Her Last Flight

by Beatriz Williams

  “I thought I was going to see an airplane,” he said.

  “You’ll see it, all right. I can’t let you in the hangar, that’s all.”

  “Your own father?”

  “Rules are rules. A hangar’s a dangerous place if you don’t know what you’re doing.”

  “Now, pumpkin—”

  “Drink your coffee, all right? I’ll let you know when the excitement starts.”

  When she returned to the hangar, Sam still held court outside. She nodded to the security guard and slipped in by the side door. There were no windows on this building, nothing to allow passersby any glimpse of the machine that lay inside. Irene flipped on the lights, and out of the blackness appeared this beautiful silver bird.

  Now, it’s easy for the modern reader to forget what a revolution the Rofrano Centauri caused in American civil aviation. These days, she hangs by cables in a gallery all her own of the California Museum of Flight in Sacramento, viewed and photographed by thousands every year. Her iconic lines decorate any number of books and articles and motion pictures on the history of airplanes. But in July of 1928, nobody had seen anything like her before. Irene thought she looked like a giant winged bullet. Her fifty-four-foot wings were molded directly on the aluminum skin of a fuselage thirty-eight feet in length. There was not an edge or a corner on her. Her two enormous propeller engines threw blades the length of a grown man. She could hold three hundred gallons of fuel in her regular tanks, and another hundred in an auxiliary tank. On paper, the Centauri could fly for over three thousand miles at a hundred and fifty miles an hour before she had to land and refuel.

  Of course, flying in the air was not like flying on paper. You had wind, for one thing, blowing you this way and that way according to its own unpredictable formula, and you had navigational error. Hidden under Irene’s bed at home were several books on navigation, both by sea and by air, dead reckoning and celestial and radio methods. (The Centauri was equipped with a two-way radio and a backup receiver, as well as an emergency beacon.) She had studied them all, had practiced them over and over during those flights to San Diego and to Oakland, out to sea and back again, and Sam said she was a natural, that her mind had an intuitive grasp of the geometric logic that was navigation.

  Still, the Pacific Ocean was a gigantic landscape, a third of the distance around the globe itself, barren and featureless without end, and one tiny airplane was like an ant adrift on the Sahara Desert, looking for islands the size of rocks. A mistake of a fraction of a degree could send you hundreds if not thousands of miles off course.

  The door rattled behind her.

  “Who’s the fella?” asked Sam. “Looks a little old for you.”

  Irene hesitated a second or two. “My father.”

  “No kidding! Why didn’t you introduce me?”

  “Because we have work to do.”

  “Where’d you stash him?”

  “In the cafeteria, putting himself on the outside of a cup of coffee. He’s what you might call the worse for wear.”

  “I see.”

  That was another thing about Sam. You didn’t need to explain yourself; he let you decide just exactly how much to tell him, or not. He didn’t force you to share your sorrow. He didn’t force you to share his. He laid his hand on the skin of the Centauri, near the seam of the cockpit door, and said, “Weather forecast looks about right.”

  “What about the ship?”

  “I spent two hours this morning with Rofrano, looking over every inch of her. Not a hair out of place. She’s ready.”

  “And you?”

  Sam crossed his arms and turned on his side, leaning against the plane. “I’ve been ready for months. You?”

  “Course I’m ready.”

  “You don’t sound sure about that.”

  “Of course I’m sure!”

  “Not turning yellow on me, are you?” He said it with a grin, as if to say Of course you’re not yellow, you of all girls. “Anyway, you brought your old dad to see you off.”

  “That was an accident. He turned up this morning from some kind of business trip, high as a kite. He’d seen the papers. I couldn’t leave him home.”

  “Jehosephat, Irene. You haven’t told your father?”

  Now Irene crossed her arms. “I wrote a letter, is what I did. You can say things right in a letter. I figured I’d mail it right before we take off.”

  “Irene Foster,” he said, shaking his head, “you’ve got more sand in you than any man I’ve met. You’re going to fly across the entire Pacific Ocean in a metal bird in the sole company of a bum like me, and you don’t care to tell your own father about it?”

