Betty Cavanna Read online

  “Sure.” Rette went out to the kitchen, tore off a section of paper towel from the wall rack, and started to grease the tins. “I bought Tony a birthday present today,” she said after a few minutes. “A book.”

  “A book?”

  Rette nodded and answered her mother’s unspoken question. “It’s called Wind, Sand and Stars, and it’s about flying. A girl at the book shop recommended it. I hope it will be all right.”

  “Hope what will be all right?” A chunky, brown-haired man with a boyish sprinkling of freckles across his straight nose stood in the kitchen doorway.

  “Rette,” and Mrs. Larkin to her husband, “was just talking about a birthday present she bought for Tony.”

  Jim Larkin snapped his fingers. “Tomorrow, isn’t it? I almost forgot.”

  “The night before Valentine’s Day,” murmured Rette’s mother, her eyes soft. She spooned the dough into the muffin tins. “Twenty-three years—”

  “What did you get for Tony, Rette?” Mr. Larkin was saying.

  “A book,” Loretta repeated. “Wind, Sand and Stars.”

  “Oh, yes!”

  Obviously her father had heard of it. Rette felt reassured.

  But later that evening when she took the book from its brown paper bag and carefully untied the ribbon that bound the gift wrapping, when she settled down in bed and started to turn its pages, doubt assailed her again.

  It was a strange book, and it seemed to Rette to be not so much about flying as it was about a man’s thoughts. Even in translation from the French, the language had a beauty and a flow that made her keep on reading, once she had started a passage. But frequently the philosophy was beyond her, and the elements about which the pilot-author was writing were entirely strange to her world.

  Yet every now and again she came across a paragraph that she felt must touch closely the way Tony felt about the air.

  “Flying,” she read, “is a man’s job and its worries are a man’s worries. A pilot’s business is with the wind, with the stars, with night, with sand, with the sea. He strives to outwit the forces of nature. He stares in expectancy for the coming of dawn the way a gardener awaits the coming of spring. He looks forward to port as to a promised land, and truth for him is what lives in the stars.”{1}

  “Flying is a man’s job,” Rette read again, and lay back on the pillow. When she read sentences like this she wished, almost desperately, that she had been born a boy. It seemed to her that a man’s life was so much more direct than a woman’s. You simply chose a goal and worked toward it, and there with nothing, given youth and strength, that couldn’t be achieved. You didn’t have to be glamorous or charming or even particularly attractive. You weren’t caught in a web of artificialities, like a girl.

  “Rette, better put your light out. Tomorrow’s a school day.”

  How many times had her mother said these same words, Rette wondered, as she called back, “All right.” She slipped the book into a drawer of her dresser and clicked off the switch of the bedside lamp. Crawling back under the blankets, she lay flat on her stomach and thought, Well, I’m not a boy, so there’s no use wishing. Then she promptly went to sleep.

  She didn’t waken when Tony came in, nor did she hear her alarm the next morning. Still deep in dreams when her mother touched her shoulder, Rette jerked back to consciousness abruptly.

  “Better get up right away, dear. We all overslept.” Even as she spoke, Mrs. Larkin turned to start downstairs.

  Rette dressed automatically, with a vague feeling of alarm at the pit of her stomach that might have been caused by being startled out of sleep but that was, in more likelihood, rooted in the inescapability of a math quiz, scheduled for third-period class.

  “I detest math with a vengeance,” she told her assembled family at the breakfast table, but she wasn’t surprised that nobody seemed disturbed.

  Tony, bound for the 8:18 train to the city, was eating with one eye on the clock. Mr. Larkin was absorbed in the morning paper, and Gramp had not yet emerged from his lengthy bathroom ritual to appear downstairs. Rette’s remark might have fallen into a vacuum for all the response it got.

  “Tony,” her mother asked from the kitchen door, “will you have one egg or two?”

  “I’ll skip the egg, thanks. I’m late.” Tony started for the front of the house with his easy, long-legged stride. Rette could see him shrugging into his tweed topcoat, which he wore open in defiance of the February winds. “‘By everybody,” he called from the doorway. “See you tonight.”

  “For dinner?” Mrs. Larkin asked.

