Saving the Queen (24 page)

Twelve

Late on Tuesday afternoon, having spent three endless days with Rufus probing explosive mysteries he had barely touched on in his theoretical work at Yale, and committing to memory abstruse formulations at a speed that astonished his tutor, Blackford felt tired, restless, and vaguely apprehensive. He wrote a long letter to Sally, full, he thought to himself as he read it, of crap. His letters to her, however keenly he missed her, were becoming inexorably wooden, so that when he finished he was even more restless. The telephone rang. It was his father—jovial as ever, but this time with a little less of the rodomontade, a great deal more of the furtive purpose and quiet authority Blackford had associated with his father many years ago, when there was the Hero, and the Son, and nothing very complicated in between.

The news was
good!
All good! Tom Oakes was so
awfully
sorry he had not been in touch with Blacky for so many months but he hoped Black had received his telegram on his commencement from Yale. (Black hadn't.) He had been traveling, mostly in the Far East, and now he was making a tour of European capitals. He had become the senior salesman and exhibitor for the new Sabre F-86 fighter—“the most magnificent fighting plane in the world, believe me, Blacky, and I don't care what the British say about their Hunter IV. I've been taking up sixty-five-year-old generals and twenty-one-year-old kids and putting it through its paces, and letting them handle the controls. They are smitten by it, they
swear
by it, they want to
make love
to it!…”

They met for dinner, the father, from some access of undisclosed insight, having specified the Connaught. He asked about Blackford's mother and was pleased to learn what he obviously knew, that she was happy.

“She would never have got that dowdy kind of life with me, but that's what she wanted. I've been seeing a very nice girl in Baywater, Long Island, Blacky, not far from the Sabre people. A war widow with a grown-up daughter who is married to a Sabre engineer, and we plan to marry this spring—if I am
one half
as successful as I think I will be!” He pulled his chair closer to his son's, waving away the waiter who had brought an assortment of pastries—he took it for granted that his splendidly proportioned son routinely turned away the pastry dish.

“I'm operating now on a
guarantee
—
twenty thousand dollars
, plus a commission of twenty-five thousand per airplane, diminishing in five-thousand-dollar leaps to five thousand, minimum, per plane.
I could sell five planes in Paris on Tuesday
. And I'm going from there to Rome, Oslo, Copenhagen, and then all through Latin America. The English, of course, are dogging me, and everywhere I show up, their people are there in five minutes pushing the Hunter and asking for a
mano a mano
, theirs against ours, and I'm disposed to okay it—for next Monday—if I can persuade the home office we'd come out of it the winner.” Tom Oakes lifted his wineglass to his incumbent mistress, with whom, for all his talk of the alluring, expectant widow in Long Island, he was utterly engrossed. But right now, he sat happily at the Connaught, his wallet easily capable of paying the expensive bill for the dinner of a son he had so frequently neglected as, for so long, he had neglected his son's mother. The hell with it, his mistakes were in the past. He looked proudly across the table at a creation for which—he often thought of his hero Lindbergh's persistent interest in genetics—he, Tom Oakes, was at least one-half biologically responsible. A fierce love for his son seized him, and hoping that he wasn't just going through the usual, sentimental routine, which he had heard so often at the bar from the middle-aged fly-boys—awful fathers, but usually, after a while, contritely awful fathers—he thought: I would do anything for Blacky. A thought germinated in his mind.

“I'm confident of my model, though the Hunter
does
have a couple of special features. But here is my surprise for you, Blacky. Tomorrow, I'll take you up in the Sabre and you will fly it. After all, you were a certified ace on the previous model. You haven't forgotten how, have you?” Tom Oakes laughed, as if he had asked his son whether he had forgotten how to read.

“Dad, I haven't flown a jet fighter since the summer before last in the reserve. I'd
love
to try this new one. Where do we go, and at what time?”

