalor III was due tomorrow, and there just wasn't enough in his account to meet it. How did you ask your wife for money when you'd just seen her come out of a hotel, baggage and all, with another man?
Oh, to hell with that. What you really wanted was to get back Dolores. Not the kind patroness of the surgical arts, but the old Dolores, whose raging passion fires rose beneath your hands, whose body somehow magically shaped to yours.
The pipe clattered to the floor and Ivan saw he had bit clear through the stem. He got to his feet, brushing at ashes that lay scattered over the fine lightweight flannel trousers. He looked at the shattered pipe stem, and with an angry gesture threw bowl and bit together into the waste basket.
There was nothing like getting it over with. Decisively he yanked at the chain of the desk lamp. She was probably upstairs in her own
room. He opened the door and switched off the ceiling fixture before closing it behind him.
GARY HEASLIP
When he had finished dinner--served in the kitchen after the Carters had finished--Gary went out to look the place over. There were four cars in the garage. There was the Cadillac convertible, in which he had driven home with Mrs.--with Dolores. Beside it stood a Jaguar two-seater, built more for beauty than for use. Behind these were a shiny station wagon and an immense black Packard, so gaudy with chrome trim its bulky dignity was lost through overdress.
He got into each car, started the engine, and listened critically to the measured explosions of the cylinders.
He felt out the brake pedals and tried the clutch on each.
By the time he had finished it was after nine thirty. He replaced the car keys in the little cabinet by the garage door, turned out the lights and, lighting a cigarette, went to stand in the doorway.
Darkness had come. The stars emerged one by one, wheeling slowly over his head. The night was silent, so silent that the chirping crickets and the frogs seemed louder than the traffic noises of New York. The gentle lapping of the water at the seawall murmured against the occasional clatter from Vera's kitchen. After a moment Gary closed the garage and went to the seawall where the Ivalor was moored, its white hull dark against the starlit water. He sat down on the seawall. Then he caught the glow of the airport lights. The calm was gone.
It happened then, as it always did these last three weeks. His mind went back over the words of Hennler on the company communications receiver: "... Montaugan to one-oh-five ... Report altitude." "One oh-five to Montaugan. Flying at five thousand as per flight plan." "Montaugan to Long Island one-oh-five. Boston center reports traffic at five thousand. Clears Long Island one-oh-five, descend immediately to two thousand ..." "... Descend immediately to two thousand." "Descend immediately to two thousand."
Gary went over the crash again. There had to be some way of proving that Hennler was lying, that even the official tape recording of their conversation was a lie, too. Then he was back in the plane ...
*
... The roar of the motors suddenly doubled up, as though extra engines had been added to the little 3's power. Metal crumpled somewhere out on the right wing. The DC-3 seemed to buck, then it was falling and the wheel moved by itself while
Phil screamed somewhat foolishly--a little corny actually for a man who was dying--"This is it!" so that the shrill sound of his voice pierced the earphones and the weird harplike whine of the wind through the crumpled wing-metal.
Then the fluttering, the wild vibration, as if the plane were attempting to beat like a wounded bird with its damaged lift surfaces.
Gary cut the engines, and yelled into the company communications microphone: "Long Island one-oh-five to Montaugan. Crashed another ship ... Going into the ocean off Montaugan point."
The two-thousand feet of falling space were used up in one great splash and Gary was struggling with the escape hatch. A moment later the ship was gone. He was in the water, fighting clear of his uniform to stay afloat in the slow, rolling waves ...
*
Gary flung his cigarette into the water by the hull of the Ivalor. There was a quick steaming hiss. On the county road a car nosed irregularly through the night, the two luminous cones of its headlights feeling before the buglike shape like the antenna of a giant insect. A plane droned in the distance. The water lapped at the seawall, and one of the lines holding the Ivalor creaked gently. A light went on in a house down the inlet. The Montaugan lighthouse blinked red, then white, then red, then white. Something, perhaps a cat, scrambled through the garden. He lit another cigarette. In the Carter's big house someone had turned on a radio ...
*
The preliminary hearing was held behind closed doors. It was informal. They formed a semicircle around the table, behind which sat the official examiner. Besides the examiner, whose name was McGonigle, there were Jack Williamson, president of Long Island Airlines, Harvey Browning, chief pilot, a company lawyer named Ericson, his own lawyer, Hal Ludley, a couple of government inspectors, a Civil Aeronautics Board lawyer, and August Hennler, chief radio operator for company communications at Montaugan. A stenotype reporter sat in one corner, picking his nose. Near him was a naval officer, pilot of the other plane in the crash.
After a while McGonigle said, "All light, gentlemen. Let's get going with this matter. Now, this is only a preliminary hearing. Let's try to keep the whole thing informal. Our purpose is just to collect information."
