Flying Blind

The coffee was bitter. “Don’t be silly.”

“I learned a long time ago, not to confide in just anybody.”

“I like to think I’m not just anybody.” I saluted her with the coffee cup. “There are times I fancy myself somebody.”

She laughed. “Don’t be so anxious to be somebody. Look how much fun I have.”

“Like almost getting crushed to grape jelly in that crowd? You got a point. Since we’re talkin’ like a couple of humans, you mind if I ask you something just a touch on the personal side?”

“I think that would be all right,” she said, not quite sure.

“Where the hell were you brought up? Seems like every state in the union claims you as theirs.”

She chuckled and blew on her hot chocolate; steam shimmered off it. “That’s ’cause I was raised in just about every state in the union…. Well, not really. Just Illinois, Kansas, Missouri, Iowa…”

“Minnesota?”

“Minnesota, too. Not Michigan, that I can remember. My father moved us around a lot. He was an attorney working for the railroad. Rock Island Line.”

“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?”