“Not yet. But it’s time, you know. Every living thing has its time on this earth, and its time to . . . well, you know. Heaven and all that.”
“I know.” Doris looks away.
I glance at Wesley in the mirror. He looks as if he’s holding back a regular Niagara of tears. “Wesley? You all right?”
“Yes, Janey.”
“I know it’s hard to lose something you love, but—”
Wesley bursts into sobs.
“Now you’ve done it,” says Doris. “Can’t you just leave us be? We already know all that!”
I shrink back into my skin and focus the rest of my attention on the road. I don’t even look back in the mirror. What do I know about tadpoles, after all? I can hardly remember being one myself.
I stop the car at the veterinary hospital and open the door meekly for the ankle-biters to hop out. I usher them into the waiting room, where Lindquist sits on the bench. Sandy forms a mound of calico fluff on her lap. Next to her sits Mr. Caruthers, and at his feet lies Mollie, head on paws, who rises and wags her tail as the children approach.
“How’s the beagle?” I ask.
“Oh, she’s fine. A little indigestion, that’s all. I just thought that Mollie and me, we’d maybe stay for a bit and keep everybody company.” He gives me this sort of half-ashamed smile, not unlike Mollie’s own expression. “She’s good with kids, you know. When they’re sad.”
The children crowd around Lindquist’s lap. I start to turn for the door, give them all a bit of privacy, but Sandy chooses to lift her head and blink at me. Her eyes are cloudy and sort of confused. Probably they’ve slipped her something to make her comfortable. We should all be so lucky. I step forward and reach between limbs to give the old furball a little scratch around the ears, the way she likes, and wish her Godspeed.
Then I head back outdoors and light a cigarette, which I smoke in long, deep drags, staring through the fronds of the palm to the blue sky above.
After our last walk through the streets of Paris, Velázquez delivered me to my room at the Scribe, but he kept his clothes on. He said I had had too much to drink, and would neither enjoy nor remember the occasion properly, and he wanted our last time in bed to be memorable, like it had been four days ago when I had driven out to the airfield to meet him. I asked if he would lie with me until I fell asleep. He hesitated and then agreed.
I remember I put on my nightclothes and swallowed some aspirin with water before I climbed into bed, as was my habit when I was drunk. Velázquez stayed dressed atop the covers, so he wouldn’t be tempted, he said. He put his arm around me, however, and I laid my head on his chest. I told him I was sorry about his fiancée, and he thanked me gravely.
“But it was selfish of me to tell you that story,” he said. “It’s a terrible, tragic story, and I should not have added to your burden.”
“Why did you tell me, then?” I asked.
“Because I want someone else to remember her, in case I am killed. I want someone else to know that she was alive, and how she died.”
“Don’t say stupid things like that. You won’t be killed.”
He reached for his cigarettes on the nightstand and lit one. He told me to go to sleep, and that’s the last thing I remember about Velázquez, his solemn voice commanding me to sleep, and the smell of his cigarette, those pungent Gauloises he used to smoke, the smell of good-bye.
I make straight for the cottage when we return to Coolibah. The yellow Ford is parked out front—Olle’s come home—and so is Leo’s moped, and I can’t face either of them, I really can’t. I am only just held together by a thread.
I run a bath and emerge an hour later, wrinkled and shivering, to wrap myself in the bathrobe that appeared on the hook one day, no explanation, a typical Lindquist maneuver. I badly want a drink, but to fetch a drink means returning to the main house and Olle’s library, and that is impossible in my present condition, so I light a cigarette instead. I lie on the bed like this, in my bathrobe, smoking in long, deep drags as I stare at the dark wooden beams of the ceiling, and I feel this terrible hole in the bed, where the cat used to sleep, and also a terrible hole in my chest, as if someone has reached inside and torn away some piece of flesh. The cavity grows and grows, splitting my ribs apart, until at last I spring from the bed, crush out the cigarette, and sit down in the chair before the desk, where my life’s work lies in neat stacks of manila folders, carefully labeled.
This is where Leo finds me some time later, when he knocks on the door. I bark, Come in, without looking up, and hear the creak of hinges.
