Flying Jenny

by Theasa Tuohy

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, by any means, including mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written consent of the publisher.

  Published by Akashic Books

  ©2018 by Theasa Tuohy

  Paperback ISBN-13: 978-1-61775-621-4

  eISBN-13: 978-1-61775-621-4

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2017956878

  First printing

  Kaylie Jones Books

  www.kayliejonesbooks.com

  Akashic Books

  Brooklyn, New York, USA

  Ballydehob, Co. Cork, Ireland

  Twitter: @AkashicBooks

  Facebook: AkashicBooks

  E-mail: info@akashicbooks.com

  Website: www.akashicbooks.com

  Table of Contents

  ___________________

  Copyright & Credits

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Acknowledgments

  About Theasa Tuohy

  About Kaylie Jones Books

  About Akashic Books

  for Mom

  CHAPTER ONE

  DEFYING THE ODDS

  New York City, 1929

  The Williamsburg Bridge was already jammed with photographers, spectators, and newsreel cameras when Laura Bailey and Cheesy Clark arrived on the scene. They had a tough time shoving their way through to a good vantage at the railing so they could see all the way upriver toward the Queensboro Bridge.

  “So,” said Cheesy, removing the bulky flash attachment from his Speed Graphic as he set himself up for shooting, “here we is, me and you. A gal reporter and a cheesecake artist. Whaddaya think the deal is?”

  “This whole thing doesn’t make any sense.” Laura frowned as she wriggled into a space between a steel post and Cheesy, and stepped up on a rung of the railing for a better view. A puff of breeze warned that she needed to hold as tightly to her little hat with one hand as she was gripping the railing with the other. “I bet that span isn’t even two hundred feet above the water,” she yelled to him over the noise of the crowd. “No one can fly under that. And look,” she said, pointing west toward the Manhattan side of the bridge, clogged with Sunday traffic moving to and from Queens over the East River. “There are cables and stuff hanging down that could catch and rip a wing in a second.”

  Cheesy, the stub of a cigar clenched tight in his teeth, did no more than grunt. He was too busy jamming plates in and out of his Speed Graphic, turning one way for shots of the swelling crowd, whirling back, shooting the bridge up ahead, the barges, Sunday sailors, and other river traffic, then leaning back to get a dizzying shot of the soaring towers of the bridge they were on.

  “Heck of a spread for the paper tomorrow,” he finally said. “Don’t wanna miss any angles. If the fool pilot gets hisself killed or not, still heck of a spread.”

  “Ouch, get your clodhopper off my foot,” Laura yelped, as a Pathé newsreel cameraman backed into her.

  Laura was at a distinct disadvantage jockeying among all these men, dressed as she was in a mid-calf-length skirt that hobbled her movement, the tiny hat with a veil perched atop her dark marcelled wave.

  “Sorry, lady,” the cameraman said. “But what are you doing here, anyway? You’re in the way.”

  “So are you, buster,” Laura snapped, giving him a shove and turning her attention back to the bridge ahead, scanning the horizon on the outlandish possibility that there could really be a little bi-wing airplane approaching. It was a perfect summer day, blue, cloudless sky. The rumor was, as hard as it was to comprehend, that some crazy barnstorming pilot from Roosevelt Field was planning to fly under all four bridges that crossed from Manhattan to Brooklyn and Queens.

  People were doing all sorts of screwy things in 1929, as a glance at any newspaper would reveal. They called their era the Jazz Age, the Roaring Twenties. The Great War had been over for ten years, it was a time of boundless hope, optimism, and prosperity. “Blue Skies” was the song on everyone’s lips. The tabloids were full of flagpole sitters, flappers doing the Charleston, and marathon dancers leaning on their partners through endless nights. The more serious journals had many readers believing that Herbert Hoover would put a chicken in every pot, a car in every garage, and that the bull market would run forever. But everyone agreed that these stunt pilots took the cake. Ever since Charles Lindbergh had flown the Atlantic solo two years before, the entire world had gone nuts over flying. Even women were doing it.

  The traffic on the Williamsburg Bridge was light but growing; it didn’t yet look as jammed as the Queensboro up ahead.

  “Let’s hope he flies north to south,” Laura said to a reporter jammed next to her with an Evening Graphic press card stuck in his hat. “If he starts downriver from the Brooklyn Bridge, we won’t be able to see him coming, only going.”

  The man laughed. “If he crashes into the Queensboro before he gets under it, we won’t be able to see that either. Some guy I just talked to has binoculars; he says he can see a lot of press stationed up there. They’ll get the good shots.”

  “We shudda had another shooter here,” Cheesy grumbled. “I can catch action north, but with the bend in the river, I’m outta luck if he crashes into the Manhattan or the Brooklyn Bridge.”

  “You’ve got to crash doing this stunt,” said a photographer Laura recognized from the Evening Standard. “There’s hardly any clearance under most of those bridges.”

  At that moment a collective “Ooh, ah” rose from the growing crowd. Laura could make out a dark speck moving through the sky toward the Queensboro Bridge. “Can you see any better through your camera lens?” she turned to ask Cheesy. But the photographer was slamming plates with the staccato of a machine gun.

