QUEEN OF THE NIGHT
With a hundred million dollars’ worth or orders for Scorpions on the books, Adrian Van Ness should have left Paris a happy man. Instead, he was miserable. De Havilland Aircraft had picked up at least two hundred orders for Comets and the British were suddenly the world leaders of commercial aviation. Frank Buchanan blamed it on Adrian’s timid refusal to build a jet-powered airliner and was whispering “I told you so” through all ranks of the company, making Adrian look like Casper Milquetoast.
Tama kept throwing contrite looks at him but he ignored her. Their affair was over as far as Adrian was concerned. He might even end her connection with Buchanan Aircraft if he could think of a good reason. Madame George’s girls had made him feel sexually invulnerable.
Adrian’s main concern was what to do about the next generation Buchanan airliner. The Scorpion’s sales gave them the money to build one. If he hoped to keep Buchanan in the major leagues with Lockheed, Boeing, Douglas, he had to make a decision soon. To jet or not to jet, that was the question. Buzz McCall sat next to him halfway to California, arguing for a jet. He showed him a Frank Buchanan sketch of a plane twice the size of the Comet with the Pratt & Whitney engines they were using in the Scorpion in pods on the wings.
Adrian resisted the idea. Part of the reason was personal. A few rows ahead, Frank Buchanan sat talking to Dick Stone. The back of Frank’s head was a kind of statement of his persistent contempt. Adrian saw Buzz as Frank’s spokesman, with no opinion of his own worth discussing.
“I don’t think we should rush into this,” Adrian said. “I want to commission a survey of the public attitude toward jets. I’m not sure people want to fly at six hundred miles an hour.”
Buzz saw the survey as another proof of Adrian’s basic problem: lack of nerve. “Adrian, Americans want to go as fast as possible. Even the car business understands that. Why the hell do you think they’ve decorated the fuckin’ fenders and hoods and grilles with all those fins and streamline effects? They want to make them look like planes.”
In California, the debate continued to rage through the usual drunken lunches in the executive dining room. Frank and Buzz converted everyone, even young people like Cliff Morris and Dick Stone, whom Adrian hoped he had brought into his executive aura. One day, after a particularly vitriolic (and alcoholic) lunch, at which a jet had been favored by a five to one margin, Adrian went back to his office teetering on the brink of decision. Something deep in his mind still resisted the idea of admitting Frank Buchanan was right.
His secretary buzzed him. “Victoria is calling from London.”
“Hello, darling, how are you?” Adrian said.
“Haven’t you heard the news?” Victoria cried. “Grandmother’s plane crashed. Everyone died. She’s gone!”
Within minutes, Adrian had the British embassy in Washington on the telephone. They ruefully confirmed that a Comet 3 en route from Naples to London had crashed off the island of Elba. “No survivors?” Adrian said dazedly.
“None, I’m afraid. The ambassador, I’m sure, joins me in expressing our deepest regret.”
Adrian hung up and sat motionless behind his desk for a long time. The whine of a jet engine out on the airfield meant another Scorpion was about to be flight-tested. As it rose to a shrill wail, Adrian tried to absorb the meaning of Clarissa’s death. He told himself a fifty-five-year-old man did not fall apart over the death of his eighty-three-year-old mother. But for Adrian it was a primary event. He felt like someone who had spent most of his life guarding a door against a dangerous intruder. Now the door had swung open to reveal no one was there.
Or was it the other way around? Had he, all his life, been trying to burst into a guarded room and now, suddenly, the door was open and the secrets he had been determined to discover, the oracle he had been longing to interrogate, had vanished? He was free in a new mysterious way he had to explore.
Should he divorce Amanda and marry Tama? No, that had never been more than a remote possibility and now it was out of the question. He began to understand his involvement with Tama in a new way. In his imagination, he had seen himself introducing her to his mother as his wife, relishing the shock and dismay on Clarissa Ames Van Ness’s face. Tama’s middle-class taste, her sensuality, were polar opposites of Clarissa’s standards. Of course, he had never done it because he also loved his mother.
And feared her.
