Her Last Flight

by Beatriz Williams

  “The fictions. The lies we tell to other people, the lies we tell to ourselves. The stories we make of our lives, the heroes we fashion of our own clay. The myths of our own creation. Those are the real stuffing of a person, in my opinion. What makes each one of us different from the other fellow.”

  “My goodness,” she says. “Aren’t you a surprise.”

  “Oh, I’m full of surprises, believe me. Anyway, if you ask me, a biography should read like a novel, not an encyclopedia entry. All those facts get in the way of the truth. We ought to be able to see the world through our subject’s eyes, to live life as our subject lived it. To feel the ticktock of his pulse in our own veins. That’s truth. That’s what I want to do.”

  I finish the coffee and hold out the empty cup to her, and I’ll be damned if Irene Foster Lindquist doesn’t just take the cup and head for the percolator and pour me another. Irene Foster! Like some cafeteria waitress. She presents the scarred side of her face to me, like the dark side of the moon. Nobody’s ever seen those scars before. She didn’t have them when she was flying around the world the last time, that’s for sure. I’ve seen the photos of those days, believe me.

  She hands me back the coffee cup. I drink it neat.

  “So let me get this straight,” she says. “You decide to write a biography of Sam Mallory. You go off looking for the wreckage of his final flight—”

  “No, no, no. It’s a little more complicated than that. It’s more of a love story.”

  “A love story? You and Sam?”

  “Don’t be jealous. It’s a love from afar. A love across the years, between adoring me and unknowing him.”

  “I’ll say. You’re—what, twenty-eight?”

  “Give or take.”

  “Well, Sam would be a lot older. If he were still alive.”

  “Oh, but you have to understand what a crush I had on him! I was just a teenager when he dropped off the face of the earth. I thought he was just the most. I thought he had it all over that stuffed shirt Lindbergh. All those death-defying stunts he did. Those glamorous women on his arm, a different one every week. So daring, so handsome. You might say I was fixated.”

  “And you didn’t grow out of it?”

  “Of course I grew out of it. I’m not exactly the romantic type, am I? But I always had a soft spot for him. I always wondered what happened to him. As you know, he didn’t so much vanish, like you did, as—I don’t know—fade away? Like when somebody leaves a dinner party without saying good-bye, and nobody can remember when she saw him last.” I stub out the cigarette. “Time marched on. I went to college for a bit, traveled for a bit, started selling my photographs, ended up with the Associated Press. Then the war. I got to Europe in ’44, a couple of months before the invasion, and managed to land on Omaha with the second wave. Carried on through to Paris, as close to the action as I could get. Then I got to talking with this fellow who’d flown with the Republican air force in Spain, during the civil war. We had a few drinks and so on. And he told me the strangest thing, right out of the blue.”

  Now, I’ve been watching Foster’s face throughout this little biographical sketch. I want to see how she reacts to my assessment of Mallory, how she reads the story of my life, abridged edition, and whether she notices all the little spaces between the lines. And of course, the last part. The Spanish air force. The war. The thing about war, if you’ve been in one, you never really leave it, even when it’s all over and everybody goes home. A piece of you remains behind, buried in the blooded earth, and when somebody calls it back—as I just did—that piece sort of jumps to attention, if you know what I mean. And you can’t hide a thing like that.

  But maybe this woman isn’t like everyone else, after all. Maybe Irene Foster has been hiding from the world so long, she’s just buried too deep beneath her own skin for anyone to discover in some flicker of eyebrow or quiver of chin. Maybe this woman has become a Lindquist after all. She listens to me, strokes her cat with one hand and her coffee cup with the other, and when I pause, as I do now, she takes a sip and asks me to continue. What strange thing, Miss Everett? What did the Spanish fellow tell you?

  “He told me that he knew Sam Mallory in Spain, that he’d helped the Republicans during the civil war. And he knew when and where Mallory’s plane went down, in May of 1937.”

  Lindquist bends her head to snuggle the cat on her lap.

  “Well?” I say.

  “Well, what?”

  “Well, aren’t you fascinated to learn how Mallory died? Don’t you want to know the rest of the story? How we found the wreckage?”