  The black spot was coming closer. It wobbled, caught a sunray that flashed on the water, and headed straight for the dangling cables. Laura’s chest tightened; she realized she was holding her breath. The poor guy was going to kill himself! She’d never seen anyone die before. She gritted her teeth. I suppose it’s part of the job, she told herself. I can’t be weak-kneed, I have to be strong. I have to prove myself. She watched the speck swerve, then merge with the shadowed waters beneath the bridge, her held breath turned to a gasp. The little spot popped up into the sun! A
cheer went up from the bridge watchers.

  “He made it.”

  “That was close.”

  “Wow.”

  The crowd roared. The expanding dot was clearly identifiable as a plane now, fast approaching, threading its way among the ships and barges in the harbor. It neared the Williamsburg, and the open-cockpit biplane rocked from side to side in greeting to the cheering, waving crowd. Laura could have sworn she caught a momentary glimpse of a grin under the cloth helmet and goggles of the figure in the cockpit. Bridge traffic was at a standstill.

  The plane was heading straight for them, its nose pointing down. Laura elbowed and clawed her way back through the crowd and zigzagged past the stalled cars in what could only be described as a broken field run. The goal post was a view from the other side.

  As she shoved one last person out of her way, she grabbed up a handful of skirt, yanked it above her knees, kicked off her high heels—Thank God they’re not the ones with the strap across the instep, she thought—and hoisted her lithe five-foot-four frame up several rungs on the bridge’s railing. Jeez, I hope Cheese has the good sense to be right behind me.

  Cheesy Clarke, nicknamed for his penchant for pinup photos, was known in the trade as a cheesecake artist, but his talents went way beyond that. Before he was taken on as a staffer at the Enterprise-Post, the tabloid where he and Laura worked, he’d continually scooped most of the staff photographers at the numerous newspapers in New York City. Always in the same black rumpled suit with no tie, he all but lived in his car with its police radio. Day or night, he was at a crime scene faster than anyone else, often beating the cops.

  Cheesy was a swell guy, one of Laura’s favorite photographers. He was a deez and doze type from the Bronx, with little education, and not the best table manners in the world, but he was funny and dedicated to his work.

  Sure enough, there he was hanging over the bridge railing right beside Laura.

  “You’re pretty fast on your feet for a broad,” he said with a grin.

  “Darn right,” Laura yelled into the wind. Mild though the weather was, there was more than a little breeze when you stuck your head out this far. “I was saving you a spot.” She was already half over the rail leaning on her abdomen to help balance while she stretched for a better view of the water.

  “Holy cow, here he comes.” Laura could barely hear Cheesy over the sound of his camera’s slide click as she caught sight of the first dark shadow of wings spread on the water.

  At that same moment, she felt the wind tug at her hair. Uh oh. She didn’t dare grab at her hat. She needed both hands on the rail, or she’d be in the drink as well. With something akin to seasickness, she watched the little veiled felt that represented a week’s salary sail off. Borne by the fickle wind, it floated, then dipped, then glided down to the river far below.

  She didn’t have time to mourn, here came the plane. It did the very same kind of pop-up Laura had seen when it had come out from under the Queensboro Bridge moments before. I must ask someone how they do that, Laura thought. If the pilot is too dead to talk, someone at an airfield or someplace like that will know. Must be like gunning a car engine. Wow. I’ve never had a story like this before. It’s a real humdinger. She shifted her belly slightly on the railing and peered down, straight into the hole of metal that passed for a cockpit—a flutter of white.

  A silk scarf flashed, blowing in the wind.

  In a long-ago picture, it had been wrapped around the woman’s throat and a car’s rear wheel. Isadora Duncan, her mother’s lover. It had broken Isadora’s neck, and her mother’s heart. But, nothing ever really touched her mother, Laura had decided then. Just another moment of her narcissism. Mother had wailed, “Poor Isadora, a part of me has died. How shall I go on?” It always felt to Laura that everything in the world except herself was a part of her mother’s past; Isadora had been her modern dance phase. It would take a genius to ever predict what phase Mother would . . .

  “Good grief,” Laura screamed at Cheesy, “that was a woman!” She knew it. She didn’t know how, but she just knew it! “A woman!”

  The tiny biplane and its shadow were already skimming through the sky and gliding along the choppy surface of the water. The crowd behind Laura was cheering. Some people were actually dancing around the stalled cars or doing jigs on the roadway of the bridge.

  “A woman!” Laura screamed again at Cheesy. “I’ve got to get to a phone.” As she dropped off the railing and scrambled into her shoes, she caught a view through the bridge’s lacy grillwork. The tiny dot of a plane was swinging slightly to its left trying to avoid the smokestack of a river barge on its way to the next bridge. I’ve got to file this story. I can’t stay to see what happens, Laura thought. Cheesy will get a picture.

  CHAPTER TWO

  FLYING JENNY

  What a lark! Jenny Flynn momentarily turned in the cockpit to watch a woman’s tiny hat waft its way toward the choppy waters of the river below. Was the hat a salute or just some overzealous gawker losing her balance? Jenny raised a hand to her own cloth helmet in a loving salute to her hero brother. Look down, Bubba, from your home in the clouds, and watch me win this one for you.

