Mr. Mallory yanked open the door and stepped onto the grass. The noise woke the kitten. Limb by limb it uncurled in Irene’s lap, yawned, and dug its claws into her leg like tiny pins, kneading and kneading. She detached it with one hand and reached for the door handle and leapt free—insofar as you could leap in a lean skirt of navy blue poplin, cut a few inches longer than what was then considered fashionable—and nearly crashed into Mr. Mallory, who had come around to open the door for her. Sorry, she said, just as Mr. Mallory said sorry too. He laughed and reached for Sandy. “Let me take that cat off your hands, hmm? Then we’ll go find you a spark plug.”
Together they walked toward the row of sheds that turned out—when you got close enough to appreciate their size—to be airplane hangars. Already a few men milled about, reeking of cigarettes and engine oil and energy. Mr. Mallory raised his hand and said hello. The other hand maneuvered Sandy, who was climbing his shirt to knead the skin at the base of his throat. Together they reached the easternmost hangar and the biplane poised beside it, catching the morning sun in a burst of white. Irene stopped. She had never stood so close to an airplane; it was like a mythic beast to her. She stared at the wing, which was larger than she expected and also more frail.
“What’s it made of?” she asked.
“Just canvas and wood,” said Mr. Mallory.
Irene wanted to touch, but she didn’t. The airplane’s skin reminded her of the wing of an insect, so thin as to defy physics. If force equaled mass times velocity, how could something that frail survive the invincible wind? On the other hand, insects could fly, that was indisputable. Irene reached out and laid her fingertip on the edge of the wing, laid her hand on an airplane for the first time. But it wasn’t delicate after all. It was stiff and lacquered, the same texture as metal. Soon she would learn that the fabric was coated in a kind of glue they called dope, and this was the source of the distinctive smell she would shortly encounter inside the hangar.
But all that lay in the future. Now there was only wonder.
“Shall we?” said Mr. Mallory, standing beside her, and for a moment she thought he was inviting her into the biplane that sat beside them, inviting her to fly. She opened her mouth to exclaim Yes! but it turned out he just meant the hangar and the spark plug. He walked around the nose of the airplane, shifting Sandy from one shoulder to the other, and Irene, still dazed, stroked the wing a last time and followed him.
The doors to the hangar were the kind that rolled sideways, like pocket doors, except these were made of plain lumber and stood wide open to the California sunshine. Inside, Irene glimpsed two small, battered airplanes. Mr. Mallory maneuvered Sandy carefully from his shirt and back into the crook of his elbow. He nodded to the machine on the right. “Training planes. Picked them up cheap from the army. That one’s a Curtiss Jenny. The other’s a Canuck.”
“Which one do you recommend?”
“Neither.”
Irene stepped forward into the hangar. The grass turned to beaten earth. The air smelled of dust and grease and wood, a garage smell, except for something else, an unfamiliar chemical note. Aside from the two of them, and the airplanes and the tools, the hangar was empty. Irene wandered between the two machines. She touched the smooth wooden curve of a propeller blade, the taut canvas skin of a fuselage, a metal strut.
“I don’t see any difference between them,” she said.
“The Canuck’s the same plane, Canadian model. It’s lighter and it’s got . . . it’s got . . .”
Irene turned. Mr. Mallory stood by a wide wooden workbench that ran the entire length of the building. The rear of the Curtiss Jenny stood between them, cutting him off at the waist, so she couldn’t quite see what he was doing. Rummaging or something. Irene ducked under the airplane to join him at the bench. He had pulled out a crate from the shelf and Sandy stood against it, paws on the edge, to peer inside.
“It’s got what?” she said.
“Hmm?”
“The Canuck.”
“Oh. It’s just a flimsier airplane, that’s all. But it’s good enough for instruction. Here you are.” Mr. Mallory turned and held out his hand, which contained a pair of spark plugs.
“Oh! Thank you. I’d almost forgotten.”
