From Time to Time

17

IN MY HOTEL ROOM in the morning, walking across the carpet buttoning my shirt, I stopped at the window to see what was going on outside today. Nothing much, the usual, except . . . were the pedestrians across the street moving a little more quickly? Yes. Then a group of three boys, heading west, came running, passing the other pedestrians, and I finished with my shirt, grabbed a jacket, and went downstairs to stand on the curb staring toward Columbus Circle three blocks to the west. Lot of people over there, mostly men, all turning north into Central Park West, all in a hurry.

“What’s going on?” said the Jotta Girl at my elbow.

“Don’t know.”

“Well, let’s go see!” She took my arm, and we stepped down off the curb to cross. Then I gripped her elbow, holding her back; an open roadster was tootling along toward us from the east just a shade too fast—a dark green beauty, windshield folded flat down on the hood—but it slowed and stopped beside us. “Going to see knobby shoes?” the driver said—to both of us, I guess, but looking at the Jotta Girl. He was maybe thirty-five, hatless, wearing a heavy black turtleneck. “Well, hop in!” Hands on his big wooden steering wheel, his idling engine going chunka-chunka, chunka-chunka, he sat grinning at us, open and friendly, nodding at the seat beside him.

I said, “Well . . .” but the Jotta Girl said, “Sure. Thanks!” We walked around the back of the car; two enormous spare tires lay flat, strapped to the back. He’d leaned across to open the door for us, and for some reason I got in first, surprising the Jotta Girl a little, and me too. She pulled the door closed, he shoved the shift lever, a heavy rod with a grip handle that rose straight up from the wooden floor, and we rolled on, keeping to the car tracks for a smooth ride. Suddenly I felt good; this was a fine day, the windshield folded flat down on the long hinged hood, the air gentle on our faces. Our driver sat glancing up at the sky, almost sniffing the air, then turned toward us with a big smile and said, “Looks like old knobby picked a good day.”

I didn’t know what he was talking about, but the Jotta Girl said, “I’m worried about him.”

“Well, he’s not worried, you can bet your boots.” Our driver grinned at her. “My name’s Coffyn,” he said then, “Frank Coffyn,” and the Jotta Girl, sounding surprised and delighted, said, “The aviator?” and he nodded, looking pleased. We told him our names; then the Jotta Girl sat sneaking little looks at him. He had a longish thin face, dark blondish hair, and—no, he wasn’t wearing it long, I saw, just needed a haircut. The wind was ruffling his hair, and when he sort of smoothed it back, the Jotta Girl said, “I expect your hair is permanently windblown from flying so much.”

“Yep.” He leaned forward to smile across me at her. “Used to be curly, but years of flying straightened it out.” I could tell he’d used the line before, but she laughed.

At Columbus Circle we turned north, and up ahead at Sixty-second Street saw a steady straggle of people coming out of Central Park to cross the street, others coming from the north and south, some actually running, all heading for a big vacant lot on the corner. The lot, we saw driving toward it, stood enclosed by a ten foot-high fence of new pine but already plastered with a big poster in giant type for something called Moxie. Inside the fencing—long, tan, and rising higher than the fence by a dozen feet—stood a tent. And as Frank Coffyn parked across the street from the lot, we saw cops all over the place, but a boy was managing to climb the fence by jumping up on a friend’s back, then climbing quickly to his shoulders, and finally leaping to catch the fence top, hauling himself up fast before a cop could come running over. Another boy set his foot in the stirrup of a friend’s clasped hands who shot him to the fence top, where he swung around on his belly to drop, grinning, out of sight.

We walked across the street toward a wide opening on the Sixty-second Street side of the fence, but cops stood barring the entrance there. Beyond them, inside on the trampled-down weeds, stood the long, high tent, and at its entrance a young man of around thirty speaking to the crowd of boys, men, and two or three women. He wore boots laced to the knees, and a tan leather jacket. “Roy Knabenshue,” Frank Coffyn said, and lifting his arm, he began waving it slowly back and forth. “And from thence, wind permitting,” Knabenshue was saying, “in a southerly direction.” Some of the men—reporters—were making notes.

Knabenshue saw Coffyn’s arm, and called, “Frank! Come on in!” To the cops who’d turned to look back at him, he called, “Let him in, please! He’s an assistant!”

The cops nodded to Frank, who took us both by the arm saying, “We’re all assistants,” and walked us in. I don’t know if Roy Knabenshue really had been waiting for Coffyn or not, but he beckoned to us now, turning to push aside the tent flap, then stood holding it for us, and we walked into the brown light filtering in through the canvas: I had no idea what we were going to see.

It was a balloon, almost filling the tent, a long dirigible-shaped balloon, enormous, its rounded bottom well over our heads, the sides almost touching the tent walls; it was like standing in a closet with an elephant. The thing rose clear up to the far-off tent roof; sixteen feet high at its thickest part, I learned the next day from the Times, and sixty-two feet long. The tent seemed full of men—no other women—and the Jotta Girl left to go stand outside.

I could see better now, adjusting to the light. The balloon hung just above us covered by a snug-fitting net from which ropes led down to a flimsy-looking framework. The bottom of the framework was a pair of narrow skids; long sandbags lay across them to hold the thing to the ground. Someone, maybe Knabenshue, yelled, “Okay!” and the men in the tent began positioning themselves along the sides of the framework. Frank stepped up with them, so I did too. Someone on the other side yelled something, and everyone on my side grabbed a rope and began shoving or kicking the sandbags off the runners. I did the same, feeling the sudden strong upward pull of the balloon.

