Her Last Flight

by Beatriz Williams

  She spent all morning in the hangar, discussing the accident and the damage with the mechanics and with Rofrano, how long the repairs would take and how much they would cost, and then she went to the Burbank Hospital to visit Sophie and the new baby.

  Sophie was in excellent spirits, as you might imagine. She was one of those women who gave birth like a peasant in the fields, and she was already disobeying the orders of the doctors and nurses by pottering around the hospital room, doing this and that. She carried the baby around like a small white-bundled football in the crook of her right arm. For some reason, this reminded Irene of Sam, who used to carry Sandy around the same way.

  “She’s been an angel,” Sophie said, “although they’re generally angels at first, and then they wake up on the third day and turn your life upside down. Would you like to hold her?”

  “I’d be afraid to.”

  “Don’t be silly.” Sophie thrust the baby to Irene, who had no choice but to hold out her good arm and accept this present. “Open your eyes, Clarakins. That’s the most famous woman in the world holding you. And if you’re lucky, she might just teach you to fly someday.”

  “Her father ought to teach her that.”

  “No, I’d rather she learned from another woman. Octavian’s a darling and I adore him, but he can’t help condescend a little. He’d call her sweetheart or something, and she’d never learn properly. You taught me more about flying than my husband ever did.”

  Irene thought about Sam, who had taught her to fly and never called her sweetheart. She peered into Clara’s face, which was squished shut and somewhat red, not at all like a baby in an advertisement. “Should I be doing anything? Is she breathing?”

  “Of course she’s breathing.”

  “How can you tell?”

  “My dear,” said Sophie, “you just know. Now tell me about the airplane. What does Octavian say? Can it be fixed quickly?”

  They spoke about the airplane. Sophie was something of a mechanical genius, knew everything about engines and aerodynamics. She took Clara back, to Irene’s relief. Outside the window sprawled Burbank, bigger and bigger every day. Outside the door, the nurses giggled and listened through the keyhole, thrilled that Irene Foster stood on the other side of it. Irene interrupted herself in the middle of a discussion of ailerons. “How did you meet? You and your husband.”

  Sophie didn’t miss a beat. “He was delivering an engagement gift from my fiancé.”

  “You were engaged to someone else?”

  “Not for long.” She cuddled Clara to her chest. “Honestly, how could Mummy even look at another man, after that?”

  “If I told you something,” Irene said, “if I told you that I wanted to just disappear somewhere, where nobody knew me and no one could find me, what would you say?”

  Sophie looked up. “I’d say, where and when should I bring you your cat?”

  Out in San Bernardino, Hank Foster was nearly dead of liver disease. His wife, however, was a dedicated nurse. He had married her three years ago, surprising everybody. Like him, she was an alcoholic. They had met at a drying-out hospital, to which Irene had sent him after an especially bad bender that had required several personal telephone calls from George to the publishers of various newspapers. They had kept the story off the front pages in exchange for a series of interviews with Irene, which took place in the privacy of her own home and offered readers an intimate portrait of her life as an aviatrix and wife. Irene hadn’t loathed anything in her life as much as she loathed those interviews. She still hadn’t quite forgiven her father for them, although at least it had all led to this woman, Pamela Benson Foster, who seemed to view her present charge—nursing Hank through his final illness—as the single good work that would secure her place in heaven after a lifetime of sin.

  “He’s having a good day,” she told Irene, on arrival. “He sure is happy you’re visiting.”

  “Is he still in bed?”

  “No, he’s out back, on the porch. His favorite spot. We had some friends over last night, and all he talked about was you. Proud as a peacock.”

  Irene followed her through the house, which Irene had bought for him after the first book came out, the one she and George had written together on the steamship home from Australia. Flight from Home continued to sell respectably well, thanks to the drama surrounding the rescue and all the subsequent scandal, and Irene had signed over royalties to her father, which earned him a decent income. He sat now in the rocking chair that looked out across the San Bernardino Mountains. He had an Indian blanket over his lap, though the air was warm. When he saw Irene, he tried to rise, but she shushed him down and kissed his cheek.

  “How are you feeling, Dad?”

  “Pretty well, pretty well. Better than you, I guess.” He nodded to the sling.

  “Oh, it’s all right. Looks worse than it is. I can take it off when I drive and everything.”

  “That’s my girl,” he said, proud as a peacock.

  “I’ll just get some lemonade,” said Pamela, from the doorway.

  Irene settled herself in the other rocking chair and stared at the wedge of blue sky above the mountains.

  “So what happened out there?” asked her father.

  “Just a squall, really. I shouldn’t have tried landing. I should have circled until the thing passed through. I had the fuel. But I figured I had to win that race. I didn’t have any minutes to spare.”

  “Had to win the race?”

  “For publicity. You don’t get publicity for coming in second.”

  “You don’t need any publicity. You’re Irene Foster.”

  “Well, tell that to George,” she said. “No, forget I said that. George is right. This lecture tour, we can’t fill the seats. Couple of towns are talking about canceling.”

  “I can’t believe that. Why would they cancel? Who wouldn’t want to hear you talk?”

