Her Last Flight(113)

“She’s Doris, all right.”

“Oh, we fell in love with her, right from the start. Sam just adored her with this idolatrous love; he carried her around everywhere with him, wouldn’t let her out of his sight. We’d already started the airline. First it was just a charter for tourists, but soon we were running regular flights and taking on pilots. Wesley arrived right after. I was so busy. I learned I could just put everything in a box, everything that had happened, and put that box at the back of the closet, and we were happy. The world had left us alone at last, we were still madly in love after all this time. We had these two beautiful children together, we were flying every day, we could step right outside our house and surf side by side. We were in paradise! But it turned out that Sam couldn’t put everything in a box, the way I could. The lid wouldn’t stay shut, no matter how hard he tried.”

She speaks in a clear, precise voice, as if she’s considered all these thoughts before. When I sneak a glance or two in her direction, she’s staring straight ahead, without actually looking at anything. Even this pause seems considered.

“You might think,” she continues, “that if you love somebody long enough and hard enough, you can make him happy. If you give him a home, and children, and love. If you give him comfort at night, and adventure during the day. And he was happy. For weeks at a time, it was so good. It was miraculous. He took this joy in the children, you can’t imagine. And then the darkness would fall again. I always knew because he would fly somewhere, or drive somewhere, or surf somewhere.” She lifts her right hand and points. “Right out there. You see that wave? That was his favorite, when he was in despair, because he knew it might kill him.”

“When? What day was it?”

“Just over three years ago. The ninth of September 1944.”

“I was in Paris.” I stare in wonder at the horizon and think of the Hotel Scribe, of the journey out to the Orly air base in a Jeep driven by the jittery eighteen-year-old GI assigned to me by the Allied command. I cross my legs together, just like Irene’s, and tell her, “I met Raoul Velázquez a few days later. On the eleventh.”

“Ah,” she says softly. “Ah. Of course.”

“Of course?”

Irene turns to me. “There was a storm the night before. I remember listening to the wind and the rain and thinking Sam would want to surf in the morning, when the weather had cleared but the waves would be coming in like mountains. And sure enough, when I woke, he was already gone. He left a note to say he would be back in time to take the children to school.”

“But he wasn’t.”

“No. As soon as I saw the note, I had this terrible feeling. I told myself it was silly, that Sam was indestructible, but when he hadn’t returned by ten o’clock I knew something was wrong. The funny thing is, I thought he had cracked up the airplane. I never thought the ocean would take him. But when I landed here, his ship was sitting on the grass, just fine. The sun was glinting on the fuselage. I found his shoes and towel and things on the sand. I sat down next to them and waited. Waited and waited. You see, he had promised me.”

“Promised you what?”

“That he would die in my arms. Isn’t that ridiculous?” She laughs softly. “Ridiculous and sentimental. I thought he couldn’t be dead, because he’d sworn to God he would die in my arms, and nowhere else.”

We’re silent for a moment, contemplating the rhythms of the surf, and then I ask her how long she waited. Whether anything of him ever turned up.

“No. Not a thing. As if the ocean just swallowed him. It was Olle who came looking for me, in the afternoon. He took care of everything for me. I was destroyed. I only held myself together at all because of the children, and because Olle wouldn’t let me alone.” She laughs again. “So I married him out of gratitude, I think. And maybe because I was so mad at Sam for dying.”

“Mad? You were mad at him?”

“Of course I was. Weren’t you? I was furious. For throwing himself away like that, when we loved him so much. For making us wake up every morning and find a way to go on without him.”

From down the beach comes the sound of laughter, as Doris screeches her delight over some seashell. The sun’s come out, but the wind still churns, and the surf arrives in tall, angry, chaotic waves. I think that I would like to be a wave myself right now, to throw myself against a rock and just expire.



At the bar in Nuremberg, after Captain Hawley put his officer’s cap back on his head and left me alone with my letter, I went upstairs and took off my clothes and lay on my bed. I considered whether I wanted to live or not. It seemed to me that nobody was left alive who mattered to me, nobody on earth left to live for. Velázquez was dead; my father, or so I then supposed, had been dead for years. I might as well have been dead to my mother and stepfather. My own body appeared to recognize its isolation and was now wasting away, day by day. Every morning I trudged into the tribunal courtroom and learned that the world itself was not worth living in, that man was so corrupt and so evil that further existence was pointless, that humanity did not deserve to continue.

You are like Sam reborn as a woman, Irene had said.

I don’t know if that’s true. In my last memory of my father, I’m thirteen years old and he’s taking me out to dinner for my birthday, just the two of us, at some restaurant in San Francisco. He orders turbot and Scotch whiskey; I have chicken and a lemon soda. Over some chocolate cake for dessert, he hands me a box, and inside that box is a necklace on a silver chain, on which hangs a tiny shell containing a tiny freshwater pearl. I’m so overcome by this beautiful object, I burst into tears. Dad fastens it around my neck and says that whenever we’re apart, as we must be, I should look at this necklace and remember how much he loves me. That I am everything in the world to him, and always will be. He drives me home the long way and walks me to the door, but he doesn’t go inside because of Mama. He just hugs me and kisses me good-bye and walks down the step and gets into his car. He waves out the window as he leaves. I remain on the step until the smell of him drifts away. And that’s all there is.