Dogfight (12 page)

Hettie was reading a book that summer in which spies had lived with deaf people for a year to learn how to read lips. Hettie was practicing. She watched her father's mouth moving, then Amelia Earhart's. She shifted the hard apple from hand to hand, thumping it against her cast, and concentrated on their lips. Unless she was mistaken, Amelia Earhart said to her father, “Peter Saxacorn, I love you more than anything in the world.”

This was Rye, New York, March 1937. A line of magnificent houses stretched along the beach like gracious actors preparing for a bow. The air was still wintry, but that didn't stop summer residents from reclaiming their houses, bringing servants out from the city to open the windows, clean the linens, scrub the bitter salt smell from the floors. Everyone in Rye knew that Amelia Earhart was preparing to leave soon on another flight, this one around the world. Hettie knew everything about her. Born in Atchison, Kansas. College at Columbia. Summer school at Harvard, where she became friends with Hettie's mother. She had already flown with Wilmer Stultz and Louis Gordon across the Atlantic, across the very ocean that stretched grayly away from the beach where Hettie's mother had humiliated her. She had piloted a plane all on her own along the same route, setting a new speed record for the crossing: 13 hours, 30 minutes. And again, two years later, she had flown nonstop from Mexico City to New York—14 hours, 19 minutes—another record. She wasn't just the fastest woman; she was the fastest anybody.

One thing Hettie could say in her mother's favor was that she had
brought Amelia Earhart into their lives. They were friends before Hettie was born, when her mother was still beautiful. Hettie had seen pictures of them together. Boston, against a plain brick wall. Their hair bobbed short, like schoolboys, their slender calves and narrow ankles below knee-length dresses.

When Miss Amelia—that's what Hettie called her—would come to dinner, she would say, “Your mother was a wild one, Hettie. Every boy from Annapolis to Princeton was after her.” She would flash a wide, tipsy smile and laugh out loud like a man. “But Peter was the lucky one.” Here, she would touch the backs of Mr. Saxacorn's fingers. “They were the most beautiful couple. The envy of the known world.”

He'd say, “I'm a lucky man,” and draw his hand away.

“Poor Peter,” Hettie's mother would say. “I'm sorry I can't be beautiful for you anymore. I never bounced back from carrying you, Hettie. I gave you all my beauty in that delivery room.”

Hettie's mother was English and her voice squeaked when she was drunk. She'd try to catch Hettie and pull her into her lap, but Hettie was too old for that and besides, the thought of being born made her cringe. Hettie would skip away, stay just out of her reach. Her mother was too heavy and too drunk to catch her.

“You're still the most beautiful woman I know,” her father would say and his dishonest kindness made Hettie love him more.

Now, lying in her bed, the dampness from her bathing suit soaking into the sheet beneath her, Hettie remembered Amelia Earhart's hand on her father's. She was glad for him. Maybe they had always been in love. Her mother would be angry when she discovered the wet sheets, sandy from her feet, but Hettie didn't care. She closed her eyes and she was in a Lockheed Vega with her father and Amelia Earhart. They were flying above Rye on a mad dash for Mexico City. Amelia was at the stick. The massive houses scrolled by beneath them one by one until they came to the house of Charles Putnam, Amelia's husband, where they swooped down for a closer look. He was standing on his own balcony looking up at them, smiling sadly.
He raised his drink; he was sorry to see Amelia go but he, unlike Hettie's mother, understood that you can't stand in the way of true love. They dipped a wing in salute, then looped away from him into the sky. A voice behind Hettie said, “Ahoy, a white whale.” She turned around and her father was gone. In his place sat Baker Fitzgerald, his skin already beginning to tan, his hair the color of a wedding ring. He was pointing out the window and she followed his finger with her eyes until she saw a surfacing whale, massive and sickly white with red-rimmed eyes and algae growing on its back, water rushing from its exposed flanks. Amelia said, “Hold on tight, Hettie,” and they dove again. The engines howled. Baker's arms slipped around her waist. Gunfire broke the water like raindrops.

