Flying Hero Class

by Thomas Keneally

  Pitiable remembrance had entered her face.

  “I’m sorry,” she continued. “I suppose I’m lucky, with a chance to visit my sister. The leisure to go all the way over there to Frankfurt.”

  With a lustrous sensuality still shining in her face, even in bereavement, how the gentlemen of Budapest, Arizona, must have longed to offer her fraternal comfort!

  She said, as if in fact she read the thought, “Oh, I had lots of friends. Ronnie never was strict. And he was a good quarter century older than me. What they call an issei. Him and his parents were in the detainment camps out there in the wilderness during the big war, and my parents were, too, though the two sets didn’t really know each other well. Ronnie himself was a kid in the camps, and his brother fought in the American issei battalions in Italy and was killed. When the war ended, my folks were scared of going back to California, so they stayed on in Arizona, market gardening near Flagstaff. Arizona people aren’t too bad. Very short on college professors, a place like Budapest. Very short on great minds of the Western world and table manners. Kind of limited, like I suppose I am. But not bad people. If you stick with them.”

  She hooded her eyes and let her mind run on the clientele of the Polka Barn and the populace of Budapest.

  “And I had lots of these friends, guys who were casual with me, and Ronnie was kind of lenient. But when Ronnie went, all those friends, men and women, didn’t mean anything at all, sir. All I wanted to do was draw close to my own blood, to my sister and the others. Why, I went all the way out to Los Angeles, to the Japanese fishing fleet, for the Shinto funeral of an uncle I’d only met when I was a kid, and never once since. I really liked that—that was a real funeral. The Shinto priest chanting in a beautiful black robe, and the fishing boats bobbing around out there behind his head on the Los Angeles River. Oh my, I even grew a little sad that Ronnie and I were Methodists. But you can’t be Shinto in a town like Budapest. It’s a town with some goodwill and nice people. But their range don’t extend to Shinto.”

  A sudden shriek of engines told Mrs. Nakamura that she couldn’t pursue any further for the moment the question of ancestral religion versus Methodism in Arizona. One of those plane tug machines had torn them away from their inertia and was harrying them out into the dark, toward what McCloud thought of as the unlikely duty of taking wing.

  There was always this excitement for McCloud to anticipate: by the end of a long flight, the aircraft seemed an entirely different vehicle than it had seemed at the start, as if while it sliced through the time zones it left some of its old nature behind and grew new matter, a new atmosphere, appropriate to the fresh hours it was screaming toward. Not even smoke fug or the stale recycled air ever convinced him it was otherwise.

  CHAPTER TWO:

  Taking Off and Taking Over

  From the trolley he ordered white wine—he would have enjoyed Scotch, the drink of the man from the Telegraph, Cale. But then Whitey Wappitji, on his way to the toilets, might see and give that little ironic flinch of the forehead and eyes, the one which implied that as a troupe they, McCloud maybe in particular, weren’t setting Bluey Kannata much of an example.

  Waiting for the wine, McCloud stood up and explained to a steward dispiritedly, without any hope of favors, that he was going back to visit his wife. The plane banked briefly, and he had a glimpse of Long Island suburbs below and the Atlantic blackness beyond. Probably even down there, a long way northeast of the magic city, they had seen Whitey, Bluey, Paul Mungina the didj man, on their televisions. They had seen Cowboy Tom Gullagara and Philip the Christian. The more modest fame he himself had come to New York for had evaded him, and despite his professional joy at the Barramatjara’s unrivaled success, those moist lights below struck him now with a deadly wistfulness.

  He was pleased when the plane leveled back so that he could see nothing but the soothing darkness. Reaching up from the windows to the limits of space’s infinite parabola.

  He’d brought with him to New York—a justifiable mix of business with business—his short stories in a paperback edition with a terrible cover and his unpublished novel. The novel had consumed three years—he’d gone free-lance to finish the thing, becoming a part-time tour administrator rather than the full-time one he had been, getting more work that way than he would have liked to but still not enough to add up to an economic existence of his own.

