Georges was merely a boy; she could have easily—had she been less advantaged and fate turned on her—had a child about his age.
But here was Georges now, the organza blowing all around him as he looked smashing in a tennis sweater and shorts, with his long, long muscular legs, tan and lean. And long. Oh, so very long. He turned and smiled when she appeared, then rushed toward her with open arms and enveloped her with a tactical embrace and a wiggling tongue.
“I didn’t expect you,” she said, pulling away but still delivering an impromptu smile. “You should have called!”
“Love cannot wait!” he insisted, and pushed his face close to hers again, his eyes closed, mouth open. Tongue ready.
Mabel struggled against him for effect.
“What is wrong, mi mujercita hermosa?” he implored, pulling away, but with his hands still cupping her elbows.
“Georges, I’ve asked you before that if you are going to compliment me, please do it in English!” Mabel said disgustedly, then turned away.
“I said ‘my beautiful little woman,’ ” he replied, looking baffled.
“Is that all I am to you?” Mabel cried, turning back quickly enough that her curls bounced into her eyes. “A little woman? Well, I am the kind of woman who is about to make history! Fly across the ocean! How little is that, Georges? JUST HOW LITTLE?”
Georges’s hands dropped and he looked downward, defeated.
“Is the tiny man, yes?” the young man said quietly. “I saw the photograph in Le Figaro. I did not think you could love a man so small.”
“With his big shoes on, he’s only a little shorter than me!” Mabel protested. “And he has a plane. He’s going to fly to New York, and I’m going with him.”
“Pero te quiero,” he insisted, his eyes looking frantic. “¡Te amo, May-belle!”
“You must leave now, Georges,” Mabel said, sliding her eyes downward and away from him. “I must realize my destiny.”
He dropped to his tan, perfectly sculpted knee and clasped his hands together.
“One more bath,” he pleaded. “One more bath!”
Mabel shook her head silently. “I’m sorry,” she said as she swept out of the room. “I cannot.”
* * *
But Georges was a stubborn little gigolo, and returned the next night to passively shoot himself in the rib in the villa courtyard to prove his love. He was, with Arnaud at his side, rushed to the nearest hospital while Mabel continued to pack her things for her odyssey into greatness. She had a difficult time deciding which fur weighed less, the fox or the sable, the ermine or the mink. She threw them all into the trunk, forecasting that four little fur coats couldn’t crash an airplane.
She had almost finished packing all of her trunks the next morning when the telephone rang and Marcelle announced that it was Miss Jenny Dolly on the line.
“Oh, Mabel! What are you going to do?” Jenny cried the moment that Mabel picked up the phone.
“Oh.” Mabel laughed. “He was barely hurt at all! Can you believe all of the hullabaloo over a silly man who just can’t take no for an answer?”
“I thought he was unscathed,” Jenny said, surprised.
“Well, the injury was well-intentioned, but a little target practice wouldn’t hurt him any!” Then Mabel laughed.
“I would say you’re right about that, after almost clipping his wings as he landed!” Jenny giggled.
“I would hardly call him an angel, Jenny. He was a nice boy, yes, but an angel . . . ? Besides, I thought it was kept very well under wraps,” Mabel confessed in a lower tone. “I’m surprised the newspapers picked up on it at all.”
“It’s on the front page in Le Figaro, Mibs!” Jenny scolded. “Haven’t you seen it?”
“No. What for?” Mabel argued. “I’m in Chantilly! There are no photographers here. Why should I bother reading the paper?”
Then she cupped her hand against the receiver and called down to Marcelle to bring her that day’s edition of Le Figaro, very excited that the news of a near suicide over her had reached all the way to Paris! It must be superlatively more glamorous than she had thought! She then returned to Jenny.
“What’s done is done,” Mabel said firmly, but she smiled. “I have to move on with my life, and he with his!”
“I’m glad that you can see it that way,” Jenny said, still suspicious of Mabel’s big-girl act. She knew inside her friend must be heartbroken.
