Her Last Flight

by Beatriz Williams

  Mrs. Mallory wasn’t looking at Irene any longer; she gazed serenely across the assembled reporters and took up her daughter’s hand again. She spoke as if reciting from a prepared script, which probably she was: “I am grateful that my husband has secured the assistance of such a single-minded professional for his endeavor. I know Miss Foster understands how much Pixie and I depend on her skill and endurance. Our very hearts and lives are at stake.”

  “Believe me,” said Irene, “so are mine.”

  More laughter.

  “All right, all right,” said Sam. “I think it’s about time we gave you gentlemen the dope on what this bird can do. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but our mechanics have been busy fueling the plane while we’ve been shooting the breeze out here. Our equipment’s aboard, ready to go. Miss Foster? Do feel like heading up in the air and taking a turn above Los Angeles?”

  “I certainly do, Mr. Mallory. I couldn’t be readier.”

  Sam turned to his wife and kissed her good-bye—more flashbulbs—and then bent to lift Pixie in his arms. Sam’s daughter had a round face and a light sprinkle of freckles across her nose, like any cherub. She put her small arms around her daddy’s neck and cuddled his face against hers, and how those photographers loved her for it! Sam whispered something in her ear, and she nodded her bright blond head. Irene turned away when her eyes started to prickle.

  There at her elbow she found Sophie, who enveloped her in a hug.

  “Safe flight, my dear one. Where’s your father?”

  “Still inside the cafeteria, I think.” Irene reached into the inside pocket of her tunic. “Here. Give him this. I meant to mail it, but since he’s here in person . . .”

  Sophie took the envelope. “You’d better hurry inside that airplane, then. Before he reads it.”

  “I will.” Irene turned to Sam, who was showing Pixie how to wave to the photographers. “Are you going to quit mugging for those cameras and get us in the air, or what?”

  The crowd laughed. One of the photographers called out, “Aw, come on, Miss Foster. How about one of the two of you?”

  Irene checked her watch—eleven fifty-six—and lifted her chin to judge the distance to the cafeteria. “Just a minute or two, I guess.”

  So Irene stood next to the gleaming ship with Sam, first waving, then looking at each other, then hands on hips casting each other the old challenging gaze—a novelty pose, they called it—and finally Irene sitting on one wing, in between engine and fuselage, while Sam stood next to her knee. That was the shot that made most of the papers, the shot that made the history books and the encyclopedias. Sam propped his elbow on the wing’s edge, right next to Irene’s leg, and they looked sunny and at ease with each other, like they were setting out for a picnic instead of the final test flight of a prototype aircraft they planned to fly across the Pacific Ocean together.

  At last Irene nudged Sam, and Sam said, “All right, boys. You’ve had your fun. Now it’s time we had ours.”

  He put his hands around Irene’s waist and slid her back to the ground, and nobody took a photograph of that. In those days, a respectable newspaper simply wouldn’t publish it.

  By the standards of 1928, the Centauri was a large, powerful aircraft. Still, it was not luxurious, certainly not in comparison to the modern passenger airliner. For one thing, when you were traveling thousands of miles over the ocean in 1928, you didn’t carry so much as a pound of unnecessary weight. The main deck was made of aluminum and left bare. The seats had no cushions. The air was hot and smelled of oil and gasoline. It was a special grade of fuel made especially for airplanes, and Sam and Irene weren’t planning to waste a drop of it.

  The enclosed cockpit of the Centauri was larger than that of most existing airplanes, but not wide enough to accommodate both of them. Irene sat behind Sam, in the navigator’s seat, which had its own window and communicated with the pilot by means of a pulley cable they called the clothesline, even though their seats were only a yard apart and she could reach out and touch him if she wanted. This was because the two giant engines threw off so much racket, you couldn’t hear anything else inside that airplane but the relentless beat of gears and propellers. Nor did you want to. Without that noise, you were in trouble.

