Read Conquerors of the Sky Online
Authors: Thomas Fleming
Conquerors of the Sky (7 page)
Penelope Foster's first reaction to the war was exultation. She was sure Germany would be smashed in a matter of weeks. As dozens of her friends and relatives, including her older brother, were killed by German machine guns and artillery in France, rage became her dominant emotion. She changed from a cool, detached imagist poet to a ranting, chanting writer of patriotic verse in the Kipling tradition. She shouted her poems from platforms to intimidate men into enlisting in the British army.
At night, in her Kensington flat, Penelope wrote more bad poetry to the heroic dead, and abused Frank Buchanan. She still refused to let him touch her. “Where are your heroic countrymen?” she hissed. “Why aren't they here, fighting for civilization? The barbarians are at the gates!”
Frank tried to defend President Woodrow Wilson's neutrality. He portrayed America as the one nation that could negotiate a just peace between the warring powers before they destroyed each other. Penelope called him a coward and a fool.
One terrible night at Pound's flat, after one of the best imagist poets, T. H. Hulme, was killed in Flanders, Penelope reviled Pound for not fighting beside him. Her diatribe was a paradigm of the way the war annihilated Pound's dream of a civilization redeemed by art. He began to sneer at the idea of patriotism, to see literature and art, not as a vortex transforming the world, but as a refuge from a world gone mad.
When German zeppelins and Gotha bombers appeared over London, smashing churches and homes, killing hundreds of people, Pound mocked Frank's vision of the plane annihilating frontiers. Its new goal was the annihilation of the countries behind the frontiers.
“I can hardly wait for them to bomb you American cowards,” Penelope raged. She glared at Frank, her Pre-Raphaelite face livid with loathing.
The dreamer-designer Frank Buchanan shuddered under these blows. He wandered the streets of London consoling himself with streetwalkers while Craig
whispered in his soul.
They're only good for one thing, kid. When you listen to their yak-yak they drive you nuts.
whispered in his soul.
They're only good for one thing, kid. When you listen to their yak-yak they drive you nuts.
One night, after a particularly unsatisfying encounter with a prostitute, Frank found himself on Brompton Road, standing before a building with a small sign crudely lettered over the doorway:
Church of the Questing Spirit.
Inside about two dozen people listened to a gray-haired minister talk about a world beyond their tormented visible one. The rectangular room, with a dome of stars painted on the ceiling, was the London headquarters of the sect Althea Buchanan had joined in California.
Church of the Questing Spirit.
Inside about two dozen people listened to a gray-haired minister talk about a world beyond their tormented visible one. The rectangular room, with a dome of stars painted on the ceiling, was the London headquarters of the sect Althea Buchanan had joined in California.
At the end of the sermon, the minister gestured to Frank, in the first row, and said: “Young man, are you as troubled as you look?”
Frank poured out his growing despair and confusion over the war. The woman he loved called him a coward for defending his own and his country's refusal to fight. What should he do?
The minister stepped into an anteroom and emerged with a shirt that had somehow been ripped almost to shreds. “Put this on,” he said.
Frank shrugged off his jacket and thrust his arms into the shirt. Instantly he felt an incredible lash of pain across his back. Again again again, a fiery agony unlike anything he had ever experienced seared his flesh. He ripped off the shirt and flung it at the minister.
“What is it? What are you trying to do?” Frank gasped.
“That shirt belonged to a seaman in Nelson's navy who was lashed to death,” the minister said. “You're one of us. Everyone in this room has felt that pain when they wore this shirt. Most people feel nothing.”
“What does it mean?”
“Each of us has to find his own interpretation of that pain.”
Outside the church, Frank found the night sky full of searchlights and flares. The Gothas were raiding London again. Huge explosions made the sidewalk tremble. The bombs were falling only a few blocks away, around Marble Arch. A man grabbed his arm. “Where's the nearest subway station, pal?” he asked. His accent was as American as his vocabulary. People were using London's underground for air-raid shelters.
“I don't know this neighborhood.”
“Ah, what the hell. Let's have a drink.”
They pounded on the door of a nearby pub. Behind the blacked-out windows a dozen fatalists were savoring what could be their last pints. The American ordered double Scotches for himself and Frank and held out his hand.
