The Fly Boys (24 page)

“Is it strictly business, or … is it pleasure?”

“A little of both, I’d say,” Linda replied evenly. “He might offer me a job.”

“On his newspaper?”

“Yes.”

“And you’d probably sleep with him to get it, wouldn’t you?” Steve accused. He instantly regretted his words. He’d just met
her. Who was he to act so jealous?

Linda glared at him. “Who the hell do you think you are to say that to me, you bastard! That’s a terrible thing to say!”

“But is it true?”

“Go to hell!” she spat at him, her eyes flashing blue flame. “And what if I
did
sleep with him for a job! What of it? I know what I want for myself in this man’s world, and I intend to get it, and if sometimes
being a woman is a disadvantage and sometimes it’s an advantage,
what of it
?”

“You’re such a wiseacre,” Steve sulked.

“Don’t give me too much credit for brains,” she muttered, grabbing her purse and lighting a cigarette. “I said
you
were my type, didn’t I?”

“Dammit! I don’t want you to go!”

She nodded. “I know. And part of
me
doesn’t want me to go. That’s the major reason why I’m going.”

“I don’t get that,” he complained angrily.

“Yeah, you do,” she said quietly, exhaling smoke.

Steve glanced at her. “Well, maybe I do.” Looking at her, he couldn’t suppress a smile. “You’re one tough dame.”

“Tough as nails,” Linda agreed. She winked at him. “Tough as you, and that’s no lie.”

The doorbell jangled insistently. On her way out she paused to kiss Steve on the cheek. “See you in the funny pages, Cap’n.”

“’Bye, Baby Blue Eyes.”

She left the bedroom. Steve listened to her cross the apartment and open the closet to fetch her coat. Then he heard the click
of the front door as she let herself out.

“Wow,” he told the empty room.

He was on his way out of the bedroom when he happened to glance into the bathroom. He laughed out loud.

Linda had used her lipstick to cross out Doreen’s name and insert her own. After “
Call Me
” Linda has inserted her Los Angeles telephone number.

Steve fetched his little black book and carefully copied the number down. He knew he’d be calling it one of these days.

“
Tough as nails,
” she’d bragged to him. “
Tough as you.
”

An older woman … son of a bitch.

“Son, I’d hoped that you would have come to your senses by now,” Herman Gold murmured into the telephone.

“Why do you look at it that way, Pop?” Gold could clearly hear Steven’s angry tone above the hiss and crackle of the transcontinental
telephone wire. “Why do you insist on viewing my decision to make a career in the Air Force as some form of temporary insanity
on my part?”

“Because I know where you belong—” Gold began.

“Oh, is that right?” Steve demanded, sounding sarcastic. “
You
know where
I
belong? And where’s that? As your office boy?”

Gold struggled not to lose patience with his son. Anger only made things worse between them. “I would never have you be an
office boy, and you know it. I’d give you a good position at GAT. A responsible, respectable job—”

“As your lackey,” Steven cut him off.

“No! As my assistant!” Gold said, his voice rising.

“Oh, sure,” Steven laughed. “Assisting you in
what?
Answer me this, Pop. If I wasn’t your son, and my résumé came across your desk, would you hire me
then?
”

“But—but
you are
my son.” Gold evaded.

“That’s what I thought,” Steve said, sounding weary. “Thanks, Pop, but no thanks.”

“Okay,” Gold sighed. “Have it your way. But you yourself have told me how unsatisfied you are stuck in Air Force public relations.”

“Pop, I’m working on something for myself,” Steve said.

“A promotion?” Gold asked eagerly. “You’ve been a captain a long time now, son.”

“I
know
that.”

Gold heard the cold, flat tone.
He’s feeling bad enough about his stalled career. He doesn’t need his father rubbing salt in the wound
. “Don’t get me wrong,” Gold said hastily, trying to repair the damage. “You’ll always be tops in my book.”

Gold was gratified to hear Steven chuckle.
Damn
, Gold thought sadly.
When he was a little boy it was always a snap for me to get him to laugh
.

“Pop, don’t sweat it. Like I said, I’m working on something….” He trailed off.

“Can’t you tell me what you have in mind?” Gold asked, intrigued.