  “Sure thing.” Tony grinned back at his mother and was gone.

  Rette returned to her hot cereal, an island in the middle of the cream. Systematically she began eating around its shore line, turning her dish as she had since she was a child. “Are we going to have a cake?” she asked.

  “A cake?” Her father looked up from his newspaper.

  “A cake for Tony,” Mrs. Larkin interjected, putting an eggcup before Rette. “Yes, I think we should. Don’t you?”

  Rette nodded. “It’s always more birthday-y,” she said.

  “Let’s have a chocolate cake,” proposed Mr. Larkin. He always wanted a chocolate cake, just as he always wanted a cherry pie. All other varieties he considered second-rate and scarcely worth the trouble. “How about it, Rette?”

  Willingly enough, Rette nodded and became her dad’s ally. She was eating too rapidly to take time to talk.

  Yet in spite of her concentrated effort she too was late in getting off. “I guess I’d better take the bike,” she said with a certain distaste, as she pulled on her mittens. “I’ll never make it if I walk.”

  Covertly she glanced at her dad, who occasionally stepped up his own leave-taking enough to drop her off at school en route to his local real-estate office. But he was absorbed in his coffee and paper. He didn’t even raise his head.

  “I guess you’d better,” Mrs. Larkin said vaguely, and settled back in her chair with a contented sigh. Rette slammed out of the house, envying both her parents their extra moments of leisure, and wheeled the despised bicycle out of the garage.

  The girls in the senior class simply didn’t ride bikes any more. Through a twist of fashion they had abandoned the habit six months ago as a kid practice. So as Rette pedaled, pink-nosed, through the wintry Avondale streets, she felt as conspicuous as though she were wearing Mary Janes and a smocked dress.

  Consequently, in response to an occasional, “Hi, Rette!” from a hurrying classmate, she was almost curt. She wanted to get her bicycle parked as soon as possible, and it was with considerable relief that she reached her homeroom desk.

  The assembly bell had not yet rung, and there was the usual preschool shuffle and chitchat. Corky Adams, a thin boy with glasses who sat directly behind her, lowered a copy of the Avondale Blade, the town’s slender weekly, the moment Loretta dropped her books on her desk.

  “Say, Rette.”

  Loretta turned, rather surprised. Corky rarely attempted to be social.

  The boy folded the newspaper back to page one and handed it to her, pointing to an item at the top. “I bet your brother’ll be interested in this.”

  Rette’s expression softened. As a staunch admirer of Tony’s, Corky couldn’t help having some virtue in her eyes. She read the headline obediently.

  WINGS AIRPORT TO OPEN

  ON SITE OF FORMER

  TISDALE FARM

  “I know,” she said. ‘Isn’t that exciting?”

  Corky blinked up at her. “Will Tony fly there, d’you expect?”

  Rette shook her head. “I doubt it. He flies once a week with the Reserve, and that’s about all he has time for.”

  Corky looked disappointed. “That’s too bad. With a field so close to where you live—”

  Rette thought it was too bad too, but she took a more mature view of the situation than Corky. “Anyway,” she said, “flying’s pretty expensive, and Tony’s just getting started in a new business.
He might not be able to afford it, even if he did have the time.”

  “What business is he in?” Corky changed the conversation but not the subject.

  “He sells for an oil company. Not at a gas station,” Rette explained, “but to something called ‘commercial users.’ I don’t quite understand what that means.”

  “I do,” Corky nodded knowingly. “Selling,” he said in a statement that sounded like a direct quotation from his father, “is a great game if you’ve got the temperament.”

  He looked so much like a wise little owl that Rette could hardly stifle a giggle. “I guess.”

  She turned back to her own desk just as a tall girl, looking very efficient, came down the aisle toward her.

  “O Loretta,” she said, consulting a list she carried, “Miss Corwin wanted me to tell you. You’re starting in the Claremont game.”

  Rette nodded, unaware of the envious glance of Margaret Lewis, who sat across the aisle. She had played varsity basketball since she was a sophomore. Like Tony, she possessed a certain natural co-ordination that made her good at most sports. It had never occurred to her that this was a thing to be cherished. Success, by her own count, was quite a different thing.

