Her Last Flight

by Beatriz Williams

  I touch his fingers. “I don’t suppose you had time to stop at the drugstore, while you were in Honolulu?”

  He pulls the hand away and gathers it inside the palm of the other one, behind his back. “I’m afraid I didn’t have time. Good night, Janey.”

  He turns and starts to walk back across the lawn.

  “You were lying, then,” I call after him. “You do have hard feelings.”

  He stops and turns back to me. “I wasn’t lying to you, Janey. I understand you better than you think. I just think it’s best if I stand back a little, from now on. Sometimes you have to keep watch from a distance or you don’t see things as clear as you should.”

  So he walks away, and it’s strange to see. It wasn’t supposed to hurt.

  Aviatrix by Eugenia Everett

  July 1928: Honolulu

  We forget, don’t we? We are seduced by the ease of airliners today, the punctilious way they make their rounds, like milkmen. We forget what a feat it was to cross the Pacific from California to Hawai’i, what a test of equipment and ingenuity, of mechanical skill and navigational skill, of pure luck, of courage most of all. We forget how dazzled we were by those with the guts and the ability to make these flights. How we worshiped them as heroes, and by worshiping warped them into something else. Poor Irene. Poor Sam. By the time the Centauri’s wheels kissed the Hawaiian ground and rolled to a stop, it was already too late. They could not turn back. They could not foretell that in that instant, their old lives had been picked up, side by side, by a giant wave that was hurtling them onto an uncharted shore.

  Two known photographs still exist of the gala dinner in Honolulu on the night of July 31, 1928, celebrating the safe arrival of Sam Mallory and Irene Foster on the first leg of their landmark flight to Australia.

  In the first photo, Sam hands Irene out of the rear seat of the Hispano-Suiza limousine that delivered them from the Moana Hotel. He’s wearing a tuxedo, she’s wearing the evening gown provided for her by George Morrow, a long, pale, gauzy confection made especially by a Hollywood costume designer, whose name is now lost to history. Sam’s left hand holds her left hand, and his right hand disappears at the small of her back. Despite this physical contact, there seems to be no particular intimacy between them. Their faces point toward the crowd, to the various municipal officials and local business bigwigs, not toward each other. Sam Mallory is simply a gentleman helping a lady from the back of an automobile. This photograph was reprinted in hundreds of newspapers across the United States and even around the world, and nobody had the nerve to suggest—at least in print—that there was anything untoward about their association.

  In the second photo, which was recently discovered in the archives of the Associated Press, Irene stands at the podium, flanked by the territorial governor on one side and Sam on the other. She speaks into the giant microphone. Her expression is both passionate and exhausted. Her eyebrows form sharp, eager peaks. Her hands grip the lectern on each side. To her left, Sam Mallory stares up at her with an absorption that might be interpreted as surprise, or rapture, or merely an intense interest in what his flying partner had to say that evening. Whatever this expression meant, however, it wasn’t indifference. It was not gentlemanly concern. If you were Mrs. Sam Mallory and opened up your early-edition newspaper on August first to find this photograph instead of the one that actually appeared there, the one taken outside the Hispano-Suiza, you would have excellent cause to drop your cup of morning joe and say to yourself, Uh oh.

  But while a photograph may tell a thousand words, it doesn’t tell the full story. It’s an instant, a snapshot, a single frame of a lengthy motion picture. A sentence lifted from a novel. Irene, of course, had no idea what emotions painted Sam Mallory’s face as she made her speech in the hotel ballroom that evening. She was exhausted, and she still couldn’t hear very well, and hadn’t even imagined she would be called on to speak. She had done her duty already! She’d shaken all the hands and said nice things to everybody about Hawai’i and the hotel. She’d expressed amazement at the suckling pig, the sweetness of the pineapple. When the speeches began, she sat back and figured her work was done. Sam rose and delivered a spirited address—or so it seemed, though she couldn’t make out the words—which she dutifully applauded while checking her wristwatch.

