The Best of Edward M. Lerner, page 26
Where? Here in Arizona! Don’t they teach anything in school anymore?
Route 66. The railroad, the Santa Fe. And Lucky Lindy, Charles Lindbergh to you, had just designed the town’s new airfield. Transcontinental air service was only beginning. Back then that meant a bunch of short flights, and Winslow offered the only all-weather airfield between Los Angeles and Albuquerque. People didn’t fly at night in those days. The airline scheduled a flight to land in Winslow before dark. Anyone in a hurry hopped on the train, to travel through the wee hours.
Planes, trains, and automobiles (just why are you grinning at me, boy?), they all stopped in Winslow. That’s why Fred Harvey built La Posada, The Inn, and the jewel of his hotel chain, right there. Pueblo Deco, the architect called La Posada: geometrics and sand painting and fantasy hacienda all rolled into one. Seventy guest rooms. Three restaurants. Three private dining rooms. The great lounge. Lovely gardens, all around. Smack dab on Route 66 La Posada sat, and just across the tracks from the train depot. Call it a mile from the airport.
There I was, with a broken-down car, and no money to get it fixed. But I was pretty, not yet thirty years old, and, at least I so asserted, of good moral character. That, and being white—this was another era—was what they were looking for at La Posada.
That’s how I went to work as a Harvey Girl.
~~~
No one used the phrase yet, they wouldn’t for decades, but I was star-struck. I admit it. How not, when a big Hollywood star or three was at the hotel every single day. Mary Pickford. Shirley Temple. Gary Cooper. Clark Gable.
Oh, spare me that look. You surely know who Gable was, without Googling him. Whatever that means.
But my thoughts are wandering about even more than usual. Sure, it was usually the Hollywood folks who caught my eye. But it wasn’t just them and, anyway, so many years later, it was other guests who seem to have mattered.
Who? Funny thing, at the time I didn’t always know.
Oh, I knew Charles Lindbergh! It had only been three years since he had flown solo across the Atlantic. And Howard Hughes, though, truth be told, I knew him as a movie producer more than anything else. I hung on every word from his table, waiting for all the talk of aviation and starting an airline and whatnot to give way to Hollywood gossip.
But that wild-haired German man, who seemed never to be without his pipe? Or the reserved fellow who sometimes came by train to huddle with Mr. Hughes? If not for Mr. Hughes’s questions, I would never have guessed the colleague with the Boston accent was shooting off rockets in Roswell. Or the pilot who went on and on about using instruments to fly, about how cockpit gauges of some sort were more reliable than the eyes in one’s own head? I didn’t come to know his name till during the war, when I read it beneath his photo in the newspapers. Jimmy Doolittle.
Jeez-oh-Pete. The Doolittle Raid, 1942. Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo. Google that.
At first, I mostly worked in the finest of the hotel’s restaurants, the Turquoise Room. Let me tell you, that was one elegant place. Heavy linen tablecloths, fine china, lovely candle fixtures, sprays of flowers all around. Lovely Navajo blankets, hung like tapestries. And the tips were... let’s just say if I hadn’t been on a six-month contract, I still would have stayed.
Anyway, the Turquoise Room was ever abuzz with conversation. I was a sponge for it all. I lived for the Hollywood gossip, I admit it, but I didn’t miss out on other things. Once the Indian Detours started—
I know that look. Indian Detours were another Fred Harvey innovation. Beyond serving people who had to travel, Mr. Harvey hoped to make the Southwest someplace people wanted to travel. So his star hotels, like La Posada, offered guided excursions. To the Petrified Forest. The Grand Canyon. And the pit not nearly as grand, but much closer, that the locals called Franklin’s Hole.
I’d not ever managed to see these sights, but every day, as I bustled among the tables, I’d hear—well, overhear—guests marveling about them. And I talked with the girls who were couriers. You’d call them guides, but on the Detours they were called couriers. They were college graduates, and they all studied up on things like southwestern art, geology, and history.
