Till We Meet Again (42 page)

Most of her free afternoons of June, July and August had been spent mastering the basics of stunt flying. Eventually, with Mac sitting by her side, she had progressed to complicated stunts: the Oregon Sea Serpent, the Cuban Roll, the Cuban Eight, the Frank Clark Reversement Roll, and the Rankin Roller Coaster. All well and good, Freddy thought, but today she was no closer to her aim of saving money for a plane of her own than she had been before, since she hadn’t been able to resist spending every penny she’d earned on her aerobatic lessons.

In two weeks her freshman year at UCLA would begin, Freddy thought glumly. She’d already received a copy of her class schedule. Her mother had taken her shopping for college clothes. When would she be able to fly except on weekends? It had been essential to make the most of the summer, even though it had taken all her salary.

Freshman year, she reminded herself in misery, would mean taking those required courses that were designed by a well-meaning university to give her a well-rounded education in the liberal arts. “Damn it to hell, I don’t
want
to be well rounded!” Freddy raged out loud to the unimpressed altimeter, to the hapless airspeed indicator, to the stick that existed only to obey her.

Yet what else was there to do? Join the Navy and see the world? The Foreign Legion? Run away with the circus? Shit, any of them would take a boy, but a not-quite-seventeen-year-old girl? Fat chance. Her destiny led straight to a stuffy college classroom and English 101.

If Freddy could have taken her feet off the rudder pedals she would have stamped in such frustration that she might have kicked a hole through the floor of the plane. Instead she executed one last, flawless Chandelle, a steep, climbing turn of 180 degrees, and came in to land at Dry Springs.

Mac and Swede Castelli, who had come to the airport to talk more stunting business with McGuire, were both outside the hangar, watching her land. She jumped out of the plane, pulled her goggles off, unbuckled her parachute, slung it over
one arm, and approached them, hair caught into a copper lariat by the wind, a rakish, slender figure with her Robin Hood walk, that slight, unconscious swagger which was accentuated by the jodhpurs and low boots she had bought when her Levi’s wore out. She had rolled up the sleeves of the boy’s shirt she always wore for flying.

“Hi there, little lady. That was a mighty pretty Chandelle up there,” Swede Castelli said, in what she instantly decided was a patronizing tone. All old stunt pilots, she thought, were convinced that no one could ever fly as well as they had. Well, maybe not all, maybe not Mac. And she loathed being called “little lady.”

“Purely decorative, Mr. Castelli,” Freddy answered shortly. “A bagatelle.”

“You looked O.K., kid,” McGuire said.

“Gee, Mac, I just don’t think I can handle all your lavish admiration. I may blush,” she said acidly, and disappeared into the office. Mac too. They were all the same, she told herself bitterly.

“What’s biting her?” Castelli inquired.

“She wants to be Amelia Earhart,” Mac explained.

“Well, so do I. Doesn’t everybody?”

“She’s an emotional kid,” Mac shrugged.

“Kid? Listen, Mac, that girl isn’t a kid anymore. She’s a dish, a dream, a—”

“She’s a kid, Swede
. And you’re a dirty old man.” Mac’s voice was unexpectedly angry.

“It’s not a bad way to go, don’t knock it, McGuire,” Castelli said, good-humored as ever, as Freddy reappeared on her way to her car. He waved at Mac and turned to leave. “Sure you won’t reconsider?” he called back to Mac as he walked with Freddy toward their cars.

“Positive,” Mac answered.

“It’s good money,” he shouted, visibly without hope that he could change Mac’s refusal.

“No can do, Buddy. I told you, I’m out of that business.”

“Ahh,” Castelli said to Freddy in mild disgust, “he’d do it for me, I know he would, except he always had this thing against wearing wigs. But it was worth a shot.”

“What was it?” Freddy asked indifferently. Mac was still turning down jobs that hopeful stunt coordinators continued to offer him, not believing that he could have finally retired from the business.

“A film called
Tail Spin
. I offered him his choice: Alice Faye, Constance Bennett or Nancy Kelly … he could have stunt-doubled any one of them. Roy Del Ruth, the director, asked for Mac specially. He never forgot how believable he was, doing Jean Harlow in
Hell’s Angels.”

“But that was a silent movie—I remember it from seven years ago.”