“Buzz McCall's the name, flying's my game.”
“Likewise,” Frank said.
Buzz was a chunk of a man, with black hair and a complexion as swarthy as an Italian's. He had a square fighter's jaw and a swagger to his walk and talk. Except for his stockier physique, the resemblance to Craig was uncanny.
Buzz began telling Frank he was on his way to France. A group of Americans had volunteered to form a squadron in the French air force. They were going to call it the Lafayette Escadrille. “We're gonna teach these German fuckers a
couple of lessons for bombin' women and children,” he said.
couple of lessons for bombin' women and children,” he said.
“Have you got room for another pilot?” Frank said.
Death machine,
his mother whispered. But Frank dismissed her once and for all. Buzz and Craig and this war-maddened world were suddenly connected to the fiery shirt he had just torn from his back in the Church of the Questing Spirit. If he hoped to live as a man and not a momma's boy, he would have to wear that ancient shirt, no matter how much pain it cost him. He would have to endure history's lash.
his mother whispered. But Frank dismissed her once and for all. Buzz and Craig and this war-maddened world were suddenly connected to the fiery shirt he had just torn from his back in the Church of the Questing Spirit. If he hoped to live as a man and not a momma's boy, he would have to wear that ancient shirt, no matter how much pain it cost him. He would have to endure history's lash.
“America stands for peace and nothing but peace!”
Auburn hair streaming to her waist, Amanda Cadwallader trembled in the icy January wind cutting through Harvard Square. The barbaric weather was not the only reason for her tremors. It was her first public speech, her first attempt to bring California's message of peace to war-infatuated eastern America.
As a crowd gathered, two of her fellow sophomores at Wellesley handed out leaflets quoting poets and philosophers, including Harvard's own William James, on the folly of war as the solution to settling quarrels between nations. A big bulky young man in a well-tailored dark suit snatched one of the leaflets, glanced at it and crumpled it into a contemptuous ball. He planted himself directly in front of Amanda and shouted: “Are you German?”
“I'm from California,” Amanda said.
“That explains the nonsense you're preaching. You've got an orange for a brain!” the young man bellowed. His thick-lipped wide-boned face had an adult cast. He looked like a faculty member.
“Yeah, yeah,” jeered a half-dozen grinning young men in the crowd. “An orange for a brain.”
“I've got a perfectly good brain,” Amanda said. “I had a straight-A average at Stanford. I'm getting the same grades at Wellesley. Why can't you discuss the subject likeâlike gentlemen?”
“Because there's nothing gentle about a German. A German is a Hun,” her chief antagonist said. “If we had any guts, we'd be over there fighting them now.”
“Right. Absolutely right,” rumbled from the crowd.
“We don't agree with you in California,” Amanda said. “America should be a voice of peace in the councils of the nations.”
“Tell it to the Kaiser,” sneered her antagonist.
Amanda glanced at her two followers, one of whom was her Wellesley roommate. Both easterners, they had been dubious about this venture. She had persuaded them to try it with the sheer force of her western enthusiasm.
“My friends told me this would happen. I had to see for myself. You're nothing butâbarbarians.”
She began to weep. Abominable! Amanda hated the way she wept whenever she was extremely angryâor extremely happy. Her mother had opposed the idea of letting Amanda go east. Her half-brother had been almost gleeful, he was so sure she would make a fool of herself. Her father had encouraged her. He said it would be a good way for her to find out just how confused and spiritually sick America was on the Atlantic seaboard.
The crowd began to disperse. But Amanda's chief antagonist remained behindâand was strangely contrite. “We're not barbarians,” he said. “We're perfect gentlemen on every topic but the one you've chosen. To prove itâlet me buy you all lunch.”
Amanda turned to her two followers. The idea unquestionably appealed to them. The young man was remarkably self-possessed. His tailoring was expensive and foreign. There was something mysterious, intriguing, about his tufted brows and hooded eyes.
Twenty minutes later, Amanda and her friends were gorging on lobster salad, caramel cake, and ice cream sodas in the Crimson Cafe off Harvard Square. Adrian Van Ness talked to them earnestly and honestly about the war in Europe as he saw it in January 1916.
