Part 17

Small cold shivers of fright began rippling up and down Ronny’s spine the moment his father stopped the car at the wharf on the bay front, and Gloria Cargill and Mrs. Kinney screamed with delight at the waiting parallel planes of the flying boat. In spite of the warm brilliance of the Florida morning at ten o’clock, in spite of the salt tang of the wind that snapped flags on mastheads and ruffled the blue water between the slips, in spite of the hilarious breakfast party they had all shared in celebration of Ronny’s birthday trip to Bimini, his feet chilled and his hands went clammy and the bacon and boiled pompano sat uneasily within him. Yet the terror that from childhood had ridden him, the fear of high places, of falling horribly through thin air, and therefore, of all flying, was no greater in him at this moment than his fear of letting his father know that he was afraid.

He sat mute in the corner of the back seat, his slender hands gripping at his boyish bony knees. The lucky fact that no one ever noticed him much anyway gave him a chance to pull himself together. As his father dashed around to help out Gloria, and burly Colonel Kinney reached back a hand for his smart chubby wife, Ronny looked at himself deliberately in the little mirror over the wheel. His tan hid the pallor that he felt. His mild gray eyes steadied as he watched them, so that they would not betray him. That he did not show his panic more plainly gave him courage to get out of the car, carrying Gloria’s green-leather vanity case and her flimsy green-silk coat.

None of the four looked at him as he came up, the tall awkward boy so acutely aware always that he could never be the figure of a man that his father was. Ronny looked at him now, shyly, with the spark of his adoration in his eye.

Andrew Burgess always dominated any group. His graying dark hair was bared, flying its shaggy crest of lock above the others. His bronzed handsome face was alert and eager, with only a few folds about the eyes to betray his years. Ronny thought again, as he had since a small boy, with that same little throb of almost hopeless devotion, that his father was the finest man he had ever seen in his life. To Ronny, who at school had followed breathlessly in the newspapers his father’s polo exploits, his tennis triumphs, the purses and the ribbons that his racing stable won, Andrew Burgess was also the most brilliant sportsman in the world. His father never in his life refused a high dive or knew the weak sickness of great heights. Never in a thousand years would he have given up practice with the school polo team, as Ronny had, after being in hospital two months with a broken rib, because ever after that when he thought of playing polo the thunder of those following hoofs came sickeningly back to him, the trampling pain, the darkness, the oblivion. His father’s ribs had been broken, and his collar bone and his leg, and he had played more dashing polo than ever, after that. But Ronny couldn’t. He just couldn’t, that was all, no matter how deep within him burned the bitter knowledge that he was a coward.

Sometimes Ronny thought that if his father ever discovered the depths of his son’s weakness he would disown him. It was only that as a motherless sickly child Ronny had been given over to the care of the best of nurses, as a mild little boy to the most expensive of schools, that had saved him until now, he was certain, from being found out. This winter in Miami was the first time Ronny had ever been with his father for so many months. It was as if Andrew had suddenly discovered that he was about to be twenty and had decided to make a man of him. As a result Ronny had had desperately to try to live up to what was expected of him by a man who retained all his enthusiasm for sports, even if he were too old now for the more strenuous of them. Ronny had to give up entirely his rather studious, leisurely life. He had no time now for reading, or for the Spanish translations he had been so interested in doing with a young instructor at his college. And he gave up his beloved photography, which for years at school and summer camp and college had absorbed him. There was time for nothing now, and certainly no excess energy for anything but sports.

He struggled with them, with what valiance he could muster. He worked hard at a golf lesson every day, to improve his indifferent game, while his father and Colonel Kinney tramped their speedy eighteen holes every morning. He worked at tennis lessons for which he had no feeling whatsoever, because it had been one of the things his father had done best. And he spent hours every afternoon with his father and the Kinneys at polo games or at the races, where he bet and lost often, so that his father would not think him a piker, struggling wildly to conceal even from himself how supremely he was bored. It seemed to Ronny that nothing but luck and Gloria Cargill had kept his father from finding him out.

It had been all luck at first. His father happened never to have seen Ronny swinging rather wildly with a brassie, or practising an overhand with his usual awkwardness. Ronny took care always to be swimming among the breakers when everyone else was diving from the tower by the pool. He rather liked swimming, anyway, if he could be left alone at it. He grew brown from work with a medicine ball every morning on the sand, put on a little weight, and tried to remain inconspicuous. His father, incapable of imagining that any real man could be uninterested in the sports he loved, was only vaguely disappointed with him as yet.

