Steve Kistulentz - Panorama

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.

“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.