In her last known photograph, Irene Foster stands at the door of her Rofrano Sirius and waves to the crowd below, all of whom had risen before dawn to watch her depart. She wears her usual uniform, a loose, shapeless flight suit that looks gray in the monochrome print but was actually khaki, covered by a leather jacket. Knee-high boots like a cavalry officer. A leather cap covering her famous sand-colored curls. Two rows of small, even white teeth gleam from between her smiling lips. Of all the photographs taken of Irene, this one is perhaps the most famous, because it’s the last moment anybody could say for sure where Irene Foster was and what she was doing. And everybody loves a mystery, don’t they? Everybody wants to look into those pale, thrilled eyes and imagine what happened next.

Hanalei, Hawai’i

November 1947

The last time I saw Velázquez before he rejoined his squadron in The Netherlands, we went for a walk in the darkened Paris streets after dinner. He had tried to obtain an overnight pass but could not, so we had only a few hours before he was required to report to the airfield. We ate at the Ritz, because it was one of the few places you could get a decent meal if you were willing to pay enough money, and Velázquez seemed to think that some ceremony should attach to our last evening together. I drank glass after glass of expensive wine, and Velázquez said I should walk it off for a bit before we returned to my hotel. He took my arm and steered me carefully around the various hazards. It was still quite early, because of the curfew, and I remember thinking it was strange to be so drunk so early in the evening.

To pass the time, he told me more about his childhood. I asked him about this girl he was supposed to marry, and at first he was reticent, saying it was not right to speak of his previous love at such a moment, but at last he admitted that he had met her while visiting some Basque friends from university, that she was the daughter of a lawyer, beautiful and also very clever (maybe not quite so clever as you, my beloved, but just as beautiful), and his Castilian parents were not pleased that he had fallen in love with a girl so decidedly bourgeois. Her parents, meanwhile, were too intimidated to press the case for true love, because Iberia as a whole retained strong notions of caste in those days. Velázquez solved this impasse by getting her pregnant, but by then the war had already started and he hurried down to train at the fighter school in El Carmoli, in the south, because he had always wanted to fly and felt a duty to come to the defense of democracy. He promised he would return north to marry her before the baby came.