Beneath the table, Amanda took Frank's hand. She was telling him she was ready to start something more serious than a company. The gesture annihilated Frank's first inclination to explore Cadwallader's offer with Buzz McCall and a lawyer at his side. Frank held out his hand. “I can put us in business in a month.”
For the moment Frank was ready to believe love conquered everythingâeven greed.
Martini in hand, Adrian Van Ness sat beside John Hay Whitney on a leather banquette in the elegant cabin of Whitney's Sikorsky Amphibian, one of the first business planes in America. Opposite the banquette, in a stylish wicker pullup chair, sat Jock's cousin, strapping Richard Whitfield, vice president of the New York Stock Exchange. They were all listening to Winston Churchill, the volatile British politician who had been England's chancellor of the exchequer for the past five years, tell how he had accidentally made a fortune in the stock market.
“My old friend Tillotson asked me just before I sailed if I had any money to invest and I told him I could always find two or three thousand pounds. I meant this was the limit for me and let it go at that. I had no intention of speculating. He went out and bought shares on margin in your aircraft stocks through this young rascalâ”
He beamed at Adrian Van Ness and took a hefty swallow of his brandy and soda.
“I get off the boat and find out I'm a bloody millionaire. I'm tempted to call him Santa Claus but he's too young.”
“There's no question, the market Adrian's made in aircraft stocks is one of the accomplishments of the decade,” Richard Whitfield said in his clipped Locust Valley lockjaw way.
“I think the real credit belongs to one Charles E. Lindbergh,” Adrian said.
There was more than a little truth to Adrian's modesty. Since the Lone Eagle flew the Atlantic, Americans had invested an astonishing four hundred million dollars in aircraft stocks. Airlines had sprung into operation in all parts of the continent. Manufacturers were eagerly building planes to meet their growing schedules.
“Nonsense,” Richard Whitfield said. “You were the only man on Wall Street ready to do something about it.”
The praise was equally true. Adrian, backed by Tillotson's money, had already bought into many of these airlines and aircraft companies at bargain ratesâand was in an ideal position to become Wall Street's leader in financing new ventures through stock offerings.
It was hardly surprising that Adrian had become Richard Whitfield's favorite young comer. He was escorting Whitfield's older daughter, Cynthia, around New York. Adrian's yellow Hispano-Suiza roadster was parked outside the Whitfield Seventy-third Street town house two or three nights a week. He had put off indefinitely a reconciliation with his wife Amanda. He soothed his conscience by sending her a hefty check each monthâand advising her brother Gordon on his investments. Recently he had helped Gordon make a million dollars selling a small aircraft company he had founded with a designer named Buchanan to United American Aircraft, a Detroit company that proposed to become the General Motors of the plane makers.
Very little of the airplane investments had yet to return a nickel but the paper profits were marvelous. That was the way things worked in America in the year 1929. You could buy town houses and diamond necklaces and Hispano-Suizas simply by displaying your stock portfolio to your banker. Stocks had been going up for eight years and there seemed to be no reason why they would not go up indefinitely. In the White House, President Herbert Hoover was confidently predicting the end of poverty. A jingle in the
Saturday Evening
Post summed up the national attitude, in which Adrian heartily, even defiantly, concurred.
O hush thee, my babe, granny's bought some more shares,
Daddy's gone out to play with the bulls and the bears,
Mother's buying on tips and she simply can't lose,
And baby shall have some expensive new shoes.
Down came the New Haven Amphibian for a gossamer landing a few hundred yards from John Hay Whitney's dock. The plane taxied to the pier and the copilot helped them debark. Cynthia Whitfield strolled toward them in gray slacks and a monogrammed white Bergdorf blouse, pouting. “Why didn't you wake me? I adore that plane.”
Adrian smiled tolerantly. Vassar had taught Cynthia that most men were lunkheads. But Adrian did not particularly care what she thought of him. Cynthia was an appurtenance he needed to be a man of substance as successful as Richard Whitfield and possibly, in the not-too-distant future, as rich as John Hay Whitney, with his strings of polo ponies and racehorses and mansions in Cannes and Long Island and North Carolina and Florida.
“If you spent less time imitating Scott and Zelda you wouldn't have to sleep until ten-thirty every morning,” Adrian said.
“What's all that about?” Churchill asked.
“A writer named Fitzgerald and his wife. Wrote a book about a gangster. Typical Irish moonshine,” Whitfield said.
Churchill chuckled and they all trooped into the house for lunch. Adrian
entertained them with tales of new air records. Two Australians had flown the Pacific, British flyers had winged nonstop from London to India. You could fly all over the Caribbean now thanks to enterprising Juan Trippe, who had launched an international airline named Pan American. Adrian basked in the glow of admiration these stories evoked.
