Flying Jenny

by Theasa Tuohy

  “Pants. The broad had on a man’s suit! Look at that picture,” he said, slapping his fist hard against the newspaper in his hand. “Pinstripes and a tie! You tough dames are all the same—no sense of propriety.” Collins pulled his feet off his desk, pushed his hat back on his head, and began banging away with two fingers on his Underwood upright. The toothpick was moving faster than his fingers.

  Collins is a jerk, Laura thought, always smelling of hops from having drunk his lunch, never an original thought in his bleary head. Even his desk was blank. No mounds, like hers, of all the odds and ends and tidbits she always meant to do a story on. Collins’s desk looked like no one lived there.

  This was, indeed, 1929. Prohibition was in full throttle with bathtub gin selling for as little as ten cents a bottle. Any Saturday, even the kiddies at their five-cent movie could see jerky black-and-white newsreels of Elliott Ness’s G-men smashing stills with their axes as mobsters fought over territory in the streets of big cities. Al Capone was king of Chicago. Speakeasies were everywhere. Detroit authorities claimed that the city’s version of the clandestine booze joints, colorfully known as blind pigs, were so numerous that revenue from illegal liquor was second only to the city’s auto industry.

  The Nineteenth Amendment had been ratified nine years before, giving women the right to vote, and it appeared there was no stopping them. They were moving into all sorts of male preserves that had previously been forbidden. They were even flying airplanes under bridges like that daredevil Jenny Flynn, whose exploits had been recorded by Pathé News and RKO, and spread across the front pages of all of New York’s papers. And they were also crashing and burning, like that Gena Jones, who knew how to fly but didn’t know what level of oxygen would keep her from blacking out. True, Dietrich, the glamorous German film star, had been stopped and questioned for wearing pants in public; but that was Paris, not America. Here in New York sat Laura Bailey, the Enterprise-Post’s first and only female reporter in the city room, with Collins and the other reporters grumbling that she had the temerity to sound off when her story didn’t make the front page.

  “Hey, Bailey,” the city editor bellowed, “get over here, I got something for you!”

  Laura unfolded herself from her desk, stubbed out her cigarette on the linoleum floor, patted into place any stray strands of her dark hair that might have escaped from her bob, straightened her calf-length skirt, grabbed a notebook and pencil from the mess on her desk, and headed toward the pulsating center of this tight little universe. She passed rows of cluttered desks, peopled by white-shirted men, their sleeves rolled up, banging away at typewriters or yelling into the mouthpieces of long-necked telephones. It’s no wonder everyone shouts around here, Laura thought, we’re so used to the continuous clacking of the wire machines we’re not even conscious of the roar.

  A stub of cigar in the grip of his stained teeth, Rufus Joshua Barnes mumbled, “Long Island, you grew up out that way, didn’t you?”

  “What are you talking about?” Laura replied. “I was born in Greenwich Village.”

  “Oh yeah,” Barnes said. “A bohemian, I forgot.”

  Laura smiled to herself, thinking that this tough, gritty, fat man would be stunned to know just how bohemian her upbringing really had been. Like having no idea who her father was.

  “Get on with it,” Laura said tartly, circling her right wrist in a hurry-up motion. “What do you want me to do on Long Island?” None of them seemed to like her or want her around, so she saw no reason to try to be polite. She had learned quickly to give as good as she got.

  “Nothing, actually,” Barnes said with a cat-ate-the-canary smirk. “I was just thinking how you fouled up out there at Roosevelt Field and didn’t get an interview with that stunt-flying dame. I was hoping the failure might have matured you a little as a reporter.”

  “Now just a minute—”

  “Just a minute yourself. Here,” Barnes said, studying a scribbled note in his big hand, “I’ve got another assignment that I trust you won’t mess up.”

  “Yeah?” Laura couldn’t keep the skepticism from her voice. It sounded like a trap—some back-of-the book rubbish, no doubt.

  “So, you’ve done okay on the orphanage thing.”

  “Detention,” Laura corrected.

