Her Last Flight(41)

But while a photograph may tell a thousand words, it doesn’t tell the full story. It’s an instant, a snapshot, a single frame of a lengthy motion picture. A sentence lifted from a novel. Irene, of course, had no idea what emotions painted Sam Mallory’s face as she made her speech in the hotel ballroom that evening. She was exhausted, and she still couldn’t hear very well, and hadn’t even imagined she would be called on to speak. She had done her duty already! She’d shaken all the hands and said nice things to everybody about Hawai’i and the hotel. She’d expressed amazement at the suckling pig, the sweetness of the pineapple. When the speeches began, she sat back and figured her work was done. Sam rose and delivered a spirited address—or so it seemed, though she couldn’t make out the words—which she dutifully applauded while checking her wristwatch.

It was Sam who nudged her shoulder on his return. “Irene? Your turn.”

“Me?”

“They want you to speak.”

Irene opened her mouth to say, Aren’t you the one who’s supposed to speak? But the room was silent, everyone was looking at her, there wasn’t time to argue. Sam rose and helped her out of her chair. She made a quick, nervous gesture to smooth back her hair, to straighten the lei on her chest. As she approached the podium, the vibration of applause met her ears, if not the sound itself. She smiled and laid her clasped hands on the edge of the lectern. Everyone was smiling. A flashbulb went off in the corner of the room. She thought, What in the devil have I got to say to these people?



In the old days, when Irene’s mother was still alive, when Hank Foster’s drinking was just a feature of him and not the ruination of him, Irene’s parents used to have friends over for dinner. Hank Foster was very good at dinner parties. (Irene’s grandparents would say that dinner parties were about the only thing their son-in-law excelled at.) Irene sat at the top of the stairs in her white flannel nightgown and listened to the goings-on in the parlor and at the dinner table, and it was clear that Dad was the star of the show. He wasn’t the only one who spoke—the best actors know how to play off the supporting roles—but he was the one you wanted to hear, he was the one who made you listen and laugh and think and sometimes cry, who sent you away at the end of the evening with that warm, well-fed, optimistic buzz that said, Now that was a darned good party.

Still, Irene was an analytical child, then as now, and as she got older she started to wonder how he did it. What was the secret to his style, how did he keep everyone pitched forward and engaged? Irene compared her father to her teachers at school, who just rattled on about facts and figures, names and dates, and nobody gave a damn. So why did you give a damn when Hank Foster spoke? Because he didn’t explain his ideas in lectures. He explained them in stories. He made everything human. He made you experience his ideas. She asked him about it over breakfast the next morning, and he laughed and agreed. Tell ’em a good story, I always say.

Now it was Irene’s turn. She stood in front of two hundred and twenty members of Honolulu’s best bigwigs and their tanned, expectant wives, everyone straining to hear what this remarkable woman, this aviatrix, this Irene Foster had to say.

Tell ’em a story, Hank Foster said in her ear.

So Irene opened her mouth and talked about that first day surfing with her father, and how it was terrifying at first and then you started to learn the rhythm of the ocean. How, on the way home, her father spoke about the great Hawaiian kings and how you couldn’t rule over other men unless you could master the giant waves of Waikiki and Kahalu’u. So these feats, which some might consider quixotic, are in fact vital to humankind, she said. Someone has to go out there and do them, to prove that they can be done, to plant in every breast, man and woman, the yearning to surf, to fly, to dream.

She spoke for less than ten minutes, and since she still couldn’t hear very well and hadn’t rehearsed anything—hadn’t even imagined she would be called on to speak—she remembers babbling on about the importance of aviation to the future of mankind, and her gratitude to Mr. Mallory and Mr. Morrow for this exhilarating opportunity, and her hope that women around the world would take some inspiration from this flight and consider flying as a possible hobby or even career.

She was shocked, later, to read accounts of this short speech as an “electrifying prophecy” and a “call to arms for those who believe that womanhood’s best days are ahead of her.” Shocked at the thousands of letters she received from women and girls around the world, the tears, the gratitude, all of which seemed addressed to someone else, some public icon who was not Irene at all.



As for Sam, he rode back to the hotel with her in silence. Irene figured he was tired. She was tired too; she was thoroughly exhausted. She had forgotten the flight, she had forgotten Sam’s wife and Sam’s little daughter, she had forgotten just about everything she ever knew. They parted in the hotel lobby—their suites belonged to opposite sides of the Moana, somebody’s pointless notion of propriety—and Irene hardly took time to undress before she staggered into bed, where she slept for an untold block of hours before opening her eyes to stare at the ceiling fan that dragged in circles above her and wonder where the hell she was.

Then she remembered. She was in Hawai’i.

She sat up. The room was dark, the curtains shut tight. It might have been any hour, it might have been noon the next day, but some instinct told Irene the sun hadn’t yet risen. The air was warm and damp and smelled of flowers. Irene should have left the window open to the breeze coming off the ocean. She reached for her watch on the nightstand and discovered it was half past four in the morning. No wonder she was awake! In Los Angeles, it was half past seven. Her brain jumped and sizzled like an electrical circuit. Her body felt as if she’d been overturned by a bulldozer. There was no hope of returning to sleep.