“Eleven o'clock, Northolt Air Force Base—that's fifteen miles west of London. Go out on Western Avenue. Go to the tower building and ask for your old man. You're in for a ride I think will surprise even you.” Tom Oakes had become accustomed to his son's blasé acceptance of geewhiz experiences, and had never accompanied him to the Café Tipperary.

Blackford made a quick calculation. “Dad, I'll have to leave the base not a minute later than three forty-five.”

“Why?” his father asked, clearly crestfallen. He had imagined the entire day with his son.

“I'd change it if I possibly could. But you know I'm here on this foundation project involving a study of engineering techniques. Through a contact, I was able to arrange to examine the library at Windsor Castle, which is the repository of all the old and modern sketches for the famous British buildings, cathedrals, bridges, that sort of thing. The keeper is laid on to begin looking after me at five
P
.
M
., and will stay with me through the early evening, and again the next two days. I'm afraid I just can't budge it. But you'll be back in London before going to Latin America? And if the Monday contest goes through, you'd be back for that, wouldn't you?”

“Back for that! I'd probably fly the plane. But if I didn't, I'd be hustling for it with the brass. Whatever happens, Blacky,” his father said softly, “I wouldn't leave Europe without seeing you again.”

He became more matter-of-fact. “I'm going to leave two Sabrejets at Northolt Base, so that the English aviators can fly them—and weep. We'll leave a couple of American pilots to stand by to take up prospective purchasers. The third plane, I'll fly over myself, with a copilot, to Paris on Thursday. Maybe I'll just go on over late tomorrow afternoon, since you're going to be tied up.”

They had a good evening, and Black found his father depending less, than on previous occasions, on booze for animation. But Black also acknowledged—his objectivity seldom deserted him—that, undoubtedly, he had himself become easier to talk to as he drew away, with apparent success, from the adolescence his father (let alone the faculty at Greyburn) had had such great difficulty in handling. His father, who retained his leathery good looks and happy-go-lucky smile, recalled, with lascivious pleasure, the hours they had spent together, flying every kind of airplane, to the desperation of his mother.

“Do you realize you weren't seven years old when you took the controls of a plane, and that you made your first solo landing at ten? I remember when we arrived home and told your mother you had landed in an airplane by yourself, and she shut the door in our faces and wouldn't speak to me for a week! I told Charlie Lindbergh that story, and he said he had the identical experience when
he
taught Jon to fly. I remember the letter you wrote me after your first week as a flying cadet. The idea that any army instructors could teach Tom Oakes's son how to fly!”

“I didn't get all that much combat flying done in the war, Dad.”

“Whoever said aces can't be grounded by hepatitis? You shot down three planes in three missions. The Germans were just lucky hepatitis was on their side.”

Tom Oakes called for the bill and paid it, leaving a generous, though not exorbitant, tip.

“Oh, Blacky, I have a delayed commencement present for you. I didn't know what to buy you, because I never know what your mother or … Mr. Sharkey … is giving you, so I thought the thing to do was to let you decide. I've been saving this from my first big pay check three months ago, and I am really happy for you to have it.”

He handed Blacky an envelope.

“Go on, open it.”

Blacky unobtrusively moved it under his napkin, opened the envelope, and counted five one-hundred-dollar bills. He looked up and saw that his father's eyes were moist. Blacky understood. There had never been such an accumulation of cash during his boyhood.

“I did it in dollars, because currency restrictions are tough, and you may want to save this for traveling abroad—I don't know what your arrangements are with the foundation.”

Blackford thanked his father, and gripped his hand, and they walked out. Above all, Black didn't want his father to see the apartment, whose opulence would certainly have surprised, and possibly even dismayed, him; and so he volunteered to drive his father home to his hotel.

“I'll tell you what, Dad, I'll pick you up in the morning, and we'll drive together to Northolt Base. What do you say?”

His father, whose thoughts were seldom well concealed, paused … and, in the nick of time, Black added conversationally, “I lent my apartment to my roommate to give a friend of his a going-away party, so I'll have to sneak through the kitchen to my own bedroom.”