  Barnes looked at her and rubbed the stubble on his chin. “You really have a sassy mouth, kid. Didn’t they teach you nothing in that college?”

  This was an old refrain around here, and Laura got pretty tired of hearing it. As far as she could tell, most of these guys hadn’t bothered to finish high school. Not wanting an education made no sense to her. She’d grown up in an atmosphere where intellectualism was everything. People in her mother’s circle lived, breathed, ate, and slept with books, art, ideas—almost to the point of psychosis. They were poets and painters who always had to know everything, be on the cutting edge, test whatever theory was new, stretch the boundaries of convention way beyond anything that resembled everyday life. The poet William Carlos Williams and the writer Waldo Frank were just two of the legion of her mother’s lovers who had hung around and pontificated to Laura on the spirituality of creativity. Laura’s only escape from a bizarre childhood had been a full scholarship to Barnard College—which was a blessed 119 blocks uptown from her home. She took the IRT subway each day from the Christopher Street stop to 116th Street and Broadway, across from the large ironwork gates of Columbia University. It was light-years away from her chaotic home on Gay Street, just around the corner from another of her mother’s friends, e.e. cummings, who was in revolt against the constraints of the rules of poetic punctuation.

  Laura’s mother was bereft that her daughter was consorting daily with such ill-read lowlifes, but took consolation in the thought that approval would have been forthcoming from another of her former lovers, the revolutionary journalist John Reed, who was now interred in the Kremlin Wall.

  “I’d like you to let me do the talking for once,” the city editor continued in exasperation. He frequently voiced his despair of ever being able to teach this highbrow kid anything. “I got something for you.”

  “So, what is it?”

  “Here’s the deal. Some stunt-flying women are in this cross-the-country air race—a first-time thing. Since you’re such an expert now on flying dames, I’ve decided to send you out to the finish line. Your pal Jenny Flynn isn’t on the roster, though. Her with enough pull not to lose her license. Curious thing. Anyway, I’m sending Riley to cover all the real races among the men, but you can cover the ladies.”

  “Out? Out where?” Laura was frowning.

  But she’d already lost Barnes’s attention, as he turned to pick up his ringing phone. The black cord dangling against his white shirt, he held the cup to his left ear and covered the mouthpiece with his right hand long enough to growl at Laura, “Don’t just stand there. Get going. We need the sob-sister touch on this thing. There could be a bunch of ’em get killed. Damn sure if they can’t fly any better than that Jones dame who buried herself in a fireball in Roosevelt Field.”

  Laura grimaced at the editor’s callousness, but kept her eye on the real ball. “Where am I going?” she asked again.

  Barnes didn’t bother to cover the mouthpiece this time. “Cleveland,” he hissed, and Laura could hear someone on the other end saying, “What? Did they win the game today?”

  “Cleveland—jeez, you mean out in Ohio?” Laura said to Barnes’s back. “That’s a long way. Takes days, doesn’t it?” Laura had rarely been out of New York City, except, of course, the recent trip to Roosevelt Field on Long Island. And, she’d been in the country north of the city once and once to New Jersey.

  As she walked in a daze back to her desk to pick up her hat and gloves, she thought, Maybe this business of chasing news isn’t so bad after all. Going to the Midwest—maybe her own roots were there. She suspected that’s where her mother came from. Laura had a picture of her mother that had been taken in St. Louis, although she could never get her to talk
about any of that.

  Ah, so what? She quickly came to her senses. She had nothing to go on. She didn’t even know her mother’s real name. Even her own was made up.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  HOME SWEET HOME

  Instead of taking the Sixth Avenue el as she normally would, Laura hopped in a cab at Park Row to head home and pack a bag.

