Her Last Flight

by Beatriz Williams

  Sometimes I think about what might have happened if some German antiaircraft gun hadn’t got the better of Velázquez in the winter of 1945. The war was nearly over, after all, and he might well have survived those last few months of it.

  By May, I was in the Obersalzberg, photographing the advance to Hitler’s mountain retreat. Velázquez was right about one thing; I had not been faithful, either to him or to his memory. Even before his death, I had picked up a lover or two, as the occasion presented itself. I had also struck up a friendship with a certain American general—four stars and married, another breach of the rules, but this fellow was an incorrigible philanderer so I felt I was not corrupting anybody, and anyway the wife had made her bargain long ago. This energetic and purely physical affair proved fruitful for my career. No longer was I given stupid assignments to photograph the revival of the Paris fashion houses in the wake of liberation; here I was on top of the world, the very front lines of the front lines as American troops liberated all the wine in Hitler’s cellar, to say nothing of the silver. I don’t know, maybe you’ve seen a few of those snaps yourself. One of them won the Pulitzer a year back.

  Anyway, as I said, I was in the mountains of southern Germany when news of victory reached me. The Fascists had been defeated at last! Japan remained, of course, but everybody knew that was only a matter of time and blood. I took some dutiful shots of the jubilation among the GIs, and then I requisitioned a Jeep and drove into Berchtesgaden and drank myself senseless on the cheap local liquor.

  By the end of the evening, I was addressing the empty bottle, which had become Velázquez in my mind. I told him I was awfully sorry about the general and the UPI reporter after Dachau and that sweet, virile, ecstatic GI from St. Louis in the back hallway of the tavern just now, and I assured him that he, Velázquez, had been a better lover than all three of them together (although that idea was also tempting). I said we’ve done it, we’ve beat the Fascists, we’ve got your revenge on Hitler for Guernica and Madrid and your parents and your sister and the girl you should have married. You would feel so vindicated! You would maybe wrangle a pass in the next month or so and come to visit me, and we would not leave our room for two days, and maybe, in the joy of that moment, victory and reunion and postcoital gratitude, when you sometimes confuse the intense, satisfied lust you’re feeling for true love, I might have made the mistake of saying yes, yes, I will marry you, Velázquez, I will become your wife and have your children and live a quiet little life with you in some quiet little house in some quiet little village in the country. I would have promised you this and maybe I would have done it too. Or maybe not. We’ll never know for certain.

  I don’t remember how I spent that night. In disrepute, probably. In the morning, I drove the Jeep back to the quartermaster and went on with my work, because what else can you do? You cannot call back those you have lost, however much your bones ache with missing them, however giant and mysterious the holes they leave behind.

  Lindquist disappears around the corner at the top of the stairs, to put her children to bed for the three thousandth time or so. The voices and thumps drift downward, Leo and his little siblings, joined by Lindquist. I head for the library and Olle’s liquor cabinet to add another splash of bourbon to the dregs of my cocoa. When I’m on the outside of that, I help Lani clean up in the kitchen, and at last I step outside, where the air is dark and fresh and smells of blossoms. I think how lovely it is to smell blossoms in October. They mingle with the bourbon fumes to produce something new and alluring that I believe I shall always associate with Hawai’i and Coolibah, after I’ve left this place and moved on to the next.

  I haven’t taken more than five steps across the lawn before somebody calls my name. I consider pretending I don’t hear, but then I find myself craving some company. So I stop and turn.

  “O captain, my captain. What brings you outside on a night like this?”

  “Do you have a moment?”

  “I’ve got a whole lifetime of moments. The question’s whether I should spend any more of them with you.”

  He smiles through the darkness. “Would you? Please?”

  “I should warn you,” I say, wagging my finger, “I’m a little the worse for bourbon.”

  “I guess I’ve handled a drunk or two in my time. Come along. Find somewhere to sit down.”

  “I think that would be wise.”

