From Time to Time

18

DOWN IN THE LOBBY before breakfast next morning, I bought a Times, then stood at the lobby theater-ticket window behind a man buying tickets for Kismet. And felt not even slightly surprised to hear just behind me, “Good morning, Simon. What are you going to see?” And I turned to face the Jotta Girl, glad of an excuse to smile—it was hard not to laugh. But I didn’t mind being so obviously pursued: this was a good-looking girl. And while it was flattering, I knew my feelings for Julia couldn’t be touched, so it was kind of funny, too. “The Greyhound,” I answered, and could have spoken her reply right along with her.

“Why, so am I,” she said, her voice astonished at the coincidence. And, the man ahead of me turning away, studying his tickets, I stepped up and bought a pair on the aisle for today’s matinee of The Greyhound. I didn’t mind; I don’t like sitting alone at a play or movie. And keeping the aisle seat for myself, I handed her the other.

But I like breakfast alone, and had it in the hotel coffee shop, with only the Times. Read the advance review of The Greyhound, which said, among other not entirely flattering things, that “by checking your intelligence with your hat,” you might like the play well enough.

A TAXI-AEROPLANE.

Frank Coffyn is Looking for Fares at Pier A, North River.

To the Editor of The New York Times:

I thank you for your comment on my trusting my aeroplane. You are like the boy in the well-known song in that you “guessed right the very first time.” Aeroplanes, particularly hydro-aeroplanes, are very much safer than people think. In my opinion the machines are ahead of the men who pilot them, for probably 95 per cent of flying is in the machine one flies. That is immediately apparent when one sees that almost everybody who wants to learn how to fly does so very quickly. Aeroplaning is not for supermen, and they who fly are not supermen at all.

But aeroplaning, particularly in this country, has received several black eyes because of the carelessness, amounting almost to criminal recklessness, of some airmen and some aeroplane builders. Imperfect machines there are, of course, just as there are badly built automobiles. Chauffeurs who try to take sixty-mile-an-hour automobiles around street corners at that speed find imitators among the airmen. You will find such antics more or less common with every kind of vehicle, born, probably in the familiarity which breeds contempt for the factor of safety.

I agree with you that “It would be interesting to know how many people in this city would be willing to take a ride in an aeroplane.” It costs money to operate a flying machine, particularly with the present types of motors. I cannot therefore, much as I should like to I do so, invite people to ride with me at no expense to themselves. But I will carry passengers, either male or female, from Pier A, North River, to and around the Statue of liberty at a price that should not hamper those who really want to ride. Aviation has not yet reached the stage where it has become a poor man’s pleasure, as the case is with the automobile.

My hydro-aeroplane is, in my opinion, a far safer machine than the average New York taxicab. Certainly I feel that I take far fewer chances in it than I do when I ride through New York’s crowded streets in a taxicab, whose chauffeur is trying to take me to my destination as quickly as possible, regardless of decent precautions for my own or pedestrians’ safety, so that he may pick up another fare at an early momemt.

Again permit me to thank you for your editorial. If the same class of people who made the automobile industry, as it now exists, possible by their purchase of motor cars were only to try aeroplaning, particularly over the water, which is ten times safer than flying over land. I am sure that aviation would receive that stimulus which would quickly put it on a sound and sane footing, free from crazy exhibition features and disgusting exploitation of circus stunts.

FRANK T. COFFYN.

And then I found this in the Letters to the Editor column. But Coffyn’s “assurances” didn’t even come close to convincing me that “hydro-aeroplanes” were “very much safer than people think.” What did sound persuasive to me was that “aeroplaning, particularly in this country, has received several black eyes because of the carelessness, amounting almost to criminal recklessness, of some airmen and some aeroplane builders.” Even while reading those bone-chilling words, the blood was withdrawing from my skin with the sudden understanding that I actually had to go up in Frank Coffyn’s “hydro-aeroplane.” Had to. Had to. Because how else—I sat looking across the restaurant tabletops—how else could I search the length and breadth of Manhattan Island for something, it seemed to me, that I’d never seen or even heard of? How else search for a building with a prow like the Mauretania’s? Oh, Rube, Rube, what have you got me into?

It was early, so I walked, taking my camera. This is Broadway and Twenty-third Street, southeast corner of Broadway. And this is Broadway and Ninth Street, northeast corner of Ninth. Still pretty nice and respectable down here. But as I moved further and further down into this 1912 New York, it got shabbier. I glanced into Max’s Busy Bee Quick Lunch Room here, and thought that if Max had ever eaten here himself, it must be his widow running it now.

But every sight and street sound, even these kids’ voices (this is Ann Street) were a fascination to my hungry eyes and ears. Here on Fulton Street even this barber pole and tailor’s shop—is this understandable?—took my eye. And when I reached the place those men are passing, I had to stop and—feeling foolish—take this.

