Cliff hoped Frank Buchanan would join them for lunch in the company dining room. But he stayed in the wind tunnel. Dick met a half-dozen lesser designers and as many engineers. He was amazed by the acrimony flickering between the two groups. He was even more amazed by the amount of Inverness Scotch everyone consumed. Dick's first taste brought tears to his eyes. He had no intention of swallowing another drop until Buzz McCall wondered if all Jews were timid drinkers. Almost strangling, Dick matched him belt for belt.
“Believe it or not, eventually you get to like the swill,” Cliff said.
After lunch Dick wobbled through routine security and physical examinations. Security chief Hanrahan only seemed interested in whether he had any Communist relatives. Owlish Kirk Willoughby, the company doctor, wanted to know if he had been to the Honeycomb Club yet. When Dick said no, he asked him to send him a memo on his first impressions. He was collecting opinions.
Cliff called to report Frank Buchanan had finally emerged from the wind tunnel. Five minutes later, Dick sat in the chief designer's cluttered office listening to him sneer: “An MBA? What does that stand for? Master of bullshit? Nothing personal, but I have a rather low opinion of so-called business schools. I don't think they can teach you anything helpful about making planes. I've never gone near a university. Neither has Jack Northrop or Ed Heinemann, the best designer at Douglas. Can you explain why this uncanny gift should suddenly manifest itself in the human race?”
The man was everything Adrian Van Ness was not. Passionate, sincere, childishly enthusiastic. All traits Dick Stone, the rationalist, considered dangerous, although he had adored them in his grandfather. But it was one thing to enjoy passion and enthusiasm in a professor of literature at the City College of New York and another to approve them in a man who was supposedly in business to make money.
“Stop and think about it for a moment,” Frank Buchanan continued. “Our teachers were two self-educated mechanics who ran a bicycle shop in Ohio, Orville and Wilbur Wright. Can you imagine anything more unlikelyâexcept the story of the Savior being born in a manger?”
“I don't happen to believe in the Savior,” Dick said.
“I don't either, in any literal sense,” Frank Buchanan said. “But you can't be Jewish and not believe in some of his ideals. They're all in the Old Testament.”
“I'm sorry,” Dick said in a softer tone. “My father's a rabbi butâhe didn't persuade me.”
“Maybe I can, before we're through,” Frank said. “I was brought up to believe all the great religions reflect the same spiritual truths. Reading poetry taught me everything in the material world is an emblem, a shadowing forth of a spiritual world. That's what makes the plane so important. In spite of the
way we've already abused it, I still think it can become a symbol of our ascent to a new spiritual synthesis.”
Dick Stone cleared his throat. He was not here to discuss metaphysics. “That's very interesting. Mr. Van Ness wants me to review the Talus's costs and do an analysis of them. Estimate future outlays, that sort of thing.”
“You can't do it. We're building a plane, Stone, not an automobile or locomotive!” Frank roared. “We don't know what she'll run into up there in the sky. You've flown. Don't you remember days when the plane got thrown all over the horizon? When she shuddered and yawed and groaned like a man on the rack?”
“As far as I was concerned, it did that every time we flew,” Dick said.
“I know what you mean. I flew in World War One and I was terrified every moment. The peacetime sky isn't quite as deadly but it's full of mysteries. Forces that reveal themselves in new ways every time we challenge them in a different airplane. That's why you can't worry about costs, you can't start whining about budgets. By the way, can you fly?”
“No.”
“Take my advice and learn. It will help you deal with a lot of people in this business, especially our chief of production, Buzz McCall.”
Dick found himself confused by the mixture of hostile and friendly signals in this encounter. “Mr. Buchanan,” he said. “I promise you that nothing in the job I'm going to do will interfere with your goals.”
“You shouldn't make promises like that when you're working for Adrian Van Ness,” Frank said.
His bitterness shook the reassurance Dick Stone had felt in Adrian Van Ness's office. The sky was the not only place where they were exploring mysteries. There seemed to be almost as many loose inside Buchanan Aircraft.
The doorbell rang just as Sarah Chapman Morris was sitting down to lunch. She was ravenous. Perhaps it had something to do with nursing. She remembered overeating when she nursed Elizabeth. On her plate was a ham and cheese sandwichâdouble slices of both with mayonnaise and lettuce on well-buttered white bread. For a side dish she was finishing up some macaroni left over from dinner. For dessert there was chocolate pudding she had made for the children two days ago; it should be eaten before it spoiled. She asked Maria, her Mexican maid, to answer the front door. It was probably some magazine salesman.
