Conquerors of the Sky

by Thomas Fleming

  Adrian informed McCall that he was the new owner and asked if Frank Buchanan was in the building. “He’s been drunk for the last three months,” Buzz said. “Ever since he crashed Lustra Two.”

  Adrian sat down slowly. Gordon Cadwallader had shown him the press clippings of Lustra Two’s debut. They had convinced him that Buchanan Aircraft had a plane he could sell to the airlines.

  “How long will it take to build another one?”

  “That depends on when Buchanan sobers up.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He tore up all the designs. Ditto the blueprints. He did the same thing to the Lustra One files.”

  “I thought you had a half dozen orders for Lustra Ones.” Again, Adrian was relying on Gordon Cadwallader’s information.

  “We did. Frank wrote letters, cancelling them.”

  “I’ll sue him. I’ll put him in jail,” Adrian said.

  Buzz shrugged. “You can probably do both. But it won’t get you any closer to building some planes.”

  “There are other designers.”

  “Look at this before you start hiring someone else,” Buzz said. “I found it in the mailbox when I came in.”

  It was a letter on the stationery of TWA, the new airline recently put together from the wreckage of Trans Western and several other lines that had collapsed since the stock market crashed. Adrian read it and handed it to Amanda.

  Dear Frank: I have just taken on the job of consultant to TWA. They have financing from Howard Hughes, the Texas multimillionaire and are planning to buy quite a number of planes. I told them if it was at all possible, they should get a model with a Buchanan wing. Can your company produce a transport capable of carrying 25 or 30 people within the next six months?

  Sincerely,

  Charles Lindbergh

  “You know Mr. Buchanan well, Mr. McCall?”

  “Pretty well.”

  “Do you want to keep working here?”

  Buzz shrugged. “I gotta work somewhere. I got a wife and two kids.”

  “Tell him if he wants to save your job—everyone’s job—he should consider coming back to work as soon as possible. Assure him I will let him have complete autonomy as chief designer. I have no intention of changing the company’s name. Everyone knows Buchanan means quality planes. Tell him I can sell planes better than anyone else in the country. I know almost every airline executive in the business personally.”

  “I’ll tell him,” Buzz said. “I don’t know whether it will do any good.”

  “Tell the office people to report for work tomorrow,” Adrian said.

  Buzz nodded and swaggered out. Adrian sighed and turned to Amanda. “I’m terribly afraid we’ll have to postpone our second honeymoon.”

  Amanda did not speak until she was back in the Hispano-Suiza. As Adrian drove out of the Buchanan Aircraft parking lot, she hissed a single word: “Liar.”

  REVELATIONS

  For a long time that word liar encompassed all of them—Adrian, Frank, her brother. Amanda did not know the exact content of the lie. But she sensed its presence the moment Adrian rehired Frank. She saw the cold-eyed banker she had disliked in England. She was equally sure the contrite husband she had seen on Casa Felicidad’s porch was a fraud.

  She decided to leave them all. She was going to flee to New York, walk the streets, sell herself to men if necessary. She was going to escape California and its lies. Everything about it had become a lie, even the beauty of the land itself, its perpetual sunshine that denied the evil festering in the souls of men like her brother Gordon.

  As she planned her escape, hoarding small amounts from the money that Adrian gave her to run their house in Westwood, only a few miles from the Buchanan plant, she had to struggle to retain her intuition of deceit. Adrian did everything in his power to annihilate it. He wielded arguments like a master duelist, portraying the golden future they would share, vowing that he had done nothing that any rational man would not have done when he discovered the truth about Buchanan Aircraft.

  “The money!” Amanda raged. “Where did you get the money?”

  “From your brother.”

  Adrian did not tell her how or why Gordon had produced the cash. He described it as a loan. She was even more confused by his repeated protestations of love. Still she refused to let him touch her. Adrian was not exactly importunate on this point. He was working fifteen hours a day, organizing a sales force, pleading with bankers for loans, trying to accommodate Frank Buchanan’s erratic work habits.

