Her Last Flight(43)
But he wasn’t there. The beach was empty.
Irene came to a stop where the water washed around her shins. She spun around and there he was, stroking toward her, a few yards away. In another second he caught up and snatched her against his chest.
“Goddammit, Irene! Didn’t you hear me yelling?”
“Yelling! Yelling for what?”
“Shark,” he gasped.
Sam’s legs gave way and they sank kerplop into the undertow. The water whisked away and left them bare. Sam’s heart thundered in her ear, his arms wouldn’t let go.
“I didn’t see any shark,” she whispered.
“Big silver fin about six feet away from you. Just before you caught the wave.” He flopped them both backward to lie on the wet sand, Irene on top, while another wave washed up to his ears. “I thought you were a goner.”
They lay another minute or two while their flesh molded and their wet clothes glued together. Irene slid a few inches down along his left side; her right knee rose to cross his thighs. Her arm curled atop his breastbone, rising and falling. Her breathing slowed, and so did his. The surfboard bobbed away. Dawn broke at last, and the sky turned pink.
Three stories above them, a man stood at the window of his hotel room, opened the sash, lifted a camera equipped with a special long focus lens, and snapped a few photographs.
Hanalei, Hawai’i
October 1947
When I return to the house a half hour later, I carry a thick manila envelope from the lining of my suitcase, which I toss on the sofa table in front of Lindquist.
“You missed this.”
She looks up at me, brow furrowed. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“My suitcase. Never mind, that’s not important right now. This.” I press my finger on the envelope. “I want to talk about this.”
Though the sun fell below the ocean long ago, the air remains balmy. Lindquist has settled back outside to the lanai, where you can hear the surf beat upon the night sand. She drinks a glass of lemon water, iced; I’ve fetched something stronger from Olle’s stash. It’s just the two of us, and the absence of any male spirits in the atmosphere is both peculiar and tranquil.
Lindquist leans forward in her wicker chair to examine the envelope. “May I?”
I remove my hand and she takes the envelope and opens it. One by one she removes the photographs, examines them, and lays them on the table.
“Where did you get these?” she asks.
“Here and there. You’ll notice the AP owns the rights to most of them, so I’ve pulled favors and had prints made. You don’t get the same detail from a newspaper clipping.”
“That’s true.”
She pulls out the last photograph and lays the envelope to one side while she studies them. You would think the sight of these images might inspire some kind of emotion in that face of hers, but she’s just lost in thought, fingers knitted together and pressed to her bottom lip. I light a cigarette and stare over her shoulder.
There are a dozen of them, although I’ve got many more stored at the Los Angeles bureau office where I was conducting my research. I chose each one with care. Here’s Irene Foster standing next to Sam Mallory and his wife, while he holds a towheaded cherub in his arms. Here’s Foster and Mallory posed before their Rofrano Centauri, just before they depart on their landmark flight to Australia. Foster and Mallory, tired but triumphant, waving from the airplane door on arrival in Oahu. Foster delivering some speech in Honolulu, Hawai’i, while Mallory looks on. Lindquist points to that one.
“I couldn’t even hear my own voice,” she says. “The noise from the engines in those days, it was deafening. Literally deafening. That was my first speech.”
“First of many.”
“I didn’t even know what to say. I didn’t know I was supposed to speak at all. I thought that was Sam’s job.” She chuckles. “I remember standing there and wondering what my father would say. He could always hold an audience. He was a terrific raconteur. Also a drunk.”
“Wasn’t everybody’s dad a drunk?”
“You too? Then you know what it’s like.” She shakes her head. “Those marathon flights, they were murder. All strung out on coffee and nerves. And all the same, that was the best part. It was just you and the airplane and the landscape around you, and the rest of it didn’t matter, the speeches and interviews and newspaper articles. You knew you were doing something special, something nobody else had done before, and that first flight . . . Sam there in the cockpit with me . . .” She reaches for her lemon water. Her other hand finds the calico cat that sleeps on a cushion at her feet.
I wheel around the wicker chair to prop myself on the arm, right next to her. My own glass is empty, but I’m not about to leave her for the sake of a little more bourbon. Photographs. They have an effect on people, don’t they? Show somebody a picture from some particular moment that means something to her, some person who means something, and you can just about hear the noise of suction as she’s drawn back into the past. As she becomes the person she once was. It’s a technique I’ve used before, not least on myself. I stare at her long finger, which taps on another photograph, also taken nineteen years ago in Honolulu, in which she and Mallory step from the back of some giant limousine, and he’s just turned away from her to face the camera and hasn’t yet put on that face you wear when you’re being photographed.