  As the taxi let her out, she glanced briefly up at the windows of her small room, perched like the afterthought that it was on the flat roof of the brick row house on Gay Street. She was put up there as a child so she would be out of the way of the adults, but it was a happenstance she had learned to cherish, being a short stairway’s remove from the chaos of her mother’s life and loves. She smiled as she looked up: that was her sanctuary, her spot, her place. She was even lucky in her fire escape. A number of houses on the block-long, crooked street between Waverly and Christopher in what was called the West Village were marred by clunky ironwork that ran down the front of the building. But hers was in back, and climbed to her window. On hot summer nights, she could fall asleep out there to the buzz of insects and the glow of fireflies stalking tall sunflowers and tomato plants in the garden that belonged to the tenants in the basement apartment. In the autumn, she would read in the waning light and, come winter, she had even been known to sit on her sill in muffler and cap practicing snowball pitches.

  She took the steps to the stoop two at a time, unlocked the building door, then headed up the flight of carved wooden stairs to the apartment she and her mother shared on the second floor. Now that Laura had a job, she had thought of getting her own place, but decided her familiar garret room was just fine. And as much as her mother was a burden, she felt she needed to stick around to look after the child-woman who had never grown up, who was way too impractical to manage on her own.

  “Why are you home so early? You haven’t lost that dreadful job, have you?” Her mother’s voice came from the tiny sitting room to the right of the stairs. On the left, at the front of the house, was her mother’s bedroom. What passed for a kitchen (it had a tiny square wooden table and two chairs, a huge bucket for blocks of ice, and a single burner) was at the back, off the sitting room. Laura and her mother managed bathing and other tasks of personal hygiene with a bowl and pitcher in their respective bedrooms, with water heated on the burner. The little-better-than-a-ladder stairs to Laura’s garret wound up through a space built in between the kitchen and the indoor toilet.

  “Sorry to disappoint you, Evelyn, but I haven’t lost my job yet,” Laura said, moving to the doorway to address her mother, who was dressed, as usual, in a loose-fitting, airy garb that might have been Tibetan or Egyptian. One could never be sure, except that it would always be earth tones. The room was made even smaller by overflowing bookcases that lined the walls except for a break for a brick fireplace, containing a spit and a large black pot, where an occasional sumptuous meal was cooked. A colorful American Indian blanket with a child’s handprints woven into it, for which Evelyn displayed an excessive attachment, served as a rug. No curtains hung at the two paned windows looking onto the street.

  Laura, eager to move on, stayed in the doorway. “I won’t be joining you in the ranks of the starving, writing for little literary journals. I have an assignment to go to Cleveland.”

  “What could possibly be of interest there? Everyone there is so repressed and boring.”

  “Repressed and boring might be good after the freewheeling life you’ve led,” Laura responded.

  “Believe me, my dear, the Midwest is stultifying.”

  “That’s interesting,” Laura said, raising an eyebrow, a petulant tone creeping into her voice. “It’s the first time you’ve ever admitted to me that you’ve even been there.”

  “One can know many things, my dear, without actually experiencing them.” A sly smile flickered across her extraordinarily beautiful face. She was blue-eyed, and wore her long blond hair in a very non-revolutionary bun, pinned at the nape of her long neck. Most other countercultural women of the Village wore their hair bobbed, but Evelyn was quite frank about the fact that she liked the severity, to more prominently display the shape of her face.

  “It would just be nice to know if the Midwest is where you came from,” Laura replied. More to the point, she thought, who is my father and why do you revel in torturing me with unanswered questions?

  “Your endless interest in questions of paternity are baffling, when what you should be doing is freeing your mind of constraints.” It was her mother’s mantra. Laura planned one day to have it immortalized in a cross-stitch sampler made as a wall hanging. “Conventions of the past are the enemy.”

  “You and your Freud and your free love.” Laura’s retort was fairly predictable too. “Mom, if you put your energy into writing about something sane, instead of beating that drum, you could be a very successful writer, like some of those friends of yours.”

  “Mom? Why do you insist on that? I don’t call you child, why should you call me Mom? It’s so impersonal.”

  “I’ve got to get packed.” Laura started for her stairs. “I’ve got a train to catch.”

  “How long will you be gone?”

  “I don’t know, Mom. It depends on the story.”

  Evelyn’s laugh was good-natured. “You can be so stubborn.”