  It was Sam who nudged her shoulder on his return. “Irene? Your turn.”

  “Me?”

  “They want you to speak.”

  Irene opened her mouth to say, Aren’t you the one who’s supposed to speak? But the room was silent, everyone was looking at her, there wasn’t time to argue. Sam rose and helped her out of her chair. She made a quick, nervous gesture to smooth back her hair, to straighten the lei on her chest. As she approached the podium, the vibration of applause met her ears, if not the sound itself. She smiled and laid her clasped hands on the edge of the lectern. Everyone was smiling. A flashbulb went off in the corner of the room. She thought, What in the devil have I got to say to these people?

  In the old days, when Irene’s mother was still alive, when Hank Foster’s drinking was just a feature of him and not the ruination of him, Irene’s parents used to have friends over for dinner. Hank Foster was very good at dinner parties. (Irene’s grandparents would say that dinner parties were about the only thing their son-in-law excelled at.) Irene sat at the top of the stairs in her white flannel nightgown and listened to the goings-on in the parlor and at the dinner table, and it was clear that Dad was the star of the show. He wasn’t the only one who spoke—the best actors know how to play off the supporting roles—but he was the one you wanted to hear, he was the one who made you listen and laugh and think and sometimes cry, who sent you away at the end of the evening with that warm, well-fed, optimistic buzz that said, Now that was a darned good party.

  Still, Irene was an analytical child, then as now, and as she got older she started to wonder how he did it. What was the secret to his style, how did he keep everyone pitched forward and engaged? Irene compared her father to her teachers at school, who just rattled on about facts and figures, names and dates, and nobody gave a damn. So why did you give a damn when Hank Foster spoke? Because he didn’t explain his ideas in lectures. He explained them in stories. He made everything human. He made you experience his ideas. She asked him about it over breakfast the next morning, and he laughed and agreed. Tell ’em a good story, I always say.

  Now it was Irene’s turn. She stood in front of two hundred and twenty members of Honolulu’s best bigwigs and their tanned, expectant wives, everyone straining to hear what this remarkable woman, this aviatrix, this Irene Foster had to say.

  Tell ’em a story, Hank Foster said in her ear.

  So Irene opened her mouth and talked about that first day surfing with her father, and how it was terrifying at first and then you started to learn the rhythm of the ocean. How, on the way home, her father spoke about the great Hawaiian kings and how you couldn’t rule over other men unless you could master the giant waves of Waikiki and Kahalu’u. So these feats, which some might consider quixotic, are in fact vital to humankind, she said. Someone has to go out there and do them, to prove that they can be done, to plant in every breast, man and woman, the yearning to surf, to fly, to dream.

  She spoke for less than ten minutes, and since she still couldn’t hear very well and hadn’t rehearsed anything—hadn’t even imagined she would be called on to speak—she remembers babbling on about the importance of aviation to the future of mankind, and her gratitude to Mr. Mallory and Mr. Morrow for this exhilarating opportunity, and her hope that women around the world would take some inspiration from this flight and consider flying as a possible hobby or even career.

  She was shocked, later, to read accounts of this short speech as an “electrifying prophecy” and a “call to arms for those who believe that womanhood’s best days are ahead of her.” Shocked at the thousands of letters she received from women and girls around the world, the tears, the gratitude, all of which seemed addre
ssed to someone else, some public icon who was not Irene at all.

  As for Sam, he rode back to the hotel with her in silence. Irene figured he was tired. She was tired too; she was thoroughly exhausted. She had forgotten the flight, she had forgotten Sam’s wife and Sam’s little daughter, she had forgotten just about everything she ever knew. They parted in the hotel lobby—their suites belonged to opposite sides of the Moana, somebody’s pointless notion of propriety—and Irene hardly took time to undress before she staggered into bed, where she slept for an untold block of hours before opening her eyes to stare at the ceiling fan that dragged in circles above her and wonder where the hell she was.

  Then she remembered. She was in Hawai’i.