And hated her.
And pitied her.
Adrian struggled to place all his emotions on the table so he would know, like the gambler who was getting ready to bet his money and his life, the status of the deck. Was he free of Clarissa’s accusing voice, free of ruined? When it wailed in his head now would it belong to no one in particular? Could he ignore it if he chose?
The decision, the great decision to jet or not to jet, was part of this new freedom. Should he bet the net assets of the company on a plane that had just crashed?
No. In some unassailable blindly superstitious corner of his mind, Adrian felt his mother’s death was a retribution—and a warning. He had spent his life rejecting most of her advice. Now she had died aboard the world’s first jet airliner, the plane she had wanted him to build. It was an omen no one in the aircraft business, where fate so often seems to be sitting in on every hand, could resist.
It was also an irresistible opportunity to use his presumed grief with masterful effect. He called in Frank Buchanan and Buzz McCall and told them the news. They were appalled and sympathetic, of course. Adrian nodded and briskly turned the conversation to business. He predicted that this crash, the second Comet to go down this year, would cast a fatal shadow over the plane. One more crash and it would be out of business. “I seriously think it could finish jet-powered air travel for twenty years,” he said.
Instead of an intercontinental jet plane like Boeing and Douglas were building, Adrian had a better idea. “At the last meeting of the Conquistadors, at least three airline presidents told me they needed an intermediate range plane that could take off from La Guardia and other small airports. Let’s build one for them—with turboprops.”
Pratt & Whitney had produced this compromise between a jet engine and a propeller. Buchanan had used it successfully on the Excalibur-derived transports they had built for the Air Force at the start of the Korean War.
“I like the idea of an intermediate plane,” Frank said. “But why not make it a jet? The Comet isn’t crashing because of its engines. It’s the pressurized cabin. The Brits didn’t take into account the effect of the extreme changes in air pressure at the altitude a jet flies. It’s metal fatigue, not engine failure that’s bringing them down. They’re just disintegrating up there in the sky.”
“You’re telling me to build a plane that may kill people the way that thing just killed my mother?” Adrian shouted.
“All right,” Frank said. “I’ll give you your turboprop.”
Buzz and Frank departed, shaking their heads. Adrian strode up and down the office in a terrific state of agitation. “The son of a bitch, the son of a bitch,” he kept saying. He realized his reaction made no sense. What was happening to him? Had he lost his emotional bearings?
At home, Adrian found Amanda working in the garden. Beneath a large old-fashioned sun hat, she looked oddly youthful, as girlish as when he first met her. “My mother’s dead,” he said. “She died in the crash of the Comet.”
“I know,” Amanda said. “Tama called to tell you how sorry she was. She wants you to call her.”
Amanda patted earth around a newly planted bulb. “Are you going to marry Tama now?” she said in a dry, almost toneless voice. She had begun talking that way about a year ago. Adrian thought it was another way of telling him how much she hated him.
“Why should I do that?”
“You don’t love her?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Adrian—I’ve known for years. I was glad. For her sake. For yours. I knew you only stayed with me b
ecause of your mother.”
“That’s not true!” Adrian shouted. “It was for Victoria’s sake. For your sake too—if you only gave me a chance to show it instead of crawling into bed with that slob Frank Buchanan.”
“That was meant to be, Adrian. There was nothing either of us could do about it.”
“I did something about it.”
“I knew you would.”
“What the hell is the matter with you? Why don’t you talk to me like a human being, an adult woman, instead of in that voice of the living dead?”
“Call Tama. She needs you,” Amanda said and left him there in the garden. He called Tama. She was at her Malibu beach house. He could hear the surf crashing. She was out on the deck with the white telephone in her hand. “Adrian,” she said. “I called to tell you how sorry I am about your mother. How sorry I am about everything. Will this—make a difference, Adrian? I mean—will you feel free to—”
“I’ve always been perfectly free to do what I pleased. What I’ve done—and haven’t done—are for very good reasons,” he said.
“Oh, God Adrian, I haven’t been able to eat or sleep since that argument in Paris. I didn’t mean any of those stupid things I said. I love you. Doesn’t that make any difference? Can’t you forgive me?”
