Judith Krantz

by Till We Meet Again

  She had already wasted—no, not wasted, invested—three whole dollars on movie tickets this year. Another three dollars had gone on birthday presents for Delphine and each of her parents. If only she’d had time to make them presents at school, in shop class, instead of buying them, if only she’d even learned how to knit or crochet or sew, Freddy thought, angry with herself, as she contemplated the hoard of seven dollars and fifty cents she had saved out of her allowance. So much for unearned income.

  The picture of her earned income was healthier. Her job at Woolworth’s every Saturday paid thirty-five cents an hour, bringing in two dollars and eighty cents a week. Unknown to her family, she’d had that job for the past three months. She had been able to save it all except for the carfare to reach the downtown Woolworth’s, the fifty cents she’d spent on a pair of men’s Levi’s to wear for her lessons, and the money for her sandwich lunch at work.

  Her earned income now amounted to twenty-six dollars and fifty cents, which, combined with the seven-fifty from her allowance, made a total of thirty-four dollars. Thirty-four dollars was an awful lot of money, she thought ruefully—unless you were learning to fly. So far she had taken three hours of flying lessons, a half hour at a time each week, and they had cost her twelve of those precious dollars. Mac, thank heaven, had reduced his usual price of six dollars an hour to four, his “under sixteen” price, he’d told her. She still had twenty-two dollars in her kitty, enough for five hours more if she could continue to hitch rides out to Dry Springs and back each Friday. That would amount to eight hours of instruction in all. If she kept her job, she’d still be able to buy the essential Christmas presents for her family. Shouldn’t anybody at all be able to know enough to solo in a total of eight hours? Maybe Mac would even let her solo with less time, she told herself hopefully, as she measured out jujubes.

  After all, hadn’t Mathilde Moisant learned to fly in thirty-one minutes? And become the second licensed woman pilot in America? But that was back in 1911, before all the annoying rules and regulations had been established to keep people out of the air. What’s more, the early planes looked so simple that they must have been like flying bikes. They had no throttles, no brakes, no instrument panels; they looked like large pieces of weird gym equipment with a wheel somewhere in the middle; they had nothing in common with Mac’s new, red, enclosed-cockpit Taylor Cub, than wings and the ability to get off the ground.

  She really wished she didn’t have to lie so much, Freddy admitted to herself regretfully, as she filled a bag with long strings of licorice. If she’d still been at Sacred Heart, under the inquisitive nose of Delphine, she couldn’t have managed to get away with it, but her parents had allowed her to transfer to the local public school, John Marshall High, without too much of a struggle. The Sacred Heart education had been so good that, combined with a year of summer school, she’d been able to skip her junior year at high school.

  Now, at fifteen, she was in her first term as a John Marshall senior. Three months ago, when school began, she had started to lie. To explain why she was away all day Saturday working, she’d invented a weekly day-long visit with an invented best friend who lived in Beverly Hills and had a swimming pool, in which Freddy said she was practicing to get on the school swimming team. This particular lie was readily believed, since Freddy was already a star on the diving team, the only girl in school to feel entirely happy as she launched herself from the high diving board. To explain why she came home from school so late each Friday of the past six weeks, after her flying lesson, she’d invented an extracurricular activity that kept her after school: painting scenery for the annual Christmas play. To explain to Mac why she only took a single half-hour lesson a week, although she was determined to solo on her sixteenth birthday, this coming January, she’d invented a mountain of homework, although, in reality, she was able to rush pell-mell through it all at school, during study period. To explain to her family why she spent so many hours after dinner studying for ground school with Mac, she’d invented determination to get very high grades. That was really only four lies—five if she counted hitching rides, Freddy decided. She’d never been told not to hitch rides specifically, but she knew what the answer would have been if she’d asked.