Into the dining room stalked her mother-in-law with a huge pink rabbit. “Oh, isn't that sweet,” Sarah said, jumping up to kiss her. “Can I give you some lunch?”
“I never eat lunch,” Tama said. “How's the baby?”
“Just fine,” Sarah said. “Would you like to see her?”
She put the macaroni in the oven and they went upstairs. In the nursery Elizabeth was playing mother with Margaret, who now weighed ten pounds and was thriving. Liz was pretending to read a copy of
Winnie the Pooh
. Tama gave her a perfunctory kiss and picked up Margaret. “She's looking more and more like Cliff,” she said.
The baby's hair was dark and she did seem to have Cliff's fine nose. But she had the Chapman family's blue eyes. Sarah decided not to point this out. Lately she had begun trying to conciliate her mother-in-law.
Tama put Margaret back in her crib. “Maybe I'll have a cup of coffee,” she said. “Black.”
Sarah served the coffee, rescued the macaroni and resumed her lunch. She sliced the sandwich and licked some oozing mayonnaise off her fingers. Tama sipped her coffee and said: “Do you know where Cliff spends a lot of his time these days?”
“He's been awfully busy with this experimental planeâ”
“He spends it with a redhead named Cassie Trainor. He met her on the plane the night after Margaret was born.”
Sarah tried to read Tama's expression. Was she mocking her? Sympathizing with her? The wide dark eyes were opaque, the heavy-boned, strong-jawed face expressionless. Sarah suddenly remembered Amanda Van Ness's visit, a year ago, when she told her all the women at Buchanan Aircraft were humiliated. Was this some sort of initiation?
“How do you know this? Did he tell you?” Sarah said, all interest in food gone.
She had wondered more than once if Cliff was faithful. They did not make love nearly as often as they had in England during the first year of their marriage. It was an impossible subject to discuss with your husband. It was also impossible to check up on a man who had a hundred excuses for his absences. She knew from her own experience that everyone in the aircraft business worked horrendous hours. She had barely seen her own father when he was involved in designing a plane.
“Of course he didn't tell me,” Tama said. “I had security check him out. Dan Hanrahan and I are old friends. He runs security checks on my girls all the time.”
Although she knew how Tama's girls helped sell Buchanan's planes, her casual reference to them shocked Sarah. The woman had no shame! But Sarah was much too absorbed by Tama's revelation about Cliff to give the girls more than a passing reproach. “Why are you telling me? Wouldn't it be better if I didn't know?”
“Not if he stays married to you. I can't figure out what you've got on him. It sure as hell isn't sex.”
“Really! I know you've always disliked me. But I can't see why you've chosen this moment to become completely rudeâ”
“Whether I like you or not has nothing to do with it. You're married to my son. I happen to
love
him. Last night you entertained Dick Stone, a guy who knew you in England. What do you think went through his head when he saw you?”
Tama strode into the living room and came back with a framed picture of Sarah and Cliff on their wedding day. She pointed to the slim WAAF and said: “She's turned into a fat slob. That's what Dick Stone thought.”
“This is insufferable!” Sarah cried. “I refuse to listen to another word. Please leave my house this instant.”
Tama ignored her. “Stone is the sort of guy they're going to start hiring at Buchanan, if they make it into the next decade. People from your generation, who judge a man by the looks of his wife as much as by his own looks or his ability on the job. Cliff's got everything he needs to go to the top of this company. But he can't do it with a fat slob for a wife.”
“My weight gain is connected to having children,” Sarah said, almost strangling with indignation. “It's a natural thing. My mother gained weight the same way and never lost it.”
“And I bet your father's got a couple of Cassie Trainors in his pastâand maybe in his present.”
“You really are insufferable!”
“Cut out the Greer Garson act and listen to me. Do you think you're the first woman who married some guy during a war and then found out he's not Mr. Perfect? I married Cliff's father in 1918 when I was sixteen years old. When he came back from France I realized I couldn't stand the sight of him. He got me pregnant before I got up the nerve to dump him and the Catholic Church.”
“This is irrelevant. I still love Cliff.”
“If you were telling the truth you wouldn't be standing there forty pounds overweight. I've still got that letter you wrote me when we both thought he was dead. All that baloney about always remembering his heroism. Not one word about the possibility that he was still alive somewhere in Germany. I figured it out on the spot. You were glad he was dead.”
“No!” Sarah said, tears of shame mingling with the rage already blurring her eyes. The woman was an uncanny monster. How, where, did she acquire the skill to uncover that secret sin, unspoken, unconfessed, unadmitted to anyone?
“I want to love him. I try to love him,” Sarah said. “But he makes it soâso difficult. Nowâtelling me thisâyou've made it impossible.”
