Starduster, Starduster, Starduster. She was sick of it, Sarah Morris thought, as her husband orated another aspostrophe to the plane that was going to make their fortune. Usually she tolerated these monologues at the dinner table. Why was she irked by a Saturday morning version? What was wrong with her? Didn't she want to make a fortune?
Already, the Starduster had doubled Cliff's salary. They had moved from
south Los Angeles to a stone-and-stucco house on the upper slope of the Palos Verdes peninsula, with a marvelous view of the ocean. It was a nice place to live, washed by sea breezes, largely free of the noxious gases that created smog attacks in the rest of Los Angeles.
Maybe her alienation was simply British. While the Starduster gathered momentum, her father and his colleagues at de Havilland were frantically trying to find out why the Comet had disintegrated in midair three times. They were conducting enormously expensive tests that were driving the company to the edge of bankruptcy. Her mother related the doleful story to Sarah in weekly letters. When she tried to talk to Cliff about it, he had gloatedâyes, gloatedâover the Comet's failure. In a flash her English self, her English pride, had been reborn inside her American persona.
“Bzzzzzzz.” Her six-year-old son came racing into the living room flying a scale model of a B-17 in his upraised hand. He rounded the couch and a wingtip caught a lamp shade. The lamp toppled onto a vase and water and tulips spewed all over the couch. “Oh!” Sarah cried, seizing him in a near death grip.
“It's okay, it's okay,” Cliff said. “He didn't mean it. Right, Charlie?”
“Right,” Charlie said, twisting away from Sarah. The mockery in his green eyes, the curve of his smile, left Sarah shaking inside. Was she looking at Billy McCall's son? The rest of Charlie diminished the fear. He had jet-black hair and a physique that seemed closer to Cliff's thick-boned body than Billy's lean sinewy frame. But Billy's father, Buzz McCall, was thick-boned and dark to the point of swarthiness.
Cliff was oblivious to the resemblance. Charlie was his son, the light of his life, the reason he went to work every morning with a smile on his face. Charlie and the Starduster. They had transformed Cliff's life, rescued him from the morose, sullen husband who had emerged from the destruction of the Talus. Sarah told herself she should be grateful for that. But gratitude kept eluding her. Maybe it was because another secret separated her even more brutally from Cliff's happiness.
It lay upstairs at the bottom of her jewelry box. A letter that had arrived the day after Tama committed suicide. On the blue-bordered page were three words:
I was wrong.
Sarah knew why Tama had killed herself. Cliff had choked out the awful story the night of her death. The next day the letter arrived, addressed to Sarah.
Since that day it arrived again and again in Sarah's mind.
I was wrong
reverberated through her soul. Wrong about what? Sarah asked. The answers were endlessly puzzling and often demoralizing. Wrong about what a person can accomplish in America? Wrong about the power of love? Wrong about Cliff? Wrong about leaving her first unloved husband, Cliff's lost father, disobeying the injunction of the Catholic Church? Wrong about trusting Adrian Van Ness? Wrong about redesigning Sarah Chapman to be an executive's wife?
Someâperhaps allâof these questions caused sadness to seep through Sarah's soul. She awoke in the gray predawn light and prowled the rooms of her house. She stood in the doorway and contemplated her two daughters and her son,
blissfully asleep in the peaceful year 1957 and wondered what their futures would be. It was the age of Ike, the general and president who ruled a prosperous, self-satisfied America. She read magazines that declared the family was the natural center of a woman's life, the only social entity to which she should ever belong. The editors of the
Ladies Home Journal
told her that an incredible 97 percent of American women had taken marriage vows.
Where did that leave Tama's
I was wrong?
Where did it leave Sarah? Another voice answered that question.
Humiliated,
Amanda Van Ness whispered. It was a year since she had been summoned to her audience with Queen Califia in Adrian Van Ness's blood-smeared bedroom. The episode still partook too much of a nightmare to think coherently about it. But it had engraved Amanda on Sarah's consciousness as a primary being, a symbolic woman. Again and again she found herself returning to Amanda's first visit to their tract house in south Los Angeles, when she had warned Sarah and her daughters against humiliation.