  “People who have seen me before. I haven’t done anything new since the Rio flight. I haven’t got anything to talk about, just all that business I’ve done before.”

  “That’s some business, though. Nobody could get tired of hearing about that.”

  Irene laughed. “You couldn’t, maybe. But you’re my father.”

  He reached for her hand. “I sure am.”

  Funny, how she had resented him once. She had hated him, and despaired of him, and been ashamed of him. Her father had been a thing she avoided, a carbuncle on the hide of her life. He had been the cause of her misery, he had drunk away all their comfort, he had failed her and failed her. Now he was dying, and it wasn’t that all these feelings had disappeared or been forgotten. They lay in a heap on the floorboards between their two chairs. But above that heap, Hank’s hand linked with Irene’s hand. She clung to that hand. She said, “Remember how you taught me to surf, when I was eleven?”

  “That was nuts, wasn’t it? You were just a scrap.”

  “Those were the best moments of my life,” she said. “The truest.”

  “What about flying?”

  “Flying’s something else, now. Flying doesn’t belong to me. But that does. Just you and me.”

  She didn’t add, And Sam, even though surfing belonged to her and Sam too. Because where was Sam now? In some hospital room, attended by a starlet of some kind.

  But surfing got on her mind anyway, and when she left her father’s house, instead of returning to Burbank, she found herself headed in the direction of the Pacific Ocean.

  She wasn’t actually going to surf. For one thing, she hadn’t touched her surfboard in years, not since she arrived home from Australia and packed it away in the garage. Presumably the moving men had then transported this ancient thing to the new house in Burbank, but Irene didn’t know where it was, or whether George hadn’t just had it thrown out at some point, while she was away. No, she wouldn’t surf. She couldn’t surf. She just wanted to see the ocean, that was all.

  These days, the beaches were more crowded. So many people had moved to Cal
ifornia at the end of the twenties, and then as the crops kept failing in the Midwest and the farmers moved here in their droves. This promised land, California. Even when money was tight, you could still pack up a picnic lunch and your bathing suit and take the family to the beach. The sand and sun and ocean were all free. The smell of brine, the cool breeze off the water, the tide that filled the rock pools. The noise of the seagulls, the tiny, interesting crabs, the way the waves rose and hung and unfurled in perfect arcs—all these miracles could be experienced by anybody for nothing at all, like a birthright, and so they packed the beach at Huntington, at Santa Monica, at Long Beach, and learned to paddle in the cold Pacific current, to swim and to surf.

  Irene didn’t want to see any of these people. She didn’t want to be seen, to be recognized, to be eaten alive and have nothing left of herself. She went instead to the old spot, where Sam had once had a house not so far up that strip of beach, where there was a wide spot in the road on which the surfers parked their cars at dawn. Before she left the car, she tied a scarf around her head to disguise her hair, the sandy curls Sam had cut for her on Howland Island, which were now an iconic symbol of American womanhood and rendered her instantly recognizable. Under a silk scarf, nobody even saw her.

  The old path was still there, snaking carefully down the cliffs. Right here, the bend where she and Sam had spoken their first words. The beach was not deserted. People were out there enjoying the surf, picnicking from baskets. None of them noticed her, this lean woman wearing a white shirt and plain dungaree trousers, her hair bound in a silk scarf that rippled and whipped in the gusts of wind that came off the water.

  The sun was falling now, and Irene hadn’t eaten since eight o’clock that morning. Her stomach was vast and empty. She should return home now. She should go back to the house that she and George had designed and built together.

  She turned and started up the path, but instead of walking to where she had parked the car, she walked along the edge of the cliff until she came to the small, weathered gray cottage that had once belonged to Sam. Irene knew the house well. She and Sam had spent hours there in the weeks before the flight to Australia, poring over maps and charts. Sam used to make her cocoa, while he drank coffee spiked with whiskey. She never drank cocoa anymore because it reminded her of Sam, and those weeks and months that marked the territory between Irene’s discovery of flying and the world’s discovery of Irene. When flying had just been flying, this terrific adventure she was undertaking with Sam, and the future opened before her in bright, grand colors.

  Now she stood on the sandy path, ten or fifteen yards from the southwest corner of the cottage, not far from the place where she and Sam had stood after returning from the airfield with Irene’s new spark plugs, the day they had met. The house and the ocean had not changed; the sky, the setting sun, the smell of the sea and the warm grass, everything was exactly as it had been that first evening. In fact, the encounter returned to her so vividly that, at first, she took no particular notice of the aging yellow Nash roadster parked outside the front of the house, because it belonged there in her memory. Then she stiffened and put her hand to her mouth. She looked at the small stone terrace, the deck chairs where she used to sit with Sam on sunny afternoons, and saw a man in one of them.

  “Hello there,” he called.

  “I thought you were in San Diego,” she called back.

  “I thought you were in New York.”

  She held up her arm. “No, I cracked up in Fort Worth.”

  They stared quietly at each other. The surf crashed. Sam had a bruise on his jaw, a black eye. A thick white bandage wound around his forehead and the back of his skull. His clothes were too bulky for his lean body, suggesting more bandages underneath. A pair of crutches lay on the stone next to the deck chair. Irene walked closer.