  He laughs in reply and starts walking in the direction of the sea. He doesn’t touch me, doesn’t seek my hand or my arm or anything. The moon has risen, three quarters of a clean white pie, just enough light to see by. By and by we come to some kind of gazebo, all by itself, surrounded by nothing but bushes bursting with flowers. You can’t tell what color they are because it’s too dark, but you can see their petals reflect the moonlight, and you can smell their perfume. I follow Leo up the steps into the shelter of the gazebo and lie down on a bench. He sits nearby, gripping the edge with his hands, and stares at me.

  “I just wanted to apologize,” he says.

  “You brought me all the way over here to say sorry?”

  “Wanted some neutral territory, I guess, in case you were going to throw something at me. I was kind of a bozo the other night.”

  “You had a stepmother to defend. I admired you for it, I really did. No hard feelings, as someone once said to me.”

  “All right, I was sore. I admit it. I thought you liked me.”

  “Oh, I do like you, Leo. I like you very much. I am deeply, deeply attracted to you. That tip you gave me was just the icing on an awfully delicious cake.”

  “I see,” he says, husky.

  “It’s funny, you’re not a bit like him, though.”

  “Like who?”

  “Like this fellow I knew during the war. Velázquez. He was gruff and short and hairy and plain, and I can’t ever seem to stop thinking about him.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “He’s dead, Leo. He died in the winter of ’45, in a bombing raid over Cologne.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “So am I.” I raise my head. “Have you said everything you wanted? Because I’d like to go to bed now.”

  He rises and helps me to my feet. I keep hold of his hand, because we’re friends again. We walk to the cottage through the flowery air. The moon glows above us. When we reach the door, I stop and turn to face him, and the air just expires from my lungs. Having watched his face all evening, contorted into all kinds of expressions, I’ve forgotten how simply alluring he is, how alluringly simple.

  “Tell me something. How did your father meet your stepmother?”

  “It was the airline. She advertised for pilots, and he’d done a little crop-dusting, so he applied. She trained all the pilots herself.”

  “And nobody knew who she was?”

  “You have to understand, we don’t care much about the outside world around Hanalei.”

  I nod. “That’s why she landed here.”

  “I guess so. I think she hated all the fuss.”

  “And how did you feel? Getting a new mother after all those years? And then your brother and sister coming along.”

  I observe him carefully. I am not so drunk that I can’t pay attention. I note his hesitation, the brief furrow of his brow as he gives his answer some thought.

  “I was just happy for Dad,” he says. “And I was happy for her. For Irene. I thought she’d had a rough time, and now she had someone to take care of her, for a change.”

  “Everyone needs that, I guess.”

  “Everyone but you. Isn’t that right, Janey?”

  I put my hand on the doorknob. “Good night, Leo. Pleasant dreams.”

  Inside the cottage, I pour myself a glass of water from the tap and swallow a couple of aspirins. Leo was right, I can take care of myself, all right. I know what to do when I’m going to bed a little the worse for Olle’s fine Kentucky bourbon.

  But I don’t hit the sack right away. Instead I light a cigarette and dig out the leather diar
y from its hiding place—I won’t tell you where—and flip to the last few pages. I should explain that this is not some ordinary diary. More like a journal, a bewildering mishmash of jottings and engine diagrams, telephone numbers and map directions, which takes on narrative form only at the end, in which Mallory writes of his ordeal in the Spanish badlands, the anguish of his own injuries and the infinitely worse anguish of watching Irene suffer, while helpless to save her. His devastation that he will never see his daughter again. It’s not something I enjoy reading, and yet since I first discovered the diary, these harrowing words have drawn me back to read them, over and over, until they’ve scored themselves upon my skin. I seem convinced of something essential inside them, some secret to life itself; that if I experience Mallory’s agony often enough, I’ll discover what it is he’s trying to tell me.

  I come to the last line:

  GM to rescue at last thank God She will live

  Every story has a hero and a villain, doesn’t it, and if it doesn’t—why, we fashion them ourselves. We want to take sides. We want to pledge our allegiance to one person or the other, one cause or another; to atone for our own thousand failings by planting ourselves on the high ground of righteousness, so we can crush some other poor schmuck beneath our heels and feel we are not simply right, but good.

