During the week of rain, Rette, unable to stay away from the airport, did her first “hangar flying,” as Pat called the endless discussions of air experiences that go on among pilots or students. She picked up a vocabulary that was new and vivid and fascinating, and showed off extravagantly before her parents and Gramp by using expressions like “prop wash” and “fishtail” and “CAVU.”
Before Tony, however, Rette subsided, fearing to be corrected or teased. She was secretly disappointed because Tony showed little interest in her flying. He seemed to be walking around with his head in a private set of clouds these days.
Before the rains descended, Elise had gone up on her first dual hop, Rette on her second. Rette still found it hard to believe that Elise could actually be interested in the business of flying. It seemed so out of character. To Loretta, Elise epitomized everything that was feminine. She reminded her of a line of a song that was popular a few years back:
“The girl that I marry will have to be
As soft and as pink as a nursery....”{2}
Satins and laces and eau de cologne seemed to be Elise’s birthright, not the jargon of the airport and the flying of planes.
She didn’t even dress the part of the student pilot. She wore a sweater and a tweed suit on the day she took her initial lesson, instead of the slacks or dungarees Rette affected, copying girl flyers in magazine illustrations she had seen.
Not that slacks were in the least necessary. Sitting in the cabin of the little Cessna was as comfortable as sitting behind the wheel of any car. The only difference was that the plane didn’t drive like a car. It sounded like one and it smelled like one and it was even interior-decorated to look a little like one, but Pat had been right in saying that the wing and the wheel were contradictory. Rette was already finding it out.
During Rette’s second lesson in the air, Pat taught her to do turns to headings, sighting an object at a 45-or 90-or 180-degree angle to the plane and turning until she approached it, then rolling out. She did some climbing turns too, and just when she was settling back in her seat, feeling rather satisfied with herself and calmly looking out to the right and left as the ground fell away beneath the ascending plane, several things happened in quick succession.
“You’re banking too steeply,” Pat called. “That’s all right in a level turn, but not in a climb.” Then, soon after Rette had leveled off, Pat snapped, “Bring your left wing up!” A few seconds later, “Your nose is too low.”
It seemed to Rette, in the next ten minutes, that she couldn’t do anything right. In her next turn she forgot to neutralize and handled the stick as she would have handled the wheel of her bike, keeping on pulling it around after she was in a turn. Then Pat criticized because she failed to co-ordinate her ailerons and rudder. “You’re horsing the plane around too much,” she said.
By this time Rette was feeling as jittery as a newly saddled colt. She felt confused and incapable of remembering any of Pat’s instructions. Her mental picture of how a plane flies wavered and disappeared. She concentrated so hard on the controls that she became jerky and tense, and Pat rapped out one criticism after another as Rette tried to follow instructions.
“Pull your nose down to the horizon. Look before you make a turn. Don’t jerk the stick that way!”
Rette’s self-confidence evaporated into the blue air. “Relax,” Pat said finally. “I’ll take the controls for a minute. Look around and tell me where we are.”
Rette looked down on a toy village of neat streets and houses. “Why, were right over Avondale,” she said.
“Where do you live?” Pat asked.
“On Cherry Tree Road.”
Pat manipulated the plane skilfully into a quarter turn. “Your house ought to be off the right ring, almost directly below.”
“It is!”
Rette wished there were someone in the garden, so that she could wave. The row of maples beside the garage was tinted with green, and the forsythia by the back fence was a blaze of yellow, even from this distance.
But Pat didn’t give her long to feast her eyes. “All right, now,” she said. “Advance your throttle and climb to two thousand feet.”
For twenty minutes longer Rette worked with the intense concentration Pat demanded. She climbed out of the plane finally, spent and unsure of herself. Gone was the exhilaration of the first flight, gone the sense of immense capacity. Rette realized for the first time why flying is difficult to learn—because her instincts, her most deeply established habits of mind and body, kept tempting her constantly to do the wrong thing.
