Sea Glass_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [56]
McDermott and Alphonse ride in silence and Alphonse watches the people getting on and off the trolley, more getting off than on as they travel farther and farther west. McDermott has a word with the conductor and offers him a cigarette and when he turns to look back at Alphonse, he points out the window. Alphonse sees a large flat field with a building and a tower and, lifting from the snow, an airplane. Suddenly the day, which until that moment has not felt one bit like a holiday, turns as sparkling as the snow.
* * *
“I sometimes come out here and watch the planes take off and land,” McDermott says. “They have a little waiting room inside that building there where you can get a cup of hot chocolate. I bet you’d really like a cup of hot chocolate right now.”
Alphonse has counted seven planes already. He doesn’t know all their names, but McDermott identifies them as they walk in from the trolley stop.
“See that one there with the Texaco star?” McDermott says, pointing to a bright red plane. “That’s a Lockheed monoplane just like the one Frank Hawkes piloted from New York to Los Angeles and back again last summer. Nineteen hours ten minutes going west. Seventeen hours thirty-eight minutes going east. West to east is faster.”
“Why?”
“The winds, I think. That big red one there? That’s a Fokker Thirty-two. Wingspan ninety-nine feet. It has four rooms, a kitchen, two lavatories, and sleeps sixteen. That one there — taking off? — that’s a Travel Air open cockpit. One hundred and twenty-two miles per hour. That’ll be headed out to New York. Most of these planes, they go to New York or to Boston, and then the passengers make a connection to another plane and go off to Miami or Saint Louis or Havana. There should be a crowd of people in the waiting room today, all trying to get home for Christmas. That one there? Coming in? That’s a Boeing mail plane. Pretty plane, isn’t it? It’ll be loaded with cards and packages today.”
Alphonse and McDermott walk through the snow, and even though it goes in the sides of his boots and sometimes reaches above his sock line, Alphonse doesn’t care. He can see a man in the tower with a microphone in his hands. To think that the airfield has been here all this time at the end of the trolley line and Alphonse hasn’t known it! Even if he was too shy to go all the way to the building he could have stood at the end of the field and watched the planes taking off and landing.
McDermott steers Alphonse into the waiting room. The warmth is a surprise, though everyone still has a coat on. In the corner there’s a woman in a fur coat talking to a woman in a cloth coat and when Alphonse looks at them again he notices that the woman in the cloth coat is the same woman who was in the brown bathing suit at the beach that day, the one who dug her hands and knees into the sand.
Alphonse worries that someone will come over and ask McDermott and him to leave, because everyone in the room is so beautifully dressed and there he is in shoes without laces and his pants not even reaching his socks, and McDermott — well, McDermott looks better than Alphonse does, but not as good as the people standing around drinking coffee and chatting as if they did this every day. And then Alphonse glances down and spots the light green sweater with a frill, which everyone can see now because he’s opened his jacket in the warmth, and he freezes the way a dog does when it knows it has done something bad.
“I’ll get you a cup of hot chocolate,” McDermott says.
Alphonse wraps his jacket tight across his chest and nods. He should have let his mother fix the zipper. McDermott goes to the counter and comes back again with a white china cup that has a blue line and an airplane on it, and Alphonse takes a long drink of the hot brew and thinks that it is just about the best thing he has ever had to drink in his whole long life.
The schedule is printed in chalk on a blackboard beside the