Marcelle appeared at the door with Le Figaro. She handed it to her mistress without making eye contact. Mabel snatched the paper from her and scanned the cover, looking for headlines with something along the lines of “Scorned Lover Faces Death in Bid for the Desirous Miss Boll,” but there was nothing. As usual, Jenny didn’t know what she was talking about, and was most likely doing some early-morning drinking—
And then Mabel spotted it. Not Georges’ name, not hers, but one name that made her catch her breath.
“LEVINE VOLE AVION POUR LONDRES.”
“Marcelle, what does it mean? What does it say?” Mabel cried as she shook the paper at her maid.
Without looking at it, Marcelle said quietly, “ ‘Levine Flies Plane to London.’ ”
Mabel dropped the paper, then screamed.
* * *
It came as a surprise only to Charles Levine that he and Maurice Drouhin should end up in a fight, despite their repeated attempts with a new English–French dictionary supplied by Hartman. It was, naturally, over payment, spurred by Levine’s announcement that any monies gathered from appearances and broadcasts would be split three ways, not two. Despite Mabel’s money in his pocket, Drouhin found this a breach of contract. The French pilot with the blossoming nose took a swing at Levine, who, due to his size, ducked an inch and missed the Frenchman’s fist. Then Drouhin filed a complaint with the courts, and, much like the injunction with Bertaud, Miss Columbia was locked in a hangar at Le Bourget by the end of the day for an indefinite amount of time.
But this time Levine wasn’t about to wait for an injunction to be lifted. This was France, not America, where the courts were notoriously slower, extensively complicated, and, in Levine’s view, far more corrupt.
He knew the guards at Le Bourget; he had been at the airfield every day for months. When he arrived one night, he explained to the guards that the Miss Columbia was not an ordinary aircraft; it needed to be flown every day to keep the engine in full operating condition. He promised—no, he swore—that it would be a quick flight around the airfield and then right back in the hangar. You have my word, Levine confirmed.
So the padlock was fitted with a key, and Levine climbed into the cockpit. After a few false starts, he rolled the Miss Columbia to the runway, even though he had never flown an airplane before without an instructor. He charged down the runway, managed to get it off the ground, and—if he read the compass correctly—headed for England.
Without any warning and, more important, without permission, the Miss Columbia circled Croydon Aerodrome in South London hours later. Levine attempted to land once and lost his nerve; then he missed the runway; and finally, on try number three, he touched down but bounced back up, then landed with the brakes squealing and smoking. Trying to navigate the plane into a hangar, he clipped the wing of the Miss Columbia against a wall and took it out.
Charles Levine, climbing out of the cockpit at Croydon and waving like a hero, wasn’t about to wait for anybody.
* * *
Mabel left all four trunks of her furs behind, throwing only an overnight bag and the blue suitcase into the passenger seat of the Duesenberg after hanging up with Jenny Dolly, and wasted no time heading straight for Paris.
She made two stops: one at her mansion to rouse her driver, and the other to see the jeweler who had some of the faux pieces completed. To her delight, the jeweler presented the necklace made of faceted jewels: one that had belonged to Genghis Khan, who certainly procured it in a rape-and-plunder episode; another from Catherine the Great, whose maid was stab
bed to death in an attempt to steal it; and another huge rock from the more recent ending of Czar Nicholas II, after which the Bolsheviks smuggled it out of Russia and then sold it to a jeweler. The baubles were in a crown intended for the betrothal of the prince of Wales to his cousin Lady May Cambridge, but after sufficient pestering by the press for a wedding date, the prince called off the engagement, the crown was disassembled, and Mabel Boll had a new necklace with the bloodiest of pedigrees to play with. It gave her a considerable neck ache; she guessed that it weighed more than her head. Or her dog.
That paste version was not even close to being as heavy, Mabel marveled. Did it still count as fake if she had the real one at home in a drawer?
After the jewelry stop, Mabel directed the driver to Le Bourget, where she marched onto the airfield and demanded a pilot, waving around a fistful of paper bills.
“Five thousand francs to the pilot who will fly me to London!” she yelled.
When no one paid attention to the woman waving money, she upped the ante.
“Six thousand francs! Fly me to London right now!”
She was starting to turn some heads.