  Early in 1932, Amanda felt a presence in her body. She recognized it immediately as a child and knew in the next instant it was a girl. A few days later she met one of the Mexican pickers from Cadwallader Groves working in a grocery store in Westwood. Impulsively, she told him about the baby, then realized how strange the encounter was. Miguel had worked at Cadwallader Groves for over twenty years. “What are you doing here?” she asked.

  “No more orange work,” he said. “They cut down the trees.”

  She drove to Casa Felicidad in a wild rage. Sure enough, men were sawing down tree after tree. The landscape lay bare all the way to the river. Tractors were ripping up the stumps, leaving raw wounds in the green grass. The earth was being raped in front of her eyes.

  “I won’t let you do this!” she raged at her brother.

  “It’s none of your business,” he said.

  “I own half of it. I should have been consulted!”

  “Adrian sold your half to me months ago.”

  A saw emitted an especially piercing shriek. For a moment Gordon almost lost his business aplomb. “Something like this had to be done soon,” he snarled. “I mortgaged the place to the last tree to play the stock market. It’s either drill for oil or let the goddamn banks grab it.”

  Amanda knew why there was a snarl in Gordon’s voice. She knew why he had been secretly glad to risk Cadwallader Groves to make millions on Wall Street. She knew why he did not care about what he was desecrating here with his tractors and saws.

  Gordon was destroying Eden. He was destroying the memory of their father and her mother walking naked among the trees, making love on the cool grass. Five-year-old Amanda had adored the lovemaking. She had clapped her hands and begged them to do it again. Seven-year-old Gordon had screamed no and had run frantically around the grove, clutching his dangling thing. Eden had made him afraid. It required courage to live in Eden.

  Gordon was destroying Eden because there was evil in his soul. Adrian was his collaborator. He did not care if Gordon erected grimy rigs that spewed black stinking oil over the green grass where love had flowered in the sunlight. That meant there was evil in Adrian’s soul too.

  The wish to flee them all swelled in Amanda’s throat with new desperation. But what could she do, where could she go with a child? The whole country was bankrupt. People were standing on endless lines to get a bowl of soup in New York and Chicago. Motherhood, motherness, consumed her.

  She went home to Westwood and lay in bed remembering the loneliness of Casa Felicidad after her father died in the army and her mother retreated to her room and began to imagine she was Queen Califia, betrayed by her subjects.

  For the first time Amanda thought about her mother’s delusion. She had chanted songs about the cruel fate of Califia, abandoned as a prisoner, a victim, to the power of men. The words had a meaning for her. Now Amanda was in the middle of the same meaning.

  Did her mother include her husband, Amanda’s father, in her denunciations of male cruelty and lust? No, he was the exception, one of the rare ones who had no evil in his soul. Amanda had dreamt of finding Eden again with Frank Buchanan. Not at Casa Felicidad with Gordon watching. They would fly to it in one of Frank’s planes.

  She had been sure they could find another Eden in some remote canyon in the Cascades or the Sierras. They would swoop into it and strip off their clothes, strip off shame and civilization and discover the redeeming power of love.

  What had gone wrong? Was Fran
k really no different from Adrian? Amanda could not believe it. All her instincts denied it. A hundred times, she got out the letter Frank had written, breaking his promise to marry her. She relived the conversation in the hangar. She wept. When Adrian came home at midnight, he found her in the kitchen staring at nothing, weeping.

  He was profoundly, genuinely alarmed. When she told him Gordon had revealed his sale of her share of Cadwallader Groves, Adrian swore her brother had given her the most venal, the most atrocious version of the story. He had planned to raise the money from a bank, offering her share of Cadwallader Groves as equity, guaranteeing her continued half ownership of the property. He said he never would have taken such a step without her approval. But the bankruptcy court had moved the date of the Buchanan sale forward with no warning. He had been afraid to tell her before their reconciliation and there had been no time to tell her afterward.

  It was almost convincing. Amanda discerned in Adrian’s vehemence a kind of caring. She stopped crying. The child swelled in her belly, independent, indifferent to memory, regret, hatred. Amanda lived with Adrian Van Ness and the daily drama of Buchanan Aircraft’s struggle to survive. It was impossible to remain indifferent to it. Adrian talked about nothing else. Her own happiness, the happiness of her child, was at stake.

