Her Last Flight

by Beatriz Williams

  “Isn’t it beautiful?” Lindquist says. “I come here when I want to be alone. That’s the best thing about flying. It gives you the freedom to leave the rest of the world behind you. Hop down, now. I’ve packed a picnic for us.”

  My legs are wobbly and something seems to be wrong with the way my head is attached to the rest of me, but I hold myself upright and follow Lindquist along the grass and scrub, through some trees, until we emerge on a cliff above a flawless white beach. A large wave thunders onto the rocks below. Lindquist sets down the picnic basket and puts her hands on her hips. She’s wearing her usual uniform of tan slacks and white shirt; she’s taken off the navy jacket and the gloves and put a straw hat on her head—to save what’s left of her skin, she says, as if she weren’t just the kind of irritating woman who can carry off a wrinkle or two and only look more alluring.

  She turns her head to me. “Well? What do you think?”

  “I hope you’re not expecting me to surf, that’s all.”

  “Of course not. Only a daredevil would surf this wave. Give me a hand, will you?”

  I help her spread the blanket and unpack the sandwiches and the bottles of lemonade and the orangey-pink fruit she calls papaya. She removes her hat and eats in silence, legs tucked up against her chest, watching the waves form offshore. The sun is hot, but there’s enough breeze to keep us comfortable. When we’ve finished the sandwiches and the fruit, Lindquist tells me there’s a cake inside the basket, and could I fetch it out and slice it up with the knife. I do as she asks. As I sink the blade through layers of frosting and sponge, I feel as if she’s watching every movement, every tiny gesture, like this is a test of some kind. I hand her a slice. We eat. I say this would be a grand time for a cigarette.

  “I’d rather you didn’t,” she says.

  “Well, I’ve thrown up all the Scotch, so I’d say you owe me a cigarette.”

  She opens her mouth and stops herself.

  “What?” I say.

  “Nothing.” She stands up and holds out her hand. I allow her to draw me up. The ocean stretches out before us, all the way to the Orient. The wind tumbles my hair. Lindquist speaks so softly, I have to strain to hear her, and yet I have the feeling that this is why I’m here, this is why she brought me here, the flight, the Scotch, the island, the picnic, this particular stretch of ocean before us: all of it in preparation for this moment, some grand speech.

  “Samuel Mallory had his faults,” she says. “We all do, I guess. But he was an honorable man. He was a good man. He always wanted to do the right thing, even when he fell short. He loved me. He loved his daughter. Everything else came second. He would have died for us both. If you’re going to write this book of yours, you have to make that clear, because unless you understand that, you can’t understand Sam at all.”

  “What about his wife? Didn’t he love his wife?”

  This brings her up short. She studies the question for some time. So long, in fact, that I start to wonder whether she means to answer me at all, whether we will ever get to the heart of the matter.

  I continue. “Men, you know. They talk all the time about love and fidelity, but in the end they just follow their own inclinations to populate the earth, and who suffers? The wives and the children they leave behind. And that’s something I take personally, because the same thing happened to me. My father left my mother for another woman, and I wound up getting myself in the kind of trouble that a girl often gets into when she loses a father, the kind of trouble she never recovers from, the kind of trouble that haunts her all her life.”

  “I see,” she says. “What kind of trouble, if you don’t mind my asking?”

  “Ah, but we aren’t talking about me, remember? We’re talking about you and Mallory and what really happened in that space of time between Los Angeles and Sydney, Australia. Not what the newspapers reported. Not what the photographs showed, God knows. The truth.”

  Lindquist crosses her arms and kicks a tuft of grass and stares out to sea. A gust of wind dares to tangle her famous hair, the hair that Mallory first cut for her on Howland Island.

  “All right,” she says. “I’ll tell you the truth. I just don’t know if it will be enough for you.”

  One last thing, the most important thing, though I’ve never told a soul until now. Remember that fellow at the law firm, the married lawyer who impregnated me? That was my stepfather.