Pier A was down where Frank said it was, sticking out into the Hudson on the west side of lower Manhattan not too far from the very tip of the Island. And today, strung out along the grassy riverbank for maybe a hundred yards on each side of Pier A, stood . . . I really don’t know how many people; a lot. The crowd—men’s dark suits and white stiff collars, women’s long colorful dresses—stood silent, faces tilted up, absorbed and staring. I walked up to them, and stood looking between heads out at the gray Hudson. Out beyond Pier A a wooden raft lay swaying from the tiny waves, a rowboat tied to it. Then, far beyond this, I found what these silent people stood watching: a plane, not high, way off over the water toward the Jersey shore.

I wasn’t sure at first that I actually heard it. Then, watching it, small and low but sharply clear and alone in the air, I did hear for sure the steady stutter-stutter-stutter-stutter-stutter-stutter sound. He was coming low, right at us; then he rose steeply and, over the trees of Battery Park, Frank Coffyn, his plane white on the blue, began swinging and swerving, entertaining us down here, gracefully tilting from side to side, the right wings dipping, then the left, and from the crowd came a long murmured ohhhhh of pleasure.

He flew away, dwindling, back toward the Jersey shore. We watched his slow, lazy turn, glittering for a heartbeat as the sun touched the taut cloth of the wings. Then, low over the water and straight at us he came, growing again but this time dropping, descending, the propeller a shimmering circle. Lower . . . lower still . . . then faster than a blink, a wind puff yanked up the left wings, dipping the other side to nearly touch the low waves. Instantly Coffyn did something to simultaneously level the plane and touch the river, a sudden jittering white scuff appearing at the front of the long boatlike hull, the plane sagging back into ungainliness. Then on she came, a clumsy boat now, bucking the wavelets, and I stood watching, badly scared. Scared for Frank and the passenger I could see now, and scared for myself, in the sharp understanding that this plane, that all these crude early planes, like Roy Knabenshue’s strange balloon, could abruptly kill you.

On she bobbled and bounced, straight for the big anchored float, about to hit it; then Frank cut the motor, swinging the rudder, and—wings passing right over the raft—brought the body of his plane alongside the raft, and his passenger, a woman, I saw now, stepped expertly out onto the raft, a rope in hand. She tied it to a metal ring, Frank watching her, and in that moment I took this. Then he turned to toss out an anchor to hold the other end steady, and I stood staring, shocked at the flimsiness of this contraption. The thing sitting out there on the water wasn’t much more than a kite! A pasteup of wood and stretched cloth. Only those flimsy wings to support that great big heavy-looking circular motor mounted there right out in the open. This motorized kite looked like something you could put together in your garage. In about fifteen minutes. Go up in that? Sitting out there high in the air over New York City?

The passenger standing on the raft—Frank stepping over to join her now—was a woman in a long blue skirt and a middy blouse with a big square sailor’s collar at the back. She looked nice standing there smiling at Frank, who stood grinning over at the crowd on shore.

Then they rowed in, Frank tied up the boat, and he and the lady stood on the pier in a little circle of reporters with notebooks; I recognized a couple of them from Roy Knabenshue’s tent. “Did you enjoy your aerial sightseeing, Mrs. Coffyn?” one of them called out, and she turned, smiling. Oh yes, it was thrilling! Watching her face, I saw that she meant it: she may have done this before to drum up business, probably had, but she meant it. Everyone should fly over the city, she added, and Frank said, “Everyone with five dollars,” and they all laughed. Frank turned for a moment to look out into the bay at an incoming ship. A reporter asked if this wasn’t his second flight of the day. Yes, it was. Was he going up again? Yes, he thought so. Again he turned to look out at the distant ship, and I did too. Still far off, but now I could make out two threads of black smoke lining out behind its stacks. “Gentlemen,” Frank said to the reporters, “on my first flight today, I saw that ship just entering the Narrows, and flew out to take a look. I flew over the vessel at a height of about four hundred feet, and saw the passengers at her prow gathering, as I supposed, for the first glimpse of the Statue of Liberty.”

“Did they see you?”

“Oh yes indeed, greeting me with considerable enthusiasm.” And waving their hats, I thought to myself. “The ship’s horn hooted at me, and I then flew down alongside her just over the water to read her name, the St. Louis, as I learned. I then attempted to hover over her stern, but she traveled too slowly for me. Even flying at my minimum speed, I could not help but fly ahead of her. So I gave up the St. Louis as a poor competitor, left the vessel, returned to the Battery, and, as you are aware, have had time for even a second flight, and the St. Louis not yet here. I firmly believe that the traveler’s future,” and he pointed upward, “lies there.” Then, nodding toward the ship: “And no longer there.” Propagandizing for the cause, I thought. Still, I felt a swift little thrill hearing him, he was so spectacularly right. Did he really believe it? Glancing over at the kite out there by the raft, it was hard to think so.

Now he gave reporters and crowd a friendly nod, a gesture with the chin, took his wife’s arm and walked on, and this 1912 crowd, including the reporters, all respected their retreat to privacy. No one followed with a last question, and it didn’t seem to occur to anyone to hold out something to be autographed.

They walked on toward a smiling young woman waiting for them a dozen yards from the pier; then Frank glanced over and saw me. He grinned immediately, beckoning, and the four of us came together in a group, the young woman taking both of Mrs. Coffyn’s hands as they spoke and brushed cheeks. I took off my hat as Frank introduced me to his wife, who looked at me with lively, cheerful interest in a new person. Then she introduced me to the very good-looking Harriet Quimby, “who is an aviatrix!”

