The Aviator's Wife (48 page)

“At Columbia-Presbyterian. I arrived two days ago. Can you get in touch with Dr. Atchley? Apparently he’s not on call today.”

“Yes, I believe so.” Even though he couldn’t see me, my face glowed.

“Could you please ask him for the name of the best oncologist in New York? I think my doctors are adequate, but given the diagnosis, I would feel it shortsighted not to get another
opinion.”

“Of course, Charles—are you … are you all right? I mean, of course you’re not. But how are you taking this?” Although I knew how. After forty-five years, I knew.

He was making a list of the things he wanted to ask the doctors. He probably already had contacted Pan Am to rearrange his schedule. I was sure he had his battered traveling bag, with its small medicine kit and a couple of
changes of old clothing that he planned to wash out in the bathroom sink, for he didn’t believe in unnecessary baggage. Although none of his clothing—island clothing; threadbare shorts and tennis shoes—would be appropriate for New York in March. I would have to bring him some things from here.

“I’m fine. I’ve known for a few hours now, so I’ve had time to absorb it.”

“A few hours? That’s all
you need?” And despite the sick, cold terror filling the pit where my stomach used to be, I laughed.

“Yes.” His voice was stern now; he did not understand my laughter.

“Charles, try not to worry. It may be the wrong diagnosis. Let’s just wait until the doctors here see you.”

Now he was annoyed; he snarled into the phone, “It’s not the wrong diagnosis. I asked for a medical book and researched
the symptoms myself. My hope is that it will respond to the radiation, as many cancers do.”

“All right. Do you want me to—I don’t know, what else can I do?”

“Nothing. I don’t want you to come here until tomorrow because I don’t like you driving in the dark. Please don’t tell the children. There’s no reason to worry them and of course we don’t want any publicity. If anyone asks, just say I have
a virus I caught in the jungle.”

“I will. Charles, I—have a good night. Try to get some sleep. I’ll be there in the morning.”

“You, too. And enjoy your evening.”

I hung up the phone, and laughed again.

The door to the kitchen swung open and Dana greeted me with a merry smile on his face, a tray of cocktails in his hand.

“Do you want to see a show tomorrow in the city? A patient of mine offered
tickets to
A Little Night Music
. Finally, I’ve wanted to see this for—What? What’s wrong, Anne?”

I shook my head, and tried to catch my breath, but let out a ragged sob instead. “It’s Charles. He just called. Dana, he—he’s sick. Leukemia. I don’t remember what kind. But he’s in the city and he asked me to ask you—to ask
you
, of all people!—if you could recommend—”

But I broke down, unable to
say the words, falling into Dana’s familiar arms. He held me to his chest, and clucked soothingly before settling down with me on the sofa.

I laid my head on his shoulder, waiting for my tears to dry.

And I tried not to think about my husband.

CHARLES RESPONDED WELL
to the initial treatments, and we had a few good months. Months in which we were finally together, as I had desired, so long ago.
But I couldn’t help but remember the old adage:
Be careful what you wish for
. I was the caretaker, now; the healthy one. And Charles was not a compliant patient; he envied me my strength when he couldn’t even climb a staircase without needing a nap. He wanted to keep up his hectic schedule but when he no longer could, he goaded me into his newest project: the extensive editing of my diaries for
publication. I’d stopped writing them, years ago—after the war. But observing Charles’s urgent interest in them now, I couldn’t help but think he was writing his own obituary using
my
words. Rearranging them, pruning them until they portrayed someone I no longer recognized.

But there came a time when there was no use pretending; his body stopped responding to the treatments, and we finally told
the children. After a terrible month in the hospital during which it became apparent that his white cells were just as stubborn as the rest of him, he said, “I want to go home to Hawaii. I want to go home and die in peace.”

Dana told him it was suicidal. “You won’t make it,” he said bluntly. “You’re much too weak, and it’s a hell of a long flight.”

