Her Last Flight(86)

“When you’re done with all this, let me know,” he said.

“Let you know? How?”

“I’ll send a postcard or something. You’ll find me.”

Irene pushed down the clutch and turned the ignition. The engine coughed once and woke. Sam stepped back and waved her off down the road. As she swept past, she heard him call something, but she couldn’t make out the words.



George called her from New York the next morning, while she was eating breakfast in her hotel room in Sacramento. The speech had gone well. She was her old self, animated, bursting with passion for this thing called flying, for the grand possibilities of human endeavor. She did something she hadn’t done before, which was to talk about the famous Australia flight: what exactly had gone wrong with the engine, how they had found Howland by moonlight, how she’d learned from Sam Mallory to remain calm at the moment of crisis, the one absolutely necessary characteristic of a great pilot. The audience—a dinner crowd—had stood and applauded for six minutes and then turned to dessert, which was pineapple upside down cake.

“Had a nice time?” George asked.

“The best.”

“Good. I thought maybe you needed a little vacation. A little lighthearted fun, for a change. You weren’t yourself.”

“Well, I’d have to say I feel like myself again.”

“And how’s Mallory feeling? Bones all healed?”

“Bones don’t heal in a week, George. But I firmly believe he’s a thousand times better than he was before I came.”

“I’m glad to hear it. Now listen to me, Miss Foster. While you’ve been resting up, I’ve been thinking. Kicking around a few ideas with the publicity fellows here. Tell me what you think.”

Irene swirled her coffee around the cup. “Think of what, George?”

“The circumnavigation. What if it’s not just you flying around the world?”

“You mean a copilot? A navigator? I’ve already done that.”

“No,” he said, and Irene could hear the excitement in his voice, a vibration she knew well. She imagined him sucking on his cigar, beaming into the telephone, while New York hustled and bustled outside his window.

“What, then?”

“A race,” he said. “A race around the world.”





Hanalei, Hawai’i





November 1947



Kaiko leans on his crutches near the airplane’s left wing, looking deeply pleased with himself. I duck under the tail section and gaze at the faded letters and numbers with reverent eyes.

“Is this what I think it is?”

“If you think it’s Irene’s old airplane, the one that vanished from the face of the earth, then you would be one hundred percent correct, Sherlock.”

I walk around the fuselage in slow, small, cautious steps. The metal is dull and dirty and curiously fragile, as if you might dent it by pressing a finger against the skin. It’s also smaller than I imagined. In photographs, scale is maybe the hardest thing to convey. That’s because a camera lens sees the world in only two dimensions, while our miraculous, stereoscopic human eyes have evolved over the eons to see the world in three dimensions. When you compress every object, near and far, into a single flat plane, your eye can’t necessarily tell the difference between something giant and something tiny. You know what I mean. You’ve gone to the Grand Canyon or someplace, you’ve oohed and you’ve aahed, you’ve taken out your Brownie and filled an entire roll of film with magnificent vistas of this monumental work of nature, and you’ve bounded off to fetch the developed prints at the drugstore a week later, and what a disappointment! That’s not how you remembered the Grand Canyon at all! This is just some pretty landscape. It doesn’t stir your heart, it doesn’t make your soul grow, the way your soul grows when you actually stand on the vast rim of nature’s greatness.

Now, professional photographers have turned to various tricks and expensive equipment in order to create the illusion of what we call a depth of field, but by and large, you can’t understand how big or how small a thing might be unless you’re standing in its presence, measuring its size against your own, and I always imagined that this airplane, as legendary as it is, as capable of flying all the way around the world, was . . . well, bigger. But she is not big at all. Not an unnecessary ounce of metal encumbers her. She’s designed for utility, form following function as the modern designers insist, but what a form. The sleek lines of her, the way her nose tilts just so, the cocky angle of her tail. You can just about hear the soft whistle of the air as it whooshes along her sides. I gather my courage at last and run my fingertips along the curve of her cheek. There is not a flaw on her, not a dimple.

“How did she get here?” I ask.

“She flew in, what do you think?”

“Just flew here to Hanalei? From where?”

“Don’t you know all that already? You and Irene, you’ve been huddled up like sisters.”

I examine my fingers for dust. “We haven’t gotten to the part about the race yet.”

“No kidding?”

“You know her. If she doesn’t want to talk about something, she just stops the conversation right there. Don’t worry. I’ll get it all out of her eventually.”