Irene took the spark plugs. He was smiling at her, grinning really, and with his other hand he scooped up Sandy, who was taking some interest in the boxes of screws lined up where the bench met the wall.
“Say. If you’re interested. There’s an air show today, starts at noon.”
“An air show?”
“You know. Pilots take turns going up, showing off our airplanes, that kind of thing. Then we take up members of the public for five dollars a spin.”
“Will you be flying?”
“Wouldn’t miss it. For one thing, I need the dough. Flying’s a lot of things, but it’s not cheap. Especially if . . .”
“If what?”
“Nothing. Got a few plans, that’s all. If you’re interested . . .”
Irene cast a glance out the open side of the hangar, to the landing strip that baked in the sunshine. Her heart was thudding a little. “It sounds wonderful,” she said. “But I should really be getting home.”
“Oh. Sure, of course.”
“But I’d love to. I really would.”
The kitten seemed to be falling asleep along the length of his forearm. Mr. Mallory stroked the top of its head with his finger and nodded. “All right. Let’s get you back to Santa Monica, then.”
“Wait a minute. You’re just going to drive me there and back here again? For your air show?”
“It’s no trouble.”
“It’s an awful lot of trouble!”
“I don’t mind,” he said. “It’s a pleasant drive.”
“Don’t be silly. I’ll just stay.”
“What about your folks?”
“I live with my father,” she said, “and he’s away right now. So there’s nobody to worry about me, really. I can stay all day.”
As time went on, Irene would remember that day at the airfield as a series of scenes, as pieces of a dazzling puzzle. There was breakfast with Sam—he was now Sam, and she was Irene—in the cafeteria, a neat, cheap building made of stucco, set apart from the hangars, furnished with metal chairs and tables covered in cheerful red-and-white linens. They both ordered coffee and corned beef hash, topped with eggs fried sunny side up, while Sandy lapped from a dish of cream. Sam asked Irene whether she had a job, and she said yes, she was a receptionist at a doctor’s office, and she hoped to enroll in a nursing course in the fall.
“Well, now,” he said, “that’s admirable. Why nursing?”
And Irene found herself telling Sam things she hadn’t told anyone else at the hospital, or really anyone at all. She explained—or rather he dug from her, bit by bit—how she told her parents one evening when she was very young, when her mother was still alive and her father held down a respectable job, that she wanted to become a doctor. Her mother had smiled in that sarcastic way she had, but her father had nodded gravely and said she would make a good doctor, she had a calm head on her shoulders, and she should study very hard to make this dream a reality. How later that night, she’d overheard her mother telling her father that he shouldn’t indulge the girl like that, it was ridiculous to imagine that Irene could become a doctor. Why not? said her father. He’d seen plenty of women doctors, there were several medical colleges that now accepted female candidates. Because she will want a family one day, her mother said, and then all that education would go to waste; because children had a way of demanding your attention, of diverting this abundant river of female energy and ambition into themselves.
Irene didn’t remember how her father answered this, or whether she even really heard his response through the walls of the house. Possibly the conversation never even happened, she admitted to Sam, sipping her coffee, and this was only the way she remembered her parents’ reactions to her ambitions, like a composite drawing, a convenience of
memory. Either way, she did study hard. She took all the difficult classes, algebra and trigonometry, chemistry and physics, and graduated at the top of the class of well-bred girls in the private school her grandparents had paid for. She had just finished her first year of premedical studies at Berkeley when her grandfather died, and his estate went into probate where it was entangled by lawsuits, and there was no more money for such frivolities as college. They ended up in Los Angeles instead, she and her father, because it seemed like a fresh start. That was a year and a half ago. Her father was still looking around for steady work, which was why he was away. As soon as they could afford it, she was going to start that nursing course.
She sat back. Her coffee cup was empty. Sam had also finished his breakfast and his coffee, and he leaned on the arm of his chair and stared at her in a peculiar way, made all the more peculiar because Sandy had fallen asleep on his shoulder, sort of wrapped around the base of his neck and held there by static, possibly.
