The Aviator's Wife (49 page)

“Oh!” For in my hand is the photograph of a young woman. It only takes me an instant to recognize her as me.

So young—dark hair, not gray; no lines or wrinkles. The woman in the photo is a girl, really; a thin, solemnly smiling girl, not the grinning
idiot of all those early newspaper photographs. This smile—this careful, cautious smile—is the one that reflected my truest self. Especially back when I was so young as to be unformed; afraid of everything because nothing truly terrible had happened to me, yet.

And in my lap is a baby.

My firstborn; the blond curls, the cleft chin, the big blue eyes. With a shock of remembrance that pulls me
to my knees, I recall the day Charles took this photograph. He had just gotten a new Kodak, and was forever snapping at everything—when he wasn’t taking it apart and putting it back together, fascinated by all the intricate parts.

That day, I was holding the baby, squirming in a towel. Charlie had just been bathed, and he was smiling, reaching toward me, when Charles snapped the picture.

I don’t want any reminders
, Charles had declared after that terrible May.
We need to forget
.

Yet he has carried this photograph on every journey, every flight since; even to war and back. I picture Charles in the jungle, trying to sleep on a cot or maybe on the ground; oceans away from home, bombs overhead, just one soldier among many, wanting to remember something good, something decent—something to
remind him why he is there.

Or, perhaps, something that might allow him to welcome death.

Through eyes blurred with tears—healing, welcome tears—I look back at the still figure on the bed; rising, I walk over and place the photograph in his arms. And I bow my head, touching my cheek to his, thanking God for this—this unexpected gift of a glimpse into Charles’s heart; the heart he had tried to
hide from me, all these years.

This answer to all my questions.

All the king’s horses and all the king’s men
, I begin to croon softly, just as I used to do to the babes in my arms, all of them.
I thought they’d never be able to put the Lindberghs together again
.

Gently, Land reaches over the bed to close his father’s eyes.

As he does so, I pray that at last, Charles has found what he has been
looking for, all his life.

CHAPTER 22

I
AM FLYING
.

Alone, unafraid, high above the blue of Long Island Sound.

I went to visit the daughter of an old friend, who still had an estate with a private airfield. At her father’s behest, she had kept an airplane, a four-seat monoplane, in a barn, all these years. Once, the wheel of that plane had fallen off. Once, a girl too young, too stupid to be afraid,
trusted a boy to bring her home safely, and he had. And she had thought that he would, for the rest of their lives.

So did he.

I thanked Harry Guggenheim’s daughter Diane, a slim, nervous, middle-aged woman now. Harry had died a few years previous. While he always asserted that his friend Slim was no anti-Semite in public, in private Harry had stopped returning his calls.

“Are you sure you
want to do this, Mrs. Lindbergh? You haven’t flown in a long time.”

“I know. But I have to.”

“You remember everything?”

“I don’t know, but I suppose I’ll find out.”

“How are you doing? Without him?”

“Well. Well enough.”

“Father always said he lost him a long time ago.” Harry’s daughter shook her head. “Before the war. But then he always said, ‘Damn, if I don’t miss him, still.’ Did he believe
it all, Mrs. Lindbergh? Did Colonel Lindbergh believe what he said, back before the war?”

I hesitated, torn between wanting to placate the daughter of a kind, loyal friend, and the truth.

“If you knew him,” I finally said, “you would know Charles Lindbergh never said anything he didn’t mean.”

“That’s a shame.” Diane shook her head, slowly, mournfully. Then she looked at me with a pitying smile.
“But you, we never believed that you—”

“Well, I did. I’m tired of people pretending that I didn’t. I was just as wrong as he was. More so, because I didn’t speak out for my own beliefs. I borrowed his, as wrong as I knew they were. I’m no better than the Germans. The Germans who sat by and didn’t say anything, all those years.”

“Oh, no, Mrs. Lindbergh, you’re not like them! I’ll never believe
it. My father never believed it!” My old friend’s daughter wouldn’t help; she wanted to absolve me, and I didn’t want to be absolved.

“I’m sorry, Diane. Truly sorry, for the pain we caused you and your family. The pain
I
caused you, and so many others.”

“It was so long ago.” She shrugged. So did I. Unlike men, women got less sentimental as we aged, I was discovering. We cried enough, when we
were young; vessels overflowing with the tears of everyone we loved. All the tears I cried when my son was taken. But I hadn’t shed one tear since my husband died.

“Father always said you were the brave one.” Diane laughed down at me in astonishment; she was a head taller than I was. “He
said that the colonel never knew fear, he never understood consequences. You did, but you went along with
him, anyway. That was bravery.”

“Or idiocy,” I replied, then I climbed—stiffly, every joint aching—into the cockpit. I pulled my goggles over my head, fleetingly aware of how ridiculous I looked—a graying grandmother wearing old-fashioned flying goggles. Then I shrugged it off, fastened the safety harness, flipped a switch, and opened up the throttle.

Slowly I began to taxi, surprised, at first,
by how the propellers cut my vision; I’d forgotten that, about old planes, with the propellers on the noses instead of the wings. Gradually, it all did come back; I pulled on the stick, accelerating, holding my breath, and then it happened—that lovely, balletic, suspended moment, and I had no fear. Why should I be afraid? I was nearly seventy years old, and had begun giving too much consideration
to the various ways an elderly person can die. Crashing in an airplane seemed a reasonable alternative to most of them.

But I will not crash, not this cloudless, windless day. I am in total control of my aircraft, taught by the best pilot there ever was, and I keep a gentle tug on the stick, nosing the plane up, up, up, over the house—Diane is just a doll now, waving her hands over her head—over
the trees, catching the wind, and then soaring out over the ocean. My ears pop, and I realize I have forgotten to bring any chewing gum, and for a moment I inhale the sharp, cool scent of spearmint—the flavor of gum that Charles always had on him.

