Her Last Flight(90)
In her last known photograph, Irene Foster stands at the door of her Rofrano Sirius and waves to the crowd below, all of whom had risen before dawn to watch her depart. She wears her usual uniform, a loose, shapeless flight suit that looks gray in the monochrome print but was actually khaki, covered by a leather jacket. Knee-high boots like a cavalry officer. A leather cap covering her famous sand-colored curls. Two rows of small, even white teeth gleam from between her smiling lips. Of all the photographs taken of Irene, this one is perhaps the most famous, because it’s the last moment anybody could say for sure where Irene Foster was and what she was doing. And everybody loves a mystery, don’t they? Everybody wants to look into those pale, thrilled eyes and imagine what happened next.
Hanalei, Hawai’i
November 1947
The last time I saw Velázquez before he rejoined his squadron in The Netherlands, we went for a walk in the darkened Paris streets after dinner. He had tried to obtain an overnight pass but could not, so we had only a few hours before he was required to report to the airfield. We ate at the Ritz, because it was one of the few places you could get a decent meal if you were willing to pay enough money, and Velázquez seemed to think that some ceremony should attach to our last evening together. I drank glass after glass of expensive wine, and Velázquez said I should walk it off for a bit before we returned to my hotel. He took my arm and steered me carefully around the various hazards. It was still quite early, because of the curfew, and I remember thinking it was strange to be so drunk so early in the evening.
To pass the time, he told me more about his childhood. I asked him about this girl he was supposed to marry, and at first he was reticent, saying it was not right to speak of his previous love at such a moment, but at last he admitted that he had met her while visiting some Basque friends from university, that she was the daughter of a lawyer, beautiful and also very clever (maybe not quite so clever as you, my beloved, but just as beautiful), and his Castilian parents were not pleased that he had fallen in love with a girl so decidedly bourgeois. Her parents, meanwhile, were too intimidated to press the case for true love, because Iberia as a whole retained strong notions of caste in those days. Velázquez solved this impasse by getting her pregnant, but by then the war had already started and he hurried down to train at the fighter school in El Carmoli, in the south, because he had always wanted to fly and felt a duty to come to the defense of democracy. He promised he would return north to marry her before the baby came.
“Then what happened?” I asked.
His face turned bleak. “Guernica,” he said.
“Something’s wrong with the cat,” I tell Lindquist, when I come in to breakfast. “It doesn’t want to get out of bed.”
Lindquist shrugs over her newspaper. “She’s old. She’ll get up when she’s ready.”
“I don’t know. I think you should take a look.”
As I said, the cat’s grown attached to me, and it’s now taken to sleeping on my bed at night, observing my darkroom rituals with an air of disgust such as only a cat can affect. Over the past week or so, I’ve noticed that it moves a little more slowly and deliberately, hopping down by degrees; that it stays curled for hours in a snug ball in one corner. At first I figured, as Lindquist did, that this was just regular old age, and no wonder. But when I rose this morning, the cat didn’t stir. I checked that it was still breathing but I thought maybe it should go to the vet, just to be sure, because Irene thought the sun rose and set on that cat.
I explain all this to Lindquist as she crosses the lawn with me in giant, silent strides. I’m surprised by the tenderness with which she addresses the beast. She strokes its fur gently and bends down to ask it a question, and I don’t know what the little furball says to her in reply, but Lindquist lifts her head again with the same white, bleak expression I remember from Velázquez’s face, when he told me about Guernica.
“Do you think you can hold her in your lap on the way to the veterinarian?”
It turns out, there’s only one veterinarian on Kauai and his office is on the other side of the island, in Lihue, and because Kauai is essentially a volcano, we have to motor all the way around the perimeter instead of directly across. Lindquist drives the Buick like a racecar, which would scare me if she hasn’t always driven that way, guided by an intuition for her car and the road beneath. The cat sits in my lap, not complaining. The children are at school already.
“Thank goodness,” says Lindquist. “They’d be devastated.”
Now, I’m no expert, but I’m pretty sure this is what the shrinks would call projection, although I don’t say so. Lindquist would rather die than admit sentimentality. I don’t say this to criticize; I’m the same way myself. To admit you are sentimental is to admit you are vulnerable, that you are susceptible to emotional excess, and we can’t have that in this modern age, can we? Lindquist pours out all her sentiment into the road, into the neat, quick curves and short stretches of pure speed, as we race toward the veterinarian in Lihue.
As for me, I’m not worried one iota about the damned cat. It’s a nuisance, so far as I’m concerned. I don’t understand its affection for me, because I rarely offer food and my lap is not soft. The kids find it hilarious, the way this moggie follows me around and says miaow when I leave to visit the bathroom or something. It’s a jealous creature too. If Leo brings me a passionflower, as he sometimes does, that cat will shred the petals the instant my back’s turned, and more than once it’s stalked his hand or his foot when he settles down beside me on the sofa of an evening. Still, despite its distaste for the rituals of human courtship, the cat is an agreeable cat, and I go so far as to stroke its fur as we bend and twist along the Kauai highway, because I don’t want it to fret about its condition. The vet will fix whatever’s wrong. I repeat this thought aloud to Lindquist.