Taking Off (16 page)

PANMUPHLE

Monsieur le Docteur Faustroll in the registry of the Qth or 15th District, Paris.

*   *   *

MY TRANSLATION wasn't all that it might have been. I recognized that. It ran like an engine with dirty plugs, sputtering and stuttering until at last it coughed and died. An engine like that was not fit to pull a plane from Babbington to New Mexico, and a translation like that wasn't going to be enough to endear a matriculating youngster to the faculty of the Faustroll Institute, if such an organization actually existed or could be found, nor was it likely to gain him entry into the prestigious ranks of Advanced French and the racy stuff its privileged students were rumored to read. I decided to sleep on it, give myself a day or so away from it, and then dismantle it and tune it up.

Chapter 33

Elements of Aeronautics

THE ADVENTURES & OPINIONS OF DOCTOR FAUSTROLL
was not the only text that I studied in preparation for my journey to New Mexico and matriculation at the Faustroll Institute. I had on my own bookshelf, in my bedroom, a text that not only played a part in inspiring me to fly but taught me nearly everything I knew of the art. Years earlier, Dudley Beaker, who lived in a stucco residence or domicile on No Bridge Road beside the stucco dwelling or abode wherein resided my maternal grandparents, Herb and Lorna Piper, had given me a copy of
Elements of Aeronautics
by Francis Pope, B.A., First Lieutenant, United States Army Air Corps Reserve, and Captain (First Pilot) with Transcontinental and Western Air, Inc., and Arthur S. Otis, Ph.D., Private Pilot, Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and Technical Member of the Institute of the Aeronautical Sciences.

“Study it, Peter,” he said. “Study it carefully. I think that the time is coming when air travel will become commonplace, and there will be opportunities for the young man with a prepared mind. I must confess my fear that much of the glamour of the experience of air travel will doubtless be lost when it is available to the great unwashed, but I also realize that its vulgarization will bring opportunities. If you are going to be prepared to seize those opportunities, you ought to have some idea why an airplane is capable of flight.”

“And how,” I said.

“What?”

“How.”

“What?” he asked again, with evident irritation.

“How,” I said. “I ought to know
how
it is capable of flight, too. How it flies. How it works. What makes it able to fly.”

“Yes,” he conceded, “I suppose you should.”

Elements of Aeronautics
and I were nearly the same age; the book had been published just three years before I was born. This fact struck me when I opened it and began reading it, at the very beginning, in the way that had already become my habit and has never left me. I begin with all the “front matter” that most people skip, so I've been told, often by the very people who do the skipping. There, on the copyright page, was the copyright date, and it put me in mind of my birth date, and the two made me realize in a boy's way that a book cannot do what a boy can: grow and change. In books, as Mrs. Fendreffer so often said, we can find the wisdom of the past, but she did not say that yesterday's wisdom is very often today's nonsense and that books as often turn the foolishness of the past—our myths and bigotries and superstitions—into holy writ, immutable in a changing world.

In a sense,
Elements of Aeronautics
was out-of-date, and my first glance through it showed me that the drawings were done in a style that was almost quaint, not at all the style that a contemporary publication, a new book, would have used. The article about the aerocycle from
Impractical Craftsman
was even older. It had appeared ten years before
Elements of Aeronautics
had, thirteen years before I had. In a way, I felt like the youngest of three brothers. The oldest of us was twenty-eight, a man, seriously pursuing a career in a local bank now and thinking of marriage. His early dreams of teenage aviation, inspired by that issue of
Impractical Craftsman
when it was new and didn't smell at all of mold, had never been anything more than daydreams, daydreams that he never entertained any longer, not even when a little plane came buzzing slowly overhead in the clear sky of a summer day. The middle brother was eighteen, out of school, working the bay. He had no plans for the future at all; he just worked the bay from day to day and chased the girls at night. Life was easy and simple. Why should he complicate it by attempting to learn to fly? The idea had once inspired him, made his heart seem to lift and soar, when he watched small planes taking off from the runway at the Babbington Municipal Airport, but when he had bought and tried to study
Elements of Aeronautics,
he had stumbled when he had reached Part II: Aerodynamics, and he had put the book aside, never to be taken up again. I was the little brother, only fifteen, fascinated by my older brothers and all the things that had once fascinated them, and eager to make a place for myself, a name for myself, in the trio. So I took up the daydream of the aerocycle and the old issue of
Impractical Craftsman
and the abandoned copy of
Elements of Aeronautics,
and claimed them as my own. The essential principles of aeronautics had not changed in the eighteen years since the book had been published, and motorcycles hadn't changed much since the article had been published, so their age was not a disqualification; rather, it became a recommendation, like the additional years of experience that lend weight to the pronouncements of older brothers. But, as I said above, the ossified wisdom of an earlier time, codified as writ, can bring trouble to the modern age, to modern youth.

The frontispiece to
Elements of Aeronautics
made me feel important. I memorized it. Phrases from it began to appear in my everyday conversation.

If taking my place in a nation on wings, as the frontispiece assured me I would do, made me feel important, the book's explanation of yaw, “sometimes spoken of technically as rotation about the normal axis,” pitch, “sometimes spoken of technically as rotation about the lateral axis,” and roll, “technically spoken of as rotation about the longitudinal axis,” made me feel queasy. For each of them, I imagined myself astride the aerocycle, executing a maneuver that took each type of rotation to its exaggerated maximum: a circle, a loop, and a spin. Mentally reeling, I set the book aside. However, I knew that, unlike my imaginary older brothers, I would take it up again. I just needed enough time away from it to recover my equilibrium. Inevitably, I suppose, despite the dizziness they induced, the terms began to work their way into my vocabulary. When I rode my bicycle, I would yaw left or right instead of turning, pitch up or down a hill or bump, and now and then roll a bit from the vertical, sometimes spoken of technically as going off-kilter.

