Her Last Flight(16)

“I’m glad you survived, anyway,” Irene said.

“Yes.” He turned away and lifted Sandy from the pilot’s seat. “I’m damned lucky to be alive.”



In the next scene, Irene stood near the lookout tower with the other spectators, the women in their short, fashionable dresses and the men in their pale suits. Sam was about to take off in his Curtis Jenny. She knew it was him because the name was painted on the side of the fuselage, Papillon. It meant butterfly in French, she knew. She thought that was a dumb name for an airplane. She hoped it would fly more like a hawk, an eagle, swift and strong.

A woman had come up to stand beside her. Irene snatched a glance and saw that she was petite and pretty in the way of dolls, huge eyes inside a face shaped exactly like a heart, mop of short blond curls held in place by a straw hat.

“You’re a friend of Sam’s?” the woman asked.

“You could say that.”

“I don’t mean to be rude. I saw you together earlier, that’s all.” The woman put out a tiny hand. “I’m Sophie Rofrano.”

“Oh, then you’re—”

“Yes. Run the place, together with my husband. Isn’t it a fine day? Of course, it’s mostly fine in California. That’s why we’re all here.”

Irene took the hand and was surprised at the firmness of the handshake. Most women of that size, they had a puny grasp to match. “Irene Foster. It certainly is fine.”

“I remember the first time I watched him fly. Sam, I mean. He found us right after we started the airfield. He’d flown with my husband in the service, you know.”

Irene didn’t know, but she nodded anyway. It made sense, after all.

“He’d just bought a Jenny off somebody else, somebody who’d cracked it up and quit flying, and Sam put that airplane all back together again and off he went, into the sky.” Mrs. Rofrano waved her hand at the landing strip, and the airplane toddling toward the end. “I’d never seen anybody fly a Jenny like that, not even my husband. I didn’t know you could. He knew exactly how to push her, exactly how much she could tolerate, exactly what she could do. Turns and loops and dives. He put her down again—it was an air show, just like this one—and he must have found twenty new students, right there. Are you one of them? Students, I mean.”

“Yes. No! I—well, we surf together, that’s all.” It wasn’t exactly a lie, after all, and it certainly sounded less awkward than the truth.

“Surf! On the water? The ocean?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, that’s grand. I didn’t even know Sam surfed. He doesn’t tell you much about himself, you know.”

“I know.”

“Ah.” Mrs. Rofrano folded her arms. “There he goes.”

As she spoke, the noise of Sam’s propeller, idling in the distance, turned loud and purposeful. Irene lifted her hand to her brow and stared at Papillon, an unobstructed view, soaked in sunshine. The propeller whirred furiously on its nose. It started forward, bouncing like a spring on the ruts in the grass. Irene could see Sam’s leather cap and his goggles throwing off rays; she thought she could see his expression, but maybe that was only her imagination filling in the details. Either way, the crowd stirred and spoke around her, oohed as if they’d never seen an airplane before.

And yet. Didn’t Irene feel the same way? Yes, you encountered airplanes all the time in that hopeful blue California sky of the 1920s, puttering away, climbing and falling and banking, performing heart-stopping stunts for onlookers, like looping the loop and flying under bridges and wing walking and what have you. Until now, Irene had felt no more than the usual amazement at these antics.

Now it was different. Now Sam’s airplane prepared to meet the sky. Now Sam’s airplane gained speed and thrust downfield. In Irene’s eyes, it seemed to lengthen, to suck power under its skin, to gather all that California sunshine into its wings. Irene felt the lift of its nose in her own body, the flex of its wings; she knew the exact instant its wheels came apart from the grass and the wind drew it upward, as if it had no weight at all. She followed the diagonal line of its ascent until it soared above the boulevard, the trees, and vanished into the sky, and what she wanted to do, in that moment, was not to climb inside an airplane with Sam and soar away into that vanishing sky. Was not to pilot an airplane at all.

She wanted to become. She wanted to become the airplane.



The scene that followed would soon become commonplace to Irene, but on that March afternoon in 1928, everything was new. Each aerobatic maneuver drenched her in wonder, like a river baptism, in which you were plunged several times into the water and came out reborn. The steep dive that pulled out just above the ground into a graceful upward arc. The journey along the tine of an imaginary corkscrew while a trail of red smoke curled behind like a pig’s tail. The climb, steeper and steeper until your heart stopped, until the airplane briefly became vertical, then upside down in contravention of everything you thought you knew about nature and physics, just hanging there upside down, seconds passing into eternity, then a swooping fall while your heart resumed beating and you said to yourself, loop the loop. Irene wouldn’t remember every stunt Sam performed that day—stunts piled on stunts, and which ones she witnessed then and which ones later—but she would remember the grand finale. Everybody would.