  All along, I have figured this story has one villain, and I thought I knew who it was. But maybe I was wrong, all along. Maybe I should have learned by now that nobody is all good or all bad; that hardly any battles are fought between good and evil. There is more good and less evil, or more evil and less good, but the only time I’ve ever felt the presence of absolute evil was when we opened the gates at Dachau and saw what men had wrought. And I’ll bet even those SS guards thought they were doing the right thing at the time. The human brain is capable of all kinds of contortions, all kinds of earnest and precise blindnesses, in order to protect itself from the idea that it might have made a mistake. That it might have taken the wrong side.

  That final line, the last words Sam Mallory ever wrote, as he lay injured in his airplane and waited to die: what if I’m wrong about that?

  I run my fingers along the ink, where Mallory’s fingers left their mark, and tap some ash into the dish beside me.

  As usual, I wake up in a sweat a few hours later. To pass the time, I reach for the newspaper clippings my old friend Bill sent me, the ones about Howland and Australia and the scandalous Honolulu photographs that apparently drove Mrs. Mallory to attempt her own life. Eventually I fall asleep again and rise at nine. Lindquist is gone. I snatch some coffee from the kitchen and bicycle down the highway, right through Hanalei, until I reach the village of Kilauea and the post office on the main road, which serves more or less the same variety of purpose here. The woman at the counter doesn’t seem to recognize me. I ask if I can send a telegram. She hands me the form, and I tap the pencil against my lips a few times before I compose the message.

  BILL YOU BIG LUG STOP HOW ABOUT PULLING ALL YOU CAN FIND ON GEORGE MORROW STOP SEND TO YOURS TRULY CARE OF KILAUEA POST OFFICE STOP HAWAII BEATS ALL STOP WISH YOU WERE HERE STOP MUCH LOVE JANEY

  III

  Flying with me is a business. Of course I make money. I have to or I couldn’t fly. I’ve got to be self supporting or I couldn’t stay in the business.

  —Amelia Earhart

  Aviatrix by Eugenia Everett (excerpt)

  October 1936: California

  Irene had wired ahead to George:

  LAND BURBANK APPROX 5PM STOP NO PRESS STOP REPEAT NO PRESS STOP LOVE ALWAYS IRENE

  When the airplane rolled to a stop outside Hangar A, however, Irene looked out the cockpit window and saw four or five men in shabby blue suits gathered respectfully at the corner, holding their notebooks and their cameras. A couple of flashes went off. Landon took off his radio headset and turned to Irene. “I guess your public awaits,” he said.

  “I’m sorry. I told him not to call the press.”

  “No such thing as bad publicity, right?”

  Irene unbuckled the safety strap and reached for her kit bag. “Thanks for the lift,” she said.

  “Any time. Sorry about the race.”

  “Those are the breaks. At least the ship’s not a write-off.”

  “She’ll take some fixing, though.”

  Irene ran a brush through her curls and dug out a tube of lipstick. “She will.”

  The autumn sun was already dipping below the hills to the west. Landon opened the hatch and a couple of flashbulbs went off, a couple of voices called out in greeting. George bounded up the stairs first, tore off his hat, greeted her with an embrace and a kiss, prompting a few more flashbulbs and a photograph that would appear in the Burbank Daily Review the next morning, page four, and the Los Angeles Times, page eleven. He drew back and held her by the shoulders. His expression was one of fatigue and relief, and for a moment the exhausted Irene just absorbed the familiar air of him, hair oil and shaving soap and a distant note of cigars.

  “Welcome home, darling,” said George. “How’s the arm?”

  “The arm’s just fine. I thought I said no press.”

  “Just a few fellows. Hardy and Patrick from the Daily Review, Rogers from the Times. Ten minutes, tops.” He kissed her forehead. “Then dinner. You must be starving.”