  With help from Buzz McCall, they had persuaded Frank Buchanan to come back to work and begin building another Lustra II for TWA. Adrian made an important contribution to the new design. Waiting at the Los Angeles airport one day, he watched a single-engined Varney Speed Line Vega take off, followed by a lumbering Ford Trimotor flying for Braniff. He suddenly remembered a story Carlo Pontecorvo had told him about how nervous single-engine planes made passengers on European airlines. He cancelled his flight and rushed back to the plant to persuade Frank to put two engines on the new Lustra II.

  A day later, Adrian had sold the idea to Jack Frye, the president of TWA, and changed the plane’s name to the SkyRanger. He disliked Frank’s fondness for classical names, which few customers would ever understand.

  The child grew. It leaped in Amanda’s belly now, especially when Adrian put his hand there. Amanda permitted this much touching. She could not remove the word liar from Adrian’s forehead. But she found it difficult to remain in a state of rage at him. He was so polite, so urbane, so determined to make her like him again. Amanda began to wonder if she could ever leave him.

  A rhythm developed between the baby and the new plane at the factory. Both seemed to be growing on the same schedule. Adrian told Amanda he had promised a bonus to the workforce if the SkyRanger flew on or before the day his daughter was born. When Adrian invited Amanda to visit the factory in the middle of her eighth month, she could not resist the idea.

  Inside the cavernous hangar, four dozen workmen swarmed around the ribbed fuselage, which rested on jigs, erector set—like metal platforms about six feet above the floor. It looked like the stripped skeleton of a whale on the deck of the Pequod in Melville’s Moby-Dick. But this creature was coming to life. An obsequious smile on his tough guy’s face, production chief Buzz McCall introduced her to foremen and riveters and machinists and explained that tomorrow they were going to give the SkyRanger her skin. Twin shells of lightweight steel would be glued together around the ribs.

  “How many more weeks, Mrs. Van Ness?” one of the workmen yelled, as they departed. Amanda held up three fingers.

  “We’re way ahead. We’re gonna finish this baby in two!”

  In Adrian’s office, she met Buzz McCall’s dark-haired wife, Tama, who was, she cheerfully explained, Buchanan’s publicity director.

  “And office manager and payroll clerk and bookkeeper,” Adrian added.

  “This’ll make a terrific story,” Tama said.

  A grinning little man with a flash camera materialized and began taking pictures of Amanda and Adrian, smiling, their arms around each other. Tama posed Amanda in the window of the office, so her bulging stomach was profiled against the light. “Terrific,” she cried as the flashbulb popped again.

  Amanda felt violated by the whole process. But she did not know how to protest it. Tama led her back to the assembly line, where Amanda posed with a half-dozen grinning workmen while the photographer blazed away.

  The SkyRanger was completed in two weeks and rolled out for her first tests. It was a time of terrific tension for Adrian and everyone else. Would she live up to the promise of her design?

  Precisely on the day her obstetrician predicted, Amanda went into labor. As she struggled to cope with the pains, she found herself hoping fiercely for a girl. She did not want a son. Adrian would corrupt him. She could protect a daughter from him. Confirming her intuition, the child was a girl.

  “Do you have a name for her?” the formidable floor nurse demanded, as she filled out the tag for the tiny wrist.

  “No,” Amanda said, dismayed that she had never discussed it with Adrian. Would he name her Clarissa after his mother? She hated the name. She was afraid to use her own mother’s name. She half-believed that names had power, that they carried meaning, fate, into a life.

  “Where’s my husband?” she asked.

  “I have no idea,” the nurse said, her opinion of Adrian’s absence all too clear.

  “He’s here at last,” Adrian said from the doorway of her room.

  He kissed her limp hand. “I kept in touch by telephone. We were putting the plane through the final tests. She passed them all. The TWA people were there. They signed a contract for twenty planes on the spot.”

  “Marvelous. They want—a name.”