  “How did you get out of the hospital so soon?” Irene said, which was a way of asking how badly he was hurt.

  “I just walked out. Never liked hospitals. I figure the sea air will cure you faster than a hospital can.”

  Irene came to a stop at the edge of the terrace. The sunset could not disguise the wan, fatigued cast of Sam’s skin. “You look like hell,” she said. “Don’t you have someone to look after you?”

  “I’m not an invalid.”

  “What are you making for supper?”

  “I don’t know. Boil an egg or something.”

  Irene climbed over the low wall of the terrace and put her hand on the lower half of Sam’s forehead, the part that wasn’t covered by the bandage. “I don’t think you have any fever.”

  “Of course I don’t have any fever.”

  “What about that actress of yours? What’s her name? She ought to be here, looking after you.”

  “I believe she would tell you that’s not part of her job description.”

  Irene stared at Sam, who stared back. They hadn’t been this close, or this alone, since Australia. Possibly they hadn’t touched, except for a handshake or two.

  Irene said, “I thought you’d have sold this place by now.”

  Sam settled his head back and closed his eyes. “I would never sell this house.”

  Inside, everything was the same, as if it hadn’t been touched since she left it. The single big parlor, overlooking the water. The tiny kitchen. The lavatory. The hallway that led to the bathroom and to Sam’s bedroom, which she had never entered or even glimpsed. To the right of the parlor was a small office, lined with bookshelves, where Sam had kept all his books and maps. He had this idiosyncratic method of shelving them. He once tried to explain to Irene, but it just ended in laughter. Somehow he always found what he was looking for.

  The windows were open to the sea breeze, and the door to the little stone terrace. The same two deck chairs sat in the same proximity, like the promenade deck on an ocean liner, Sam asleep in one of them. As Irene cooked an omelet, she could see the top of his head from the kitchen window. She had laid a blanket over his legs while he dozed. She thought he had broken an ankle or something; he wore a cast over his foot that went halfway up his calf. When the omelet was finished, she divided it in half and put the halves on two plates; she poured a whiskey and soda for Sam and plain soda water for herself and brought everything out on the terrace, which was now dark beneath a black sky dazzling with stars.

  Sam was already awake. The omelet and whiskey amazed him. “Just like we used to make,” he said.

  Irene sat down in the other deck chair with her plate and her glass of soda.

  “I don’t mean to imply anything untoward,” said Sam, cutting into his omelet, “but does your husband know you’re here?”

  “He’s on his way to New York.”

  “He didn’t get the news about Fort Worth?”

  “No, it’s about publicity.” She hesitated and told him about the flight, the solo circumnavigation. He let out a low, slow whistle.

  “That’s some flight. But then you always did have sand. More sand than anybody I ever met. Remember how you landed on Howland?”

  “That was you,” she said. “You were the one who wouldn’t let me turn yellow.”

  He finished his whiskey. “Why did I do that? I don’t know why I did that.”

  Irene took his empty glass and hers and went to the liquor cabinet to refill them both. When she returned to the terrace, Sam had finished his omelet and lit a cigarette. The wind tufted his hair around the bandages. He looked a little bit like a bandit, and she told him so.

  “A bandit? That’s funny.”

  Irene said, “I heard about your wife.”

  “You mean that she isn’t my wife? Years and years of refusing me a divorce, and then she splits for Reno with Pixie. Divorce papers arrive in the mail.”

  “That must make it hard to see your daughter.”

  “Irene,” he said, “Pixie hates me. Sends my letters back unopened. Not that I blame her. I was a chump. I wanted Bertha to hate me enough to kick me out, and I wound up hurting my own daughter instead.”<
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  Irene thought of her father on his rocking chair. “You have to keep trying. You can’t give up.”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I think I’m done.”

  “Done with what?”

  He took a long drag on his cigarette.

  “Have you ever wondered if maybe you got it all wrong from the beginning? That you somehow started off in the wrong direction, and everything you did since, every step, it was all the opposite way from where you meant to go?”

  The stars blinked sleepily above them. Irene turned to Sam, whose throat worked and worked. Irene tried to speak too. Sam got there first.

  “It’s been coming on for a while. Bit by bit, ever since I got back from Australia. Bertha was still in the hospital. I’ll never forget the expression on her face. Like she’d won some game of chess or something. Trapped me in a tiger pit. And there was nothing I could do to escape, because of Pixie. Because she was Pixie’s mother. Whatever move I made to grasp some straw of joy, she would counter it. I thought, I can’t do this. I just can’t go on.”

  “But you kept going. You kept on flying.”

  “It was the only thing I knew how to do, the only way I could support my daughter. So I flew, because I had to fly, but when I got into an airplane I didn’t care if I lived or died anymore. The only thing that kept me alive was Pixie, because she needed me.”

  “Oh, Sam—”

  “I just—I have nothing left, Irene. Nothing. Last weekend, in that air show, I went through my routine, you know, cut everything a little close. Gave them a good show for their money. About halfway through, I just knew. I was through. It was time to either break free or die. And I thought there was only one way to do it so I wouldn’t get the chance to back out.”