  “More tired than hungry, actually,” said Irene, but George was already replacing his hat, lifting her kit bag, taking her hand. They descended the steps together in a routine George had choreographed so long ago, Irene didn’t have to think. The newsmen gathered around at the foot of the steps and began their questions in the usual way, to which Irene answered in the usual way.

  “How’s the arm, Miss Foster?”

  “It’s all right.” (Lifting her left arm.) “It’ll be in a sling for a few more days, but there’s no fracture. Nothing to worry about.”

  “You must be awfully disappointed, Miss Foster. Would you care to comment on the crash in Fort Worth?”

  “I wouldn’t call it a crash, really. We just had a hard landing, that’s all. When a squall moves in just as you’re approaching the airfield, you have to prepare for the worst.”

  “With all due respect, Miss Foster, should you have attempted the landing at all, with weather bearing down?”

  “It’s a race, Mr. Rogers. Flying the Coast-to-Coast Derby’s a different matter from making an ordinary journey from city to city, carrying passengers. If you want to win, you have to take a chance or two. You can’t let a little weather get in your way.”

  “But surely it’s not worth risking your life?”

  “Any kind of competitive flying carries an element of risk. That’s why we fly these races, to push the airplanes and the pilots to their utmost, to push back the frontiers of what’s possible, so that the common man can get on an airplane in full confidence that the machine and the captain will get him to his destination in safety and comfort.”

  As she finished this speech, George put his hand to the small of her back and rubbed his thumb against her spine. He did this to convey approval to her during the countless times they’d stood like this over the years, at the bottom of the airplane steps, while Irene spoke to the press and George gazed at her as if she were some kind of goddess come to earth. They used to rehearse at home. George would ask questions and Irene would answer them, and George would tell her how she ought to have answered them, frankly and openly while still communicating some particular message, some theme to which she and George had agreed. Now it was second nature. Irene knew exactly what she was supposed to do. Say what you would about George—and there were plenty of mutterings by the fall of 1936, few of which ever reached Irene’s ears—he had a natural gift for publicity. A genius, really. Without George Morrow, there would have been no Irene Foster, at least as we know her today.

  Anyway, she appreciated the gesture. It had been a long flight from Fort Worth, and her arm hurt, and she was tired and hungry, and now she had to stand up straight in the midst of this humilia
ting defeat and answer impertinent questions in a dignified voice, when all she really wanted was to berate herself for her mistake; to demand whether these smug, paunchy reporters thought they thought they could fly an airplane any better; to crawl under the blankets of a soft, warm bed and hide from the world. At a time like this, a hand at the small of your back, rubbing your aching spine, is worth more than treasure.

  After exactly ten minutes of questions, George raised his palm. “All right, boys. That’s enough. My wife’s going to need some dinner and a good bed, and it’s my job to see that she gets them.”

  When they reached the car, Irene turned to George. “Can’t you drive this time? I’m just beat, I really am.”

  George dropped her kit bag in the narrow back seat. “You can do it, darling. It’s just a few miles.”

  “George, please.”

  “But you love to drive.” He kissed her cheek and opened the driver’s door. “Makes a great photograph, remember? That’s how we want people to think of you. Driving off the airfield in your own roadster.”

  Of course, he was right. He didn’t say it, but Irene knew the photos were everywhere, the Fort Worth crackup, Irene’s airplane tilted to one side in a grassy ditch, landing gear crushed, rain pouring down, Irene’s head bowed and her face crumpled with disappointment. They needed an image to counterpose defeat with triumph. They needed Irene thundering off the airfield behind the wheel of her custom Hudson roadster, husband at her side. She climbed in. The key was already stuck in the ignition switch. She pushed down the clutch and turned the key, and the engine growled awake, and Irene wanted to bawl out her frustration like a baby. But she didn’t. She put the car in gear and pushed down the gas pedal and released the clutch, and she and George roared down the driveway against the setting sun, while the photographers clicked their shutters and captured the moment for history.