“It’s going to take some time,” Steven said evasively. “I don’t want to tell you any more about it right now.”

“Okay. All right,” Gold said, disappointed. “But I don’t understand why you have to expend so much energy working on
creating
something for yourself when everything you could want is right here waiting for you.”

“Pop, I’ve got to hang up now.”

“Yeah, sure,” Gold said softly. “Stevie,” he hesitated. “I …”

“Talk to you soon, Pop.”

“… love you—” Gold told the dial tone. As usual, a hundred different things to tell his son flooded into Gold’s mind. Why
couldn’t he ever think of the damned things while Steve was still on the line?

He hung up the telephone and lay back on the big circular bed, to stare up at the cherubs cavorting across the bedroom’s painted
ceiling. It was just seven in the morning. What with the time difference between the coasts, Steven found it most convenient
to call home early.

The bedroom Gold shared his wife reflected her tastes. The French doors leading out to the balcony were framed in draperies
of embroidered, emerald satin. Mirrors gilded in honey gold reflected ebony wall paneling inlaid with floral bouquets carved
from ivory and rosewood. The room’s scrolled, gilt-bronze furniture reposed on lion’s paws upon the plush ivy-green carpeting.

What Erica had spent down through the years just on interior decorating this house was more than they had paid in total for
their first home, Gold thought. But what the hell; they had the money.

He thought about how Steven liked to make all of his long-distance calls from his Pentagon office in order to save money.
He wouldn’t have to worry about finances if he came to work at GAT
, Gold brooded.
And I wouldn’t have to worry about our estrangement
.

Father and son had traveled a rocky road since Steven had entered manhood. The battle over the boy’s destiny had begun back
when Steve was still in high school. Gold had insisted that his son pursue the goal of a college education, but Steve had
defied him by running away from home when he was barely seventeen. Gold had hired private detectives to track his son, but
the gumshoes had lost the kid when he’d lied about his age and used a phony name to volunteer for service with the Flying
Tigers in China. Gold had managed to find Steve and bring him home, and there’d been a reconciliation between them when Gold
had accepted the fact that his son intended to serve as a fighter pilot. That uneasy truce had ended with the war. Gold had
assumed that when the fighting ended his son would settle down into a career at GAT.

He’d assumed wrong. Gold had never been so disappointed as on that day back in the fall of 1945 when Steve had informed him
that he’d decided to make a career of the Air Force. Since then, Gold tried to understand that Steve wanted to be his own
man, but he could not totally suppress his bitterness over the way his only son had so harshly and easily rejected everything
he’d spent his life building.

Gold got out of bed and headed for the shower. As he passed a mirror, he stopped to gaze at himself. He looked drawn and tired
standing there sleepy-eyed in his rumpled pajamas. There were deep lines etched into his face. His day-old beard and what
was left of his red hair were flecked with white.

Fifty years old
, he thought.
Old enough to stop kidding myself; to know that I’m not going to be here forever
.

Old enough to accept the fact that Steve was not going to come into the business. Gold had no other sons. He had to wonder
who would carry on as leader of GAT. What was the point of all his hard work if control of GAT was destined to pass into some
other man’s—a stranger’s—hands?

Gold showered and shaved and dressed for the office in a gray linen double-breasted suit, black leather loafers, maize cotton
shirt, and a maroon and yellow foulard-patterned silk tie. He went downstairs to find his wife and daughter just finishing
breakfast in the screened veranda off the kitchen.

Large potted palms stood guard in the corners of the veranda’s gray slate floor. A slowly revolving fan suspended from the
teak ceiling stirred the morning breeze. The veranda looked out on a fragrant flower garden. The splashing pink marble fountain
was framed by a whitewashed arbor draped with purple wisteria.

Erica was sipping her coffee as Gold came into the room. She was wearing a plum-colored satin dressing gown. Her blonde hair
was down around her shoulders.

“Good morning, darling,” she murmured as Gold came around the table to give her a kiss. “I thought Steve sounded good this
morning, didn’t you?”

“Hmm,” Gold grunted noncommittally. Erica had always sided with Steve against him. He loved his wife dearly, but sometimes
it got on his nerves the way she persisted in the crazy notion that their son was right in resisting Gold’s efforts to bring
him into the business.

