“They’re very good,” Amanda said.
Adrian glowed. “When I showed them to my mother, she said ‘most poets die poor.’”
“What’s wrong with being poor? All the Mexican pickers at our grove are poor. But they’re happy.”
As Adrian opened the door of the taxi that would take Amanda back to Wellesley, she kissed him on the lips. “I like you,” she said.
When Amanda told her roommate about the kiss, she was horrified. “You can’t be that forward. It just isn’t done in this part of the country. He’ll never call you again.”
Adrian called the next night to arrange another Saturday lunch at the Crimson Cafe—and a trip to the movies after it. That soon became a Saturday routine. At lunch Adrian read her other poems full of sadness and anger at life’s cruelty. Amanda sensed some wound deep in his soul and longed to heal it. She also discerned how lonely he was at Harvard. He seemed to have made almost no friends.
Adrian said he did not get along with New Yorkers even though he had been born there. They were only interested in making money. He disdained Bostonians—although he had numerous cousins there—because they thought making money was vulgar. At other times he claimed most of his fellow students were childish. “They haven’t found out what life is all about,” he said. “You have to read history—and experience it—to do that.”
As Amanda puzzled over his melancholy, Adrian invited her for dinner with his mother at her Beacon Hill town house on a rainy night in late March 1916. Amanda wore a loose blue lace dress and a soft blue velvet hat she had rushed into Boston to buy the previous day. Clarissa was regal in black silk and a pearl choker. She sat with her back as straight as a West Point cadet’s, barely smiling as Amanda said hello.
She was awed by Clarissa’s hauteur. Amanda was sure there were no women like her in California. Her own mother, so indifferent to clothes and style, so moody and impulsive, gave her no preparation for dealing with such glacial self-control. Clarissa was a block of dark New England ice. Trembling, Amanda understood Adrian’s melancholy. This woman did not know how to love anyone—even a son.
“Adrian tells me you’re from California,” Clarissa said. She made it sound as if it were a communicable disease.
“Yes,” Amanda said. She talked nervously, defensively, about her birthplace. “I had a letter from my mother yesterday. The temperature hasn’t gone below seventy since January. I told her here it hasn’t gone above twenty-five.”
“No question, the entire state is a gigantic playground,” Clarissa said. “But doesn’t that get rather boring? You can’t play all the time.”
Floundering, Amanda pictured herself as the heroine of her favorite novel, Ramona. She too had been despised by arrogant easterners. But she had found pride and love in her California heritage. “We don’t play all the time,” she said. “We’ve produced some important literature.”
“Oh?”
“Frank Norris’s The Octopus, Mary Austin’s The Land of Little Rain.”
By this time they had sat down to dinner. Clarissa carefully carved another small slice from her lamb chop. “Personally, I prefer Richard Henry Dana’s view of California.”
Amanda replied with equal care: “He was one of those New Englanders who hated California.”
“He loved it on his first visit. It was his second visit that disillusioned him. It had changed so utterly—for the worse.”
“He hated it,” Amanda said. “The second visit was his way of satisfying his puritan conscience for falling in love with it the first time.”
“You think poorly of a puritan conscience?”
“My father says California makes puritanism superfluous.”
Amanda glanced at Adrian. He was watching them with disbelieving eyes. He apparently never imagined anyone could challenge his formidable mother this way. In spite of his adult physique, he looked like a bewildered boy.
Love, the emotion that Amanda’s father had taught her was life’s noblest experience, stirred in her soul. With it came a wish to share with Adrian the richest memory of her childhood, the gift her father had told her she could only offer to the Precious One.
In the silence at dawn her mother and father and Amanda and her brother Gordon drank cool orange juice on the porch of their turreted white mansion, which her father had named Casa Felicidad, the house of happiness. They stepped out of their night clothes and walked naked among the blossoming trees. “There is no shame,” her father said. “California is a new beginning. We can stop believing in ridiculous things like God. We’re free to be noble and good without God.”
