The Lost Pilots

by Corey Mead

  When they awoke the next morning, Clarke elatedly proposed marriage. Jessie had always been impulsive; it was one of the shared traits that had bound her and Lancaster together. Now, after last night’s fervor, it wasn’t difficult to persuade herself that she and Clarke should be together. Surely she loved him.

  She accepted his proposal.

  Jessie was acutely aware that Lancaster would be crushed, but she naively believed that, once he adjusted to the situation, their professional partnership would carry on as before. And she still loved him as a friend, and desired his presence in her life. But since Lancaster couldn’t or wouldn’t get a divorce, Jessie felt she had every right to seek out a proper marriage. A marriage that, among other things, was public. Clarke was radiant and adoring, and if he suffered from occasional mood swings, that only indicated his zeal. Jessie, in the throes of sudden love, thought he would make a wonderful husband.

  But with Lancaster sending her daily proclamations of love, Jessie found herself in a bind. She knew the intense difficulties Lancaster was encountering on his journey, and the depth of his anxieties. She rationalized that she’d be doing Lancaster a kindness by waiting until he returned to Miami to break the news. But her letters also indicated a desire to postpone that occurrence for the longest possible time. After Lancaster informed her of the meeting in which Tancrel and Russell had proposed their illegal smuggling operation, Jessie’s response was directly contradictory to her previous advice. Whether this was intentional or not, it was clearly slanted to her advantage:

  I can’t understand what you mean by the whole thing being a wash-out. . . . Having spent so much time and money, not to mention hardships, it seems an awful pity to give up now. If you come back now I don’t know what the hell we are going to do. I know you are worried about me, but there is no need to be.

  Haden has been a peach and the odd bucks that he earns criticizing manuscripts and playing bridge has kept the troops going. If you all come back broke I don’t know how I’m going to feed you! Haden and I frequently make a meal out of half [the dog’s] hamburger, but with you and Gent that wouldn’t work so well. Also we are working very hard at the writing. . . . Haden simply can’t work with you and Gent and . . . all the excitement that went on before. Of course I miss you like the very devil, but I do so want to get this book out and make enough money to buy a schooner, and then we’ll all ride out the Depression in the South Sea islands. How does that appeal to you darling?

  If you could just make enough over there to keep yourself and stick it out until we get this book written I really think it would be better than us all being in a flat spin here. The season is almost over here and I’m certain you couldn’t make enough for cigarettes. . . . The Robin isn’t suitable for finding pupils, either—and where are you going to find the pupils?

  This house was a madhouse before and it was impossible to get anything done. You used to yank Haden downtown with you every day and he was just wasting his time. . . . Do weigh it up carefully, dear, and write me what you think. . . . Of course if you ever do have a buck or two weighing down your pockets I should be quite glad to keep them from pulling your suit out of shape!!

  In Jessie’s next letter she seemed her old caring self again, warning Lancaster, “Watch your step, my darling, as I’m certain you are dealing with a damn slippery lot. . . . I do want you to be on your guard.” Her mixed messages accurately reflected the turmoil of her situation. But for Lancaster, they were a punishment that kept him wretchedly awake throughout the unforgiving hours of the night.

  12

  THE TORTURES OF THE DAMNED

  On Sunday, April 3, the day after Russell showed Lancaster the letters hinting at Jessie and Clarke’s affair, Lancaster paid a visit to the Los Angeles Metropolitan Airport in Van Nuys. A friend who worked there agreed to loan him the necessary fuel to fly back to Nogales. Russell had yet to deliver on his pledge to raise funds in the city; Lancaster was sorely tempted to abandon him and fly to Nogales alone.

  That night his suffering reached new lows. From the Padre Hotel he phoned Jessie repeatedly but received no reply. “Why!!” Lancaster wrote in his diary. The torment was too intense for him to sleep. At 4 a.m. he jotted, “Ill with nervous worry.” Desperate, he called Shelton for advice, but Shelton—who knew the truth about Jessie and Clarke—urged him not to do anything.