Sarah had told no one about her midnight visit to the Van Ness house. But everyone in the company soon knew about Amanda's breakdown. Susan Hardy said Buzz McCall had gotten the story from the Mexican housekeeper, whom Adrian had fired a week after the incident. Buzz claimed Adrian had known Amanda was Califia, the woman who had sent threatening letters to half the executives in the company. Buzz claimed it was a plot to close the Honeycomb Club. For Susan, the discovery of the existence of the club had been a humiliation. Sarah, more sure of her ability to match the Honeycomb's women in the bedroom, had only been dismayed. Now she wondered if she too should feel humiliated in the name of other women who felt that way.
After helping Sarah clean up the mess on the couch, Cliff headed for another weekend of work on the Starduster. Charlie and his sister Margaret went off to a play group at the country club, and Elizabeth, now a precocious fourteen, vanished in a swirl of hair spray and mascara with a troop of equally precocious girlfriends. Sarah helped Maria make the beds and then went out on the porch to read
The Lonely Crowd,
a book that argued Americans were shifting their values from inner moral codes to the opinions of those around them. Sarah suspected they had been doing that since 1776âbut California was a giant laboratory that seemed to prove every word of the sociologist's argument.
Grrrr.
Her concentration was broken by another plane, this one's motor not created by the voice of a six-year-old. Over the ocean, a green monoplane was tracing a Jackson Pollock line against the blue sky, rolling, diving, looping, spinning in and out of near disaster again and again, carving the air into forms that built wildly, musically on one another. There was a rhythm to it, violent, spasmodic, that found an echo in Sarah's inner ear. It resembled the new music, rock and roll, which her daughter Elizabeth found exhilarating and Cliff found infuriating. The pilot ended his performance with the most dangerous stunt in the aerobatic book, a
lomcevak.
He climbed almost vertically until he stalled and then tumbled down, tail over nose, wing over wing as if he and the machine had simultaneously gone berserk. He regained control less than fifty feet off the water and roared skyward for a farewell loop.
Sarah gripped the railing of the porch with both hands, feeling as weak, as feeble as a ninety-year-old. Billy McCall was back in Los Angeles. Whenever he arrived, he announced his presence to her this way. It had become a cruel game they played with each other. The next time she saw him at a Buchanan party or ceremony, she would smile and tell him how much she enjoyed his performance. He would nod and tell her he was working on a whole new repertoire out in the desert.
I was wrong.
What was Tama telling her? Wrong to cling to Cliff and her children, in spite of the sadness that washed through her body like a tide of sludge? Wrong to trust her body to deliver happiness? Wrong to be born a woman? Maybe that was the fundamental mistake.
That night when Cliff came home Sarah kissed him and said: “I want to learn to fly.”
“What?” He looked at her as if she had gone insane.
“I've always wanted to learn. Will you teach me?”
He shook his head. “I haven't flown a plane since I left the army. You know that.”
“You could brush up easily enough. Then you could teach me.”
He started to get angryâor ashamed. “Sarahâwe've got three kids to raise. Flying is dangerous. Dangerous as hell.”
“How can you say that? When you're busy trying to sell the whole world on how safe it is.”
“The airlines are pretty safe. But flying around in a private plane isn't. Unless you do it all the time and keep your skills sharp. That's why I gave it up. I didn't have the time. Or the money.”
He was lying. He gave it up because he was afraid of it. How did she know that? Was Billy McCall whispering it to her? “Why the hell do you want to learn?” Cliff asked, trying to control his exasperation.
“For the thrill of it! Because I've got three kids am I condemned to being a hausfrau for the rest of my life?”
“I sure as hell hope you're going to stay around and raise them. Flying isn't thrilling once you learn. Did you ever talk to an airline pilot? They're bored stiff most of the time. It's like driving a truck.”