“Whether you love him or not isn't the point,” Tama said in the same merciless voice. “Your responsibility is to those two kids upstairs. They're going to have enough trouble being women. You want them to have a failure for a father?”
“I try to talk to Cliff about the business. He isn't interested in my opinions.”
“That's because you're about as subtle as a kick in the shins. You want to run him. Meanwhile you're turning into Margaret Rutherford in front of his eyes. You can't get a man's attention with ideas. You want to help Cliff get somewhere? Stop eating. Get down to a hundred and ten pounds and buy
yourself some decent clothes. Look like a young executive's wife. Talk like one. Smile. Tell amusing stories. Charm the socks off guys like Jim Redwood and Adrian Van Ness. You can do it. They like that English accent. They think it's classy. Especially Adrian. He's nuts about everything English. He worked in London in the twenties.”
“IâI don't know what to say,” Sarah said. “Except toâtoâexpress my astonishment at your utter lack of consideration for my feelings. Nowâwould you please leave?”
She turned her back on Tamaâsomething she hadn't done to anyone since she was five. It was childish but the awful thing was, she felt childish. She felt reduced to the shy stammering creature she had been in grade school by this overbearing woman, so much older, yet still possessing the sheen of youth.
Tama walked past her to the table and picked up her gloves and purse. “When you calm down maybe you'll be glad I did this,” she said.
Tama strolled to the mirror over the sideboard to check her makeup. “You may not think so right now but you can do it. This is America, not England, where you go on doing the same stupid things for five hundred years because that was the way your mother and father did it. In America we believe you can change your life, create yourself. You know what my mother did for a living? She washed clothes for the Anglos in San Juan Capistrano. My father weeded their gardensâwhen he felt like working. You want to know what it's like to be Mexican in California? Pick up some dirt and put it in your mouth.”
Tama dug into her purse for her car keys. “Now my name is Morris instead of Moreno and I'm driving that car out front. I've got a five-figure salary and an unlimited expense account and one of the most powerful men in California, maybe in the country, in my life. You may not approve of my morals but it's a hell of a lot better than ironing shirts.”
She pushed the dark wave on her forehead firmly into place and smiled at Sarah.
Smiled.
Sarah could not believe the woman's effrontery. Tama strode to the white Cadillac convertible at the curb. Sarah wandered dazedly around her house. On the second or third circuit, she passed her uneaten lunch. She dumped it into the garbage. She opened the door of her white American refrigerator and stared at the glowing interior. In the center sat the chocolate pudding.
She reached out a trembling finger and put a speck of it in her mouth. Tama had it all wrong. Sarah was only trying to make up for those five horrible war years when there was no sugar, no sweets, no pleasures that were not forbidden, sinful.
She had sinned for England. She had opened herself to Cliff, to the cascades of pleasure he sent surging through her body. She sinned for England and the only sweetness available in a world at war and told herself it was love.
But it was, it was, it was love. Love was offering, gift, commitment. She had lived all three, she was Elizabeth Barrett Browning plumbing heights and depths, a Bronte heroine clutched by dark desire. Now she was trying to deny it all, get back to Englishness again in suburban Los Angeles. Enjoy afternoon tea and
scones and sweets and occasional sex with her preoccupied husband.
Oh God, oh God, oh God, Tama was right. She was re-creating her mother's life with a tiny change to make herself feel progressive, modern. She would be more involved in her husband's business. More participatory. She must have gotten the idea from a
Good Housekeeping
article on how to live happily ever after.
Sarah found herself in the living room staring at the portrait of the slim bride in the WAAF's uniform.
Like a daregale skylark scanted in a cage
. Was that why Dick Stone had asked her if she still read Gerard Manley Hopkins? He was seeing an English skylark in a cage of fat?
Sarah went back to the refrigerator and threw the chocolate pudding into the garbage. She poured the heavy cream she used on her fruit desserts down the sink. Out went the whipped cream, the jams. She transferred chocolate chip cookies, macaroons, and other snacks from handy jars to the back of her kitchen cabinet.
Finally there was nothing left in the cabinets but condiments and canned fruit and nothing in the refrigerator but milk and veal for dinner and salad greens and an array of baby food. She seized ajar of spinach, untwisted the cap, and spooned some of the mush into her mouth.
“Mommy,” Elizabeth said, wide-eyed in the doorway. “Why are you eating that?”
“I'm playing a game with myself,” Sarah said. “It's called growing up. I'm going back to being a little girl like you and then I'm going to grow up all over again. Fast.”
“That sounds like fun,” Elizabeth said. “Is it an English game?”
“No. It's American,” Sarah said.