She shook her head.
“Thenâwhy?”
“He talked me into it. He made me feel sorry for him. It was better than feeling nothingâthe way I feel with you.”
“You need help,” Dick said. “I'll talk to our medical director. He'll suggest a therapist.”
“Great,” Cassie said. “It'll be nice to have an intelligent adult to talk to for a change.”
“We can work this out. It won't be easy but I'll try to understand.”
“I don't want your lousy understanding,” Cassie said. “I don't want your goddamn condescending forgiveness either.”
She strode defiantly to the bar and filled another glass with bourbon. “You want to know the real reason for this mess?” she said, her voice thickening with tears. “I could put up with your impossible hours. I want to see us win this damn war as much as you do. I could even put up with your stupid guilt about killin' Billy McCall. What I can't stand is knowin' you don't love me. You never have. I don't know what the hell you love besides your miserable airplane company.”
Are you ready to be the next president of Buchanan Aircraft, Dick?
whispered Adrian Van Ness.
Was this the price he was paying? Was that his secret motive from the start? A sly ambition, nurtured in the small hours of the morning, watching Cliff Morris flounder? No. Dick denied the accusation. He was working for those kids on their way to fly obsolete planes into a vortex of radar-guided antiaircraft fire over Hanoi. Maybe he was no longer working for the greater glory of the United States of America. He was still working for the fliers, for the brotherhood of the air against the greedy ignorant groundlings.
True enough, true enough. But that commitment did not explain why he had lost his all-American girl.
Dick saw Cliff Morris in that king-size bed in the Watergate apartment, entangled with Angela, emptying his grief, his pain, into her. Breaking through loss and bitterness to clutch at joy.
Freedom
âthat was what the image said. In some incomprehensible way, the word, the image, belonged to California, even though it was being enacted in Washington. It was not just the freedom to fuck. It was an inward thing, a kind of space between a man's mind and heart where a person lived. Why had Dick Stone lost his space? What was wrong with him?
At first I thought I could not bear
The depths of my despair
Amalie. She was still there, barring his way to happiness.
“That was beautiful,” Susan Hardy said when Sarah Morris finished telling her husband how much she hated him. Susan helped Sarah weep for Charlie through the rest of that long night. They wept as women and drank like men. Susan let Sarah read aloud the letters Charlie had written her from Vietnam, telling her how much he loved to fly, how unafraid he was of dying.
If I have to die in order to fly I'll take it. I've been dying to fly all my life. It's logical.
Sarah could see him laughing as he wrote it. He could make a joke out of anything, even death. Courage was as natural to him as breathing.
“Burn them,” Susan said.
“Burn them?”
“They're dangerous. Your husband would try to publish them. He'd try to make Charlie a martyr of the air. He'd inspire thousands, millions, of others to think that way. We'd never eliminate the war love from their souls.”
Burn them? Sarah could not strike the match. She let Susan do it. She piled the letters in the fireplace and burned them with her zippo. “Zip and they're zapped,” Susan said. A bad joke.
Susan had not abandoned their friendship when Cliff became president of Buchanan. She sent Sarah notices of meetings of Women Concerned About the War and similar groups with capital letters. Sarah sent her money. After Billy and Victoria died and she became Mrs. Clifford Morris, the hollow woman, going through the motions of celebrity, Sarah sent Susan even more money.
In return Susan kept Sarah informed about the latest gossip at Buchanan, which she obtained through her “network.” Sarah was confused by the term at first. She thought a network was something that broadcast television and radio shows. Susan explained this network broadcast the kind of information women needed to survive in a male-dominated world. She told her Cliff had seduced an actress named Angela-something in his office and was now seeing her almost nightly in her house above Mulholland Drive.
Of course Susan had no idea Mrs. Clifford Morris did not care whom her husband was seeing or what he was doing with her. She was actually relieved that she was not required to be Sarah, to play that part in the bedroom where she had shivered and shaken with horror and terror for the deaths her hatred, her inverted love, had caused. Sarah understood why Cliff was equally reluctant to visit her there, even if he did not understand why, even if he was simply trying to avoid the dead weight of her despair, a potentially fatal drag on his salesman's buoyancy.
If Sarah did not care, what explained that explosion of hatred? Was it simply a performance to please Susan, her only friend? Or was Mrs. Clifford Morris in
touch with Sarah on some subterranean level? Perhaps that was it. Lately Mrs. Clifford Morris had been giving Susan Hardy more and more money and going to some of her capital-letter groups with her. She listened to angry women telling each other how their husbands and lovers had abused and exploited them. Many were from the aircraft business but not all. The aircraft business did not have a monopoly on macho males who only wanted one thing from a woman. At these meetings for some peculiar reason Mrs. Clifford Morris found herself able to get in touch with her previous incarnation, Sarah.
