Authors: Thomas Fleming

Conquerors of the Sky (8 page)

BOOK: Conquerors of the Sky

9.61Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub

ads

A week after he brought Amanda Cadwallader to dinner, Adrian Van Ness visited his mother's Beacon Hill town house for tea. She was wearing the pearl choker that Geoffrey Tillotson had given her for her fortieth birthday. The Tiffany lamp beside the tea table cast a golden glow on the silvery jewels.

“Your little girl from the golden West is charming,” Clarissa said. “So unspoiled. It's hard to believe they even have schools out there.”

“I think I'm in love with her,” Adrian said.

“Darling, never confuse love and sympathy. You feel sorry for someone who's such a lost lamb. Can you imagine her as hostess at a New York dinner party?”

“She's very intelligent. She has excellent taste in poetry.”

“You mean she likes yours.”

Clarissa Ames Van Ness smiled mockingly at Adrian. She was so sure of her
social and intellectual superiority, so certain of her ability to control her son. It was exactly what Adrian needed to convince him he was in love with Amanda Cadwallader.

Physically, Amanda was the total opposite of Adrian's dark, elegant mother. Amanda's face was long and angular, more sensitive than beautiful. Her slim body was almost boyish. Her streaming auburn hair proclaimed both her femininity and her western innocence. All of which made her attractive to Adrian.

Beneath his hyperactive intellect, Adrian was searching for a woman who would help him escape his mother's looming presence. He was emotionally exhausted by their alternating bouts of affection and anger. He did not, he could not, stop loving Clarissa Van Ness. But he could not resolve her apparent indifference to his father's fate.

Defying and irritating his motherâand enjoying every minute of itâAdrian continued to see Amanda. He struggled to change her mind about the war in Europe. But her California naivete was impenetrable. She simply insisted America had everything to lose and nothing to gain by entering the war. Her knowledge of European history was zero, her interest in it zero minus. She did not really argue. She believed. Adrian told himself it was part of her innocence. He even began to doubt his own arguments in favor of intervention.

They did not spend all their time arguing about peace and war. At the movies, Adrian teased Amanda about her resemblance to Mary Pickford, whose beatific smile and cascades of auburn ringlets had made her America's sweetheart. Amanda disarmed him by taking his hand and whispering. “I only want to be your sweetheart.”

As spring advanced, they went for walks in the country and rows on the Charles River. Amanda was a fervent believer in exercise in the open air. On one of these excursions on the water, Amanda revealed more than an enthusiasm for California's scenery behind her smile. Adrian grew weary at the oars and suggested they tie up at a grassy spot on the river above Watertown. They ate sandwiches Amanda had packed and washed them down with iced tea. The rich May sunshine inspired Amanda to rhapsodies on California. In a month they would separate for the summer.

“Will you miss me?” Amanda asked.

“Yes,” Adrian said.

“A part of you likes meâand a part doesn't.”

“That's not so,” Adrian said, vehemently trying to conceal the truth from herâand from himself. His mother's critique of Amanda often troubled him.

Amanda flung herself into his arms. Her kiss was wilder, more intense, than anything Adrian had ever imagined. He was still a virgin. In his head women were divided into good and bad. Some of his fellow freshmen were already sampling what the bad ones had to offer in Boston's Scollay Square brothels. But Adrian had remained aloof from this ritual as well as the other forms of college friendship.

“There's nothing to be ashamed of,” Amanda whispered. “Come to California and I'll show you there's nothing to be ashamed of.”

Dimly aware that he was being invited to play Adam to Amanda's Eve, Adrian spent the summer in Maine resisting a procession of young women Clarissa considered more suitable than his California temptress. To his mother's almost visible distress, the romance resumed when school reopened in the fall of 1916. Not even Amanda's enthusiastic support of Woodrow Wilson's campaign for a second term on the slogan “He kept us out of war” diminished Adrian's ardor. There were more kisses on the Charles and more dinners on Beacon Hill at which Amanda jousted with Clarissa with growing skill.

