Taking Off (17 page)

“Al!” I cried.

I saw the look on her face, saw that she was reading the look on my face. She saw the alarm there, and it made her swing around to face forward again. The dogboarding woman on the right tugged hard on the reins, but the dog was determined and resisted her. She yawed involuntarily, she fought to recover, she rolled, and her board shot from under her directly into Albertine's path. Al saw it. In an instant of peripheral awareness she turned to the left to try to avoid it, but she was on top of it. Her front wheel struck the board, and Albertine pitched forward, up and over her handlebars and onto the pavement.

I was off my bike in a moment and at her side.

“Oh, my darling, my darling,” I said, kneeling beside her, kissing her, “my leettle garajzh.”

She didn't seem to be in pain. She didn't seem to be hurt, only surprised, but, “Something is wrong,” she said. “Something is wrong.”

Chapter 35

From the Symphysis Pubis to the Crest of Ilium

SHE LAY ON A GURNEY in the hallway of the emergency room at Carl Schurz Hospital, just down the street from our apartment, just half a block from home. Hours had passed since the accident. She was in shock, I suppose, still not quite believing that this had happened to her. In the park, when she had come to rest on the pavement, she had worn that look of surprise, but now there was added to it a grimace, and I could see that she was suffering. She had cried out when the emergency medical technicians had lifted her onto the stretcher to load her into the ambulance. Here in the hospital she had been given morphine for the pain, but she could feel it through the morphine.

“Was my skirt up around my waist?” she asked.

“You're wearing shorts,” I said.

“I am?”

“You are.” I brought her hand to my lips. I had a flash of a memory, one of my earliest. In the memory, I was standing on my maternal grandparents' front lawn, with a kitten in either hand, looking across the lawn to where my grandparents, my parents, Dudley Beaker, and Eliza Foote were gathered for drinks in the summer dusk. Something had happened to disturb my mother, to upset her. I didn't know what it was, and wouldn't have understood it if I had, but I saw that something had upset her, disturbed her equilibrium. When I looked in the direction of the adults, I saw my mother in the act of falling from her lawn chair, and she wore the expression of surprise that I had seen on Albertine. At the time, I thought that my mother was playing, partly because of that expression of surprise. I saw, and understood in my infantile way, that she was exhilarated by crossing the line of equilibrium into a more excited state, and I laughed then, but in the hospital, with Albertine hurting so and worried that the world had seen her underwear, I saw in the mind's eye of memory that my mother had also been shocked at the moment of her tumble, astonished that this should be happening to her, and deeply embarrassed.

“Was I wearing shorts the whole time?”

“Yes, my darling.”

“How prudent of me.”

“Your dignity was preserved throughout.”

“I doubt that,” she said. She sighed. “What happened?”

“That woman's dogboard shot in front of you, and you hit it.”

“Yes,” she said distantly, apparently struggling to regain the memory.

“You had turned backward to say something to me, but I saw what was happening and when I called to you, you turned around, turned forward I mean, and you saw what was about to happen, so you yawed to the left, trying to avoid it. You didn't have time to turn much, not enough to avoid the board, but you did turn enough to avoid going straight over the handlebars and landing on your head.”

“Did I execute a full forward somersault?”

“Head over teakettle.”

“I think it's cracked.”

“Head? Or teakettle?”

“Head, maybe. Teakettle, definitely.”

In another couple of hours, after she had been investigated by X-ray and magnetic resonance imaging, we knew that she was right. Her pelvis had been fractured “in three places,” according to the surgeon on duty in the emergency room, who later charged an inflated fee but was, in his reading of the film as well as his estimate of what his time was worth, wrong. Her pelvis had actually been fractured along a nearly continuous line from the symphysis pubis to the crest of ilium, making the integrity of the pelvis itself—so essential to supporting the body in its upright human stance and allowing it pedal mobility—tenuous, liable to a painful and perhaps irreparable shift along the fracture if she were to put her weight on her right leg, but we didn't know that until later.

“What did I say?” she asked.

“Say?” I stroked her hand. She was lying on her back. She had been told not to move.

“You told me that I turned around to say something to you. What was it?”

“I don't know. You never got to say it. Do you remember what you were going to say?”

“No. I don't remember,” she said. “Something clever, I think. We would have laughed.”

*   *   *

SOMETIME AFTER FOUR in the morning, I came out of the hospital entrance and turned toward home. I doubted that I would be able to sleep if I went home, and it was too early to call Albertine's mother and the boys to tell them what had happened, so when I reached the corner, I turned toward Carl Schurz Park instead. I couldn't stop my mind from replaying the memory of Albertine in the air, flying forward over her handlebars, yawing, pitching, and rolling in her flight, until she landed—crashed, that is—on the unyielding pavement, and then the still way she had lain there, with her legs straight out and that awful look of surprise on her face, and with it, almost superimposed on it, ran the memory of my mother, falling from her lawn chair. For both of them I felt a deep sympathy and, surprising to me, a deeper sadness for the loss of dignity that they had suffered, and I felt, as intensely as if I had fallen myself, how hard it is to hold on to dignity, to attain some scrap of dignity and then hold on to it, and I resented the way that accidents had snatched their dignity from them. I stood at the railing, looking down at the dark water of the East River, feeling useless. I couldn't mitigate Albertine's pain, couldn't alleviate it in any way, and I couldn't imagine how I could restore her dignity. While I stood there, feeling the hollow emptiness of uselessness, I began to feel something else overcome me, a familiar feeling, the overwhelming feeling of being full of my love for her. There were times, and this was one, when the experience of that love was so great that it overpowered all other emotions, rendered me incapable of feeling anything else. This state of being full of love for her was buoying, uplifting, elating, and liberating, and it lifted me, made me feel that if I chose to, I could arise and fly across the river, to Queens.