He let Amanda touch the dangling part of his body. She put her hand into the russet hair beneath her mother’s belly and felt her cleft. Her brother Gordon did the same things. Then in the dawn stillness on the dewy grass with orange blossoms drifting around them her father and mother showed Amanda and Gordon how men and women loved each other.
Amanda gazed at Adrian and spoke the meaning of this memory carefully, softly, intending the words only for him, indifferent to what Clarissa thought. “For those who believe in it, California is Eden,” she said.
WAR HERO
A week after he brought Amanda Cadwallader to dinner, Adrian Van Ness visited his mother’s Beacon Hill town house for tea. She was wearing the pearl choker that Geoffrey Tillotson had given her for her fortieth birthday. The Tiffany lamp beside the tea table cast a golden glow on the silvery jewels.
“Your little girl from the golden West is charming,” Clarissa said. “So unspoiled. It’s hard to believe they even have schools out there.”
“I think I’m in love with her,” Adrian said.
“Darling, never confuse love and sympathy. You feel sorry for someone who’s such a lost lamb. Can you imagine her as hostess at a New York dinner party?”
“She’s very intelligent. She has excellent taste in poetry.”
“You mean she likes yours.”
Clarissa Ames Van Ness smiled mockingly at Adrian. She was so sure of her social and intellectual superiority, so certain of her ability to control her son. It was exactly what Adrian needed to convince him he was in love with Amanda Cadwallader.
Physically, Amanda was the total opposite of Adrian’s dark, elegant mother. Amanda’s face was long and angular, more sensitive than beautiful. Her slim body was almost boyish. Her streaming auburn hair proclaimed both her femininity and her western innocence. All of which made her attractive to Adrian.
Beneath his hyperactive intellect, Adrian was searching for a woman who would help him escape his mother’s looming presence. He was emotionally exhausted by their alternating bouts of affection and anger. He did not, he could not, stop loving Clarissa Van Ness. But he could not resolve her apparent indifference to his father’s fate.
Defying and irritating his mother—and enjoying every minute of it—Adrian continued to see Amanda. He struggled to change her mind about the war in Europe. But her California naivete was impenetrable. She simply insisted America had everything to lose and nothing to gain by entering the war. Her knowledge of European history was zero, her interest in it zero minus. She did not really argue. She believed. Adrian told himself it was part of her innocence. He even began to doubt his own arguments in favor of intervention.
They did not spend all their time arguing about peace and war. At the movies, Adrian teased Amanda about her resemblance to Mary Pickford, whose beatific smile and cascades of auburn ringlets had made her America’s sweetheart. Amanda disarmed him by taking his hand and whispering. “I only want to be your sweetheart.”
As spring advanced, they went for walks in the country and rows on the Charles River. Amanda was a fervent believer in exercise in the open air. On one of these excursions on the water, Amanda revealed more than an enthusiasm for California’s scenery behind her smile. Adrian grew weary at the oars and suggested they tie up at a grassy spot on the river above Watertown. They ate sandwiches Amanda had packed and washed them down with iced tea. The rich May
sunshine inspired Amanda to rhapsodies on California. In a month they would separate for the summer.
“Will you miss me?” Amanda asked.
“Yes,” Adrian said.
“A part of you likes me—and a part doesn’t.”
“That’s not so,” Adrian said, vehemently trying to conceal the truth from her—and from himself. His mother’s critique of Amanda often troubled him.
Amanda flung herself into his arms. Her kiss was wilder, more intense, than anything Adrian had ever imagined. He was still a virgin. In his head women were divided into good and bad. Some of his fellow freshmen were already sampling what the bad ones had to offer in Boston’s Scollay Square brothels. But Adrian had remained aloof from this ritual as well as the other forms of college friendship.
“There’s nothing to be ashamed of,” Amanda whispered. “Come to California and I’ll show you there’s nothing to be ashamed of.”
Dimly aware that he was being invited to play Adam to Amanda’s Eve, Adrian spent the summer in Maine resisting a procession of young women Clarissa considered more suitable than his California temptress. To his mother’s almost visible distress, the romance resumed when school reopened in the fall of 1916. Not even Amanda’s enthusiastic support of Woodrow Wilson’s campaign for a second term on the slogan “He kept us out of war” diminished Adrian’s ardor. There were more kisses on the Charles and more dinners on Beacon Hill at which Amanda jousted with Clarissa with growing skill.
