Flying Jenny

by Theasa Tuohy

  Laura folded her napkin in a very deliberate way, staring at Jenny all the while, as she seemed to be searching for words. “Then why—”

  Jenny cut her off, her voice sharp. “I’m lazy. I’ve got a good life. Why shake that up? Risk it all, traveling around the country to air shows?” Her tone softened. “But now John’s saying Roy’s right, and you’re saying it too.” She smiled ruefully. “That I should go for it. Get my transport license, at least. Not purposely hold myself back. You have to understand, I’m cautious, conservative. I’ve lived a very circumscribed life. I’m not a banker’s daughter for nothing. My big rebellion was dating John, way older than me, a man of the world, all those French girls. My parents were horrified, my high school friends wild with jealousy.”

  Laura was mesmerized. She hadn’t taken her eyes off Jenny as the pilot had picked her way through her own feelings about Roy and how he was affecting her life.

  Jenny squared her jaw. “I guess I need to be making up my own mind from now on, don’t I?”

  “Hooray,” said Laura, lifting her coffee cup in a toast.

  Jenny smiled. An awkwardness moved in. Laura drank her juice, buttered a biscuit, fiddled with her coffee cup. Jenny held hers up to signal the waiter for another refill.

  Finally, Laura broke the silence. “Tell me about your brother.”

  Jenny made a small sound that was almost a chuckle, touched her right little finger to her lips, a tiny smile creasing the corners of her eyes. “Charles? I don’t know. In a funny way, I guess he was my best friend.”

  Laura’s face lit up. “Really, a brother so much older?”

  “When I was little, he would put me on his knee and read Peter Rabbit, and once in a while play games. But never when his friends could see. Once he said, ‘Shoo, shoo, get along, little doggie.’” Jenny’s words came from deep in her throat, as she frowned and puckered her lips. “He and some high school pals were in our living room, and I had tried to join and climb on his lap. His friends laughed, and I cried.” She paused, took a sip of coffee, then spoke more slowly as she continued. “My father intervened that time; he heard the racket from his study and came out. But I was the one he admonished, not Charles. I think I was four. ‘It’s way past your bedtime, young miss. And what do you think you’re doing down here with the boys? You have your own dolls and things to play with.’”

  Jenny smiled now at the memory, looking into the middle disance as if searching out the details of her story. “I realized, long after Charles died, that was the summer before he was to go away to college. My father explained that Charles and his friends were deep in conversation about the growing war in Europe.”

  Laura sat up straighter. “That’s funny. When I was a child my best friend was also an adult. My Aunt Edna would read to me and play jacks.”

  Jenny went on as though she hadn’t heard Laura’s remark. “The last time I saw him, he had come home in his uniform—shiny brass buttons, even on his epaulettes. He took me down to Klein’s drugstore—I was wearing a yellow pinafore—and he bought me an ice cream cone. That was a big thing then, we usually ate ice cream with a spoon at home, but here was this special thing they were calling a waffle cone, or cornucopia. Charles explained it. He said they were first introduced at the World’s Fair in St. Louis way back in 1904. That cone flashed back in my mind when I found that John had gone to college there.” Jenny continued with no segue from one memory to another. “I remember looking up at Charles, he was a towhead, he was bathed in the glow from the brass and he seemed to wolf down the ice cream almost all in one inhale. Funny how things impress kids. For years after, in fact still, I guess, I eat ice cream so fast it leaves a frozen ache in my throat for several minutes.”

  And with no pause, Jenny returned to Laura. “Here’s my advice to you, kiddo. The first thing we have to do is find out the truth about the Jesuit. Clem will do it, he’s a lawyer. And that should help you get over Roy, since Clem is sweet on you.”

  “How do you know?” Laura asked in surprise.

  “How do I know? Girl, have you not got eyes?”

  Laura looked bewildered.

  “Holy smoke,” Jenny said. “We are a pair.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  THE TRAIN TO NEW YORK

  Laura was the only person to get on the train in Pershing—a whistle stop for the fast train to Chicago, meaning the stationmaster had to flag it down. She still had her valise and hatbox, but it felt as though everything else in her life had changed in the six days since she’d left New York. For starters, she was wearing no hat or gloves.