Chapter 36

Please, Sir, I Yearn to Learn

“FIRST OF ALL,” said Rudolph Derringer, Certified Flying Instructor, “I want you to banish from your mind the notion that flying is dangerous.” He paused and scanned the room, turning a stern and serious mien on each of his eager students. He wore a leather flying jacket with a silk scarf thrown around his neck, apparently carelessly, and a leather flying helmet with goggles pushed up on his head. “Flying is not dangerous,” he said, shaking his head. He stopped. He paused. He raised a finger. And, as if the distinction had just occurred to him, he added,
“Crashing
is dangerous.”

After a moment of uncertainty, we allowed ourselves a little nervous laughter. Outside, a storm was blowing through Babbington. (Was it part of the aftermath of Hurricane Felicity? I'm not sure.) Eight of us—seven men and a boy—were sitting on folding chairs in a hangar at the Babbington Municipal Airport, which was still known simply as that, since the supporters of former mayor Andy Whitley had not yet launched their campaign to have it renamed for him. Wind drove the rain against the corrugated metal siding, and we shivered in our seats.

“That's one of the maxims of the aviator,” Derringer said, chuckling now. “Flying isn't dangerous; crashing is dangerous.” We all chuckled along with him, dutifully, but a joke is never funny the second time around.

“You get what you pay for,” muttered the man sitting beside me, dealing me an elbow in the ribs to catch my attention and pointing to the ad in the
Babbington Reporter
that had lured us to the airport.

“You get what you pay for,” muttered the man sitting beside me …

He let his finger rest beneath the word
nothing,
and he gave me another poke in the ribs to make certain that I hadn't missed the point.

Derringer held up a battered copy of
Elements of Aeronautics.
Momentarily overcome by the desire to stand out in the crowd, court the instructor, get a head start on the competition for teacher's pet, and show that I was not only eager but prepared, I came close to announcing that I owned a copy, but, fortunately for my dignity, Derringer spoke before I had a chance to speak myself.

“You can't learn to fly from a book,” he said with a sneer. He turned the cover of the book toward him and read the title as if it were an obscenity. “I sure as hell didn't learn to fly from a book. I learned to fly by the seat of my pants—and that's how I'm going to teach you to fly. You've got to
feel
the plane under you, the way you feel a horse under you when you're in the saddle. Anybody here ride?”

None of us did, and our headshakings and murmured disavowals seemed to disappoint Derringer so deeply that I thought for a moment of offering my years of bicycle riding as an approximation. Again, Derringer saved me from the guffaws of my fellows by speaking first.

“Well,” he said, with evident pity, “it's a shame. If you rode, you'd know what I mean about the seat of your pants. Flying that way—it's something you feel.” He stared off into the distance, upward, as if he were looking beyond the ceiling, beyond the storm and the clouds, to the limitless open space above us, his proper realm. “You become one with the plane,” he said rapturously, “one airborne entity, a mythical being, a flying man, the way a rider comes to feel that he and the horse beneath him have become one, have become a mythical creature, a centaur. The seat-of-the-pants rider doesn't put his horse into a gallop;
he
gallops. And when you fly by the seat of your pants, you don't bank the plane,
you
bank. You don't roll the plane or loop the plane,
you
roll,
you
loop. Ultimately, you don't fly the plane—
you
fly.”

“Ultimately, you don't crash the plane,” muttered the disenchanted guy beside me. “
You
crash.”

After a moment of stillness to allow the last note of his lyrical introduction to resonate, Derringer began to outline the lessons in the course that he offered, and we began to understand that the lyrical introduction was all that we were going to get for free. His presentation was on the order of what today would be called an infomercial, short on information and long on purchase opportunity. I learned, when Derringer got to the point of closing, that the cost of the course was beyond my boyish means. It may have been beyond the means of the men seated with me as well, because none of them wrote checks when they were invited to. Instead, they filed into the wet night, heads down, disappointed. I followed, adopting much the same attitude.

“It's simply amazing,” said the guy who had sat beside me. “In less than a minute, Rudolph Derringer, CFI, managed to become repetitious and boring.”

“Yeah,” growled another guy. He took a drag on a cigarette that he held in his cupped hand to protect it from the rain. “He started out great, too. Full of promise.”

“Right,” said another. “When we were filing into the hangar and taking our seats, and I saw him standing there, he seemed like a dashing adventurer, a living advertisement for the romance of flight.”

“He certainly dressed the part.”

“That he did.”

“I think I'm not alone in saying that when I came into that hangar and saw him standing there, I said to myself, ‘This is a guy who can teach me to fly.'”

“With the one mistake of repeating a joke, he became a windbag, nothing but a gag man, and not a good one.”

“And we began asking ourselves, ‘Am I really going to trust this clown to teach me how to fly? I mean, what if a situation arises in which there's nothing to prevent flying from turning into crashing but what Rudolph Derringer, Certified Fucking Idiot, has taught me?'”

“He crashed.”

“One little mistake, and he crashed.”

“Let that be a lesson to you, kid.”

“Yeah,” I said, trying on, to see how well it fit, their snarling rejection of Rudolph Derringer and trying, behind my back, the method of cupping a hand to hold a cigarette and keep it safe from the rain.