  Cirrus, she sang to herself, Cirrocumulus, Cirrostratus—the clouds she would one day meet above 16,500 feet. The kings and queens of atmosphere. The only lie she hadn’t been able to dope out was how to get out of school early on Fridays so that she could leave sooner for Dry Springs Airport. The teachers at John Marshall High School were the mighty Cirrostratus clouds of teachers. They’d heard every excuse known to teenagers, and only a note from home would make a dent on them. How many notes from home could she produce, even if she stole her mother’s writing paper and was able to forge her handwriting? And what if a teacher checked on the phone with her mother? No, it just wasn’t possible.

  As she weighed out an enormous bag of gumdrops, Freddy wondered, not for the first time, if it wouldn’t have been a better idea to tell her parents the truth right from the beginning, and as always, the answer was the same. What if they hadn’t permitted it? That chance was too risky to take. It was bad enough to lie about something that didn’t officially exist. It would have been ten times worse to be forced to lie about something she had been formally forbidden to do. And the other choice—to give up the idea of flying until she was old enough to do whatever she pleased—was no choice at all. That would mean waiting five more years, until she was twenty-one. It was legal to solo on your sixteenth birthday, and on the ninth of January, 1936, she would—must—solo. Then, after another ten hours of instruction she could take the test for her private pilot’s license. Then, and only then, could she start to build up the flying hours that would enable her to begin competitive air racing, or perhaps, one day, make a flight no one else had yet attempted. It was too soon to form clear-cut ambitions when she didn’t know how she would get the money for those ten hours of instruction.

  Other women had done it, Freddy told herself, firmly rejecting such gloomy questions. Last year, according to the Aviation Yearbook she’d found in the public library, over four hundred American women had held private pilots’ licenses. They’d found a way, and so would she, Freddy promised herself as she moved briskly from the counter to the scale.

  With relief, she saw that it was time for lunch. There was a sandwich counter in the Woolworth’s where the counterman slipped her a free glass of milk with her tuna on rye. In return she gave him a grateful look, from eyes she had no idea were of a blue so saturated with color that they seemed locked into the sky.

  As she ate her sandwich, Freddy turned her mind away from her money problems to ground school Mac had warned her about it. “Sure, you want to fly, kid, but take my word for it, you’re going to hate ground school,” he’d predicted.

  She hated Home Economics, Freddy thought, smiling, but she loved ground school. She doted on the Theory of Flight. Lift! Wasn’t that one of the best words you could imagine? Of course, she’d known that a plane could fly—so had Leonardo da Vinci and the Wright brothers, for that matter—but until ground school she hadn’t known why. Lift, glorious lift! And equally thrilling, Angle of Attack, the term for the angle at which the wings of a plane met the air—as essential as Lift, and something only the pilot could control. If her Angle of Attack was wrong, the plane, pointing too high or too low, could crash. It was something she thought about for hours. And what about Greenwich Mean Time, the time at that meridian of the planet where the Greenwich Observatory was located? It gave her a deep pleasure to know that everyone in the world of aviation, from the best pilots flying the most powerful planes, to Freddy de Lancel, sitting in front of a tuna sandwich, was willingly and dutifully subject to Greenwich Mean Time.

  “I didn’t order this, did I?” Freddy asked the counterman who had put another tuna sandwich in front of her. “Barbara Hutton’s treat,” he answered generously, wondering if she knew that she’d eaten her first sandwich in six big bit
es and still looked as if she were starving. How could such a peach of a girl be allowed to go hungry? He waited all week just to watch her eat lunch, but she must be in love, for she had that faraway look in her eye, and she never wanted to chat. Often, when he wasn’t busy during the day, the counterman looked wistfully in the direction of the candy counter, knowing that he could pick her out immediately, for her long hair, like a pile of newly minted pennies, was a patch of brilliance in the busy store and she was tall enough that she stood out from the crowd of women.