  She sat up. The room was dark, the curtains shut tight. It might have been any hour, it might have been noon the next day, but some instinct told Irene the sun hadn’t yet risen. The air was warm and damp and smelled of flowers. Irene should have left the window open to the breeze coming off the ocean. She reached for her watch on the nightstand and discovered it was half past four in the morning. No wonder she was awake! In Los Angeles, it was half past seven. Her brain jumped and sizzled like an electrical circuit. Her body felt as if she’d been overturned by a bulldozer. There was no hope of returning to sleep.

  She swung her legs out of bed and staggered toward the window that overlooked the beach. When she drew open the curtains and raised the window sash, she saw that dawn hadn’t yet arrived, wasn’t even a promise, and the old familiar moon still spilled its light across Waikiki Beach and the ocean beyond.

  Not so deserted. Irene rested her forearms on the ledge and allowed the breeze to whisk along her skin, and when she opened her eyes again she saw a man on a surfboard atop a ridge of phosphorescent foam, soaring toward shore.

  As Irene hurried down the empty stairs and corridors, out the doors to the terrace and beach, she told herself that this surfer was probably not Sam. This was Waikiki, there were plenty of surfers, and Sam ought to be asleep after a day like yesterday. But that was just logic. She knew it was Sam; of course it was Sam. She’d recognized his figure from four stories up. She knew his hair, and the way he moved his board, and the way he positioned his arms. She also knew that he liked to surf early, before the sun came up and the people with it.

  She reached the sand just as he came out of the waves, carrying the massive board under his arm like a piece of kindling. His hair was wet; his arms and shoulders ran with salt water. He shook his head and noticed her, and to her relief he grinned.

  “Shouldn’t you be sleeping?” she called out.

  “Shouldn’t you?”

  “I just woke up. Anyway, I’m not the one flying the airplane.”

  Sam walked right up to her, and for a second or two Irene thought he might drop a kiss on her cheek or even her lips. Instead he planted the end of the board in the sand and flung himself down.

  “You can, if you like,” he said.

  She sat down next to him. “Can what?”

  “Fly the airplane. I’ve been thinking. Staying awake so long, it’s not safe. We should take turns flying the bird, so the other man can catch a few winks.” He turned his head to the side to look at her. “What do you think?”

  “I’m game.”

  “I know you’re game. That’s why I asked you along. Say.” Now he rolled the rest of his body on his side so he was facing her, up on one elbow, his wet head propped up on his hand, a yard of pale, moonlit sand between them. “That was some show last night. You were terrific.”

  “At the dinner, you mean?”

  “When you gave that speech. That was something else. I didn’t know you could put on a show like that.”

  “Baloney. I couldn’t even hear my own words.”

  “Honest Injun. You socked it to them. I’ll tell you, they loved your act a hell of a lot more than they loved my sorry efforts.”

  Irene held up her hand. “Wait a second.”

  “What’s that?”

  She closed her eyes and fell back on the sand. “I can hear you!”

  He laughed and rolled on his back again. “Same thing happened to me when I woke up. Realized I could hear the waves outside the window. Then I figured I might as well ride a few of them, since I wasn’t going back to sleep.”

  “I thought we weren’t supposed to bring any extra weight.”

  “Nah, I borrowed the board from the bellhop. You want to take a turn?”

  “I can’t. I’ve got my pajamas on under this thing.” She fingered the sash of her dressing gown.

  “So what? I won’t look.”

  “Sure you won’t.”

  “Well, I might. But it’s only me, right? Your old pal Sam.”

  To the left, an indigo light had begun to outline the shape of Diamond Head. The waves thundered quietly toward Irene’s feet. The stars, which had spilled across the black sky so generously a moment ago, were dying off. Irene untied the belt of her dressing gown and sat up.

  “All right,” she said.