Hettie opened her eyes, walked over to the full-length mirror. She studied herself close up. Her hair sticky from the salt in the wind, the constellation of freckles across the bridge of her nose. She stepped back and turned sideways, hiding her cast against her body. She had no figure yet, was lean and tall like her father, but that didn't mean she wouldn't ever have one. There was hope for her yet. She would just be sure not to have children.

Her parents were having a party tonight and everyone would be there. The Blackfords and the Duponts, the Marchands and the Ex-leys. Neville what's-his-name—the diplomat who had served with Hettie's grandfather in the foreign service—he would be there, too. Amelia Earhart would come with her husband. Hettie wondered what it was like for her father and Amelia Earhart, having to hide their love. Having to be nice to her mother and Mr. Putnam, having to kiss each other on the cheek, when what they wanted to do, Hettie imagined, was go running up the stairs and fall into each other's arms. She ached for them.

Tonight, her mother would dress her up in one of the frilly, little-girl dresses with a low waist. She would put a bow in her hair and parade her around the house a few times to greet the guests, before banishing her to her room for the duration of the party. Everyone would ask about her cast, and her mother would tell the story for
her, would get it all wrong. Hettie was running from her awful parents, her mother would say. She'd been sent to her room and was trying to escape. She would tell the story dozens of times, maybe changing it a bit once in a while, and everyone would laugh. But that wasn't it at all. Hettie always obeyed her father. She wouldn't have run from him. She had been standing at her open window on the second floor looking at the smaller houses across the cockleshell road, white as bones, and had suddenly realized that she
could
jump. She could ease out onto the sill and hurl herself off, give herself up to the air. And that's exactly what she did. It was as if she couldn't stop herself. It had been the most thrilling thing she had ever done, worth all the pain, when she pitched forward on the grass and snapped her wrist, worth the miserable, persistent itching. Only Amelia Earhart could understand something like that.

Hettie's mother had big plans for her cast. Just that morning, sprawled on a beach chair, like something washed up from the sea, she had said, “Hettie, how does this sound? We'll paint your name with nail polish on your cast. I'll do it in calligraphy. I learned calligraphy in school and I haven't tried it in years—It'll be smashing—and we'll tie a bow around it, a blue one like your dress. What do you say?”

Calligraphy. What a useless talent. Nothing at all like lip-reading or disguise. Nothing at all like flying a plane. Even now, Hettie heard the servants downstairs moving furniture to make a dance floor, the caterers setting up. From her window, she could see sofas and end tables being carried across the neat lawn and loaded into trucks to be carted away. They would be stored for the night and returned in the morning. Hettie stripped out of her bathing suit and changed into dry clothes. She crept to the head of the stairs and listened for her mother. She could hear her voice, directing the caterers, drifting in from the beach. Her mother wouldn't want her wandering off so close to the party.

“Hettie, what are you up to?” Her father's voice behind her.

She turned to find him leaning out of the bathroom, just head
and shoulders, hair slicked back with water. The left side of his face was smeared with shaving cream, the right smooth and clean. He had a cigarette between his lips. She stepped over to him on tiptoe and kissed his cheek. She wanted to smell him, that lime and soap smell with the smoke all mixed in. She stepped back, winked, and pressed a finger to her lips. He said, “I get it. Secret mission. Mum's the word. Aye, aye, captain.” Her father had been a navy man.

“Close your eyes,” she whispered and he did as she asked.

“Don't hurt me,” he said, eyes squinched shut, a pencil line of smoke drifting up from between his lips.

Hettie nicked a cigarette from the pack on the ledge of the sink and trotted back to the landing, waited until two workmen passed carrying a long striped sofa, then dashed down the stairs and threw herself into the cushions, pressed herself flat. They wobbled, a moment, under her weight but didn't stop. She got off at the back of the truck, thanked them for the ride, and headed off down the road toward the Fitzgeralds'. Maybe Baker would want to share her cigarette.

She knocked on the kitchen door and was met by a colored woman who sat her down at the kitchen table and asked her to wait while she went to fetch Baker. The kitchen was immaculate, smelled of bleach. Baker came in without the colored woman and stood in the middle of the room. He said, “Whaddaya want?”