Walking back to the airport office, after leaving the Cessna on the line between a Piper trainer and an Ercoupe, Pat said, “Remember when I asked you to climb to two thousand feet back there?”
Rette nodded.
“You climbed so steeply you came within a hairsbreadth of going into a stall. For a minute I didn’t think you’d make it.”
Rette looked concerned. “What would have happened?”
“Plenty.” Pat grinned roguishly. “Next time we go up we’ll try some stalls—not accidentally though—on purpose.”
Riding home from the airport, Rette did no singing on this day. Her eyes were thoughtful, and for the first time in her life she felt abashed at the prospect of being put to a physical test.
Flying she considered a sport, and at all other sports—hockey, basketball, tennis—she was an acknowledged leader. Incited by competition, she had always learned a new game quickly, and she had early recognized the sense of power that comes from conquering an opponent. The thrill of winning could make her eyes sparkle and her blood run quick.
But in flying Rette missed the stimulation of the fight. Each time she went up she came to a deeper realization that this was something entirely different in her experience. Flying was something one did alone. There was no competition to spur her on. She would stand or fall on her individual performance, as would Elise.
Rette wondered about Elise and decided to ask Pat, next time she came out for a lesson, how her classmate was getting along. No matter how clumsily she herself handled the controls, Rette was fairly certain that Elise’s performance wouldn’t match her own. She didn’t realize that she was unconsciously seeking a rival, so that she would feel more at home.
When Rette reached the house on Cherry Tree Road, Gramp was sitting on the back terrace on a straight kitchen chair, hauled out in lieu of the garden furniture, which was still stored in the basement under its winter covering of newspapers. His face was turned to the sun, and he was swathed in such a bulky overcoat that he looked like a wise old turtle, sticking up his scrawny neck to peer around.
Gramp nodded and smiled, sensing his granddaughter’s mood before she had said a word. “Flying not going so good?”
Rette sat down on the flagstones and hugged her knees. “It’s not the flying: it’s me,” she admitted. Then she tried to explain her difficulty to Gramp. “I seem to have a blind spot. I can’t seem to help thinking of the stick the way I think about a handle bar on a bike or a wheel on a car. And it doesn’t work that way at all. It looks like a wheel, but it isn’t.” Then she laughed at the confusion of her own description. “It’s hard to explain what I mean.”
But Gramp nevertheless nodded sympathetically. “Don’t be impatient, Lark,” he told her. “It will come.” His blue eyes seemed to look back over the years and he chuckled, half to himself. “I remember when I was learning to drive a car,” he said. “It’s like it was yesterday.”
Rette waited, while Gramp paused and reflected. How anything so long ago could seem like yesterday was hard to understand, but she always humored Gramp when he drifted back over the years and tried to follow him on his wanderings, when older people were apt to be inattentive or brusque.
“I had just got my license,” Gramp said after a while, “and you can bet I was proud. I was driving down High Street on the way to your grandmother’s—we weren’t married yet, but we were engaged—when out of Cuthbert Avenue, l
ike a little black beetle, darts one of those electric runabouts ladies used to drive. I wasn’t accustomed yet to meeting another car unexpected, and d’you know what I did?”
Rette shook her head. “What?”
“I pulled on the wheel and hollered, ‘Whoa!’” said Gramp, “just like I was driving my father’s team.”
Rette laughed at the picture. “Did you have a smashup?”
“Nope,” Gramp said, almost sorrowfully. “That little electric scooted around the corner and hugged the curb, though, you can bet.”
It was hard for Loretta to imagine a time when there were so few automobiles that each was endowed with a personality, as the cars in Gramp’s stories always seemed to be. It seemed odd to think of clutch and brake pedals as strangely behaved, hard to understand, tricky to handle, yet that was just the way she herself had been thinking of the controls of a plane.
Rette rocked back and stared out across the lawn. There had been nothing wrong with Gramp’s reactions, she decided, only with his intentions. An image in his head had made him see the automobile he was driving as a sort of mechanized horse. Had he seen clearly in his mind’s eye the clutch that can disconnect the motor, the brakes that can clamp down on the wheels, he would then have done the right thing instinctively.
