From Time to Time (26 page)

It felt good now, this lazy hawklike circling gradually expanding the entire harbor for me. Well behind us now lay the green spot of Battery Park flecked with the colors of dresses and drab suits- they were watching us!

"Took a motion picture cameraman up to photograph the office buildings at the tip of the island. Flew level with the top windows, full of rubbernecks watching us and waving while he cranked away at them. Then, right over the East River the bolts worked loose, the camera fell off the wing, and that's where it is now, bottom of the river somewhere.

Finally, moving north as we climbed-how high? Two thousand feet? Three? I didn't know-we turned in over the city, and I saw what I can still see in my mind: far down there, spread out for me in this faintly hazed morning, lay the city of this fresh new century, the city between the two other New Yorks I'd known, and it seemed beautiful.

I've never flown across the New York of the final years of the twentieth century, but I've looked at aerial photographs, and they're stunning, especially the glittering unworldly night views. But the tall, tall, and ever taller buildings, so thick and close in midcity, hide the city they occupy. Often the aerial photographer, searching with his camera, can't find streets or people, only layered walls, the city lost.

But not yet, not now. Now the long, slim, familiar map shape of Manhattan lay down there, its neat crisscrossed streets crawling with the specks and shapes of its life. And I began to search for--what? A kind of stone ship was all I could think of, an impossilbe stone ship with windows. Here and there the slim upward-pointing fingers of New York's "skyscrapers stood mostly alone, easily found. As if reading a familiar page. m~ eyes moved down from the great green rectangle of Central Park, following the curves of Upper Broadway-I could see the specks of color that were its people and vehicles-and easily found the slim white tower of the Times building rising alone and unchallenged. To the west the nineteenth century lay almost untouched in long brown-fronted, black-roofed stripes across the city map. I picked out the shining white newness of the Public Library at Forty-second Street, simultaneously seeing in my mind the reservoir that belonged there too. Off to the east, a smudge of scattered lumber, cut stone, and dirt ramps: Grand Central Station a-building. I sat in comfort there on the taut fabric of my wing, floating on the air, looking down at the two not-quite-the-same grays of the enclosing rivers . . . followed the long sun glints of the tiny strips of El lines down each side of the city. Then, yes, that was Thirty-third Street, must be, because the great white rectangle just beyond it, sparkling in its newness, could only be Penn Station. And off to the east where one day the Empire State Building would climb, lay the green peaks and domes and the fluttering flagpoles of the great Waldorf-Astoria Hotel.

But Frank Coffyn had seen all this again and again, and occasionally he leaned forward to talk, to ask questions. And while he listened to my replies, I realized something that possibly he didn't. That everything entering Frank's mind and attention came out into something about flying.

So I'd come from Buffalo, eh? Well, before long I'd be able to travel from Buffalo to New York by aeroplane. How- did I like the Plaza Hotel? Just fine: my room overlooked Central Park. And Frank nodded, and said it must be almost like seeing it from a plane. "Frank, what would you have done, I said, "if you'd lived long before the aeroplane? I'd turned to look at him, and his eyes actually went wide. "My God, he said softly, "what an awful idea. But it didn't happen, Si. And I'll tell you why. I was born to fly across the Atlantic Ocean. I'm going to, Si. I want to be the first.

I could only nod and say, "Well, Frank, it will be done.

"Oh, yes; if only I can raise the money. I need bigger engines. And a bigger aeroplane to hold them. And protection from the weather. Si, it's eighteen hundred and eighteen miles from Newfoundland to the coast of Ireland. He was serious! He'd thought this out. "With a speed of forty-five miles an hour I could do it in forty hours. I've learned that from June to September -his hands on the controls, his feet on the pedals moved frequently, carefully, but his mind was far away- there is a prevailing wind blowing from the west which would give me from twenty to thirty miles an hour help. He knew all this, and it was right. "Once started, there could be no landing on the water, but I firmly believe that with two engines, one of which could be switched on in case of damage to the other, and with two hundred gallons of gasoline, the thing could be done. We're learning now, Si. We're all of us learning the hazards of aeroplaning. I've learned to be careful flying low over city streets; the currents of air that come up from a city are treacherous. We have to learn, and on the day a man flies the Atlantic, he'll need-well, what? Forethought. Careful preparation. Patience. All those virtues and more.

I sat nodding, silently saying, Frank, there's a boy alive now . . . where? Where was Charles Lindbergh at this moment? I didn't know, but silently I said, You can't quite do it, Frank. Just barely not quite. But the boy who is going to probably knows your name.