  “I don’t, no. I didn’t want him anywhere near this place, and especially not those newsmen out front. Now it’s too late, I guess.”

  Sam turned his back against the fuselage. Irene stared at his cheekbone, his closed eye, his tense jaw, his matted hair, and asked if he had slept here in the hangar last night. Without moving, he said he had. Nerves, he said. Me too, she told him. So he cracked open one eye and lifted up one corner of his mouth and asked why she hadn’t joined him?

  Irene could have answered this question all kinds of ways. Plenty of people already thought that she and Sam were having a love affair, after all. The newspapers hinted it so brazenly that the history books, written in the years to come, would take some form of romantic entanglement between Irene Foster and Sam Mallory as fact. Could you blame them? Put two attractive, red-blooded people, man and woman, adventurers both, together inside a closed cockpit, and naturally some form of chemistry was bound to brew between them. Stood to reason! Anyway, you could just tell, when they were together. That banter, for one thing. The way they looked at each other. And that time she picked a piece of lint from his sleeve? That was the kicker. Everyone in the press room agreed this was something a woman would only do to a man with whom she was intimate.

  Then there was the matter of the wife. No sane newspaperman was going to print anything to besmirch the sanctity of the American marriage, but that Mrs. Samuel Mallory was something else. She would sit down for an interview in her prim, middle-class parlor in Oakland, arranging herself and her small, angelic daughter, whose hair was like a cloud of pale gold, on the sofa in their white dresses and ribbons. She was a handsome woman, there was no doubt about that, dark haired and almond eyed, but you could see at a glance that she must’ve been ten years older than her husband, and those ten years had begun to tell.

  She would relate to some reporter how she’d been the widow of one of the other pilots in Mr. Mallory’s squadron, and how she and Mr. Mallory comforted each other after the war, and how that friendship grew into love. What was that? Did she trust her husband? Of course she did! She trusted him absolutely! She believed Miss Foster was a woman of integrity, passionate about flying, and Mr. Mallory was a man of honor. She had no objections whatsoever to the proposed flight. Mr. Mallory always carried a navigator on these adventures. If that navigator happened to be a woman, why, these were modern times, weren’t they? A man and woman could surely labor together as friends, without allowing any base inclination to intrude between them.

  The reporter would nod earnestly and take all these words down in his notebook, which he repeated verbatim, without a hint of irony, in his story the next day. It was for the reader, after all, to make of Mrs. Mallory what he would. It was for the reader to determine whether a man should fly all the way to Sydney, Australia, in the company of some doll he wasn’t married to, and whether his wife was a fool to let him do it. Frankly, the newspapermen didn’t care, one way or another. The story made good copy, that’s what they cared about.

  As for Irene herself, she hadn’t even met Mrs. Mallory. In all those weeks since March, when Mr. Morrow had first agreed to finance the Sydney expedition—all those weeks while she and Sam had planned and trained and flown together in almost daily proximity—Sam’s wife hadn’t once come to visit. Instead, Sam flew the repaired Papillon north to Oakland once every m
onth or so, in order to keep their affairs in order, and to spend time with their daughter, Pixie. He stayed for two or three nights at a time. As for what he did there, Irene never asked. She didn’t feel she had the right to ask.

  Which was why, when Sam cracked open one eye and lifted up one side of his mouth and asked Irene why she hadn’t joined him in the hangar last night, she just turned away to inspect the line of rivets along the wing.

  “Figure we spend enough time together already, Sam Mallory,” she said.

  At eleven o’clock on the morning of the thirtieth of July, 1928, the doors of Hangar C at Rofrano’s Airfield in Burbank, California, drew open and the Centauri rolled out like “a giant silver torpedo,” as the Orange County Register phrased it. The metal sides flashed in the sun. The photographers swarmed her, bulbs popping. Mr. Rofrano appeared out of nowhere in a pale suit and a Panama hat and spoke to the reporters. Irene watched all this from the window of the cafeteria, where she was sharing a final, anonymous cup of coffee with her father. The air was hot and filled with grease, with the clatter from the kitchen, but Irene didn’t mind. To her it smelled like home.