  A beautiful, cloudless day—she felt one with the sky. The wind whipped her face and stiffened her silk scarf into a flag flying in her wake. But why were the bridges packed with spectators and newsreel cameras? No one was supposed to know. Nosy reporters with their stupid questions. She hated the way they seemed to treat fliers as their own personal terrain. How did word get out she was doing this? She’d impulsively been drawn into a dare . . . Yikes, of course. That dadgum Mark had set her up, trying to entice her into accepting his job offer. She’d deal with him later!

  Jenny squirmed a bit in her hard seat—not much more than a hole cut in the metal fuselage—to adjust the pillow she always kept wedged at her back against the risk of falling out when flying upside down. She hated chutes, rarely wore one. And seat belts in these old clunkers could be rusted and worn, and certainly too big for a ninety-pound teenager. She gripped the stick, looked around, and focused on what was ahead. The map spread on her knees, a corner tucked in her seat belt to keep it from blowing away, showed two bridges down and only two more to go—the Manhattan and the Brooklyn—around this bend of the river.

  New York was an alien place. Flying under bridges packed with cars and people, past huge buildings that folks actually lived in! Skyscrapers. No yards, no grass, few trees. Soaring over billowing wheat, making forced landings in cornfields, was her way. She’d be in a dickens of a spot if she had engine trouble around here. For now, the steady drone of the new and souped-up Curtiss-Wright engine in this borrowed but familiar old Great War relic was sweeter than a concerto. Another Mark selling point: “Working for us, you’d have the best and latest equipment. Your incredible skill and our expertise—a winning combo.” But she didn’t want that. This was her life: moving on her own, just herself and the sky.

  What a day. Glorious, skimming over the water, testing her mettle. That first bridge, what was it called? Its dangling cable caused her to drop so low, lose so much altitude before she could scoot under, that she’d nearly stalled—was close to being dunked. Her altimeter registering less than zero! She’d skirted so close to the river she could smell it, feel the spray hit her face as her propeller roiled the water. Then she’d gunned her, to pop up on the other side.

  A slow grin spread up from Jenny’s mouth to crinkle her eyes behind her goggles. She slapped her knee in glee. I bet that was the very spot where the so-called hot shot from the airfield took his dunking last week. The tale of that guy was how Mark goaded her into taking this dare. Once he’d started in on Jenny, a lot of the other hangar jockeys had chimed in. No way could a girl do it. Too many men had tried and failed.

  Coming around the river’s bend, Jenny gasped—two looming suspension bridges one after the other, each a beauty. The first, the straight taut fingerboard of a violin, the next strung like creamy harp strings. Wow, t
hey were really close together!

  And something she hadn’t counted on—open shipping channels. There were not only two bridges, but two ships as well. Big ones, each with several smokestacks: one going to and one coming from the open sea beyond. She tightened her grip on the stick—what to do? Stay level, calm, as she always did. The two behemoths were passing each other in the short space between the bridges.

  She skimmed the water under the first bridge then sharply pulled back the stick to pop up and take quick stock of her situation.

  She could most likely make it flying level in the space between the ships as they passed each other but, unsure about the wingspan of her borrowed plane compared to the smokestacks on each ship, she decided not to chance it. So she flipped a hard left rudder and the little biplane dutifully turned on its side and did a vertical slip under the Brooklyn Bridge. The faces of the seamen as she passed were a blur, but she could hear their cheers.

  As she righted her plane, she pulled back on the stick and soared into the open bay of New York Harbor. There, straight ahead, was Lady Liberty smiling at Jenny’s accomplishment, the white sails of weekend boaters dotted around.

  “Hallelujah!” Jenny yelled to the open water.

  She looked again, and the Lady’s smile had vanished, just the same stern stone face so familiar from high school history books. I hope she’s not mad at me, Jenny thought, everyone else is going to be. Her mother would have heart palpitations, call for the smelling salts, if any photos ran in the Daily Oklahoman. “My dear, how could you do this to me? Don’t you know who we are? We have a standing to maintain in the community.”

  The Department of Commerce will probably be so angry they’ll take away my license. But shoot, that’s too much to worry about today. I just did something no one has ever done before, and now I’m going to buzz around Miss Serious Face over there and see if I can’t get her to smile again.

  Jenny remembered from those same school lessons that the symbolic broken chains on Miss Liberty’s left foot could only be seen from the air. At the time, she’d thought what fun it would be to circle in an airplane to see them. Now was her chance. Probably never be frolicking around these parts again. Let’s just hope the killjoys at Commerce don’t yank my ticket and forever shackle me to the earth. She kicked her right rudder, made a sharp banking turn, and began circling for a better look. First around the torch. She dropped closer, spotted the broken chains and then tourists leaning sideways looking up from openings in the statue’s crown at the sound of the buzzing plane. She waved and yelled, the spectators gleefully returning the greeting. She dipped her left wing, a favorite gesture of Bubba, her brother Charles.