There are references to specific dates and historical events in this, that place it at a particular point in time, so it seems necessary to tell you that it was written in the post-Watergate era---a transitional time for America and the character.

                                                FLIGHT     by  Patrick Breheny

     No one ever found out what happened to Mrs. Willis. Investigators learned one thing---she didn’t like the way things were. Retired, elderly, widowed, she was among that portion of Americans who had shifted along an invisible fault line after World War II to become the chunk of Los Angeles’ population, building the long arteries of the city, and eventually choking them with traffic.

     Once Mrs. Willis had been part of her community. Her husband Jack was active with the Chamber of Commerce in Hollywood, and she sponsored Communion breakfasts for the Police Department at Blessed Sacrament, the church on Sunset Boulevard from which an occasional movie star is sill buried. Both of her sons graduated from Hollywood High School; Joey was commencement speaker at his graduation, and Mark in senior year, played Teddy in Arsenic and Old Lace. Joey, after graduation, went to UCLA, and Mark, in turn, to Cal Tech. Mark had wanted to study acing, but his dad had convinced him to be more practical.

     That perception of solidarity no longer existed. With time, Mrs. Willis and her senior community had become a chancre beneath the cosmetic of California goodllife. She was, at least, more fortunate than many of her peers. She lived, with a small inheritance from her husband and her social security, in a crumbling single bedroom stucco cottage that was but one unit in a flora centered court of the type that abound in Hollywood, and are painted in pastels of pinks and oranges and greens, as garish as the trees sold in street corner lots at Christmas. Mrs. Willis’ courtt was apple green.

     Mrs. Willis’ neighbors were retired also, and, not surprisingly, reported that she was an opinionated woman. There were many things she did not like. She did not like living so close to the corner of Santa Monica Boulevard at Madison Street near Vermont Avenue, with the traffic and noise and vice that she was so often reminded of on television by the chief of police. And if she like the police chief’s annual vice crackdowns, she did not like the helicopter keeping her awake at night, even if it was watching for the colored from the next block who might be coming in her back window (some of whom she no longer had to worry about living behind her because they lived across the street.) There were hippies on the block too, and Mexicans, and  Asians and Arabs, and sometimes it seemed to her that all of Hollywood was being bought be foreigners.

     In fact, when one of the newcomer speculators bought the court she lived in and almost doubled her rent, Mrs. Willis decided she’d had enough.  She told the owner it was her last month, to apply her security deposit to pay for that, and bought a ticket to Kennedy Airport to visit her brother Michael whom she had not seen in twenty five years.

     Mrs. Willis had once been Margaret Simmons, a nice girl who grew up in the Bronx. When the IND subway was extended to the Bronx along the Grand Concourse in the 1920’s, her family moved near Fordham Road from Vinegar Hill in Harlem.

There were still tennis courts and meadows in Fordham then, though the apartment buildings were already going up, all five stories high walk-ups (the six story elevator buildings would come later), and in her parish to be, the bishop had consecrated the new church and school a year before she moved there. Margaret was at that consecration. It took an hour and a half on three trolleys to get there from Harlem, because the subway would not open for another month, but her father brought her up on a muggy Sunday afternoon to visit the neighborhood where she would spend her adolescence, and to see the bishop bless the buildings where he had determined she would go to school. Margaret did as her father had hoped. Not only did she graduate from the grammar school and high school, but one June Sunday in 1933 married Jack Willis, who boy from the neighborhood who was well liked and thought to be ambitious. Later both her sons were baptized in the church by Father Martin, the old priest who had been pastor since the parish’s inception.

     All of that, of course, was long ago. After the war, Jack Willis moved to California to follow Army friends who’d found work with the studios, and took a job as a carpenter. He saved for several years, then got a contractor’s license from the state, a GI loan, and opened his own construction firm.

     The boys spent their grade school years in parochial school before going to Hollywood High. The public school was a concession Mrs. Willis allowed because she figured if they didn’t have the faith by then they’d never have it. Joey, the UCLA graduate with an ROTC commitment stayed in the Air Force as a career, attained the rank of captain, and in 1968, at the age of 34, was shot down and killed in Vietnam. Mark, the younger, was an engineer, and had a family of his own in Inglewood. Jack Willis died of a stroke five years ago, and now Mark brought his mother out to the house to see the kids every other Saturday or Sunday. The weekend in between was reserved for his mother-in-law.

     It was Mark who took Mrs. Willis to the airport the Sunday she flew east, and it was he who was supposed to meet her when she returned. The flight attendants would remember her. She told them it was the worse food she had ever tasted, she could not chew it with her dentures, and that even if she could, she wouldn’t eat it. The movie was about Watergate, and she said she had seen enough of that in two and a half years on television, why couldn’t they just leave the poor man alone, hadn’t he suffered enough already. She told one of the attendants that if the wheel of the food cart brushed her shoe again she would kick her right on the shin.

     In New York, brother Michael met her. Michael, several years older, also retired and a widower, had a house in Red Bank, N.J. a community of old, well kept wood frame buildings at the Jersey Shore. Mrs. Willis had ideas of moving permanently to Red Bank with Michael, and that was the purpose of her trip.