“There’s nothing to forgive. I was unpleasant too. I’m afraid our little fling has just run out of gas.”
“Little fling? Adrian—it’s been almost ten years. I divorced Buzz. I’ve told you what you mean to me. Told you and told you.”
“I know. But you don’t mean that to me. You never have. You were—very helpful. I needed you badly when it began.”
Adrian was trying not to be cruel and failing miserably. He could not control the anger at women that lurked deep in his soul. “It might be best if you left the company, Tama. It’s not a healthy situation for either of us. I’m sure you can get more money doing the same thing at Douglas or North American. Everyone says you’re the best publicity woman in the business.”
“Adrian!”
“I’m only being sensible, Tama. I’ll arrange for severance pay tomorrow. It’ll be very generous, I assure you. If you invest it well you’ll never have to work again.”
“Adrian!”
The telephone was a wonderful invention, Adrian thought, as he hung up. It enabled a man to say things to a woman he could never say face to face.
Adrian showered and dressed for dinner in his usual deliberate fashion. He put on one of his new pink shirts—a daring style that some people thought might replace white as the color of choice—and one of his newest Savile Row suits. A resolve—a wish—was growing in his mind and heart. A decision to reorder his life. Victoria would be coming home in a year. Why not bring her into a house where her father loved her mother, his wife, in a new profound way?
Wife. Why did his mother’s death give that word new depth and resonance? Wife—was Amanda the victim of his long bitter need to fend off Clarissa Van Ness? Had he kept her at the same taut arm’s length in his mind and heart? Was it possible that he was now free, not to take a mistress selected by Madame George, but to love his wife?
At dinner he talked about Victoria. He praised her intelligence, her cheerful disposition, her budding gifts as a poet. He gave Amanda more than her share of the wine. Over dessert, with the housekeeper safely clanking pots in the kitchen, he took Amanda’s hand and made his plea. He told her about his ruined American father, his discovery of his English father, his mother’s obsessive attempts to control him. He confessed the whole truth about selling her share of Cadwallader Groves to her brother.
“This has been the most momentous day of my life. I’ve seen so much. Especially how I’ve let my quarrel with my mother hurt us. I’ve only known one way to deal with a woman—warily, fearfully, if you prefer the whole truth. That’s why I could never find a way to explain our reconciliation in 1931—I mean really explain it. I should have insisted on the absolute truth that I’ve always loved you and money had nothing to do with it. But I couldn’t do it. Pride—that spirit of defiance my mother stirred in me—was always in the way. Now I’m free to ask you to forgive me. Can you—will you?”
“What about Tama?”
“Forget Tama. She was never more than a consolation.”
Amanda’s eyes blazed with unnatural light. “That is more unforgivable than all the rest of it, Adrian. Forever unforgivable!”
“Why?” Adrian gasped. He had no idea Tama Morris meant anything to Amanda. As far as he knew, they had not met more than a dozen times.
Amanda tore her hand away and flung back her chair. Another emotion seemed to overwhelm her. She trembled violently. Tears ran down her cheeks. “Oh, Adrian,” she said. “If only you’d said this years ago.”
She fled to her bedroom. Adrian retreated to his study in a near frenzy. There would be no sleep tonight or any other foreseeable night. His stomach ached. He gulped antacid pills and poured himself a tumbler of port. For a long time he sat on the terrace watching the planes land at Los Angeles International Airport. He tried to think of a name for his new turboprop.
Starduster. Yes, he liked it. Lockheed named their planes after stars. This claimed the whole galaxy. He poured himself more port and decided maybe the Prince was right. One of Madame George’s girls was the way to go. He could set her up in New York. It would be easy to keep it a secret from everyone, even Victoria.
But it was Amanda’s love he wanted. A love he had neglected, denied, abandoned. It was the only way he could ever expiate the enormous echoing guilt that was throbbing in his belly now when he thought of how much unhappiness he had caused Clarissa Ames Van Ness.
