The Aviator's Wife: A Novel

by Melanie Benjamin

  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

  “MAMA! 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.

  As for my increasingly political husband, he continued to shuttle between Paris and London, giving his advice concerning their military air fleets. He even went, secretly, back to Berlin; France enlisted Charles’s aid in persuading Germany to sell them some planes in order to shore up their nonexistent air force. Charles, doubtful, did use his influence, to no avail.

  Yet our lingering presence on the continent, our now highly publicized and scrutinized past visits to Germany, were cause for much discussion back in America. At least, according to the worried letters, full of newspaper clippings, I received from my family.

  One night, Charles and I went out for a romantic dinner at La Tour d’Argent. Just as the third course arrived, we heard an overdressed American couple at the table next to us say, too loudly, “I guess America’s not good enough for them! So what if their baby was kidnapped—we’ve all had hard times, but none of us ran away from them.”

  I froze, my fork halfway to my mouth. I looked at Charles, who raised an eyebrow, forbidding me to react in any way. I continued to eat, as I heard the woman say, “I guess sauerkraut’s more to their taste, not apple pie.”

  “Sauerkraut and iron crosses,” her husband agreed.

  The pressed duck was tasteless in my mouth; the wine turned to vinegar. Charles was right. If this was what was waiting for us in America, we could not return.

  Charles, however, was smacking his lips with gusto, tearing into his duck as if he hadn’t eaten in days. His eyes gleamed with purpose. I knew he had just recognized his latest mission.

  Two days later, he was on the phone to Cunard, arranging our tickets home.

  AND SO WE RETURNED, leaving a continent about to be torn apart by war for the safer shores of America, or so we thought. Charles went first, to report directly to Washington about all he had seen—and to caution them as well. He firmly believed that Germany would easily overtake Poland; he thought England and France were foolish to declare war outright, and had even written a secret paper to Chamberlain and to Daladier urging them not to. I wished he hadn’t done that; he was already being maligned as an appeaser, even a spy, in some quarters.

  But Charles, single-minded as always, did not appear to notice. After he reported to Washington, he looked for suitable homes near Mother but delayed taking one until I got there. It was a good thing that he did, for none of the clippings he had sent me mentioned schools, and when I chastised him for this, he was honestly perplexed. It had not yet registered with him that our children were growing up, needing schooling and friends and doctors and all the other things children required. Beyond the fact of their births, that primal inclination to protect them from harm, he did not seem much interested in parenting. I wondered if it was because of what happened to little Charlie; if he couldn’t see the point of getting too involved, only to have them taken from us. Or if he simply couldn’t understand the needs of a child beyond the age of twenty months, the age of his firstborn, forever. I understood this, had feared it in myself when Jon was first born, but found my heart miraculously expanding along with our children as they grew. I rejoiced that I was able to love and care and worry just like any other mother.

  Yet other mothers did not pin whistles to their children’s pajamas so that they could call for help in the middle of the night.

  In April 1939, I trudged down the gangplank of the Champlain, clutching Land with one hand, Jon with the other. Dozens of police escorted the children and me to a waiting car amid the usual blinding torrent of cameras, which terrified the boys, who had never before faced such an onslaught. Land turned his face to me and wailed, while Jon held tightly to my hand, his face pale and grave.

  “Mrs. Lindbergh! Mrs. Lindbergh! Are you glad to be back? Where is the colonel?” I shook my head at the usual questions, but then froze when confronted by new ones.

  “What do you think of the Nazi Party? Did your husband really meet secretly with Hitler? Is it true that he was offered a commission in the Luftwaffe?”

  I started to get in the car but turned around, unable to keep quiet.

  “My husband has been recalled to active duty as a colonel in the Army Air Corps. He’s unable to meet me because of his work.”

  Then I ducked inside the car, my heart pulsing daringly; I knew I shouldn’t have answered them. Charles had forbidden me to do so; he felt it best that he always be the one to speak for us in public, and normally I was only too happy to let him. He wasn’t here, however, and I heard the hostility behind those questions, and felt that I had to defend him—even though I knew he would not see it that way. But I was proud of the work he was doing now; because of his knowledge of the European situation, the military had him flying all over the country, inspecting air bases, suggesting which factories could be modified to turn out the type of planes necessary to make America the leading air power in the world.

  I was proud of it, and wanted to tell the world about it—for I didn’t know how long it would last. Already, I could see that Charles was on a collision course, torn between his sense of p
urpose and his sense of duty. They were very different things; I saw that clearly. I wasn’t sure that he did, however.

  “You spoke very well, Mama.” Jon patted my hand. “They were such nasty men.”

  “I did? Well, thank you, darling.”

  “Are we home now?”

  I looked out the car window; we were still surrounded by strangers peering into the windows, trying to catch a glimpse of my children, flashbulbs popping, blinding us. I hugged them both to me, and sighed.

  “Yes, we are, darlings. We’re home.”

  AS WE DROVE OUT of the city, across the bridge into New Jersey, my stomach fluttered. And with every mile we drove toward Next Day Hill, my head began to throb, my skin to feel clammy.

  “What’s wrong, Mama?” Jon asked.

  “Nothing,” I said, trying to smile. My son frowned, knowing that I had lied to him.

  Now that we were almost there, I was dreading coming home. Being away for three years had kept the ghosts at bay, but now I was about to encounter them in their own setting. For it was at Next Day Hill that Violet Sharpe—poor, excitable Violet Sharpe, barely older than myself—had taken her life a few weeks after the baby’s body was found. After being summoned for yet another round of questioning about her involvement in the kidnapping, she had swallowed a glass of chlorine cyanide.

  I was horrified and sickened at the news. And racked with guilt. I should have known; I should have realized that Violet didn’t have a Charles to bully strength into her, to force her to look ahead, to forbid her to dwell in the past. She didn’t have anything in her life but my mother’s protection and shelter, but even my mother couldn’t protect her from Colonel Schwarzkopf’s ugly interrogations; interrogations instigated, originally, by me.

  I made myself look at her body, even though Charles flat out forbade me to. I couldn’t explain to him why I needed to see her, register the thin, worried face, the sad little ribbon tied in her hair, her mouth blistered and stained from the poison. The whites of her eyes, still visible beneath half-closed lids, staring at me accusingly.