  “That’s your ship, is it?” Mr. Foster whistled. “Mighty fine bird.”

  “You see that man in the Panama hat? That’s Mr. Rofrano. He’s the one who designed her.”

  “The moneybags?”

  “No. Mr. George Morrow, the publisher, he put up the money for the airplane and the flight expenses.”

  “Say, where is he? I’d like to shake his hand.”

  “You can’t,” said Irene. “He’s on a steamship. On his way to Australia to meet us.”

  “You must be setting off soon, then.”

  “As soon as we can.”

  “That’s swell. You be sure to tell me the big day. See you off in style.” Mr. Foster swirled the last of the coffee in his cup. He fiddled the cigarette between his fingers. The sun was nearly overhead, and the light came like dust through the windows, so he didn’t look as haggard as he had that morning. Irene remembered when he was the handsomest man she had ever known, when he filled any room with magic. Now his hair was gray and thinning and his skin had begun to sag. He talked too loud. He made grand, clumsy gestures as he spoke. At some point, he’d developed this habit of sticking complicated words into conversation, so that strangers would understand he wasn’t just any old drunk, he was a smart drunk. He was so conscious of his own dilapidation, so ashamed of himself, and until this moment Irene hadn’t even realized. She was too busy being ashamed of him herself. She laid her hand on his arm, and he looked at her in surprise. Even as a child, Irene had never just touched a person for no reason.

  Irene hadn’t finished her coffee, but she set the cup in the saucer and drew her other hand away from her father’s arm. “I’d better be off, I guess, before they send a posse out for me.” She leaned in and kissed her father’s cheek. “I’ll see you around, Dad. Don’t go poking your nose into anything, now.”

  Mr. Foster, a little dumbfounded, put his hand to his cheek and sank back in his chair. “All right, then. You have yourself a time out there, pumpkin.”

  Sophie Rofrano met her just outside the cafeteria door. “Irene! There you are. I’ve been looking all over.”

  “Is something the matter?” Irene asked.

  “Not matter, exactly. I just wanted to warn you in time.”

  “Warn me? About what?”

  “Bertha’s here.”

  “Bertha? Who’s Bertha?”

  Sophie hissed in her ear. “Sam’s wife.”

  “Oh, right. Well, she’s got a right to come, I guess. He’s her husband.”

  Sophie stopped and turned Irene to face her. “Now, listen to me. I haven’t said anything because I didn’t think it was my place. It’s your affair, not mine.”

  “Affair? That’s a funny word to use.”

  “My dear,” said Sophie, full of sympathy, “anyone can see how it is, between the two of you.”

  “We’re good friends, that’s all. We’ve got a rapport, like friends do.”

  Sophie still held Irene’s upper arms, just below the shoulders. She stared into Irene’s eyes for a moment or two, frowning, until Irene shrugged and the hands fell away and Sophie crossed her arms over her chest. “All right. Whatever you say. I’m sure you’re just as pure as Ivory soap, the two of you. But you need to know a little something about Bertha Mallory, Irene.”

  “What’s that?”

  Sophie tilted her head in the direction of the Centauri, where the crowd of reporters and photographers milled about under the blazing sun. “What she says to those fellows, those newspapers? What she says to you or me or anybody?”

  “Yes?”

  “Don’t believe a word of it, that’s all.”

  When they reached the airplane, Irene spotted Bertha Mallory. You couldn’t miss her, really. She stood right next to Sam, as light and feminine as a fairy, resting her arm through the crook of his elbow. She wore a white dress that swished a few inches below her knees, white shoes and stockings, a straw cloche hat with a navy blue grosgrain ribbon around the crown, and no cosmetics at all except for a swipe of cherry lipstick. Though she wasn’t tall, she held herself straight, as if still balancing that schoolgirl book on her head. The cloche hat cradled her face just so. Her eyes were dark and lovely, especially as they turned toward her husband and glowed with pride, while the little girl held tight to her other hand.

  “. . . simply couldn’t be any more proud of him,” Mrs. Mallory was saying. “Flying’s always been his life. We’re just a poor second, Pixie and me.”