An hour or two after midnight, the telephone rang. It was Dan Hanrahan, Buchanan’s chief of security. “Adrian?” he said. “I’m at Tama Morris’s house. I think you better get out here right away.”
“What’s wrong?”
“She’s dead. Killed herself.”
A full moon splashed ironic gold on the heaving Pacific as Adrian drove down the boulevards and up the coast highway, his brain clutched in an icy fist. It’s not your fault, he repeated to himself. It’s not anyone’s fault.
Buzz McCall opened Tama’s front door. The last person Adrian wanted to see. Buzz looked like a man who had just fallen out of a plane without a parachute. “I found her,” he said. “I called Dan.”
Buzz struggled to control himself. Adrian could not believe it. The ultimate tough guy, bawling. “She’s in there.” He pointed to the bathroom.
Hanrahan was taking photographs of Tama. She lay in her big oblong tub—her Roman tub, she used to call it. Her heavy-lidded eyes were open, staring sightlessly at a photograph of her and Adrian which had been taken at the rollout of a Buchanan plane. The water in the tub was dark red.
“Did she cut her wrists?” Adrian asked.
Hanrahan shook his head. “A knitting needle in the heart.”
He handed Adrian a letter. “I found this on her pillow. She left one for Buzz and another one for Cliff.”
Adrian opened the envelope and read the bold scrawl. I can’t prove my love in any other way I guess so here goes. I’m too old to start hopping from bed to bed the way I lived before I met you. If there’s another place I hope we meet there so you can say you’re sorry. Tama.
“What did she say to Buzz?”
Hanrahan dug the letter out of his pocket. If you weren’t such a louse I’d have come home to you with my broken heart. But I knew there was no point to it. I really loved you in the old days but you ruined it. Good-bye, you bastard.
“Cliff’s still got his,” Hanrahan said.
“He’s here?”
“She called them both before she did it.”
“What do we do?”
“Call the cops. But I think you better talk to Cliff first. He said some wild things when I first got here.”
Adrian handed both letters to Hanrahan. “Burn them,” he said.
He walked into the living room t
o find Buzz and Cliff glaring at each other. Cliff must have been walking on the beach. His shoes were soaked and sandy. “You’re a pair of bastards,” Cliff shouted. “All you ever did was fuck her around.”
“Shut up,” Buzz snarled. “If you were a man instead of a fuckin’ crybaby maybe she’d have asked you for help.”
“Prick!” Cliff shouted and hit Buzz with a terrific roundhouse right that sent him hurtling across the living room through the glass doors to the deck. Cliff lunged after him. Buzz struggled to his feet just in time to get another punch in the face that sent him crashing through the deck’s bamboo railing onto the beach below. Cliff jumped on top of him screaming, “Prick! Prick!”
Hanrahan started after them. Adrian seized his arm. “Let them fight it out,” he said.
It was no contest. Buzz was almost sixty years old and he was only half Cliff’s size. Cliff pounded him to the sand again and again in the ghostly moonlight. In Adrian’s eyes each punch was a demolition of Buzz McCall, the swaggering sultan of the assembly line, the man who called him a coward, who had possibly—no, probably—killed Beryl Suydam.
Cliff finally knocked Buzz into the surf, where he seized his stepfather by the throat and began drowning him. “Now,” Adrian said and Hanrahan leaped to the beach and rescued Buzz. The security chief took the battered loser home and Adrian descended the familiar ladder to the beach and put his arm around Cliff, who stood with his back to the house, watching the white combers rumble toward them in the darkness.
“I loved her,” Adrian said. “We had a nasty fight in Paris. It was partly about business. I decided it wasn’t working anymore and told her I wanted her to leave the company. With generous severance pay of course. I had no idea anything like this would happen. She never gave a hint, I swear it, Cliff. Not a hint. She was always so independent, proud.”
“Yeah, proud,” Cliff said, rubbing his eyes with a fist like a three-year-old.
“Cliff,” Adrian said. “I’m going to do my best to make this up to you—and to myself. You’ve always had a great future with this company. But now—”
Conquerors of the Sky Page 47