This thought coincided almost immediately with the slam of the balcony door. Lemko found Richard MacMurray digging through the bottom of his closet and emerging with a small suitcase, the kind just big enough to fit in the overhead bin. Richard pointed at a leather dopp kit on the dresser, and Lemko simply zipped it and tossed it to him. He nestled it in among two T-shirts and two folded blue shirts and sets of underwear and socks for a couple of days. Lemko thought about his own bag, how being part of an Adam and Eve Team meant keeping a go bag packed in your office or the closet at home. He kept two, winter and summer, and was always raiding it for a spare shirt or a pair of socks, and now he’d be spending the night in DC with not much more than a toothbrush and a disposable razor, rethumbing his heavily annotated copy of On Death and Dying.
Richard zipped up his bag and yanked out the retractable handle and said only, “I’m going to need a ride to the airport.”
Lemko said, “Why?”
“My nephew. What will they do with him until I get there?”
Nessen had apparently dismissed the cop and had busied herself rinsing out the empty glasses of orange juice and putting the cashews away. She stepped out of the kitchen, drying a glass with a bright-yellow hand towel. “There’s a nephew? What nephew?”
“Christ. I thought you people were supposed to know these things. My sister has a son. Gabriel. He’s five—no, six. He’s six, I think. Your file doesn’t say anything about him?”
He took the yellow hand towel from her, refolded it, and hung it on the handle of the oven door, then pushed past her, preparing to leave.
“Unbelievable. Somebody better take some initiative and find out about the kid.” Richard pointed, making clear that Carol Nessen was the somebody he had in mind. Turning to Lemko, he said, “If you want to do something for me, you can get me to the airport and get me on a plane to Dallas, and if you can’t do that, then you can lock up because I’m going downstairs to catch a cab.”
Lemko would have to write this up in his incident report to the general counsel, the justification for expensing the ride to the airport, the comped ticket to Dallas. Mostly, he’d have to explain why they hadn’t known about the boy. Richard and Lemko sat in the back of the cab and did not speak. They rode in silence until Richard noticed the coat sitting across Lemko’s lap, and took it from him, started playing with the black velvet collar. The coat fell open, and Lemko saw the tag: This coat tailored especially for Lew MacMurray. They did not talk, not even when they crossed the river and the ominous clouds began to unleash a heavy blanket of snow.
47
IT TOOK Nessen over ninety minutes of working the phones from Richard MacMurray’s apartment desk to confirm that there indeed was a child, Gabriel Llewellyn Blumenthal, age six. The Dallas County Office of Family Protective Services was closed for the holiday, so phone calls went to the airline first, where a recheck of the ticket audit and a call to the airport Angel Team confirmed that the child had not been a passenger on Flight 503. The Angel Team at Salt Lake airport had called it in; the kid was in the care of a coworker of the deceased. Nessen scribbled notes, made more phone calls.
She managed to reach an FPS caseworker, who promised to locate a qualified court-appointed special advocate to retrieve the child and watch over him until the uncle arrived. Again Nessen referred to Richard by the phrase only known living relative, and the caseworker was relieved because, in the entire spectrum of emergency-custody cases, a sole surviving relative was perhaps the easiest to deal with. They understood what duties were now required of them.
The child wasn’t in the system: no notices of neglect, no complaints to FPS. He presented no special needs, no history. The mother, at least the parts of her narrative that could be discerned from her presence in various databases (Division of Motor Vehicles, Harris County Traffic Court, even Internal Revenue—a call that was technically illegal but that the caseworker made anyway), was squeaky clean: no delinquencies, no outstanding traffic tickets or library fines, a solid credit score of 754, registered to vote at her current address, which was a garden apartment in a reasonably safe neighborhood.
Nessen kept having to thank people for getting involved on New Year’s Day, for interrupting their afternoons of football, and each person she spoke with breathed the heavy sighs of the put-upon bureaucrat; each thought that the pay of a municipal employee was not nearly enough to justify holiday work, that they would never get those hours back. They moved into action only because they were parents themselves and a six-year-old was involved.
As Nessen told the caseworker, “We’re putting the uncle on a plane now,” she felt as though this was the most important duty of an Adam and Eve Team, to shepherd the relatives through their final obligations to the deceased.
The caseworker wanted to know, “What’s the uncle like? Are there going to be any problems there?”
Nessen took the cordless phone with her into the kitchen, tore the doodles she had made while on hold into a series of long strips, and tossed them into Richard’s garbage can. “I don’t think so. He’s a pretty solid guy.”
“Solid? In what way?” the caseworker asked between smacks of her gum.
Nessen coughed. “As in ‘employed.’ ‘Familiar.’ His name is Richard MacMurray. You’ll recognize him the minute you see him.” She heard the caseworker’s computer keyboard clicking in the background.
The caseworker laughed. “Oh, that guy. From television.”
48
AMONG THE tariffs and wages in the latest collective-bargaining agreement, the customer-service personnel of Panorama Airlines had negotiated a clause, little noticed by management, that expanded the definition of holiday and double time, all while reducing the number of customer-service advocates (the term used in the contract to describe the polyester-blazered attendants who printed boarding passes and threw luggage onto the conveyor) on duty on a holiday evening. Just one red-jacketed employee stood at the gate, and when Lemko and Richard MacMurray approached, Lemko discreetly moved to the head of the line, told Richard to take a seat, that he’d handle everything.