“Irene sent me,” he says, apologetic. “She figured you might be hungry, since you didn’t come to dinner.”
Though I’m afraid of the likely state of my face, I turn anyway. Leo’s carrying a tray with a plate of food on it, a glass of water and also a glass of something else. I can tell from his expression that I’m not myself.
“Thanks. Just set it on the dresser.”
He stares at me another second or two before he steps to the dresser and nudges aside my hairbrush with his knuckles to make room for the tray. “You should eat.”
“I know I should. I’ll eat when I’m hungry.”
“The bourbon was my idea. Thought you could use a drink. Don’t tell Irene.”
“Is it a double?”
“What do you think?”
I scrape back the chair and fetch the bourbon from the tray. It’s a double, neat, as if he read my mind from all the way across the lawn. I thank him sincerely and return to the desk.
“What’re you working on?” he asks.
“This and that,” I tell him, and then I figure I owe him for the bourbon and add, “George Morrow. I’ve been trying to figure out what happened to him. After he called off the search, I mean. There’s nothing in the newspapers. He’s turned into a recluse or something.”
Leo shifts his weight from one foot to the other. “I guess he was pretty upset. She was his wife, right? His whole life was wrapped up in her.”
“He just ended the search and released this final statement to the press—The time has come to let Irene go, forever honor her memory, allow me to mourn her in privacy, that kind of thing—and that was that. Never went out in public again. Sold his house in Burbank to Rofrano.”
Leo scrunches his face. “Rofrano.”
“Mr. Octavian Rofrano? The Rofrano Aircraft Company? He designed the airplane she flew. They were pretty close, the four of them. Socialized together. Lindquist says they used to keep . . .”
“Keep what?”
I turn back to the yellowing newsprint on the desk before me. “Keep the cat for her, when she was on her lecture tours and her . . . and her . . . .”
“And her what?”
I look up again. “Say. How did she get the cat back?”
“I don’t know. I wasn’t around back then. I mean, I was, but—”
“Because if Sophie Rofrano was mothering the cat while Irene flew around the world . . .”
Leo spreads his hands.
“I know, I know. You don’t know nothing.” I wave my hand. “Thanks for the hooch, anyway. You’re a real pal, Leo Lindquist.”
“Janey—”
“I’m fine. I truly am. It’s just a cat.”
“Goddamn it, Janey Everett. Would you just for one minute admit that you care about something? Anything?”
I continue to stare at the newsprint, although it’s starting to blur. “Would you for one minute, Leo Lindquist, admit that I’m just passing through? Sure, I liked the cat. I like you. I like your whole lovely happy goddamn family. You’re a real nice bunch. But I’m here to write a book, that’s all. I’m here to get the facts, and maybe make some conclusions from those facts, and when . . . when I’m done . . . when I’m through . . .”
He lifts me from the chair and sits down on the edge of the bed, while I fall to pieces against his chest, like I have not done in some time, not since I heard that Captain Raoul Velázquez de los Monteros had di
ed of catastrophic injuries in some field hospital just across the German border, two days after his airplane had fallen in flames from the sky.
Leo wakes me in the night and tells me I was having a dream. I already know this, because the dream still hangs around me, more real than the bed and the room and Leo combined. It was about Velázquez. To make it up to Leo, I snuggle my face into his chest and allow him to stroke my hair, the way he likes.
“When you leave,” he says, “I don’t want you to tell me first. You should just go.”
I can’t reply to that. I mean, I could, but it would come out all wrong, and I don’t want Leo to be upset with me. He doesn’t deserve to be upset, and I don’t think I could stand it. So I comfort him the only way I can, in the only language I really know, the only thing I have to offer him, which others may call a sin but to my way of thinking is a gift, this body of mine, this appetite for intercourse, this instinct I have for giving and receiving pleasure. I figure the only thing is to ride him to exhaustion so he goes right back to sleep, and an hour later that’s what he does, tucked inside the cradle of my arms and legs, lips still moving like he’s trying to tell me something. I’ve broken another rule, I guess, but by now I’ve broken so many, it doesn’t seem to matter.
