Till We Meet Again (43 page)

Detroyat looked alarmed. “That is not a maneuver for a young lady pilot, Mademoiselle, in fact it is most unwise. I must counsel you against it.”

“I do … aerobatics,” Freddy said, as modestly as she could, since she was speaking to the world’s champion, but she could not prevent the pride that blazed out of her eyes. “I’m only a student pilot, but …”

“But one who has mastered the Sea Serpent?”

“Yes.”

“I must congratulate you, Mademoiselle,” he said seriously, visibly impressed, without a trace of mockery. “As one pilot to another, I salute you.” He took her hand and was shaking it when Eve came up to him and unceremoniously swept him away.

“Madame de Lancel, who on earth is that unreasonably romantic-looking girl in white linen?” Detroyat asked. “I should like to invite her to inspect my ship.”

“You don’t mean my daughter, Lieutenant?” Eve asked, instantly alert.

“Your daughter? The pilot?”

“Yes, as a matter of fact. Amazing, isn’t it, for a girl who is only sixteen?”

“Only … sixteen?”

“Only sixteen,” she repeated firmly. “Still a child, Lieutenant.”

“Ah.”

“Come along, Lieutenant, the president of the French Hospital is so anxious to congratulate you.”

“How delightful,” sighed the gallant officer, “I can scarcely wait.”

The night after the party for Detroyat, Freddy was unable to sleep, her blood rampaging with nervous excitement. “As one pilot to another, I salute you,” he had said. One pilot to another! Not “little lady,” not “kid,” but
pilot
. Why was it that nobody seemed to think of her as a pilot? To Mac she was the eternal student. He’d seen her take her baby steps and he’d never forget it. Never let
her
forget it. She’d really like to hit him! To her father, she was daughter, first, last and foremost. Pilot only on sufferance, and he’d rather not think about it, certainly not hear about it from her. Her mother, once the car had been loaned, seemed to have forgotten where she was going in it, and what she was doing when she got there. Neither of them had any notion that she’d been mastering aerobatics, because they made it clear, without words, that they didn’t want or expect progress reports.

And, to be fair, if she truly thought of herself as a pilot, why wouldn’t she have marched right on into the Ninety Nines’ tent and joined the only other women in the country who shared her passion? She was one of them, wasn’t she?
Wasn’t she?

Damn it to hell, she had been selling herself short, accepting the evaluations and dismissals of the only people she cared about, not allowing herself to realize, except for a brief minute or two, how far she had come.
Pilot
. And a damn good one!

Was it because she was not yet old enough? Seventeen in just a few months—surely that was old enough to believe, if only inside yourself, in what you were?

Look at Delphine, not even a year and a half older, fragile, always-to-be-protected Delphine, who didn’t know a spark
plug from a potato, who could only navigate her way from one manicure to another, busy starring in a French movie without so much as an if-you-please. First, hysterical phone calls from Grandmother and then a letter from Delphine herself, who had been mysteriously unreachable by phone, a letter that had taken many days to arrive, containing the serenely happy announcement that she had signed a contract with Gaumont. She had begun work on the picture before they’d even received her letter. Somehow, everybody had decided that it was all Bruno’s fault, but nobody could think of what to do about it, how to stop it.

So Delphine was launched off into the great world, while she, Freddy, was automatically turning down an offer to do some stunt flying that she knew she could handle, because the same parents who had stood by in frantic but futile alarm while Delphine turned herself into a movie actress had decreed that she was to remain a student. Well, to hell with that noise! It wasn’t going to happen, not to this particular pilot.

Swede Castelli’s office in the I. W. Davidson Studio was as untidy as Freddy had expected, but larger than she had thought it would be. As well as a desk, he had a big conference table, its surface littered with model airplanes; maps hung on all the available wall space, photographs of planes from the Great War were piled on the floor in the corners, and snapshots of Swede Castelli himself, from his stunting days, were propped up here and there.

“Nice,” said Freddy truthfully, stretching out in the chair opposite the desk. “I like it here.” She sat with her jodhpured legs square on the floor. She had worn her almost-knee-high riding boots today, although, for the sake of comfort, she never flew in them, but she knew the Prussian effect they made. She’d tucked an old black turtleneck sweater into her jodhpurs and cinched them with the biggest leather belt she owned. From the neck down, she thought with satisfaction, you couldn’t tell her from Baron von Richthofen.