  She lifts her head, and her eyes are wet. The lashes are stuck together.

  “I’ve got a flight in an hour,” she says. “I need to go check the airplane.”

  “Now hold on. Am I just supposed to wait around until you get back?”

  Lindquist finishes her coffee, sets the cat on the floor, and steps gracefully from the counter stool. “My husband will give you a lift back into town. In the meantime, you can clean up the kitchen.”

  The damn cat just stares at me as I wash out the pan and the plates and wipe the toast crumbs from the counter. When I’m done, I pour myself another cup of coffee and light a cigarette. The windows have steamed up, so I don’t notice anybody coming until the bell tinkles on the door.

  He’s a big fellow, muscular, pink faced, just starting to grow the paunch of middle age. He wears the usual island costume of pale shirt and pale cotton trousers, and his hair is even paler and thinning fast. He glowers at me and growls You’re the one? in some kind of faintly discernible Scandinavian accent, though I couldn’t tell you which part.

  “Probably.” I stick out my hand. “You must be Olle, here to give me a lift back into town.”

  “What the hell did you say to my wife?”

  “Me? I just told her I know who she is, and I won’t call the press on her, so long as she’s a good girl and tells me all about herself.”

  “Jesus Christ.”

  “I think it all might have been a little much for her, so early in the morning.”

  Olle Lindquist gives me the goggle eyes and slumps into a chair. Honestly, I might have expected more from him. I think a husband should stand up for his wife, don’t you? Only maybe he’s the kind of fellow who will punch the lights out of the man who threatens him, but can’t figure out what to do with a feminine adversary. There are such fellows. This one pulls his hand through what hairs remain to him and stares at the foggy window in the direction of the hangar.

  “If you want to go to her—” I begin.

  “No. She’ll want to be alone.” He looks back at me. “As for you. What’s your name, anyway?”

  “Janey Everett. I’m a photojournalist.”

  “What’s that?”

  “A journalist who tells stories with photographs. Except I’m through with that for a while. Hanging up my camera. Dusting off my typewriter to write a scintillating, no-holds-barred biography of Sam Mallory. I figured the only way to get the real story was to go to the horse’s mouth.” I flick out a little ash into a nearby tray. “The horse being your fascinating wife.”

  “Yes, but how did you know? How did you find out?”

  “Oh, that little mystery? Nothing some careful research and a few well-placed friends couldn’t solve. I’m afraid I can’t reveal my sources, however.”

  He raises a finger and wags it at me. “You. Are a dangerous woman.”

  “They are the best kind, you know. You should try one sometime.”

  Olle stands up. “I am taking you back to town in the automobile,” he says, “and you are going to get on board the next boat back to Oahu, is that clear? You’re going back where you came from, and you are not saying a word about any of this.”

  “Are you giving me an order, Olle? Because I don’t take orders, not from four-star generals and not from you.”

  “Who the devil are you?” he asks, incredulous.

  “I am Persistence, Olle. I am Curiosit
y.” I glance to the cat and back again. “I am Heartbreak. I am Survival. I am Recklessness and Perseverance. You can’t win.”

  He swears. I shrug.

  The bell tinkles again. A pair of men walk in, pilots by the look of them, talking some shop. They spot me right away and the conversation dies.

  “Morning, Olle,” one of them says. “Passenger?”

  I stand up and hold out my hand. “Janey Everett. I’m new in town.”

  “She was just leaving,” says Olle.

  “Isn’t he a gas? Really, I’m an old friend of Mrs. Lindquist. We go way back. Can either of you two tell me—”

  But I am interrupted, just then, by the howl of an engine, the scream of air. The men all look up and tilt their ears to the sky, and then some kind of signal passes among them, I don’t know what, secret pilot communication, and they all go thundering out the door, bell a-jingle, and I have no choice but to thunder after them, toward some terrible emergency, some fate that has turned in an instant.