The frontispiece to
Elements of Aeronautics
made me feel important.

Chapter 34

Albertine Takes a Tumble

“THE CONFINES OF THE AVERAGE GARAGE,” I said to Albertine.

“Ahhh, darling,” she said with a sigh, “you know how I love that sweet talk.”

“The confines of the average garage,” I repeated seductively.

“Mmm,” she moaned with pleasure.

“Those confines come up again and again in the descriptions of these build-it-yourself planes.”

“All the romance has gone from garages, I see,” she said, pouting.

“The people selling the kits or plans are always reassuring the prospective builder that the plane can be built ‘within the confines of the average garage.'”

“And you suspect them of stretching the truth? Or shrinking the truth?”

“It's not that. It's the word that surprises me.”

“
Garage?
”

“No.
Confines.
”

“I prefer
garage.
If you say it right, it sounds like a term of endearment. ‘Oh, how I lahhhve you, my leettle garrr-azzzh.'”

We were having this conversation on the roadway that winds through Central Park, on a Sunday afternoon. The road is closed on weekends to vehicular traffic but available to runners, walkers, skaters, dogboarders, and bicycle riders. We were on our bicycles. It was a fine day in late fall, the air cool, the sun low but warming, our spirits light.

“It surprises me that they don't just say, ‘You can build it in a garage.'”

“Well, Peter, I think they want to make the point that you can build it in the space that would be available in your garage if you have a garage, but that you don't actually have to have a garage.”

“Yes, but—”

“Not everyone has a garage. We don't.”

“We have no car.”

“Exactly. Therefore, no need for a garage. So the people selling the kits or plans may be trying to reassure the prospective builder that a garage is not actually required, just the space that your garage would contain if you had one.”

“The space contained by the average garage would easily fit within the confines of our apartment,” I pointed out.

She turned to deliver a rejoinder, and I saw the accident occur, the absurd events preceding it, the awful instant of coincidence, and the consequence.

To Albertine's right, a woman was dogboarding, and to her left, another woman was dogboarding. In the space of the five years that Albertine and I had been living in Manhattan, the sport of dogboarding had come from nowhere to attain a status of considerable popularity. I have heard people attempt to explain its sudden rise with the theory that it suited the predilections of many because it was an outdoor activity in which the dog did the work rather than the master, that it required gear expensive enough to give it consumer snob appeal (particularly if you counted the dog), and that it offered a physical and sensual experience that other urban sports did not, combining as it did elements of wake riding, skateboarding, and snowboarding. In addition, though, I think we should not discount the powerful appeal of its giving residents of the Upper East Side something they seem to have craved for a long time: a
reason
for housing a large dog in the confines of a small apartment.

The dogboarder's dog is outfitted with a harness similar in cut to the coats that pampered pets wear in cold weather. It fits over the dog's chest and around its forelegs and back, with reins extending rearward from the sides. Behind the dog, the boarder stands on a platform that resembles a skateboard, with the difference that instead of skate wheels the dogboard has two large wheels, miniatures of the high-tech wheels with composite rims that are used in bicycle racing, one fore and one aft, of a diameter great enough that they rise above the surface of the board, set within slots in the board and turning on axles that run through mounts below it.

I remember wondering, when I glanced at the enormous and powerful dog pulling the woman on Albertine's right, whether it had been bred expressly for dogboarding. The dog pulling the woman on Albertine's left was smaller, but not by much, and it was especially keen. It strained in its harness in a way that the larger dog did not, lunging forward whenever the other moved a bit ahead. I wondered, and I intended to discuss this with Albertine later, after they had passed by, whether the women were longtime rivals, competitors in business and within their social set and now in the dogboarding arena of Central Park. In the manner of superheroes, both were dressed in sleek, formfitting, iridescent outfits that advertised their fitness and firmness and enhanced the resplendence of their bodies in action. They were running a playful game, crisscrossing, playing their dogs as charioteers would their steeds, tugging lightly at their harnesses to yaw the dogs this way and that. Though neither allowed the other to remain ahead, the race they were running was not a race for position but for prominence in the eye of the beholder, status as the most adept and alluring dogboarder in the city. Their rivalry had infected their dogs; they snarled at each other across the couple of feet that separated them. Later, I told myself that I should have realized that the women and their dogs posed a threat to Albertine, but they were so fluent in their movements, the dogs so good at what they were doing and the women apparently so fully in control of their dogs, that they seemed to be harmless, until the moment when Albertine turned her head, just for an instant, to reply to me, and in that moment the smaller of the dogs did something to offend the larger. What? Nothing that I can see in my mind's eye when I recall the moment. It may have been a look; it may have been something in his tone of voice, a vulgarity in his snarl; it may have been some grosser violation of the code of dogs; it may only have been that he strayed a bit from what the larger dog perceived as the proper confines of his lane. Whatever it was, it made the dog on the right respond suddenly and violently. He lunged at the dog on the left, to nip at his foreleg, I think, as a warning against persisting in that offensive behavior.