“I’m sorry about your mother,” Sam said at last. “You were just a kid.”
“She was sick a long time. It wasn’t a shock or anything.”
“Was that when your dad started drinking?”
“No,” Irene said. “He drank before. But after Mama died, he couldn’t stop.”
Sam nodded. “So everything was up to you.”
“I guess you could say that.”
“Well,” Sam said, stroking the cat on his shoulder, staring gravely at Irene, “I guess I don’t have to ask why you go out surfing in the morning.”
Then they were back in the hangar, readying the Jenny for her flight. Already people were arriving for the exhibition, people in their dozens, men and also women in their shingled hair and dark lipstick, small hats nearly worthless against the sun, but that was fashion for you. Sam explained about the engine and the controls, ailerons and elevators, throttle and rudder. “It’s an old plane now,” he said. “I’m saving up to buy something newer. Faster. Rofrano’s designed this bird with aluminum skin and a pair of six-hundred-horsepower engines. If I had that ship I could fly anywhere.”
“How much does it cost?”
“She, Irene. An airplane’s not an it.”
“But why female?”
“Aw, now. I’m not walking into that one, believe me. Let’s just say it’s because a pilot falls a little in love with his airplane, after a while.”
They had stopped working and stood facing each other. Sam propped one elbow on the edge of the cockpit. Sandy was inside, wandering dangerously near the rudder pedal.
“What if the pilot’s a she?” asked Irene.
“Now that’s a good question. I’ll have to ask around.”
“Do you get any around here? Women pilots?”
“Course we do. I’ve taught a dozen women how to fly.”
“Any good ones?”
“A few. If they stick with it. Just like anybody, man or woman. You have to keep flying. The only thing that keeps you alive up there is experience. At all cost, you have to fly.”
Irene turned to lean her elbows on the fuselage so she could stare into the cockpit, the simple controls, the wood that Sam kept spotlessly varnished. Sandy leapt into the seat and stretched her paws against the side.
“When did you learn to fly?” she asked.
“Ten years ago. No, eleven.”
“You mean the war?”
“Joined the Army Air Service in the summer of 1917. Then—well, I guess you know the rest.”
By now, Irene had turned on her elbow to face him. Their arms were inches apart on the edge of the cockpit. Irene thought he didn’t look at all like the press photographs, the newsreels, where he grinned at the camera like the handsome daredevil he was supposed to be. Now he looked serious. He looked grim, like he was looking back on this career of his, as an inspiration to American manhood, and didn’t like what he found there.
“I’m glad you survived, anyway,” Irene said.
“Yes.” He turned away and lifted Sandy from the pilot’s seat. “I’m damned lucky to be alive.”
In the next scene, Irene stood near the lookout tower with the other spectators, the women in their short, fashionable dresses and the men in their pale suits. Sam was about to take off in his Curtis Jenny. She knew it was him because the name was painted on the side of the fuselage, Papillon. It meant butterfly in French, she knew. She thought that was a dumb name for an airplane. She hoped it would fly more like a hawk, an eagle, swift and strong.
A woman had come up to stand beside her. Irene snatched a glance and saw that she was petite and pretty in the way of dolls, huge eyes inside a face shaped exactly like a heart, mop of short blond curls held in place by a straw hat.
“You’re a friend of Sam’s?” the woman asked.
“You could say that.”
“I don’t mean to be rude. I saw you together earlier, that’s all.” The woman put out a tiny hand. “I’m Sophie Rofrano.”
“Oh, then you’re—”
“Yes. Run the place, together with my husband. Isn’t it a fine day? Of course, it’s mostly fine in California. That’s why we’re all here.”
Irene took the hand and was surprised at the firmness of the handshake. Most women of that size, they had a puny grasp to match. “Irene Foster. It certainly is fine.”
“I remember the first time I watched him fly. Sam, I mean. He found us right after we started the airfield. He’d flown with my husband in the service, you know.”
Irene didn’t know, but she nodded anyway. It made sense, after all.