Anyway, I asked the couriers a lot about what all they’d seen. I borrowed some of the notebooks from which they studied. I suppose the hotel manager noticed my interest because one day, when a girl was under the weather, he asked me to fill in on a Detour. Or maybe he was just desperate. Lord knows I was no college graduate like those girls.
Back then, my memory didn’t leak like a sieve, not like nowadays, at least about anything that’s happened, well, in recent years. Recent decades. So, despite my nerves, I knew the Petrified Forest spiel well enough. I even had answers for most of the group’s questions.
Two days later, I was promoted to courier.
~~~
Have I ever told you about Terrence? Terrence Smith? Back in the old days, I’d have remembered a detail like that. No matter. And while I hope to tell you I loved your grandfather, that I miss him still, every day, well, that movie the other night brought another era, and another man, back to my mind. Someone I’d known years earlier. Someone I hadn’t thought of in ages.
Oh, but that Terrence was the handsome one! I noticed him almost as soon as I started at La Posada. He was too gorgeous not to have noticed. Oh, my, yes. He was much taller than average, with the most striking cobalt-blue eyes. He had straight black, slicked-back hair. Chiseled features. A strong jaw, a Roman nose, and thin, straight lips. No matter the hour of day or night, Terrence was always clean shaven. He didn’t seem to tan, no matter how much of the day he spent working under the desert sun.
Hollywood handsome he was, except that, well, it took me a dog’s age to put my finger on it. His features were too, too... what’s that word? Even? No. Smooth? Smooth? No. Symmetric. That’s it. His face was unusually symmetric. And his speech was a bit different. A bit... mechanical, maybe.
Anyway, Terrence did odd jobs at La Posada. He was good with his hands, fixing all manner of things that got broken. And that doodad in your hand that you don’t think I see you peeking at? Terrence had something similar, I think. I asked once what he called it, and he told me it didn’t have a name. Just something he said he’d put together.
Oh, how he flirted with all us girls. Terrence was as fascinated as anyone with celebrity, but in his case, it wasn’t the stars, but politicians and professors and business folk. One morning Terrence might ask what this one or that one had talked about the night before as we were serving the dinner. Or, after a Detour returned to the hotel, he might be curious what comments the guests had made. More than once he said that La Posada, not New York City, was the crossroads of the world.
He seemed more interested in me once I became a courier. But for all that, he was altogether too... respectful. Especially for someone otherwise so good with his hands.
Oh, that shocked look is priceless! I wasn’t always a crone, you know. And this was less than a year after the Crash. If I had never been a flapper, well, I came of age (do people still say that, I wonder?) in the Roaring Twenties.
Still, it did nothing for a girl’s self-confidence that Terrence would sooner talk about Howard Hughes—the aviation stuff, not his movies or his latest starlet—than about us.
~~~
The scientist guests gave me the heebie-jeebies. Oh, not them personally. They were mostly nice enough. But the questions they would ask on the Detours? Oh, lordy, how I dreaded those. And when I drew a scientist type for my first outing to Franklin’s Hole? Jeez-oh-Pete.
Well, let me tell you, I had the shakes for the entire fifty-five mile outbound drive. I did my best to hide it but my nerves must have showed, because all three guests in the touring car were determined to jolly me out of it.
When we arrived, when I saw this enormous, gaping hole, I was more anxious still.
I went into my memorized spiel. Franklin had been a scout for General Custer—yes, that Custer—and the first white man to report on the hole. The hole was about 4000 feet wide and 600 feet deep. The experts, I recited, said it was almost certainly a volcanic crater.
“I think not,” the German man said. He was the scientist of the group.
In waitressing as much as in retail, the customer is always right, so I was leery about correcting him. My notes, fortunately, gave me something to fall back upon. “Some people believe,” I remember beginning cautiously, “that this crater was the result of an impact. By a meteor or comet of some sort.”
These days, that is what they think. That big hole in the ground is Meteor Crater, no two ways about it.
