The Aviator's Wife (41 page)

Once, Charles went into Jon’s closet and threw every single item of clothing on the floor, simply because one sweater had been hung up and stretched out at the neck.

The children loved him, cautiously,
respectfully—or loved the
idea
of him, anyway. Growing up a Lindbergh meant they had assumptions made of them wherever they went, and one of those assumptions was that they were brave, daring, and capable of great things. They each saw these characteristics in their father, of course, and admired him for them. And there were good times; odd, though, as the years went on, the details of these lost
their sharpness, so that they became impressionistic paintings compared to the unmistakably photographic images of the bad.

But Charles organized outdoor games on a scale I never could: scavenger hunts and relay races and football, which he and the boys enjoyed with almost too much enthusiasm. Charles allowed his sons to tackle him with as much force as they had in them; force that grew in intensity
as the resentments piled up. But Charles never complained, not even when Scott accidentally cracked one of his ribs.

He also encouraged Ansy’s love of writing, just as he always encouraged mine, even going so far as to print up her short stories and binding them so that they looked like real books. And he delighted in Reeve’s sense of humor, egging her on mischievously, playing silly jokes on
her and allowing her to play them on him.

Of course he worried about their physical safety, teaching each basic self-defense when they were old enough to learn, drilling into them the importance of never talking to strangers or getting into other people’s cars, training a succession of guard dogs to watch over them when they were very young.

Still, we all found it easier to love and admire him
when he was gone. The first day or so after Charles left again we all would continue to walk tentatively, weigh our words cautiously, looking over shoulders in case he was still there. Then, there would be a collective sigh; the air would be light and breathable, and gradually we would remember how to be ourselves again.

Until the next time he came home.

“Jon! Land! Come pick up this mess.”
Still standing next to the telephone, I stared, horrified, at the collection of shoes and equipment in the hall. How had I let this happen? While I knew, rationally, that Charles was days away from coming home, I panicked as if he were about to walk in the front door. “Come down here this instant and pick this up! Both of you!”

Then I ran back to the kitchen, remembering the leaky drain. I’d
never hear the end of it if he came home before it was fixed.

“
MAY I COME IN?
”

I glanced up; Charles was standing in the door of my writing retreat. Hastily I shut the book I was reading and thrust it beneath some papers, just as I had so often done as a schoolgirl. I picked up a pencil and began to scribble something on a piece of paper. “Of course, you can come in,” I replied, turning that
brazen grin on him, just as I used to on the photographers.

“I’m not disturbing you?”

“No, not at all.” But I couldn’t bring myself to meet his gaze; I couldn’t let him see how miserably guilty I was. For he had built me a lovely little house out of his own belief in my ability to write, and so far I had done nothing in it but daydream, write in my diary, cry, and read novels. Trashy novels,
at that; for some reason, the dense, poetry-filled literature I had loved for so long—Cervantes, Joyce, Proust—muddied my head, these days. I wondered if I had lost brain cells as well as hormones. I buried myself in popular fiction instead; the book I had hidden from Charles was Kathleen Winsor’s latest. Although I didn’t think it nearly so juicy as
Forever Amber
.

“Do you like the cabin?” Charles
had to bend in order to get through the door; he had designed it, with considerable thoughtfulness, for my much smaller frame. So the windows were lower, the roof cozy. He could stand, just barely, once he got inside; the top of his head, now almost completely gray, with just flecks of reddish gold, was only an inch from the ceiling.

“Yes, I do. Thank you so much.” Unlike some of Charles’s gifts—like
the motorcycle he had expected me to learn to ride, forgetting that I had a balance problem that made it impossible for me even to ride a bicycle—so far the cabin had remained a symbol of his thoughtfulness; any sense of failure to make good
use of it was only on my end, not his. While he urged, he did not criticize, as he might once have—and perhaps I’d been too reliant on his criticism, after
all? For left to myself, I couldn’t make any progress. Despite the peacefulness of the setting, the waiting sense of calm, almost as if the very beams, made from ancient pine trees, were content to bide their time until I was ready, I felt guilty every time I entered. I had done nothing worthy of such a gift other than sign permission slips and write out grocery lists. And read trashy novels.