  Aviatrix by Eugenia Everett (excerpt)

  August 1928: Australia

  Irene had some inkling what to expect when they touched down in Sydney, a little more than forty hours after their rescue from Howland. The captain’s briefing, the radiograms from Morrow, had all made clear the worldwide sensation their disappearance had caused, how everybody in America and around the globe had followed the story with utmost interest.

  Still. When the crowd surged forward to encompass the Centauri, almost before it had come to a stop on the runway at Sydney Airport, Irene stared out the window in a state of shock. Nothing could prepare you for that, nobody could explain what it was like to sit in the focus of so much concentrated attention. In those days, when things like syndicated newspapers and radio and moving pictures were only just beginning to exert their power over the mass imagination, fame wasn’t yet something to be afraid of, something that could take over your life and habits and change your psychological composition. Only one man in the world really knew what celebrity meant, and that was Lindbergh. As Irene witnessed this evidence of fame, as she was made to understand what a crowd of fifty thousand people actually looked like, she didn’t feel any sense of elation or triumph. She felt the opposite. She felt dread. Her life was about to change; her daily existence, her sense of herself—Irene—had just been obliterated and replaced with something she didn’t recognize. There was nothing ahead but fog and darkness.

  The first man through the hatch was George Morrow. Boy, was he beaming! Irene couldn’t understand a word he said, but she had the unsettling impression that he was a Broadway manager, and she was an actress who had performed her part perfectly, though she hadn’t even seen the script. First he kissed her hand and then he shook Sam’s hand. Then he noticed the cat, crouched behind Sam’s ankles.

  “What the hell?” he said.

  Sam picked up Sandy. “Stowaway.”

  “I’ll be damned. That’s brilliant!” Morrow exclaimed. “Press’ll love it.”

  A car was already waiting, motor rumbling, to whisk them into town, to George Morrow’s suite at the Harbour Rocks Hotel. There, a doctor examined them both thoroughly and pronounced them in excellent health, except for some lingering exhaustion and dehydration, in addition to the temporary loss of hearing, which the doctor expected to subside soon. Morrow and the doctor then bustled outside to announce this happy news to the waiting press, and Sam and Irene were left alone with Sandy, who curled up in an armchair and went warily to sleep.

  There was no point in talking yet, because of the deafness, and of course they expected Morrow back any second. Sam got up and walked to one of the giant windows that looked out over Sydney Harbor, and Irene joined him. They didn’t touch. Nor did they hear George Morrow when he bustled back inside and came up behind them. They both started when he took each of them by the arm and informed them, loudly, that he was going to escort them by the back stairs to their suites, where the hotel chambermaids were waiting to draw their baths and ready them for an afternoon nap.

  “You’ll want to get some rest,” Morrow said. “Tonight there’s a ball in your honor.”

  Possibly nothing in Irene’s life until that point felt quite as immediately good as that bath. For one thing, the bathroom itself was a large, luxurious cave of marble and porcelain and soft Turkish towels. The water was fresh and warm, drawn for her by a reverent, wide-eyed chambermaid who added oil from a glass decanter and didn’t say a thing, not because of professional politeness but because her heart was too full for words. Then she left, and Irene sank into that tub like you might sink into heaven.<
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  When she emerged, wrapped in a dressing gown, she was taken aback to find George Morrow at home on her sofa, smoking a cigar and nursing a glass of whiskey. He rose at once and asked if he could pour her something. Champagne, perhaps? It was legally available here in Australia, after all, and would help her sleep.

  “No, thank you,” she said. “I don’t touch intoxicants.”

  It came out more prim than she intended, and Morrow had the grace to set aside his glass. He urged her to the sofa, settled himself in the nearby armchair, and apologized for intruding.

  She cupped an ear. “I’m sorry. You’ll have to speak louder.”

  “Of course!” he barked, leaning forward a few inches, and repeated himself.

  “You’re not intruding at all, Mr. Morrow. We couldn’t have made the trip without you,” she replied.

