On the Wings of Love

Well, so much for damage assessment. He could only hope the aeroplane was in better shape than he was. Bracing himself against the pain, he seized the splint with both hands and swung his legs to the floor. That was more like it. Except for his rear still being on the bed, he was almost standing. All he had to do now was get his body over his feet. Then, broken leg or no broken leg, he would walk out of here and find out what was going on.

Gingerly Rafe put his weight on his good leg and stood up. The room shimmered in front of his eyes. He forced himself to focus on the face of the mounted tiger, on the dead-cold yellow glass eyes and leathery black nose. Why would anybody hang up a dead animal anyway? Even the well-mounted ones were ghastly.

Staring into the tiger’s open jaws, he gathered his resolve. The leg was well braced. There was no reason he couldn’t walk on it if he was careful. Nothing was impossible. When he’d started on his aeroplane, nobody had believed he could do it. But he’d shown them all.

The tiger’s face had begun to blur, its stripes curving into a moiré before Rafe’s eyes. He willed the leg to move, willed himself to put weight on it. Pain was a state of mind…to hell with pain…He leaned forward, trusting the strength of the splint. Slowly his weight came down on the broken leg…

Then pain exploded in him, shattering balance and will. The tiger’s face vanished in a swirl of darkness as Rafe pitched helplessly forward. He lay still on the Turkish carpet, at the foot of the brass vase, no longer wondering or caring where he was.

Alex came out through the kitchen onto the back porch, letting the screen door slam behind her. “He’s awake,” she said. “I just saw him.”

Maude Bromley glanced up from her needlepoint. “Oh? Is he hungry? Do you think he’d like some soup? I can send one of the kitchen girls up with a meal.”

“I didn’t ask him.” Alex draped herself sideways across the arms of a wicker chair and fanned herself with a magazine.

“Alex, your manners—”

“He was rude, Mama. More than rude. He was awful! First he grabbed my arms. Then he told me to stop babbling. He didn’t even thank me for saving his life!”

“Well, give him time, dear. He’s had quite a shock. And that sedative Dr. Fleury gave him yesterday afternoon was supposed to make him sleep round the clock. You can hardly blame the young man if he’s not quite himself.”

“Oh, you’re always making excuses for people!” Alex stormed. “For Papa, for everybody, even total strangers!”

“And for you, Alexandra. Something tells me it wasn’t just Mr. Garrick who was rude. If the truth be told, young lady, you’ve a sharp tongue in that pretty head. If you’re ever to find a good husband, you might do well to bridle it.”

Maude had spoken in the gentlest of tones, her thin fingers never missing a stitch of the rose pattern she was outlining in fine, mauve wool. Alex studied her mother, trying to imagine what she had been like as a girl, long before Buck Bromley came into her life. She seemed so controlled now, as if her emotions were encased in glass. Had she ever laughed loud and openly? Had she ever cried into her pillow at night?

Maude had not married young. At twenty-eight she had been an old maid by the terms of the day, a quiet, bookish young woman who’d kept house for her widowed father and worked half days at a nearby public library. Buck had been younger than Maude, uneducated and uncouth. She had taught him how to speak properly and how to eat a six-course dinner without using the wrong fork. Aside from that, what had they ever seen in each other? Alex wondered.

“If I marry, it will be to a man who loves me as I am,” she said, swinging a bare leg over the side of the chair. “Otherwise, I’ll stay single, thank you.”

Maude measured a strand of wool and clipped it with her tiny silver scissors. “Why should love be so important? I was in love with your father, and in the end, what difference did it make?”

The revelation caught Alex off guard. Her lips parted but she did not speak.

Maude smiled her quiet smile and resumed her needlepoint. “Some of the best marriages I know are based on suitability, not love,” she said. “It’s best that way, you know. When a woman is not quite in love with a man, she has…balance, let’s say. She’s able to keep a bit of the power for herself and look at life with her eyes open. When he hurts her—which every man does sooner or later—”

“I would never marry the sort of man who’d hurt me!”

“Time will tell, dear.” Maude’s needle slowed. “But a woman who’s not quite in love can bear the hurt. She can tend to her own affairs and wait for the pain to pass. She can be sensible. On the other hand, a woman who lets herself fall in love with a man gives up everything. He gains total power over her—power to dominate, power to hurt…And he’ll use it. No man can resist using it.” She paused to unravel a tangle in the yarn. Her fingers trembled slightly.

“Mama—” Alex reached out, hesitated, then put her hand back in her lap.

“Never give a man all your love, Alexandra. Always hold back a little for yourself, for your own survival. I know that sounds like cynical advice, but as you grow older, you’ll find it to be quite sound.”