Cynthia announced a determination to take flying lessons. Adrian coolly declared he was opposed to it. He said there was some evidence that frequent flying disordered a woman's body chemistry. They were studying the problem in Germany. It was a lie but Cynthia promptly lost interest in flight. As she left with the other females for tea on the terrace, Adrian lit a cigar and smiled at Mr. Churchill. Women were as easy to manipulate as the stock market.
The pain of losing Beryl Suydam had receded to a bittersweet memory. In fact, Beryl's fame as a long-distance pilot was worldwide since she flew from Moscow to Vladivostok. It added to Adrian's aviation persona when he casually remarked that he had given Beryl her first flying lessons.
The next day, Adrian sat in his mother's Fifth Avenue dining room, eating this sense of male superiorityâand little else. Clarissa had come back from England only a week agoâand become an instant critic of the bull market. The burden of her speech was a grave warning to get most of his money into cash as soon as possible. She saw portents of the crash of 1893 everywhere.
“What does Geoffrey think?” Adrian said.
“He's as bad as you. Totally infatuated with the airplane. Irrational on the subject. He feels he's creating a monument to Peter, I think.”
That remark made Adrian even less inclined to take her advice. With icy élan, he explained Wall Street to his mother. “They simply won't let the market go down,” he said. “There's too much money at stake.”
“They” were the big operators, the bankers and brokers who had loaned six billion dollars to speculators who had bought stocks on margin. Then there were the investment trusts, worth eight billion dollars. With such titans involved, the idea of a crash was ludicrous.
Clarissa Ames Van Ness raised her wineglass to her lips. Her hand trembled. “Adrian, for God's sake. I heard yourâyour father say the same thing thirty-six years ago.”
Icy fury replaced icy elan. She was still mouthing the lie. For a moment Adrian almost told her he knew everything. He knew his real father. But forethought rescued him. He recoiled from the ensuing scene. What would he do if she wept and begged his forgiveness?
“You're talking about another century, Mother. You're hopelessly out of your depth. Do you know how much I'm worth, personally?”
“No,” Clarissa Ames Van Ness said, her head bowed. She was still beautiful, even with age's wrinkles making their first inroads around her eyes and mouth.
“Ten million dollars.”
Clarissa rang for the maid to take away their unfinished dinner. That done, she gazed at Adrian with something very close to loathing in her eyes. “I won't give you a cent if you fail. I won't go destitute into my old age to support your
New York arrogance. I told your father the same thing in 1893.”
“Your compassion is overwhelming. It makes me think he was glad he ran into that tree limb. He may even have done it on purpose.”
His mother struggled to her feet, knocking over her wineglass. She was as white as the tablecloth. “I think we've said more than enough for one evening.”
A month later, on October 24, 1929, Adrian stood in the visitors gallery of the New York Stock Exchange beside Winston Churchill, watching traders scream orders on the jammed floor. Huge blocks of stock in companies such as General Motors and Kennecott Copper were being thrown on the market. There were no buyers. Prices were in a vertical dive and “they”âthe big operators and investment trustsâseemed powerless to pull them out.
With class A stocks dropping ten points an hour, it was almost a waste of time to ask the latest quotation on anything as speculative as airline and plane maker stocks such as United American Aircraft. They were already in the dust, mangled bits of wreckage.
“My boy,” Churchill said. “We're both learning a lesson here today. There's no such thing as Santa Claus.”
Adrian could not even muster a smile. All he could hear amid the frenzy on the exchange floor was his mother's voice tolling
ruined.
Was it his turn now to dwindle beneath her scorn? To live as her humble servant until fate or his own decision arranged an accident to remove him permanently from the scene?
Alone in his office, Adrian struggled to still the winged thing that looped in his chest. He was back in Anson, the American wog again. He was watching Beryl Suydam walk out the door, her radical shoulders squared. There was only one hopeâhis British father. The fountain pen slithered and slipped in Adrian's sweaty fingers as he composed the cable. CAN FIRM EXTEND FIVE HUNDRED THOUSAND POUNDS CREDIT? SITUATION GRAVE BUT GREAT OPPORTUNITIES FOR THOSE WHO STAY CALM.
He sat in his office for another two hours, watching the stock ticker fall farther and farther behind. Richard Whitfield called asking Adrian if he could spare any cash. “I've had to sell out my Harvard roommate,” he said. “He's threatening to kill himself.”
Adrian's male secretary came in with the brown cable from London. “What should I do, Mr. Van Ness?” he asked. “I'm getting creamed.”
