The Aviator's Wife (14 page)

“Harry, no cameras,” Carol hissed, eyeing Charles nervously. My husband did not tense, however; he appeared relaxed, even happy, as he chatted amiably with the Great Aviatrix. This evening, anyway, my husband appeared to have called a truce with the press.

Harry sipped his champagne
and shrugged. “Can’t frisk everyone, you know. I’ll go talk to the fellow.” And with his broad shoulders leading the way, he barreled through the crowd of people I barely knew but who had been invited to welcome me—to welcome
us
—back home. My family was nowhere in sight, although they were fond of the Guggenheims; Con, Dwight, Mother, and Daddy were in Mexico, and Elisabeth always had an excuse
to stay in Englewood these days with Connie; they were about to open their dream school.

Welcome back, The First Couple of the Air!
proclaimed a banner hung across the Guggenheims’ mantelpiece. That was who we were now; that was what we did. We flew. No one even bothered to pretend that we were like other newlyweds, who set up housekeeping together, or picked out china patterns, or argued amiably
over budgets.

Charles and I spent the first months of our married life in the air, crossing the country, christening every new airfield that popped up like tulips in this new, springlike era of aviation. Everything
was possible, the future as vast and endless as the sky itself—as long as planes kept flying.

And so we flew, to ensure that they would. Right after our honeymoon, Charles was named
to the board of one of the first passenger airlines—TAT, or Transcontinental Air Transport—and like everything in his life, he took his duties seriously. He wasn’t content merely to lend his name for publicity and investors; he insisted on mapping out routes himself, with me in the copilot seat. He even piloted the first official flight. And I was the first official “air hostess.”

As newsreel
cameras whirred to capture the occasion, a group of movie stars and celebrities, including the governor of California, made their toothy way, travel cases in hand, down a red carpet just outside Los Angeles. Only this was not a movie premiere; they were the passengers on that first flight, and at the end of the carpet Charles and I stood in front of a gleaming Ford Tri-Motor plane. While flash powder
blinded us, Mary Pickford flirted shamelessly with my husband, and I smiled gamely, pretending not to mind.

I needn’t have worried; Mary Pickford was too chicken to actually fly. She simply christened the plane with a champagne bottle and remained on the ground as Charles made a great show of putting on his flight jacket, and I made a great show of tying a ridiculous apron around my ridiculously
flimsy flowered dress, and we followed our “guests” up a short temporary staircase onto the plane. Charles piloted it to the first refueling stop in Arizona, while I fussed over the ten passengers seated in wicker chairs, five on each side of the plane, each with its own window, velvet privacy curtain, reading lamp, cigar lighter, and ashtray. I handed out magazines, helped two male attendants
serve catered meals on real china, and poured coffee out of a sterling-silver coffeepot. When we hit our first air pocket, all the passengers turned instinctively
to me, terror in their eyes; I smiled reassuringly, and soon they were all behaving like experienced flyers.

We also flew to console, to buck up the country’s nerves, when, just two months after the inaugural flight, TAT—now dubbed
“The Lindbergh Line”—suffered its first accident. The plane went down near Mount Williams, New Mexico, far from any road or path. Charles decided it was up to him, as the face of the company, to locate the wreckage, so I climbed behind him into the cockpit of a Lockheed Vega and kept my eyes peeled, not sure what I was looking for. My stomach heaved when I found it. The blackened, twisted plane looked
broken, like a child’s toy carelessly thrown; my fists balled up, hitting my thighs as if to inflict the kind of pain the passengers must have felt. I knew there were no survivors—how could there be when the plane had burst into flames on impact? We flew as close as we could, but it was not close enough to see the bodies, for which I was ever grateful; unballing my fists, I wrote down the coordinates
that Charles barked to me, and, dry-eyed, handed them to the search party when we landed, fifty miles away, in a flat patch of desert. As the First Lady of the Air, I murmured empty words of sympathy to the families at the mass memorial a week later, proud that I did not disgrace Charles by surrendering to my emotions and sobbing with them. Two days later, when I climbed once more into a
passenger plane—half empty; the public scared easily back then—I did so with a confident grin for the photographers that I could scarcely believe when I saw it in the papers.