Amanda reiterated her invitation to California, which acquired orgiastic overtones in Adrian's mind. For a while he almost lost interest in the war in Europe. Then the Germans began proving all the nasty things interventionists like Adrian said about them, sinking American ships and trying to turn Mexico into a hostile foe on America's flank. Woodrow Wilson's balancing act on the neutrality tightrope ended with a crash and America declared war. Adrian wondered if this spelled finis to his romance with Amanda.

He was surprisedâand pleasedâto discover a warrior maiden on their next date. Like many other pacifists, she had been swept away by the president's soaring call for America to wage a war without hatred or greed, to make the world safe for democracy. Her father had volunteered for the army the day he read Wilson's speech in the
Los Angeles Times.

On a Saturday night two months later, Adrian was lounging in his room, enjoying the prospect of taking Amanda to dinner in Boston. One of his floor mates said: “Van Ness. There's a red-haired creature outside weeping and wailing to see you.”

Behind Amanda in Harvard Yard a battalion of seniors was practicing the manual of arms with wooden rifles. Like most of America, the school was feverishly committed to the war. Tears streamed down Amanda's face. She clutched a telegram in her hand. FATHER KILLED TRAINING ACCIDENT STOP. RETURN HOME AT ONCE STOP. MOTHER VERY ILL.

Her tears stirred the guilt Adrian had felt the day they met, when he had mocked her pacifism. He was swept with a masculine desire to comfort this fragile, wounded creature. “Darling, it's terrible. My heart breaks for you. But you have me. You have me to take care of you. I love you,” he said.

Adrian took Amanda back to Wellesley where sobbing friends helped her pack. He hired a taxi that took them to Boston where Amanda boarded a train in North Station for her return to California. He wiped away her tears and kissed her. “I'll see you in a month. Two at the most.”

Adrian rushed to his mother's house on Beacon Hill and announced his plan to move to California, marry Amanda Cadwallader and complete his education in some local college at night. “That is an absolutely absurd idea,” Clarissa said.

Before Adrian could begin to think of an answer, Clarissa outlined her plan for Adrian's life. “I want you to become a man of substance, Adrian. You can't do that growing oranges in southern California. You also can't do it with a woman like Amanda for your wife. A man of substance needs a wife who glories in his success as her success, who understands his ambition and defers to it.”

Defer? Adrian raged behind his impassive expression. Is that what you did to my father? Is that what you call it?

“Your little California friend will never defer because she doesn't understand. She doesn't have a worldly mind, Adrian. I daresay no one in southern California does. One acquires worldliness painfully, through disappointment, yes, through pain. Through an awareness that there are winters as well as summers in every life, cold and snow and icy rain as well as sunshine.”

“She knows pain now,” Adrian said. “We both know it. We know what it means to lose a father.”

Adrian's reply suggested more than the loss inflicted by death. It evoked the several ways he had lost Robert Van Ness. The implied accusation aroused his mother to fury. “Go to California if you want to. But you'll go without a cent of my money.”

Adrian was stunned. For some reasonâperhaps the unstinting way his mother had always given him moneyâit never occurred to him that she would invoke this ultimate weapon. He stalked out of the house and spent the next month in an agony of indecision. A letter from Amanda reported nothing but chaos and despair at Casa Felicidad. Her mother was having a nervous breakdown. Her overbearing older brother had taken charge of the orange groves and the household. She begged Adrian to join her as soon as possible.

Adrian spent a week composing a reply.

Dearest One:

Your letter tore at my heart. I wish I could rush to your side. But my mother is absolutely opposed to our marriage and has vowed to disinherit me if we go through with it. This leaves me in an impossible position. I can only see one solution: to submit and get my degree so that I can make my way in the worldâwhich will, I hope, lead me with all possible speed to your side. Until that day, you have my undying love. Tell me I have yours.

Adrian showed the letter to his mother before he mailed it. It was a gesture of defiance but Clarissa chose to ignore it. She put her hands on Adrian's shoulders. “That is a manly letter. And a wise one,” she said. “But I hope you don't mean that last sentence about undying love.”