  Aviatrix by Eugenia Everett (excerpt)

  March 1928: California

  So there it was, Irene’s future turning on the malfunction of a single spark plug. You could say it was luck, or you could judge the hand of fate at work, or God, or whatever you believed in. The airfield turned out to be in Burbank, half an hour away on the other side of the Hollywood Hills, but Irene didn’t mind. She sat next to Sam Mallory in his yellow Nash while the sun rose to her right and the hills rolled all around, briefly green after a spell of spring rain. Above them, the sky was untainted blue, a thing Irene took for granted. Soon she would learn that most skies were not so blue; that in most places, the daytime temperature didn’t hover blissfully around seventy-six dry, placid degrees Fahrenheit for much of the year. For now, all Irene knew was the coast of California.

  Unlike Irene’s Ford, the Nash was only a few years old and had an electric ignition, a three-speed transmission, a dry clutch, a brake pedal. Why, compared to the old Tin Lizzie, it practically drove itself. It stopped on command, it unleashed what seemed like a vast amount of power whenever Mr. Mallory pressed his foot on the gas pedal. They rolled the windows down and the wind scattered her hair every which way. Irene didn’t mind. She never took much care of her hair anyway.

  At one point, winding north through Laurel Canyon, Irene stroked around Sandy’s ears and asked Mr. Mallory how he got the scar on his nose.

  He fingered across the ridge and back again. “Crackup last summer.”

  “Crackup? You mean a car accident?”

  “No, an airplane. We call ’em crackups, it sounds better.” Mr. Mallory was smoking a cigarette, which he held in the hand nearest the window. He took a quick drag and said, “I guess you might have heard about that one.”

  “Only me and the whole world. Aren’t you just a little crazy, going back up in an airplane after an accident like that?”

  “Sure, I’m crazy. We’re all crazy, us pilots.” He stubbed out his cigarette against the side of the car. “But it’s freedom up there, Miss Foster. You and the blue sky. It’s the future, it’s the whole damned universe, right there before you, wide open and beautiful to take your breath away. It’s worth a broken nose or two. It’s worth whatever price God asks of you.”

  Of course Irene had heard of Sam Mallory. By the spring of 1928, everyone in California had heard of him. In fact, if you lived anywhere in the world and possessed a radio or a newspaper subscription, you had probably—like Irene—spent a certain portion of the past August attached to both, desperate to discover whether Sam Mallory was somehow miraculously alive on the surface of the Pacific Ocean, or heroically dead on the bottom of same.

  Irene’s father did not own a radio. He claimed it was because he opposed such modern contraptions on principle, but really it was because he couldn’t afford one. Irene remembered listening to the radio in the drugstore instead. Of course, the place was packed that first morning, cheek by jowl with eager listeners. The press had been talking up the Dole Derby for weeks. It was the Pacific’s answer to Lindbergh mania, a contest sponsored by the Dole Pineapple Company, in which pilots from around the country took off from San Francisco Bay one fine summer morning and raced each other all the way to Honolulu, Hawai’i. First prize, twenty-five thousand dollars. Second prize, ten thousand dollars. As it turned out, there was no need for a third prize, because only two airplanes taking off that day actually made it to paradise, or at least the earthly kind.

  And Sam Mallory was not one of them.

  Irene didn’t remember all the details. She didn’t know what type of airplane Sam Mallory had been flying or why exactly he had been forced to ditch the machine in the ocean, several hundred miles short of Hawai’i, in the dark of night. Something about a faulty fuel line. All she remembered was that he and his copilot—Irene didn’t recall the name—had been reported far ahead of his nearest competitor when she went to sleep that night, and when she woke the news was everywhere, in thick black headlines, in chattering radio receivers:

  GOEBEL AND DAVIS WIN DOLE DERBY

  Smith Second; Three Airplanes Lost at Sea

  Naturally, the press was not going to let this terrible disaster go to waste. Day after day, the radios and newspapers reported back from the frantic search for the downed airplanes. They found the first one fairly quickly. But the fate of the Miss Doran and the rather foolishly named Icarus—Mr. Mallory’s airplane—remained unknown. Irene would stop by the drugstore on her way home from work to listen to the latest bulletins, delivered in breathless yet stalwart tones by Mr. Floyd Gibbons of the National Broadcasting Corporation. How much food and water the pilots had carried with them. The shifting weather patterns. The dimensions and capabilities of the emergency rafts carried aboard. (As it turned out, Sam Mallory’s airplane had not carried a raft at all, on account of the extra weight.) The concentration of man-eating sharks in that area of the Pacific Ocean from where the lost airplanes had issued their last transmissions.

