Freddy glanced overhead. There was almost no visibility. The low, foglike winter clouds of California’s rainy season thinned out a little bit at the end of the runway, but on the ground it was dark, dank and miserable. Not a tempting day, a nonpilot would think, to take up a plane. But once above the clouds, once she’d broken through into the sunlight, it would be as good a day as any other, except that she wouldn’t be able to see the earth. And that was just as well, Freddy thought, as she walked watchfully around the Beechcraft, it would be better not to be reminded that no matter how high she flew, mankind still crawled below. Just sky. Just horizon. And most important, clouds to play with. She craved that more than anything.
The Bonanza had been maintained by one of the Eagles’ most experienced mechanics, but Freddy took extra care in her visual and physical inspection of the exterior of the plane, since she hadn’t personally checked it out in several months. She forced herself to be particularly meticulous because she was so anxious to be off. The airport was quiet at this early hour of the morning, and because of the weather, there were no other private pilots landing and taking off. She taxied out to the end of the runway, heart beating with a captive’s eagerness for escape, as she sped efficiently through the preflight checklist, saw that none of the needles on her instrument panel was in the red, and finally, released from discipline, let loose into the oblivion of the elements, headed down her home-base runway toward the beckoning promise of sky.
Once above the overcast, it was a day of overwhelming brightness. The cloud cover below was squashed so flat that it was like a lid on an endless can. The alluring cloudscape that Freddy had hoped to find was absent. Even the smallest peak and valley had been compressed into the lid, above which everything was the clear, unambiguous blue of morning, a blue without mystery or variety. A boring blue, Freddy realized in hostile disappointment, a blue that contained nothing that could help her to clear her mind and diminish her anger, the kind of blue a pilot could only drone through impatiently on the way to someplace else.
She headed north, hoping for a wisp of cloud that might have detached itself from the mass below, even a very small cloud, just big enough to tangle with, to tango with. If only she could catch up with a thunderstorm, the sort of storm every sensible pilot flew around, a vulgar, obvious storm, gaudy with menace, a vow of danger lurking in its turbulence, risk the unspoken covenant in its lightning, a storm that would throw her around in the cockpit and demand every ounce of her ability and experience. There probably wasn’t even a rain shower from here to Chicago, she thought in disgust. The day was all zero visibility and no action.
Freddy looked around the spacious, comfortable cockpit with sudden loathing. What a characterless plane! Its leather was immaculate, its instrument panel shining with newness, the metal of its brake pedal, which didn’t bear the traces of a single foot, so new and unmarked that she scuffed at it in anger. She’d flown thousands of new planes before, right from the factory to the airdrome, that was what the ATA job was all about, but she’d never resented one for being new as she resented this Bonanza.
This plane was not only too new, it was exceedingly uninteresting, Freddy decided grimly, wondering why she had been so eager to buy it. The model had been introduced to the market only a few years ago, the first single-motor plane ever designed to carry four people at a cruising speed of one hundred and seventy-five miles an hour, a highly crash-worthy plane built with great attention to quality in each of its details, a plane that everyone called incomparable. She called it a fucking bloody fat cow, Freddy thought furiously, a flying cow that could carry Ma, Pa, two kids, a picnic basket, overnight bags, a couple of slobbery dogs—why not a potty seat too, while they were about it?
She flipped the Bonanza around the empty sky, ripping through some aerobatics and noting, with a bleakly unimpressed eye, that the cow could stand up to pressure. And why not? She’d certainly paid enough for this airborne limousine, Freddy thought in contempt, filled with an acrid longing to be flying some beat-up, honorable old crate, some ancient kite with history stored in each of its fabric-covered wings, a plane with individuality and valor invisibly engraved on each of its instruments She’d fallen in love with a lot of planes in her day, and not one of them had ever betrayed her, not one had turned on her and made her into the worst kind of laughingstock, a plane didn’t spy out the fact that you were a woman, with a woman’s weaknesses, and use them to sucker you, to treat you as a victim, easy to mock, easy to gull—easy, easy pickings.
There was a small break in the cloud cover to her right, and she flew over and dove through it to see where she had wandered to. She realized that she didn’t really know where she was, and her watch told her that almost two hours had passed since she’d left Burbank. She was out over the ocean, a gray ocean with a horizon that was only one shade less gray. A dense fog was rolling in toward Santa Monica. Every airport for many miles around would be closed to all but instrument traffic, or maybe just plain closed.
This might as well be Lapland, Freddy decided, shaking her head in bitterness, remembering the day she had first flown over the Pacific, so sky-loony that she would have chased the sailboats over the edge of the horizon if Mac hadn’t stopped her. So young, so wild … so happy. It had been that day that she’d soloed. January ninth, 1936—in a few days it would be sixteen years in the past. Half of her lifetime.