  She would have felt successful if she could have walked into the room smiling at Jeff Chandler, as Elise Wynn was doing just now. She followed Elise with her eyes, marveling at her apparent poise. Elise never seemed self-conscious or gawky. She had a gentleness about her, a sweet, almost kittenish quality that the boys liked.

  Immediately Rette felt all elbows and knees. It was a reaction that was inevitable. Much as she struggled against it, the same feeling always swept over her when Elise came near.

  The assembly bell rang, and Rette rose hastily, anxious to be doing something—anything—that would provide distraction. The feeling she had about Elise was closely akin to jealousy, and Rette recognized it as a destructive emotion and fled before it down the hall to the auditorium, where she sank gratefully into a seat beside Cathy Smith.

  Cathy was a comfortable sort of girl who lived in a private world composed largely of horses and dogs and demanded little of Rette or anyone else. She smiled companionably, but a little vaguely, and didn’t try to make small talk. Rette wriggled a little, wound one leg around the other, and turned her attention to the platform, where the principal was just appearing through the stage door, followed by a tall young man dressed in a tweed sport coat and dark-brown gabardine slacks.

  There was something in the young man’s bearing, something in the way he wore his clothes, something in the cut of his lean jaw and in the way his close-cropped, rebellious hair fitted his head, that made a ripple pass over the auditorium. It was a purely feminine ripple, like a prolonged “Ah,” and it made the boys sit up a little straighter and take special notice of the guest. Even Cathy Smith came out of her daydream long enough to turn to Rette and raise an appreciative eyebrow.

  “Who is he, d’you know?” she asked.

  Rette shook her head. “I didn’t even know we were going to have a speaker,” she whispered back. “That is, if he is a speaker.”

  “I hope,” murmured the girl on Cathy’s right.

  Somehow, to Rette, the young man didn’t look like a speaker. He looked as though he belonged out of doors, not on the platform of the crowded Avondale High auditorium. He had squint lines around his alert blue eyes, and his skin had a weather-tanned glow.

  She waited as impatiently as the rest of the girls around her for the routine announcements to be finished, for the mechanics of the assembly program to reach the point where Mr. Martin, the principal, would explain the presence of this interesting alien.

  Finally, rather ponderously, Mr. Martin came to the point. ‘Ί want to introduce Mr. Stephen Irish,” he said, “who is connected with Avondale’s maiden venture in aviation. Mr. Irish has a proposal to make that may be of interest to some of the upperclassmen—especially the boys.”

  Mr. Martin nodded and smiled in the direction of the guest speaker, and Stephen Irish came to the edge of the platform in a few strides. He scorned the lectern, behind which the principal always stood, and seemed to want to get as close as possible to his audience. Then, in a voice surprisingly brisk for its depth, he began to talk.

  Rette sat entranced; he was like no assembly speaker Avondale High had ever had. As he described the inception of the new airport, and outlined its growth from dream to reality, he spoke as he might have spoken to one other person—without formality, but with a quick sincerity that made her hang on every word.

  “Wings Airport is a young man’s venture,” he said, “and we think that our greatest and first appeal should be to youth. You people will be the civilian flyers who will make the United States the first truly air-minded country. You’re going to be thinking about planes the way your grandfathers thought about cars. Did it ever occur to you that the men who drove the early cars were considered pretty venturesome boys?”

  A ripple of amusement crossed the auditorium, but Rette, seeing in her imagination a picture of a bright-eyed young man trying to learn to control the first horseless carriage, was thoughtful.

  Stephen Irish dug his hands into the pockets of his jacket and rocked a little on his heels. “One of you,” he said, grinning, “is going to have a chance to be just as venturesome as his grandfather. One of you—probably a junior or senior—is going to have a chance to learn to fly a plane.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  In the high-school auditorium intense quiet was followed by a stir of interest, most vocal among the older boys. Across the center aisle from where she sat, Rette could see Jeff Chandler leaning forward, his eyes on the speaker, his lips slightly parted, as though he were hanging on every word.