“Sell,” Adrian said, ripping open the cable.
DEEPLY REGRET MR. GEOFFREY TILLOTSON HAS RESIGNED AS MANAGING PARTNER EFFECTIVE IMMEDIATELY.
Ruined.
He had hoped a reply that was even faintly encouraging would open his mother's checkbook too. Once and for all he abandoned that alternative. What was the other alternative? As he returned from the visitors' gallery, his secretary told him that eleven men had already committed suicide.
Adrian stared at the brown cable. Faintly, as if it were coming from a great distance, he heard Geoffrey Tillotson say:
Men carry on. It does a man no good to whine.
Adrian Van Ness was not the son of that ruined speculator of 1893, no matter how much sympathy he would always feel for him. He was the son of
that hearty chunk of England, who stood with feet planted wide and told life to deal what blows it might, he would take them standing. He was the great-grandson of Oakes Ames, the flinty Yankee who had defied a world that pronounced him ruined.
Adrian summoned Bleriot's plane soaring over Dover Castle in 1909. He remembered Peter Tillotson in the Bristol Scout banking over Anson in 1912. He recalled the transcendence of flight above England, the sense of soaring above history into the future. He still believed tomorrow belonged to these miraculous machines.
The future. Forethought.
He could hear Geoffrey Tillotson pronouncing them. The words would always have an English echo in his ear.
Father,
Adrian whispered.
O Father.
Although a winged creature looped in his chest, Adrian Van Ness would carry on.
Where, how? In the chaos of a collapsing economy, mere determination seemed futile. As he sat in his Wall Street office, his mother's presence uptown loomed above the skyline. It was only a matter of time before he succumbed to that invincible checkbook.
Unless he got out of New York. Unless he went someplace where planes were being made, some place Clarissa Van Ness would never follow him.
That was when Adrian remembered Amanda and Prince Carlo Pontecorvo's advice about those two thousand acres of orange trees in California.
While a half-dozen reporters watched, the gleaming white monoplane emerged from Buchanan Aircraft's dim main hangar into the brilliant California sunshine. The plane emanated modernity. Her sleek fuselage had a shark-like shape. Her streamlined engine cowling, her art deco wheel pants, added speed as well as beauty. The twin tail fins doubled her stability and maneuverability. Her 400-horsepower radial engine would enable her to fly twice as fast as the lumbering Ford Trimotors which most airlines were currently using. The multicellular wing, each cell a complex of metal angles, was so strong a steamroller could be driven across it repeatedly without damaging it.
“What's her name?” asked one of the reporters who had not bothered to read the publicity release.
“Lustra Two,” Frank Buchanan said and explained the poetic allusion. He did not have to explain Lustra I. That plane was already well known to aviation writers. It had challenged the Lockheed Vega for the supremacy of the skies, setting records for speed at air races and on distance flights. Lustra II was an attempt to take the basic design and convert it into a ten-passenger airliner.
“I'm in favor of changing it to Hot Pants,” Buzz McCall said. “In a minute, you guys'll see why.”
Buzz climbed into the cockpit and the engine rumbled. Minutes later, the Lustra leaped off the runway and whirled around Buchanan Field at 500 feet. At this dangerous height, Buzz did stalls and spins and banks that demonstrated the plane's amazing responsiveness. He opened her up to full throttle and whizzed across the airport again, a white blur, then all but turned her on her axis to slide in for a perfect landing.
“You're looking at the next generation airliner,” Tama Morris (aka Moreno) said.
They were all working for Buchanan AircraftâBuzz, Tama and her friend Gloria Packer, and several former mechanics from the Buzz McCall Flying Circus. Frank had hired them when Buzz agreed to take over as chief of production. Buzz and Tama had gotten married in 1929, shortly before the stock market crashed.
Frank had not had much difficulty persuading Buzz to take the job. His movie career had popped like a soap bubble in the sun as talking pictures arrived in 1927. Airplane movies went into eclipse around the same time when several stunt pilots died trying to fulfill impossible demands by directors who knew nothing about flying. The talkies had been fatal to Tama too. Her acting skills were rudimentary.
The reporters drank champagne in the hangar and peered at exhibits of the Lustra's wing structure and ultra-safe fuel system. Standing on the sidelines watching the party, a glum look on his foxy face, was their original backer, Gordon Cadwallader. Beside Cadwallader was Buchanan's chief financial officer, a small desiccated accountant named Arnold Appleby, from United American Aircraft, the Detroit company that had bought Buchanan, Lockheed and a dozen other aircraft companies in the bull market frenzy of the late 1920s. He was probably computing the cost of the champagne and the gasoline to fly the Lustra II for five minutes and adding it to his list of complaints in his daily memorandum on cutting costs.