  She made her way to the center of the car, where she found a place to herself. They would stop only once before Kansas City; she was relieved at the prospect of time alone without some seatmate chattering away. Cheesy had left for New York a day earlier, ordered back by Barnes who said he’d had “enough pictures of airplanes to last a lifetime.” He let him stay only long enough to get pictures of Gilmore the Lion in flight. Her boss had warned Laura, too, that although he liked the story and photos of her parachute jump and loved the one of her dangling from the tree, he still wasn’t about to pay her for traveling time, so she’d better make it home the quickest way possible.

  Roy had been gentlemanly enough to see her off before Jenny and John drove her away from the Duncan Hotel. He took her hand. “It was a lovely time, my dear. But you must learn to not take these things too seriously.” He had put his arms around her when she burst into tears.

  As John shifted into gear, he’d turned to Laura in the backseat and said, “Roy is careless with people.” He paused for a beat then added, “Even with himself.”

  She had burst into tears again when Jenny hugged her as they heard the whistle of the train approaching the station at Pershing, south of Pawhuska. The Flynns had gone to quite a lot of trouble to get her there. John had had to ride back to Ponca City with Clem to retrieve his Duesenberg, then backtrack to Pawhuska instead of going on to Oklahoma City, as he’d intended. But Jenny had insisted. “After all she’s been through, we can’t just leave her to fend for herself,” she told her husband.

  “You’re a special, special friend,” Jenny had said to Laura, shouting over the toots and hissing of the approaching train. Laura flashed for a moment on the whistle of the ship that had sailed Aunt Edna away. She left for Paris a month before Laura’s fifteenth birthday, to be a foreign correspondent for Vanity Fair. That’s when Laura decided she’d like to be a reporter, a proper one, not freelance like her mother and her friends with no real jobs, but something solid. Laura went down to the docks to see Edna off. She had gotten there quite early to make sure she didn’t miss Edna, but ended up waiting in the cold for hours, stamping in the snow trying to keep her feet warm. She went briefly inside a dusty shipping office where an electric fire was lit, but didn’t stay long, worried she’d never see Edna again. The French Line’s SS Rochambeau was at the ready, its two decks lined with waving passengers, its whistle tooting; they were about to lift the gangplank when Edna came running. Laura frantically yelled and yelled as Edna boarded; she finally turned as she got on the ship. Then, miracle of miracles, she moved right over to a deck railing and they both waved until the ship was out of sight.

  As Laura had boarded the train in Pershing, Jenny said: “I’m sorry I was so mean at first, and I swear I will come to New York soon. I’m going to study like crazy for my transport license, then you can write a story that I’m only the fourth woman in the US to get one. I’m sure I’ll be at Roosevelt Field often.”

  Laura dropped her luggage on the adjoining seat and scrambled over it to the window to return Jenny’s wave. She was trotting alongside the train as it slowly picked up speed, her face melding with Aunt Edna’s. Laura’s tears began flowing again, her eyes red and swollen.

  She opened her handbag and found an already wet and crumpled handkerchief. She must stop this. She never cried. Never. She hardly knew the meaning of tears. On the playground, a few encounters with ruffians
on the street—one didn’t cry, you just hit back. No emotion from Evelyn, who took pride in being what she called “self-contained.” Laura wasn’t sure if she liked herself better this new way or the way she was before. Good things, like making friends with Jenny, felt painful somehow. So did the dreadful suspicion that perhaps her mother had been the object of derision all these years. The woman who ran off with the priest.

  The rejection from Roy was still too raw to even think about. She needed to read a magazine or work a puzzle, do something to take her mind away; the lost love was so painful that, just as they said in books, it felt like a stab in the heart. It took your breath away. It was even worse than the awful pain she’d felt when Aunt Edna went away. This was only the second time she’d ever lost someone. There’d really never been anyone else in her life to lose. Certainly not a father; she’d never had one in the first place.

