Her Last Flight

by Beatriz Williams

  There are a dozen of them, although I’ve got many more stored at the Los Angeles bureau office where I was conducting my research. I chose each one with care. Here’s Irene Foster standing next to Sam Mallory and his wife, while he holds a towheaded cherub in his arms. Here’s Foster and Mallory posed before their Rofrano Centauri, just before they depart on their landmark flight to Australia. Foster and Mallory, tired but triumphant, waving from the airplane door on arrival in Oahu. Foster delivering some speech in Honolulu, Hawai’i, while Mallory looks on. Lindquist points to that one.

  “I couldn’t even hear my own voice,” she says. “The noise from the engines in those days, it was deafening. Literally deafening. That was my first speech.”

  “First of many.”

  “I didn’t even know what to say. I didn’t know I was supposed to speak at all. I thought that was Sam’s job.” She chuckles. “I remember standing there and wondering what my father would say. He could always hold an audience. He was a terrific raconteur. Also a drunk.”

  “Wasn’t everybody’s dad a drunk?”

  “You too? Then you know what it’s like.” She shakes her head. “Those marathon flights, they were murder. All strung out on coffee and nerves. And all the same, that was the best part. It was just you and the airplane and the landscape around you, and the rest of it didn’t matter, the speeches and interviews and newspaper articles. You knew you were doing something special, something nobody else had done before, and that first flight . . . Sam there in the cockpit with me . . .” She reaches for her lemon water. Her other hand finds the calico cat that sleeps on a cushion at her feet.

  I wheel around the wicker chair to prop myself on the arm, right next to her. My own glass is empty, but I’m not about to leave her for the sake of a little more bourbon. Photographs. They have an effect on people, don’t they? Show somebody a picture from some particular moment that means something to her, some person who means something, and you can just about hear the noise of suction as she’s drawn back into the past. As she becomes the person she once was. It’s a technique I’ve used before, not least on myself. I stare at her long finger, which taps on another photograph, also taken nineteen years ago in Honolulu, in which she and Mallory step from the back of some giant limousine, and he’s just turned away from her to face the camera and hasn’t yet put on that face you wear when you’re being photographed.

  “That expression,” she says. “In the other ones, he’s just posing for the camera. When I remember Sam, this is what he looks like.”

  I first started taking photographs when I was small, maybe eight or nine. My father gave me one of those Brownie cameras for my birthday one year, and such was my adoration for him, I accepted this present as you might accept diamonds. He showed me how to use it, and even today, when I’m messing about with cameras, I sometimes recall my father’s scent, deep in the cavities of my head, that flavor of cigarettes and shaving soap and perspiration and engine oil and whiskey that set him apart from everyone else. I hear his rumbly voice as he explains how it works, the principles of light, the mirror inside the camera that places an upside-down image on the film in the split second of the shutter’s opening and closing. Then he talks about subject and composition and shadow, and I listen so earnestly because this is my father, who knows everything, who is capable of anything.

  Sometimes I think about the time he took me out for a drive to look for things to photograph and how we stopped for lunch at some little roadside diner, I don’t remember where, and how we both ate grilled cheese sandwiches while he told me I shouldn’t listen to a word he said about subject and composition, I should photograph only what I wanted to photograph, and how I wanted to photograph it. I said I wanted to photograph him, so he sat back and smiled, posing, and I told him not to smile, I wanted him to look exactly as he really was and not some grinning stranger. So he stopped smiling and looked out the window, and I took a photograph with my Brownie, kind of blurry because I was too close, just across the table. But I still have that photograph. I wouldn’t trade that photograph of my father for all the gold in Fort Knox, because in that moment we were happy, in that photograph all our happinesses are contained.

  Afterward, on the way home, he told me I ought to be a photographer someday. He said I had the instinct for it, because here I was, only nine years old, and already I knew how I wanted to photograph somebody: not as mere fact but as truth.

  “What about your face?” I say to Lindquist. “What are you thinking in that photo?”

  She laughs. “As I recall, I’m thinking I’d much rather be back inside the airplane.”