“Dick Stone seems to think it's still thrilling.”
“That's because he flies up to Palo Alto to see a girl who likes doing it at ten thousand feet.”
Sarah shook her head. “He loves it. You can see it on his face, in his eyes, when he talks about it.”
“I don't care whether you love it or hate it. You're still not entitled to risk your neck learning how to flyâwith three kids to raise.”
She could not tell him she wanted to invade Billy McCall's sky, she wanted to face him as an equal. That was the only way she could respond to his challenge. The other way, the telephone call for another flight to the desert, was the really ruinous choice. That would separate her from Cliff, the children, forever. Dying in the wreckage of a plane would not do that. It would leave
her enshrined in their hearts as a cynosure of courage, a martyr of the air.
I was wrong,
Tama said.
Humiliated,
Amanda whispered.
Sarah glared at her husband, fighting despair. “I want to learn!” she said. “I'm going to learn! If you won't teach me I'll find someone else.”
Cliff kissed her on the forehead as if she were a tired child. He put his arm around her and chucked her under the chin. “Okay,” he said. “You can take your first lesson on Charlie's twenty-first birthday.”
He was eluding her. The Starduster was taking him away from her in a new way. The collapse of the Talus had thrown him backward to the sullen playboy. Now he was moving ahead or beyond her, on a wave of pride, confidence, that she could not share, that she almost resented. Why couldn't she rejoice in his renewed American optimism?
I was wrong,
Tama said.
Humiliated,
Amanda whispered. The words dislocated everything. “I'm going to fly someday. I really am!” she said.
A week later, on another sunny Saturday after Cliff had gone to work, a cable arrived from England. FATHER KILLED IN CRASH. FUNERAL TOMORROW DON'T TRY TO COME. MOTHER. A transcontinental transatlantic phone call told her the rest of the story. Working overtime on the redesigned Comet, her father had spent the night before last at the factory, getting snatches of sleep on a cot in his office. Everyone else was doing the same thing, including the engineers who were installing new wing flaps. They had to disconnect the aileron controls to do this and in their exhaustion reattached them backwards.
The next morning, her father and three members of his design team went up to test the flaps. A crosswind caused the plane to yaw. The pilot tried to compensate with the aileron. The wing responded in the wrong direction. He applied more pressure and the wing struck the ground. The plane cartwheeled across the airport into a line of trees, killing everyone aboard.
I was wrong,
Tama whispered. Sarah threw herself on the bed and wept for the rest of the day. She was still weeping when Cliff arrived around four o'clock. He had heard the news at Buchanan. He held her in his arms and told her how sorry he was. “You see what I mean about planes being dangerous?” he said.
She wanted to scream insults at him. He was using this tragic accident to destroy her wish, her hope, for freedom. He was frightening her into being an inferior, a passenger, for the rest of her life.
Humiliated,
Amanda whispered. Would she end up like her, locked in an asylum?
Somehow this justified more tears. She wept all night and into the next day. She realized her grief made no sense. She had never been close to her father. He was seldom home. But he had always been cheerful and affectionate with her, especially when she was little. He called her Lamby. It was a silly name from a game they used to play. She would sit in his lap and insist she was his lamby pie. He would pretend to eat her.
Cliff was right about the danger of flying. There was a very good chance that she might kill herself trying to become Billy McCall's equal. But that only seemed to justify more tears. She thought of Lamby and Billy and Tama's letter
and Amanda's fate and wept and wept for a world hopelessly out of joint. Her father was dead, his jet plane in ruins, while the Starduster carried Cliff farther and farther away from her.
Frank Buchanan came to dinner and tried to console her with memories of her father from their friendship in England before the first World War. He talked about going to Ezra Pound's apartment in Kensington, where they gave an assembly of poets a lecture on aerodynamics. Her father had fallen in love with one of the poets. Frank intimated it was not a platonic attachment. That only made Sarah remember Tama's suggestion that he probably had a secret love life. She burst into tears and fled to her bedroom.