Amanda reiterated her invitation to California, which acquired orgiastic overtones in Adrian’s mind. For a while he almost lost interest in the war in Europe. Then the Germans began proving all the nasty things interventionists like Adrian said about them, sinking American ships and trying to turn Mexico into a hostile foe on America’s flank. Woodrow Wilson’s balancing act on the neutrality tightrope ended with a crash and America declared war. Adrian wondered if this spelled finis to his romance with Amanda.
He was surprised—and pleased—to discover a warrior maiden on their next date. Like many other pacifists, she had been swept away by the president’s soaring call for America to wage a war without hatred or greed, to make the world safe for democracy. Her father had volunteered for the army the day he read Wilson’s speech in the Los Angeles Times.
On a Saturday night two months later, Adrian was lounging in his room, enjoying the prospect of taking Amanda to dinner in Boston. One of his floor mates said: “Van Ness. There’s a red-haired creature outside weeping and wailing to see you.”
Behind Amanda in Harvard Yard a battalion of seniors was practicing the manual of arms with wooden rifles. Like most of America, the school was feverishly committed to the war. Tears streamed down Amanda’s face. She clutched a telegram in her hand. FATHER KILLED TRAINING ACCIDENT STOP. RETURN HOME AT ONCE STOP. MOTHER VERY ILL.
Her tears stirred the guilt Adrian had felt the day they met, when he had mocked her pacifism. He was swept with a masculine desire to comfort this fragile, wounded creature. “Darling, it’s terrible. My heart breaks for you. But you have me. You have me to take care of you. I love you,” he said.
Adrian took Amanda back to Wellesley where sobbing friends helped her pack. He hired a taxi that took them to Boston where Amanda boarded a train in North Station for her return to California. He wiped away her tears and kissed her. “I’ll see you in a month. Two at the most.”
Adrian rushed to his mother’s house on Beacon Hill and announced his plan to move to California, marry Amanda Cadwallader and complete his education in some local college at night. “That is an absolutely absurd idea,” Clarissa said.
Before Adrian could begin to think of an answer, Clarissa outlined her plan for Adrian’s life. “I want you to become a man of substance, Adrian. You can’t do that growing oranges in southern California. You also can’t do it with a woman like Amanda for your wife. A man of substance needs a wife who glories in his success as her success, who understands his ambition and defers to it.”
Defer? Adrian raged behind his impassive expression. Is that what you did to my father? Is that what you call it?
“Your little California friend will never defer because she doesn’t understand. She doesn’t have a worldly mind, Adrian. I daresay no one in southern California does. One acquires worldliness painfully, through disappointment, yes, through pain. Through an awareness that there are winters as well as summers in every life, cold and snow and icy rain as well as sunshine.”
“She knows pain now,” Adrian said. “We both know it. We know what it means to lose a father.”
Adrian’s reply suggested more than the loss inflicted by death. It evoked the several ways he had lost Robert Van Ness. The implied accusation aroused his mother to fury. “Go to California if you want to. But you’ll go without a cent of my money.”
Adrian was stunned. For some reason—perhaps the unstinting way his mother had always given him money—it never occurred to him that she would invoke this ultimate weapon. He stalked out of the house and spent the next month in an agony of indecision. A letter from Amanda reported nothing but chaos and despair at Casa Felicidad. Her mother was having a nervous breakdown. Her overbearing older brother had taken charge of the orange groves and the household. She begged Adrian to join her as soon as possible.
Adrian spent a week composing a reply.
Dearest One:
Your letter tore at my heart. I wish I could rush to your side. But my mother is absolutely opposed to our marriage and has vowed to disinherit me if we go through with it. This leaves me in an impossible position. I can only see one solution: to submit and get my degree so that I can make my way in the world—which will, I hope, lead me with all possible speed to your side. Until that day, you have my undying love. Tell me I have yours.