  But she’s not in the mood to say more. Sometimes photographs have that effect as well; you’re drawn back into yourself, your own reflections on the past, and you don’t want to share them. That’s fine too. I figure she’ll go to bed thinking about what we’ve just seen, about that monumental flight to Australia with Sam Mallory, the flight that changed her life, and not only will she wake up remembering all kinds of details she’s long buried, she will want to unburden them to somebody.

  Because of all the bicycling and surfing, I have no trouble falling asleep as soon as I crawl between the fresh new sheets of that bed. My battered, exhausted body can do no more. Not a single clear thought, not a twitch of muscle. For a few blessed hours I am plunged in the deep, and then I burst back out, panting, just as fast as I went down.

  I consult my watch. Twenty-six minutes past one o’clock.

  As I know from experience, there’s no point in lying flat on your back, or tossing and turning in some vain attempt to get back what you have lost. I throw off the covers and walk naked (I don’t wear pajamas, but maybe that doesn’t surprise you) to the carrying case that holds all my photographic equipment.

  The dark of night, I’ve learned, is the perfect time to develop film. In the first place—well, it’s dark, which is a necessary condition for the process. In the second place, making photographs is good for the soul. There’s a routine to it, a series of precise maneuvers on which you must concentrate all your attention. Once, back at the Scribe bar in Paris, Bob Capa told me that he took a hundred and six photographs on the landing beach on D-Day, the best photos he ever took, priceless, historic, irreplaceable, and some goober in the photographic lab back in London mishandled the film and destroyed all but eleven of them. So you see, you can’t let your attention wander. You can’t let any other ideas distract you. For a blessed hour, you can think of nothing else.

  So I find a light socket for my red bulb. I lay out the trays, pour in the chemicals. Unroll the film from its casing, clip the ends, load the reel. Another thing I love about developing film at night, nobody bothers me. As much as I enjoy company—a certain kind of company in particular—I prefer to be alone. Answer to nobody, pretend nothing, expend not the slightest effort to entertain, to cajole, to argue your cause. To manipulate the inanimate is so much easier.

  Not all the negatives are worth the effort of turning into photographs, mind you. I inspect each one thoroughly, and in the end I find only six I want to print. As I pull each one from its bath and hang it to dry, the way a housewife might hang her laundry, I feel a sense of perfect accomplishment, as if I’ve done all I could. I wash out the trays, put everything away. I unplug my red light from the wall and wind the cord around it. Then I switch on my penlight and gaze at each print in turn.

  There is Lindquist with her short silver curls, her graceful, unscarred neck, the firm line of her jaw, although I would have liked her to gaze a little more toward the camera lens, because her eyes are astounding when fixed upon you.

  There are the cherubs at play in the surf, goddamn them. Lani in the kitchen. The cherry-red Buick, which looks in motion even when it’s at rest. And last, there is Leo. I pull the photograph from its clothespin to examine it more closely. I realize I’ve forgotten what a perfect specimen he is, how like a drawing from an anatomy textbook. He lies on his stomach in the squalor of a sinful bed. One sheet twines ar
ound his ankle; another streaks across the small of his back; he clutches a pillow under one arm. The camera finds the left side of his face, exhausted and happy.

  I replace the photograph on the line and climb back into bed. On the nightstand is the leather diary, and tucked inside are a few photographs dear to me. The blurred, sepia snap of my father is one of them. There are a couple of others. But the one I remove from the pages is the photo I took of Velázquez, just before he was reassigned back to his squadron in some RAF forward air base in The Netherlands at the end of October. Unlike Leo, he’s awake. He stares at the camera, naked and exasperated, because he wants to get back to what we were doing before, which you can imagine. His plain, wide face bears some shadow of stubble along the jaw and above his thin upper lip; his chest is dark and furry and shaped like a barrel of wine. One arm stretches toward me, as if to take the camera from my hand. His mouth is open a little, because he’s telling me that he hates having his photograph taken.