Richard hadn’t gotten two feet toward the chairs when a loitering passenger voiced his objection. “I guess waiting your turn doesn’t apply to guys in suits.”
Richard knew how Lemko would defuse the situation: by telling the saddest possible version of the truth, that the man over his shoulder (Richard saw Lemko indicate him with a slight jut of his chin) had just lost his sister, and that if no one else in line objected, Lemko was going to borrow this gate agent for five minutes to get Richard a boarding pass and to make sure someone was on the other end of the flight to greet him in Dallas and take him to the hotel reserved for victims’ families.
Lemko spent five minutes explaining before stepping around behind the desk himself to type at the second terminal. The gate agent went back to waiting on the people in line, and as each subsequent passenger came to the counter, they pretended not to look at Richard. He was not just a familiar face from television; now he was the literal face of a plane crash. A survivor.
The man who had complained about being asked to wait took his itinerary and boarding pass, went back to the newsstand to make a few purchases, then came to Richard and extended his hand. And there was something about his demeanor, his approach, that suggested sincerity. He was a supplicant. Richard wanted to end the encounter and thought the quickest way was to stand up; his father’s teaching again, reminding Richard in the voice of decades past how rude it was to shake hands sitting down, how rude it was to shake hands with gloves on. Richard realized that he’d never put on his coat, but also hadn’t removed his gloves.
Among the many moments of this New Year’s Day, here was one that neither Richard nor this passenger Samaritan would ever forget.
The man said, “I’m sorry for your loss.”
Lemko walked over from the ticket desk, waving a handful of papers at Richard to get his attention, and Richard stepped away with a mumbled apology.
&nbs
p; “We’re not putting you on this flight,” Lemko said. “Actually, there isn’t going to be a flight.”
“Mechanical problems?”
“We don’t have a pilot. The aircraft arrived from Cincinnati, but the crew aboard is already too far into overtime to make the flight to Dallas.”
As they walked toward the security entrance, Richard’s face betrayed his anger. Lemko had expected this too. Emotions come to the surface faster, and with more violence, in the presence of stress. He was quoting that from somewhere in his training but could not cite the source.
In the terminal hallway, workers were removing silver garlands and snowflakes, those secular holiday symbols that public spaces depend on. In the newsstand, a turbaned woman was using a razor to scrape off the painted-on material that made the windows look like they were frosted over by snow and ice.
Without warning, Richard veered off into the men’s room. Just inside the bathroom door was a two-chair shoeshine stand, the attendant nowhere in sight. His supplies and rags were still there. Bending down, Richard linked him to the brilliantly polished and thick-soled black work shoes visible in the first stall. The bathroom smelled well worn and close, the air heavily ammoniated. Burnt urine, Richard thought. All the sad intransigence of bus stations and train stations and seaside amusement parks with their broken attractions, the tea-cup ride at the Delaware shore where he’d vomited all over his sister’s shoes, the stadiums he’d visited as a teenager that had long ago been torn down, his mother’s soiled hospital linens and medicated lotions and alcohol wipes, all of his past was present in that smell. Richard couldn’t think of anything else but bathrooms.
He needed to think, and in order to think, he needed quiet. He slipped into one of the shoeshine stand’s polished chairs, and from the stall, the man said, “No more shines today.” Richard was unable to answer, and the voice repeated itself, adding, “I’m done for the day. Going to go home and see my family for dinner.” The man exited the stall and kept talking to Richard as he washed his hands. “Watch some football and, I’ll be honest, drink a beer or three.”
“Sounds nice,” Richard said. “I could use an evening like that.”
The shoeshine man stepped back to the stand, entered his catcher’s crouch, and began packing up his polishes, sponges, brushes, and cloths. “You going to watch?”
“My sister was on that plane. The one that went down this afternoon.”
There was a long silence. Then the man snapped a towel open and said, “Stay right there.” He reached into his case and extracted a tin of black Kiwi polish, spat on the corner of a brush, and started working on Richard’s shoes. “This one is on me. Can’t have you showing up to home with shoes looking like that.”
Richard managed, “Thank you.” He shut his eyes for a moment, and when he opened them again, Lemko had entered the men’s room and was tipping the shoeshine guy what looked like a ten-dollar bill.
Lemko said, “We’ve got you on the 9:40 a.m. flight, first class direct to Dallas.” When Richard raised an eyebrow, he sputtered out a detailed but nervous explanation. “No pilot now means no flight at seven o’clock tonight. No flight at seven means the nine o’clock is overbooked by twenty percent, and even if I asked for volunteers, we wouldn’t get any. I tried every other airline. We checked Dulles and Baltimore and even Richmond, but with the snow and the backup in traffic”—Lemko stopped and looked at his watch—“and the logistics problems caused by the incident, well, it just isn’t going to happen tonight.”
The shoeshine guy went back to packing up his kit. He unlocked the small locker next to his stand and started putting away his brushes and rags. “What the man here needs is someone to talk to. Times like these, you need to be with your family.”