“Fine. Seven thousand francs!”
She had everyone’s attention, and they stood back to watch this situation develop. A young man approached her with a smile. Mabel eyed him; he was suitable.
“Can you fly me to London at once?” she asked. “Do you have a plane?”
He shrugged and said, “Parlez-vous français?”
“You are off your nut if you think I’m going up there with a Frog,” Mabel snapped. “Eight thousand francs to an American or English pilot to fly me to London!”
“But how about a Canadian pilot? Erroll Boyd is around here somewhere,” another pilot offered in English.
Mabel raised her eyebrows and nodded. A Canadian would do.
“Boyd! Hey, Boyd!” the man shouted. “Feel like taking a run to London?”
“Nope,” a voice called back from a dark corner of the hangar.
“For eight thousand francs?” the first pilot added.
“Yep,” Boyd replied.
If Erroll Boyd had wanted to rattle off his experience as a war combat pilot and an aviation daredevil, Mabel would have simply waved her hand as she climbed into the plane. It didn’t matter, and she didn’t care. She just needed to get to London—that day. She had her alligator purse, her overnight bag, and the small blue suitcase. She was ready.
“Looks like we’ve got a storm coming in from the east,” Boyd said as he flipped through his instruments. “I bet we can beat that.”
“A bonus of five hundred francs if you can,” Mabel replied.
“Which reminds me,” Boyd said blankly. “Fee up front.”
Mabel sighed and dug through her purse, handing over the cash in a crumpled, massive mound.
Boyd tucked it into his shirt pocket and what wouldn’t fit there he shoved into the pocket of his leather jacket.
Mabel was busy plotting. She’d check into Claridge’s, praying that they had a suite, and then proceed to comb through London until she found one Charles Levine, probably checked into some hotel under “Drouhin.”
That Levine. That Levine.
If he thought he was going to ditch her, he had another thing coming.
Mabel felt the first bump after about an hour, strong enough to knock her alligator purse to the floor, and the second bump shot the purse almost behind her.
“You might want to hang on,” Boyd suggested, right before a jolt dropped them the height of a Parisian town house.
Mabel had one hand clutching the seat, the other clutching her ancient crown-of-thorns necklace until she realized she was wearing the imposter, and quickly transferred that hand to the other side of the seat.
“It’s just turbulence—air pockets,” Boyd replied, keeping his eyes on the controls.
They hit another void and Mabel shrieked like a chimp.
“This storm is coming in faster than I thought,” the pilot related. “We may have to land for a while until it passes.”
“Oh, no!” Mabel’s face froze. “You will not! I need to get to London today. If Charles Levine could make this flight, so can you!”
“Levine?” Boyd laughed. “Chump. He was just lucky, that’s all. I don’t know how that man did not kill himself. And he certainly didn’t have this weather.
“Keep an eye out below for a grassy field or a clear area,” Boyd instructed Mabel. “I’m going to have to bring her down.”
“Under no circumstances!” Mabel shrieked.
“Ma’am,” Erroll Boyd said frankly, “you paid me to fly but not kill myself. I’m landing this plane. It’s coming down.”
“Don’t . . .” Mabel warned, “. . . you . . . dare.”
From out the window, Boyd could see a good landing spot: a grazing field. He dipped the nose and headed toward it.
Mabel stomped her Cuban-heeled alligator shoes on the floorboards.
Within a minute the plane was on the ground, bumping and sliding along a muddy pasture. As the plane came to a final guttural stop, Mabel’s alligator handbag slid forward and hit the heel of her matching shoe.
“You have no idea what you’ve done,” Mabel screeched as she reached back and picked it up.
How was she supposed to get to London from the middle of a cow field?
With her purse in her hand, she reached up and popped Boyd on the head with it.
“Cows!” she shrilled, then bopped him again.
“Please stop!” he cried, and for a moment she stopped and got her breath.
“Cows! Goddamn cows!” she blurted, then smacked him one more time, grabbed her overnight bag, her blue suitcase, fell out of the plane, and hobbled across the muddy field to the road beyond.
