Her Last Flight(101)

I am no more inclined for flight tonight than I was then, but what choice do I have? She’s found me out. She knows my weakness, my terrible need. She understands how deeply I require the knowledge inside her head.



I did not lie to you. I never said I wasn’t Sam Mallory’s daughter, did I? Since leaving home, I’ve told only one person, and that was Velázquez. I told him in the last hours I knew him, as we walked around the dusky streets of Paris together. It was my final hope, my single remaining card to play, my ace, and though Velázquez was at first disbelieving, then astonished, and then struck with awe at this evidence of God’s mysterious ways, still he wouldn’t break his promise. He apologized and explained that it was not his secret to tell.

I forgave him for that. I hope you’ll forgive me for misleading you. It’s just that I don’t tell anybody who I am. People have a way of making assumptions about you, when they discover you were spawned by some famous person, some person they think they knew because they read about him in a newspaper. And to reveal your true self to another person, that’s like taking a knife and paring away a section of your own skin, so that somebody else can see the workings of your blood and muscle for himself.

But here is the truth. When I was thirteen years old, as I said before, my mother told me my father had left us for good this time, had taken up with one of his whores and wanted no more to do with us. She packed me in the car and took me to Reno, Nevada, where you could then obtain the most efficient divorce in America. She told me we would move to a new home in Washington State, containing a new father, whose name she adopted for me. She told me that Mr. Everett would take better care of me than Mallory ever had, and I should take him to my heart. I didn’t believe her. I tried to run away and find my father again, but I didn’t get far before my stepfather found me and brought me back and whipped me on my naked buttocks with his belt. He told me that my mother had just been protecting my feelings, that my father was actually dead, he had been killed in an airplane crash like the crazy fool he was, and I should forget he had ever existed.

I don’t think my stepfather quite realized what kind of effect this statement might have on me. He wasn’t a man of much imagination, so he couldn’t have understood what it was like when your father made his living in an airplane, flying stunts, flying races, flying for daring distances over water, just flying, all the time, every day, so that his daughter would lie awake at night and pray and pray that his airplane would not crash, that her father would return to her and cradle her in his arms just one more time, that was all I asked of God. When Mr. Everett told me that my worst nightmare had come to life, that my father’s beloved body had gone to earth and been destroyed, I felt not sadness but relief.

Finally, there was no need to worry that he would be killed, because he was already dead.

Except that Sam Mallory was not dead yet. Just imagine my astonishment when I left home and got out in the world and discovered that he was still alive and kicking in 1936, the year before my stepfather popped my cherry on the Chesterfield sofa of his private office. Just imagine my guilt that I hadn’t succeeded in escaping that day when I was thirteen, that I might have found my father and saved him if only I’d been more intrepid, more clever, more determined.

Just imagine my fury at the woman who had stolen him from me, who had known him when I had not, who had won his heart and kept it for her own exclusive use.

Anyway, I’m telling you now, better late than never. I was born Eugenia Ann Mallory of Oakland, California, daughter of Samuel and Bertha Mallory. My father was the greatest pilot the world has ever known, and I am here to find out how and why he came to die on the badlands of northern Spain, at the exact moment I needed him most.



Lindquist flies by moonlight and what she calls dead reckoning, and when we land we make only the softest of bumps before rolling to a stop in the middle of the night grass. She takes me to the same place we had our picnic. The moon stands above the horizon and strikes a luminous path across the ocean before us. Lindquist sits right at the edge of the cliff, and after a second or two of hesitation I join her, even though I’m dead scared of heights. Did I mention that? Something to do with my fear of airplanes, probably. I don’t look down, that’s all. If I do, the vertigo will overcome me, because I’m already a little dizzy. My heart thumps in my chest like a dynamo. Lindquist doesn’t speak, so I pipe up in order to break this terrible silence. I ask her how she figured out I was Mallory’s lost daughter.

“Do you remember when I brought you out here a month or so ago?”

“Do I ever.”

“Well, I had my suspicions. I couldn’t put my finger on it. Your hair’s dark, for one thing, and what I remember most about Sam’s little girl was her bright blond hair—”

“My mother loved that hair. Started to go dark right after Dad came back from Australia. Stood to reason, I mean she was a brunette herself. But she was real disappointed. She had her heart set on a blonde.”

“Did she? I guess I’m not surprised. Nothing that woman could do would surprise me.” She crosses her legs, Indian style. “Still, every time I looked at you, I heard bells dinging in my head. You look like him. Your eyes are alike, and you have his jaw, just a little softer, but I only recognized that later. It was your gestures, your way of speaking. The way you sit and look at the person you’re talking to. So I thought I’d bring you out here, away from all the distractions. I watched you while you ate and talked. And I just knew. You were like Sam reborn as a woman.”