Till We Meet Again (33 page)

Lash by lash, Delphine had applied the black mascara, managing, in her skill, not to make it too thick or too beady. Now she inspected Freddy’s eyelashes, found them to her liking, and, slowly and dramatically, imparted her most important piece of insight to her sister. “If a man stops talking, and you don’t know what to say next, just repeat the last few words he’s said in a questioning tone of voice, as if you hadn’t understood him, and he’ll go right on talking, and tell you more and more.
It never fails
. I’ve never told another girl about it before, not even Margie.”

Impressed, but not convinced, Freddy asked, “Just echo his last few words? That’s all there is to it?”

“That’s all. It’s simple, but men just can’t resist you if you do it right. You’ll get a reputation as a terrific conversationalist, and with your looks, and your sensational legs—I’d give
anything
to have legs like yours—you’ll be the most popular girl in the freshman class.”

“My looks?”

“Don’t look in the mirror yet. Wait till I’ve finished. I haven’t done your hair.” Delphine loosened Freddy’s hair and brushed it until it lay as neatly as it ever would. She parted the bright tumble on the side and then, with the curling iron that she had been heating on the dressing table, she pinched a few cunningly placed waves into the long heap of hair until it rippled down on either side of Freddy’s face and turned under at the ends. Finally she applied a coat of pink lipstick to Freddy’s lips and, dissatisfied because the shade wasn’t any deeper than Freddy’s own, used a tube of light red lipstick to cover the pink. Delphine took out a big, black chiffon scarf from her dresser drawer, unpinned the sheet that she’d put around her sister, and draped the scarf artfully so that Freddy’s triumphant shoulders and the deep cleft above her breasts were revealed in their nakedness.

Delphine caught her breath in delight. “Turn!” she commanded, like a fairy godmother, and she whirled Freddy around on the seat so that she faced the mirror.

Freddy looked at herself in astonished silence.

“Well?” Delphine breathed.

“I … I don’t know what to say …”

“You’re devastating! Freddy, you’re simply breathtaking. I can’t believe it’s you!”

“Don’t I look too … old?”

“You look like a movie star,” Delphine said with reverence, bestowing the ultimate compliment. “I knew you could, if you just used a little makeup.” Delphine bent over her creation and kissed Freddy on the top of her head. Her taste was faultless, and Freddy had turned out to be even more beautiful than she’d dared to hope. She felt a tiny twinge of envy, but a quick look in the mirror reassured her. They were such different types that they set each other off.

“Let’s go show somebody,” Delphine begged, tugging her sister’s arm.

“No, I can’t. I’m … well, it’s a little frightening. Give me time to get used to it. Anyway, who can you show? Mother doesn’t know you use all this stuff, does she? Dad would kill you. And me. Me first, I’ll bet.”

“You’re right … I just got so excited that I forgot. Freddy, when you’re at college I’ll do your face for you any time you need it—that’s the second part of my present.” Delphine bustled about in satisfaction, putting away her battery of cosmetics, many of which she had first seen advertised in movie magazines and ordered by mail.

“Wait, let me look at those pictures,” Freddy said suddenly, in abrupt curiosity, reaching for a pile of glossy photographs that she spied in the bottom of one of Delphine’s cosmetic drawers.

“Never mind!” Delphine ordered hastily, but Freddy was already turning them over, photo after photo of Delphine and a variety of unknown escorts. They had been framed in pasteboard mats that bore the names of all the well-known nightclubs of Hollywood. There were unmistakable cocktails on the table in front of Delphine, and a cigarette in her hand, as she sat at the Coconut Grove, the Trocadero, the Palomar ballroom, the Circus Cafe, and Omar’s Dome.

“But these men … they’re not college boys, are they?” Freddy asked.

“Some are, some aren’t,” Delphine answered, flustered.

“Say, wait a minute … this character has to be thirty if he’s a day. But not bad looking. Delphine, do you drink and smoke?”

“Not much. Only enough so that they won’t think I’m a kid.”

“How old do they think you are?” Freddy wondered, captivated by her sister in the photographs. She was a glamorous, older, poised, flirtatious stranger, smiling into the eyes of men no one in the family had ever met.

“Twenty-one”

“How do you get away with it?” Freddy asked in admiration.