If at times he looked a little puzzled at the quiet boy who took no prizes, broke no records at anything, would not play polo, was not handsome and dominant and magnetic, he had not thought about it long enough to be resentful. The boy was young yet. After all, he’d had too much schooling, too many women nurses as a small boy. It was a good thing he’d remembered to take him out of college. There would be still time for his polo.

“Stick with me, old boy!” he would shout to Ronny in one of his lavish moments, when a horse of his had won or he had taken a close game from Colonel Kinney. “I’ll make a he man of you yet. Next year, when you’re toughened up a bit, we’ll look around for a couple of good polo ponies for you and you can get in on the practice games up at Aiken.”

Those were the moments that Ronny, writhing inwardly, hated most. It made the time when his father must find him out seem very near. It was to the putting off of that moment, which would have been the end of everything for Ronny, that Gloria Cargill had assisted.

Ronny did not really like Gloria Cargill. He did not really like big wheezy Colonel Kinney, whose talk was like his father’s--all sports and poker and bootleggers--but somehow not the same--a thousand times more monotonous. He did not really like Mrs. Kinney, who was fat and flat faced, who wore the most expensive clothes in the most startling colours and played bridge like an inspired card sharp. He never knew what to say to any of them, and they had a way of screaming with laughter at some embarrassed speech of his and then staring at him curiously, with cold eyes, touched slightly with contempt. They always made him feel that they knew perfectly what a coward he was, if his father did not. But even they were easier to endure than Gloria, for all that she took his father’s attention from him.

His father said that Gloria Cargill was the most marvellous woman in New York, and all his world of rich men and expensive women and racing and cards and sport and supper clubs seemed to agree with him. She was the youthful widow of a tire king, and she spent her money like a spoiled empress. She was almost as tall as Andrew, with a lithe figure that was swaying and sleek either in a bathing suit or in one of her fabulous evening dresses. Her hair was wild red gold around the bold beauty of her face. Her brown-velvet eyes had little gold lights in them that burned when they looked at men, and the wet brightness of her mouth showed scarlet down the whole length of a hotel corridor or across a dance floor.

For Ronny the worst of it was that she had discovered that he was painfully shy of handsome women and therefore delighted in tormenting him. She could turn the whole force of her fascination on him, like a headlight, in which he squirmed and blinked miserably, to her laughing delight. She adored running a glittering hand suddenly down his coat sleeve, drowning him in her gusts of perfume, clinging with a burlesque of devotion to his arm and flashing her heady glance into his dazzled eyes. Once or twice Andrew had seen him blanch and jerk his hand back involuntarily and he had been furious, because an assured gallantry to women was to Andrew the fundamental of red-blooded masculinity. He lashed out savagely to the boy, if in a low voice, in one of those sudden rages which reddened his face uncontrollably. The whole thing fixed Ronny in his miserable sense of inferiority.

But if he secretly disliked Gloria, he was grateful to her for taking his father’s attention. It seemed that everyone was watching to see if she would marry Andrew. Their world agreed it would be an excellent match, with plenty of money on both sides. Sometimes Ronny had moments of bitter jealousy of her, of this woman like a brass band and an express train, who thought she was good enough for his splendid father. But chiefly he was humbly glad to be effaced. And if she did marry him, perhaps his father would not mind so much finding out, as he must sometime, how much his son was unlike and unworthy of him.

Ronny thought all that over in a flash now, joining them in the full sun upon the wharf. He was trying to keep himself from staring at that flying thing. Gloria caught his somewhat rigid glance and smiled at him brilliantly. He had never seen her beauty so bright and polished and complete. She was all in a green so bright it made your eyes redden to look at it--green shoes and small green hat with a diamond and emerald pin pulled tight down over her blazing gold eyes. There was a flash of emerald light on her finger and a cuff of glittering bracelets on her wrist. And yet she dominated all that flash and glare with the sheer assault of her eyes, her lips, her poise, her conscious charm. Beside her, fattish Mrs. Kinney in her egg-yellow chiffon was almost inconspicuous. Not that Mrs. Kinney cared. Her voice was as loud as Gloria’s, if not louder. Her laughter had edges. Ronny saw men around the wharves lingering and staring at the bright group, chauffeurs staring from parked cars and mechanics from the plane shed. The women especially seemed to be carelessly aware of the attention they were attracting. When Gloria glanced about her with quick casual glances, it was as if she trailed her laughter like an insolent plume across all the staring faces, fascinating them and knowing that she fascinated them, although they did not exist. That sort of thing always made Ronny’s feet and hands seem enormous and uncomfortable. Now he tried to imitate his father’s lordly buoyance, knowing exactly how far he failed.