First the CAB lawyer got up and outlined the situation. Long Island Airlines flight number one-oh-five had crashed about one half mile off Montaugan point at seven minutes to four p.m. on the afternoon of June first, nineteen fifty-one. The pilot of the wrecked aircraft, a DC-3, was Captain Gary Heaslip.
The copilot, Mr. Philip Vert, had been killed in the crash, as had the stewardess and all but one of the passengers.
The plane was on a regularly scheduled flight from Hyannis, Massachusetts, to LaGuardia Air Terminal at New York City. The flight routing included landings at Nantucket, Martha's Vineyard, and Block Island. The flight plan, filed by Captain Heaslip and cleared by the Boston Air Traffic Control Center, called for the DC-3 to fly at five thousand feet. This was relatively high for a feeder line plane operating a local service, but was used because of the proximity of the Quonset Naval Air Base.
Flight one-oh-five had taken off from Block Island and climbed to five thousand feet when the Boston Traffic Center was advised that naval aircraft from Quonset base were using the airlanes at five thousand feet and at two thousand feet. Boston Center had ordered the flight plan of Long Island one-oh-five changed to three thousand feet, and had notified the control tower at Montaugan to that effect. This information had been relayed by the Montaugan tower, as could be seen from the tower log which would later be offered as exhibit "A", to company communications of Long Island Airlines at the Montaugan facility.
The company communications officer on duty was Mr. August Hennler. He received the change of flight plan from the Montaugan tower at three fifty p.m. and had transmitted the change to Long Island one-oh-five approximately forty-five seconds later. The delay was occasioned because he was then in contact with Long Island flight one-twelve, eastbound out of LaGuardia. Captain Heaslip thus had received this information at nine and one quarter minutes of four p.m. and had instructed his pilot, Mr. Vert, to descend to two thousand feet
In descending to this altitude the plane entered heavy clouds, and would have operated on instruments until directly above Montaugan airport. Captain Heaslip reported leaving five thousand feet at nine minutes of four. At seven and one half minutes of four Mr. Hennler received a final message from Captain Heaslip reporting one-oh-five had collided with another aircraft.
A naval plane piloted by Lieutenant Roger Eagle had crashed Long Island one-oh-five in midair. The impact was received on the right wing of each of the two planes. The wingtip of the navy ship had made contact with the propeller of the number-one engine of Long Island one-oh-five. The blades sheered off two feet of the right wingtip of the naval aircraft, but the impact was sufficient in the case of Long Island one-oh-five to entirely dislodge the number-one engine from its mounting. A moment later the entire righthand lift surface of the DC-3 broke off at the engine nacelle. The DC-3 fell out of control, striking the water approximately seven hundred and fifty yards off Montaugan Point. Lieutenant Eagle was able to return to his base.
The fuselage of the DC-3 had sunk in a matter of thirty seconds from the time of impact.
The CAB lawyer went on, "The major points in question here concern the transmission of the information received from the Boston Center at Montaugan, and the manner in which this information was transmitted to Captain Heaslip. When questioned on the day following the collision, Captain Heaslip said that the message he received from Montaugan instructed him to descend to two thousand feet. He was extremely clear on this point.
"On the other hand, Mr. Hennler states that the information as he transmitted it called for one-oh-five to descend to three thousand feet."
Examiner McGonigle stirred in his seat. "Apparently," he said, "the question is one of whose error this is. That is, whether Mr. Hennler transmitted the wrong information to Captain Heaslip or whether Captain Heaslip misunderstood the information transmitted by Mr. Hennler? Is that correct?"
"That is correct."
"In short," McGonigle said, "we're going to have to take one man's word against another's. Right?"
"Fortunately," the lawyer said, "that is not the case here. As you know, all Civil Aeronautics Authority control towers are equipped with memobelt recording equipment to keep a permanent sound record of all tower-to-plane and plane-to-tower radio messages. Recently a number of scheduled airlines have installed similar systems for recording communications over company radios. Long Island Airlines has one. A tape recorder is permanently in circuit with the equipment at the Montaugan facility. The tape which was recorded during the conversation between Mr. Hennler and Captain Heaslip was impounded by inspectors on the day following the crash."
Gary relaxed, letting himself go comfortably loose in his chair. There was nothing to worry about, after all. All they had to do was play the recording, and rescind the temporary order that had grounded him since the crash.
It wasn't going to help things, of course. Not for Phil Vert, and not for the little stewardess--a pretty little kid. Nor for the passengers. He shuddered. But you couldn't think about the dead forever. You had to go on living yourself. And what if the hearings hadn't come out this way--the way they were going to? What if, instead, they grounded you for keeps? What then? What else could you do? Not even pilot air-freight. Not even be an instructor. When they grounded you, as they had Tommy Mills after that crash on the Seattle-Alaska run, you had to begin your life all over again. Get into something else. Start at the bottom somewhere, because being a pilot didn't train you for anything else.
Private Chauffeur Page 3