  Irene checked her box of notepaper and pens. She checked her charts and equipment, her compasses and sextant and smoke bombs that measured wind drift, her celestial maps, her Mercator projections of the North Pacific and South Pacific, ocean currents indicated, prevailing winds noted. She had recalibrated all three of her magnetic compasses an hour ago, but she checked them again now, because a mistake of a sliver of a degree would mean missing those volcanic specks known as Hawai’i by hundreds of miles. She turned on both radios and settled her headset over her ears, tuned the agreed-upon frequency and announced herself into the transmitter. A crackle came back from the transmitter in the airfield’s control tower, then Mr. Rofrano’s baritone, eternally calm. Rofrano tower. Centauri, acknowledge. Another voice joined them from the United States naval station at Long Beach. Everyone in place, everyone at his designated mark. A whole legion of supporting actors in this drama, the choreography of which had been arranged by George Morrow.

  In the cockpit, Sam started the right engine, then the left. The propellers thudded, measured at first, then faster and faster until the thuds all merged into a noise like a colossal insect. The ship faced north, so there was no glare from the sun to disturb their preparations. Not a word passed between them, by air or by paper. Sam knew exactly what she was up to, and Irene knew what Sam was up to, almost as if her own hands performed his tasks and her own eyes looked through that cockpit window and surveyed the airfield, the sky, the landscape, the wind sock that drooped atop the control tower.

  As they pulled away from the hangar area and onto the landing strip, Irene couldn’t help looking out the window at the crowd that followed them, forming and re-forming in a swarm, like ants. Already Irene felt detached from them. They belonged to the earthbound world. The slim tube of the Centauri contained Irene’s world. Everything that was real and important.

  Eleven minutes later, the Centauri lifted off from Rofrano’s Airfield in Burbank, California, on an east-southeast bearing, banked south, and crossed directly over the city of Los Angeles before reaching the edge of the Pacific Ocean in the sky above Long Beach. Irene saw Catalina Island crawl past on the left, surrounded by a hundred tiny white scratches, the wakes of motorboats. She informed the Long Beach naval station of their position, altitude, and heading.

  Once they reached eight thousand feet, Sam leveled off and turned his head to wink at Irene, as if they’d just gotten away with something mischievous. The radio crackled. Irene turned her attention to the receiver, while Sam turned his attention to the controls. It was the Long Beach naval station, acknowledging her transmission and wishing them Godspeed.

  Because the Long Beach naval station already knew what Mr. Rofrano was now announcing to the reporters gathered in the makeshift press room of the airfield cafeteria, while they ate their grilled cheese sandwiches and smoked their cigarettes, passing the time before the scheduled return of the Centauri from its test flight.

  The Centauri would not return to Burbank that day, after all. Sam Mallory and Irene Foster had just begun their historic flight to Sydney.

  Hanalei, Hawai’i

  October 1947

  What I didn’t tell you about that Spanish fellow, the one who told me where to find Mallory’s wreckage, was that we were lovers. Or maybe you’ve guessed? I mean, it wouldn’t be out of character for me, and in times of war we are all prone to do reckless things, like take lovers we know will probably die.

  We met at an airfield outside Paris, not long after the Allies retook the city from the Nazis. Those were heady days. The journalists all found digs at the Hotel Scribe (and they say the press doesn’t have a sense of humor) where we proceeded to drink the bar dry. That’s another story. I did try to refuse the assignment to photograph Allied
airplanes landing and taking off from this French airfield, which only last week belonged to the Luftwaffe, but that didn’t work out so well and Raoul Velázquez de los Monteros was the officer assigned to show me around.

  Naturally I was curious about the name. It turned out he’d flown for the Republican Air Force during the civil war in Spain, and when the game was up in early 1938, he fled over the Pyrenees to France and offered his services to the French air command, vowing revenge on Fascists everywhere. Two years later, when the Fascists overran France, he was forced to flee again, this time to join the Royal Air Force, and that was more or less how he wound up escorting an American photographer around the Orly Air Base, ten miles southeast of Paris, on a beautiful early September day in 1944.