  Aviatrix by Eugenia Everett (excerpt)

  August 1928: Pacific Ocean

  They were about nine hundred miles north of Samoa when Irene, who was piloting the Centauri at the time, noticed the fuel level was a lot lower than it should be. A minute or two later, while she was troubleshooting the problem, the right engine stopped. She swore and turned her head.

  “Sam! Engine’s out!”

  He bolted up from the makeshift cot, a couple of yards away. Sandy, curled up against his ribs, leapt away and scurried underneath to hide between the kit bags. “What?”

  “I think something’s wrong with the fuel line! Right engine!”

  Of course he couldn’t hear what she was saying. He staggered up and looked over her shoulder at the cockpit dials. Then he staggered over to the window on the right-hand side and peered at the engine, which was illuminated by moonlight. Irene wasn’t sure, but she thought he swore. Then he went to the navigator’s table. A moment later, while Irene struggled with the sagging airplane, a note came through on the clothesline: Baker Island, 102 miles bearing WSW.

  She nodded and started to bank for the turn.

  Behind her, the radio crackled over the noise of the remaining engine. The longwave frequency, as Sam tried to raise Samoa and the men assembled there to assist their arrival. George Morrow had arranged it all. He had negotiated the itinerary and the logistics with the navy, had confirmed the frequencies over which the Centauri and the vessels lined up along her route would communicate with each other. Had also sat for hours with Sam and Irene and a naval officer at a table covered by charts of the South Pacific Ocean. They’d dickered over islands and currents and prevailing winds and weather patterns. They had settled on the official landfalls—Honolulu, Samoa, Sydney—and also alternatives, should some mechanical fault occur, should some storm arise along their path. So Irene already knew about Baker Island. She could picture it on the map, nineteen hundred miles southwest of Honolulu, a thousand miles north-northwest of Samoa, an expired volcano colonized by coral and shaped like a potato chip. There wasn’t much in the way of vegetation, just sand and grass, which was why it made a likely spot to land an airplane in a pinch.

  Irene glanced again at the fuel gauge. This was certainly a pinch.

  Sam had made no move to replace her at the controls. She looked over her shoulder and saw he was busy at the navigation table, radio headset covering his ears, fingers busy at the dials. Though the engine noise was now diminished by half, she still couldn’t hear the pings of Morse code, or whether he’d been successful in contacting the navy. Sam had nearly reached the end of his scheduled two-hour nap; he’d been due to replace her within minutes. A quarter of an hour, and Sam would have sat at these controls, Sam would have possibly noticed the anomaly sooner; Sam with his experience and expertise might have been able to do something about it. Now it was too late. The sun wasn’t due to rise for another couple of hours. How were they supposed to find a few hundred acres of sand in the dark of night? How were they supposed to land on it? They had the cold, clear moon; that was all.

  All of these thoughts shot across Irene’s mind one by one, without stopping for consideration. She didn’t have time to think. She had an airplane to contend with, an airplane that could putter along with one engine, as long as the pilot made the constant, necessary adjustments. Still Sam didn’t tap her shoulder, didn’t make her rise and return to her old seat. Irene kept flying. She got the knack of it. She glanced at the compass every ten or fifteen seconds, glanced at the altimeter (six thousand two hundred feet) and the speedometer (ninety-six miles an hour, much slower now) and the fuel gauge (eleven gallons remaining, dear God) in a continuous rotation. Each piece of information fed her brain. She felt preternaturally alert, as alive as an electrical wire, aware simultaneously of a dozen different things. A moment ago she had had to pinch herself to keep from dozing.

  A note dragged into view on the clothesline: Maintain heading. Superb flying.

  Irene was too busy to be shocked, but she felt the shock nonetheless, erupting down below somewhere, her stomach maybe. Sam wasn’t taking over. Irene was going to fly them to Baker Island on a single engine. She was going to land the airplane by moonlight on a coral island in the middle of the South Pacific, no airstrip or anything, no beacon, nothing but moon and stars.

  Thank God for the full moon. Thank God for the clear air.

  Irene kept one hand on the stick and scribbled on the paper with her other hand: Miles?