She lowered her bespectacled eyes as if she’d just realized she had said too much. Feeling awkward, Alex gazed at the clouds. Her eyes followed the flight of a storm petrel. Briefly she thought of the aeroplane. How fragile it had looked against the vastness of the sky. How free.

“You’re wrong, Mama,” she said softly. “If I ever get married it will be for love, and nothing else.”

“That’s your choice, dear.” Maude spoke without looking up, as if she had just closed a window in her mind. “I hope you’ll be very happy.”

Alex shaded her eyes and gazed toward the dunes. On the beach, half a dozen men who worked for her father had spent the morning trying to free the wrecked aeroplane from the wet sand before the tide came in. Now she could see them coming up over the rise. They were bringing the flying machine with them, half dragging, half carrying the twisted wreckage onto the lawn. Seeing it now, Alex could not help marveling that Rafe Garrick had survived the crash at all. The craft’s double wings were intact, but the front struts were crushed. The rear was askew, and the engine hung precariously from the sagging frame.

“Poor Mr. Garrick!” said Maude.

“Pooh! He got out alive, didn’t he?” Alex’s feigned disinterest masked a sense of wonder. This shattered wreck of wood, wire and stiffened cloth had flown in the sky. Its pilot had seen the earth as she herself had never seen it—the sweep of the land, with clustered towns and pencil-line roads; the alabaster curve of beach where land met sea; the harbor, with boats scuttling like water striders on a pond. Rafe Garrick had soared over hills and valleys. He had looked down on birds and on the sun-gilded tops of clouds.

Then, like Icarus, he had fallen out of the sky.

“If he’s awake, he’ll want to know about his aeroplane,” Maude said. “Maybe you ought to go and tell him they got it off the beach. And while you’re at it, maybe you should ask if he’d like the servants to bring him some lunch.”

Alex turned her head to let the breeze cool her sweat-dampened hair. “I don’t want to go back in there, Mama. He’s rude. I…don’t think he likes me. I don’t think I like him, either.”

“That’s no excuse, Alexandra. Anyone can learn to keep a civil tongue.”

“Someone should tell Mr. Garrick that.” Alex tossed her head. “I’ve had my turn with him, thank you.”

Maude’s breath eased outward in a sigh of defeat. “You’re as strong-willed as your father! All right, I’ll go and talk to Mr. Garrick, and you get ready for the tea at Mrs. Townsend’s this afternoon. You really ought to bathe if there’s time.”

“Mama, you talk to me as if I were still five years old. I’m a grown woman. I think I’m old enough to decide whether or not I ought to bathe,” Alex said.

Maude tugged at a stubborn strand of wool. “Now what did I tell you about that sharp tongue, Alex? Talk to other people the way you talk to me, and you may find yourself very sorry one day.” The yarn had tangled again. Maude fell silent for a moment while she worked it free. “And while we’re at it,” she continued, “what’s this I hear about you driving?”

“Driving?” Alex parroted the word, trying to sound innocent, though she knew it wouldn’t work.

“Elvira Hodge told me she saw you flying down the road in your father’s Pierce-Arrow last night. She said you must have been going at least thirty-five miles an hour.”

“I like driving autos. And I like going fast.”

“It isn’t safe. What’s more, it isn’t ladylike.”

“Alice Roosevelt drives.”

“Alice Roosevelt also smokes. Does that mean every young girl in America should take up the disgusting habit?” Maude removed her glasses, folded the needlepoint and put it back into her wicker sewing box. “Alexandra, I’m not going to sit here and waste time arguing with you. No matter what I say, you’ll do as you please. I’m going inside now to see if Mr. Garrick needs anything from the servants.”

She rose to her feet, tall and pale in a dress of gray batiste, her light brown hair coiled into a double chignon and covered with a net. She closed the screen carefully as she went back into the house.

Alex watched her mother go, sorry now that she had been so difficult. Maude’s life was hard enough without a contrary and willful daughter adding to the burdens of it. Alex knew. She knew it all too well.

She remembered her first year at boarding school. She’d been only fourteen at the time, and racked with homesickness. On a dreary November Saturday she had impulsively caught a train home, arriving at the station just after dusk.

Alex would never forget the look of the house that evening as she walked up the drive—strangely dark and brooding, with just one light, dimly flickering in the window of her parents’ bedroom. Buck’s dark green Cadillac was parked at the foot of the front steps.

The door was unlocked. Alex stepped into the cavernous foyer. “Mama? Papa?”

No one had answered, not even the servants. Alex had been close to tears before she remembered that this was the night of her mother’s big charity ball. Not only would she be busy running the affair at the country club, but Mamie, the cook, and Cummings, the butler, would be helping as well.

That was when she’d heard it—the creak of a floorboard in an upstairs room, and faintly, the rumble of her father’s laughter.