But, of course, I
was
confident; Charles was piloting this plane, so I knew nothing would happen. It was those poor people’s misfortune to be piloted by someone else; someone
less
.

We also flew to set records, to explore.
Not just the world, the skies, but our marriage.

I never saw my husband smile as readily as he did the day I
flew solo for the first time, after months of study and practice flights that had been wedged between our official TAT duties. Taking off was easy; my mind was so full of checklists and procedures that I was too busy to be frightened. It was only once I was up, able to relax after those
always tense first moments of takeoff, when I realized that even though I had done this a hundred times before, Charles had always been in the instructor’s seat.

Now there was no one in the plane but myself. And the enormity of what I was doing—flying alone, relying solely on my intelligence and skill for what seemed the first time in my life, made my veins suddenly fill with liquid lead, my
stomach pitch uncontrollably, and beads of sweat break out on my brow. Terrified I would black out, I willed myself to concentrate on the instruments even though, for a sickening moment, they blurred into one smear of lines and circles and numbers. The wind that I always welcomed was now sinister; despite my study of physics and aerodynamics, it seemed a miracle that it didn’t simply fling this insignificant
little piece of machinery to the ground. How could I ever have imagined I could do this by myself—keep an airplane aloft?

Then I remembered that Charles was below, watching me, always watching me—testing me, as well. To see if I would measure up to his standards, because after only a few months of marriage, I sensed he wasn’t quite convinced. Frankly, neither was I.

But there really wasn’t any
other option—so I talked myself through the maneuvers; banking to the right, to the left, circling carefully into the easiest landing pattern, keeping my eyes on that strip of land and my hand on the throttle at all times, trying to ignore the slim figure waiting, his hat in his hands, at the far end of the runway. I landed the plane with just a couple of bumps—I jerked the stick, reflexively,
upon touchdown. When I closed the throttle completely, causing the propeller to slowly cease its spinning,
Charles came running toward me. His face was open and boyish, his eyes snapping.

“Good girl! How do you feel?” He helped me step out onto the wing, where I wavered for a second, the wind finally having its say and nearly knocking me off my feet.

“Wonderful!” And I did, all of a sudden.
Because he saw me that way.

“I’m very proud of you.”

“I know.”

And he swept me up into his arms, right there on the airstrip, heedless of the reporters rushing up to us with their notebooks and their pencils. I had passed my test—not just my solo test but my first test of our marriage. He led, I followed, and that meant I had to keep up with him. Now I had proved that I could.

Sometimes, I
admit, I was so terrified I couldn’t form the words to tell him—such as the time I allowed my husband to hurl me off the top of a mountain like a slingshot. Perched on the edge of a cliff, held back by a tight, corded, thick rope, I sat in a new sailplane, frozen with fear, my hands gripping the steering stick so tightly it left an imprint, although I could scarcely feel it. My face was paralyzed,
yet I knew that somehow I grinned that carefree grin at Charles and the reporters and photographers standing around, then I shut my eyes as the cord was winched back and cut. I tried to remember the hasty instructions Charles had given me—“Aim high to find the best current, and then trust the wind!”—feeling my heart in my throat, certain that I would be smashed up against the side of some mountain.

But I was not! Instead, I did catch a current and finally experienced flight as I’d dreamed it—silent, soaring, like a bird, a majestic creature with proud eyes and little use for others. I shouted my joy, unashamed, for there was no one to hear it, and I glided and swooped for what felt like hours but was really only minutes.
I circled lower and lower and made a somewhat bumpy landing in a field.
Several cars came driving up as I climbed out of the plane; a startled man poked his head out of his window.

“Where did you come from?” he asked in astonishment.

“Up there!” I pointed back up at the mountain, and laughed at the look on his face. I had just become the first American woman to fly a glider.

Charles and I both rejoiced in moments like these, and built on them; while I logged ever
more solo flights on the way to my pilot’s license (which Charles carefully put away with his own, for whatever museum would want them someday), I began to study celestial navigation.

