Frank sat snatching glances upward, hunched over that big wooden wheel, and the Jotta Girl and I just sat with our mouths open, heads tipped back, following Knabenshue. Sometimes he seemed directly over our heads, and sometimes either he or the street veered, bringing him to one side of Broadway or the other. On and up—slowly shrinking, Knabenshue stood on a pair of black threads underneath his yellow whale. On over the Upper Broadway hotel district, chugging along at close to a thousand feet, I thought. Now the small wind up there pushed him east directly over Seventh Avenue, it seemed. People began appearing at windows, looking up, and we saw them coming out onto roofs. On down to Fiftieth Street he sailed, and just west of the Winter Garden—moving his rudder, I expect—Roy Knabenshue began moving right down and high above the Great White Way itself.
And Broadway had become aware, the news traveling—by phone, I suppose—faster than Knabenshue himself. Because now around us and up ahead, pedestrians were stopping on the walks, turning to look back, then looking up. And were calling, pointing, beckoning. Beside us and up ahead, office windows were raising, heads appearing, to lean out and look up. More people on rooftops, and a block ahead, a little red Broadway streetcar had stopped, and everyone on it including the uniformed conductor and motorman came tumbling out into Broadway. Frank began muttering—“Damn . . . Watch out, you fool! . . . Out of the way there! . . . Madam, would you remove your skirt from my spokes?”—as people hurried right out into the street to stop and point up, and beckon to still others. In the street around us men had begun taking off their caps and hats, holding them high and waving them in a little circle, and some of them yelled, “Hurrah! Hurrah!” pronouncing it just like that.
“. . . all Manhattan went airship mad,” my New York Times said next morning. “The news of the presence of this strange object in the sky quickly spread from Harlem to the Battery. From his lofty point of vantage a thousand feet above the sea level the navigator of the air was able to behold with equal ease the Statue of Liberty and Grant’s Tomb, and everywhere within the territory lying between . . . He, in his turn, was visible to the little human ants that he saw crawling around in an excited way on the ground.”
Just past the Astor Hotel a block up from the Times building, we had to stop, immediately becoming a little island like all the other cars, cabs, carriages, and streetcars standing motionless in what was now an almost solid pack, curb to curb and up over the curbs, of people staring at the sky. Frank’s motor off, we too watched—chins up, mouths open—as Roy Knabenshue sailed on down to the Times building. From here we couldn’t judge distances too well, but the Times story the next morning said that “he reached a point on a line with the Times building and about fifty feet west of the tower,” and that “he then turned his machine so that it pointed straight east. It remained stationary in that position long enough to allow him to wave his hand in acknowledgment of the greeting wafted up to him by members of the Times staff who were watching his flight from the tower.” We could see them. Every visible window on the top floors of the Times building had been raised, and people—two, three, and sometimes four to a window—hung out, staring at Roy Knabenshue suspended there in space. We saw him wave, and then the women in the windows began waving handkerchiefs at him, and the men waved their shirtsleeved arms—and I felt wonderful; felt that damned, embarrassing lump in the throat you get sometimes at some very special human event. That man up there waving, those people in the tower, handkerchiefs fluttering back: I looked at the Jotta Girl and she looked at me, and we both nodded, smiling a little sheepishly, then looked up again at the sky.
Knabenshue must have moved his rudder, and for a moment or —that appeared in the Times, and is just about what we saw as he turned.
A shower of something fell from the balloon. For an instant I thought it was water, but the shower widened into a shimmering cloud as it fell, too slowly for water, and I realized Knabenshue had dropped a shower of paper.
“Must be over Times Square,” Frank murmured. “He’s dropped the checks.”
“Checks?” said the Jotta Girl.
Frank nodded, still watching Knabenshue. “Yeah, each good for a dollar.” He glanced at her. “Find one, take it to the newspaper office, and they’ll give you a dollar. It’s advertising; they’re paying him, that’s why he’s up there.” Frank laughed. “He was sick all morning—I phoned him. Indigestion. Not used to New York food!” He laughed again. “But he needs the money, so he’s up.”
Sounding so let down I had to smile, the Jotta Girl said, “Oh. I thought he loved it.”
“He does.” Frank set his forearms on the big wheel to look across at her, puzzled. “He loves it. It’s why he does it. But it takes money. And to get money, you’ll go up long as you can get out of bed.”
Knabenshue sailed on, that crazy cloth propeller catching the sun, shrinking, shrinking to a black speck under a thumbnail splotch of yellow, clear on down to about Madison Square. Then, quickly, helped by the western breeze, he turned to the east, occasional little flutters of paper appearing below him like tiny far-off insect swarms. He was far to the east now, above Second Avenue maybe, or even First; we couldn’t tell. And over there, too, the streets filled. “. . . none but invalids and cradled babies,” the Times reporter wrote, “could have remained indoors in the Borough of Manhattan. Every housetop as far as the eye could reach was filled with men and women and children, all of them gazing upward in rapt contemplation of the same object—the traveler in the sky . . . between the Park and Madison Square every sidewalk was crowded with people, some of whom seemed glued to the spot with faces turned heavenward and mouths agape. While others were running hither and thither in eager attempts to be Johnny-on-the-spot when the aeronaut should return to solid ground once more. Not less than three hundred thousand witnessed Mr. Knabenshue’s cruise over Manhattan Island.”
We too sat watching him slide down out of the sky in a long glide toward Central Park—part of the time, we learned later, spilling gas to get himself down, because his engine had failed. And when he landed in the Park, fighting treetops a little to get down to the croquet field, he got into trouble with the cops, who ordered him out of the Park.
Broadway draining of people now, Frank started his engine, offering to drop us off wherever we were going, and we accepted—or at least the Jotta Girl did—a ride back to the Plaza. There we stood on the curb, smiling down at Frank in his roadster going chunka-chunka-chunka, the late sun polishing that lovely green hood, and I craved this car, I wanted to steal it. We asked him in for tea at the thé dansant, which I could hear going strong with “By the light! . . . of the silvery moon!” but he couldn’t. There in his marvelous long-hooded open green beauty of a car, white shirt open at the collar, yellow hair mussed by the wind, he said his wife was expecting him, and I nearly smiled at the Jotta Girl’s face. Married?
He said, “Come on down and see me, and I’ll give you a ride in my hydro-aeroplane. Pier A, North River, near the Battery.” We thanked him, both promising to show up soon for a flight, my mind simultaneously shouting that nothing could get me near his “hydro-aeroplane.”