I have only a moment or two to hold him close before somebody knocks on the door. I reach for Leo’s shirt and pull it over my head. On the other side of the door, Lindquist gives me a withering look. She holds a cardboard box under her arm.
“What’s that?” I ask.
“I need to speak with you.”
“At this hour?”
“It’s the only time we have. I want this to be the two of us.”
“What? Why?”
She stares at my face for a second or two. There is some faint light from the porch, and a moon that’s nearly full in the western part of the sky, so I guess she can see me all right.
I shift from one foot to the other and cross my arms. “Well?”
“I think it’s time to tell you about what happened to your father in Spain,” she says. “Pixie.”
Aviatrix by Eugenia Everett (excerpt)
April 1937: Spain
Four and a half hours after taking off from the airport in Alexandria, Irene landed in perfect weather at the El Carmoli air base on the southeastern Spanish coast, near Cartagena. Nobody stopped her or tried to intercept her, even though this was one of the major Republican air bases and the location of the high-speed flying school for fighter pilots. It was a landing strip in the middle of the desert, bleak and brown, tufted with long, skinny grass. The airplanes, lined up in motley rows, were years out of date. As she rolled toward a hangar, she felt all the amazed eyes on the airplane’s skin, and still not a single soul moved from the buildings or the shadows to stop her. Maybe they were all taking a siesta or something, Irene thought.
She brought the ship to a stop and turned off the switches, made notes in her log. She unbuckled herself from the seat and bounded to the door. Outside, a couple of men in flight suits stared at her, astounded. “Good afternoon,” she said, in her best Spanish. “I am looking for Señor Mallory.” She made a gesture with her hand, indicating height. “American. Blond hair.”
Both men nodded vigorously. “Señor Mallory! Sí!”
“Do you know where he is?”
Maybe she said it wrong. Irene had studied French in school, and most of her Spanish was learned in bits and pieces as she navigated her way around Los Angeles. The men looked at each other gravely, and back at her.
“He is in the north,” said one of them. “He is in Guernica.”
Irene Foster had never heard of Guernica before that day, the twenty-seventh of April. Not many had, outside of Spain itself, although it was a symbol of Basque independence, where King Ferdinand had stood under the municipal tree in 1476—the famous Tree of Guernica, an oak—and sworn an oath to uphold the rights and laws of the Biscay province, of which Guernica was capital. It was located on the northern coast, right on the edge of the Bay of Biscay, and it had been horrifically bombed by the Luftwaffe the day before, on behalf of the Spanish Nationalists.
All this was explained rapidly to Irene, once she’d identified herself as a friend of Señor Mallory. Too rapidly, because she didn’t quite understand the significance of this episode until later. It was war, after all, and bombs got dropped during wartime and killed people. It was terrible, and Irene felt this as a personal horror because bombing seemed to her a perverse way of using this great scientific achievement that was an airplane, that dropping bombs from airplanes was a betrayal of everything she had strived for. As if your beloved brother had turned out to be a murderer. But when she heard the word Guernica she didn’t feel any particular foreboding. No cold chills down her spine. Why should she? Not yet.
There were many deaths and injuries, said the men, and Irene could tell from their faces that this thing called Guernica was a terrible, wretched affair. Still she did not really understand. Señor Mallory had taken off in one of the larger airplanes late yesterday afternoon, as soon as the news had reached them, and flown north to help evacuate the wounded. One of the other pilots had flown in company with him, a man whose fiancée lived with her family near Guernica. They had heard nothing since from either man.
Nothing at all? Irene asked. They hadn’t returned here with their evacuees?
There was no cause for alarm, they assured her. After all, Mallory was not a combatant. Probably he was taking these injured people to Madrid or to Valencia, not to hot, dry, isolated El Carmoli, with scant hospitals nearby. He would be back in a few days, once the wounded were all evacuated.
How do you know this? Irene demanded. How do you know he hasn’t been shot down or crashed?
The two men traded glances and said of course there was no way of knowing for certain. That was the nature of war. You simply had to keep faith and wait for news. Señorita Foster could stay here for as long as she liked. The commandant’s wife would be happy to accommodate her until Señor Mallory returned.