She held the cigarette between the knuckles of her middle two fingers and raised her eyebrows. He found a box of matches in the drawer. They sat on the back steps and smoked, passing the cigarette between them.

“Don't you want to take this down to the beach or something?” Hettie said.

“Don't worry. No one'll come out. They're all getting ready for your party.”

He dragged and looked away, squinting toward the sunset. Very handsome. He didn't cough. Beyond the line of scraggly trees, the sun was flaring out, the sky bleeding light. Hettie said, “I'd still rather be on the beach. My mom'll kill me.”

“I can't.” He passed her the cigarette.

“Why not?” Hettie said.

When he didn't answer right away, she asked again.

“Breece Marchand is back home,” Baker said. “My parents won't let us out alone after dusk. They're worried that he'll, you know, try something.”

“We could handle him,” Hettie said, but she didn't press it. She knew about Breece Marchand. She could picture him. Broad, stupid forehead, tall with slumped shoulders. Breece was almost ten years older than her and Baker. He was the boy that had attacked—her mother's word—Baker's older sister. Hettie didn't know exactly what that meant—With a knife? His bare hands? Something else?—but it sounded sinister enough. She knew that the police had come, and he had been sent “away” for a while. She remembered her parents having whispered arguments at the kitchen table about what had happened. She scanned the tree line for dark figures. Then said, “What's he look like now, so I'll know if I see him? Does he look different? What exactly did he do, so I can tell the police if there's trouble?”

Baker started to answer, then stopped. An odd, closed look came over his face. He snatched the cigarette and took a long drag, the ash crackling, then flicked it off into the dunes. He said, “We saved your ass in the war.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“If not for our boys, the Kaiser would have whipped you limeys for sure.”

“I'm no limey,” Hettie said. “My father was in the navy.”

“Your mother's from England,” Baker said. “The English are notoriously fat.”

“Not me.” Hettie stood. She thumped her chest with her cast. “I was born and raised in Atchison, Kansas.”

She ran down the steps and kept running. It was almost dark and night was bringing cold. The trees were full of dangerous shadows all the way home.

Hettie skidded through the open front door and slammed into her
mother, her face pressing into her mother's breasts, her hands, in an effort to stop herself, digging into her mother's spongy stomach. She wrenched herself backward against the wall. Her mother said, “Good Lord, child, slow down. You nearly flattened me.” She touched a hand to her chest, took a moment to collect herself. “We've got to get you dressed.” Hettie knew there was no use arguing.

She let herself be led upstairs and sat on the bed, hiding the damp impression her body had left on the sheets, while her mother ran her a bath. Her mother waited while she undressed, watched her, made certain she was installed in the steaming water, before she went downstairs for a glass of wine. “I'll be right back,” her mother said in warning.

Hettie hated being bathed—
children
were bathed—but she had no choice. She couldn't even wash herself because of the cast. Her mother had told her that her skin would go rotten beneath the plaster if she let it get wet. She pictured her decayed arm, saw it like the soggy driftwood that washed up on the beach. She could break it with her fingers, peel away soft splinters, as easy as pulling cooked chicken from the bone. Part of her, a small part, wanted to sink the cast, to hold her arm underwater, soak it through, to see if what her mother told her was true.

Her mother returned carrying a washcloth and her wine. The wine she set on the edge of the tub, the washcloth she soaped and used to scrub Hettie, head to foot, her calves, the insides of her thighs, her stomach and chest, her neck. She washed her hair. Hettie sat frozen, waiting for it to be over. She was too humiliated to open her eyes. When the washing was done, her mother had Hettie step from the tub to be dried. “Keep your cast over your head,” she said. Hettie did as she was told. She could feel the water, cooling now, running down her arm, over her rib cage, could feel her mother's hands pressing the towel against her.

“Can't I dry myself?” Hettie said.

“You wouldn't have to suffer so, if you weren't such a daredevil.”

Her mother waited while Hettie tried on dresses, a fourth, a fifth,
finally coming back to the second, light blue, ankle-length, with a bow of darker blue satin at the waist. Her mother's wineglass had long been empty.