Trophy for Eagles (10 page)

The plaid shirt and black pants were long gone. Jack had set up an
appointment with Grover Loening to talk about buying an airplane, and without any embarrassment at all told Bandy, "You're going to
need some new clothes."

They were almost the same size, and Bandy had been taken by Winter's valet to a dressing room the size of his house back in Salinas. George, the genial English valet, kept calling Bandfield
"sir" as he laid out suits, shoes, sweaters, and all the accessories from
the inexhaustible closets.

George was carefully folding the clothes into a trunk when Win
ter interrupted them. He led Bandfield out the French doors of the
house and down a flagstone walk bordered by beds of roses picked
out in early-blooming alyssum and pansies, until they reached the garage, a converted carriage house that sparkled like a hospital.
They walked past the convertible Rolls, a Duesenberg, a Cadillac
phaeton that Bandy would have killed for, and a series of stiffly
formal older foreign cars. Winter was impressed that Bandy could
identify the Minerva, and promised to let him drive the Isotta-Fraschini and the Hispano-Suiza.

Bandy's voice was tinged with lust. "Do you drive all these?"

"Once in a while. Mostly I use the new Buick to go back and forth
to town. It's a darb, got a radio, you can listen to music all the way into town, can you beat that? I'm having them put in all the cars. Bruno Hafner is letting his man Murray do the work."

He stopped and rubbed his hands together. "This is what I wanted
to show you. It's my favorite. Grab that side of the cover, and lift it
off carefully, so we don't scratch the finish."

They uncovered a glittering 1926 Stutz Vertical Eight, a five-
passenger speedster that gave Bandfield an auto-erection. The bright
yellow body had horizontal stripes along the cowl that made it look
as if it were going ninety sitting still.

"It's my favorite, but I can't drive it anymore—I kept speeding in
it, and a motorcycle cop used to lay for me. You and Millie can use it while you're here. Go out on some country road and drive it fast enough to blow the carbon out of it."

The next afternoon Bandfield didn't blow much carbon out, for the twisting Long Island back roads didn't lend themselves to high
speeds. Putting along at thirty miles an hour was better suited to the
quiet contemplative mood in which Bandy and Millie found themselves. Murray had been there in the morning, and a radio was slung under the dashboard. As they idled along the roads, the trees
still in leafy prepubescent spring green, they listened to the speaker
putting out "Old Man River." When the song was over, Bandfield
snapped the radio off. He drove carefully, reining in the gutty power
of the Stutz so he could hear Millie.

"You should join the Book-of-the-Month Club. It's great—makes
you read the books everybody is talking about."

He nodded assent. Back in Salinas, people didn't talk too much about books, but he'd join anything she wanted him to, the Elks, the Masons, anything.

"Did you read
The Sun Also Rises?
Hemingway is so powerful. I'd
love to meet him. Maybe you'll meet him in Paris."

Bandy doubted it. "If—when—I get to Paris, I'd rather meet some
French flyers than some fat old American writer. And I want to go see the battlefields."

Seeing her disappointment, he countered, "I read
Beau Geste,
though. Did you? It's about the French Foreign Legion. P. C. Wren wrote it. A grand story—it would be a great movie."

Literature was important to Millie; in the past a reply like Bandy's
would have turned her away from one of her suitors in college. But
somehow this handsome aviator, rough-hewn though he was, had an appeal that extended beyond books.

"This is the farthest I've ever been from home. How about you?"

"That's the best thing about flying—always on the go."

"We go to St. Louis a lot to see my cousins and watch the Cardinals. And we went to New Orleans once."

He took the lead, and told her about San Antonio, and Mexican
food, and the chill high beauty of the Rockies. "I used to have to fly
to Albuquerque once in a while—no passengers, just some mail or
special freight. I'd fly along just above the mountaintops, and there
would be herds of antelope, bounding along the valleys. There are
pretty lakes up there, too, probably full offish. It was gorgeous. And
the Midwest is beautiful too, miles and miles of farmland."

She seemed to draw a little closer.

"It's really the only way you can see America. You know, flying is
just like a lens. It's a big telescope that you can focus on the countryside."

When she nodded, the curls bounced on her forehead. He'd never seen anything so devastating.

"You know, when you see hills on a map, it's just squiggly little
lines, and even when you see them from the ground, they're just flat
bumps on the horizon. But from the air, you see how they're laid out. You see any lakes or dams, and how the valleys run, and if there are any passes."

She said, excited, "Just imagine if they'd had a plane when people
were going west, a plane to go ahead and scout the passes."

"Yeah, and the Indians and the buffalo, too."

They were silent, happy to have found each other, unaware that each was playing the other masterfully, content to chatter and content to be still.

She liked the fact that he took her seriously, that he didn't
patronize her the way the boys back home did. She took a chance.

"Do you know why I want to fly?"

He shook his head.

"Two reasons: fairy tales and Jules Verne."

"Jules Verne?"

"You know,
Around the World in Eighty Days,
the one about the
balloon flight. Every time I read it, I wanted to fly, to get away from
Green Bay, and just see the world."

He liked talking to her better than to anyone, better than to Lindbergh, better than to Hadley. And unlike most smart people he'd met, she listened well, asking intelligent questions.

"I love listening to you. You always know what to say, and I don't
have to pry things out of you."

"Like you have to pry the abalone out of their shells?"