     Michael, unfamiliar with Queens, got lost and somehow found himself driving toward New England instead of the George Washington Bridge. Their route, via a detour from the Merrick Parkway, sliced through the city but avoided contact with it. The buildings beside the road, separated by concrete and steel barriers, seemed as remote from the interior of the car as pictures from the moon. The Cross Bronx Expressway signaled exits for streets with familiar names---Webster Avenue, Jerome Avenue---but the tenements hovered like silos for human storage, and the lights from the windows seemed to generate a frenzy to match the hundreds of speeding automobiles. “You wouldn’t know it now,” Michael told her, though she wanted to get off and look, but didn’t ask because the evening was late, and the Bronx, she had been told, was not safe after dark. Michael’s hair was white, his face pinched into one great wrinkle, and he was so thin he looked taller than she remembered him. She didn’t recognize him at all at the airport until he shouted to her. “Margaret,” he’d called her, and that seemed strange. Her husband had called her “Mag”, her son called her Mom, and her neighbors called her Mrs. Willis. She only saw Margaret. MARGARET WILLIS. It was printed on social security checks, and utility and phone bills. As Michael drove the eight year old Impala onto the bridge, she glanced at the stranger with such little resemblance to her brother, and wondered if there had ever been such a person as Margaret Simmons. Certainly there wasn’t now. Perhaps she had dreamt it all.

     It didn’t seem Red Bank would work out. It was damp for one thing, much too damp for July, and she felt aches she’d felt in Los Angeles only on rainy winter evenings. Michael had intestinal problems, constipation, and smelled much of the time from passing gas. The pains reminded her of what old fashioned northeastern winters were like when she was young, and if she was so uncomfortable in July, what would December bring?

     After two days of enduring rheumatism and Michaels groaning water pipes and faucets, she decided it was time to see New York where, the TV reported, the temperature was in the eighties. Michael balked. He didn’t like the idea of going to the Bronx. He saw no point in it. There would be no one there they knew. He didn’t want to drive his car into New York on a weekday.

     But she was determined, and he couldn’t let her go alone either. Together, on Wednesday morning, they rode a bus to the Port Authority Bus Terminal building in Manhattan, then took the subway to the Bronx. She wanted to see the church where she had been married, and the apartment building she had lived in as a youngster.

     They got off the D train at Fordham Road. The street, as she remembered it, swarmed with people. Alexander’s Department Store was still there, though in front there were street vendors now selling hot dogs, pretzels, costume jewelry, and cheap articles of clothing. Many of the shoppers were black and Latin, though Fordham still had lots of whites around. It seemed sacrilegious to her that so many of the young girls, of all ethnicities, were dressed in tight blue jeans and shorts, and had crosses dangling over exposed cleavage.

     As Mrs. Willis and her brother walked east on Fordham, boarded windows and twisted steel gates gave documentation of the pilferage of a recent blackout. They went a few blocks and turned south, down a narrow street littered with black garbage bags awaiting pick up, in front of buildings she recognized, now smudged with soot along the tops from years of incinerator smoke and coal.. The numbers of people in the street escaping the hot apartments reminded her of Harlem, of which she had memories that entered her consciousness like the opening and shutting of a camera shutter, a sudden Rorschak blot of light forming a butterfly, then gradually, inexorably, returning to darkness.

     They walked several  blocks more, turned a corner, and abruptly she was in front of the church. The façade of the building was a multi-colored hodgepodge of names, codes, obscenities, gang emblems and word rendered unreadable as they were spray painted over by others. It seemed the structure could be used immediately as a psychedelic circus. Mrs. .Willis went up the steps to the entrance, but a thick chain hung padlocked around the handles. There was a small, incongruously neat sign enclosed in glass, the type one sees in the reception lobby of a funeral parlor, white one inch plastic letters contrasted by a black cushion, giving the times of masses and confessions, and a phone number to call in an emergency. Next to the sign was a bell she tried pressing but found stuck.

     “Its abandoned,” Michael said. “They built a new church on the Concourse, and took all the benches and statues out of here. Come on, let’s go.”

     Michael had to help her down the stairs. The rheumatism was getting her for sure.  The building they grew up in was two blocks away, and she insisted, again against Michael’s protests, that she see it. So they slowly walked another block, then turned the corner, and walked one more.

     The building had been burned. The front doors, the basement and first floor windows, and the fire escape outlets all the way up were sealed by corrugated tin bolted into the masonry, the red bricks charred around every window. A message on the sidewalk from an aerosol can appeared to be written in blood. “Vito was here” it said. Vito had left too.

     She was having more difficulty walking. They were a block from the Grand Concourse and Michael shouted up to a cab as it passed through the intersection. Margaret had to sit on the stairs in front of the burned out tenement. They were the steps she’d sat on with Jack, after movies and dances, fifty years earlier. The taxi driver heard them, circled the block, and came down from the other side of the street.

     They took the cab to the Port Authority, then bussed back to Red Bank. Thursday she called Mark in Los Angeles, and told him to meet her the next afternoon at the airport. Friday morning Michael drove her back to JFK.

     What happened to Mrs. Willis after that is uncertain. Michael saw her board the plane, and two of the flight attendants remembered her. It was the same Los Angeles based crew she had flown to New York with, and they noticed because she did not complain this time. The couple who sat beside her realized at some point that she was gone, they assumed to get a better view of the movie, though they could not actually remember her getting up, and she’d left her sweater on the seat.

     The only thing determined absolutely was that she did not meet Mark in the L.A. terminal, and her baggage was never claimed until the airline eventually gave it to Mark. The police filed a missing person’s report, they considered the possibility of kidnapping but could find no evidence, witnesses nor motive and, with no leads, left the case open but in reality stopped investigating  The airline did its part too, with no more tangible results. They stated indisputably that she could not have fallen out of the plane without the cabin becoming depressurized, and nothing of the sort happened during the flight. All that was really known was that Mrs. Willis had disappeared. It was as if, somewhere between New York and Los Angeles, between a past that did not exist and a present that was intolerable, she had simply, literally, vanished in the air.

Copyright by, and all rights reserved to, Patrick Breheny