“I do.”

With a stifled cry she threw her arms around him. Adrian remained rigid, his arms at his side, refusing to return the embrace.

Clarissa kissed him on the forehead and let him go. Adrian retreated to the bathroom and wiped off the kiss with a cold washcloth. He knew it was an infantile gesture. But it had symbolic power.

Idealism thundered in Adrian's soul. He was too young to fight to make the world safe for democracy. But he could and would make love and honor his guiding principles. He would marry Amanda Cadwallader and teach her to be the wife of a man of substance. He would acquire enough of that substance to defy Clarissa Ames Van Ness forever.

THE LAST PATROL

From ten thousand feet in the cloudless blue sky of November 1918, the Argonne battlefield was a crazy quilt of green fields and toy farmhouses and the dun gouged earth of no-man's-land. Beside Lieutenant Frank Buchanan flew his wingmate and best friend, Captain Buzz McCall, who had painted death's heads inside the red, white, and blue circles on his wings. They had transferred from the Lafayette Escadrille to the American Air Service when the United States entered the war in 1917.

Around them droned a half-dozen other planes in loose formation. They were finally flying swift stubby-winged French Spads, a plane that could outspeed and outdive the German Fokkers. For months they had been forced to fly Nieuport 28s, a tricky unforgiving plane that had killed more American pilots in training than the Germans had killed in combat. It stalled without warning and the wings had a tendency to fail in a roll or dive.

There were no American-designed planes on the western front. The inventors of the twentieth century's miracle machine had barely advanced beyond the clumsy craft the Wright Brothers flew at Kitty Hawk, while the British, the French, the Germans, the Italians, all had fighter planes that could fly over a hundred miles an hour.

A burst of machine-gun fire on his left broke through Frank's gloomy meditation. It was Buzz McCall, telling him to wake him up. Buzz was squinting above and behind them. At first Frank could see nothing. The trick was not to focus your eyes but to let them roam the empty sky. It was one of the first things a pilot learned on the western front. A cluster of specks rapidly grew and acquired color: at least a dozen Fokker Dr 1 triplanes with black crosses on their green wings.

Down they came out of the sun, hoping for surprise. In their eagerness they forgot that their three winged planes, having very little weight and a lot of drag, dove slowly. They were violating one of the modern world's fundamental laws, the machine must be obeyed before it will obey. The Americans had time to react.

Frank pulled back on the stick and shoved his right foot down on the rudder pedal. Up, up he soared into a loop. Just over the vertical he cut his engine and pulled the stick back sharply. There he was, slightly dazed by the gravity pounding his chest, behind the lead Fokker as the German came out of his dive. Frank's Vickers .303 machine guns hammered and two streams of tracers tore into the German's cockpit. The Fokker went into a writhing spin, an unmistakable death throe.

His fifth kill. He was an ace. He could hardly compare himself to Buzz McCall or Eddie Rickenbacker, who had five times that many victories. Moreover,
he might soon be a dead ace if he did not do something about another Fokker on his tail. Red tracer bullets whizzed between his wings, snapping struts as Frank took violent evasive action, essing left and right, his brain turning to terrified mush.

Behind him the German abruptly spun out of control, smoke gushing from his engine. Buzz McCall hung on his tail, pouring extra bullets into him to make sure he was not faking. It was the tenth or eleventh time Buzz had saved Frank's life.

Around them the sky was crisscrossed by diving, rolling, spinning Fokkers and Spads. Buzz pointed below them, where two Fokkers were about to give a floundering American the coup de grace. Down they roared to pull out on the Germans' tails. Frank had a perfect shot at the Fokker on the right. He pressed the trigger. Nothing. Cursing, he grabbed a small hammer he wore around his wrist and whacked at one of the Vickers' outside levers, just in front of his windshield. The guns stayed jammed.