  On Monday Russell and an acquaintance, who Lancaster thought resembled a “tramp,” joined Lancaster at the airport in Van Nuys. He flew them up in the Robin for a tour of the city. “Russell says this man is putting $200 into Latin-American Airways,” Lancaster wrote in his diary. “Poor fish!!!” Russell continued insinuating that Jessie was having an affair, but Lancaster, despite his hellish night, upheld her honor. “Russell finishes himself as far as I am concerned,” he noted huffily, “because he talks about Chub in a nasty manner.”

  On their flight from Nogales to Los Angeles, Lancaster and Russell had been accompanied by a passenger named Mrs. Stewart, the wife of a mining engineer. Now Mrs. Stewart wanted to fly home. Lancaster, fed up with Russell’s false promises in Los Angeles, pledged to leave the following day. Despite his dislike of Russell, Lancaster agreed to pick him up at Burbank Airport for the flight to Nogales.

  The next morning, Lancaster and Mrs. Stewart drove to Metropolitan Airport to retrieve the Robin. But upon reaching the plane they were met by a federal agent who announced he was searching for Russell and Tancrel. The agent peppered Lancaster with queries about his recent travels before finally letting him go. Wary of becoming caught up in Russell’s impending arrest, Lancaster told Mrs. Stewart they should avoid Burbank Airport and instead depart for Nogales immediately. Having abhorred Russell from the start, Mrs. Stewart was more than happy to leave him behind.

  The pair flew six hours to Tucson, landing just before dark. They were picked up by Mrs. Stewart’s husband, Charles, who drove the remaining sixty miles to Nogales while chatting amiably with Lancaster about gold mining. After checking in at the Casa Ana Maria, Lancaster set out into the night to find Shelton, whom he located, blind drunk, at a Mexican bar. Once Shelton heard the story of the federal agent in Los Angeles, he enthusiastically supported Lancaster’s decision to cut all ties with Latin-American Airways.

  The night before, Jessie had finally answered one of Lancaster’s phone calls, right in the middle of a party. Caught off guard, she’d given the phone to Clarke. Surrounded by eavesdropping partygoers, Clarke had little choice but to reassure Lancaster that things were fine and the rumors were false. His soothing words failed to restore Lancaster’s confidence. Now, back at his hotel, Lancaster opened two fresh letters from Jessie, which she had mailed the previous Tuesday. He found them difficult to analyze. “Much disturbed,” he wrote in his diary, before repeating that he was “[i]ll with worry.” The entry ended on a plaintive note: “Chubbie, darling, what is it all about?”

  Lancaster and Shelton approached Tancrel the next morning and declared that they were through with Latin-American Airways. At first Tancrel wheedled and cajoled them, pleading for patience. When the two held firm, Tancrel furiously erupted, shouting insults and hinting ominously at violence. Following this “harrowing” (Lancaster’s term) confrontation, Tancrel tried to take ownership of Jessie’s propeller, but he had no money, and his efforts failed. After securing the propeller for themselves via a loan from Shelton’s father, Lancaster and Shelton drove to Tucson, lifting each other’s spirits by plotting their trip home to Miami. On the way they would visit Shelton’s father in St. Louis to discuss purchasing an amphibian for their planned West Indies–based passenger transport company. Freed from the burden of Latin-American Airways, the pair reconnected as friends, and their drive to Tucson was a merry one, despite the morning’s events.

  In Tucson they picked up the Robin at the airport, but a bolt sheared as they steered it out of the hangar, and the right side of the landing gear collapsed. The propeller cracked in pieces; fortunately, they had Jessie’s to replace it. Bu
t a great deal of additional damage remained, rendering Lancaster anxious about the delay and the steep cost of repairs. Shelton’s father again proved their only hope for assistance.

  That night Lancaster wrote to Jessie, “On our way back east, thank goodness. . . . Have been through hell, sweetie, but see daylight at last.” He also included a warning: “Russell and Tancrel may try to be vindictive. Take no notice of anything until I get back.” He was longing to see her and kiss her, he wrote, to take her on his knee and tell her everything. “Sweetheart, remember Port Darwin?” he pleaded. “We made it. Remember Andros? You made it. Well, I am going to make it this time. For us both, always.”