“Once we were four,” Richard said.
The shoeshine man shook his head.
Lemko held out his cell phone. “Is there someone you’d like to call?”
There was no obvious call to make, no one left to be informed. Only known living relative. He knew then what he had always known, that the history of the telephone itself is a history of heartbreak.
Heartbreak from its very beginnings, as in the story of Elisha Gray, inventor, in his race with Alexander Graham Bell to perfect the “speaking telegraph.” History paints a kind picture of Gray’s archrival, ascribes to him noble motives; his wife having lost her hearing to scarlet fever at the age of five, Bell did what so many of us do in our daily lives: he dedicated himself to undoing the damage of the past.
The truth, as always, is more nuanced and complex. Bell was a curmudgeon, a notorious grouch. As a child, his experiments included provoking the family terrier into a constant growling state in an early attempt to induce speech. As an adult, he berated his celebrated assistant, the poor Watson, for his inability to carry a tune. It was the harmonics of singing that Bell thought could be most easily reproduced. Watson sang into Bell’s conical microphones; he sang drinking songs and college anthems and ditties about wayward women and Civil War marching songs until his throat went raw from the effort.
Meanwhile, in Illinois, the person passed over by history toiled on his own inventions. Elisha Gray filed a notice of intent to patent his version of the telephone on February 14, 1876, saying in part: Be it known that I, Elisha Gray, of Chicago, in the County of Cook, and State of Illinois, have invented a new art of transmitting vocal sounds telegraphically, of which the following is a specification: It is the object of my invention to transmit the tones of the human voice through a telegraphic circuit, and reproduce them at the receiving end of the line, so that actual conversations can be carried on by persons at long distances apart.
Elisha Gray’s notice was the thirty-ninth official document filed that day at the United States Patent and Trademark Office; Alexander Graham Bell’s application for a full patent was fifth. History tells us about some apparent skullduggery—Bell’s attorneys bribed or threatened the patent examiner, a vulnerable rake of an old man to whom $100 meant the eradication of his debts, and whiskey in endless rivers. Bell’s patent contained explanations and diagrams that did not, and could not, work. His later filings featured drawings of an apparatus nearly identical to the one that appeared on Gray’s application. Nonetheless, the details of these stories are lost to the erroneous wash of conflicting memories. It would be years before Watson would invent that convoluted story about Bell’s clumsiness in the lab, the spilled bottle of acid that led to his pleading, Watson, come quickly, I need you, but the anecdote would provide exactly the type of humanizing narrative the telephone needed to succeed; the Bell Telephone Company and Gray’s Western Union Telegraph Company sparred for years, with suits and countersuits, until Gray’s name fell away from history, consigned to the scrap heap of crackpot claims and marginal contributions.
This lesson of heartbreak Richard MacMurray had already committed to memory.
There had been a phone call about his father.
There had been a phone call about his mother.
Richard rarely thought of the particulars of her death; she had lived out her days in Florida on Social Security, a lump-sum settlement from the federal government, and Lew MacMurray’s congressional pension. She’d been fine one day, maybe it was a Monday, and by Thursday, her physician had found some polyps and wanted to schedule more invasive diagnostic procedures, and she was just too embarrassed to talk about it with her son or her daughter. A week later she’d been admitted to the emergency room in Pensacola with nonspecific bleeding, and he knew the end was rapidly approaching. Mary Beth couldn’t decide whether or not to bring her husband, or even if she could take time off work, and, besides, it was a nearly ten-hour drive, and Richard was already at the hospital. He’d spent most of his mother’s final hours talking on the phone to his sister, who kept promising to come when things stabilized a bit, assuming there would always be more time. But there wasn’t more time, things never did stabilize, and Mary Beth arrived about twenty minutes after Richard had finally given
up and allowed his mother’s body to be taken from the room.
He had made all the final decisions, and his sister’s only comment at the funeral had been, “Mom would be appalled to know that you put her in that dress.” Richard had looked at his sister and hissed under his breath, “Well, she’ll never fucking know, will she?” and then hadn’t talked to Mary Beth again until the day she had called to tell him that she was pregnant.
He remembered the exact time of each of those phone calls (4:48 a.m. for his father, 5:30 a.m. for his mother), and, however coincidental it was, it seemed he could not look at a clock in the predawn hours without the time displaying one of those two moments exactly, as if the minutes between did not exist.
Lemko said again, “Surely there’s someone you’d like to call.”
49
CADENCE WOULD remember the phone call as the call that changed everything. She’d just walked in the door, where she was confronted with both the message light on her answering machine flashing its metronomic blink and the phone ringing its insistent digital chirp. She fought the temptation to let the call go to voicemail. The caller ID screen read LEMKO, BRADFORD R., a name she did not know, accompanied by a phone number and area code she did not recognize. The call couldn’t be more uncomfortable than any other thing that she had done that day—like sit for almost three hours on an airplane next to a man she would almost certainly never see again—so she picked up the phone.
“I need to see you,” Richard announced.
“Richard. I wasn’t expecting you,” Cadence said.
Panorama Page 27