“They don’t want him to speak, little lady, they just want him to put on a wig and fly. Is that too much to hope for? Is that an insult?”

“No,” Freddy giggled, tickled out of her vile mood by the vision of Mac in a platinum blond wig.

“Well, Im off to try to find three other guys. I’d do it myself, but I’ve lost my girlish figure. You going to the Air Races?”

“Every day,” she said, suddenly remembering.

“Listen, little lady, maybe next year, or the year after, you’ll be in them. You never know,” he said kindly, as he looked at the cloud that had fallen over her face.

“Thanks, Mr. Castelli. But I don’t think so.”

“Say, wait a minute. What about you? You could be a stunt-double easy—Mac’s told me how much you’ve learned—there isn’t anything we’ve planned you couldn’t handle. What about it?”

“Now
that’s
impossible,” Freddy said, laughing at his eagerness, “much more impossible than my being in the Air Races next year.”

“Why? Just tell me what’s stopping you?”

Freddy approached Eve’s glossy LaSalle convertible. She reached inside, pulled out a pale blue cashmere cardigan and threw it around her neck. The sleeves, knotted hastily under her chin, caught her wind-whipped hair and tamed it into a flaming frame for her earnest face.

“I have to start college in two weeks, for one thing,” she said, leaning on the door of the car. “I have a firm rendezvous with Beowulf, Mr. Castelli. In addition, my father, a very conservative man, would kill me, then my mother would kill me and if there was anything left of me, Mac would finish off the job.” Freddy’s positive stance, even more than the smart, expensive car, convinced Swede Castelli that he was barking up the wrong tree. This particular little lady was a society girl with an unusual hobby.

“I get it. No harm in asking, right?”

“Right, Mr. Castelli.”

“So say hello to Beowulf. He’s a lucky guy.”

By the time the Air Races ended, on the ninth of September, on the day of Eve’s big reception for Lieutenant Michel Detroyat, the only French flier at the races, Freddy was smoldering with so many emotions that she didn’t recognize herself.

She had watched with a pounding heart as Louise Thaden flew over the finish line of the Bendix, at the wrong end of the field, so modestly convinced that she’d come in last that she’d taxied her ship almost off the field before a running, screaming mob of thousands was able to reach her and make her understand that she’d won. She had crossed the country in less than fifteen hours, leaving behind all the field of experimental, supercharged new racers. And she had won in a Beechcraft, thought Freddy, tormenting herself, torn between admiration and new waves of the most poisonous envy, an ordinary little Beech Staggerwing, a plane
anybody
could fly, a plane anybody with a couple of thousand dollars could
buy
.

The night of the Bendix, Freddy had hung around the Egyptian tent put up by the Ninety-Nines, the national organization of licensed women pilots, and seen Thaden and second-place winner, Laura Ingalls, and Earhart and Cochrane, and dozens of other women pilots go inside to celebrate the victories, but she’d been unable to make herself join them, simple as it would have been. Freddy had found herself caged in by a paralyzing shyness that was far stronger than her desire to meet and congratulate her heroines. Her pilot’s license was in her purse, but she simply couldn’t force herself to walk in and introduce herself, although she knew, logically, that she would have been immediately made welcome.
I have nothing to show for myself
she told herself miserably and listened to the merriment inside the tent for a few minutes more until she could bear it no longer, and fled.

The Chatterton, thank God, had been won by a man, and she’d put it out of her mind.

“Freddy, you do know that I expect you at my reception today,” Eve said, walking into Freddy’s bedroom, where Freddy sat looking at the walls. Eve felt the concern of a mother who had watched her child become more and more
remote each day of the races. She had been confident that Freddy would be excited and thrilled by the aviation events taking place in their own hometown. They had filled the newspapers to a point where even Eve and Paul knew all about them. But no, Freddy spent every minute of every day at the airport and came home lost in her own thoughts, with strangely blurred eyes, which Eve attributed to the long days spent under the sun that beat down on the grandstands.

“Of course, Mother,” Freddy said. “I’ll be there.” A good dose of the leading lights of the French colony would take her mind off herself and how inadequate she felt, she decided. Besides, she was curious to get a look at the famous guest of honor, king of the world’s aerobatic pilots. He was as far out of the range of Freddy’s envy as if he’d been Charles Lindbergh. Or Saint-Exupéry, for that matter.