Anyway, I told the three men on the tour that a Philadelphia geologist named Barringer had staked a claim to this area, hoping to mine meteor iron from beneath the crater floor. I remember I pointed out to them, way at the bottom of that gigantic bowl, a little dot: the mine shaft Barringer’s company had sunk. They never did find any metal.
Would Barringer have found anything if he had kept drilling? If his backers hadn’t pulled out? I don’t know. After the Crash, no one had the money for any such hare-brained scheme.
“Ja, ja,” the German told us. “I also that have heard. But the energies involved?” His eyes glazed over, as if lost in his thoughts. “To have such a large hole made? The meteor would have many thousands of tons weighed. Or....”
“Or what, Albert?” another guest prompted.
Albert Einstein: he was another visitor I only recognized later. I only knew he was on a visit to America, making his way to a meeting in California. Back then, I doubt anyone but other scientists would have recognized him. So, as he chewed on his pipe, I went back to the history of Franklin’s Hole, things the Indians had had to say about it. Well-memorized material.
“Or a very much smaller mass, into energy converted,” Albert finally continued.
“That can happen?” a second passenger asked.
“Ja, ja,” Albert agreed. Fussing with his pipe. “That is how the sun works.”
“Something small enough to be dropped from a plane?” the final passenger asked. A pilot. We often had pilots passing through. Maybe this was Jimmy Doolittle. I can’t picture anymore what Jimmy looked like, only the young Spencer Tracy cast in the movie as Jimmy.
“A bomb?” After much puffing on his pipe, Albert had decided, “Perhaps, I think.”
~~~
I found the whole day exhausting. When we finally got back to La Posada, all I wanted was a cold drink, a light dinner, and a long, hot bath. But Terrence found me first, and he wanted to talk. And talk. And talk.
He thought my day had been fascinating.
“Matter converted into energy?” he prompted me, more than once. “You’re sure?”
“Yes,” I answered. Again. The third time, I added something else I’d heard that day. No matter that I was speaking by rote, I used the tone of voice that says: doesn’t everyone know this stuff? “E equals em cee squared.”
Terrence’s eyes went round. “Do you understand what that means?”
I managed to keep a straight face, pleased to have made such an impression.
“Why else would I say it?” Remembering the pilot’s question that afternoon, I came up with a wrinkle all my own. Mr. Hughes’s colleague, as far as I knew, the one working in Roswell, was still making holes in the desert. Combined with Albert’s idea, couldn’t Mr. Goddard blast much bigger holes? And so I tossed off, almost flippantly, “Soon enough we’ll be seeing devices like that on a rocket.”
Smug from seeing Terrence shocked speechless, I went off for that cold drink.
~~~
The day after my Franklin’s Hole adventure, Terrence didn’t show up for work. Nor, when the chief handyman went looking, was Terrence in his room. All Terrence’s stuff, the clothes and books and whatnot, were there, but I didn’t see any of his personal projects, the gadgets he tinkered with.
One of our maids, thinking back on it, remembered she’d seen a bright light in the distance from her third-story window, gazing out toward the desert. A few of us not on shift that morning trudged out the direction she pointed us. Apart from a scorched area maybe thirty feet across, about a half mile from the hotel, we saw nothing unusual. Certainly, we didn’t find Terrence. But on our return, about halfway back to La Posada, I spotted something familiar. It was standing on end, peeking out from within a clump of mesquite grass, behind a knee-high stand of buffelgrass.
Terrence’s favorite doodad.
That and a stained photograph are all I had to remember the man by. Somehow, don’t ask me to explain, I knew that something I’d said the evening before is why Terrence left.
I never saw him again.
~~~
And that was the last time I spoke with Grandma.
She passed away quietly in the night, propped up with pillows in her bed, hours after she had finished her rambling story.
She had never made it to California, never gotten any closer than Flagstaff. I had; that’s why I kept checking for messages, for my job in LA. Remembering stolen glances at my gadgets made me feel rotten.
Okay, more rotten.