She meant it only as a wry comment, but it was wildly funny to
him. He liked her sense of humor, brisk and allusive, even if he had
to listen closely to tell when she was kidding and when she wasn't.

"You must be a good teacher. Do you like it?"

"I like it, but it's not enough. It won't take me anywhere. I'm dying to see the mountains the way you've seen them, to fly the oceans. Life is so short, and there's so much to do."

He squeezed her hand.

"Anyway, teachers are so underpaid, it makes me mad. Half the women who teach with me are dried-up little Min Gumps who never had a boyfriend, never had a vacation, never laugh. I'm not going to wind up like that."

He shrugged and laughed. "You don't think there's any money in flying, do you?"

"No, but there's a thrill in it. I don't care if it pays anything, just
enough to live on, but I want to get on that old magic carpet and fly
everywhere. That's why people love movies. They take them every
where, even if they know it's just an illusion. Besides, as soon as I
stop getting sick, I know I'm going to enjoy it, and I'll do the flying
myself. I want to go solo, to fly along the beach, just above the waves, to fly through the clouds."

"That can be dangerous—you don't know which way is up in the clouds."

"Good! That's what I want to get away from, a world where
everybody knows what's up and down, good and bad. I want to get
into the air where there's only me and God and the wind."

He agreed fervently. He would have agreed with her if she'd just
recited the alphabet.

"Besides, if I stay a teacher, I'll work for some smelly potbellied
old principal till I die a dried-up virgin in Green Bay."

The word
virgin
was hot stuff, the first overtly sexual signal she
had sent. He tried to think of some clever way to capitalize on the opening.

She was quiet for a moment, and then said with a diamond
intensity, "I'll make Uncle Jack proud of me." She waited half a beat
and whispered, "I'll make you proud of me."

With a muted roar, the Stutz's ninety-two-horsepower Vertical
Eight engine carried them from Hempstead to Hampton Bays, then
over to Orient Point, where they parked the car on the beach to picnic out of the hamper the valet had provided.

Bandfield was amazed at her appetite. She matched him sand
wich for sandwich, pickle for pickle, cup for cup of milk. They sat
holding hands at the end of a derelict pier, feeding gulls that curled
in a tight clockwise traffic pattern around them. Bandy tried to stall
the gulls out, tossing pressed chunks of bread in high arcs that had them skidding in, wings flapping, calling in exasperation.

They drifted back to where he'd spread a lap robe on the sand. She sat primly in her lacy white dress, legs daintily crossed. He
stretched on his side, occasionally glancing down to admire his new
clothes, the first plus fours he'd ever worn, but most often staring up
at her.

Across the road was a tumbledown building, an abandoned tool-
shed. Someone had written in broad red brushstrokes the word "Repent," as if to forestall the lovers naturally seeking the beach.

He pointed and said, "We don't have anything to repent—yet," trying to steer conversation back to the subject of virginity.

"Probably a Baptist out here, worrying about people necking on the beach."

"What religion are you?"

"Episcopalian."

Feeling too good, he got too smart. "Isn't an Episcopalian just sort of a cut-rate Catholic?"

She stiffened and drew back. "What kind of a crack is that? What
religion are you? Or are you an atheist?"

He felt all the progress he'd made sliding away. "I'm sorry, I was
just kidding, no offense. No, I'm not an atheist, but we didn't get any formal religious training. My dad was against it, and I don't think my mom cared."

She smiled, no longer angry. "What would a cake-eater like you know about religion anyway? You're just like the college girl who was an artist, but would never draw the line."

Corny jokes were more his style, and he countered with doggerel
he remembered from Cal:

"And you're like the girl in the poem that goes 'She doesn't drink,
she doesn't pet, she hasn't been to college yet.' "

She groaned, and he felt as if he'd lost ground again. In many
ways, it wasn't fair; she was far better read than he and interested in
many more subjects. He realized how narrow his life had become,
how totally involved in flying and engineering he was. He tried
desperately to recover.

"It was wonderful the other night at the Waldorf, wasn't it? I still feel a little bad about Slim and his mother—we managed to ignore
them all night."

"They understood. He and Uncle Jack were busy drawing air
planes all over the napkins; I thought the waiter was going to make
them pay extra."

They were still for a moment, and then she leaned over him, took his face in her hands, and said, "Bandy, you are being a gentleman,
but I can't stand that sad look any longer."

Her lips were soft and full, and he pulled her over him so that she
lay across his chest, her heavy breasts pressing into him. They kissed
for long minutes, and he felt their passion growing when she rolled
away.

"Whew, hot stuff, eh? We'd better get started back."

Flustered, he helped her fold the blanket. "I'm sorry if I was too
forward, Millie."

"You? It was me. I kissed you. But we've got to be careful. I think
we like each other enough to get into trouble if we don't watch out. A little more of that and I'd have you out of Uncle Jack's knickers and into mine."

He reached for her, and she laughed, pushing him away. "We've
hardly met, and I've been brought up with some pretty conventional
ideas about sex."

He was content to have been so close so soon. Her exquisite naturalness pleased and excited him, making him feel that he was something special to her. On the way out, they had stopped at a two-pump Sinclair station to find a bathroom for her. Returning, there were no gas stations, no restaurants, and she made him stop the car and bounded into the shrubbery, yelling, "No peeking!" Later he slid his arm around her shoulders. She fed him the line "Don't you think you'd better use two hands?" and he responded, as they both knew he would, with "No, I've got to use one to drive."