“I have fake ID, of course. Everyone does,” Delphine answered evasively, and, grabbing the photographs away from Freddy, shut them up into a drawer and slammed it shut.

“Just answer one more question,” Freddy said to her older sister.

“One?”

“Those men? Do they take you out dancing in nightclubs and buy you orchids to pin on your shoulder and look at you the way they do in those pictures because you’re such a terrific conversationalist? Do you spend the whole evening asking them what they think about the football team and the comic strips and what kind of car they own?”

“Not entirely,” Delphine said carefully, “but it’s a beginning.”

It was a Sunday afternoon in June of 1936, the day after Freddy’s graduation from high school, and she was off alone on a cross-country flight, the longest she had ever made, from Dry Springs to San Luis Obispo and back. The most direct route lay north and a little to the west, over Big Pine Mountain of the San Rafael Range, across the valley to the east of Santa Maria, past the Twitchell Reservoir, and over the Arroyo Grande, directly into the airport at San Luis. A far easier route would have been to simply follow the coast north and turn east at Pismo Beach, but it wouldn’t have given her any practice in navigation, and during the months she’d been working with Mac toward her private pilot’s license, which she obtained just over a month ago, Freddy had been studying navigation as hard as she could.

Navigation,
pinpoint
navigation of absolute accuracy and precision, was, once you could fly, the next essential key to becoming a true pilot. It wasn’t as mysterious, Freddy thought, as she’d first expected it would be. Basically it meant flying with a knowledge of where she was at all times, knowledge gained by constantly reading the earth and its landmarks,
instantly comparing that knowledge with the chart on her knee and resolutely staying on the magnetic compass headings she decided on before she set out. Winds aloft could push a plane off course in a few minutes of inattention, so Freddy watched with vigilance for checkpoints on the ground that should be coming up to the right, to the left or directly underneath her wings. If there was the slightest deviation, she immediately adjusted the compass to make a correction for the wind.

As she passed over the little town of Ojai, which was exactly where it should be, Freddy allowed her mind to turn to the future. Starting tomorrow, she would begin her summer job, working six days a week at the Van de Kamp bakery at Beverly and Western. The chain of bakeries, which had started with a homemade candy called “Darling Henrietta’s Nutty Mixture,” now owned a hundred windmill-shaped shops all over Los Angeles. Her job began at six in the morning, when the bakery opened, and ended at two in the afternoon, when the afternoon-evening shift took over. Because of the inconvenient hours and the six-day week, she was well paid, twenty-five dollars a week, as much as a trained secretary could hope to make. To Freddy it meant that she would be able to fly several afternoons a week as well as on weekends.

Freddy groaned. Her destiny was obviously bound to selling candy, cookies and cakes, all of which she loathed, but these sweet things seemed to be one of the few businesses that was Depression-proof. Still, daily suffocation in the smells of warm sugar became a minor matter when it meant money for her summer flying time and enough left over to begin,
just
to begin,
only
to begin, damn it to hell, to save for a down payment on a plane.

Today she was enjoying the pure delight of flying Mac’s new ship, a bright yellow Ryan STA monoplane with a Menasco C-4 125-horsepower engine, a more powerful plane than the Taylor Cub, and one she’d only flown five times before. Her father had given her a string of real pearls for graduation, but her mother, blessings on her head, had come through with hard cash, enough to buy Freddy three of these long cross-country flights, of which today’s was only the beginning. The pearls were the first valuable jewelry she’d ever owned. Maybe, Freddy speculated, she could pawn them.

She knew that she couldn’t expect any future financial help from her father. He was perfectly willing to buy her a
set of expensive golf clubs, or membership in a tennis club-even bridge lessons, if that had been her fancy. Thanks to her mother, he had finally agreed not to formally oppose her flying, but he’d made it plain that he wouldn’t contribute a dime toward it, not even in the shape of a loan. He hoped, obviously, that by making it difficult for her, he’d hasten the moment when she lost interest.