  “Believe me, Miss Foster, the honor of sponsoring this historic journey was all mine.” He paused to beam. Like the rest of him, his dentistry was perfect and whispered of prosperity. “Of course, like the rest of the world, I’m only happy you’re alive and well. Alive and well,” he repeated, more loudly, because Irene was squinting with the effort of making him out.

  “Oh, I guess it will all die down soon enough. I’m just an ordinary girl, after all, and I don’t much care for all the fuss.”

  “An ordinary girl? Miss Foster.”

  “It’s true, I’m as plain as could be. I just like to fly, that’s all.”

  “Plain?” He laughed. “Don’t you see yourself at all? Plain? Ordinary? You’re extraordinary. By God, you’re the biggest sensation since Lindbergh. Those crowds out there”—he flung his arm to the window—“are here for you.”

  “And Sam.”

  “Sam, of course.” Mr. Morrow leaned back and set the cigar in an ashtray. Irene couldn’t help staring at his immaculate fingernails. It was funny how you forgot certain details about civilization, like how immaculate fingers could be. Now he laced them together and looked at her. He made a couple of false starts before he spoke again. “Miss Foster. Can I be candid with—”

  Irene cupped her ear again. “I’m sorry.”

  Morrow cleared his throat. “Can I be—oh, damn. Never mind. I only wish to say that I see a very bright future ahead for you. You’ve captured the imagination of the world. Books, lectures. You’ll be bigger than Lindbergh.”

  Irene couldn’t hear every word. She wasn’t sure she understood him properly. Write books? “Sam’s going to write the book,” she said. “He already said so. He’s going to write a book about all this, and use the money to—to—well, to take care of his family.”

  “People want to hear from you, Irene.”

  “I don’t see why.”

  “Because you’re a woman, Irene, and the world’s fascinated with women. Women with a sense of adventure, women who can take on men at their own game. The emancipated woman, she’s the spirit of the age.” Morrow lifted his cigar from the ashtray and pointed it at Irene’s mouth. “You, Irene. People want to hear from you. They can’t get enough of you.”

  Irene was so exhausted, she didn’t want to argue. She couldn’t think through an argument, couldn’t put together any kind of complex thought or sentence. “But I just want to fly,” she said again.

  Morrow reached to tap the ash from the end of his cigar. He rose from his chair and approached the window, which looked out over a sunny, chilly Sydney Harbor. It was winter here, after all. Morrow braced one hand against the window frame and gazed out across the sun-dappled water. He wasn’t wearing a suit jacket, just his trousers and stiff white shirt and waistcoat, neatly buttoned, conservative dove gray. The blue smoke of his cigar trailed around him. Its rich scent was altogether different from Sam’s cigarettes. Irene, sitting on the sofa in her dressing gown, felt woozy with the need to sleep. Morrow seemed to disappear into his blue fog. Her eyelids sank downward. Just as she began to doze off, Morrow appeared next to her on the sofa, so close their knees almost touched.

  “Miss Foster, I don’t mean to be importunate—” He stopped, coughed, and continued in a louder voice, close to her ear. “And I realize it’s none of my business, as a mere friend. But as a manager—as your business manager—I feel it’s incumbent upon me to ask . . .”

  Irene picked at the edge of her robe. “Ask what?”

  “Whether there’s anything you should tell me, about you and Mr. Mallory.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Irene, they’re going to ask, those reporters. Maybe not in so many words. But the whole world’s dying to know—a man and a woman, stranded on an island together—don’t tell me you don’t understand my meaning.”

  Over on the armchair, Sandy lifted her head and licked a paw. Irene set down the hem she’d been picking and smoothed it over the bump of her knee.

  “No,” she said. “I’ve got nothing to tell you about Sam and me.”

  Morrow held her gaze for a second or two, just to see if she’d back down, she thought. So she didn’t. He turned away and stubbed out his cigar in the ashtray. “All right, then. I can see you’re tired. Get yourself some rest. We’ll discuss all this in the morning over breakfast.”

  “You and me and Sam.”

  “Of course.”