New buildings down there, moving evenly away under us-hotels, apartments, whatever. But still a low and comfortable city, still visible to itself. Ahead now-we seemed almost directly above Fifth Avenue-the one-corner-missing rectangle of Madison Square, and I would not move my head to look off to the east toward Gramercy Park. And then down there . . . why, yes. Yes. Oh my God, yes, yes, yes! There at the intersection of Broadway and Fifth Avenue, looking ready to sail up either one, I suddenly spotted what Z had seen, "her prow sharp and straight as that of the Mauretania herself. Yes, she was "a ship! Of stone and steel, steadily moving toward us as though in actual motion. And Z was right: it seemed all wrong to call this beauty (I took this later at ground level) by so ordinary a name as the Flatiron Building.

Nothing of this to Frank, of course. I sat silently elated; Z would be down there tonight. And I would be too. I hadn't blown it after all; now again it began to be just faintly and distantly possible that I could join a course of events and alter them-so that a war might slip away into a new past as only a possibility that had never occurred.

On down Manhattan Island to the green slipper that was Union Square: I'd seen this last with Julia and Willy, watching a nighttime parade. Sliding toward us, and then underneath us, the maze of Manhattan's earliest streets: short, angling, curving, the planned orderliness above Fourteenth Street sliding behind us. I glanced at Frank, grinning, nodding, to say that I liked this. And he smiled the tolerant acknowledgment of a man who'd seen it all many times but is pleased to show it again.

The black sliver of Trinity's steeple still alone on the sky. . . Then Frank nodded to the east, and we began sliding downward toward the city-quite fast, the streets expanding up toward us, dots rapidly swelling into people. Frank out to scare me a bit, I think. Then I felt the pressure of my strap as we tilted to the left into a downward turn. A half-second glimpse of the basket masts of a gray battleship moored on the Brooklyn shore, and down we came, still turning, the flat gray of the East River widening to meet us.

We leveled, swaying, twenty feet-no more-above the water just under our wings. Frank, taking his eyes from the river for only an instant, sneaked a glance at me; I was supposed to be scared, and was, oh, I was. Because just ahead, and I understood Frank's glance and was terrified, hung the Brooklyn Bridge-we were going under it! We didn't know until we saw this photo in the

Times that in this moment a newspaper photographer, seeing what Frank was about to do, actually snapped this muddy photograph. An instant later, under we went, gloriously under the bridge, its shadow flashing across us. Then out, and directly over the stack of the tug there in the photograph. And the gush of hot, hot gas pouring up out of that stack seized our flimsy little kite and shook it-heaved and tossed us helplessly, a dog mercilessly killing a rat.

Frank fought, forcing his controls, using his entire strength to hang on to control, only barely doing so. We nearl~' went in, we damn near hit the river. Frank's face like a carving in wood, he held on to that little plane, bucking, bucking, a steer out of the chute, fighting it, my strap dug into my waist.

Then abruptly we were out, not crashed, not quite striking the river, all suddenly serene, and we shot up into the sky, out of danger, in a fine and graceful curve.

I found my voice. I said, "Frank. Tell me again about flying the Atlantic. The careful preparation. The forethought. The caution. All those necessary virtues.

Frank said, "I'm sorry. I'm very sorry. Si. I was a damn fool. And, suddenly angry at himself: "That's not the way I fly! On down toward Pier A now, an easy touchdown to the water, a nice slow taxi toward the raft. "But on the day a man flies the Atlantic, he'll need careful preparation, yes. He'll need rigorous forethought. Plenty of patience. All that, Si, all of those. But at the last, when he climbs into his aeroplane and sits facing the Atlantic Ocean, it's going to take a little wild and woolly recklessness too.

CHAPTER 19

A LONG-HAIRED GIBSON GIRL handed me this program in exchange for two tickets to The Greyhound. She wore a gray uniform dress, big white Buster Brown collar with a huge bow tie, and a button that said Usher. She led us-the Jotta Girl and me-down to seats right on the aisle, and when a twelve-year-old boy in a red bellboy suit with brass buttons came along selling long thin boxcs of chocolate mints, I bought one.

I glanced around: people coining down every aisle, edging into the rows. Z would he here, was maybe here right now; maybe I was looking at him. All over the theater splendid long-haired women in high-necked dresses sat removing their enormous hats-carefully, using both hands to lift them straight up, the Jotta Girl one of them. She wore a long pale dress and a pink hat not quite ten feet in diameter. The men, all over the theater: stiff collars, short hair parted in the middle, mostly, some of them wearing pincenez glasses. Would Z be wearing pincenez? I didn't think so, but maybe.