Steve Kistulentz - Panorama

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.”

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.

“I don’t know anyone else I can talk to about this.” His voice wavered, enough that he heard it himself, wondered if it made him sound weak.

And it was from his voice, the shake in it, its fluttering pitch, that Cadence took her cue. She felt obligated, at least somewhat. “Talk about what, Richard? What’s happened?”

He recognized the repeated use of his first name as a device; in our most intimate relationships, we use any excuse not to call someone by name. He’d called Cadence all sorts of things—Cate and Catey-Cat and Cat and just C.—when he wrote her notes, and he didn’t much like Cadence using his first name; it sounded like he was being scolded.

“I need to tell you in person. You’re going to have to have faith,” he said, resisting the urge to use her name. “Can you come see me?” he asked, and knew immediately from her sharp intake of breath that she would refuse to come to his apartment precisely because it was his. “That isn’t what I meant,” he said, trying to preempt the argument that rested just under the surface of their conversation. She’d say something about how she wasn’t going to go home with him, not under any circumstances, and he’d say whatever he could to avoid that part of the discussion. He worried that Cadence might hear the irritation in his voice. “I just need…” He stretched it out; how strong the urge was to blurt out what had happened, to just admit how strange everything had been in the past seven weeks, in the last several hours, but to admit it required more strength than he could muster. If there was one thing that could make this evening better, it would be the solace of Cadence, his familiar. The story of his life was getting bad news on the telephone, and he wasn’t about to contribute to it now. “I need to see you.”

Lemko and the shoeshine guy tried their level best to maintain a discreet distance, but the three of them were standing in a cramped men’s room, so Richard just walked past them out into the terminal corridor and headed to the exit. Lemko fell in behind him, a good three steps back.

“I need you,” Richard said. “I need help.”

That, for Cadence, was enough.

She wouldn’t meet him at his apartment, she said, and she did not have to explain to Richard the reasons why. “My place is a mess,” she parried, as if anticipating his suggestion. “I’m repainting my end tables, and there are brushes and newspapers everywhere.”

“I guess that leaves the Cleveland,” he said. A favorite bar. A demilitarized zone almost exactly halfway between her apartment and his. It occurred to Richard that they’d spent the entirety of their time together floating around the city, going from event to event, happy hour to fund-raiser to concert to the Kennedy Center to cultural evenings at the Smithsonian. He wondered how many times they’d simply spent the evening inside, cooking dinner together, afterward lounging on the sofa while he absentmindedly rubbed her feet. Not often enough. He wanted nothing more than that kind of quiet now, a woman nestled against him, a dog at his feet. Gabriel.

“One hour,” Cadence said, and hung up.

Lemko took his phone back from Richard, and they stopped in front of the next airport newsstand. “I’ve never understood why they sell luggage at airports,” Lemko said, pointing at one of the open stores. He was desperate to lighten the mood. A combination of bureaucracy and a confluence of unimaginable events—a dead pilot, snow, another overworked crew, unusually heavy traffic to Dallas—had defeated him in his only task for the afternoon, which had been to see to Richard MacMurray’s safe delivery to Texas.