The engines are so whiny, so loud—I’ve forgotten how loud! Even in an enclosed cockpit, they aren’t muffled, at least not to my sensitive elderly ears,
and I marvel that we were able to carry on any kind of conversation on that endless afternoon, when we were burning off fuel.

I bank the plane due left, flying north now, recognizing some of the houses below; the dunes, the outline of the beach, although of course things have changed since the last time I flew over this spot. There are more houses, smaller and closer together; strip malls; highways
now, segmenting the land into neat, orderly squares.

I have a moment where I want to fly inland to see what else has changed, but then I remember why I’m aloft in the first place, and head the plane out over the water.

The white waves keep up their steady, relentless assault against the shore, and I nose down a bit lower, trying one more time to imagine what it was like for him flying alone
with only this cold, hard slab of water beneath him for almost the entire trip to Paris. I can’t; after all these years, I still can’t put myself in his place and see myself doing what he did. I still can’t stop admiring that boy’s bravery, his astonishing daring. I still can’t stop marveling that this same boy chose me; and I’m glad that I can’t, for we should rejoice in being seen, needed. Loved.

But it’s not the foundation on which to build a life, a marriage, and it never should have been. I wish I hadn’t taken so long to understand this in life, although I suppose I should be happy that at least I was able to imagine it on the page.

Peering over the propeller to my right I see it, a lighthouse on a strip of land curling out into the water, and I know I’m almost there. I reach into
my pocket.

He dictated, in one of his last lists, that I was to be buried next to him in Hawaii. He never asked me if this was my wish, and I never told him that it wasn’t. I let him die thinking that he would lie beside me; I let him die thinking I was honored that he had chosen me, and me alone, for this privilege.

But I will not be buried next to him. When I die, I told my son on the long,
sobering flight back from Hawaii, after we laid
Charles in the ground beneath several slabs of stone, his grave crudely marked so that strangers couldn’t find it, I want to be cremated. And I would like my ashes to be scattered, among various places dear to me—my garden in Darien; the shores of my family’s summer home in Maine; over the sound, at a point about two miles offshore.

About where
I am flying right now. I peer out the dirty side window and see the lighthouse far below, and a calm, blue harbor of water. Right—here—

I pop open the window with my elbow, bracing myself against the onrush of cold air, and I kiss his wedding ring, then let it fall from my hand, hoping that the weight of the gold will allow it to cut through the currents and fall over the waters of the sound,
near where we honeymooned.

Near where the ashes of our firstborn were scattered.

I still don’t understand why Charles did what he did; why he had to father other children, have other families. Perhaps we both kept looking for our lost child. I did, by scanning the faces of every little boy I saw, every little boy about eighteen months with blond hair, blue eyes. By searching in my surviving
children’s faces when they were around that age, looking for some gesture or laugh that might remind me of him.

Maybe this was Charles’s way of looking for Charlie; by trying to replace him, over and over and over.

Whatever his reasons, I don’t want to lie next to him when I’m gone and I’m not sure if my children understand. I know that if I explain what their father did to me—to them—they might.
But I won’t do that. I won’t do that to him. I won’t do that to them.

I won’t do that to the generations of schoolchildren who will learn about him in history books, and marvel, and be inspired to try astounding feats of their own. I won’t do that to the brave,
primitive monoplane hanging in the Smithsonian, ever empty, ever waiting for him. Just as I once was.

I’ll keep his secrets for him.

I bank the plane, and I close my eyes, just for a moment, and I think of Dana, back in the city. He is a good man. A kind man. We ended our physical affair a few years ago, tamping the flame into a warm, comfortable friendship—much like a marriage, I suppose. But I know that if I asked him to he would leave his wife for me, no questions asked.

But I won’t ask him, or anybody else, and it’s not
out of any misplaced widow’s loyalty.

Dana taught me what it was like to be loved, to be equal. But Charles taught me how to be alone, long before I ever wanted to be.

But now, I do. Now, I’m ready.

I turn back toward land; the airplane has no radio, of course, so there’s no way for me to be in contact with anyone on the ground. And unlike Charles, I want to be. Charles was of the air, but
I am of the earth. Most of us are.

I’ll never forget what he taught me. I’ll never be rid of his legacy; for the rest of my life, I know, I’ll be invited to dedicate statues, airports, schools, in his name.
I
will be invited; not those other women stashed away overseas, and I suppose for this, I should be grateful.

I will take my duties seriously, just as seriously as I once navigated as his
crew. I will be the bridge between who Charles was, and who he was assumed to be. The keeper of the flame. The guardian of his reputation, for much of it deserves to be remembered. And it’s up to me, as the aviator’s wife who was once an ambassador’s daughter, to decide how much.

I will go wherever I’m invited, whenever I’m asked in his name, alone. I will leave there, alone.

I will fly, alone.
Wearing my own pair of goggles, my view of the world just as unique, just as wonderful, as his was, but different. Mine.

Alone.

The horizon is blurring into the darkening sky, and I need to get back, before the day is gone. There are people back on the ground, waiting for me.

But if I don’t get back before the sun sets, I can always look to the sky and navigate by the stars. That is one of
the many things he taught me, back when I longed to be taught. If I ever get lost now, on my own, I won’t panic, I won’t flail. I know how to find Polaris, and I can always steer by that.

For it is the one star in the sky whose bright, unwavering gaze reminds me most of him.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

WHEN I FIRST HAD THE IDEA TO WRITE
a novel about Anne Lindbergh, I found that people all had the same reaction: a gasp of recognition, followed by the inevitable, “Oh, I
love
the Lindberghs!”