Don’t look back, Freddy told herself, don’t ever look back. She must be hungry, she decided. She hadn’t had breakfast, she’d thrown up dinner, so even if she didn’t feel hungry she probably needed food. The quickest place to find something to eat was at the airport on top of Catalina Island. She’d been there many times, an unkempt little strip without a tower but the only place to land in the neighborhood with the distinction of being fifteen hundred feet high, on top of a rocky desert island with a romantic name and a harbor that had been a gambling haven in the thirties. There was a coffee shop in permanent operation at the airstrip, for day trippers made Catalina a popular and simple excursion in good weather. She’d have it all to herself today, which fit in with her mood, Freddy thought, as she headed toward the familiar, flat-topped lump far out in the ocean.
On a clear day, as real-estate salespeople always point out, you can see Catalina. But not today, she realized, as it began to disappear. She looked at her compass, adjusted her heading, and pointed the Bonanza directly toward the island.
As she came near Catalina, a pouncing sponge of fog, dense and disorienting, moving much faster than she had estimated, unexpectedly slopped over her windshield. Her nose and wings disappeared. She was, it seemed, flying a magic cockpit. So what, thought Freddy angrily, so what. A California fog was nothing. She could always head upstairs and punch through to sunlight but, damn it, she wanted her coffee, she owned this territory, it was her personal sky, claimed when she was a kid, won and rewon time after time, and she was damned if she’d let a little shitty fog snatch it away from her. She was the only person in her sky, and she knew the approach to Catalina so well that she could fly it blindfolded. She checked her altimeter. She had plenty of altitude, which was the only thing to worry about as she started to plan her landing.
Moving dexterously, handling her plane with supreme confidence, her coordination unaffected by either her emotions or the fog, Freddy flew the perfect invisible rectangle that would bring her, in a minute, smoothly settled onto the landing strip on top of the boulder-strewn, treeless bluff. The Bonanza was slowed down to its precise landing speed, the landing gear extended, the flaps down.
Too low, were the only words Freddy had time to think as Catalina, like soundless thunder, came at her out of the fog, a wall of rock, inescapable. There was a second left, only time enough to pull the nose up sharply, so that when she crashed she was at an angle to the side of the mountain. The shattered Bonanza still climbed the mountainside for yards and yards until it skipped and slid and fell into a ravine where it split apart and the noise stopped.
23
Bruno had been one of the first people in New York to meet Marie de La Rochefoucauld, one of the many daughters of the most prolific noble family in all of French history, a family whose members, under the notation “House of La Rochefoucauld,” occupied more than a full page in that bible of aristocracy, the Bottin Mondain; a family of interrelated branches adorned by three dukes; a family so large that many a La Rochefoucauld heir had married a La Rochefoucauld heiress throughout the parade of centuries; a family allied to all of the great names of France; a family whose origins, as Debrett’s Peerage, with an editorial bow, would occasionally note about an English duke, were “lost in time.”
Bruno had known one of her brothers at school, and it was through him that Bruno had met Marie soon after she arrived to earn her master’s degree in Oriental art at Columbia University. Why she would want to do that was only one of the marvelous mysteries of her supremely self-contained personality.
How could he have not expected that he would fall in love someday? Why had he been so sure that he was so different from other men, Bruno asked himself, yet, had he known, had he even suspected what love was like, how would he have been able to endure the years of waiting until he met Marie? In this spring of 1951, he was filled with an astonishing emotion that spread its branches through every one of his limbs, until he imagined himself looking like a chart of the circulatory system, each artery and vein and blood vessel a rushing thoroughfare of first love, all the more painful because he was thirty-six years old and Marie was only twenty-two.
Yet Marie didn’t treat him as if she thought he was too old for her, Bruno mused as he sat, immobilized by love, in his office at the bank. Of course, she did not know yet how he felt about her. She behaved toward him with beautifully simple but faintly reserved friendliness, the same friendliness, he had to admit, with which she acted toward everyone else she knew.
Marie was living in the John Allens’ vast stone town house. For many years the Allens had been friendly with Marie’s parents, the two couples linked by a common passion for the Chinese ceramics that they collected to the benign lack of interest of their acquaintances. The Allens had invited Marie to stay with them during the two years of her studies, and had put several rooms at her disposal. She had a sitting room where, from time to time, she received her new American friends for tea or sherry, although her days were rarely long enough to permit her to spend time on such matters, for up at Columbia she plunged deeply into her studies.
As brilliantly made as a crown jewel, Marie was tiny and slim. She had long, straight, shining black hair that she wore hanging down almost to her waist, pulled back from her untroubled white forehead and tied behind her nape with a silk ribbon. Her eyes were gray, under thin black brows, so lovely in shape that they might have been designed by Leonardo, and her fine nose had a delicate arch. Her mouth was gentle, excellently formed, and untouched by lipstick. She had little color in her exquisite face; the fascination was in the contrast of the blackness of her hair, the whiteness of her delicate skin and the clear, exceptionally light gray of her eyes.
