Her Last Flight(23)
“You can’t be saying he crashed that airplane deliberately,” she said.
“I’m not saying he did or he didn’t. But all the money in this business comes from publicity. You’ve got to keep the public interested, or you won’t make a dime. The books and lecture tours and racing prizes, that’s all because the public wants to hear about your daring escapes and your gory crackups. You’ve got to do something new and exciting. If you want to keep flying, you have to feed the public.”
“Feed the public.” Irene rolled the words between her teeth. “But that’s your job. You’re a publisher, aren’t you, Mr. Morrow? You feed the public.”
“It is my privilege, Miss Foster, to furnish the public with inspiring stories of human bravery. Aviation happens to be at the vanguard of all that’s daring and courageous in American manhood. They are the last remaining pioneers, these men, the last fellows willing to die to expand the frontiers of human capability.”
“Those are some grand sentiments, Mr. Morrow. But what about womanhood? Isn’t a woman capable of courage and daring?”
Morrow turned his shoulders an inch or two in Irene’s direction, as if she’d finally said something worthy of interest. “Do you fly, Miss Foster?” he asked.
“No,” she said. “Not yet.”
“But you’d like to.”
“Would you object if I did?”
“Not at all. I admire the courage and skill of our lady pilots every bit as much as that of men. Maybe more.”
“Why more? Because you don’t expect it?”
“No. Because there are no obstacles for a man to climb into a cockpit and learn to fly, except his own natural skill and courage. A woman who flies must battle not only the objections of certain backward elements of society but often the dictates of her own upbringing.”
“Why, Mr. Morrow. Are you a feminist?”
“Of course I am. As every right-thinking man should be, in this modern age.” He smiled at her, a remarkable display of white, square-toothed dentistry. “It’s good business, after all.”
Mrs. Rofrano laughed. “Everything’s business to you, George.”
“It’s what makes the world go round. All a man needs to do is give the public what it wants, Sophie, and what the public wants now is novelty. It wants new heroes to worship. And if you ask my opinion, it’s the age of the woman, right now.” He stabbed his finger into the tablecloth. “The great story of our times isn’t this Volstead business, it’s the emancipation of the female sex.”
“Do you really think so?” Irene said. “Do you really think the female sex is emancipated?”
“I think a woman can do whatever she wants to do, these days, whatever she dares to do. She can vote. Why, she can run for office herself. She can walk into a speakeasy and order herself a cocktail, if she doesn’t mind breaking the law. She can show off her pretty ankles and drive a car and get a college degree and a job. She can race cars and fly airplanes.”
“Hear, hear,” said Mrs. Rofrano cheerfully.
Morrow lifted his empty glass, clinked it against Mrs. Rofrano’s glass, and rose from his chair. “If you really wish to fly, Miss Foster,” he said, straightening his cuffs and his tie, smoothing back his hair, “I hope most sincerely that you lay aside any reservations, any objections from friends and family, and simply do it. Now, if you’ll be so kind as to excuse me, I’m afraid I was supposed to be in Pasadena an hour ago.”
When he was gone—and this took some time, because George Morrow never left a room without shaking a least half of the hands inside it—Mrs. Rofrano slid back into her original seat and said, “Well? Are you going to follow his advice?”
Irene’s coffee was cold. Her sandwich was nothing but crumbs. She looked down the table to Sam Mallory, who had long since returned his attention to the man sitting beside him. Sandy had finished her cream and found her way into his lap, one paw outstretched across his waist like a lover, and he stroked her small calico head with one hand and smoked a cigarette from the other. The glass of whiskey stood empty in front of him. The collar of his flight suit was unbuttoned.
“I don’t know,” Irene said. “Flying costs money.”
“Most pilots I know don’t let that stand in their way. They find the money, one way or another. They find a way to get in the air, whatever it costs them.”
When Irene was nine years old, just before her mother got sick, she went with her parents to the Panama-Pacific Exposition in San Francisco. She saw the Tower of Jewels and the Palace of Fine Arts and all the other glittering exhibits, but what she loved best was the wooden roller coaster in the Joy Zone. The speed and the noise, the way it whipped you about. She made her father pay for ride after ride. When she got home, she set about building one in the backyard. It started on top of the treehouse her father had built, about twenty feet high in a eucalyptus tree. She nailed together wooden boards and fitted the rails to her red wagon. She still remembered the way it felt when she climbed into the wagon at the top of the track for the first time, staring down the curve to the ground. It was like the way you felt on your surfboard when a giant wave began to swell up beneath you, lifting you upward into the break, and you knew you were about to experience the ride of your life or else possibly break your neck, one or the other, no telling which.