  “Wings Airport,” Mr. Irish was continuing, “is willing to give a course of flying lessons to any student sixteen years old or over who can qualify. The course will be offered as a prize in a contest, and since the details of that contest will be of interest to only a limited number of you, I suggest that Mr. Martin take over from here.”

  As Mr. Martin got to his feet, Rette could see the light of anticipation die in the eyes of the boys that were under sixteen. She knew how they felt; she had often experienced that sudden upsurge of excitement, followed by the dull finality of an idea’s death. It made her sad to see their dream crushed. To fly—it would be such a marvelous thing! The romance of it made her spine tingle and her shoulders quiver. She glanced at Jeff Chandler again.

  “The competition,” Mr. Martin was saying, “will take the form of an essay contest.”

  Instantly a groan of disappointment could be heard from the ranks of the junior and senior boys.

  The principal raised his hand. “Mimeographed forms containing contest rules will be available in the anteroom to my office,” he continued. “I urge students who are interested to call for copies at once, since all entries must be submitted within one month.”

  He glanced at his watch, then brought the assembly to a close. Rette had a feeling that his judgment as to the wisdom of this contest was suspended. She wondered whether Mr. Martin considered flying risky and foolhardy, and rather suspected that he did.

  The buzz of excitement created by Stephen Irish and his proposal increased, rather than abated, back in Rette’s home room. The boys, their clannishness stimulated, gathered in little knots to talk about flying, and the girls had to exclaim over the glamorous Mr. Irish.

  “If he’s the instructor, I’d like to learn to fly myself!” plump Judy Carter said, with an upward roll of her eyes.

  The mere idea of Judy Carter behind the controls of a plane made all the girls within hearing distance chuckle. “What’s so funny about that?” Judy asked them, drawing herself erect. “I’m sixteen. I might fool you all and win the prize.”

  “Are girls allowed?” Elise Wynn asked.

  “He didn’t say they weren’t.”

  Rette edged closer, and a pounding started in her chest—a heavy, jarring thud of excitemen
t she couldn’t control.

  “Do you really think—” she began, but the sharp clap of Miss Damon’s hands interrupted her.

  “Will this group come to at least a semblance of order,” the home-room teacher demanded in her most authoritative voice.

  All through first-period French, Rette played the out-grown game of make-believe. Because she couldn’t quite bring herself to hope that a girl could win the essay contest, she pretended that she was Jeff Chandler, editor of the Avondale Arrow, the school paper—a boy who might really stand a chance. But toward the end of the game Rette got mixed up. She carried home to Tony the marvelous news that she had won—she, Loretta Larkin—because somewhere along the way she had discarded the identity of Jeff.

  Only the imminence of the algebra quiz broke into her daydreaming during second period. Rette was afraid of failure, impatient of it and afraid. Deeply rooted as the conviction was that she didn’t understand math and never would, she still resented the poor grades she received. Why, when English and history and most other subjects came so easily to her, did she have to bog down in this?

  A pit yawned in her stomach as she walked into the mathematics room. The questions that Mr. Scott was writing on the blackboard looked even more impossible than she had anticipated. Her shoulders sagged and she sank into her seat hopelessly. If she let her math grades fall any farther, she’d be barred from athletics in the spring.

  It was hard for Rette to understand the apparent calmness with which most of her classmates attacked the problems. Judy, sitting in front of her, wrote her name in a neat, small backhand at the top of her paper and then wriggled forward with her eyes on the board. Elise, two seats to Rette’s left, was already making rapid calculations on a scratch pad—proving the first problem, Rette suspected. Elise, for all her arrant femininity, was a whiz at math.

  Rette fretted. She gnawed at her pencil and stared at the blackboard until it became a blur. Then, viciously, she attacked the first problem, but by the time she was halfway through she was in a hopeless muddle, so she was forced to give it up and go on to number 2. This question, and the third, weren’t so bad, and Rette regained a little confidence. She sailed through a couple of questions on theory, because she had a good memory although she couldn’t apply the rules she had learned. But the last five questions became increasingly difficult. All of them were problems, and three of them Rette couldn’t possibly solve. She made a rapid calculation. Four out of ten questions were sure to be wrong. Unhappily, she gnawed at her pencil again and gazed around the room.