“Yes,” Rette said out loud. “That’s right.”
“What?” Gramp asked.
“I was just thinking out loud,” Rette told him. “I’ll bet, Gramp, that I’m having the same trouble you had. You didn’t really understand a car, and I don’t really understand very much about how an airplane flies—not really. Maybe if I could get so that I could see in my mind how an airplane works. I’d do the right thing just naturally.”
“Maybe you would,” Gramp admitted. “It’s worth a try.” Rette was still busy with the same line of thought when she walked, in the evening, over to Jeff Chandler’s house, her math book tucked reluctantly under her arm.
She was going to Jeff’s because he had wrenched his ankle sliding home in a sand-lot baseball game, and the doctor had advised him to keep off it as much as possible for a few days. The number of the house, 128 Potter Street, was firmly fixed in her mind, and Rette scanned the plates above the doors of the row of little houses as she hurried along.
The April dusk was soft, and Rette could see a pink reflection from the sunset in the eastern sky. The trees on Potter Street were few but old, and they bent kindly over the weathered houses, shading the high front porches with their delicate new leaves.
“Rette! Hi, there!” Jeff’s whistle stopped her, and Loretta turned up a short cement walk. Using a cane, Jeff hobbled across the narrow porch to meet her. “It was swell of you to come here.”
“I don’t mind a bit,” Rette said honestly. “Except that it’s too nice a night to do math.”
Jeff grinned. “Are you right!” he agreed. “Let’s get it behind us in a hurry.” He held open the door.
The living room Rette entered was small and square and lacked the welcome of a fireplace. A bridge lamp turned on beside an overstuffed chair, shone on the bent head of a spare, neat woman who was threading a needle with mercerized cotton. For a second longer she concentrated on what she was doing. Then she looked up quickly and smiled.
“Mother, this is Rette Larkin.”
Rette thought she had never seen a kindlier smile on a person’s face. Mrs. Chandler’s eyes were shaded by glasses, but her mouth was warm and generous and so expressive that Loretta liked her immediately.
“Rette,” she said, holding out her hand. “How do you do? Jeff’s been telling me about you.”
“About what a dummy I am at algebra?”
“About how bright you are at writing! And now I hear you’ve won the flying prize.” She glanced briefly at her son. “I suppose learning to fly is every young person’s dream.”
“It’s wonderful,” Rette admitted with an inadvertent catch in her voice. “Now don’t get to talking shop,” Jeff warned his pupil. “You’re here to work.” He turned on the light above a round dining-room table and drew up two chairs.
“Talk to me later,” Mrs. Chandler urged, settling back in her chair with a square of linen in her hand. “I want to hear all about it, firsthand.”
Loretta and Jeff worked for nearly an hour. Then Jeff leaned back in his chair and said: “I’m giving you up—as of tonight. You ought to be able to breeze through any algebra test now, Rette. You’ve really caught on to what it’s all about.”
Rette grinned shyly and nodded. “I even feel different about it.” She sighed reminiscently. “But it took an awful lot of doing.”
Jeff laughed. “I guess anything important usually does.”
Rette’s mind flashed to her flying lessons, and she nodded. Then she snapped her fingers. “Say, I almost forgot! There’s a little lunchroom, for soft drinks and sandwiches, opening in the wing of the farmhouse where the flight office is. I thought you might like to know.”
“Me?”
“I was thinking there might be a job—” Suddenly Rette stopped, conscious of what a poor substitute for the real thing she was offering to Jeff—a chance to watch the planes take off and come in when what he wanted to do was to fly. A flush crept up her neck, and she pushed back her chair and started toward the living room. “Skip it. Maybe I’ve been talking out of turn.”
But Mrs. Chandler had also heard. “A job for Jeff?” She looked at her tall son. “That might be interesting—or at least more fun than driving a truck for the Avondale Market. Mightn’t it?”