  As she bit into her second sandwich, Freddy’s mind turned to Delphine, who, as she approached eighteen, was becoming even more beautiful than she had been, even to the eyes of a younger sister. The particular tender, almost heartbreaking fragility she had always possessed had not vanished with the years as it so often did as girls matured. The perfect bow of her lips, the upturned corners of her mouth, had been mysteriously accentuated in some way Freddy didn’t understand, and which couldn’t be explained merely by Delphine’s moderate use of lipstick. Her sister’s eyes had grown larger, her brown hair swung in a most enchanting bell-like curve, and her high cheekbones and small chin had become more defined. In family photographs she always seemed to be standing at the center of the group, even when she was only on its fringe, because the eye was immediately attracted to the extraordinarily interesting pattern of light and shadow created by her features.

  However, Delphine could be just as annoying as ever. One day she had come upon Freddy reading a book on flying and had decided that her sister was pining away for a career in the air—as a stewardess. Delphine had found the requirements for girls applying for jobs as stewardesses and read them aloud to her with unconcealed glee. “You have to be a registered nurse, under twenty-five, under a hundred and fifteen pounds, not more than five feet four inches tall—that lets you out right there, poor thing—and single—well, that part isn’t difficult. But what fun you’ll be missing because you’re too tall—it says here that you get to serve the passengers their food, help refuel the plane, assist in transferring the baggage, mop the cabin floor, carry a railroad timetable just in case the plane is grounded, and—this is the best of all—keep an eye on the passengers when they go to the toilet, to be certain that they don’t go through the emergency exit by accident!”

  “Funny, Delphine, very funny,” Freddy said lamely, her face flushing at being caught with a book about the adventures of a young bush pilot in Canada, when she should have been reading Anthony Adverse like every other girl she knew.

  She didn’t know all the words to “You Do Something to Me” or to “Just One of Those Things”; she didn’t spend her allowance to sigh over Greta Garbo in Queen Christina or weep at Katharine Hepburn as Jo in Little Women; she didn’t buy Tangee lipstick or belong to the Joan Crawford fan club or pluck her eyebrows in secret or try on her mother’s brassieres when her parents were out. And that was just the beginning of the list of things that she didn’t do or care about that Freddy knew made her a willing outsider in her class at school, a girl who wasn’t interested in dating or dancing or clothes. So be it, she thought philosophically, finishing her milk. It was no big deal. They didn’t fly.

  “How about a chocolate soda?” the counterman asked. “On the house?”

  “Gee, thanks, but no thanks. I work at the candy counter—I’ve lost my sweet tooth,” Freddy explained regretfully. She wished she had the nerve to ask him for another sandwich instead.

  Terence McGuire sat behind his desk in his office, where he should have been paying his bills, and found that he was thinking about his fledgling, Freddy de Lancel. He had taught many men and boys the craft of flying, as well as one or two women, but Freddy was the first girl who had been his pupil.

  The craft itself was teachable, he was convinced, to anyone with a grasp of basic logic and enough desire and patience to learn. Unlike some skills, it didn’t require an inborn predisposition, for none of his pupils had flying genes, any more than he had.

  Man was not born a flying animal, yet even if no birds had ever existed on the planet to demonstrate the fact of flight, McGuire was convinced that man would have learned to fly, just as, if there had been no fish, man would have learned to swim. Flight wouldn’t have happened during his own century, more than likely, but sooner or later someone, one of the many who had cast their eyes questioningly at the skies since the days that man first stood upright, would have unlocked the secret of flight, just as someone had built the first wheel, someone had rigged the first sail, someone had figured out how to build the Pyramids, and someone else had invented gunpowder. It was in the nature of the beast, he told himself, to keep pushing—regardless of whether it was a good idea or a bad one.

  No question about it, you didn’t have to be born a flying version of the young Mozart to become a pilot, and yet … and yet … a few, only a very few, people were natural flying animals—no two ways about it. The great majority of the people he’d taught successfully were not. But there had been, among his students, a few who had an immediate feeling of what he thought of as rightness in the air. It was as if they had an extra sense, a seventh sense, since the sixth sense was spoken for, that he, Terence McGuire, knew existed, even if he couldn’t spread it out on a table and measure and weigh it. He had it himself, he had had it the first time he took up his first ship, and he believed that Freddy de Lancel had it too.