Buzz's first burst, short and deadly as always, set the other German on fire. He spun away, gushing smoke and flames. But Frank's German methodically blasted a stream of lead into the American's cockpit. Frank saw the pilot, a boyish Iowan named Waller on his first mission, shudder in agony. He shoved his Spad into a dive. The German, smelling blood, followed him. A thousand feet down Waller pulled out and tried to roll to the right. The German anticipated the move and caught him with another burst, riddling the cockpit. Waller spun in, exploded and burned.

A second later the Fokker pulled up into a twisting loop called an immelman, after the German pilot who invented it. He came down on Frank's tail. It was a maneuver the lightweight triplane was designed to perform. But Buzz McCall was waiting for him down below. He rolled over and fired a burst into the Fokker's belly while flying upside down. The German, probably wounded, banked away and fled for home.

Frank flew in a daze, not quite sure he was alive. Six American planes were still in the sky. They had lost two of their green pilots. At least half the replacements failed to survive their first mission. Hardly surprising, when the average life of all the pilots on the western front was six weeks. Below them were four, five, burning wrecks. His stomach churning, Frank dove with the survivors to waggle his wings above the fallen. In his head he heard his mother's voice hissing:
death machine.

On the ground, Buzz threw his arm around him. “Good shootin' up there, Wingman,” he said. “Too bad your lousy limey guns jammed and we couldn't save Waller.”

“We're sending those kids up without enough training. It's murder, Buzz!”

“What's this, what happened?”

It was their squadron commander, a lean West Pointer named Kinkaid. With him was a handsome soldier in gleaming black riding boots and a broad-brimmed campaign hat tipped at a cocky angle. He had a brigadier general's
star on his collar. Behind him trailed a photographer and several reporters.

“We ran into the flying circus and whipped their asses, Colonel,” Buzz said. “I got two of them, Frank here got one. We lost two of the new guysâWaller and Kane.”

“Two more kills,” said the brigadier. “That means you're only three behind Rickenbacker. I'm Billy Mitchell. I came down to pin a medal on you, Captain.”

Buzz remembered he was in the army and saluted the most popular general in the American Air Service. “Pleased to meet you, sir. This is Lieutenant Frank Buchanan. He got his fifth today. A real beauty.”

Buzz described the way they had attacked the Germans as they came out of their dive. “That's the kind of aggressive tactics I want up there. That's the American style,” Mitchell said.

They adjourned to the officers' mess, where champagne bottles popped and glasses were raised in a silent toast to the dead, then flung into the fireplace. Outside, the ground crews and pilots lined up in a semblance of military formation and Mitchell pinned a Distinguished Service Cross on Buzz McCall.

He added to the commendation a speech full of fiery prophecy. Fliers like Buzz McCall were demonstrating what Americans could do in the air against German veterans. “If this war lasts another six months, we'll wipe the Germans out of the sky. Then we'll show General Pershing and that circle of dunderheads he's got around him what air power can do for their infantry.”

Flashbulbs popped, the reporters took notes. General Mitchell was already semi-famous for his running battle with Pershing's staff, who scoffed at the importance of air power. Mitchell told them he was assembling a force of de Havilland bombers that would demolish enemy airfields and supply dumps and arms factories if the Germans rejected the Allies' armistice terms and kept fighting.

Two hours later, led by General Mitchell driving a black sedan at ninety miles an hour, the squadron headed for the nearby city of Toul to celebrate Buzz's medal. They started with dinner at the Three Hussars, the best restaurant in town. Fueled by more champagne, Mitchell talked about air power in future wars with visionary fervor. The plane would soon make the infantry and the warship superfluous.

“The bombers of tomorrow will make this war's attacks on London and Paris look like acts of tender mercy,” roared the general. “They'll be no need to send millions of men to die in the trenches. The war will be over the moment one side achieves air superiority.”

“Let's drink to that!” Buzz shouted. “Air superiority!”