We walked it out of the tent, the cops waving people aside. Outside at the fence entrance, people were crowding up against the cops as we came out, trying to look past them at us, kids jumping up to look over shoulders. Men came trotting out of the tent with the sandbags and tossed them down across the skids, anchoring the thing to the ground again.

Frank and I were able to step back then, and look up at the balloon, the Jotta Girl strolling over to stand with us. It surprised me that the balloon was yellow, a sharp bright yellow there just above us against the blue sky. “Shaped like a whale,” the Jotta Girl murmured, and Frank nodded, adding, “Without a tail.” It was: the great thing hung up there snub-nosed at the front, widening back to the shoulders, then tapering back to a tail-less end. The framework underneath was aluminum, I could see now. Mounted in the framework stood a little gasoline engine connected by a belt to a four-bladed propeller, and I could see that the blades were cloth—aluminum-painted cloth—or maybe leather, stretched tight over wooden paddle-shaped frames. At the rear, a great big rudder with a pair of horizontal stabilizers. And in between these, mounted on the runners, a seat about the size and shape of a bicycle seat, but with the edges cupped upward like a tractor seat.

And that was it; no belts, no parachute, just that seat, and now damned if Roy Knabenshue didn’t step up and, grinning with the sheer fun of all this, sit down on that little seat and plant his feet on those inch-wide runners. The reporters, notebooks open, pencils ready, pressed around him, sort of pushing us aside. One of them called out to ask if flying in this wasn’t dangerous. Knabenshue, sitting there as though he were on a bike, looked happily amazed at the thought.

“No,” he said, “once you get over the first exciting sensation, the consciousness of danger leaves your mind entirely.” The way he said this made me think he’d given this answer before and often. “It becomes a habit,” he said, the reporters taking this down, “to float one thousand feet above the ground, just as it does to the ordinary man to walk around on it, and the task of building an airship—well, I really prefer to call it a dirigible balloon—is as simple as the task of navigating it, once you have become aware”—he was really talking like this—“of the existence of certain natural laws that we have to conform to.”

That all seemed okay to everyone, heads nodding, but I half whispered to Frank, “Is that true? Isn’t this dangerous?”

“Of course it is,” he said quietly, “though he half believes that himself now; he’s not the least fearful. But that little insufficiently powered creation could be turned upside down in an instant by an unexpected gust. A stray wind could tear it apart. It’s a foolish little thing. And its day is over. The future is in strongly powered aeroplanes. I like the man; I met him last night. But he’s a boy at heart, playing at this. And one day it will kill him.”

The reporters finished, Knabenshue yelled, “Ready!” and we all stepped up again to hold our ropes, kicking the sandbags aside. We held the thing, then, maybe five feet above the ground. The nose pointed down a bit, and Knabenshue reached into one of a dozen sandbags hanging from the rigging around him, brought out a handful of sand, no more, and scattered it, watching the nose. It actually lifted a bit, and he scattered another handful, leveling the thing. He was sitting above us, and I couldn’t see how but he started the engine, a slow putt-putt sound; then it sped up into a rapid putter-putter-putter. I wouldn’t have trusted it on a golf cart, but Knabenshue yelled, “Ready!” again and we all let go of our ropes, stepping back, and up she went, nose dipping but immediately leveling.

Straight on up into the sky she went, not fast, not slow, the kids yelling and capering, the adults making that sort of awestruck groan you hear at a fireworks exhibition. Up a hundred feet, two hundred, I didn’t know, but high enough to begin looking smaller. Straight on up, and looking great, a yellow whale in the blue sky, Knabenshue looking like a skier, feet wide apart on those flimsy little aluminum yardsticks, waving one arm at us, the other hanging on to something. Up a little more, then a breeze from the west pushed him out across Eighth Avenue toward the Park. Knabenshue moved his rudder, and—still rising—putt-putted off to the south.

The crowd broke to run out or walk fast, depending on age and condition, Coffyn saying, “Come on!” Across the street, into his car, and Coffyn U-turned slowly, squeezing his horn bulb again and again, the street full of kids running south. Then we got clear of them, and following the balloon above and a little ahead of us, I understood why it was yellow, moving along so plainly against this clear blue sky. Silhouetted against that long yellow oval, Knabenshue half stood, half sat, getting smaller and smaller as he slowly moved higher and higher, chugging along behind those ridiculous low-powered cloth propellers. On he sailed, passing almost directly over the Circle Theater just north and west of Columbus Circle. Frank steered us around Columbus Circle and onto Broadway, where Knabenshue seemed to be heading.

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.”

In the lobby we met Archie, to whom the Jotta Girl had spoken at Mrs. Israel’s lecture. She introduced us casually, he invited us in for tea, and in we went. More dancing, at which I was exactly as good and as bad as before. But Archie was an easy, amiable guy, good company, we all had fun, and I stayed quite a while, before—all of a sudden—I was so tired I thought somebody, preferably the Jotta Girl, would have to carry me to my room. And I made my excuses, went up, and—shoes and half my clothes off—dropped down on the bed, and right to sleep: a big, big day.