Michel Detroyat had done France proud and become the undisputed star of the races, with extraordinary exhibitions in his Renault-powered Caudron, a racer that the French army had spent a million dollars to develop. It was the first completely streamlined plane ever built, and in it, Detroyat had won the twenty-thousand-dollar Thompson Trophy Race, the international men’s free-for-all, laughably far ahead of the competition. The superiority of his plane was such that he’d withdrawn from other races “to give someone else a chance to win.”

“Darling, wear your new white linen,” Eve instructed.

“But, Mother—” she tried to object.

“It’s the most appropriate dress you have.” Eve terminated the conversation in a tone of voice that she only used on days when she exercised her official diplomat’s wife’s capacity, and Freddy knew better than to pursue the matter.

Late that afternoon the gardens of the Lancels’ home were filled with hundreds of guests. So many of them had waited in the receiving line to shake Detroyat’s hand that Freddy had only been able to observe him and eavesdrop from her position behind Eve, who stood next to him. Not a handsome man, she thought, with his too-long, too-wide nose and double chin, but his eyes, under straight and unusually heavy black brows, made up for that. He looked as carefree as a happy boy, and visibly was accustomed to being lionized, for he answered the same trivial remarks over and over without losing his animation.

“Yes, Madame, I plan to return next year to defend the trophy, thank you, Madame, I am glad you enjoyed the exhibitions; yes, Monsieur, I find Los Angeles delightful, thank you, Monsieur; yes, Madame, you are right, my father is indeed the commander-in-chief of the French Air Corps, I will give him your regards, thank you, Madame; yes, Monsieur, you have the perfect climate here and I hope to return, thank you, Monsieur; yes, Madame, California is indeed a most beautiful place, thank you, Madame.”

Small talk, thought Freddy, as the line dwindled and the guests fell upon the refreshments, would seem to be the price of fame. Finally, as always happens to every guest of honor, Detroyat found himself standing completely alone, while a horde of strangers, having paid their respects, forgot him in their interest in each other. She stepped forward, almost out of the shrubbery.

“Lieutenant Detroyat,” she found herself saying in rapid French, “could you explain if your Caudron’s two-speed, two-pitch Ratier propeller and air-operated retractable landing gear made possible your quick takeoffs?”

“What?”

“I said—”

“I understood what you said, Mademoiselle. The answer is yes.”

“Ah, I thought so. Tell me, how many degrees of variation are there between the takeoff and high-speed positions of the propeller?”

“Twelve degrees, Mademoiselle.”

“I wondered about that. Hmm … twelve degrees. No wonder you won all the time. What would happen if the landing-gear system failed? It is operated by compressed air, is it not?”

“Yes, Mademoiselle. Fortunately I have an emergency hand pump.”

“And the tunnel carburetor scoop-ram—does it extend forward all the way to the nose of the Caudron?”

“Perhaps you …” He stopped, unable any longer to keep a straight face. Finally he recovered from his fit of laughter. “Perhaps you would like to inspect the ship, Mademoiselle?”

“I would,” Freddy said. “But may I ask what it is that you find so funny?”

“The only person at this party who asks an intelligent
question is a
jeune fille
. Oh, oh, that tunnel carburetor.…” and he went off into another irrepressible bout of laughter.

“I am a pilot, Monsieur, not a
jeune fille
,” Freddy said with so much dignity that he stopped laughing and looked at her carefully.

“Yes, I should have known,” he said finally, “I really should.”

“After all, you couldn’t have guessed,” Freddy admitted forgivingly.

“But no. I could have. It’s evident. You have a pilot’s tan.” He pointed to the wide neck and short sleeves of her dress, where the deeply tanned vee of her throat reached down and made a point on the whiteness above her breasts. “Even the arms,” he said, looking at her tan arms, which abruptly became white halfway above her elbow, where she rolled up her flying shirts.

“I tried to point that out to my mother, but she insisted that I wear this.”

“Even pilots have mothers. What do you fly?”

“A Ryan … when I can get my hands on it.”

“Tiens
, I know that plane. Tex Rankin and I once competed in two identical Ryans, just for the fun of it, and I almost failed to keep up with him.”

“Have you done the Oregon Sea Serpent that Rankin invented? I’ve just learned it.”