Blood and Oranges by James Goldsborough (top 50 books to read .TXT) 📕

People felt sorry for the cute young thing in bangs and flats who didn’t seem to know what to ask. They’d start blabbing to cover the awkwardness. She had a good memory, a mnemonic camera that recorded everything but didn’t work when she was talking. So she didn’t talk. She smiled and nodded and poked here and there and remembered. She’ll marry Asa without telling a soul, Maggie thought, record it in her diary and tell us about it afterward. She’d always been like that. Little mouse sitting quietly in its corner, nose twitching, seeing everything, missing nothing.

“Howard Hughes,” Maggie began as lunch arrived, “is an impossible man—sexist, stubborn, prejudiced, just plain weird.”

Lizzie sipped iced tea.

“He is also extremely attractive.”

Lizzie arched an eyebrow.

“For all you read about him—the planes, the dames, the movies, everything sleek, fast-moving, nonstop—he is the most old-fashioned man I’ve ever met.

“Old-fashioned?”

“As in neat, picky, finicky, fastidious, everything in its place, antimacassars, lace doilies on the chairs, lace pillowcases.”

“Lace pillowcases?”

She smiled. “Yes, I was in the bedroom.”

Lizzie’s bright eyes asked the obvious question.

“No,” said Maggie. “It was a party. It’s where the coats were. Anyway, my point is that Howard thinks women belong in the bedroom, not in the cockpit. In Europe, I flew planes he’s never even heard of, and he still won’t let me fly.”

Lizzie chewed, drank, smiled at the passing waitress, waited. Maggie was prouder of her little sister than she ever let on, only four years out of college and already a familiar by-line for legions of newspaper readers. Who had changed more in those four years, she wondered: she herself, who’d lived in Europe, flown everything, witnessed war, married, seen her husband killed and made it home across an ocean infested with German submarines? Or the little mouse who hadn’t stirred out of Los Angeles yet somehow attained a level of stoical sophistication Maggie knew she would never have. It wasn’t jealousy. She loved her sister too much for that, and how could she be jealous of someone who’d always been in her shadow? But Lizzie had changed in those years, cloaked herself in a mystifying emanation that caused you to look past her, then quickly back again, certain you’d missed something. Maggie still remembered Santa Monica Hospital with doctors and police and parents all swirling around her bed and Lizzie sitting invisibly somewhere writing it all down. When would that appear in a book? Lizzie no longer lived in anyone’s shadow.

“Sleeping with him would make him even more stubborn,” Maggie went on. “He’s one of those men who gives nothing in return so what’s the point.”

The waitress brought coffee, watery and tasteless in two beige crockery cups. You didn’t come to the Brown Derby for the coffee. They fell silent, each woman lost in her thoughts. Lizzie still had no idea the purpose behind this lunch other than that they never saw each other anymore. Maggie hadn’t said a word about why she wanted to talk and obviously didn’t care whether she married Asa Aldridge or not. Lizzie would wait.

“So here’s my idea, Liz,” she blurted suddenly, “since I know you’ll never ask.” She smiled nicely. “What if I could get Howard Hughes into an air race with me, one on one? He loves competition, you know. He says women can’t fly, so what if I got him in a race and what if I beat him? What if the race was covered by the newspapers and followed all across the country, including in Washington? It could change everything. How could they then say that women can’t fly in this war?”

“Assuming you won, of course.”

“Oh, I can beat him all right. But say he fixes the thing some way so he wins—which I wouldn’t put past him—what would it matter? The race is the thing, isn’t it? The fact that he agrees to race a woman, one on one, that he recognizes our equality in the air.”

“If not on the ground.”

Maggie laughed. “That’s funny.”

“So how do you get him into a race like that?”

“That’s where you come in.”

Chapter 23

The five-star item appeared in Jack Smith’s Times gossip column.

***** Seems that Howard Hughes, known far and wide as a man with an eye for a sleek chassis of any kind and one who never refuses a challenge, is refusing a big one. The man who has set more air speed records than any other person alive or dead has declined a challenge to race around Catalina Island in his own planes, the H-1, planes built right here in Los Angeles and used to set most of his records. And who is the temerarious man who would challenge the champ? Why it is not a man at all. It is a woman, Margaret Mull of the well-known local Mull family. Miss Mull, a Hughes employee and well-known pilot in her own right, accuses her boss of under-valuing female pilots at a time the country needs pilots more than ever. So how about this, Mr. Hughes: accept Miss Mull’s challenge, invite the public to attend the race and dedicate the proceeds to the purchase of US War Bonds. The public wins—even if you don’t.

Hughes strong baritone was known to everyone at the plant and boomed out over loud speakers into every corner of the airfield and beyond to the marshes of Ballona.

“Will Margaret Mull please come to my office? ASAP.”

It was not repeated.

She was in greasy beige overalls, standing on a platform, her soft-helmeted head inside the motor of the F-11, a reconnaissance version of the D-2 ordered by the USAAF. Even so, she heard the announcement. All eyes immediately went to the only female in the hangar. Some of the guys shouted at her as she climbed down, her helmet muting their words, which was just as well. Ignoring them, she pushed the platform away from the plane, stowed her helmet, left the hangar, and started across the field toward the offices. She felt it like a summons to the