  You will comprehend that Velázquez did not think much of lady journalists and even less of lady photographers. Moreover, he had been seconded to this American base as a kind of liaison officer after surviving an improbable number of combat tours and was not especially happy in that role. He was gruff with me, which I found endearing. He was not exactly handsome and not exactly tall, but he had this oddly graceful stockiness to him, and a brusque, efficient manner that softened by degrees as we toured the hangars and the tower, and he told me what I could photograph and not photograph. At the time, I wore my brown hair cropped short and no cosmetics at all—maybe a swipe of lipstick, when I could find any—and I must have looked like a different species from the sumptuous Polish mistress he kept in London. (Although possibly she kept him; I was never quite clear on that point, and tellingly he had no money except his RAF pay.) Still, despite all that military bristling we ended up sharing dinner at a cheap little café near the air base, where the delighted proprietor kept refilling our glasses with all these magnificent vintages he had kept hidden from the German occupiers for four long years—resistance takes many forms, you understand—so that one thing led to another and we ended up in bed. C’est la guerre, as the French say.

  I was so pleasantly surprised! Not only was Velázquez a generous lover, he had the gift of stamina, even on the outside of two or three bottles of wine. We met often over the next several weeks. I used to snuffle the fur on that barrel chest of his and soak up the pungency of him. My Spanish bear, I called him. He taught me the Spanish phrase for that, which I forget. Anyway, one night I mentioned to him that I was breaking a rule of mine, sleeping with a pilot, and he demanded to know why I wouldn’t sleep with pilots when after all they were the best lovers in the entire world, and eventually we got around to the subject of Sam Mallory. He went quiet and reached for his Gauloises, a habit he had picked up when he fled to France, and smoked without speaking for some time. I had far better sense than to interrupt him. When you’ve been chasing photographs as long as I have, you know when your subject is about to reveal some vulnerable secret.

  “I knew Sam Mallory,” he said at last. “He taught me how to fly at the beginning of the war, at the fighter school in El Carmoli on the southern coast of Spain.”

  At three o’clock in the afternoon, Lindquist breaks off to go collect the children from school. She seems to have forgotten that I’m not to be trusted, or maybe she thinks that these things she’s told me, these confidences, have won my loyalty. Before she leaves, I ask if I can take her picture, and she doesn’t even hesitate. Go ahead, she says. She’s vain enough to turn the right side of her face to the camera, however.

  When she leaves, I turn restless. I read the notes I scribbled in my notebook. I rise from the wicker sofa on the lanai and return across the short stretch of lawn to the cottage, which has been faithfully cleaned by Lani, the housekeeper. I toss the camera and the notebook on the bed and take the key for the suitcase from my pocketbook. The key fits; the lock clicks. But when I lift the lid, I know right away that someone’s been inside, someone who has been very careful to leave everything as she found it.

  Nothing’s missing. My clothes are all there, my underthings, my few vanities. I am not so foolish as to keep anything valuable in this suitcase. I’ve been to war, I’ve lived in various godforsaken corners of the world, some lawful and some not, and the first thing I do when I come to rest in a new lodging, I find a hiding place for what’s important. And you see? Wasn’t I right?

  I close the suitcase and go to this hiding place of mine—I’m not telling you where it is—and reach inside. To my relief, all is where I left it. The leather diary, thank God, and underneath it, the smooth, cool handle of my pistol.

  Lindquist’s children barrel across the lawn an hour later, making straight for the kitchen door and the cookies on the other side of it. Lindquist calls on them to stop and say hello to Miss Everett, our guest.

  At the word guest, they pull up like a pair of ponies and turn to me with amazed expressions. “We’ve never had a guest before,” says the girl, who’s an inch taller than her brother and presumably the elder.

  “No doubt.” I stick out my hand. “Janey Everett. I’m a photojournalist.”

  “Is that a journalist who takes pictures?” the girl says.

  “Exactly right. I’ve always said the kids are quicker than the grown-ups.”

  “I’m Doris.” She shakes my hand. “And this is Wesley. He’s only seven.”

  “Oh, he’ll grow out of that soon enough. Hello, Wesley. Come along, my hand’s not going to shake itself.”

  Wesley giggles and shakes my hand.

  “They are handsome specimens,” I say to Lindquist. “You must be awfully proud. Do they do anything interesting?”