  Adrian took the tiny bundle out of the nurse’s arms. She had been fussing and whining. She stopped and seemed to gaze up at him. “Do babies this young smile?” Adrian asked. “I could swear she’s smiling.”

  “You are,” Amanda said. The expression on Adrian’s face was miraculous. It evoked the memory of her father’s smile. The reality of unqualified love. She could never leave him now, Amanda thought. She might even learn to love him.

  “Mr. Van Ness,” said the impatient nurse. “Does the child have a name?”

  “Victoria. Her name is Victoria.”

  The next day, Tama Morris arrived with a huge spray of roses—and her friend the photographer. Once more Amanda experienced the violated feeling, this time on her own and Victoria’s behalf. Again she found it impossible to protest. Tama was so agreeable, so enthusiastic about the baby and the wonderful story and the wonderful news at the plant. Dark eyes aglow, she recited the dazzling figures. TWA was going to pay two and a half million dollars for the twenty planes.

  A final blinding flash made Victoria whimper. “That’s it, Roscoe, scram,” Tama said.

  The photographer fled as if he was afraid Tama might do him bodily harm. She lit a cigarette and sat down on the edge of the bed. “You’re really glad it’s a girl?”

  “Yes,” Amanda said.

  “Why? Men get all the breaks in this world.”

  Propped on her white pillows, lying beneath the white hospital blanket in the white-walled room with thick white sunshine pouring through the window, Amanda contemplated Tama’s darkness. It was in her hair, her eyes, her olive skin—and those bitter words. Suddenly Amanda saw this beautiful woman’s entire life. Her willfulness, her pride, her despair. She felt a kinship with her beyond the power of words, something she had never felt for another woman.

  “Do you have any children?” she asked.

  “A son by my first husband and a stepson by Buzz’s first wife. They make me almost wish for a daughter. It’d be nice not to have to play drill sergeant all the time.”

  “Adrian seems pleased to have a daughter.”

  “Adrian’s different. He’s not your average flyboy. They think a woman’s only good for one thing.”

  Amanda saw new darkness, new perils in Tama’s soul. Tama inhaled her cigarette. “You’re lucky.”

  Amanda’s heart almost broke. Tama was explaining her fate to herself. Amanda wanted to offer her some
consolation. “But you’ve got an important job.”

  “Nah,” Tama said. “They just hired a man to be my boss. Some yo-yo from the LA Times. Adrian was nice enough to try to explain it to me, at least. It’s a man’s business. As if I didn’t know that. It’s a man’s world. Even if you’re Norma Shearer. You’ve still got some SOB studio executive telling you what to do.”

  Amanda saw how hopeless it really was. “Thank you for the roses,” she said.

  “Hey, it’s the least we could do. You’ve gotten us more publicity this week then we’ve had in a year.”

  The next day, a totally unexpected figure filled the doorway: Frank Buchanan. He carried a gigantic white rabbit and a huge bouquet. “What a wonderful surprise,” she said.

  He kissed her hand. “Are you happy?” he said.

  “Yes,” she said. “Are you?”

  He shrugged.

  “I thought the good news about the plane would make you happy.”

  “That’s my consolation. Not the same as happiness. I designed it for you—and this little creature—as much as for myself.”

  Suddenly she wanted to scream, rage at him. “I don’t know what you mean,” she said, her voice empty and cold, her eyes averted.

  “I would never have come back for any other reason. Adrian said he’d spent every cent he borrowed from your brother to buy the company. Everything you owned was at stake. I’m glad I came now. Consolation is better than nothing.”

  “I still don’t know what you’re saying!” she cried. She meant of course that he was not explaining the most important thing.

  “What happened was entirely my fault,” Frank said. “A—lamentable swinishness on my part. I deserve everything I’ve suffered for it. I only wish you hadn’t suffered.”

  Suddenly nothing mattered, the child, Adrian’s adoration of his daughter, the possibility of a happy marriage. Nothing mattered but the memory of that morning when Lindbergh was flying the Atlantic and she had taken Frank Buchanan’s hand.