“And will soon be the first woman to fly the English Channel,” Frank said.

“Soon will be trying,” she said, then to me, “Meanwhile I am occupied much more mundanely as a dramatic critic. For Leslie’s Weekly,” and I almost popped out that I worked for Leslie’s too! Instead, I managed to say, “Oh? Will you be seeing The Greyhound?” and we talked about that for a moment or so.

I liked her, this Harriet Quimby, was impressed, and long after, back again in a time at the other end of this new century, I sat in the reference room of the New York Public Library leafing through the pages of Who Was Who, not really expecting to find Harriet Quimby, because I had never otherwise heard of her. But her name is there. Harriet Quimby did fly the English Channel. Alone. The first woman to do it. On April 16, 1912. But the entry also included the date of her death a few months later. In a flying accident. But not now, not yet, not this day.

“You two off then?” Frank said, and Mrs. Coffyn said, “Yes, but if you’re taking Mr. Morley up now, we’ll stay a few minutes to watch.” She smiled at me charmingly, and everyone turned and began walking toward the pier. And in the presence of a young and lovely “aviatrix” who planned to climb into one of these crazy kites and fly out alone over the English Channel . . . and in the presence of another woman, who’d just stepped out of the awful thing waiting out there beside the raft . . . I walked along too, the condemned man helpless to do anything but join the procession leaving from his open cell door. Over the grass to the pier and the rowboat, out there on the Styx. Then toward the raft and—oh Lord—that evil construction of cloth and sticks sitting there waiting for me.

On the float I stood on the rough wood planking beside the plane while Frank knelt down to tie up the boat. I said, “Frank, this is more than just sightseeing. I want to fly down the length of Manhattan to look for a building. A building, I guess, that’s shaped like a boat. Has a prow anyway. Like the Mauretania.”

He thought about it, then shook his head. “I don’t remember anything like that. But if it’s there we’ll find it.”

“And I want to pay you a lot more than five dollars.”

“All right. We’ll see how long it takes. Shouldn’t be too costly.” He stood up, the raft bobbling a little in a way I didn’t like; should I grab my stomach and say I was seasick? The thing had two little bucket seats, one behind the other down in the flimsy fuselage. Frank walked around the front of the plane; I stood watching, then stepped as he did, onto the pontoon first, then swinging up and down into that terrible little seat, Frank behind me. There was a leather strap, the kind you’d find in an electric chair, and I cinched it tight around my waist. Frank leaned forward to pass me a pair of goggles, and I made my cheek muscles imitate what little they could remember of smiling, and put them on. Clear glass, not tinted.

Frank started his engine. Then drove out into the Hudson.

We waited, drifting sideways a little, for a tug to churn itself out of the way: it seemed to be heading upriver after the St. Louis. Frank taxied out in a wide downstream curve, made a swift tight little turn into what wind there was, and—I wanted to squeeze my eyes shut but didn’t—we began bouncing forward, slap-slap, over the miniature waves, a fan of spray from the pontoon hull wetting my face and goggles, which I wiped with my sleeve. Our motion abruptly went smooth, and just above the water we sailed right past the end of the pier, and I had a swift glimpse of Mrs. Coffyn and Harriet Quimby—she was actually beautiful—smiling, waving, and when I faced front again, being up here didn’t seem so bad.

This was nothing of what I’d expected, sitting here putt-putting along above the water. This was no hundred tons of howling metal brutally thrusting through a thinned-out alien nothingness. This was another kind of thing, the sun on my face, the soft almost Indian-summer warmth of this strange 1912 early spring pressing my forehead: I could feel the air holding us up.

The engine putted along, the propeller revolved, and I heard it, but not loudly. We sat ahead of it, and possibly most of the sound poured away behind us. Sailing along here over the Hudson, gradually rising, I grinned and nodded at Frank.

And made a mistake. In moving my head, I glanced down over the side, then looked up fast, straight to the front, and it was all right again.

Frank began circling: slow, wide, easy circles leisurely lifting us higher, higher, and that seemed okay. Slowly corkscrewing up through the air, Frank stayed over the water that would accept us engineless, if need be. I’d see the long heights of the Jersey shore stretching out, green and rural mostly. Then see the great harbor. Then, sliding away behind us, the endless brown-black fingers of the west-side Manhattan docks. Glimpsed the toy-size St. Louis, two even tinier toys shoving her sideways at the American Line docks. Saw a white scrap of sailboat . . . a greenish-black spot that was a tug . . . two little red ferries perched on the water . . . then Ellis Island far behind us . . . the little Statue of Liberty, turned green since last I’d seen it, its torch revolving slowly as it slid back behind us. “I flew around Liberty last week,” Frank said, “with a motion picture cameraman right where you’re sitting. He took motion pictures of the crown and the torch, while inside the crown another man took motion pictures of us!” I grinned and nodded, wishing I could see those films; had they survived into the other end of the century?

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 impossible 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, my 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.