Her Last Flight(31)

The door rattled behind her.

“Who’s the fella?” asked Sam. “Looks a little old for you.”

Irene hesitated a second or two. “My father.”

“No kidding! Why didn’t you introduce me?”

“Because we have work to do.”

“Where’d you stash him?”

“In the cafeteria, putting himself on the outside of a cup of coffee. He’s what you might call the worse for wear.”

“I see.”

That was another thing about Sam. You didn’t need to explain yourself; he let you decide just exactly how much to tell him, or not. He didn’t force you to share your sorrow. He didn’t force you to share his. He laid his hand on the skin of the Centauri, near the seam of the cockpit door, and said, “Weather forecast looks about right.”

“What about the ship?”

“I spent two hours this morning with Rofrano, looking over every inch of her. Not a hair out of place. She’s ready.”

“And you?”

Sam crossed his arms and turned on his side, leaning against the plane. “I’ve been ready for months. You?”

“Course I’m ready.”

“You don’t sound sure about that.”

“Of course I’m sure!”

“Not turning yellow on me, are you?” He said it with a grin, as if to say Of course you’re not yellow, you of all girls. “Anyway, you brought your old dad to see you off.”

“That was an accident. He turned up this morning from some kind of business trip, high as a kite. He’d seen the papers. I couldn’t leave him home.”

“Jehosephat, Irene. You haven’t told your father?”

Now Irene crossed her arms. “I wrote a letter, is what I did. You can say things right in a letter. I figured I’d mail it right before we take off.”

“Irene Foster,” he said, shaking his head, “you’ve got more sand in you than any man I’ve met. You’re going to fly across the entire Pacific Ocean in a metal bird in the sole company of a bum like me, and you don’t care to tell your own father about it?”

“I don’t, no. I didn’t want him anywhere near this place, and especially not those newsmen out front. Now it’s too late, I guess.”

Sam turned his back against the fuselage. Irene stared at his cheekbone, his closed eye, his tense jaw, his matted hair, and asked if he had slept here in the hangar last night. Without moving, he said he had. Nerves, he said. Me too, she told him. So he cracked open one eye and lifted up one corner of his mouth and asked why she hadn’t joined him?

Irene could have answered this question all kinds of ways. Plenty of people already thought that she and Sam were having a love affair, after all. The newspapers hinted it so brazenly that the history books, written in the years to come, would take some form of romantic entanglement between Irene Foster and Sam Mallory as fact. Could you blame them? Put two attractive, red-blooded people, man and woman, adventurers both, together inside a closed cockpit, and naturally some form of chemistry was bound to brew between them. Stood to reason! Anyway, you could just tell, when they were together. That banter, for one thing. The way they looked at each other. And that time she picked a piece of lint from his sleeve? That was the kicker. Everyone in the press room agreed this was something a woman would only do to a man with whom she was intimate.

Then there was the matter of the wife. No sane newspaperman was going to print anything to besmirch the sanctity of the American marriage, but that Mrs. Samuel Mallory was something else. She would sit down for an interview in her prim, middle-class parlor in Oakland, arranging herself and her small, angelic daughter, whose hair was like a cloud of pale gold, on the sofa in their white dresses and ribbons. She was a handsome woman, there was no doubt about that, dark haired and almond eyed, but you could see at a glance that she must’ve been ten years older than her husband, and those ten years had begun to tell.

She would relate to some reporter how she’d been the widow of one of the other pilots in Mr. Mallory’s squadron, and how she and Mr. Mallory comforted each other after the war, and how that friendship grew into love. What was that? Did she trust her husband? Of course she did! She trusted him absolutely! She believed Miss Foster was a woman of integrity, passionate about flying, and Mr. Mallory was a man of honor. She had no objections whatsoever to the proposed flight. Mr. Mallory always carried a navigator on these adventures. If that navigator happened to be a woman, why, these were modern times, weren’t they? A man and woman could surely labor together as friends, without allowing any base inclination to intrude between them.

The reporter would nod earnestly and take all these words down in his notebook, which he repeated verbatim, without a hint of irony, in his story the next day. It was for the reader, after all, to make of Mrs. Mallory what he would. It was for the reader to determine whether a man should fly all the way to Sydney, Australia, in the company of some doll he wasn’t married to, and whether his wife was a fool to let him do it. Frankly, the newspapermen didn’t care, one way or another. The story made good copy, that’s what they cared about.

As for Irene herself, she hadn’t even met Mrs. Mallory. In all those weeks since March, when Mr. Morrow had first agreed to finance the Sydney expedition—all those weeks while she and Sam had planned and trained and flown together in almost daily proximity—Sam’s wife hadn’t once come to visit. Instead, Sam flew the repaired Papillon north to Oakland once every month or so, in order to keep their affairs in order, and to spend time with their daughter, Pixie. He stayed for two or three nights at a time. As for what he did there, Irene never asked. She didn’t feel she had the right to ask.