  Pauline was therefore his true patron. She went on working all throughout. She founded her own small company and became what he, by writing his book, forfeited becoming—a serious, known-in-the-trade tour administrator. She was wonderful at it. She could fly a youth orchestra and its instruments from Melbourne to Leningrad, she could ensure they all got through customs and onto the bus and into their beds at the hotel, and determine that coffee and pastries awaited them off stage during rehearsal breaks. She was impeccable at that sort of thing and in heavy demand. The truth was that this tour of the Barramatjara Dance Troupe was seen as too small in scope to waste her time with, and so her dilettante husband had been approached to manage it.

  Her dilettante husband had then proposed to her that the Barramatjara tour would be painless, a journey she could come on to spend time with her spouse away from the complications which beset the big tours she handled.

  The idea behind his being a dilettante arts administrator was that his sacrifice of career and time would be returned to the McClouds by the end of the American tour, when publishers would compete to reward him for his great antipodean tale.

  In the writing, he had used—looting and consecrating at the one time—their childhoods, his and Pauline’s, and the pattern of their parents’ marriages as the material of the story. This was the most serious ancestor worship he had ever committed himself to. He had spent a larger part of the three years in a state of exaltation over the book, the peculiar permanence it would give to his memories and his parents and even—by extension—to the brisk, reliable, pretty woman he had married.

  While the extraordinary Barramatjara Dance Troupe were being photographed by Vogue or Harper’s Bazaar, he had been in the office of an agent far downtown whose name had been given to him. The agent was intelligent to the point of scaring him, but her cramped little office in Hudson Street had a “little magazine” atmosphere to it, as if she represented many of the worthy, a few of the famous, and none of the rich.

  She had received a copy of his novel weeks before, and McCloud had hoped that the gimcrack bookshelves, the yellowing stacks of New York Review of Books, the old-fashioned desk, the battered steel door with its obsolescent steel bar—the sort of out-of-date security device which stated most directly and most brutally that this office sat, and this woman breathed, in a besieged city—that all that would be transmuted to a sort of glamour by her literary enthusiasm for his book.

  She had certainly approved of his book. But no one abandons a career, strains forth, and weighs sentences for three years for the sake of approval. Instead of declaring it unique, she mentioned a dozen obscure American books of which it reminded her. She implied that it was already treading water in a flooded market. But that she might be able to find a place for it.

  She had sent copies to nine publishers, she said, three of whom had, while Wappitji and Bluey exercised their casual dominance over the American media, rejected it. The agent did not say reject. She used the term passed on it. An imprint, as they called it, a section of a large publisher but with its own line of books, generally worthy ones, had made an offer—$10,000, which the agent thought she could up to $12,000.

  “Four thousand dollars per year, that means,” said McCloud. “Because it took three years to write.”

  “It’s rotten,” the agent agreed. “It’s normal. But God knows, there are possibilities. Books do get found and taken up. They attract paperback and movie deals.…”

  But he didn’t really want wealth, he tried to explain. It was that he wanted to be taken seriously as an artist, and some instinct of his told him that in this commercial
republic publishers took writers seriously with money.

  He hadn’t had the nervous strength yet to confront Pauline with this offer conveyed to him, without promises of certain acclaim, by the agent. Just the same he knew Pauline would take it better than he had. She might actually be proud of him for finding a New York publisher; it wasn’t in any case the major question of her life. She would forgive all too easily a failed literary husband. If he wanted it, she would make all-too-generous room for him in her company.

  He didn’t know what to do in this matter of the imprint’s offer. As the agent had said, it was very likely better to cast your bread upon the waters.

  Making his way aft, he was half hoping that the aisles would be full of cocktail trolleys so that he could have a pensive few minutes dawdling behind them. But the way to the back of the plane was totally clear. All the passengers wore a locked-in, dazed look under the needlessly severe lighting.

  He stopped by her seat. She was jammed in between a plump man determinedly taking up space to one flank. To the other was a freckled and rawboned young mother holding a sleeping baby, and a scholarly-looking young Pakistani or Arab reading U.S. News and World Report. She should not try to haul herself over the fat man, he indicated by gesture. She should essay the mother and child and the Pakistani/Arab and meet him at the back.

