The Aviator's Wife (33 page)

At this new mention of the Jews, I disentangled myself from his arms. And a question I had wanted to ask him for years could no longer go unasked.

“Charles, what about Harry Guggenheim? You know he’s Jewish, yet he’s been such a great
friend to you—and me. Sheltering us, after the baby, after all the chaos. All the money he’s helped you find for funding, not to mention—well, back in ’thirty-two. The guidance, the support. What about him?”

“The individual Jew, I have no problem with. Harry has been a good friend, and I won’t deny it. It’s the overall influence, particularly on the press and the government. Roosevelt is surrounded
by Jews, and one of these days, I’m afraid he’s going to listen to them. And that will be tragic, and one reason is that no country can stand up to Germany in terms of air superiority. That is one thing I’ve learned this week that Roosevelt has not.”

“Then, I suppose you need to speak out,” I said slowly—reluctantly, wondering how we could reconcile this development with the dream of living,
forgotten, in Germany. I had seen how politics practically killed my father. And I feared the singular glare of the political spotlight; it was much more unforgiving than even the one we had been under. “I suppose that’s the right thing to do.”

“Of course it is. As Truman said, I’m in a unique position. I have a responsibility to the world now.”

He said it so matter-of-factly. I remembered that
drive back through the city the night he proposed, when I had first heard him talk in this manner—this calm recognition of the unique position he was in, and the responsibilities that came with it. I had
chided him on it, but I could afford to then. I was young. Untethered. My entire life ahead of me.

I couldn’t afford to now. I was too dependent on him, too wrapped up in his life, too marked
by it. And at thirty, I could no longer imagine what lay ahead of me, because of the tragedy of all that was behind. So I didn’t speak out; I didn’t question him. Not then, not later. I sat by and watched the untouched boy of ’27 become someone else;
something
else.

And I allowed him to turn me into someone else, as well. Someone who could sit, beaming, just a few rows up from Adolf Hitler while
he received the straight-armed salute of the Nazi Party. Someone who could eagerly look forward to the next time we visited Germany, in 1937, and again in 1938, when we actually started looking at houses, even after the Anschluss and Czechoslovakia. Even after I understood that Thomas Mann’s wife was not the only Jew who was not welcome in Germany.

Someone who could smile and nod when Minister
Göring presented Charles with the Order of the German Eagle, on behalf of the Nazi Party and Herr Hitler himself.

Yet for all my smiling and nodding, my eyes were shut; shut deliberately to a truth I didn’t want to see because it interfered with my dream of an untroubled life with my children; a stable life, for if Charles was content, maybe he wouldn’t keep asking me to fly off with him. With
every leave-taking, now that Jon was growing into his own little, absorbing person—so different from Charlie, and now I could rejoice in it—more and more of my heart was left behind.

Were we to live in Germany, one of Hitler’s aides promised us at a private meeting, Charles could have his pick of jobs with the
Luftwaffe
. We would have complete shelter from the press, and government guards posted
around our house at no cost to us. Jon could attend school, just like any other child.

However. I wasn’t so changed, so dazzled by promises and dreams of a real home, a real
family
, that I couldn’t hide a grimace after Charles placed the heavy iron cross in my lap. He scarcely looked at it, so used was he to medals and awards.

But I did; I fingered the cold, raised Nazi insignia on the medal.
And I whispered, more to myself than to him, “The Albatross.”

CHAPTER 13

April 1939

“M
AMA!
Are we going to live in America now?”

“Yes, darling.”

“With Grandma Bee?”

“Yes, of course.”

“And Uncle Dwight and Aunt Con?”

“Yes.”

“Will Father be there, too?”

“Of course he will! He’s already there, you know that!”

“Will you have to fly away with him again?”

I looked up from my desk, where I was reading over the letter from Charles that
I’d just received, full of clippings of various houses we might rent. I also had the latest shipping schedules, although they seemed to change by the minute as the world turned upside down around us. Seated on the floor, playing with some wooden toys that had not yet been packed, Jon looked up at me so wistfully. His reddish hair needed cutting; I reached down and brushed wispy bangs out of his
eyes.

“I hope not.”

“Me, too. Land cries when you go away. I don’t. Not anymore.”

“Oh, my boy! Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Because Father doesn’t like it when I cry. Land’s still just a baby, though.”

“Come here!” I opened my arms wide, and he ran to them; I hugged him so tight, his face was red when finally I let him go. “I don’t mind if you cry. I cry, too, sometimes. I
hate
leaving you.
I think about you all the time when I’m gone!”

“You do? Then why do you always go when Father asks?”

Because if I don’t go with him, I’m afraid he’ll never come back
—the answer was so ready, it took me by surprise and I almost blurted it out loud. “Because—because that’s what married people do. They do what each other asks. Most of the time.” I gave him a sloppy kiss as he returned to his toys.
“But I think that now Father is going to be so busy that we won’t have time for any trips. Let’s both hope, very hard, for that, all right? So no more crying! And Grandma Bee is so happy we’re coming home!”

“Will Violet be there? And Betty Gow?”

“Where did you—How did you hear of those names?” I asked him, shocked.

Charles had forbidden me ever to speak of the events of ’32 to our surviving
children. He had decided they did not need to know what had happened to the brother they would never meet. As far as Jon knew, he was our firstborn. As far as he knew, there’d never been a Betty, or an Elsie, or an Ollie. Or a Violet.

“I heard someone talk about her,” Jon replied, even as he was terribly absorbed in rolling his wooden truck, so that it made little tracks in the pile, across the
carpet.

“Who?” Who would talk about this in front of my son? I wanted to shake some sense into such an idiot.

“Germaine and Alfred.”