It was March of 1930 and Wall Street showed no sign of reviving. United American stock, which had once sold as high as 70âclose to what people had been paying for General Motorsâwas now valued at one and a half.
Beside the accountant stood Amanda Cadwallader in a flowery print dress, her shining eyes on Frank as he explained Lustra II's virtues to the reporters. Working under terrific pressure to produce planes that would make a profit in spite of the country's economic collapse, Frank had twice postponed their marriage. She had finally convinced him that she did not care whether he was rich or poor. They were to be married as soon as Lustra II was certified as airworthy by the federal government and she obtained her divorce from Adrian Van Ness.
Frank was determined to marry Amanda without a trace of Craig's misogynism in his soul. He had acquired a small library of books on the female body and applied his original mind to the problem of producing perfect bliss between husband and wife with the same passion for perfection he brought to the creation
of a new plane. Their love would be as superior to the casual sex of the aircraft world as the Lustra II was to
Rag Time.
“Tonight at our houseâa real celebration,” Buzz said, as the reporters departed.
“You're all invited,” Tama cooed after the newsmen.
“I think we better have a talk,” Appleby said to Frank and Buzz.
Gordon Cadwallader joined them in Appleby's office. Amanda was left to explore the cabin and cockpit of Lustra II. Appleby wasted no time. “We're broke,” he said. “We can't even meet this week's payroll.”
“The hell you say,” Buzz roared. “We've sold twenty Lustra Ones in the last twelve months and we've got orders for another six.”
“Whatever we've made on those transactionsâwhich is damn little, with the salaries you're paying yourselves, has been requisitioned as an extraordinary expense to meet corporate financial problems,” Appleby said.
“You son of a bitch!” Frank roared, seizing Appleby by the shirt. “You're robbing us to keep your Detroit friends driving around in their lousy Packards.”
“Robbing is hardly the correct term,” Appleby said, disengaging his shirt.
“We own you, Mr. Buchanan. You are a division of United American Aircraft and we can do what we please with your cash.”
“What about my stock?” Buzz cried. In the heyday of the bull market, with Lustras selling at the rate of three a month, he had put every cent he had into UAA.
“You're a very minor stockholder,” Appleby said.
“We're all minor,” Gordon Cadwallader growled. “UAA has twenty million shares outstanding.”
“We're declaring bankruptcy and selling off our assets to satisfy class A stockholders and creditors,” Appleby said.
“What the hell's a class A stockholder?” Frank said.
“You're looking at one,” Gordon Cadwallader snarled. “I'll only get about ten cents on the dollar. You drew a salary while I got nothing. Not even a dividend.”
“It was your idea to put us into that Detroit deal!” Frank shouted.
“You didn't complain when your stock was worth a half million dollars,” Cadwallader said.
“You're robbing my companyâmy name,” Frank said. “I'm going to sue hell out of you.”
“I don't think you have a case,” Cadwallader said. “If you threaten me, I'll make sure you don't have a case.”
“Consider yourself threatened,” Frank said.
“You're not welcome in my house any longer.”
“It's not your house. Amanda owns it just as much as you do,” Frank shouted. “The same thing goes for those two thousand acres of orange trees. The day after we're married, I plan to have a lawyer go over the books of Cadwallader Groves and find exactly where the profits are going. Your days of intimidating her into being a silent partner will be over.”
“You can hire all the lawyers in California,” Appleby said, in his infuriating drone. “This company is out of business, as of tomorrow morning. Notices will be posted, informing the employees before they leave tonight. Its assets and liabilities will be in the hands of the bankruptcy court of Los Angeles County within twenty-four hours.”
“Why did you torment usâlet us fly Lustra Two?” Frank cried.
Appleby grimaced. It was as close as he ever came to a smile. “Someone may want to buy the planeâand the design. Make sure when you leave tonight that all aspects of your design work will be available to prospective purchasers.”
“The design of that plane is not for sale,” Frank roared. “That came out of my head.”
“Your headâas well as your handsâwere working for United American Aircraft,” Appleby said.
The enormous fact of his impotence, of all their impotences, descended on Frank. Gordon Cadwallader completed his humiliation. “Stay away from Amanda. Consider that a warning.”
Gordon Cadwallader took a bewildered Amanda home. Frank retreated to the McCalls' house in Long Beach, where a funeral for Buchanan Aircraft lasted far into the night. Bootleg liquor flowed and everyone got very drunk. Frank awoke at noon the following day to find himself in a bed with Gloria Packer. “You looked so sad, Frank. I just wanted you to know I still cared,” Gloria said.