Like all flyers, I preferred to rely on the instrument panel, but Charles insisted on my learning celestial, as well;
he
had, in preparation for his Paris flight. I grew to dislike using the sextant, a heavy, awkward
instrument resembling a combination telescope/protractor. It was nearly impossible to use while flying, as the plane was never steady enough for me to confidently fix the horizon. And for the longest time, I could not find Polaris to save my soul.

“Anne, for heaven’s sake, it’s right there,” Charles would hiss out of tight, exasperated lips during a rare evening stroll about Next Day Hill, my
mother’s grand new house. Odd, that I thought of it as hers, not hers and Daddy’s. But Next Day Hill was Mother’s dream, a mansion with wings and spectacular entrance halls and even a ballroom. And glorious gardens, through which I loved to walk with my husband, who still didn’t quite seem to be my husband. So much of our married life was lived on the public stage, where he summoned such frenzy and
deification, I sometimes found myself staring at him just as adoringly as everyone else.

It probably didn’t help matters that even though we’d been
married for several months, we still used Next Day Hill as a sort of base between flights. No one appeared to expect us to buy a home of our own. We bought planes, instead; a little Curtiss two-seater for me, a much bigger, specially fitted Lockheed
Sirius for our planned trip to the Orient. We were, after all, the First Couple of the
Air
.

“See?” Charles would grab my hand—not romantically, like a lover on a moonlit stroll, but impatiently, like a teacher does a dreamy child’s—and point toward the night sky. “Polaris. It’s the brightest star in the north.”

“No, that’s the brightest star.” I pointed to another, lower on the horizon. Charles
snorted.

“That is not a star, it’s a planet. Venus.”

“Well, it is the brightest!”

“But it’s not a star. Anne, you’d think you’d never studied astronomy before!”

“I haven’t! I’ve studied literature and poetry, and I can tell you who first translated Cervantes. You don’t know that, do you?” I knew I was on rocky ground; any mention of Charles’s lack of education might cause him to spin on his
heel and leave me in the middle of the garden, without even a single word of explanation. Yet something about the way he stared down at me, so endlessly, tirelessly gifted and superior, made my skin itch and my eyes narrow to meet his gaze head-on. “It was Thomas Shelton,” I continued recklessly, finally tired of the constant lecturing, teaching,
pushing
.

Why couldn’t we have a normal marriage?
What other young couple walked in a moonlit garden, fragrant with honeysuckle and newly cut grass, and argued over the definition of stars and planets? Never mind that I had known that I was not marrying any mere man, had never for one instant
wanted
to marry any mere man; at that moment, worn out from weeks spent scrutinized
by the public, weary from having strangers knock on hotel doors at odd
hours, just to get a glimpse of us, I had had enough.

“It was in 1612,” I retorted. “That was the first translation of
Don Quixote
into English.”

Charles blinked. “That’s admirable, Anne, but I doubt it will come in handy when we’re flying across the Bering Sea at night. Now, which one is Polaris again?”

Chastened by his patience, not to mention his practicality, I looked back up at the sky.
The stars, which used to be so poetic and inspiring, were now simply more things I had to learn because my husband demanded that I do so. I gazed up at them, not seeing the beauty; I saw potential mistakes instead.

That night, for the first time, I did successfully identify Polaris. It was the one star whose icy gaze reminded me most of my husband’s.

THE FESTIVE EVENING
at the Guggenheims’ was
to celebrate our latest aviation triumph, a ten-day flight through the Caribbean with Juan and Betty Trippe for Juan’s new airline, Pan American Airways. Afterward, Charles and I flew for days in a little two-seater open-cockpit plane over the Mayan jungle in Mexico; we had been asked to photograph the ruins of Chichén Itzá for the first time from the air, and in doing so we’d discovered other
ruins as well.

Aside from the archaeological significance, for me this trip had been noteworthy because finally, after we parted ways with Juan and Betty, we had much-needed time alone; precious time, away from adoring eyes and expectations and ceremony and the hectic bustling of my family. Only when Charles and I were alone—which usually meant aloft in the sky, seeing the world in
a way no one
else could—did I ever feel as if I was truly his partner, and not just an adoring appendage standing slightly off to his side. Seated behind Charles but sometimes taking over for him whenever he grew tired, my hand was sure on the stick as I piloted the Lone Eagle over jungles and mountains.