  “Now, that’s not true, darling,” said Sam.

  “Yes, it is. And it’s perfectly fine! When you’re married to a genius, gentlemen, you have to understand that his work must come first. You have a duty to the world to give his ambition full rein, to take care of hearth and home and let him do all those great things the Almighty means him to do.”

  Then Mrs. Mallory squeezed her husband’s arm and smiled at him worshipfully, while he offered a small, tight grin to the cameras. Irene stuck her hands in the pockets of her trousers. She had changed into her flying costume, similar to Sam’s, which was military in style, a khaki tunic and a Sam Browne belt over cavalry-style breeches, long golf socks, shiny leather shoes. Her hair was scraped back in a snug bun at the nape of her neck. She and Sophie stood at the fringe of the crowd, arm in arm.

  “All right, all right,” said Sam. “You’ve got your snaps. We’ve got a flight to prepare for. Has anyone seen Miss Foster?”

  “Oh, yes,” said Mrs. Mallory. “Miss Foster. Where is she? I’m so eager to meet her.”

  “She’s right here!” Sophie called.

  The reaction was like a frenzy. The details of Miss Foster’s identity had been kept so carefully quiet until now, she was like the lost city of Eldorado. Nobody in the press had ever spoken to her or even seen her. A few of the older, more cynical hands in the newsroom had figured she didn’t even exist, that she’d been created for publicity purposes, or was actually a man after all. So you can imagine the fuss when Irene waved her hand and said Good morning, gentlemen! It went something like this, except the questions came all at once:

  Miss Foster! Miss Foster!

  Any thoughts on the upcoming flight, Miss Foster?

  Is it true you’re only just meeting Mrs. Mallory today, Miss Foster?

  All right if we take your photograph, Miss Foster?

  “Why, yes,” she said. “I don’t see why not.”

  A dozen flashbulbs exploded around her. She looked right between them all and found Sam’s bemused face and smiled at him, so that all those photos that appeared that very day in the afternoon and evening editions showed a cheerful, happy face framed by a leather aviator’s cap, far more pretty than anybody expected. Underneath these photos, Miss Foster was quoted variously about how excited she was to travel across the ocean, how impressed she was with Mr. Mallory’s skill and tenacity as a pilot, how eager she was to
prove herself, how proud to represent the ambitions and capability of women everywhere. Just about everybody reading a newspaper that evening or the next morning thought that Sam Mallory was either the luckiest man alive or else the unluckiest, depending on his or her opinion of the sanctity of marriage.

  When Irene was done answering the questions of the reporters, Irene made her way to Sam Mallory and his wife. Mrs. Mallory smelled of some delicate, floral perfume that Irene didn’t recognize. Sam said, “Irene, I’d like to present to you my wife, Bertha. She wanted to join us here at the airfield today to see what the fuss is all about.”

  This introduction was clearly meant for the reporters clustered about, taking down every word. Irene took Mrs. Mallory’s hand and said, “I’m so pleased to meet you at last, Mrs. Mallory. You must be awfully proud of Sam.”

  “I am.” Mrs. Mallory squeezed Irene’s hand, just tight enough. She stared into the space between Irene’s eyes. “My goodness, aren’t you the prettiest thing! Sam, isn’t she just lovely?”

  The reporters laughed. Sam said gallantly, “Not only lovely, but a fine pilot and navigator. Miss Foster has the coolest nerves you’ve ever met.”

  “I can see that.” Mrs. Mallory released Irene’s hand. “Of course, I have every faith she won’t need them, not with Sam Mallory at the controls.”

  “We’ll be flying eight thousand miles across the open ocean next week,” said Irene. “I naturally expect every hazard to come our way. But I am confident we will overcome the difficulties of such a challenging voyage and prove to the world what modern aviation is capable of.”

  The reporters nodded and scribbled in their notebooks.

  “You can see why I feel so fortunate to have Miss Foster as my flying mate,” said Sam. “Having her aboard is no publicity stunt, gentlemen. You won’t find a better partner for a trip like this one, man or woman. What she lacks in experience, she makes up for in courage, natural skill, and the instincts of a born pilot.”