There didn’t seem to be any point in telling him that she was determined to own her own plane. The cheapest of the three leading low-priced planes, the Taylor, the Porterfield Zephyr or the Aeronanca Highwing, each cost almost fifteen hundred dollars, with a down payment of four hundred and fifty dollars. A fortune! Delphine had received a new, six-hundred-dollar Pontiac coupé for her eighteenth birthday, and it made her the envy of half the kids in the neighborhood. In car terms, wanting to buy an inexpensive airplane was like wanting to own a Packard, the most expensive car in America. Obviously, she had to find a second- or third-hand ship that she could put into shape, a ship that she could manage to get at a bargain price, on terms that would let her pay for it over a long time.

If she didn’t own a plane of her own, Freddy asked herself, spying the peak of Big Pine Mountain right on course and beginning to gain altitude, what future was there for her in flying? More precisely, in racing?

Racing
. She knew that she didn’t stand a chance of being able to enter any of the speed dashes that covered a relatively short distance, with the planes going straight ahead full out, like racehorses. Nor could she enter closed-circuit races around fixed pylons. Only planes of far greater horsepower than one she could dream of owning stood a chance in any of the various speed races, and then only when they were flown by pilots with racing experience. During the past few years, interest in speed racing had grown so rapidly in the world of aviation that some records only stood for a few days before another pilot managed to surpass them.

However, there were cross-country races held around the Los Angeles area, in which planes flew from one refueling stop to another, toward a goal that might be hundreds of miles away. Each plane carried a handicap, based on its own best possible performance, so that the winner was the pilot who spent the least time in the air, the pilot who flew the smartest race, using the winds and the compass and the
charts in the most astute way, the most precise pilot, the most ingenious pilot, the most resourceful pilot—and sometimes the luckiest.

Damn, but she’d been born too late!
Amy Johnson, the British pilot, whose career Freddy followed with passion, had taken up flying in 1928. When the girl from Hull had only seventy-five hours of flying time to her credit, she had taken off from Croydon, outside of London, in a tiny, fragile, secondhand De Havilland Moth, and headed for Australia. A sandstorm had forced her to make an emergency landing in the desert; on landing at Baghdad she broke a wheel strut; she lost a bolt en route to Karachi; she ran out of gas at Jansi, where she had to land on a parade ground amid a group of fleeing soldiers; she flew through a monsoon between Calcutta and Rangoon, where she had to replace her propeller with the spare one she had brought along with her. On her last lap, past Indonesia, she fought a sputtering engine and bad visibility over the Timor Sea to reach Darwin, where she was acclaimed as the first woman to fly solo from England to Australia, and became an international heroine.

Now
that
was flying, Freddy brooded, and her hero-worship turned to wistfulness as she realized that Amy Johnson had accomplished her feat when she, Freddy, was only nine years old and had never even been up in a plane.

Amy Johnson had followed her first triumph by establishing a light aircraft record from London to Tokyo and then, when an unknown pilot named Jim Mollison became famous by flying from Australia to England in nine days, she had met and married him. Their two-day honeymoon had been followed immediately by Jim Mollison flying the Atlantic from east to west, breaking a number of records on the way, while Amy was busy beating his own London-to-Cape Town solo record flight by eleven hours.

What a glorious way to be married, Freddy thought with a sigh. She knew no one who would agree with her, but she was utterly beguiled by the idea of the two determined newlyweds setting off in different directions, each in pursuit of a new record to break. Lucky Amy Johnson, who’d met a man who understood the one thing she most cared about.

None of the boys Freddy had met and dated in this last year had been interested in planes. She’d put Delphine’s advice to the test, and it had worked. However, being a good conversationalist had subjected her to too many dull life
stories … it wasn’t worth being popular, in her opinion. Sure, she’d been kissed; several times in fact. No big deal, Freddy thought, shaking her head in disappointed memory of timid lips on timid lips, clumsy arms around equally clumsy shoulders.

She’d allowed those kisses so as not to disappoint Delphine, but there were so many important things that she was too late for, Freddy grumbled to herself, as she scanned the horizon. It was all of six years ago that Ruth Nichols had broken the speed record of her friend and rival, Amelia Earhart; two years later, in 1932, Earhart had flown the Atlantic solo; in 1934 Marie-Louise Bastie of France became the first woman to fly a round trip to Tokyo from Paris; in September of 1935, Laura Ingalls flew nonstop from Los Angeles to New York, breaking Earhart’s record for that route by almost four hours.