  Doris says, “I play the piano and jump my pony. Wesley’s pretty dull, though.”

  “I ride horses too!”

  “Not very well, and you can’t jump yet.”

  “Chip off the old block, isn’t she?” I observe to Lindquist.

  Lindquist shoos them toward the kitchen door. “All right, all right. Go get your cookies and change into your swimsuits. We’re going to take Miss Everett down to the beach and teach her to surf.”

  “Don’t worry!” I call after them. “She’s only kidding around!”

  A half hour later, I’m standing in the sand with a surfboard while Doris and Wesley demonstrate the essentials of surfing to my thick understanding.

  “You see? It’s easy!” Doris calls from the top of a wave.

  “Come on out! The surf’s low today!” adds Wesley, just as he spills gracefully from his board into the water.

  “Aren’t you worried about sharks?” I ask Lindquist.

  “Oh, the sharks always gather where the fish are, near the upswells. We don’t see any around here.” She lifts her surfboard under her arm. “Not often, anyway.”

  The water, I’ll admit, is delicious. Most of my experience with oceans has been of the frigid kind, and it’s a nice surprise to stick your toe into a tropical bath instead. I don’t know much about the mechanics of waves, how they form, what physical features of headland and reef and island shelf, what fickle variations of wind and tide and current turn some ordinary ripple into a behemoth worthy of riding into eternity. I do understand that each beach has its own particular wave, like a voice or a signature that might vary in each iteration but still presents a form anybody can recognize. The waves rolling on this beach are happy, gentle waves. Not the kind to set your pulse racing, unless you’re a beginner like me.

  “All right,” says Irene. “The first thing is to swim out just past the breakers, where the waves form.”

  It occurs to me, as I choke and stroke my way through the surf—yes, actually through those giant breaking waves to get to the relative peace on the other side—that Lindquist might actually be trying to kill me. If some landlubbing photographer dies while attempting to surf, the local authorities will deem this incident a foolish, unfortunate accident, won’t they? There will be some inquest, some noises of regret and humility in the face of nature’s might, and everyone will go on with her life. Except the dead photographer in question, of course.

  The board is heavier than I expected
, an awkward thing to drag along as you paddle and gasp and paddle some more, as you eventually start paying attention to the rhythm of the waves, so you can make your progress in the gaps between them, and then gather your fortitude and dive straight through the arc of water as it breaks over you. I hear the children laughing somewhere, Lindquist calling out some motherly instruction. My head reeks of brine. Then I emerge from the other side of an especially big nalu—that’s the Hawaiian word, the children have informed me, smug little bastards—and the world is blue and calm, the waves mere swells, the sun hot and white above us.

  “Now get on your board,” Lindquist says. “Just straddle it, that’s right, like a horse. Paddle a bit, so the current doesn’t carry you out too far. There’s not much rip on this beach, so it’s good for beginners.”

  I don’t quite understand the meaning of this word rip, but it does sound menacing and best avoided. The paddling I could grow to like, however. The ocean rustles like a living creature underneath me—and here I look downward, to make sure there’s not actually a living creature underneath me—and carries me on its back. Ahead lies the white beach, the jungle, the pale buildings on the ridge. Above it all, the sky without a cloud.

  “Watch the shore,” calls Lindquist. “That’s how you get your bearings. The waves will carry you one way, so it’s up to you to counter the drift.”

  I think I understand her. The board rises and falls with the incoming waves. I lie down on my stomach and rest my cheek against the slippery wood, so that my whole body moves in this delicious rhythm, surging and then idling, the sun baking me from above. Some small effort’s needed to keep from wandering off, but even that’s beyond me. Haven’t I struggled against the current all my life? Haven’t I fought and scrapped and survived? And all along there was another way. To lie on a strip of wood and allow the ocean to determine my course; to simply exist, lulled by the infinite strength of nature. Probably this is the meaning of heaven. You search and search, you think you glimpse it from time to time, in the aftermath of lovemaking or the bottom of a bottle of good champagne, and always it eludes you. Until now, perhaps? Here on the surface of a pacific ocean?