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 nearly 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.”
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 boxes of chocolate mints, I bought one.
I glanced around: people coming down every aisle, edging into the rows. Z would be 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.
Up ahead hung the tall and massive red curtain, the heavy gold fringe along the bottom at least a foot long, the velvet folds shadowed by the footlights. Breathes there a man with soul so dead he doesn’t find the moments before the mysterious curtain rise a thrill? Although I remembered that in years ahead theater curtains would vanish, leaving you to sit staring at the empty set until it turned stale, illusion gone.
Beside me, the Jotta girl sat studying her program, and I looked at mine, then counted, and turned to say, “Hey, a cast of twenty-six!” but she didn’t seem impressed. I counted scenes then: six! But didn’t say anything. I was impressed, though, and pleased. I get tired of the same old set all through the play. And tired of only two actors.
I talked a little about Wilson Mizner then, one of the play’s authors, and also something of a crook and confidence man. She seemed interested, which pleased me. It was nice having her along. I liked the Jotta Girl; liked people who like Wilson Mizner. He’d been up in the Yukon during the gold rush of the nineties, not out in the cold and snow but comfortably playing poker with the gold-bearing miners, and mostly winning. One day he sat playing cards in a Yukon saloon and bawdy house, when a man rushed in saying, “Someone just insulted Goldie!” And Mizner, dealing the cards, said, “In God’s name, how?”
The moment came: The houselights lowered . . . held . . . then flicked out, the theater suddenly black dark except for the gas flames standing behind the red exit signs. Then, always and ever a thrill, the swift rise of the curtain, this time, according to my program, on “A San Francisco Boarding House.” And we saw a thinly furnished bedroom: a single window, a dresser, a cast-iron bedstead. At which Ying Lee stood making the bed.