That had the instant, indeed the visible, effect of diminishing his father's curiosity to see his son's quarters; so they drove off together to the father's hotel.

Black, discharging the cargo, whom he embraced with sincere affection, drew a deep breath and drove home, somewhat elated at his rather brilliant prospects, mundane and futuristic. Right now he had
five hundred dollars
in his pocket. Tomorrow morning he would be flying an airplane that was the pride and joy of the American aviation world—sharing the cockpit with his own father. Later that same day he would drive brashly to Windsor Castle, built by William the Conqueror, the burial place of a dozen British monarchs, the repository of perhaps the most famous collection of technical drawings by the old engineering masters; but also—above all—the residence, during the moment he would spend there, of the British sovereign, Queen Caroline. His “mark!”—Blackford struggled, so soon after reading the literature, to retain the terminology. Blackford could not guess what, after a few days' interlude, her attitude toward him would be. Perhaps she had regretted her impetuous invitation. If so, she would clearly find it extremely difficult to undo the invitation, extended through Lady Lunford, to dine with her tomorrow night. But perhaps, though going through with the dinner, she would behave formally, forbiddingly, overbearingly. Perhaps the dinner would prove to be his final personal contact with her. If he sensed this, he would need to trot out his thermonuclear jewelry; and to consider, even, how to question her associates discreetly during the days (as many as he could stretch out perusing the archives) he had liberty to probe, at second hand, the kind of thing Rufus—and Blackford—cared about. Blackford would bring along enough notebooks, and reference books, to persuade a skeptical keeper of the seriousness of his professional concerns. He packed a very full wardrobe, in no sense exhibitionist, but comfortable, resourceful, fine, and self-assured. He decided that very early on he must, somehow, casually reveal his proficiency in atomic physics. As he lay down to sleep, he wondered whether, ever, a young man seeking to catch the eye of the Queen had done so by studying so intensively the elaborate inflections of that horney old equation, E = mc
²
.

Thirteen

It had been an exhilarating hour and one half. Within ten minutes, Blackford felt he knew the aircraft as perfectly as he had known the old Sabre he had flown in combat, and had previously taught a score of students to fly. His father gradually relinquished the controls, with considerable pride as he saw his son receive them as if by an anointive process, absorbing intuitively the uses of the innovative instruments and features, designed to increase the maneuverability, dependability, and firepower of an airplane that could be throttled up very nearly to the speed of sound.

Flying out over the English Channel, they asked permission of the tower, and received it, to cavort at fifty thousand feet, clear of commercial aviation. Black turned the plane upside down and ran the throttle up to the line of Mach I and watched the needle climb, while his father, seated in the rear cockpit, ceased, finally, to give any instructions, electing, instead, to egg his son along through the intercom, promising him that the aircraft would not fail him.…

“Go ahead and dive. Set the auto-take to five thousand—that's a safety device, pulls you out in case you black out. I don't have one back here. Remember, Black, back here I would be spending my time navigating, making radar calculations, and positioning your rockets. But even
without
the copilot, you've got an automatic radar circuitry computerized to give you a bull's-eye target for six cannon. And when the sidewinders come around, which is the day after tomorrow, they can perch just under the wings, though they'll slow you up, maximum Mach .8.”

Black dove the airplane, from a dizzy height that permitted him to see simultaneously London and Cherbourg, pulled on the controls, and lazily turned a steady figure eight while aileron rolling the aircraft, bringing a yelp of delight from his father.

“You did that one as good as Charlie Lindbergh could have done it!”

There was no higher compliment, and when they came back ready to land, just for the hell of it Black looped at a nerve-shattering three hundred feet, coming down a dozen feet above the runway, and touching down, like a paper airplane on a wall-to-wall carpet. For a while his loquacious father was silent, and as they climbed out of the plane he said to Black, “It would have been an okay way to go, you and me in the same plane. But whatever you figure the two of us are worth, I think you ought to know the buggy you looped at three hundred feet cost the taxpayers eleven million dollars.”