“Ah.”
“Actually, he had a lot of jobs. He drank.” She sipped her chocolate. “My mother is a fairly cultivated lady, from a well-to-do background, and it was hard on her, when her attorney husband turned out to be a…”
She didn’t say it, but the word hung in the air: Drunk.
All she did say was: “Kind of strange for us kids, too.”
“How many of you are there?”
“Just my sister Muriel and me. We would stay with my grandparents, my mother’s parents, part of the year, growing up. They were well off and I think it’s rather hard on kids, seeing how the other half lives, then going back to the other side of the tracks.”
I nodded. “I know what you mean. My uncle was wealthy, my pop was a diehard union man. An old Wobbly.”
“Ha! Old boyfriend of mine took me to a Wobbly meeting once.”
“It can be a good place to pick up girls.”
“Ah, well, Sam already had a girl, didn’t he? Though not for long. Your father wasn’t much for capitalism, huh?”
I sipped my coffee. “That’s the funny thing. He was a moderately successful small businessman. He ran a radical bookshop for years, in Douglas Park.”
“Douglas Park,” she said, nodding. “I know where that is.”
I grinned at her. “You really did live in Chicago, then?”
“For about a year, when I was seventeen. We had a furnished apartment near the University of Chicago. I did a miserable stint at Hyde Park High. Hated the teachers there like poison and I think the other girls thought I was a weird duck.”
“Were you?”
“Of course! In the yearbook they called me ‘the girl in brown who walks alone.’”
“And why did they do that?”
“I guess because I wore brown a lot and—”
“Walked alone. I get it.” I walked alone over to the counter with my coffee cup and got a refill; Amelia seemed to be doing fine with her hot chocolate.
Sitting back across from her, I asked, “Why flying? If you weren’t a rich kid, how did you manage that, anyway? It’s not a very proletariat pastime.”
She pretended to be impressed by the big word, saying, “Your father really was a Marxist, wasn’t he?…Jiminy crickets, I don’t know, I get asked that all the time, but never know what to say. How did I do it? Scrimped and saved and worked weekends at airfields, any job they’d give me. Why did I do it? I always did love air shows…. Probably got the bug in Toronto.”
“Toronto? Don’t tell me you’re Canada’s native daughter, too?”
“Not really. Muriel was going to college there, and I’d lost interest in my own schooling, so when I went up to visit her, and saw all the wounded soldiers—this was, you know, during the war—I had an impulse to try to help. I took a job as a nurse’s aide at a military hospital.”
“That sounds like a lot of laughs.”
Her eyes widened. “It was an education. I only lasted a few months. Those poor men, with their poison gas burns, shrapnel, TB…. I made a lot of friends among the patients, many of them British and French pilots. One afternoon, a captain in the Royal Flying Corps invited Muriel and me to an airfield and he did stunts in his little red airplane.” She drew in a breath and her eyes were lifted, as she remembered. “That plane said something to me when it swished by.”
“So that’s where it began, you and your love for little red airplanes.”
“Maybe. But then, too, I remember one air show particularly, on Christmas Day, must have been, oh…1920?”
“I don’t know,” I said, “I wasn’t there.”
“I think it was 1920, in Long Beach. They had races, wing-walking, aerobatics. I was enthralled! Then, three days later, at Rogers Field, off Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles…only in those days, it was more like the suburbs of Los Angeles…anyway, I went up for a ride with Frank Hawks, who was nationally known for setting speed records…. He took me up two, three hundred feet over the Hollywood hills, and I was a goner. I knew I had to fly.”
“Love at first flight.”
She showed me the gap-toothed grin. “That’s about right. My goodness, Nathan…you mind if I call you ‘Nathan’? It’s so much more elegant than ‘Nate.’”
“I prefer to think of it as ‘suave,’ but sure. Nathan’s fine.”
She leaned forward, her hands gathered around the cup, cupping the cup, as if holding something precious; those blue-gray eyes were alive—it was like looking into a fire. “Nothing could’ve prepared me for the physical and emotional wallop of that flight. To me, it’s the perfect state, the ultimate happiness…. It combines the physical and the intellectual…. You soar above any earthly concerns, responsible to no one but yourself.”
“I feel the same way about draw poker.”
She laughed, once. “That’s what I like about you. You don’t take anything too seriously, yourself included…yet I feel, deep down, you’re a very serious person.”
“I am deep. So’s a drainage ditch.”
Now her expression was almost blank as she studied me. “Does it bother you?”
“What?”
“Seeing someone so…obsessive about something? So committed? Isn’t there something you love to do?”
I sipped the coffee, shrugged. “I like my work, for the most part.”
“But do you love it?”
“I love working for myself. Not answering to anybody but the bill collector.”
Amusement tickled her mouth. “Well, then…you fly solo, too, don’t you?”
“I guess so. And…”
“What?”
“Nothing.”
She sat forward again, urgency in her voice. “Are you embarrassed? Were you going to share something with me? Hey, I’ve opened up to you, mister. And that’s not my style. Don’t clam up on me…Nathan.”
“Okay, Amy. I’ll level with you.”
“Amy?”
“Yeah. Amelia’s a goddamn maiden librarian. And ‘A. E.’ is a stock broker or maybe a lawyer. Amy’s a girl. A pretty girl.”
Her eyes and lips softened. “Amy…. Nobody’s ever called me that.”
“It’s all I’m ever going to call you, from here on out.”
“I guess nobody ever called me that because it’s my mother’s name…. But that’s okay. I like my mother, except for having to support her and the rest of my family.”
“One of the prices of fame.”
“You started to say…”
“Hmmm?”
“You were going to level with me.”
I sighed. “…Yeah, I guess there is something I love about my work. Back in Pa’s bookshop, I used to read Sherlock Holmes stories and dime novels, about Nick Carter the detective….”
“And that’s what you wanted to be. A detective.”
“Yeah.”
“And it’s what you turned out to be, too.”
“Sort of. Mostly what I do isn’t like the stories. It’s routine work, sometimes boring, sometimes shoddy, sometimes shady. Security work. Retail credit checks….”
She nodded. “Divorce cases, I suppose.”
“Yeah. But now and then something comes along, and I get to be a real detective…”
Another gap-toothed grin. “Like the magazines: Real Detective, True Detective…”
“Right. I help somebody. I solve something. A puzzle. A riddle. A crime.”
She was nodding again, eyes narrowed. “And in those instances, you feel like a detective. And you love that.”
“I guess I do. But it’s like what you do, Amy—it’s dangerous work. Sometimes you soar, and sometimes you crash.”
“You’ve done both?”
“Yeah. But the problem with what I do, I’m only flying solo where the business end is concerned…I’m really messing in people’s lives. Sometimes I get hired by the wrong people. Sometimes people I like get hurt.”
“And when that happens, you don’t love what you do.”
“No.” I was staring into my coffee; my face stared back at me from the liquid blackness. “Last year a young woman…young woman died because of me. Because I made a mistake. Because I believed a man’s lies, a man who said he was her father but was really her husband. Because I wasn’t as smart or shrewd as I thought I was.”