Frank had tried to stay celibate for the last three years. It had not been easy, with Buzz for a partner. Ten-year-old Billy McCall appeared in the doorway with a pitcher of orange juice, intensifying Frank's guilt. Buzz had taken Billy into his household when he married Tama. “Any chance of a ride in Lustra Two, Pops?” he said, using the nickname he had given Frank years ago.
“No one's ever going to ride in Lustra Two if I can help it,” Frank said.
Before he could execute his revenge, Frank had to extricate Amanda from her brother's custody. He drove to Long Beach Airport, where he kept his Lustra I. In a half hour he was circling over the white turreted Cadwallader mansion in Fullerton. Amanda stood on the lawn, waving to him. But it was Gordon Cadwallader who greeted him as he got out of the plane.
“I think we better have a talk,” Gordon said.
“I'm through talking to you. I'm here to take Amanda away with me.”
“If you really love Amanda, you'll do what I tell you. Get in the car.”
They climbed into his Hupmobile Six and drove to the nearby mental hospital where Amanda's mother was an apparently perpetual patient. There were a half-dozen people on the lawn talking to themselves, wandering dazedly with glazed eyes. “It costs me five thousand dollars a year to keep her here,” Gordon Cadwallader said. “If it weren't for Amanda's feelings, I'd have sent her to a state hospital years ago. She's my father's second wife. She never liked me.”
Inside, they were greeted by Carl Farber, the German doctor who ran the place. He led Frank to the second floor and stopped before a door marked 13. He opened a small window and invited Frank to look inside. A woman with
Amanda's russet hair and angular face paced up and down the tiny room. She sensed Frank's eyes on her and flung herself at the door. “Stop these men from tormenting me!” she screamed. “Tell my warriors where I am! Tell them Queen Califia is calling on them to rise again!”
“Mrs. Cadwallader thinks she's Califia, the mythical Amazon queen of California,” Dr. Farber said. “An interesting schizophrenic delusion. It enables her to despise the entire male sex.”
Back at Casa Felicidad, Gordon led Frank into his office, locked the door and set up a small motion picture projector and screen. He pulled down the shade and they sat in semi-darkness. At first Frank was bewildered by the flickering images. A dark lake, sodden Negro musicians stumbling ashore clutching their instruments, naked women on a barge. He realized it was the British director's outtake of the party at Modesto, after finishing Loop the Loop. There was Mabel Durand doing a show-it-all shimmy while her ladies in waiting Charlestoned around her in the buff.
In the next frames Mabel was alone on the raft, stretched on her chaise longue while various members of the cast and crew rose dripping from the black waters of the lake to enjoy her. One was unmistakably Buzz McCall. With his clothes off, he looked part ape. Then another man, bigger than Buzz, with pale skin and reddish hair that looked almost white in the kleig lights. Frank watched himself, sick with shame.
Gordon Cadwallader stopped the camera. “I had a private detective investigate you last year when it began to look like you might actually marry Amanda. He picked this up on the blackmail market. Do you think I should show it to Amanda?”
“What do you want me to do?”
“Write her a letter, telling her you're bankrupt and you think it best to stop seeing her.”
Frank sat down at Cadwallader's desk and wrote the letter. He stalked to his Lustra I and flew to Santa Monica, where he found the Buchanan Aircraft Company hangar padlocked and a notice of bankruptcy pasted on the doors. He borrowed a sledgehammer from one of the other hangars, smashed the lock and got into the cockpit of Lustra II.
Airborne, he roared above Los Angeles and its curving boulevards. Gordon Cadwallader and United American Aircraft had stolen his happiness, his future. But they would not steal Lustra II. Without this plane, Buchanan Aircraft was worth nothing.
Pulling a parachute from beneath the copilot's seat, Frank turned Lustra II's sleek nose east, toward the Mojave. Over the desert, he shoved the controls forward, kicked open the cockpit door and flung himself into space. By a miracle he evaded the tail and his parachute soon opened. Beneath his feet, the beautiful white plane exploded in a blossom of orange flame on the desert floor.
The sight made him feel guilty of a crime almost as brutal as the one Gordon Cadwallader had committed against him and Amanda. How could he ever explain it to Buzz and the men who had worked on the plane, who loved it as
their creation as much as his? There was only one thing to doâobliterate all trace of Frank Buchanan, the plane designer. Hitching a ride back to Santa Monica, he began methodically destroying the thousands of drawings and blueprints that had gone into the creation of Lustra II and Lustra I.