  That same night Shelton wired Jessie a blunter message: “Taking Bill to St. Louis. . . . Tell Haden keep both feet on ground. Bill trusts him, but Russell upset half the Lancaster-Miller organization by repeating scandal. Everything will be all right soon but remember Bill doing best possible for both.”

  Thanks to the skill of the Tucson mechanics, the Robin was fully repaired by Friday morning. But Lancaster and Shelton, to their great frustration, were stuck on the ground. Shelton’s father had yet to wire money for the eighty-nine-dollar repair fee and the hotel bill. Forced to wait, they whiled away their days mooning about the city and seeing movies with their remaining pocket change. Shelton remained “sober and a peach,” Lancaster noted in his diary. As Lancaster fretted and obsessed over Jessie, Shelton provided a genuinely sympathetic ear, proving himself to be “a true friend,” Lancaster wrote. Yet Shelton also tried to steel Lancaster against the possibility that Russell’s wife was correct.

  On Saturday, Lancaster wired Jessie, but her noncommittal reply filled him with worry. “If only she would say something nice, such as: Don’t worry, I still love you,” he complained in his diary. Shelton’s friendship continued to bolster him, leading to moments of decisiveness: “I have made a firm resolution to end all this mental strain—have it out! Then work for our common good. I adore her and want to see her happy.” But then the doubts would creep back in: “If only she did not drink while I was away, I would feel okay. . . . Is Haden Clarke trustworthy, is my problem.”

  The next day, still trapped at the El Presidio hotel in Tucson, Lancaster’s misery deepened. “Awakened with misgivings,” he wrote. “Suffer the tortures of the damned.” He had to get back to Miami. East, he bluntly wrote, “is where my life lies, everything I hold dear is there.” For the first time, he mentioned suicide: “If [Chubbie is] gone from me I will end this life. I can’t stand the strain much longer.” But as he described them, Lancaster’s emotions appeared more schizophrenic than suicidal; in the very same entry, he wrote, “I still have the courage to carry on. The uncertainty is hurting deep, though.”

  At Shelton’s urging, Lancaster again called Jessie, but he found her answers to be evasive and unemotional. Jessie, for her part, felt the matter needed to be discussed in person, not on the phone, hence her ambiguous responses. She told Lancaster she had mailed a letter to St. Louis, in care of Shelton’s father, explaining everything. “What is this letter in St. Louis?” Lancaster agonized in writing, regretting the phone call. “I don’t know whether I can stand any more shocks.” The year 1932, he wearily confessed, had been a disaster. “I love you, Chubbie—have done my best but failed.”

  The next day he wrote Jessie another letter in which he struck a more balanced tone. He admitted that the phone call had left him unhappy, and he protested that the “predicament in which I find myself now is not my fault. . . . You will remember Haden and you even urged me to commence that fatal Sunday when I left.” Things were difficult in Tucson: without money, he and Shelton had been “going hungry.” They hadn’t eaten for forty-eight hours, and the already skinny Lancaster had lost another ten pounds. But Lancaster also said the journey might have a positive outcome if Shelton’s father agreed to purchase an amphibian. In a moment of wishful thinking, he told Jessie that he knew she would never betray him. “Tell Haden I am not taking any notice of any scandal,” he added. “I know in my heart he is a sahib.” And, as always, there was the now-misplaced declaration of love: “You know, my sweet, the only thing in life that keeps me going is thoughts of you. I love you so sincerely that I will do anything I can to make you happy.”

  The days of endless waiting and the lack of food caused Lancaster and Shelton to get on one another’s nerves, despite their close friendship. Shelton’s promised funds had not arrived; not wanting to alienate his father before they discussed the amphibian, he had reached out to someone else, but this person hadn’t come through. Frantic to return home, Lancaster wired his friend Dorothy Upton a request for $150, just enough money to cover the repair and hotel bills, and to buy enough fuel to fly the Robin to St. Louis, where Shelton’s father awaited them. Upton, in a show of genuine friendship, immediately sent the requested money. After long days of frustration and hardship, Lancaster and Shelton were now free to leave.

  “As long as I have you I can fight and will win through eventually,” Lancaster wrote Jessie, in his final message from Tucson. “Courage will be required at this stage, more courage than I have ever been called upon to display—but am keeping the chin up. Hunger pangs are bad! . . . My sweet, when I see you I will tell you all that has happened.”