  This was not easily performed without crushing and waking the baby. But the young student of international affairs made things easy by standing in the aisle. Pauline thanked him with a nice, sad-eyed smile.

  Before meeting the Hudson Street agent, McCloud had of course envisioned a time when they would both fly ceaselessly together, gusted across oceans by weather fronts of literary applause.

  When Pauline and McCloud reached the toilets at the back, he poured two cups of water and handed one to her. She didn’t refuse to take it—thank God, she didn’t play such heavy-handed symbolic games. But she did refuse to take it without question.

  “What’s this for?”

  “To stop our brains from drying out. At this altitude, I mean.” He drank his in front of her, as if he were displaying to a child the lack of tartness in a given medicine. She began to sip hers.

  She was brown-haired and had fine features. A small woman who cocked her head. She carried on each hip a small rich wedge of flesh. In fifteen years’ time, of course, she might consider such congenital baggage a curse. At the moment it made her a symmetric little woman, and McCloud wished that both for the sake of the disorder between them and the joy it would be, they could sit for a time spaciously with each other and even try a few caresses. The deregulation of the aircraft industry had so cramped the interior of planes, however, that no broad gestures were possible.

  Pauline said, “I’ve been thinking. I have work backing up in the office. Deborah’s trying to handle the Kirov tour of Australia and New Zealand on her own, and I don’t know if she can really do that. I should really go home early from Frankfurt.”

  “No,” he said. “We all need you. The boys and I.”

  “Oh, I’m aware I’m handy. I know how to order a limo or charter a bus. But to be handy isn’t enough. I’m an unpaid supernumerary, and it’s infallible in this business that that’s the person who always ruins things. Especially if she’s a wife or a girlfriend.”

  He took her hands and said something plain about her being more than handy to him.

  But she went on talking—not like the harridans of old, for whom he had been trained by his father’s generation and by received male folk wisdom—but levelly, a modern woman, if you like; a woman afloat in her own water. She said, “You certainly needed time away from me. After the book, and all that dependence. My God, you needed a break. And that’s okay by me. You know I don’t go for the deathless-love idea, or perpetual joy-in-each-other’s-company.

  “But what’s offensive about you, Frank, is that no sooner do you decide it would be really good to be away from your old woman than you get guilty, and you go to her and say, ‘Please, please, come on the American and European tour. I’ll feel ashamed of myself if you don’t come.’ And so I spend some thousands of dollars of my own money so that you won’t feel uncomfortable about leaving me behind. I can’t believe I did it! I’d like to think I’m not as stupid as that. I could have spent two weeks reading and diving on the Great Barrier Reef. Instead I’m unpaid labor and a fifth wheel.”

  He tried to make the standard reassurances, but she held up her hand.

  “And then there’s the other side of the equation, mate!” she told him. “Because you’ve gone to the trouble of talking the old girl into coming along, even against your own profoundest desires, you all at once feel worthy enough to unload some of your tasks on me. You become entertainment-and-booze officer for your dancers, for example, and leave the hard-edged stuff to me. And you feel entitled too to charge down on other women in my presence. If I weren’t here you’d be too busy, too professional, for any of that. But you know that with me here you can be a fool and neglect things and I’ll tidy up after you. Because, after all, I do entire dramatic and dance companies. While everyone knows you’re a novelist, and no one distracts you with more than a chamber orchestra or a dance ensemble.”

  The termagants he had somehow been raised to expect left their men with moral room in which to maneuver. They overstated the treachery and foulness of their target. Each declared her man the worst who ever breathed, and on good evidence he knew he probably wasn’t; was too lacking in strength of purpose and in pathology to be the worst bastard alive! Pauline went in for accuracy, though, and left you with nothing, no grounds, no headroom for balancing and weighing with yourself, no saving and absolving rage.

  Instead of a gracious anger, therefore, McCloud felt melancholy and the genuine weight of his pitiable wrongdoings.