“Is your job offer still good?” she asked directly.

“You bet it is. But what about that date with Beowulf? What about your parents, little lady?”

“Let me worry about them,” Freddy said. “And my name’s Freddy, not ‘little lady.’ ”

“This isn’t some sort of prank?” he asked skeptically.

“Swede, I don’t play pranks. I’m a pilot. You’ve seen how good I am. I’ve watched Mac plan a hundred stunts, and if there’s one thing I know, it’s that you can mount a camera on my ship one hell of a lot closer than you could on any guy’s, since I don’t get five-o’clock shadow. Put me in any wig and I’ll look more like Alice Faye or Constance Bennett than anyone in the business. True or not?”

“True. Totally true. But Mac … you told me he’d object if you took a stunt double job. I don’t want to cause any trouble, we work together all the time, and he’s just about the best pal I’ve ever had.”

“I’ve thought it over. Swede, Mac taught me to fly and he’s like a mother hen with me.”

“Yeah, Freddy, I kind of noticed.”

“Does that mean that I have to live my life to make him happy? How many mother hens want the chicks to leave the nest? None of them, right? But do chicks stay in the nest forever? You know they don’t. It’s a law of nature. Now it’s my time to get out, and Mac’ll just have to understand that.
I need this job
. I really need it, and I’ll give it everything I’ve got, I promise you.”

“A rich girl like you? Ah, come on. What do you need this job for?”

“I worked the early-morning shift at the Van der Kamp bakery all summer to pay for my flying time. Now I have to have a plane of my own.
Have
to, Swede, not just
want
to.” Freddy leaned forward, her elbows on her knees, her chin in her hands, and looked him in the eye with clear, untroubled power. She had grown up overnight.

“I had you figured for a rich girl.”

“Rich means that I have money. Wrong. My parents are comfortable, but they don’t give me a penny for flying. The car’s a loan, if you were wondering. Look, Swede, if you don’t want me, I know someone else will. They’re making flying pictures at every lot in Hollywood. I came to you first because I know you, but if you have doubts, just say the word and I’m on my way.”

“You’ve got the job, Freddy. Hell, you had it yesterday.”

She laughed in glee. “Will I do Alice Faye or Constance Bennett?”

“Both of them, and Nancy Kelly too. I’m going to use you as much as possible.”

“The money?” Freddy asked, standing up, her hands on her hips.

“The money?”

“You said it was good, but you haven’t told me how good.”

“Fifty bucks a day, same as I pay Mac. You’ll be working five, maybe six days a week once we start shooting.”

“Extra for special stunts?”

“Freddy, I have the feeling that you know the stunt scale as well as I do. Extra, just like everyone else gets. A hundred for flying upside down, although that’s not in the script, up to a thousand-two for a spin to the earth with smoke pots, and a thousand-five for a blow-up in the air with a bail-out—those you can count on. They’re in the script. No crashes on the ground. I wouldn’t let you do them anyway, no woman ever has. Tradition. As far as buying a plane—by the time this flick is finished, you can treat yourself to a fleet of them.”

“Shee—it,” said Freddy slowly.

“It’s not exactly shit,” Swede Castelli said, offended. “It’s damn good money.”

“I meant shit, as in ‘shit, why did I wait so long?’ ”

They weren’t going to like it whenever she chose to tell them, Freddy reflected, but maybe intelligent timing would give her an edge. The pleasantest minute of the day was before dinner, while her parents shared the better part of a bottle of champagne together in the living room. To open a mere split of champagne, her father maintained, was inconceivable unless three things were true: first, that you were alone; second, that it was lunchtime; and third, that you had not been born in the province of the noble wine. As was the custom, he had been given a few drops of champagne on his tongue as soon as he’d been born, and his mother had finished the rest of the glass, delighted that her new son, like all babies in Champagne, had immediately stopped screaming.

Nor would she mention the money, Freddy decided. If she was hired to work on merely a reasonable number of pictures every year, she’d be making more than her father. And of course she’d promise always to live at home, except when she had to be away on location.

