Her Last Flight(73)
Irene didn’t speak, and George—for once—didn’t press her. She whipped the Hudson around the hills, faster and faster, relishing all the wind and speed and thunder, while George’s white knuckles gripped the door handle and his eyes darted to the speedometer. She made a final ascent around a last bend and reached their home, nestled into the shoulder of a mountain. The windows blinded her. They had positioned the house to capture the view of the Pacific Ocean as it crashed spectacularly into the continent some twenty miles to the west-southwest, and the setting sun now struck every pane of glass, so that she had to avert her eyes and didn’t notice all the cars parked outside until she came up the last of the drive and stopped the car in front of the garage.
“What’s going on?” she asked. “Who are these people?”
“Just a few friends I’ve invited for dinner. To welcome you back.”
“I don’t want to see anybody. That’s the last thing I want to do. I want to eat and go to bed.”
“It’s just a few hours,” he said, in the same tone he had earlier said It’s just a few miles. Nothing at all, dear, you can do it. You’re Irene Foster, you have a public, you simply have to do these things whether you enjoy them or not, it’s part of your job.
George got out of the car and lifted her kit bag from the back seat. Irene sat and stared through the windshield at the garage door, washed in orange. Her hands still gripped the steering wheel. George came around and opened the door.
“Can I at least bathe and change before saying hello?” she said, and somehow George missed the irony in her voice.
“Of course you can, darling. I’ll keep everyone happy with cocktails.”
So Irene went around back with her kit bag while George came in the front door and played host to these guests he’d invited over. The master bedroom opened out to its own patio, and Irene let herself in through the French doors. George had filled the bedroom and sitting room with flowers, vases and vases of them, roses and fragrant stargazer lilies, her favorites. He was good at gestures like that. Irene bent to sniff a bouquet on her nightstand. There was a note beneath in George’s elegant handwriting. You’re home safe, and that’s all that matters. Love, G.
She thought about that note as she bathed in the giant white porcelain bathtub, taking care not to dislodge the sling provided for her by the doctor in Fort Worth, who had asked for her autograph afterward. That’s all that matters. Was it really? Because she also remembered George’s words on the way to the airfield, the morning of the start of the derby. You’ve got to win this, darling. Not second or third. We need another victory, or the new lecture tour is going to bust. So the state of her health was important, but it wasn’t the only thing that mattered, not by a long shot, at least to George. Flying was expensive. They had to fill those lecture halls next month, and to fill lecture halls you needed the public’s fascination, you needed to be on the cover of twelve different magazines, looking dashing and triumphant, and gorgeous didn’t hurt, either. You needed rapturous column inches and newsreel footage of you roaring down an airfield driveway behind the wheel of a Hudson roadster.
Most of all, though, you needed a photograph in which you waved triumphantly from the cockpit of your silvery Rofrano Sirius, having just beaten the boys to win the 1936 Coast-to-Coast Air Derby.
The bath was heaven, but Irene didn’t deserve heaven. She’d taken a risk when she saw the squall moving in over the Fort Worth sky, and it hadn’t paid off. Now her beautiful airplane was on a train in Arizona somewhere, on its way back to Burbank for repair, which would cost a stack of money she didn’t have, wouldn’t have, unless this next lecture tour was a smashing success. And how was she going to fill fifty-nine lecture halls across America when she wasn’t news anymore, when she hadn’t won an air race in two years, when everybody had already forgotten about her solo flights to Europe and to Hawai’i and Rio de Janeiro, her circumnavigation of the globe?
Well, George would figure something out, wouldn’t he? George always figured something out.
Irene rose from the bath after four and a half minutes, dried herself off, dressed awkwardly in a rose chiffon dress that flattered her height and her angular body, her sunstreaked curls and the freckles she hated and Sam had loved. She added a little lipstick, a little powder, a pair of low-heeled sandals. She could hear the noise and laughter of the guests down the hallway and through the sitting room, George’s voice above all, relaxed and confident among all those human beings as Irene could never be. But that was one of the reasons she’d married him, wasn’t it? He could do these things she could not. He could manage all that for her, so she could fly.
As she passed through the sitting room, Irene spotted a folded newspaper on the lamp table. She tried to avert her eyes, but the headline caught her. MALLORY PULLED ALIVE it said, before the rest of the sentence disappeared around the fold.
Irene stood still and stared at the black letters. Her pulse rang in her ears. For a second or two, she thought she would faint.
When she could breathe again, she picked up the newspaper and unfolded it.
MALLORY PULLED ALIVE FROM WRECKAGE.
San Diego Air Show Ends in Disaster.
Flier Taken to La Jolla Hospital, Condition Remains Unknown
George and Irene had chosen a young, rising architect to create their home in Burbank, shortly after their marriage four years earlier, and he had designed the house in an open, modern style that made use of the light and color of the California landscape. At the center of the building, the living room had the feel of a baronial great hall, although shorn of any historical froufrou, as George called it. It was twenty-two feet high with giant metal beams and a wall of French doors that seemed to open out right over the edge of the hill and into the sky above the ocean, although in fact they opened out to a stone terrace and a swimming pool. It was here that George and Irene held most of their parties. The doors had already been thrown open and the air was fragrant with cigarettes and perfume. Irene slipped in quietly and tapped George on the shoulder. He turned and took her elbow.