Till We Meet Again (28 page)

“Has Madame any further need of me?” His voice was yielding, that of a willing servant.

“No, Charles. Not tonight,” she said curtly. He got to his feet, buttoned his fly, and unlocked the door, leaving without another word. Sabine de Koville lay on the carpet without enough strength to get up, a smile on her long, curling lips, which Bruno had not once kissed. He knew better, she thought dreamily, far better than to try.

8

S
TRATOCUMULUS, Stratus, Cumulus, Cumulonimbus, Freddy said to herself, turning the words over lovingly in her mind, munching on them with a bone-deep pleasure she had never felt for any line of poetry. The meteorological terms for different types of low cloud formations were of absolutely no practical use to her. As a fifteen-year-old student pilot she would not be allowed to fly through anything but clear weather, but she hadn’t been able to resist searching for the cloud names in the school library since they weren’t in her basic ground-school textbook.

“Could you
please
give me that bag?” an irritated voice shrilled. Freddy whirled around apologetically, and handed over the half-pound of Woolworth’s jelly beans. She tasted more lovely words—Altocumulus, Altostratus, Nimbostratus, the cloud formations to be found above 6,500 feet—and wondered who had invented them, while she poured a pound of chocolate-covered marshmallows into another bag. She worked absently but quickly, for she was the only girl behind the candy counter, and customers were waiting impatiently.

As she worked through the morning, Freddy began to calculate the state of her finances. When she had reached fifteen, last January, her allowance had been raised from a quarter a week to thirty cents, largesse in these Depression years. It was now early November of 1935, and her allowance had amounted to thirteen dollars and fifty cents so far this year.

Freddy shook her head over the thought of one personal extravagance that she couldn’t resist, although it ate deeply into her allowance. She was a movie nut. She’d seen
The Lost Squadron
with Joel McCrea five times, and
Central Airport
and
Ace of Aces
six times each. She’d only been able to see
The Eagle and the Hawk
, with Fredric March and Cary Grant, four times because of exams, but she’d gone to
Night Flight
, with Clark Gable, nine times during a school vacation.
Ceiling Zero
and
Devil Dogs of the Air
were coming to the movie house in the next few weeks, she thought with a sinking heart caused by the knowledge that she shouldn’t, but would, spend the ten cents for each admission.

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 bites 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.