That was very kind, Irene told them. (By now they were inside the hangar, sheltered from the fierce sun, drinking hot, strong coffee that lifted the hairs on Irene’s arms and the back of her neck.) But instead of accommodation, she would prefer a map and a hundred gallons of aviation fuel, for which she would pay in American dollars.
Of course, it wasn’t quite as easy as that. News had reached the commandant of this somewhat embarrassing (although hardly surprising) breach of the airfield’s defenses, such as they were, and he came striding in a moment later, demanding to know what was going on. She told him she was here for Señor Mallory.
“Señor Mallory?” he said, peering at Irene. His face illuminated. He switched to English. “Miss Foster! You are Irene Foster!”
Irene tried to tell him that this was a secret, but he was already pumping her hand with joy.
“I am a great admirer!” he told her. “I am filled with happiness to meet you! I have spoken about you many times with Señor Mallory! You are like a queen to us! But are you not supposed to be in a race right now?”
“I left the race,” said Irene. “I’ve come to join Señor Mallory.”
The commandant’s face turned grave. “Señorita Foster, this is no place for a woman. This is war. I cannot be responsible for what will happen to you if you stay. It is quite possible we will be bombed. And what is there for you to do?”
“I can train pilots, for one thing.”
“I am afraid that is impossible. This is not America. No Spanish man will take instruction from a woman, certainly not in a matter so serious as flying. Besides, this is a fighter school! Have you ever fought in an airplane?”
Irene had to admit that she hadn’t.
“Well, then. My wife will care for you until Señor Mallory returns from Biscay. We will attempt to send him a message, yes? Obtain some news, to make the waiting easier?” The commandant leaned forward, as one who understands the delicacy of such matters. “And y
our husband? Is it necessary for us to send him a message as well?”
“No, it’s not necessary. But I’m afraid I don’t intend to stay here, as grateful as I am for your hospitality.”
“No? You wish to stay in town instead?”
“I’m not going to stay anywhere,” said Irene. “I’m going to go find Sam.”
It took some arguing, but finally they let her go. They even gave her the fuel for nothing, although she offered repeatedly to pay. It had something to do with hospitality, and with the way the commandant admired her. Irene Foster! Sometimes her fame had its uses.
Before she left, the commandant sat her down with the map and went over the terrain, the geography of Spain. He remonstrated with her. The news from Guernica is terrible, he said. There will be frightful wounds, children maimed, the entire town destroyed.
“That’s why I’m going,” she said. “I want to help. I want to make sure Señor Mallory is safe.”
“Do you love him very much?” the commandant said earnestly, as if the immorality of loving a man other than your husband meant nothing to him, or that a woman so great as Miss Foster could naturally love whom she pleased.
“Yes, I love him very much,” Irene said, in Spanish, and the commandant nodded, as if the matter were closed.
So she took off at dawn, after a hasty breakfast and more strong coffee, and the last thing Irene said to the commandant was that he must not, above all, tell anybody where she was, or that she’d visited the air base at all. Even your husband? asked the commandant, and Irene replied, Especially my husband.
This disturbed him, but he wished her Godspeed anyway. As she made her turn at the end of the runway and began to spin her engines, preparing to depart, she saw the fleck of him through the cockpit window, standing by himself to watch Irene Foster take off in her famous airplane from his own air base, what an honor.
The commandant warned her that as she headed north, closer to the territory held by the Nationalists, she might encounter enemy aircraft, mostly German. They did not, as a rule, go out on regular patrols, but there was still some danger that she might blunder into a bombing group. Nobody had been expecting the Guernica attack; it had occurred in the middle of the afternoon, on a market day, sunshine and stalls and fresh food brought in from the country farms, then out of the clear blue sky came the grind of propeller engines, bombs whining through the air and exploding everywhere. So keep your eyeballs peeled, Señorita Foster, the commandant said, proud of his command of American idiom. As Irene flew northward over the deserts and plains of central Spain, she wondered if he’d learned that phrase from Sam.
Her Last Flight Page 29