  Seven days passed, eight, nine. Irene no longer stopped by the drugstore after work; it was simply too heart-wrenching to listen to Mr. Gibbons, in a voice of attempted cheer, lay out various scenarios by which either of the two airplanes might have survived. He had discussed Mr. Mallory’s history as a stunt pilot—The man known in Hollywood for his willingness to attempt any proposed maneuver, no matter how perilous or technically impossible, even the deliberate crash of an airplane—and before all that, his years as a barnstormer, hopscotching the country to perform for crowds of amazed corn pokes. Before even that, his stint in the Army Air Service, dogfighting above the bloody French battlefields. For some reason, Mr. Gibbons—a celebrated war hero himself—considered that this checkered history of death-defying subsistence, hairline survival, and crackerjack piloting had perfectly prepared Mr. Mallory for his present ordeal. Irene couldn’t stand his optimism. It seemed naïve to her, almost disrespectful, when the man and his copilot had obviously made a meal for the sharks by now.

  And then came the morning—Irene remembered it perfectly—when she arrived home from the beach to a newspaper headline so incredible, so almost hysterically jubilant, the words seemed to overflow and run off the page.

  MALLORY FOUND ALIVE!!

  Astonishing Rescue off Coast of Maui; Story of Survival Against Odds on Wing of Airplane in Open Ocean

  Copilot Perished; Pilot Starving, Sunburnt, and Dehydrated but Otherwise in Good Health

  (When Irene read that last part, she had to wonder whether the copy editor at the Los Angeles Times was a man of irony or had simply lost his head.) Anyway, you heard about nothing else for weeks afterward, the interviews and the celebratory dinners; the Sunday prayers of thanksgiving in churches around the country; President Coolidge’s radio address hailing the whole affair as an inspiring example of the very best of American manhood; Mr. Mallory’s arrival back in San Francisco by commercial steamer, aboard which the occupant of the best first-class suite had gallantly insisted on switching accommodation with
the hero of the day; the parades in San Francisco and then in Los Angeles.

  Then August died into September, and the ballyhoo faded into nothing as it always did, and the American man went back to his work and his home and waited for the next thrill to smack him upside the head, from the ball field or the mountaintop or the clear blue sky.

  Now Irene wound around the curves of Laurel Canyon in Sam Mallory’s speedy yellow Nash, approaching the crest of the ridge where the horizon was nothing but sky. She traced the arms and the delicate paws of Mr. Mallory’s newfound kitten with her finger and fastened on two details about the 1927 Dole Derby that she hadn’t troubled to notice much before.

  The first was the Miss Doran, and how nobody seemed to have found any trace of her or her pilots, at least that Irene could remember. They were just forgotten in the ballyhoo.

  The second was Mrs. Sam Mallory, who had made such brave, beautiful speeches during the whole ordeal about her love for her husband and her faith that he would return home safely to his wife and little daughter.

  On Irene’s lap, the kitten stirred, raised its head, stretched its paw, went back to sleep. Irene realized she was holding her breath. They turned the last corner and the valley tumbled into view, Burbank and the hills behind it, and the ocean to the left, all of it bathed in the clear, pale, fragile light of early morning. Irene exhaled at last. They cruised down the hill through the draft, and Irene thought she would always remember this moment, this sensation of speed and freedom.

  “It’s like flying,” she shouted.

  Mr. Mallory laughed and changed gears. “Not even close.”

  The airfield sat on the corner of Lankershim Boulevard and Vanowen, and stretched into a grassy infinity. Mr. Mallory turned the Nash down a gravel driveway toward a cluster of large white sheds. The one at the end of the drive bore the name rofrano in black letters.

  “What’s Rofrano?” asked Irene.

  “Fellow who runs the place.” Mr. Mallory parked the car in the rhombus of shade cast by one of the buildings. “Moved here from New York in ’22 and bought the land up to fly his own planes. Then all his old Army Air Service pals came out and asked if they could fly there too. Pretty soon he had a business going.”