“It might,” Jeff agreed, and Rette knew that he was thinking that to be close to his heart’s desire would be something—even if the nearness was purely physical—a spot on the other side of a lunch counter that catered to the flyers and students at Wings. At least he could hear the jargon of the air; at least he would get a chance to meet the pilots and plane owners. And—who could tell?—perhaps he might even get an occasional chance to go up.
With the realization that Jeff wasn’t offended, Rette’s discomfiture evaporated. “If the man needs a helper, it would probably be for afternoons and weekends,” she said. “They’re the busy times.”
Jeff raised a finger. “I’ll mush along out there and investigate, Rette. Thanks for the tip.” Then he asked, “How are your lessons going by now?”
“I’ve only had two,” Rette said modestly, but the Chandlers began to ask questions, and within five minutes Rette found herself talking unrestrainedly to Jeff and his mother. In the eyes of both there was a light of interest so utterly genuine that she couldn’t fail to respond.
“I don’t want to make the same mistake I did in math,” Rette confessed. “I want to get my fundamentals straight at the start. And I feel there’s a lot more I ought to know about how a plane flies—and why. I wish there were a book—”
“But there is!” Jeff cut in. “Haven’t you ever heard of Stick and Rudder? I understand it’s practically the bible of beginning flyers. Ask Tony about it. He may even have a copy, Rette.”
So when she went home Rette did ask Tony. He was lying full length on the sofa, listening to the radio, and he shouted above the music, “Sure. Look in my bookcase upstairs.”
Rette found a well-thumbed brown book, scrambled into her pajamas, and lay across her bed flipping through the pages. When Tony came upstairs, he poked his head into her door.
“Make anything out of it, Small Fry?”
“Not much,” Rette admitted. “It looks more complicated than college chemistry.”
Knowing his young sister’s aversion for math and all allied subjects, Tony tried to be consoling. “Start at the beginning. Read a paragraph at a time. Take it slowly. You’re always in such a rush.”
Then, as though it had suddenly occurred to him, he came in and sat on Rette’s window seat and started to quiz her about flying, much as Jeff had. But instead of talking about herself, Rette found that she wanted to talk about Jeff. She told her brother about his enormous desire to learn to f
ly, about the feeling that was almost like a sense of guilt which attacked her at intervals because she had won the prize, and not he.
Tony looked at Rette, sitting cross-legged on the bed and leaning forward, her elbows on her knees, intense and earnest. He smiled gently. “I think you kind of like the guy.”
Rette’s flush was hot and immediate. “Don’t be silly,” she shot back. “Jeff goes around with Elise Wynn.”
“Variety is the spice of life,” Tony quoted, his eyes twinkling.
“You don’t seem to think so.”
But Tony only winked. “Tell you what I’ll do for your boy friend,” he said. “I’ll take him up with me a couple times—I’m qualified to instruct—and if he’s got any natural ability, it’ll show up fast. Then we can go on from there.” He unwrapped his long legs and stood up, grinning at Rette’s look of astonishment as he sauntered out of the room.
Rette jumped off the bed and ran to the door the instant she recovered. “He’s not my boy friend,” she insisted, “but, golly, thanks, Tony. Jeff will be thrilled to death.”
It was only after she had gone into the bathroom and started to brush her teeth that she suddenly stopped and stared into the mirror. “Well, I’ll be darned!” she muttered. “The way men hang together! My own brother, and he wouldn’t do as much for me!”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Rette sat on the grass in front of the office at Wings Airport and watched Elise Wynn walk across the field with Pat Creatore toward the same Cessna trainer in which she was scheduled to go up an hour from now.
It was such a beautiful May morning, sunny and unseasonably warm, that she had come out early to the airport just to be here, just to sit in the sun and soak up the color of the scene—the line of varicolored planes, the busy mechanics in their white coveralls fussing over a ship under repair outside the hangar, the occasional arrival or departure of a trainer like the one Elise would fly.
Betty Cavanna Page 12