“I wanted to talk to you about that special project. The one I spoke to you about when I called last week.” Charles pulled up a chair; in his hands were three thick notebooks. “I’ve been working on something, as you know, for quite a while. It’s a narrative, an account of my flight to Paris.” He colored a little, and looked nervously out the window—but he laid the notebooks gently in my lap.

“But—you wrote an account back in ’twenty-seven, didn’t you?”

“Oh, that.” Charles snorted, leaning back in his chair until it creaked dangerously. “I would prefer to forget all about that. A publisher paid me a small fortune to spend a weekend in a hotel scribbling something down that they then had a real writer translate. I was so green, I didn’t know any better. This was right after I returned
to America. So many people wanted me to do this, go there, speak here, put my name to that, and I hadn’t yet learned to say no. But that account is not right. It’s not—true. Only now can I look back and see that young man, see what the odds truly were, the dangers, and the importance of it all. I’ve been working on this for a long time, since before the war, when we were in England.”

“You’ve
been writing since England?” I couldn’t help it; I felt a punch to the gut, as if I’d been betrayed, somehow. How had
he
found the time, amid all his flying, the politics of America First, the work on the profusion pump, the war? When I, merely bearing and raising children, found it so difficult to focus on writing about anything other than the insipid details of my day?

Fresh evidence, once
more, that I was less than him.

Swallowing my wounded pride, I managed not to hurl the notebooks to the floor. “So, what do you want me to do?” I asked instead, opening one of them; Charles’s handwriting filled each page, and there were notes and scribbles in all the margins, little arrows inserted into the text.

“Be my crew again,” he said simply. “You’re the writer in the family.” I winced
at this, but I don’t think he saw. “
North to the Orient
, the letters you wrote during the war—there was poetry in them, just like in everything you write. I don’t mean that I want you to rewrite anything, but rather, just help me shape it, I suppose—steer me away from merely citing facts and figures. I want this to be a real book, not just a dashed-off account like the other was. And you’re the
only person I trust to help me make it that.”

I was silent, paging through the notebooks, not really seeing them at all except as evidence of his accomplishment, of the different expectations of men and women.
Why
hadn’t I found the time to write my great book? Because he had stuck me out here in Connecticut to watch over his children while he flew all over the world, busy with his work—rehabilitating
his image, I understood with breathtaking clarity, remembering all the photo opportunities he had allowed while he worked for the Strategic Air Command, the unexpected interviews he had granted the press recently. And now, his memoirs. Why now, all of a sudden?

Because in two years, it would be the twenty-fifth anniversary of his flight to Paris. Charles Lindbergh was no fool.

As I studied my
husband, leaning forward in his chair, his hands nervously gripping his knees, a pleading softness in his eyes I hadn’t seen in so long, I felt myself as helpless as always in his presence. There were nights when I dreamed of our early pioneering flights, the closeness, the reliance on each other, only to wake up in my empty bed so lonely I hugged his untouched pillow to my chest, just to have something
to hold on to. There were nights when the fury of abandonment surged so forcefully through me I couldn’t sleep, let alone dream, and I paced the terrace instead, a wild-haired creature, smoking a cigarette precisely because he wasn’t there to disapprove, even though normally I had no taste for it.

But seeing his need for me, a miracle, a mirage I was afraid might disappear once I stepped outside
of this enchanted cabin, I had no choice but to acquiesce. Or so I told myself; I was, after all, the aviator’s wife. I had made that decision, once and for all, back before the war.

“What kind of schedule do you have in mind?” I knew, of course, that he would have one. His face cleared; he grinned and squeezed my hand in approval.