“He’d just bought a Jenny off somebody else, somebody who’d cracked it up and quit flying, and Sam put that airplane all back together again and off he went, into the sky.” Mrs. Rofrano waved her hand at the landing strip, and the airplane toddling toward the end. “I’d never seen anybody fly a Jenny like that, not even my husband. I didn’t know you could. He knew exactly how to push her, exactly how much she could tolerate, exactly what she could do. Turns and loops and dives. He put her down again—it was an air show, just like this one—and he must have found twenty new students, right there. Are you one of them? Students, I mean.”
“Yes. No! I—well, we surf together, that’s all.” It wasn’t exactly a lie, after all, and it certainly sounded less awkward than the truth.
“Surf! On the water? The ocean?”
“Yes.”
“Oh, that’s grand. I didn’t even know Sam surfed. He doesn’t tell you much about himself, you know.”
“I know.”
“Ah.” Mrs. Rofrano folded her arms. “There he goes.”
As she spoke, the noise of Sam’s propeller, idling in the distance, turned loud and purposeful. Irene lifted her hand to her brow and stared at Papillon, an unobstructed view, soaked in sunshine. The propeller whirred furiously on its nose. It started forward, bouncing like a spring on the ruts in the grass. Irene could see Sam’s leather cap and his goggles throwing off rays; she thought she could see his expression, but maybe that was only her imagination filling in the details. Either way, the crowd stirred and spoke around her, oohed as if they’d never seen an airplane before.
And yet. Didn’t Irene feel the same way? Yes, you encountered airplanes all the time in that hopeful blue California sky of the 1920s, puttering away, climbing and falling and banking, performing heart-stopping stunts for onlookers, like looping the loop and flying under bridges and wing walking and what have you. Until now, Irene had felt no more than the usual amazement at these antics.
Now it was different. Now Sam’s airplane prepared to meet the sky. Now Sam’s airplane gained speed and thrust downfield. In Irene’s eyes, it seemed to lengthen, to suck power under its skin, to gather all that California sunshine into its wings. Irene felt the lift of its nose in her own body, the flex of its wings; she knew the exact instant its wheels came apart from the grass and the wind drew it upward, as if it had no weight at all. She followed the diagonal line of its ascent until it soared above the boulev
ard, the trees, and vanished into the sky, and what she wanted to do, in that moment, was not to climb inside an airplane with Sam and soar away into that vanishing sky. Was not to pilot an airplane at all.
She wanted to become. She wanted to become the airplane.
The scene that followed would soon become commonplace to Irene, but on that March afternoon in 1928, everything was new. Each aerobatic maneuver drenched her in wonder, like a river baptism, in which you were plunged several times into the water and came out reborn. The steep dive that pulled out just above the ground into a graceful upward arc. The journey along the tine of an imaginary corkscrew while a trail of red smoke curled behind like a pig’s tail. The climb, steeper and steeper until your heart stopped, until the airplane briefly became vertical, then upside down in contravention of everything you thought you knew about nature and physics, just hanging there upside down, seconds passing into eternity, then a swooping fall while your heart resumed beating and you said to yourself, loop the loop. Irene wouldn’t remember every stunt Sam performed that day—stunts piled on stunts, and which ones she witnessed then and which ones later—but she would remember the grand finale. Everybody would.
Papillon had just completed a double loop that set off a round of gasps and applause among the spectators. Irene thought she saw Sam lift his hand and wave to them as he soared up and off, presumably to circle the airfield and return for another maneuver, or else to land. The airplane grew tiny against the sky, a white gnat, and then disappeared altogether when it crossed a cluster of cumulus that gathered atop the hills to the east. A minute passed, and another. Next to Irene, Mrs. Rofrano checked her watch and folded her arms. Several yards away stood a group of pilots and mechanics who’d emerged from the cafeteria and from their sheds to watch Sam’s antics. One of them—stern, dark-haired fellow—glanced to Mrs. Rofrano and exchanged some telegraphic communication.
Her Last Flight Page 5