  Laura turned with a grin. “Speaking of paternity, I wonder where I got that.”

  As she packed, Laura pondered the disparity in their looks, not to mention their outlooks. She tried to be serious and responsible, and did her best to conform to accepted standards of dress and behavior. She’d always watched her classmates, especially at college, to get clues as to how the rest of the world lived. Her mother, on the other hand, went out of her way to poke her finger in the world’s eye. It was typically inconsistent, Laura thought, for Evelyn to disapprove of her tabloid job—the fellows in the newsroom didn’t seem to fit anyone’s idea of proper comportment. Laura yanked her new veiled hat off the closet shelf, and wondered if it was the right thing for an air show. She stopped herself. What a dumb thing to waste time thinking about. She had only one proper hat, and she couldn’t very well wear a winter cap in the heat of the summer. As she took her comb and brush from the dressing table, she caught her glimpse in the mirror. She bent down to the low table and stared. “Whose little girl are you?” she asked the reflection. Dark hair and green eyes stared back, hardly a blue-eyed blonde. At five feet, four inches, she was considered average, no resemblance there either to the “statuesque” Evelyn, reed thin and nearly five-foot-nine. Without thinking about why she was doing it, Laura slipped off the gold chain she always wore. People had often asked if its tiny key was a charm or if it really opened something. She had learned early on to put them off by saying, “It’s the key to my heart.” It was no such thing, of course. A straightforward answer probably would have better satisfied her inquisitors: “It opens my childhood diary.” But the heck with them. Whose business was it anyway but hers? She now pulled the scuffed leather-bound book from a bottom drawer and turned the key. The woman she called Aunt Edna had given her the diary for her twelfth birthday. The petite redhead was one of the few of her mother’s friends with whom Laura got on well. Edna would play jacks and other children’s games with her. They also seemed to have an affinity for each other because Laura was born in the same hospital from which her aunt had gotten her middle name.

  Her mother always said that Edna St. Vincent Millay—whom her mother intimately called Vincent but would never allow Laura to—was her best friend in the whole world and was a devoted fan of her poetry. Had Evelyn and the poet been having a minor affair all these years? Laura doubted it, but with her mother one could never be sure. When Aunt Edna moved upstate to Steepletop, her country house, Laura had been allowed to go up only once; her mother left her behind for subsequent visits. No matter, for a short while, Laura’s best and only friend had been Aunt Edna. By the time Edna married and moved away, she had long since put away her childish p
lay with Laura, so Laura hadn’t really expected to be allowed to go to Steepletop. Her mother would have dominated the poet’s time there anyway. It wouldn’t have been the same as having Edna all to herself on long stretches to write poems, do charades, invent guessing games, while her mother was off with some beau. Her mother, often jealous when she heard of their romps, would sniff, “Vincent is behaving like a child.”

  Laura had filled the little diary quickly, had even proudly shown her aunt some of her own poems. She hadn’t read any of these entries for years, and had no particular curiosity about them now. She simply retrieved the faded, dog-eared photo that Edna had secretly given her long ago and dropped it into her purse. She snapped her handbag closed, locked the diary, put the chain back around her neck, and tucked the book back in its drawer.

  Laura laughed to herself at the memory of her insistence to her mother for years that she must surely be adopted. In one of the few times that her mother had given in to Laura’s pleadings about her origins, Evelyn had finally produced a birth certificate.

  It said Laura was born February 6, 1906, in St. Vincent’s, the hospital just up the street from their apartment. It listed her as a female child weighing six pounds, eight ounces. Mother: Evelyn T. Sampson, Father: Unknown. It told her another thing: her mother was barely nineteen when Laura was born. Pretty young to be stuck with a baby, she thought. And New York is a tough town.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  NOT QUITE THE 20TH CENTURY LIMITED

  Laura trotted down the long platform in her hobble skirt and high heels, one gloved hand up to her new hat, the other clutching her handbag. She was breathless trying to keep up with the redcap who was rolling ahead looking for her car, which seemed to be at the far end of the train.