  It wasn’t just her eagerness. Eagerness, all by itself, was a bad thing in a game in which patience was as essential as the ability to tell your right hand from your left. It wasn’t just her fearlessness. Too many pilots who crashed in training accidents had been fearless. No, there was something else involved in that seventh sense for which he had never found satisfactory words, a sort of condition of energy with which she entered into the flying process, so that the tall young girl who entered his office at a run, to let him know that she’d arrived on time, was a subtly different person as she walked out to the Taylor Cub to start her preflight.

  Concentration was part of it. He always followed a few steps behind her while she inspected the plane, and he could see that a lightning bolt striking the runway would not have broken her concentration while she was checking the propeller for nicks or cracks both with her eyes and fingertips, looking as if she were positively listening with her skin for any defect in the metal.

  You could tell a lot about someone just from watching them do a preflight, he thought. There were the people who did too much, too slowly, double-checking unnecessarily, because, in their heart of hearts, they truly hoped to put off the moment of climbing into the plane. They shouldn’t be trying to learn how to fly. However, with patience they could be taught, and eventually they might lose their fear.

  On the other hand, there were the people who cut corners, as if they hadn’t understood that they were entrusting their lives to a piece of equipment in which each bolt, nut and screw had an essential function. Those people shouldn’t be allowed to learn how to fly, and after he’d given them one warning he’d refused to take them up again. Most mistakes a student could make were survivable, but improper inspection of the ship while it was still on the ground was not among them.

  At this point, after watching Freddy make seven preflight checkouts, he’d be willing to go up in a ship she’d checked out without watching her do it with his own eyes. Not that he’d tell her, of course. Or do it, for that matter.

  Damn, but he liked the way Freddy used the sky, Terence McGuire thought, getting up from behind the desk he hated. Students tended to bounce all over the sky, slipping and sliding, clawing and clutching, rearing up and plunging down, overcorrecting their mistakes and then overcorrecting the new set of corrections, as nervous and skittish as if they were unbroken horses. He made sure that there was plenty of sky for them to learn in, but so many of them approached it as if it were an enemy, as if they didn’t trust it.

  Sky liked to be treated with decent respect, combined with a calm, quickly responsive but determined hand o
n the stick, and dancing, dancing, dancing feet on the rudders.

  As important was the fact that at each lesson he could see her precision improving. Precision was primary in this game … without precision, no other flying ability or combination of abilities was worth damn all. At each lesson, Freddy was achieving a higher degree of predictability and smoothness in the angles of her banks and turns, maintaining her airspeed and altitude exactly where he wanted them, more and more of the time. Exactly, McGuire was not backward about telling his students, meant just that: no room for any variance whatsoever.

  With more and more frequency she was executing a perfect rectangle, that fiendishly finicky series of steps that set up a good landing, a procedure involving dozens of elements of coordination of mind and body. It was utterly elementary when you knew how to do it, McGuire reflected, and a nightmare of frustrating inaccuracy until then.

  Freddy’s landings were becoming more and more consistent as well: a steady floating descent toward the numbers painted on the end of the runway, and then a quick and gentle setting down, tailwheel touching simultaneously with the two front wheels, a merger with the ground in which an ordinary passenger wouldn’t be able to separate out whether the plane had just decided to dissipate its speed and settle down on its own, or whether the pilot had put it down with a complicated knowledge as much in the body as in the head. It was all done through a series of totally unmagical and logical steps, yet, McGuire mused, no matter how many students he had taught or would ever teach, there would always be magic in a good landing.

  Fortunately the kid didn’t have a speck of passivity in her. A pilot with precision and accuracy down cold wouldn’t be worth a hoot in hell if he weren’t always on the alert, ready to react immediately to a change in conditions: a sudden gust of wind, a sudden drop in the wind, the appearance of another plane where it had no right to be; engine failure or any of the other devils that would always lie in waiting where man, machine and air came together … part of the price of flight. Or part of the challenge, depending on how you looked at it. If you ran out of lift and airspeed, you were in trouble, but if you ran out of ideas at the same time, you were dead.