“Oh.” Our Parisian couple. Who, I decided in that instant, would not be accompanying us to America.

“Betty. That’s like Grandma’s name,” my son continued in
his measured way. Jon was patient, obedient, utterly unlike any other six-year-old; I often wondered if
he had absorbed all the terror and drama surrounding me, while in the womb. And so knew that he must make up for it, once born.

Land—my little Land, my Coronation baby, as he was born in London the day King George VI was crowned—was playing less obediently on the other side of the room, systematically destroying a plant, leaf by leaf. I was too stunned to stop him.

“What did—what did they say
about Violet?” I tried to keep my voice casual but it did waver; I could not think of her without wanting to cry—guilty tears, more than anything. While I had disciplined myself not to weep for my child, I was not able to do so for the others whose lives were also cut short that terrible May. That so many were wrecked, ruined—tragedy following tragedy, innocents destroyed because Charles and I flew
too high, too close to the sun—was truly more than I could bear.

“Germaine said Violet killed herself. Mama, how can someone do that? Is it true?” Now Jon did stop playing; he looked up at me with eyes so pure and innocent, I flinched; I did not want to be the one to introduce these awful notions.

“Someone can do that, yes, but it’s a terrible, terrible thing, darling. A weak thing. Now, let’s
not talk about this—it’s not very nice. Someday, maybe, you can ask me again. But let’s not talk about it now, especially not in front of Father when we see him again. He has a lot on his mind, these days. Promise?”

Jon smiled; there was nothing he liked better than having to promise. He squared his little shoulders, adjusting them to take on this newest responsibility. When he was satisfied
he was fully prepared, he nodded.

“Promise, Mama!”

WE WERE NOT MOVING
to Germany, after all. Not after the evening of November 9, 1938.
Kristallnacht
. The Night of Broken Glass.

The night that even Charles couldn’t justify; the night that the German authorities destroyed any remaining Jewish businesses and all the synagogues, killed an unknown number of Jews, and imprisoned an even greater
number in enforced labor camps. It was a night of such brutal violence that Charles was appalled.

“I don’t understand why Hitler had to resort to this. It’s unnecessary. Beneath him,” he muttered, reading the English newspapers; at the time, we were in Iliac, our home near Alexis Carrel and his wife in Brittany. We had no electricity there, we had to use a gas-powered generator and a radio telephone.
We were almost a nation unto ourselves. So isolated were we, I couldn’t quiet the suspicion that Charles wouldn’t stop moving until he had hidden the boys and me completely from the world. Which was why I had clung to the idea of Germany, where even Charles believed we could live a normal life; not the life of fugitives.

Until Kristallnacht.

“We can’t move there now, Charles. We simply can’t.”
I was disgusted by the images reported; the beaten and bloodied men in the street, the women and children cowering, the senseless destruction. The shards of glass, the
Kristall
, gleaming ominously, like dangerous teeth, on the pavement.

“No, I don’t see how. If there’s going to be more violence—and I can’t deny that there might be—it’s not the place for us. But where is? These are important times.
We need to be more available than we are here, at least during the winter. If there is war, and I’m afraid that despite Chamberlain, there are people in the British government intent upon it, England is not the place to be. Maybe France?”

“Why not—America? Back home?” I looked at him, not hiding
the hope in my eyes. The truth was, even in the excitement of planning our home in Berlin, the promises
I held out for myself, like little presents to be opened at a later time—promises of shopping and theater and a real social life, unencumbered by the press—I missed my country. I missed New Jersey, primeval and green in the summer, a Currier and Ives painting in the winter. I missed hearing English sloppily spoken, at least according to my veddy, veddy proper British acquaintances.

I missed my
family, in particular—what little of it I had left; I still felt guilty for leaving Mother. No amount of letters crossing the fathomless ocean between us could ever make up for the remorse of running away when she needed me most.

“I don’t think so,” Charles said grimly, turning the British edition of
The New York Times
toward me. On the front page was a photograph of Charles with the German Iron
Cross about his neck. The headline below it said “Hitler Annexes Lindbergh.”

“Joe Kennedy telegraphed me last night, Anne. Do you know what he wanted? He wanted me to return the medal.”

“The ambassador asked that? Do you think it’s his wish, or someone else’s?” While the new ambassador to Great Britain, Joseph Kennedy, was known to be a loose cannon, this sounded more like President Roosevelt.

“I don’t know. I don’t think I will, though. Why? It was presented to me on behalf of a government, thanking me for my pioneering flight. If I return it, I might as well return all the other medals on behalf of all the other governments in the world. It’s not political, it wasn’t given to me in that spirit, and I don’t see why anyone would think it is.” Charles frowned, narrowing his gaze, while
his fingers drummed edgily on the stack of newspapers beside him.

I agreed with him. But I also knew better. In these days, everything was political; everything was full of significance.

So we packed up again in December 1938 and moved to a little apartment in Paris, right across from the Bois de Boulogne so that Jon could have somewhere to play, and events appeared to calm down. The Munich
Pact was still fresh in everyone’s minds; Chamberlain’s little white piece of paper signaling “peace in our time” stopped the ditch-digging, the sandbag piling that had been occurring on both sides of the channel. And we enjoyed the early months of 1939 in Paris; I bought my first Chanel dress, I took the children to museums, and we even dined with the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. Like everyone else,
I had been captivated by their romance, and was eager to meet the woman who prompted a king to give up his throne.

She was steel encased in the finest Chanel had to offer; so thin yet with large, masculine hands, a wide, snapping mouth. He had tiny eyes, was more feminine than she was with his slight frame and soft, dainty hands, and was the most boring man I had ever met. Charles yawned openly
in his face during an earnest monologue about whether or not white shoes for men were de rigueur for summer.