Her Last Flight(10)

“I don’t think Sam would have cared, one way or the other. He didn’t give a damn about fame or history.”

“Oh? Then what did he give a damn about?”

Again, she bites back some piece of candor. She’s on to me and my tricks, and still she nearly slips. She wants to unburden herself, I can see that. Most people do. We all carry some burden or another, pressing into that tender spot between neck and shoulder, invisible to others, which we wouldn’t mind shucking off for a blessed moment. But we rarely do. To shuck off our burden is to show it to the world, and then what would the world say? The world would judge your burden, that’s what. The world would judge it, and how you’ve carried it all these years, and whether your burden is more or less than any other person’s, and what all this says about you. Sometimes you’re just better off carrying the damn thing into eternity.

Evidently Lindquist feels the same way. She shrugs and digs back into her omelet. “Don’t you know the answer to that already? You’re the one writing the biography.”

“But that’s why I’m here, Mrs. Lindquist. To hear the truth from the person who knew him best.”

“Me? What makes you say that?”

I reach for my pocketbook. “Do you mind if I smoke, Mrs. Lindquist?”

“Oh, for God’s sake, call me Irene.”

I light up a cigarette, even though she hasn’t actually given permission. Gives me a moment to gather my thoughts. I toss the lighter back in my pocketbook and say, “You know something? I think I’ve gotten a little ahead of myself. What I should have done, right from the beginning, is given you some background. That’s a nice word we have in the newspaper world, background. Means everything you really want to know about a person.”

“I thought you were a photographer, not a journalist.”

“I’m a photojournalist, Mrs. Lindquist. I take pictures for newspapers. You know, a picture tells a thousand words? That’s what I do.”

“But you want to write a biography, you said. Not a picture book.”

I blow out a little smoke. “Not just any biography. I want to write a whole new kind of biography. I mean, have you ever read one? Start to finish? My God, they’re all so dull! Just facts and figures and dry little clips from letters, that kind of thing. I think it’s because the men write them. The little dears think life can be boiled down to facts, that the facts are what’s important, that facts are somehow akin to truth. I’ll tell you something, the facts are the least important thing about a person.”

“Oh? So what’s important?”

“The fictions. The lies we tell to other people, the lies we tell to ourselves. The stories we make of our lives, the heroes we fashion of our own clay. The myths of our own creation. Those are the real stuffing of a person, in my opinion. What makes each one of us different from the other fellow.”

“My goodness,” she says. “Aren’t you a surprise.”

“Oh, I’m full of surprises, believe me. Anyway, if you ask me, a biography should read like a novel, not an encyclopedia entry. All those facts get in the way of the truth. We ought to be able to see the world through our subject’s eyes, to live life as our subject lived it. To feel the ticktock of his pulse in our own veins. That’s truth. That’s what I want to do.”

I finish the coffee and hold out the empty cup to her, and I’ll be damned if Irene Foster Lindquist doesn’t just take the cup and head for the percolator and pour me another. Irene Foster! Like some cafeteria waitress. She presents the scarred side of her face to me, like the dark side of the moon. Nobody’s ever seen those scars before. She didn’t have them when she was flying around the world the last time, that’s for sure. I’ve seen the photos of those days, believe me.

She hands me back the coffee cup. I drink it neat.

“So let me get this straight,” she says. “You decide to write a biography of Sam Mallory. You go off looking for the wreckage of his final flight—”

“No, no, no. It’s a little more complicated than that. It’s more of a love story.”

“A love story? You and Sam?”

“Don’t be jealous. It’s a love from afar. A love across the years, between adoring me and unknowing him.”

“I’ll say. You’re—what, twenty-eight?”

“Give or take.”

“Well, Sam would be a lot older. If he were still alive.”

“Oh, but you have to understand what a crush I had on him! I was just a teenager when he dropped off the face of the earth. I thought he was just the most. I thought he had it all over that stuffed shirt Lindbergh. All those death-defying stunts he did. Those glamorous women on his arm, a different one every week. So daring, so handsome. You might say I was fixated.”

“And you didn’t grow out of it?”

“Of course I grew out of it. I’m not exactly the romantic type, am I? But I always had a soft spot for him. I always wondered what happened to him. As you know, he didn’t so much vanish, like you did, as—I don’t know—fade away? Like when somebody leaves a dinner party without saying good-bye, and nobody can remember when she saw him last.” I stub out the cigarette. “Time marched on. I went to college for a bit, traveled for a bit, started selling my photographs, ended up with the Associated Press. Then the war. I got to Europe in ’44, a couple of months before the invasion, and managed to land on Omaha with the second wave. Carried on through to Paris, as close to the action as I could get. Then I got to talking with this fellow who’d flown with the Republican air force in Spain, during the civil war. We had a few drinks and so on. And he told me the strangest thing, right out of the blue.”