“I spent a year at the Anson School in England,” he said. “Ten of my friends from the upper forms have died in Flanders, at Ypres, on the Somme. I've had letters from some of them. There was no doubt in their mindsâor in mineâthat they were fighting civilization's battle against the German hordes. Almost every faculty member and every student at Harvard believes this by now. We're all in favor of American intervention. There are over two hundred graduates already serving with the French and British armies as volunteers. Over a dozen have been killedâ”
“Doesn't all this prove the madness, the stupidity of war?” Amanda said.
“It proves the courage, the heroism of ordinary men,” Adrian said. “The war is a great testament to our civilization's capacity for self-sacrificeâand courage. Especially in the air. I have a number of friends in the Royal Flying Corps. One of them, Peter Tillotson, is the leading British ace at the moment with forty victories. Another friend, Carlo Pontecorvo, is flying for Italy. He thinks single combat in the plane is reviving some of the ancient ideals of chivalry. It may create a whole new race of men, with a code of honor like the knights of the Crusades.”
Amanda was fascinated by the glow of idealism on Adrian's face as he talked about planes. Her followers, both from the east, began to change their minds about the war. Adrian was a remarkably persuasive young man. Amanda was losing the argument, but to her surprise she did not care. She sensed Adrian was genuinely distressed that he had hurt her feelings. Almost everything he said was for her. He barely glanced at her followers.
Outwardly, Amanda remained unconverted. She quoted Stanford's pacifist
president, David Starr Jordan, at length. He had inspired her and a half-dozen other “peace missionaries” to transfer to Wellesley and Smith and Mount Holyoke to convert the warmongering easterners. She could hardly surrender to a spokesman for the evil East in her first encounter. But she secretly hoped she would see Adrian Van Ness again.
president, David Starr Jordan, at length. He had inspired her and a half-dozen other “peace missionaries” to transfer to Wellesley and Smith and Mount Holyoke to convert the warmongering easterners. She could hardly surrender to a spokesman for the evil East in her first encounter. But she secretly hoped she would see Adrian Van Ness again.
Within the week Adrian telephoned Amanda and invited her to another lunch at the Crimson Cafeâalone. Over more lobster salad he apologized for his slurs on California. “Actually, I know nothing about the place. What's it like?” he said.
A delighted Amanda talked about southern Californiaâshe dismissed the northern half of the state as a foggy, chilly wastelandâwith an eloquence even she found surprising. She described the lush beauty of the mountain-ringed San Fernando Valley, the majesty of the coast above Los Angeles, the vistas of the desert.
“Southern California is the last paradise in the Western world,” Amanda said. “A place where art and poetry and philosophy will flower in a new renaissance.”
“Who said that?” Adrian asked.
Amanda blushed and cast her eyes down: “My father.”
“What does he do for a living?”
“He grows oranges. Cadwallader Groves is the largest producer in Orange County. He serves in the state legislature too. In 1910 he was one of the leaders in the fight to reform the constitution. He helped break the power of the railroad barons and other vested interests.”
Amanda sipped the last of her ice cream soda. “What does your father do?” she asked.
“Nothing. He's dead.”
Adrian's voice was so cold and curt, Amanda wondered if she had somehow offended him. “Iâwas never close to him. He was anâintrovert,” Adrian said.
Even in 1916, psychology had become an instant explanation for everything. Amanda murmured sympathetically. “My father hates crowds, cities,” she said.
“Maybe I'll pay you a visit,” Adrian said. “See if southern California improves my poetry.”
Amanda asked to see some of this poetry. Surprise, surprise, Adrian had a half-dozen poems in his pocket. She made him read them to her. Many were about the nobility, the glory of flight.
“They're very good,” Amanda said.
Adrian glowed. “When I showed them to my mother, she said âmost poets die poor.'”
“What's wrong with being poor? All the Mexican pickers at our grove are poor. But they're happy.”
As Adrian opened the door of the taxi that would take Amanda back to Wellesley, she kissed him on the lips. “I like you,” she said.
When Amanda told her roommate about the kiss, she was horrified. “You can't be that
forward.
It just isn't
done
in this part of the country. He'll never call you again.”
forward.
It just isn't
done
in this part of the country. He'll never call you again.”