Frank Buchanan lurched to his feet with the rest of his by now ossified squadron mates. “General,” he said. “I hope you're not saying Americansâwould bomb citiesâkill women and childrenâthe way the Germansâ”

“The British are doing it right now in the Rhineland,” Mitchell roared. “They dropped some bombs in a fucking schoolyard last week and killed about
sixty
kinder
. Those things'll happen till we get better bombsights. Thenâ
plunk
âwe'll be able to put a thousand-pounder down a goddamn factory chimney!”

After dinner, the squadron and General Mitchell adjourned next door to Madame Undine's, the best brothel in the city. It was stocked with enough champagne to drown an infantry division and enough mademoiselles from Armentieres and elsewhere to make Valhalla look like a Methodist camp meeting.

At midnight Frank found himself in bed with two dimpled whores named Cheri and Marguerite. They were sisters. Marguerite was going around the world, licking him from the back of his neck to the soles of his feet, while Cheri was rolling her tongue around and around his aching joystick. He was Craig again, happy, proud, indifferent to death. He passed out as he came in Cheri's mouth.

The party raged around him and in the blank darkness Frank dreamt of a plane with a fuselage as round and smooth as a gun barrel, a plane that swallowed its wheels after takeoff and had only one wing, unsupported by struts. He leaped out of bed and stumbled over male and female bodies in various stages of undress to find a pen and paper and sketch it.

His mother hissed
death machine
but he defied her. This was a creature of speed and beauty, as vibrant with life as the Elgin marbles he had seen in the British Museum. It would make American pilots supreme in the air. That meant peace, not war.

“What the hell is that?”

It was Buzz McCall, glowering over his shoulder at the sketch.

“A plane we ought to build.”

“You'd never get me to fly a fucking monoplane.”

Louis Bleriot had flown the English Channel in a monoplane. But he soon gave the design a bad name because his wings frequently fell off. Frank began explaining that the problem was not the single wing but its shape and its position on Bleriot's monoplanes.

“Let's go,” Buzz said. “We've got the dawn patrol.”

In a flash, as if the champagne fumes in his head had exploded, Frank was back in the dogfight. The motors roared, the machine guns chattered, the planes blazed and spun down to doom.

He could not go up again. He was not Craig, he was Frank, the younger brother with these beautiful creatures of the sky in his head. He had no confidence in either his luck or his skill as a pursuit pilot.

“I can't do it, Buzz. I don't want to die until I see this planeâother planesâin the airâ”

“What the fuck is this?”

Buzz stepped back as if he wanted to get a better look at his contemptible wingman. “Why should I die?” he mocked. “Do you think you're better than the rest of us, because you can draw pretty paper airplanes?”

Yes,
Frank wanted to shout. He wanted to denounce everything, the war, the drunken parties at Madame Undine's, the dying. The endless dying. Before
he could speak, Buzz hit him with a right cross that sent him hurtling across the room to crash into the opposite wall.

The next thing Frank knew he was on the floor and Buzz was shoving a foot his chest. “Are you comin'?”

Frank lurched to his feet. He was a head taller than Buzz but there was no thought of hitting him back. Buzz was Craig, curing another outbreak of momma's boyitis. “I'm sorry,” he said.

“Nobody's gonna shoot you down as long as I'm up there with you,” Buzz said. “We went into this fuckin' war together and we're comin' out together.”

Buzz rounded up the rest of the patrol and they wobbled into the semi-dark street. Toward them panted Madame Undine, the fat blond-ringleted mistress of their revels. Her eyes bulged, tears streaked the layer of powder on her dumpling face.
“C'est fini!”
she cried.
“La guerre, c'est fini!”

Frank threw his arms around Madame Undine and gave her a kiss. He was going to live. He was going to build the beautiful planes that flew in his head.

“Son of a bitch!” Buzz said. Peace meant he would never pass Eddie Rickenbacker and become the top American ace.

Behind him, General Mitchell looked even more disappointed. “What the hell am I going to do with all those beautiful bombers?” he said.

BOOK: Conquerors of the Sky

9.61Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub

Read Book Download Book

ads