Adrian showed the letter to his mother before he mailed it. It was a gesture of defiance but Clarissa chose to ignore it. She put her hands on Adrian’s shoulders. “That is a manly letter. And a wise one,” she said. “But I hope you don’t mean that last sentence about undying love.”
“I do.”
With a stifled cry she threw her arms around him. Adrian remained rigid, his arms at his side, refusing to return the embrace.
Clarissa kissed him on the forehead and let him go. Adrian retreated to the bathroom and wiped off the kiss with a cold washcloth. He knew it was an infantile gesture. But it had symbolic power.
Idealism thundered in Adrian’s soul. He was too young to fight to make the world safe for democracy. But he could and would make love and honor his guiding principles. He would marry Amanda Cadwallader and teach her to be the wife of a man of substance. He would acquire enough of that substance to defy Clarissa Ames Van Ness forever.
THE LAST PATROL
From ten thousand feet in the cloudless blue sky of November 1918, the Argonne battlefield was a crazy quilt of green fields and toy farmhouses and the dun gouged earth of no-man’s-land. Beside Lieutenant Frank Buchanan flew his wingmate and best friend, Captain Buzz McCall, who had painted death’s heads inside the red, white, and blue circles on his wings. They had transferred from the Lafayette Escadrille to the American Air Service when the United States entered the war in 1917.
Around them droned a half-dozen other planes in loose formation. They were finally flying swift stubby-winged French Spads, a plane that could outspeed and outdive the German Fokkers. For months they had been forced to fly Nieuport 28s, a tricky unforgiving plane that had killed more American pilots in training than the Germans had killed in combat. It stalled without warning and the wings had a tendency to fail in a roll or dive.
There were no American-designed planes on the western front. The inventors of the twentieth century’s miracle machine had barely advanced beyond the clumsy craft the Wright Brothers flew at Kitty Hawk, while the British, the French, the Germans, the Italians, all had fighter planes that could fly over a hundred miles an hour.
A burst of machine-gun fire on his left broke through Frank’s gloomy meditat
ion. It was Buzz McCall, telling him to wake him up. Buzz was squinting above and behind them. At first Frank could see nothing. The trick was not to focus your eyes but to let them roam the empty sky. It was one of the first things a pilot learned on the western front. A cluster of specks rapidly grew and acquired color: at least a dozen Fokker Dr 1 triplanes with black crosses on their green wings.
Down they came out of the sun, hoping for surprise. In their eagerness they forgot that their three winged planes, having very little weight and a lot of drag, dove slowly. They were violating one of the modern world’s fundamental laws, the machine must be obeyed before it will obey. The Americans had time to react.
Frank pulled back on the stick and shoved his right foot down on the rudder pedal. Up, up he soared into a loop. Just over the vertical he cut his engine and pulled the stick back sharply. There he was, slightly dazed by the gravity pounding his chest, behind the lead Fokker as the German came out of his dive. Frank’s Vickers .303 machine guns hammered and two streams of tracers tore into the German’s cockpit. The Fokker went into a writhing spin, an unmistakable death throe.
His fifth kill. He was an ace. He could hardly compare himself to Buzz McCall or Eddie Rickenbacker, who had five times that many victories. Moreover, he might soon be a dead ace if he did not do something about another Fokker on his tail. Red tracer bullets whizzed between his wings, snapping struts as Frank took violent evasive action, essing left and right, his brain turning to terrified mush.
Behind him the German abruptly spun out of control, smoke gushing from his engine. Buzz McCall hung on his tail, pouring extra bullets into him to make sure he was not faking. It was the tenth or eleventh time Buzz had saved Frank’s life.
Around them the sky was crisscrossed by diving, rolling, spinning Fokkers and Spads. Buzz pointed below them, where two Fokkers were about to give a floundering American the coup de grace. Down they roared to pull out on the Germans’ tails. Frank had a perfect shot at the Fokker on the right. He pressed the trigger. Nothing. Cursing, he grabbed a small hammer he wore around his wrist and whacked at one of the Vickers’ outside levers, just in front of his windshield. The guns stayed jammed.
Conquerors of the Sky Page 8