“I’m going to die anyway. I want to die at
home.” Diminished as he was, lying in the hospital bed, his painfully thin body barely making an outline beneath the blanket, Charles set his jaw in that determined way of his and looked, fleetingly, like the hero in the photographs of ’27. Even though I had tears in my eyes, because the head oncologist had just informed Charles he only had days
to live, my heart did that crazy, balletic leap
as I gazed at his still-handsome face. The flesh, wasting away, gave up the strong lines of his face in only greater relief. His hair—thin even before the radiation—was the snowiest of white, which, when he was healthy, contrasted with the permanent ruddiness of his skin after so many years outdoors—first in the open cockpits of airplanes, then in the Pacific during the war; finally after these last
decades spent in jungles and rain forests and remote, untamed beaches.

His physical beauty, our physical attraction—that had never faded. In bed, we had always been able to understand each other. If only he hadn’t stopped coming to it, years ago.

I shook my head. It was wrong to think such thoughts now. I listened as Charles argued with Dana, who finally gave up and barked at Jon, standing like
a tall, watchful Norse god, to make whatever the hell arrangements he had to.

Finally, after everyone else had gone—the platoon of doctors, the boys back to their hotels—I kissed Charles good night. “Do you want me to stay?” I asked, suddenly weary beyond reason. I could have slept on the floor, I was so exhausted, pummeled by the last few days.

“No,” he said, frowning. “That would be unnecessary.
I will be perfectly fine, and you will sleep better in a bed.”

“All right.” I gathered up my purse and coat, stopping to wave good night from the door. Now, alone save for the IV bags and machines, he struck me as helpless, small—he, who had been a giant all my life. But he did not give me any indication that he needed my company; he opened a book—a medical book—and put his glasses on, pushing
them halfway down his nose. Licking his index finger, he turned a page.

Walking down the hall, I was so weighed down by my weariness that I wondered if my legs would hold out until I reached the elevator. I was almost there when I felt a hand on my arm.

“Mrs. Lindbergh?”

“Yes?” A young nurse, with red hair, was holding some papers in her hand. She bit her lip, then looked worriedly down the
hall, back toward Charles’s room.

“I shouldn’t do this. I know I shouldn’t, it’s very wrong. But you—I loved your book, you see. It means so much to me, I thought you should know about these.”

Then she thrust the papers into my hand, and ran off down a hall. Confused, I put the papers into my purse, assuming they were medical release forms. Then I got into the elevator, hailed a taxi, stumbled
up to my hotel room—I had long since given up my apartment—and called down to room service for a drink.

It was only after it arrived that I remembered the papers. Sipping my gin, I took them out of my purse and smoothed them on my lap. These were no medical forms. They were letters—no, copies of letters, the words slightly smudged from the mimeograph machine. And they were from Charles. I recognized
the handwriting, small, slanted purposefully to the right, although it was spidery now. The letters were short, uncharacteristically brief for usually, Charles wrote very detailed letters. They were letters of farewell, of finality, of shared remembrances and hopes, no longer to be fulfilled.

They were not addressed to me.

AND NOW, FINALLY
, we have reached our destination, the end of our journey
together. He is awake once more, aware of my presence, and he coughs; I hear the nurse walking softly toward his closed door but I beat her to it.

“I’d like a few more minutes alone with him, please.”

“Oh, of course, Mrs. Lindbergh!” And she retreats, eyes brimming sympathetically.

“Charles, it comes down to this. I deserve to know why. It’s not just the women—that, I could almost understand.
But the children—why these other children? How many?” I thrust the letters in his face, and he brushes them away with his frail hand.

“Seven. I fathered seven other children.”

I stagger at the number; until I heard it, they hadn’t seemed real, these others. His bastards. For a moment, I can’t catch my breath.

“How many years, Charles?” I finally ask, still breathless. “How many years have you
kept them from me? What do they look like? Do they look like you?” For some reason this is important; I need to know they do not look like our children. My children.

“I don’t know. I suppose they do. It began—sometime in the fifties.” He closes his eyes, as if remembering.

“So that’s why you were always gone. That’s why you never wanted me to come with you, that’s why you kept me hidden away,
too.”

“Not at first. I
was
working. I met Greta at Pan Am in Berlin. The others, through her. It was a lonely time. You were preoccupied with the children, as you should have been. You were home. You were—”

“Old,” I finish for him, and he does not contradict me.

