Sea Glass_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [57]
Honora
Honora has never been to an airfield before and is glad she thought to ask Vivian if she needed someone to ferry her automobile back to the beach. At first the Ford wagon felt stiff and unfamiliar (Don’t ever buy a Ford, Sexton said that first day at the bank), and Honora wasn’t at all sure she could manage it. But before they passed through the marshes, she had adjusted her driving to suit the quirks and oddities of Vivian’s automobile, and after that, the journey was simply fun. It strikes Honora that it has been quite some time since she has experienced anything like fun, surely not since the summer, before she and Sexton learned that the house was for sale. She left Sexton a note on the kitchen table. Gone to take a neighbor to the airfield in the neighbor’s car. Will explain later. Should be back about 5:00. Happy Christmas. Love, Honora. Of course she will forgive her husband for having missed the promised Christmas lunch, but it won’t hurt Sexton Beecher one little bit to be the one left waiting for a change.
The trip to the airfield took Honora and Vivian through Ely Falls, where they drove slowly past the displays in the windows of Simmons Department Store, exclaiming over the dioramas of old-fashioned Christmases with mannequins in high-necked dresses and long dressing gowns sitting around trees decorated with ribbons and cranberry chains and candles (though surely those cannot really have been lighted candles, Honora thinks now). Vivian and she played a game in which they tried to guess, by the demeanor and the dress of the shoppers darting in and out between traffic, what was in their packages. Vivian saw a dapper little man in a tweed coat and a bow tie and guessed a Charis foundation garment with an adjustable belt (for his mistress, of course). Honora saw a plump middle-aged woman and guessed a Hormel ham. Vivian hooted beside her.
Honora and Sexton had talked about traveling to Taft for the holiday, but Sexton said he was reluctant to take too much time away from his clients. Honora wrote her mother asking if she and Uncle Harold might get on a bus to Ely Falls and spend the holiday with them at Fortune’s Rocks (Honora anxious to show the house off), but her mother replied that Harold was still too feeble to travel (no surprise) and that they would have to make do this year with packages and letters.
“Are you afraid to fly?” Honora asks.
“Gosh, yes,” Vivian says, drawing a mother-of-pearl compact from her purse. “White knuckles all the way.”
“Where’s your luggage?”
“I had the trunks sent on ahead. Useless stuff. What on earth did I imagine I was going to do with a white ermine wrap?”
“And you’ll take Sandy with you on the plane?” The dog, in a small wooden basket, looks nearly as apprehensive as Vivian.
“He’ll be fine. Most people find flying is quite lovely, actually, and I’ll admit the service is miraculous, and the gin is first-rate. The cabin has six rooms. The ceiling is painted with stars, the toilets are modern, and the club chairs pivot so you can play cards. I’ll hardly have time for a rubber before we land.”
“I envy you.”
“They say it’s safer than driving a car, but don’t believe it for a minute.”
Wooden chairs line a spare but freshly painted room. A woman in a flying suit disappears behind a door marked “Operations” and emerges carrying a map, and when she crosses the room on her way to the landing strip, everyone pauses to gape, especially the half dozen men who are waiting for their planes. The face of a small boy next to the window can only be called rapt. Honora wonders if the boy is getting on a plane himself, but then decides not; he is poorly dressed and pitifully thin. She’s surprised that his father, who is standing next to the boy, would let him out in such bad weather in boots that