  Laura couldn’t stop herself from replaying the excruciating scene in Roy’s darkened hotel room, the silent movie titles floating around in her head as the melodrama unfolded to the clickity-clack music of wheels hitting rails. “What did you expect?” The words were drawn out and oval like steam puffs emerging from the villain’s mouth.

  Her face burning hot, not from the heat of the locomotive but with embarrassment and pain, Laura watched herself say: “I . . . guess . . . I . . . thought . . . we . . . were . . . in . . . love.” Each word emerged like a single phrase with every turn of a train wheel. As the curtain fell, the crescendo, the villain, throwing a black cape over his face. Oh my God, the headless miscreant replied. You can’t be serious.

  Laura stared out the window at passing scrub oak, trying to staunch the flow of tears with her sopping handkerchief. It was sort of funny that Jenny had used the exact same words as Roy: “Oh my God, you can’t be serious.”

  As Laura was settling down and stifling her sniffles, the train began to slow to make its stop. She gasped. The scene out the window was stunning. Oil derricks as far as the eye could see. A forest of them. It looked like a child’s playroom floor covered with Erector Sets.

  Laura had seen quite a few derricks around both Ponca City and Pawhuska, but nothing like this. A sea of them. Wishing Cheesy were here to take a picture, she grabbed her pencil to make some notes about the strange history of the Osage wealth and death—to heck with whether Barnes said it was an old story. Besides, it actually seemed possible that she might have a personal interest in the subject, although she couldn’t bring herself to think about the ramifications of that. She was trying to put it out of her mind until she could confront her mother. But this view was inspiration. She’d base her story on what Clem had told her, plus whatever she could find in morgue clips once she got back to the Enterprise-Post. He’d said Congress cut off the headright allotments in January 1906. She hadn’t bothered to write the date down—easy to remember, it was the month before she was born.

  When she’d asked Clem how many Osage were killed for their headrights, he replied simply, “No one will ever know.”

  “That sounds crazy.” Laura was astounded. “Surely you can tell when someone is murdered, or even dies suspiciously?”

  “Not when authorities look the other way, or are in cahoots with the killers.” They’d been in Clem’s mother’s house. It was the day Laura had used the telephone there to call her office. She’d been somewhat distracted at the time, trying to decide if she had the nerve to go on flying with Jenny after having seen two narrow escapes that very day. As Clem told his story, Laura was surrounded with the obvious riches of the Donohue home. When she’d first met Clem he told her that his family had moved to Ponca City to get away from violence in Pawhuska.

  As Laura made her notes now, she shuddered at how understated Clem’s comment was. Back at his mother’s house, with Laura seated in one of the straight-backed gold-leaf library chairs, Clem had explained the situation: “The federal government controls the allotments, which means there are almost more lawyers and so-called guardians in Pawhuska than there are Indians. The money is parceled out by the Bureau of Indian Affairs to these minders and they pass it on to individual Osage, or more likely their creditors. The sheriff, the coroner, the minders—none of them bother to question the death of an Indian. They say he or she was probably drunk on moonshine or peyote, or had a stroke or a heart attack.”

  And, according to Clem, that was that. No inquiry. No autopsy. The endless cover-ups began to unravel in 1921 when yet another so-called drunken Indian was revealed to have had a bullet in the back of her head. Within two years, the woman’s sister and two others in her immediate family had died. The white man who had been married to the sister gained control of what she would have inherited from the deaths. He and his uncle, who was the driving force behind those particular killings, were eventually indicted. But not until the US Bureau of Investigation finally sent in four undercover agents as salesmen, cattle buyers, and the like, because the town officials were so corrupt. A lot of lawyers and minders suddenly moved out of state when a grand jury began to probe. Even so, only three cases were ever brought to trial, and it took years to get convictions.

  The train was pulling into the station, a low building of yellow sandstone with Santa Fe Railroad cut into its face. Below that on each side of the door leading into the depot, signs read: Bartlesville. In Laura’s mind it would forever be Derrick Town. She could see the conductor helping several people mount the metal stool to her car. She spread her possessions out, hoping it would discourage anyone from sitting next to her.