“Well, darling, you look … exceptionally well tonight,” said Eve, as her daughter joined them. She didn’t believe in telling her daughters how beautiful they were, but it was hard, just now, not to use that word for Freddy. The child
had evidently recovered from whatever malaise had seized her during the Air Races; that strangely anguished expression was gone, and the graceful, periwinkle blue dress she had put on was reflected in the unlimited blue of her eyes, under the upward-lifting brows, so like Eve’s own.

There was something strangely compelling in her purposeful, energetic pose, although she stood perfectly still, leaning on the mantel and looking at them with a smile Eve didn’t recognize, a smile that hovered around her prominent, beautifully formed mouth, almost escaping at the corners of her lips. It was an inner smile, scarcely suppressed, unmistakable, lighting her whole face with a kind of triumphant joy that was in clear contradiction to the gravity with which she was looking at them.

“What’s the good news?” Eve couldn’t resist asking. Freddy had always been so transparent. It was one of her most endearing qualities. “Not Lieutenant Detroyat, I trust.”

“Hardly. Although I did like him. No, it’s much better than that. I’ve got a job.”

“Freddy, please be serious. You’ve been working all summer. You can’t work at another job while you’re in college, you must realize that.”

“Your mother’s right,” Paul said. “We’ve discussed that problem and we’ve decided to finance your flying lessons on the weekends so long as you keep your grades up. We can’t have you doing two things at once, and we can understand that you won’t want to give up flying altogether.”

“I appreciate that, Daddy. I know how you feel about it. But it isn’t a part-time job. It’s a real job.”

“Just what does that mean?” Paul asked, putting down his glass.

“A full-time job.”

“That’s out of the question,” he said heavily.

“Freddy, what are you talking about?” Eve cried.

“I’m not going to college, Mother. I can’t possibly. I’d make a rotten college girl. I realized it last night. I should have realized it a long time ago, but I wasn’t sure enough—not sure of myself, not sure what was best for me, not sure what was right for me.”

“And what makes you think that you’re old enough to know what’s best now?” Paul retorted, holding back his anger as best he could.

“I know I am, Father.
I just know.”

“Paul, wait a minute. Freddy, you haven’t told us what kind of job you have.”

“It’s a flying job, naturally. It involves precision flying for the movies.”

“Oh my God! You’ve taken leave of your senses! What does that mean, ‘precision flying’?” Eve’s voice trembled in alarm.

“Special flying, the sort of flying I’ve been training to do, exhibition flying, if you will. I have a talent for it and I do it well.”

“Not the sort of thing that Detroyat did?” Eve gasped.

“No, Mother. He’s the best in the world. I’m good, but not that good. Not yet.”

“God damn it, Freddy, I will not have it! I simply will not allow you to do such a thing. It’s out of the question, absolutely, completely and once and for all, out of the question. You are not allowed, do you hear me,
not allowed. You do not have our permission,”
Paul thundered, standing up and looming over her.

“I shall have to do it without your permission,” Freddy answered, stepping toward him fearlessly. “There’s no way you can stop me.”

“Marie-Frédérique, I’m warning you, and I won’t warn you again. I’ve had enough of this sort of behavior from Delphine. I won’t make the same mistake twice. If you think that you can do whatever you like and get away with it, you’re mortally wrong. You will either do as I say or you will move out of this house at once and not return to it until you come to your senses. No daughter of mine is going to disobey me.
Do you understand?”

“Yes, Father.” She turned and started to leave the room.

“Freddy! Where are you going?”

“To pack, Mother. It won’t take long.”

Freddy hastily filled a small suitcase with basic necessities, leaving behind the shirtwaist dresses and the pastel sweaters and skirts, that pretty, expensive college wardrobe on which every item still had a price tag. She threw her leather flying jacket over her dress and took a last look around her room. It didn’t feel like her room anymore; there was no emotion attached to leaving it. She knew that Eve would not come upstairs to try to stop her. In matters of discipline her parents had always hung together, and the only
time she could remember her mother taking a basically different position from her father’s was when she had understood why Freddy had soloed.