Grandma’s room looked as if the reminiscing had set her to looking for... something. The battered old steamer trunk at the foot of her bed—the steamer trunk I couldn’t recall having ever seen open—stood agape. All but empty. Surrounded by ancient crocheted tablecloths, embroidered dresser scarves, and hand-sewn quilts.
Had she found what she sought? I wanted to think so. Clutched in her hand, in a tarnished brass frame, was a faded black-and-white photograph, a greasy thumbprint in its lower left corner, of a young man.
I didn’t know then that it was important—only that, there at the end, finding it had mattered to Grandma. That made it important. I made myself a promise to understand what it meant.
After the funeral....
~~~
The funeral was hard. I had been so focused the past several days (barring the occasional guilty email lapse) on being there for Grandma, that it hadn’t struck me: she was all the family I had.
Had had.
And so, it was three days till I got back to the nursing home to sort through Grandma’s belongings. Where, within the folds of an old tablecloth, inside a paper bag crumbling with age, I encountered a gray, plastic-and-glass rectangular slab. It was similar in area to my Blackberry, but thinner, and it had no keyboard. Terrence’s “doodad?”
Opening my laptop, I wikied plastic. There were no plastics, apart from Bakelite, in 1930, and this—well, doodad would serve—wasn’t Bakelite.
Grandma didn’t have much of an estate to process. The antique handicrafts I offered to the staff, to share among the residents as they saw fit. Ditto, her clothes and the few sticks of furniture. I packed up her photos and the doodad.
Then unsealed the box to look again at the photo that had been found in Grandma’s hand.
Was this Terrence? Slicked-back hair was the style back then; I couldn’t go by that. The image was too small to decide if the man’s face was “unusually” symmetric. But, I decided, his eyes were more widely spaced than average. Maybe they were what made the face seem just a little... different.
Then—because I was the one-man IT department for a small accounting firm, this was high tax season, and the Y2K deadline loomed—I drove home through the night to LA.
~~~
Now and again I would study the doodad and the photo. And then put them away, none the wiser. The latest time seemed no different.
My Blackberry and brick-like first cell alike were long since retired, replaced by a modern phone with a touch screen. Terrence’s doodad still looked slicker. Not that I saw how that could be an electronic device. It had no power switch that I could see, nor any port to accept a charger plug. Not that a smart phone in 1930 could have made any sense.
But nothing would keep me from musing....
Over the years, a suspicion had taken hold: Terrence had been a spy. If he were foreign, that would explain his speech being a little mechanical and his features subtly unusual. It would explain a handyman’s curiosity about certain of the hotel guests and his disinterest in the usual celebrities. A bit of Googling had long since confirmed that in the Thirties La Posada was a crossroads and a vacation stop, someplace where people might speak more unguardedly than in Washington, New York, and Los Angeles. That a hostile foreign power—which? I had no idea—might put an agent at La Posada to eavesdrop on the unwary made a strange kind of sense.
Grandma had found the doodad off the path to the scorched area. In my mind’s eye, I saw the device accidentally dropped in the dark as Terrence toted his papers and other incriminating stuff to the desert to be torched. Scrub grass and bushes had caught fire, the blaze reaching out several feet before burning itself out. All the pieces fit.
Except for why Terrence had picked that night to flee. Except for the doodad itself.
All I could come up with was that the doodad was some kind of recording device. I pictured Terrence dictating into it each night the juicy tidbits reported by his unsuspecting Harvey Girl accomplices. Only I had trouble reconciling a recording device with Terrence taking enough paper notes that he had needed a desert bonfire to destroy them—
Or the notion that in 1930 any voice recorder could be as compact as an early iPod.
~~~
There matters remained until Apple released another generation of iPhone.
That’s when (as Grandma would have said) the penny dropped....
~~~
The doodad’s glass surface had, centered just above one of its narrow edges, an oval that suddenly struck me as a possible fingerprint sensor.
Uh-huh. In 1930. And if it were such a sensor?
Ridiculous. Right?
Except that removing the old photo from its tarnished frame, holding the greasy thumbprint near that oval, I found I had brought brightly colored symbols up onto the glass. Onto the screen.