For one moment he caught the aloof calculation in the eye of the aviator fussing about the plane which was to take them up. Instantly Ronny’s fear leaped and tore at him again. A line of perspiration was cold on his upper lip. He was afraid. He could not go up in that thing, to those terrible heights of thin air. He could not. He would not. He would tell his father that he wasn’t well. He did feel slightly nauseated already, and dizzy, as if he were looking down from a high building. Little tremors crawled beneath his skin. Nothing in the world could make him go up in that thing, even his father’s furious contempt.

Somebody gave him a soft leather helmet, and he buckled it under his chin with clammy fumbling fingers. Colonel Kinney was putting one on over his shiny bald spot. His father never wore anything on his head in Florida, and Gloria and Mrs. Kinney said their hats were quite tight enough. Then they were walking down the slippery plank and getting into the plane.

It was a three-seater. Mrs. Kinney and the colonel took the third seat and Gloria and his father the second. The women got in alertly, their high heels clicking on the deck, their sleek knees flashing among their skirts. His father motioned Ronny to sit next to the aviator, because it was his birthday treat. Ronny got in.

It was like sitting on a leather cushion in a high-sided tin bathtub, behind the smudged dimness of the short windshield. There were things--rods and handles--dangerous-looking things, between Ronny’s feet, which he would not have touched for worlds, and behind, overhead, the loom and shadow of the great wings.

Gloria’s jewelled hand patted his shoulder. “So nice of you, darling, to have this marvellous birthday!” she was crying, in that gay scream which made his very eardrums cringe. Suddenly the roar of the engine exploded in a thuttering numbness of sound that clamped mufflers on their hearing. Ronny felt his skin chill and crawl. They were off.

At the same time he had a flash of panicky decision that he must not clench his hands where this aviator could see them. There was something careless and matter-of-fact and young about him, which Ronny suddenly wished that he could emulate. So that, while the plane taxied out on the smooth bay water, rocking a little as it curved and thundered between the high black sides of oil tankers, past white bows of yachts, in an increasing blur of speed, he was equally concerned in watching his hands, fixed in a pose of relaxation, on his knees. He was bracing himself for what he knew must come, the first sickening leap upward. It did not come. There was only a slight adjustment in the angle of the seat. The water at a distance looked lower than it had been. And he suddenly realized that they were up, although he could feel no sensation in himself but a quickening of his heartbeats.

All around the plane the sapphire level of the bay was deepening and lowering. The plane ground ceaselessly, climbing with a great, roaring steadiness the orderly staircase of the wind. There was reality in it, and stolidity. Ronny felt a strange sense of lifting upward into a freedom from earthly things, a consciousness of wide salt wind and tremendous reaches of sunny air. He had forgotten about relaxing his hands now, and his heart was pounding, but in him climbed, as the plane climbed, an amazement and a new delight. He was hardly afraid at all. It was astonishing. It was delicious.

As the plane wheeled, lifted its nose, climbed, wheeled, and lifted in enormous roaring circles, the earth wheeled slowly beyond the side. The checkered green, the crowded glistening roof tops of Miami, stretching west to a mist of Everglades and sky, wheeled also. The blue bay floor wheeled, which was at this height bright turquoise, streaked with lime green, which whitened lightly on each side of the lean elbow of the causeway, where cars slid like beetles. Beyond Ronny’s right bathtub rim circled the straight lines of trees and streets that were Miami Beach; the apron patches of green that were golf links; the small squares that were hotel roofs, house roofs, patches and rectangles of colour flattened on the ground. Then, as they climbed higher and the plane lurched a little, heading into the vast sea wind, there before them, dim through the windshield, reaching out tremendously to right hand and to left, lay the ocean, a vast lavender miracle, wrinkling a little and reaching out, reaching out so enormously to the stretched horizon that it seemed to rise to meet it, to melt into it, and mingle in, the distance all one smoking, imperceptible blue.

High and far above it, yet somehow not remote, because there was nothing with which to measure the distance between, the plane snored straight eastward now upon the crystal level of its pathway, rocking a little upon its invisible cradling of air, strangely real, strangely prosaic, a thing of wood and metal, weighty, hard to the touch, solid to rest upon, commonplace in a world gone wonderful with high magic, all blue air and bluer unbelievable sea.