“Good girl. Well, I thought that you can go over what I have
so far—it’s merely a draft, of course—and then make some notes. I’ll go over what you’ve noted and incorporate it, and then—so on. There are a couple of publishers interested; I put out some feelers. I wasn’t completely sure that anyone would want to publish this after—well, my reputation, in some circles. There are certain—there are some Jews in the publishing world, you know.” He frowned, and picked
up a pencil off my desk, twirling it around in his long, tapered fingers. “I do feel as if—as if things got a bit out of hand. I truly believed what I said at the time, however, and what else could I do but speak what I
felt was the truth? But people change. I’ve changed. I’m not sure, though, that the public will necessarily believe that I have. I can only hope this might help.”

His brow was
furrowed, his path obviously not as clear as it had always been. He was thinking only of himself, and his own reputation; he had never once bothered to think about mine, even after he saw the damage done by my essay.

But the truth was the world did not wait breathlessly for
my
apology. I had been welcomed back into my old circles with a pat on the head and a whispered understanding that I had
merely been Charles’s puppet in that “unfortunate business.” Who would believe a mere wife could ever act on her own?

Anger, anger, anger. I was enormous with it these days; constantly stifling one grievance only to feel another pop up in its place. My skin felt twitchy, trying to contain them all. Sadness, I had known; terror, anxiety, occasionally joy. But anger was novel, it was frightening.
It could also be, I was only beginning to suspect, exhilarating.

I swallowed this latest grievance and placed the notebooks on my desk, piling them up so that their black spines lined up, like a stack of dominoes. “All right. When would you like my notes?”

“I have to leave tomorrow for Germany, to Berlin, for Pan Am. I’ll be back in a month.”

“A month? You’ll be gone an entire month?” My heart
sank even as I silently cursed him for doing something so unexpected as to make me miss him again.

“Yes. That should give you plenty of time, I trust?”

“I should think so. Jon can drive the girls to piano lessons, and if Land doesn’t make the baseball team this spring, then I don’t have to—”

“Anne.” Charles held his hand up. “Stop. I don’t want to hear all that. You’ll manage it all, you always
do.”

I waved his hand away, my skin twitchy once more. “It’s not as easy as you think it is, Charles. But you don’t know, because you’re never here. You just assume I can manage, when really you have no idea—”

“If I assume so it’s because you always do, which should be taken as a compliment. And I’m here now, Anne,” he said mildly. And I understood that this was supposed to be enough.

But was
it?

I wanted it to be. Didn’t I? I wasn’t sure anymore, but I was afraid to break this spell, this rare moment of the two of us spinning in the same orbit, sharing the same view once again. So I made myself believe that it was. With a wave, I managed that forced, fake grin again as he left my cabin; then I opened the first page of the first notebook.

And I began to read.

OH, WHY COULDN
’
T I
have known this boy! This brave boy of ’27, this pure, simple, unspoiled boy? When I met him, he was already on the other side of the ocean; already guarded, aware of his place in the history books.

Somehow, Charles had found a way to throw off the layers of expectation and disappointment that the years, the world, had thrust upon him, and to reclaim the heart and the voice of that boy he once
had been. I didn’t know how he had done it. I knew that I could never again recapture my own innocence, my belief in the goodness, the rightness, of things. The baby’s kidnapping had forever changed me, and finally I understood that was why I had such difficulty writing
my
book. Because I still wasn’t sure who that young girl, grinning like crazy in all those photographs prior to “the events of
’32” had turned into. And I could never quite grasp her; she kept grinning,
capering just beyond the picture frame of memory whenever I tried.

But in his recounting of the singular event of his lifetime, Charles Lindbergh had found a way to go back, almost like a hero in an H. G. Wells novel. He had time traveled, truly and honestly, almost twenty-five years in the past.

Writing with a simplicity
that was almost poetry—and befitting the farm boy he had been, not the tarnished god he had become—he wrote of the dangers facing him as he prepared for his historic flight, the difficulty finding backers, the ridicule he found at every turn as more experienced men than he laughed at the notion of a fair-haired boy taking home the greatest prize aviation had to offer. He described the hours
spent flying the mail route over a country that was no more, a country of barns and dusty roads and a few telephone poles, people running out of houses at the strange sight of his biplane in the air, only a few hundred feet up. The hours he spent going over the practicalities of such a flight, the lists he made on the back of receipts and maps.