  13

  A MAN OF MANY SECRETS

  Haden Clarke was a man of many secrets, but none so potentially explosive as the one he admitted to Jessie after they had become physical: he had syphilis. In those pre-penicillin days, syphilis was a large-scale public health problem whose foul, painful symptoms and lack of effective treatment terrified the American public. Jessie was genuinely stunned by Clarke’s admission, not to mention appalled. But Clarke was so obviously miserable, his hangdog expression so pathetic, that she couldn’t help but feel sympathy.

  Soon enough, Jessie’s shock and disgust began to recede, to be replaced by the conviction that loving someone meant forgiving their past improprieties. It wasn’t Clarke’s fault, she reasoned, that he had been unlucky. In a firm but loving manner, she told him she stood by him completely, but that he had to quit alcohol while he sought medical attention. She would show her support by abstaining from alcohol herself. She insisted, however, that she and Clarke could not get married until the disease had been fully treated, and Clarke received a clean bill of health.

  Clarke was grateful for Jessie’s understanding, but the thought of delaying their wedding panicked him. He wanted to marry Jessie before Lancaster arrived in Miami to try to win her back. Clarke promised Jessie that his own divorce would be settled any day, and there was nothing to prevent them from marrying immediately. But Jessie held firm. Now that Lancaster had broken free from Tancrel and Russell, she needed to tell him the truth. She and Clarke would write detailed letters explaining their relationship and their recent engagement. The letters would be posted to Shelton’s father’s house in St. Louis.

  When Lancaster and Shelton arrived in St. Louis, the letters Jessie and Clarke had composed were waiting. Lancaster was in a state of almost unbearable anxiety, whipsawing between hope and apprehension. But when he opened Jessie’s letters, any hope that the rumors swirling around her and Clarke had been false were immediately extinguished. “The inconceivable has happened,” Jessie wrote ruefully. “Haden and I have fallen in love.” She and Clarke wanted to get married. “I know that your one thought has been for my happiness, and feel that you will take it in the right way,” Jessie told Lancaster, with more confidence than she actually felt. But she didn’t shy away from the hurt: “It’s breaking my heart to tell you this, after all we’ve been through.”

  Clarke’s lengthy letter, which he’d written one week earlier, was, like Jessie’s, a mix of remorsefulness and resolve:

  You doubtless have read Chubbie’s letter, so there is no necessity for my relating again what has transpired. I wish, however, to explain with absolute honesty my attitude toward the whole thing and I am hoping against hope that I may be able to justify my action
in your mind and to regain, to some measure at least, the genuine friendship I am sure you felt for me. When you left you put a trust and confidence in me which I appreciated from the bottom of my heart. I considered your every interest my foremost duty, and my last thought was of anything that would harm or hurt you. . . .

  Please believe that no other power on earth could have moved me to fail you and that I would not have been swayed by this had I not been convinced beyond a shadow of a doubt that the thing was inevitable and unmistakably permanent.

  When this thing first dawned upon us a few days ago I weighed it carefully from every angle. No matter how I looked at it, I could find no possible course but the one I have taken. I did my damndest to make friendship kill my love for Chubbie, but it was a losing fight from the very beginning.

  No matter how I felt toward you this other thing was stronger.

  We both tried to talk each other out of it, but we could convince neither each other nor ourselves. . . . I don’t know what chance of happiness you and Chubbie had before this happened, but I am sufficiently sure of my ground to know with absolute finality that now it has happened neither Chubbie nor I can ever be other than miserable apart. I know it’s going to be a hell of a blow to you, old boy, but I am faced with the obvious choice of hell for one of us and heaven for two of us. . . .

  You have told me many times that your one aim was Chubbie’s happiness. I don’t know that my word means much to you now, but I give it that I will always do everything in my power to make her the happiest girl in the world. If I ever fail in this, I stand ready to answer to you for it. . . .

  Nevertheless, your attitude is going to be a dominating factor in the happiness of both of us and I am extremely anxious to know what it is. I am far from hopeful in this direction, but please wire me immediately and write fully regardless.