  He replied, 86.

  But that was just dead reckoning, she thought. They couldn’t know for certain. She hadn’t taken a celestial observation in two hours, and while the radio beacon in Samoa had insisted they were on course, it couldn’t tell them how far away they were, where precisely they existed on that curve drawn on the globe between Honolulu and the landing strip on Samoa. So these eighty-six miles were a guess. An answer worked out on pencil and paper. And on that estimate of distance depending the accuracy of their compass heading, and on the accuracy of that compass heading depending their ability to find Baker Island at all.

  Still she flew. She had no choice. There was nothing to do but fly.

  Fly and calculate. If they maintained speed at ninety-five miles an hour, they should reach Baker in about fifty-four minutes. They should glimpse the island sooner, maybe forty or forty-five minutes, depending on its visibility in the moonlight. In three-quarters of an hour, Irene and Sam would know whether their calculations were accurate.

  If they weren’t?

  Now that Irene had shut off the line to the right engine, they weren’t losing fuel at a disastrous rate. Still, if they didn’t sight Baker on time, if they had to start making sweeps in search of it, they only had about an hour left to do this. An hour, and the ocean was so vast! They might have miscalculated the tailwind out of Honolulu, they might be a hundred miles north or south of this dot on the map they had imagined themselves. What if—

  Another note. Reduce altitude to 1500 ft.

  Irene nodded and brought the airplane carefully down. Her heart beat in enormous, steady strokes. She felt them in her neck. Her head ached from the keenness of her attention. The air smelled of salt and oil and pungent aviation fuel. She realized she was thirsty.

  She scribbled, Coffee.

  Half a minute later, Sam pushed a cup into her hand.

  She drank swiftly. It was hot, but not too hot. In the thicker atmosphere at fifteen hundred feet, they had slowed to ninety-two miles an hour, and they were burning a little more fuel. But they were closer to the surface, and they could more easily spy any telltale interruption in the dark ocean beneath them. Irene’s armpits were wet; the sweat trickled down her sides and gathered between her legs, and yet she was cold. She handed the empty cup back to Sam. She had stopped wondering why he hadn’t taken the controls. He hadn’t, that was all. Maybe he figured it was more tricky to find Baker than to land on it safely, and that was why he remained at the navigator’s table, communicating on the radio, taking the speed and hea
ding of the Centauri every five minutes, making the calculation, laying the ruler flat along the map and drawing a neat line that meant absolutely nothing, might be a hundred miles away from their actual position.

  Still she flew.

  Twenty minutes passed. Thirty.

  The cockpit window, high and narrow, didn’t afford much of a view. She scribbled another note to Sam, which was probably unnecessary: Start looking.

  Thirty-five minutes.

  Forty.

  Irene’s eyes hurt from straining into the moonlight. A white square appeared to her left. She ripped it from the clothesline and read: Reduce altitude to 1000 ft.

  She tipped the nose down carefully. It was so disorienting, flying at night. Sometimes you had this wild, irrational feeling that up was down, and down was up, and the vast textured blackness beneath you was actually the sky. And even though the full moon lay within view, edging downward now toward the western horizon, Irene experienced an instant’s panic that the white disk in the sky was not the moon itself, but its reflection on the water.

  But the altimeter needle dropped obediently. Twelve hundred feet, a thousand. Irene eased the stick back again and leveled the airplane. Her hands were clammy and slipped a bit on the rubber grip. Ahead of her was nothing, just the same black moon-speckled landscape, not the slightest interruption. She glanced at the altimeter (nine hundred and eighty feet) and the speed gauge (ninety miles an hour). Then the clock, which showed that four minutes had passed, that if their calculations were perfect, Baker Island should be thrusting up from the ocean any second now.

  Forty-five minutes.

  Fifty minutes.

  Irene glanced over her shoulder at Sam. It was dark inside the cabin, lit only by the moonlight and the bulb attached to the navigator’s table, and in that glimpse she couldn’t tell if his expression, as he stared out the small, ovoid window, was grim or just flat.