Adrian called the next night to arrange another Saturday lunch at the Crimson Cafeâand a trip to the movies after it. That soon became a Saturday routine. At lunch Adrian read her other poems full of sadness and anger at life's cruelty. Amanda sensed some wound deep in his soul and longed to heal it. She also discerned how lonely he was at Harvard. He seemed to have made almost no friends.
Adrian said he did not get along with New Yorkers even though he had been born there. They were only interested in making money. He disdained Bostoniansâalthough he had numerous cousins thereâbecause they thought making money was vulgar. At other times he claimed most of his fellow students were childish. “They haven't found out what life is all about,” he said. “You have to read historyâand experience itâto do that.”
As Amanda puzzled over his melancholy, Adrian invited her for dinner with his mother at her Beacon Hill town house on a rainy night in late March 1916. Amanda wore a loose blue lace dress and a soft blue velvet hat she had rushed into Boston to buy the previous day. Clarissa was regal in black silk and a pearl choker. She sat with her back as straight as a West Point cadet's, barely smiling as Amanda said hello.
She was awed by Clarissa's hauteur. Amanda was sure there were no women like her in California. Her own mother, so indifferent to clothes and style, so moody and impulsive, gave her no preparation for dealing with such glacial self-control. Clarissa was a block of dark New England ice. Trembling, Amanda understood Adrian's melancholy. This woman did not know how to love anyoneâeven a son.
“Adrian tells me you're from California,” Clarissa said. She made it sound as if it were a communicable disease.
“Yes,” Amanda said. She talked nervously, defensively, about her birthplace. “I had a letter from my mother yesterday. The temperature hasn't gone below seventy since January. I told her here it hasn't gone above twenty-five.”
“No question, the entire state is a gigantic playground,” Clarissa said. “But doesn't that get rather boring? You can't play all the time.”
Floundering, Amanda pictured herself as the heroine of her favorite novel,
Ramona.
She too had been despised by arrogant easterners. But she had found pride and love in her California heritage. “We don't play all the time,” she said. “We've produced some important literature.”
Ramona.
She too had been despised by arrogant easterners. But she had found pride and love in her California heritage. “We don't play all the time,” she said. “We've produced some important literature.”
“Oh?”
“Frank Norris's
The Octopus,
Mary Austin's
The Land of Little Rain.”
The Octopus,
Mary Austin's
The Land of Little Rain.”
By this time they had sat down to dinner. Clarissa carefully carved another small slice from her lamb chop. “Personally, I prefer Richard Henry Dana's view of California.”
Amanda replied with equal care: “He was one of those New Englanders who hated California.”
“He loved it on his first visit. It was his second visit that disillusioned him. It had changed so utterlyâfor the worse.”
“He hated it,” Amanda said. “The second visit was his way of satisfying his
puritan conscience for falling in love with it the first time.”
puritan conscience for falling in love with it the first time.”
“You think poorly of a puritan conscience?”
“My father says California makes puritanism superfluous.”
Amanda glanced at Adrian. He was watching them with disbelieving eyes. He apparently never imagined anyone could challenge his formidable mother this way. In spite of his adult physique, he looked like a bewildered boy.
Love, the emotion that Amanda's father had taught her was life's noblest experience, stirred in her soul. With it came a wish to share with Adrian the richest memory of her childhood, the gift her father had told her she could only offer to the Precious One.
In the silence at dawn her mother and father and Amanda and her brother Gordon drank cool orange juice on the porch of their turreted white mansion, which her father had named Casa Felicidad, the house of happiness. They stepped out of their night clothes and walked naked among the blossoming trees. “There is no shame,” her father said. “California is a new beginning. We can stop believing in ridiculous things like God. We're free to be noble and good without God.”
He let Amanda touch the dangling part of his body. She put her hand into the russet hair beneath her mother's belly and felt her cleft. Her brother Gordon did the same things. Then in the dawn stillness on the dewy grass with orange blossoms drifting around them her father and mother showed Amanda and Gordon how men and women loved each other.
Amanda gazed at Adrian and spoke the meaning of this memory carefully, softly, intending the words only for him, indifferent to what Clarissa thought. “For those who believe in it, California is Eden,” she said.
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