Beside Ronny, the aviator’s sunburned profile was calm. His hands moved only occasionally now on the controls. His manner was easy and assured. From time to time he glanced about him, out at the sea below his left shoulder; once across Ronny at the sky; and once, with a long narrowed glance, at something behind and overhead, at a wire or strut or something, which for some imperceptible reason had caught his attention. Ronny followed his glance with a little prickling thrill, but found himself nodding and grinning at Mrs. Kinney in the back seat, beyond his father’s shoulder, and at Gloria’s brilliant, enthusiastic face. His father and Colonel Kinney grinned at him briefly, eyes narrowed and faces still, with the manner of men enjoying themselves sedately. Ronny felt a sudden glow of friendship for all of them. Against the vastness of the background, underlaid still with the thought of his fear, they were familiar and dear and reassuring. He was overwhelmed with thankfulness that he had not shown them how much he had been afraid. The thuttering roar of the engines which shut about them so completely was not so noticeable. Ronny felt a sudden impulse to lean over and tell his father now all about how afraid of things he was. It seemed as if an ordinary tone could have carried and that in this moment of exultation his father would understand and forgive everything. As if Ronny did not know well enough, at the same moment, that the difference between his father and himself was more impenetrable than the roar.

The plane had been moving steadily upon its level above the vast wrinkled ultramarine of ocean for some thirty minutes now. Far behind, the mainland had melted into the mist, that at the horizon blurred from sea colour into sky colour, like the bloom on a grape. Before them the islands were equally obscured. Occasionally the plane lifted or joggled slightly, as the wings bucked the booming trade wind, but on the whole it was stable, lulling into oblivion remembered fears. Ronny was growing happier and happier in knowing himself relaxed, even sleepy, under the numbing drone.

He could let his glance fall down over the side for a minute or two, with no feeling in the pit of his stomach. He grew bolder, making himself stick his head out almost into the wind to stare down. But suddenly then, like a dropped weight, he was hit by a dreadful image of himself leaping to his feet and pitching over there, head first, and hurtling down the vast empty drop. The suddenness of it caught him in the stomach and the throat so that his spine crept. He withdrew his glance hurriedly to the comfortable commonplace within--dials and indicators, floor boards, the aviator’s strong freckled hands, and his own feet. They helped to steady him physically, but horror still mounted within him, not so much at the outside world, perilous as it had become again for him, but at the suddenly revealed depths of strangeness in himself. Perhaps it was not only that he was utterly unlike his father but that he was different from all normal men. Perhaps within his very brain crawled the maggots of imbalance. At that moment he felt it was even possible for him to go mad and scream, and leap screaming over there. Ugh! Yet, of course, it was not so. It was only his imagination. But a he man would never have been troubled by fancies as sick as that.

It was at that moment that Ronny, fighting to calm the tumult in him by staring fixedly at the aviator’s hands, saw the right one jerk as the whole plane lurched sideways. He saw the aviator throw a glance over his shoulder even while his hands and feet made curt gestures with the controls. The plane righted, but tossed violently before lurching again. Ronny, throwing a look back and up, saw a broken thing hanging and banging at one wing--a great blue hole and long rags of canvas. The vast circle of the sea below them was tipping up and circling like the surface of water in a tilted cup. The man beside him, working tensely, shot a look at him, a queer, tight-lipped grin, and the plane slid downward slowly, circling and nosing, with occasional moments of level. The engine roared as usual, and the air seemed calm.

The conviction that something was wrong, that something was awfully wrong, came to Ronny with a surprising slowness. The very worst things happened to him only in his imagination. When it was a matter of outward affairs which older men had always controlled so much better than he, it was hard to believe them capable of accident. The dark floor of the sea was rushing toward them in dizzy circles. And yet there was no horror in this for him, as there had been in the thought of plunging alone. Something had gone wrong, that was all, and the aviator had told him in that one glance that he was going to make a landing. Ronny had much more confidence in him than he would ever have in himself. They would probably land all right.

It was like sliding down an enormous shoot-the-chute, even to the water at the bottom. The ocean was there, rushing up to the pitch of the plane’s nose, a ridged, blurry surface of deep blue. They were going to land all right. Ronny was certain. He was growing a little pleased with himself. There was even a breath of relief at the more familiar level after all that breathless height.