“Our children, you did a good job with them.
You
. I wanted—another chance, perhaps.”

“Why didn’t you give our children that chance?
They would have welcomed it. All you had to do was ask. Instead, you chose to fly away, to leave us. To have these other families. For the last time, Charles—
why?
”

He doesn’t answer, and I don’t know what else to ask, what else to say. I am only a woman, a woman with so much to do; even as I’ve been pacing this room, grasping for one last chance
to understand the man I married, I’ve been thinking
ahead to all the people I’ll need to call, the statements I’ll have to make, the practical business of sorting and filing and putting things in order.

Right now, I simply cannot absorb this, the enormity of it, what it means to my children, what happens next. The rage I’ve nurtured for years against him is finally gone, leaving me empty—and terrified of what will replace it; I can’t imagine an
emotion big enough, terrible enough.

We are silent, and his breathing is so heavy that I fear he has fallen asleep again. But then I feel his hand—icy, the tips of his fingers already puckered—on my arm, gripping it desperately, fearfully. He opens his eyes, and I see that he is just like any other man would be at this moment—a man frightened, sorrowful, regretful. Tears pool in his lower lids,
then trickle down his cheeks; his lip trembles, and he whispers, “Please, please, forgive me, Anne. Forgive me, before I die.”

And the words are on my lips; words of confession, which would double as his absolution. I know I have it in my power to forgive him because I, too, have sinned. Finally I am his equal; we are equal in our betrayal of each other.

But I have not sinned like he has. I
have never betrayed my children. I have only betrayed him.

“It’s too late now,” I reply, denying him the comfort I alone can give. It’s taken me forty-five years to earn this moment—and I wish, desperately, that it had never come. “You’ve hurt us all, beyond measure.”

“You won’t—you won’t tell the children?”

Oh, my children! My loves, my life
. “No, no, I will never tell them. I will never burden
them with that. Never!”

“I don’t want this to be how you remember me,” he begs, his voice cracking again, catching on the broken pieces of our shattered memories.

“Then you should have thought of that, before.”

“I only ever wanted to be your hero. These other women, I didn’t care what they thought of me. But you—”

“I didn’t need a hero. I never needed a hero. I needed to be loved.”

“I came
back.” The tears are falling down his cheeks. “I
always
came back to you.”

“Then that will have to be enough, won’t it?” I ask us both, and he nods, and I understand there are no more words. No more explanations. Bending down, I take him in my arms; he’s so light, so fragile. He reminds me of Elisabeth, when she was ill.

We match our breaths together, rising and falling as one. “I love you,”
I tell Charles Lindbergh, the last thing he will hear in this world. Such an ordinary phrase.

For an ordinary couple, after all.

Charles sleeps again, a deep, engulfing slumber that appears to consume what’s left of his flesh; he is melting into the bed, his mouth sagging, his skin papery. He sleeps like that for two more hours, until, surrounded by his son and his wife—

He awakes with a start,
a gasp, his eyes open, fixed on that distant spot on the horizon, and he inhales sharply, then exhales.

And then is no more.

There is a sharp intake of breath as we lean toward this man, this giant, but he is flesh and bones, finally, just like the rest of us. Land and I look at each other, too shocked for tears; Charles Lindbergh was mortal, after all.

As the doctor comes into the room, stethoscope
in hand, I walk away, shaking, although my eyes are dry. I wonder how to begin living the rest of my life without him; without the answers to the questions I will never stop asking.

I spy, on a corner table, Charles’s old traveling bag; already I am hungry for reminders of him. Smiling, I pick it up. However
did it last so long? It’s in tatters; the calfskin worn and shiny, the rusty clasp held
shut with safety pins.

For some reason, I open it just to smell his scent one last time, finger his old clothes—a polo shirt he’s had since his sixtieth birthday, a present from Reeve. Those horrid, scratchy wool socks he always insisted on wearing, even with tuxedos—oh, how I tried to get him to change! A photograph—I pull it out, instantly on my guard. I’m not sure I can stand any more surprises.
But it’s so unlike Charles to travel with a photograph that I have to see.
Unnecessary weight
, I can hear him bark, as I open the hinged frame.