Now she sat and watched Charlie's letters burn. Having just resigned as Mrs. Clifford Morris, she had to let Sarah do her thinking. She thought it was a shame. She wept uncontrollably and remembered things that Mrs. Clifford Morris had successfully forgotten. Charlie zooming around the house with a model plane in his hand, smashing lamps and vases. Cliff beside her in the bed upstairs, sharing his fears and hopes about the Talus and other planes.
“You can't stay here any longer,” Susan decreed. “You need a different site to launch your new consciousness.”
Oh, good, thought the ghost of Mrs. Clifford Morris. I will be neither Mrs. nor Miss. I will be Ms. A nice foreshortening of the selfâan alphabetical lobotomy.
They would move to the desert and convert Mrs. Clifford Morris's vacation house into a center for Women for Peace and Freedom. That was Susan's latest capital letter group. After thinking about it carefully, Susan decided it would be better if Ms. Sarah Morris did not divorce Clifford Morris for the time being. Divorce was an ultimate weapon, which should be used when a man was least able to cope with it. For the time being Cliff Morris was riding high on money from the war machine. Better to wait until he was dumped by his Hollywood dream girl or by Buchanan or both and then stick it to him.
A marvelous phrase that summed up msdom, Sarah thought. In the new age that would unfold in their desert encounter sessions, they would acquire the ability to stick it to all of them.
“All the murderers and their war machine,” Susan said. She was one of the leaders of the antiwar movement in California. Major politicians conferred with her before making statements. She was in touch with gays and lesbians in San Francisco who were organizing their own political movement. Excitement, energy, surrounded Susan, turning her into a pillar of fire. Out of the flames would emerge a new kind of beast, a woman who could stick it to them.
Once upon a time there was a war machine you loved.
That was Miss Sarah Chapman talking, that difficult, crotchety ghost. Eventually she would dwindle into pale voiceless insignificance, along with Mrs. Clifford Morris, who was totally insignificant from the start to finish of her brief but expensive existence.
“We're going to discover a new declaration of independence, a new pursuit of happiness,” Susan said as they piled clothes and shoes in the back of the car.
“A new declaration of independence,” Ms. Sarah Morris said. “A new pursuit of happiness.”
Miss Sarah Chapman tried to point out that her English ancestors had recoiled
from these grandiose phrases. Ms. Sarah Morris merely smiled tolerantly. For the time being she was an echo chamber in which the words resounded defiantly. But that would change. Eventually they could become part of her bones and blood, her new American self.
Want to bet?
whispered Miss Sarah Chapman, that persistent English ghost.
In the desert, visitors other than Susan Hardy's cohorts in Women for Peace and Freedom (WFPF) kept the ghost alive. First Sarah's daughter Elizabeth, precariously balanced between drug-free hope and drug-drenched despair. Elizabeth could not deal with a mother who hated her father, who denied her brother was a hero and burned his letters, who told her the man she loved, the doctor who had rescued her from the needles and nightmares of San Francisco's Haight-Asbury because she was so beautiful and now wanted to marry her was a male fraud and tyrant who only wanted to own a toy woman he had created. For one thing Sarah was not sure if that was true, just because Susan Hardy said it was. Even then she saw msdom was not always synonymous with wisdom.
Next came daughter Margaret on the long-distance telephone from England, where she was continuing to become the world's leading expert on China. She had been closer to Charlie than anyone else in the family and she required special comforting. You cannot be a comforter when your soul is consumed by hatred. So Ms. Sarah Morris had to call on the ghost of Miss Sarah Chapman to remember how deep, how pervasive, the love of planes and flight ran in Charlie's blood. She talked about her father and about Cliff. She urged Margaret to go out to Bedlington Royal Air Force base and imagine the
Rainbow Express
landing with one engine while Miss Sarah Chapman stood in front of the Watch Office praying her in. She had to make Margaret, who valued thought above feeling (or told herself she did), accept the awful inevitability of Charlie's death.
Finally, unexpectedly, the most important visitor: Frank Buchanan. He came with tears on his face, hobbling on a cane since arthritis had invaded his bad leg. He brought with him a letter of sympathy, signed by every single worker in Buchanan's El Segundo factory, where the Thunderer was built. Five thousand signatures, five thousand members of the fraternity of the air saying they were sorry and proud and sad for one of their own. Frank put the hundreds of sheets of soiled paper on Sarah's coffee table and she saw them being passed from jig to jig, signed while metal shrieked and rivet guns clattered and the gigantic American flag fluttered feebly on the wall.