CHAPTER THREE
SUMMER 1927
Ruth Elder.
Ruth Elder was bored.
How long was she supposed to stand up on this stage in a wool bathing suit with everyone ogling her? Well, not just her, but the twenty or so other girls with her, too.
She couldn’t see anything past the edge of the round, beaten platform, although she could feel just about a million eyes on her. The crowd grumbled to themselves, picking out their favorites and picking apart the features of the girls less fortunate.
“That one has a banana for a nose,” Ruth heard one onlooker say, and hoped she wasn’t the inspiration for the remark.
This is the silliest thing, she told herself. Why are any of these people here, anyway? She was surprised they didn’t cancel the contest altogether. She wanted to be out of there, her ear to the radio, getting as close as she could to the latest reports of Lindbergh and his flight to Paris.
Of course, she had been following the news stories of the flight since he had taken off the day before, and it was just the most exciting thing. It was as thrilling to Ruth as imagining getting in the cockpit and flying herself. She loved being in the air, the thrill of having no ties to the earth, nothing to keep her tethered. She understood Lindbergh’s desire to fly across the ocean: no experience on the ground could compare to gliding across clouds and seeing everything from above. No one else up there, just her and the steady buzz of the engine. Above, there were no strings to get herself tangled up in, no dishes to wash or laundry to boil and roll. Of course, she was fortunate: she’d only had to clean up after herself since she returned to Lakeland, Florida, last year and her husband, Lyle, stayed in Panama. She just could not take that jungle for one more blessed day. Relentless rain and puddles of muck everywhere. She told that to Lyle; she said, “Mister, I’ve taken just about enough of this place. If I don’t get outta here soon, I’m gonna go cuckoo! Right in front of your store, too!”
Lyle had some good sense sometimes, and he sent his young, beautiful wife back to Lakeland alone, with enough money to get a little place for herself and the promise that he’d come home just about whenever he could. He had managed a couple of trips back, but for Ruth, oh! Ruth was bor
ed easily. She had been squirrelly since she was a girl, almost skittish. She could outrun any boy, and broke a horse in seconds flat right after Daddy said to leave that devil animal alone. After that, none of her girl cousins were allowed to play with her, their mothers claiming that Ruth was “too wild.”
And maybe that was true. She was a girl on the wrong side of the railroad tracks in Anniston, Alabama, a demarcation line that separated classes as well as color. What lived on one side stayed on that side, but Ruth didn’t mind. There was plenty of fun to be had on the side where she belonged, and she had no hesitations, especially when she entered high school and wasn’t a tomboy anymore, putting on lipstick, bringing up her hemlines an inch or two. She stopped playing basketball and learned how to drive Daddy’s car, sometimes sneaking off after dark with it. She would drive away just to sit and talk with some girlfriends and sometimes boys in a field behind Anniston High School and learn how to smoke cigarettes. Now and then the boys would take out a bottle of hooch and they’d share it. One time a boy tried to kiss her, and she socked him in the jaw. Made his lip bleed and his tooth wiggle. Ruth made her own decisions, not some poor skinny boy with a dirty neck who’d just left his spit on a nasty old bottle.
Mostly she just loved to drive. To hold the Model T’s steering wheel and pick her destination when she was old enough to decide on one. She loved being alone on the road, leaving her little life behind and believing that she had a new one just ahead of her. She wondered just how far she’d get from Alabama when she had the chance.
Then her oldest sister, Pherlie, got married, and all eyes turned to Ruth. Ruth paid it no mind until she spotted a blue teal Paterson touring car with slender running boards and two rows of red leather seats parked in the school lot. It belonged to Mr. Claude Moody, her English teacher. Ruth smiled to herself. She could go fast in that car; she could go far.
So Ruth did what she did best—she called her own shots—and a week after graduation she left one Sunday morning for a walk, picked up her suitcase she had stashed at a friend’s house, and drove off in the Paterson sitting next to Mr. Moody. But in several months, they headed for Clayton, population three hundred, with Ruth’s suitcase in the backseat of a used Model T, since the Paterson had been sold shortly after Claude lost his job and the couple started getting hungry.