  “And the other thing I did which was utter stupidity,” said Pauline, “was to go looking for you and that Slavic blonde. You’re downstairs at the reception, and the speeches are still going on. And she says in your ear that there are some paintings on the second floor she wants to show you—the best acrylics are up there, little Miss Hotblood says. Barely three years out of Lodz and she knows about the best American Indian paintings. A fast learner, this little Miss Poland!”

  “The speeches had ended,” McCloud found himself gently insisting.

  “Oh, good! Had the applause? You surely aren’t telling me the best thing to do as soon as the speeches have ended is to run upstairs to a remote corner of a gallery? If so, it’s a convention no one else in the gallery last night followed.”

  There was an explanation for both mysteries, the mystery of insisting Pauline travel with him, the mystery of the Polish aficionado. And Pauline—he knew—would accept the explanation in both cases and be reconciled. But the sad thing was he could not utter it. First, of course, the story of his literary failure, or a success so meager to be worse than failure. Perhaps it had made him susceptible to the attentions of a Pole, to that heroic, that solemn, that spacious accent, to that farthest East of Europe pronouncing so piquantly on the farthest West of America.

  And then there was jealousy. Pauline had mentioned the Kirov. Who was bringing the Kirov to eastern Australia, to the plush, balletomaniac cities of Sydney and Melbourne? An impresario named Peter Drury, who had been divorced at forty and had since grazed sensitively and with a sense of droit du seigneur among the handsome women of Sydney; who kept on telling feature writers that mere girls, popsies, sheilas, mere heartiness and animal generosity, weren’t enough for him and never would be; who drank like a sailor and looked like an athlete; and who kept sending work to Pauline’s company and would tell powerful people at cocktail parties that she was the best there was.

  Sometimes, after much booze and even in the bed he shared with Pauline, he dreamed of Drury and Pauline together—the dreams arose like revelations—and it all caused him a curious and unique pain and brought an unspeakable sense of nullity.

  The nullity had been assuaged by the Sla
v’s attentions.

  If he therefore confessed something as ancient and unfashionable as jealousy, he would be forgiven. He knew it was a coherent explanation, too, but he could not humble himself to make it.

  So he fell back on impotent and conventional pleadings.

  “I think you have to make allowances for honest impulse,” he said. “The girl is an acknowledged expert in Navajo acrylics. I think that what you saw up there … We stumbled into each other.” In fact, he could have told Pauline, he was so drunk with California wine and with spirits that, admiring one of the Navajo sand paintings, he had toppled into the girl, and she had held him and then, with greater grace, opened her moist mouth. And he had thought how ignorant this woman was of his literary paltriness and how attractive that made her. Whereas Pauline would in the end sniff it all infallibly on his breath.

  Beyond everything, the fantasy which attaches to women who do not know you, cannot read you, attached to this Solidarity refugee who had an interest in Navajo acrylics!

  “But you’re right, of course,” he hurried to say; since Pauline was right and nothing could come from a merciless reiteration of his New York behavior. “I was totally pissed. I behaved like an adolescent.…”

  That, at least, was an easy version to pronounce.

  Now he had to make way for a solid woman with a beatific face who wanted to get into one of the toilets. Both the McClouds waited, trying miserably to make all this look like normal discourse. Until the woman was inside and they heard her shoot the lock.

  “Don’t misunderstand me,” said Pauline then. “I don’t mind that the blonde from Lodz fancied you—or that if I hadn’t been trapped into following you the worst might have happened. A lot of girls who kiss quick don’t always come good in the end. I’m just asking for consistency. Either you don’t want to travel with your wife, and in that case you are free to go upstairs with any Navajo art expert as soon as the speeches are done, incurring nothing but mild disapproval from your peers. Or else you do travel with your wife and disqualify yourself from clearing out up the stairs before the applause for the welcoming of the Barramatjara Dance Troupe has ended. It isn’t glands I’m complaining about, McCloud. It’s mere fucking manners! And it’s professional standards, too. I wonder, for example, what Whitey really thinks about you as a manager!”