Marie dressed innocently, almost childishly, in simple sweaters, blouses and skirts, artlessly thrown together with a lace scarf or a velvet vest or an embroidered jacket, in which she looked enchantingly old-fashioned in a city where tailored suits were the rule. She might have found her clothes in the attic of one of her family’s châteaux, Bruno thought, as he longed helplessly to buy her sumptuous clothes and great jewels. On her birthday he had gone to the best dealer in Oriental antiques in the city and bought her a bowl of Ching-te-chen whiteware of the Sung Dynasty, unequaled in its simple shape and its unadorned glaze, and she had taken one enraptured look at it and refused to accept it, because she knew the value of the seven-hundred-year-old work of art. If she had taken the bowl it would have been as if she had allowed him to give her a sable coat. Now the rejected ceramic was placed on his bedroom mantelpiece to remind him not to behave like a besotted nouveau riche with Marie de La Rochefoucauld.
She had such purity that it drove him mad. Marie never mentioned it, but Bruno, who had become the sleuth that every man in love discovers within himself, found out that she went to early mass every morning. One day when he had arrived a few minutes too early for tea and found himself the only guest, alone in her sitting room, he looked through a partly opened door and glimpsed a corner of her bedroom where a worn prie-dieu was placed before a crucifix. He had not dared to open the door any farther, and the image of her unseen bed had become a holy mystery to him, a mystery about which he knew he was unworthy to speculate.
When he woke up in the middle of the night, as he did now with increasing frequency, Bruno found himself wondering how it could have happened that he had fallen so completely and unexpectedly in love with an inexperienced, religious, intellectual, virtuous girl, whose young life had passed tranquilly in convents and classrooms and museums; who cared nothing for society or intrigue or position or possessions; whose desire, if what he deduced was true, was to spend most of her life in pursuit of scholarship, for the pure joy of learning; a girl who was, from the sensual point of view, a blank page, waiting without impatience for the destiny that would or would not bring her a husband and children.
Was it merely a turn toward an idealized virgin that had overtaken him, after so many years spent living out the most hidden, shame-laden fantasies of mature women of the world? Was this an aberration, born of sexual satiety? Could it be explained as an infatuation with her quality of being entirely French that made him, the homesick exile, believe that Marie, and Marie alone, would rescue him from the wasteland of his life?
None of these rational explanations ever lasted more than the time it took Bruno to form them. They vanished as soon as he thought of Marie, turning her little imperial head toward him, and laughing at one of his jokes, or letting him take her out to dinner and to a movie, for she adored American movies, the sillier the better, and she thoroughly enjoyed New York, making him ride on the subway and take the Fifth Avenue bus all the way down to Washington Square Park. They would watch the chess players in the park and then walk to Bleecker Street and find a cheap student coffee house where she liked to sit and watch the bohemian life swirl around her. He had this happiness only occasionally during a weekend, for on weekday nights Marie ate dinner with the Allens and studied until she went to bed.
There were other men around Marie. The Allens had presented her to some of the most eligible young bachelors in New York, but to Bruno’s watchful and jealous eye, she had not shown a preference for any of them. Above all, not one of the other men who claimed her time was French, not one could even speak decent French, and he was certain, as certain as he could be of anything, that Marie had no intention of spending the rest of her life in the United States. Much as she was amused by New York, much as she felt rewarded by her studies, she had confided in him that she deeply missed her big family. Bruno had known Marie de La Rochefoucauld since Christmas of 1950 and now, in the late spring of 1951, she was eagerly anticipating the summer in France.
“I’m sailing on the Ile de France
the day classes are over, and I won’t come back until just before the beginning of the fall semester—three whole months,” she’d said happily. “You’ll be in France for your summer vacation, won’t you, Bruno? Even New York bankers must get a few weeks off.”
“Of course,” he’d answered because he couldn’t think of an explanation for any Frenchman not going home on his vacation. It was so traditional, such a basic thing to do, that to say he had made other plans would sound strange. Frenchmen didn’t travel outside of their own country if they could avoid it.
Marie had invited him to come and visit at the château near Tours where her family spent each summer. He’d told her that he’d try to come, even as he had known that he would be separated from her all summer long, and that every day of that summer would bring the possibility that Marie might fall in love. His worst fear was that Marie might not even come back to New York to finish her work at Columbia, for it seemed impossible to him that she should remain heart-free during the gay, pleasure-filled, hospitable days and nights of an entire summer.
Yet Bruno dared not return to France, not even to visit Marie for a few weeks. The La Rochefoucauld château was not in the neighborhood of Valmont, but the jungle drums of the French aristocracy would immediately sound with the news that Bruno de Lancel was back in his native land, after his long and remarkable absence. His father would inevitably learn that he had returned, and Bruno knew that Paul’s interdiction and Paul’s threats could not have changed in six years. He would do what he had said he would do. Bruno fingered the scar that still remained over his upper lip.
Why couldn’t he ask her to marry him now, before she left, Bruno asked himself for the thousandth time, and as usual the answer was the same. Marie was not in love with him, and so she would refuse him, as charmingly and certainly as she had refused the Ching-te-chen whiteware bowl. Then he would be unable to see her frequently, unable to claim her free evenings, unable to win her love. The rules Marie lived by, rules he respected, for they were part of the world they shared, would prevent her from encouraging false hopes. She would be scrupulously careful not to spend time alone with him once she knew how he felt. She would most gently and firmly ease him out of her life, for Bruno de Lancel was not a man she could relegate to the position of a mere friend.
Judith Krantz Page 62