Oblivious to her hatred, Frank talked of Billy and Cliff as boys, when he taught them to fly. He told her of his mother's faithâof a world soul that connected everyone, the living and the dead, in which evil fought an eternal war with good. How he had dreamt in his youth that his planes would be weapons of inspiration on the side of the goodâbut now he had begun to think of them as creatures of evil. They had destroyed too many people he loved, beginning with Amanda.
That was when Sarah learned Califia's fateâwhat had happened to Amanda Van Ness. Bewildered, appalled, Ms. Sarah Morris realized this lonely old man too needed to be comforted, consoled, forgiven. The ghost of Miss Sarah Chapman
was still real enough to feel the ancient tug of daughterhood, the almost extinct wish her own lost father had never fulfilled. It was the first of many visits Frank would pay, in spite of Susan Hardy's growls of hostility.
But the ghost of Miss Sarah Chapman was still only a ghost. Most of the time Ms. Sarah Morris and her hatred prevailed. It was not entirely her fault. America seethed with hatred during those last years of Nixon's reign, with the lying president's face on the television screens night after night. Ms. Sarah even welcomed into their vituperative fraternity Cassie Trainor Stone, who became a contributor to WFPF and a member of their encounter sessions.
Listening to Cassie pour out her loathing for her absentee husband and the other Buchanan males she had known in her Honeycomb Club days, Ms. Sarah shuddered at the thought of earnest Dick Stone trying to survive this firestorm of female hatred. When Cassie announced she was divorcing Dick and returning to her Tennessee birthplace, the house resounded with mscheers. But Ms. Sarah Morris found herself feeling sorry for the failed husband.
It was the ghost of Miss Sarah Chapman again, trickily refusing to fade away, remembering the earnest navigator who hated to bomb civilians, who in turn remembered her as a daregale skylark scanted in a cage. Was she still one? Ms. Sarah Morris wondered. Had she only changed cages?
A week or so later, Dick Stone was on the telephone with a voice leaden enough to send whole flocks of skylarks spinning to earth in 13g dives. The Marines had awarded Charlie a Distinguished Flying Cross. They wanted to present it at a ceremony at Buchanan's headquarters. Cliff was in Morocco trying to sell Auroras to Arabs and Africans and could not make it. Would she come?
Once more evading Susan Hardy's doubts, Ms. Sarah Morris said yes. It was wonderful publicity for the company, of course. She rationalized it to herself and Susan by arguing that by helping to keep Buchanan airborne she was helping herself. She was making sure the pie would be big and juicy when she stuck it to Cliff with the Big Divorce that divided his assets in half.
It was a heartrending ceremony, which Ms. Sarah Morris survived only by letting the ghost of Miss Sarah Chapman take complete charge until it was over. The patriotic speeches, the pictures of Charlie, the whirring TV cameras and kleig lights would have been unendurable for the msshapened soul of Sarah Morris. She would have erupted into obscenities and denunciations of the war machine in the middle of it. Miss Sarah Chapman, who believed in heroes and dying for God and Country, even read one of Charlie's favorite poems, William Butler Yeats's “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death,” in which a boy in another war tried to explain why “a lonely tumult of delight” lured him into the sky's murderous embrace.
Afterward, in Dick Stone's office, Ms. Sarah had dazedly returned to her body as Frank Buchanan and others told her how much they had loved the poem. Finally she was alone with Dick, who was looking almost as ravaged as she felt. Insomnia had gouged ridges in his face. He looked like he was barely holding on.
“I'm sorry about Cassie,” Ms. Sarah said. “I'm afraid you didn't get much support from our little group of
ms
creants.”
He smiled gamely at the joke. “Maybe I didn't deserve any,” he said. “Are you going to divorce Cliff?”
“Eventually,” Ms. Sarah said and teetered on the brink of revealing the whole program. Why not let Big Cliff knowâDick would of course tell himâall about their plan to stick it to him? Instead, Miss Sarah Chapman took control again. An echoing voice whispered:
like a daregale skylark scanted in a cage
. She realized this mournful man confronting her was her only hope of happiness. He understood everything about her life, even the sad secret of never loving Cliff, of the wizzo WAAF drunk on bourbon and glory who had thrown herself into the big pilot's arms.
In the same terrible moment Ms. Sarah Morris realized she could be this man's hope as well. She saw the knowledge in his haunted eyesâheard his oblique wish in the question about divorce. They valued the same thingsâhonor and honesty and authentic feelingâthings that Cliff could never care about if he lived to be a thousand. In a way they were both victims of that voracious all-American hero-pilot-salesman-playboy-pseudo-CEO. Victims of this devouring America with its manic pursuit of money and power and weaponry unto death.