From Time to Time

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.”