  Clem had laughed when he’d delivered his punch line. “The Osage insisted on buying title to the land when the government forced them down here to Indian territory from Kansas. God’s own irony that this communal land turned up swimming in oil, with only 2,229 people left on the tribal rolls to share it all.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  BACK IN NEW YORK

  Laura was exhausted when she arrived at Grand Central Terminal after nearly thirty-six hours of travel, but eager to confront her mother with her growing belief that her father had been a Jesuit priest. A redcap wheeled her luggage through to Vanderbilt Avenue, where she had stepped out of a taxi to begin this journey exactly a week ago. It was difficult for her to absorb how much her life had changed since then—a broken heart, and perhaps a scandalous father.

  Her spirits sank when the cab pulled up at her brownstone on Gay Street and she saw no lights in any of the second-floor windows. It was too early for Evelyn to be in bed. Her mother often stayed away for days at a time with one of her many lovers. As Laura went up the front stoop with her hatbox and satchel, she realized she was nearly holding her breath, hoping that this wasn’t one of those times.

  She turned on the lights in the dark apartment, hung up her clothes, scoured the empty pantry for something to eat, and waited in the sitting room until ten o’clock. Finally, she climbed the steps to her attic room, knowing she had to be in the office first thing in the morning. Barnes had warned her about no pay for travel time.

  After fraught dreams of Indians in war paint encircling her desk at the Enterprise-Post while she tried to hold them off with a tiny typewriter that shot out lead pencils, Laura dragged herself out of bed. It was seven in the morning and her mother still wasn’t home.

  Laura wearily left for work, hoping she would get a warmer reception there than she’d had at home. She got off the subway at the Park Row Elevated Terminal, across from City Hall, and walked to the old Times building, where she stopped in the lobby shop for a coffee. The counter boy in his white jacket and paper soda-jerk’s cap took her nickel and poured her a hot brew with a smile. “Haven’t seen you in a week or so. Where you been?”

  “On assignment,” she replied. Those words had a nice feel. Newspapers seem to come and go from Park Row, she thought. The Times had moved out of this building and uptown to 43rd Street long ago. Now the Daily News was preparing to do the same. Even so, there still seemed to be plenty of jobs in this business. Not like the journals her m
other wrote for. The Little Review was on its last legs. The Masses had lasted only a few years. It was true, the literary magazines didn’t seem to care whether you were a man or a woman. But still, thinking about all the newspapers located around here—there were probably fifteen—it seemed she could surely make more of a go at earning a living than her mother ever had.

  When she finally got to the city room, Barnes actually seemed glad to see her.

  “So, if it isn’t the prodigal daughter!” he yelled as she walked in. John Riley and Mac looked up from their typewriters and smiled. When she sat down at her desk stacked high with editions of the Enterprise-Post that had piled up while she was away, Joe Collins, chewing on his ubiquitous toothpick at the next desk, pushed back his snap-brimmed hat and said, “So, you did pretty good, kid.”

  Myrtle called over from her switchboard position in the middle of the room, “Welcome back. You got messages.”

  “Gee, thanks, everybody,” Laura said to no one in particular. She put down her handbag, took off her hat and gloves, and set about reading the old newspapers and clearing her desk of filled ashtrays and dirty coffee cups that squatters had left behind.

  When she got around to looking at her messages, she was startled to find that there were ten from Joe Bailey, that cute boy with her same name whom she’d met on the Cleveland train. And one from Clem. Joe’s all seemed to say that he was in town on a story and would like to take her to dinner. Clem’s just said hello. Both had left return numbers, but she decided not to answer either. She’d had enough of men for a while. Anyway, Clem was probably calling because Jenny had asked him to check about the Osage priest. But Laura felt she must confront her own mother before she could talk to anyone else about it. Besides, Jenny had said Clem was sweet on her, and she would be embarrassed to talk to him after her disaster with Roy.