  Morrow’s jacket lay over the back of the armchair. He rose and hooked it with his finger. As he picked up his hat, he looked Irene’s way and smiled.

  “I like the new hairdo, Miss Foster. It suits you.”

  The hairdo, of course, was to become iconic: a symbol of the age and the women who peopled it, of this daring new generation of females. To millions of admirers, those short curls meant freedom and courage. Certainly they attracted attention. In the many photographs that survive from the press conference after the Centauri’s miraculous arrival in Sydney, Irene Foster’s hair seizes the camera’s fascination: a riotous gold mop glimmering under the lights like some kind of beacon for the brave new world.

  Naturally, the reporters wanted to know how and when and why she had cut her hair. And Irene—who was still exhausted, remember, who had napped only briefly before Morrow knocked again on the door of her hotel suite to summon her to her public—let down her guard for a single sentence, the only sentence. She glanced at Sam, who sat at her side; Sam glanced at her, and they shared a smile. “Sam cut it for me, on our third day on Howland,” she said. “Long hair just gets in the way of everything, doesn’t it?”

  The photographers present that day were not stupid. A cavalcade of flashbulbs and camera shutters captured that shared smile, which was reproduced on millions of sheets of newsprint within twenty-four hours, was thrown up on thousands of newsreel screens within a week, was printed in countless magazines and books over the years, was later expanded to gigantic proportions for museum exhibits and popular art. It became, in the collective imagination, a visual shorthand for two separate though related aspects of twentieth century life: for the unique and private connection that exists between two people deeply in love and for a moment in history when an equal standing between man and woman—the possibility for adventure shared, for genuine partnership—became possible.

  Humans being as they are, of course, the fact that both Sam and Irene married other people only made it all the more intriguing.

  Following the press conference, there was a gala dinner, then a tour of the city the next day in the company of the mayor, in which Sam and Irene (accompanied by George Morrow) appear to have met at least half the civil servants in the entire province. There was a luncheon with the Sydney Ladies Auxiliary, a military ball given by the Australian Flying Corps, a private lunch at the new Government House in Canberra with Lord Stonehaven, the governor-general of Australia, followed by a formal dinner with the prime minister and senior members of government, along with their wives. Various additional public appearances filled in the gaps of this bruising schedule.

  To Irene it all passed in a blur, or rather a jumble. She felt like a doll, dressed up—Morrow
had ordered an entire wardrobe for her—and paraded about at event after event, saying the same things to an endless receiving line of people, giving variants of the same speech, more or less, she had delivered to the panjandrums of Honolulu. What she did not experience was time to herself. Each day, Morrow left her at her hotel suite at midnight and rapped on her door at half past seven, so that she had neither time nor energy to do anything else except stumble to bed and sleep deeply, dreamlessly, for the hours allotted. Not only was she never left alone with Sam, they had no opportunity to arrange a private meeting. It was Morrow, Morrow, Morrow, all day long.

  On their fifth night in Australia, Irene rang up the switchboard and asked to be connected to Sam, but the operator told her she was unable to put through any calls to that suite without permission. Irene explained that this was Miss Foster, room 205. The operator apologized and said it was still impossible. The next morning, when Morrow’s attention was momentarily distracted, Irene told Sam. “I tried the same thing,” he said. “With the same result. I’d have marched right down the hall to see you, but Morrow’s got guards posted outside my door and yours.”

  “That’s for protection from the public,” said Irene.

  “Sure it is,” said Sam.

  When Morrow returned to the breakfast table a moment later, Sam said, “What gives with the telephone lines? I can’t get a call in to Irene.”

  “Of course not,” said Morrow. “Because any operator on that switchboard could listen in to your conversation, and every word would appear verbatim in the next morning’s papers.”

  “Baloney,” said Irene.

  Morrow shrugged. “An operator could earn a year’s pay selling that story.”

  “Couldn’t you sue the newspaper?”

  “Maybe. But the story’d be out by then.” Morrow reached for his coffee. “And I don’t think either of you would appreciate your private intercourse being made public.”