“Hi, Daddy,” Gold’s daughter, Susan, greeted him. Suzy was twenty-six. Like her brother, she had Erica’s coloring. This morning
her blonde hair was twisted up into a bun. She was dressed for work in a gray skirt and white blouse.

“Hi, Grandpa!” Gold’s grandson, Robert, was on the floor peeking out from beneath the table beside Erica’s chair.

“Hi, kiddo!” Gold stooped down to give Robert a hug and a kiss. The boy was barefoot, wearing blue shorts and a white polo
shirt. “Where’s your shoes?” he asked jovially.

“Don’t need ‘em!” the boy boasted. Almost six years old, Robert was the spitting image of his late father—handsome, with eyes
the color of emeralds, and thick coal-black hair. “I’m goin’ to the beach, Grandpa!”

“Wish I could go,” Gold moped exaggeratedly.

“Why can’t ya?” Robert demanded, his face scrunching up in concern.

“Grandpa has to go to work,” Susan answered absently. “Just like Mommy,” she murmured, her brown eyes intently scanning the
sports page of the morning newspaper.

As Gold straightened up from his grandson in order to give his daughter a good-morning peck on the cheek, he glanced at the
sports headlines. They were all about the upcoming summer Olympics in London, the first such games since Jesse Owens’s 1936
triumph in Berlin.

As usual, the news and business sections of the paper were by Gold’s place setting. He scanned them as the new girl they’d
hired to assist Ramona, the housekeeper, came out of the kitchen to pour him coffee.

The front page had stories on the continuing political mess that was the presidential campaign, the turmoil in the Mideast
as the fledgling state of Israel skirmished with the Egyptians in the desert, and the ongoing Berlin airlift. The business
section had an in-depth article concerning where the presidential challengers—the Republican Thomas Dewey, the States’ Rights
Dixiecrat candidate Strom Thurmond, and the Progressive Party’s Henry Wallace—stood on the Taft-Hartley union-busting law.
In the article all the candidates took the opportunity to attack the incumbent Truman, who was in the midst of a valiant but
probably doomed whistle-stop campaign to save his presidency. Truman’s strategy so far in the election was to blast the Republican
Congress for doing nothing, and to attack Taft-Hartley as a setback for the American working man.

There was also an article in the business section on the windfall profits being enjoyed by various companies leasing transport
equipment to the military for the duration of the airlift. GAT, for example, had leased some MT-37 cargo planes to the Air
Force. Accordingly, Gold had been interviewed for the article.

Gold was happy to see that the reporter who’d written the article had kept her promise to treat GAT kindly. He had initially
been reluctant to cooperate with the reporter. From past experience he’d learned to be wary of the media, and in this specific
instance he’d worried that it might put GAT in a bad light if the public knew the company was profiting from the Berlin crisis.
He’d agreed to the interview only as a favor to Steve. It seemed that his son was close friends with the wire service correspondent,
a young woman named Linda Forrest. According to Steve, Miss Forrest was just beginning a new job at World Press. Steve felt
getting an exclusive with Herman Gold would be just the boost this particular assignment—and her career—needed.

“Daddy, I’m going to drive my own car to work this morning,” Susan said as the nanny came in to collect Robert. “I’ve got
a lot of work piled up on my desk, and I want to tackle it before the phones start ringing.”

Gold watched admiringly as his daughter scooped up Robert, lifting the giggling boy high in the air before giving him a kiss
good-bye. His daughter was a big, strong girl.

“Remember,” Susan warned the nanny as she set down her son. “Not too much sun for him today. I don’t want him coming home
red as a lobster, like last time.”

“Yes, Mrs. Greene,” the nanny said.

“Good-bye, Mommy, good-bye, Grampa, good-bye, Gramma,” Robert called gaily as the nanny carried him out of the room.

“Another fifteen years and
he
can come into the business,” Gold muttered.

Both Erica and Suzy burst out laughing. Gold immediately blushed. He hadn’t realized that he’d been thinking out loud.

“Poor Daddy!” Susan said sympathetically. “I’m so sorry that your talks with Steven upset you so.”