  She’d lied about the pajamas. Pajamas were so much unnecessary weight! Under the robe, which had been provided by the hotel itself, she wore only her drawers and her camisole. She didn’t look back to see if Sam was watching, not because she didn’t want to know but because she didn’t want to care. The surfboard stood at his feet, stuck in the sand. She lifted it with some effort.

  “Watch for the sharks,” Sam called out behind her.

  Oh! It was good to plunge in the salt sea again, good to feel the muscles of the ocean tossing her about. The same current, the same water she and Sam had crossed yesterday, thousands of miles of it. She attempted two waves and foundered on both of them, filling her nose with salt, but she just grabbed the board and swam out again, a little farther this time. The sky grew lighter by the minute; now she could make out the buildings lined up along Waikiki, the great gray Moana smack in the middle. To the right, Diamond Head made a crisp silhouette against the golds and pinks of the rising sun. Another wave surged up beneath her. She lay on the board and paddled her arms, looked over her shoulder to judge this thing, monstrous, all the world’s energy thrumming inside. The glow of the sunrise blinded her. She closed her eyes and felt the wave instead, discovered its rhythm, paddled to keep up with it, right on the sweet spot, higher and higher, oh it was a beauty, wait and wait and now! Scramble to your feet, perfectly balanced, knees bent, soaring forever along a diagonal line to the beach until you skimmed straight into the foam, you sucked every ounce of momentum from the water and then jumped overboard and laughed for joy. Hauled up your surfboard and scrambled up the sand, looking for the fellow who waited on the beach for you.

  But he wasn’t there. The beach was empty.

  Irene came to a stop where the water washed around her shins. She spun around and there he was, stroking toward her, a few yards away. In another second he caught up and snatched her against his chest.

  “Goddammit, Irene! Didn’t you hear me yelling?”

  “Yelling! Yelling for what?”

  “Shark,” he gasped.

  Sam’s legs gave way and they sank kerplop into the undertow. The water whisked away and left them bare. Sam’s heart thundered in her ear, his arms wouldn’t let go.

  “I didn’t see any shark,” she whispered.

  “Big silver fin about six feet away from you. Just before you caught the wave.” He flopped them both backward to lie on the wet sand, Irene on top, while another wave washed up to his ears. “I thought you were a goner.”

  They lay another minute or two while their flesh molded and their wet clothes glued together. Irene slid a few inches down along his left side; her right knee rose to cross his thighs. Her arm curled atop his breastbone, rising and falling. Her breathing slowed, and so did his. The surfboard bobbed away. Dawn broke at last, and the sky turned pink.

  Three stories above them, a man stood at the window of his hotel room, opened the sash, lifted a camera equipped with a special long focus lens, and snapped a few
photographs.

  Hanalei, Hawai’i

  October 1947

  When I return to the house a half hour later, I carry a thick manila envelope from the lining of my suitcase, which I toss on the sofa table in front of Lindquist.

  “You missed this.”

  She looks up at me, brow furrowed. “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “My suitcase. Never mind, that’s not important right now. This.” I press my finger on the envelope. “I want to talk about this.”

  Though the sun fell below the ocean long ago, the air remains balmy. Lindquist has settled back outside to the lanai, where you can hear the surf beat upon the night sand. She drinks a glass of lemon water, iced; I’ve fetched something stronger from Olle’s stash. It’s just the two of us, and the absence of any male spirits in the atmosphere is both peculiar and tranquil.

  Lindquist leans forward in her wicker chair to examine the envelope. “May I?”

  I remove my hand and she takes the envelope and opens it. One by one she removes the photographs, examines them, and lays them on the table.

  “Where did you get these?” she asks.

  “Here and there. You’ll notice the AP owns the rights to most of them, so I’ve pulled favors and had prints made. You don’t get the same detail from a newspaper clipping.”

  “That’s true.”

  She pulls out the last photograph and lays the envelope to one side while she studies them. You would think the sight of these images might inspire some kind of emotion in that face of hers, but she’s just lost in thought, fingers knitted together and pressed to her bottom lip. I light a cigarette and stare over her shoulder.