The Aviator's Wife: A Novel

by Melanie Benjamin

  He was wrong, of course. Although he never admitted it. But reaction against my essay—more than five thousand words, reproduced as a slim volume, most of which ended up in bonfires—was most strong in the very literary community to which I had always aspired. The dreamy young men of my youth were now editors and publishers and critics. More than one wrote to me personally, asking how someone as bright as myself could be poisoned so thoroughly by someone as evil as my husband.

  Smith College also wrote, asking me to please stop saying that I was a graduate.

  Slings and arrows—bullets and grenades. I felt attacked from all sides; I did not completely understand what I had done, only why I had done it, and that reason did not seem enough in the sobering aftermath of publication. I was shaken, battered, and acutely—surprisingly—resentful. At first, I found refuge in my newborn daughter, delighting in her perfection, hiding from the world in my childbed. But for a week, I found myself unable to say more than “Good morning” and “Good evening” to an annoyingly affectionate Charles, who, for the first time in our marriage, began his day by asking what he could do for me.

  The conversations I had with myself, however, were endless—and even less satisfying.

  So by 1941, both Lindberghs were hated equally and once, I would have rejoiced in that; that my own actions were finally considered as significant as my husband’s. Our unlisted telephone rang and rang, and every time I picked it up I heard hatred. Often inarticulate hatred; spewing and venom, not real words. But hatred doesn’t require a common language to be understood.

  Jon came home from school with a quivering chin, wondering why his father was a traitor. Land came home from school with a black eye, defending his traitor father. The new baby, Anne Junior, called Ansy, was the only innocent in our household; now almost a year, her happy gurglings and funny talk were a balm upon my soul. I loved to pick her up and hold her, walking from room to room, as if she were my talisman against evil.

  In September 1941, just a couple of months after the frightening rally at Madison Square Garden, Charles gave another speech, this one in Des Moines, Iowa; a speech that I warned him not to give. A speech I knew would be the one he would be remembered for, despite the hundreds he had given since that night he landed alone in Paris, the world at his feet.

  The sinking of the Greer had just occurred; the sentiment of the country was even more resigned to war. Many of those who had initially supported Charles had turned on him; the crowds were smaller, composed equally of those for and those against him. It was a desperate time, a time when the country seemed to be dancing on the edge, knowing that soon, too soon, we would all be hurtled into the abyss. Dresses were gayer that season, more garish, more colorful than I could remember; songs were faster; people laughed louder, as if to cover up the booms of the war guns across the ocean. Charles knew that he had to make his most exhaustive, reasoned case to date; he must leave no question unasked, however painful.

  He began the speech by listing the three groups he believed were agitating for war: the British, for obvious survival reasons; the Roosevelt administration, which desired to use war to increase its power.

  “It is not difficult to understand why Jewish people desire the overthrow of Nazi Germany,” he continued, moving on to the third group, and I felt my stomach tighten, my breath sour. Sitting in the tiny living room of a rented home on Martha’s Vineyard—we had to leave Long Island when we could no longer walk along the beach without having invectives hurled our way—I listened to my husband on the radio, his voice tinny but sure, confident.

  Speaking up at last, I had begged him to rewrite his speech. “This is going too far. You’re going to come off as anti-Semitic. And you’re not.” Are you? I’d wanted to ask, but could not.

  “Nonsense.”

  “Charles, just by mentioning the Jews, you will color yourself the same as Hitler and the Nazis. You don’t understand what’s happening now. People will accuse you of Jew-baiting. Listen to me! For once, listen to what I’m saying—you do not know what you’re about to do.”

  He shook his head. So caught up was he in this mission, he no longer needed any crew. He was flying solo again, right into the cyclone of history.

  “The greatest danger to this country lies in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio, and our government,” he continued to broadcast, talking about the Jews. “We cannot allow the natural passions and prejudices of other peoples to lead our country to destruction.”

  Other peoples. The Jews—to my husband, they were other people. Not like him. Even if that was not what he intended, it was what would be inferred, and now it was too late. He had said it. Immediately I thought of Harry Guggenheim. Such a dear man; such a good friend.

  He’d stopped returning our phone calls a year ago.

  I switched the radio off, too sickened to listen to more. I jumped up, desperate to know where the children were; I felt I must gather them close to me and keep them safe. After I made sure that the boys were playing quietly in their room and Ansy was gurgling in her crib, I locked the doors and shut the windows. Whether it was to keep evil inside or out, I could not have decided at that moment.

  And if evil was in the shape of a tall, clear-eyed man with stern lips and an unshakable sense of his own right, I could not have decided that, either.

  THE PUBLIC OUTRAGE after Des Moines was so vehement that America First almost disbanded. Ultimately, it didn’t matter that they decided to carry on, broken and battered. Soon an event occurred that was larger even than my husband; the headlines, for the first time, more hysterical than they had been announcing his landing in Paris, or the kidnapping of our son.

  Pearl Harbor. The bombs dropped—that afternoon, as we huddled by the radio, Charles could only repeat his astonishment that the Japanese had aircraft capable of such long range—and the world changed. America First disbanded after Charles issued a statement urging all Americans to unite, regardless of past differences; he grandly acknowledged that our country had been attacked and naturally we must now fight back. All of us.

  Then he telephoned the White House, eager to report for duty; even admitting to the secretary with whom he spoke that his recent political stand might cause complications—such a bitter pill for him to swallow, but he did it manfully, as he did everything else. However, he continued, he hoped the president would agree that differences must be set aside for the good of the country.

  While he was waiting for an answer, Charles was asked, offhand, by a reporter about the disbanding of America First. He said, truthfully, that he was saddened for his country. “It was unfortunate,” he added, that the white race was currently divided in this war, when the true enemy was the “Asiatic influence.” His wish was that somehow Germany could have been appeased, and allied with us against Japan, China, and Russia. He closed by restating his desire to fight for his country, no matter what. “I’m an American first,” he said, and I winced.

  Soon after this, he heard from the Pentagon. His request to be reinstated was denied. For the duration, former colonel Charles Lindbergh’s services were not required.

  Devastated, and so honestly surprised I almost cried, Charles then turned to all the commercial airlines he had helped form, almost from the dust of the fields that, with his name attached, they had been able to turn into giant, gleaming airports and factories now busy with war work. He returned home from several meetings enthusiastic and optimistic. But when the phone did not ring for him the next day, and the day after that, and the day after that, he sank into a despair I had never before witnessed, not even when the baby was taken.

  “I don’t understand,” he muttered, sitting erect in his chair, even then. “I have more knowledge of the German air force than anyone. I traveled around our airfields when I first came back, helping them to modernize, teaching them fighting tactics I learned in Germany. And one would hope that now, more than ever, differing opinions about the world would be welcomed, for only the be
st research comes from a result of all different points of view.”

  My heart broke for him, seeing what no one else did—the naive farm boy instead of the hero. Statue that he was, monument to his own beliefs, he was no match for wily politicians. Washington wasn’t interested in what he knew; it was interested in how he was perceived by a public that would probably have to elect a president in the middle of a war.

  But I did not have time to soothe him, for overnight I was forced to deal with ration books and gas cards and rubber drives. The girl I had in every other day to help clean left to work in a factory. The cook—for I had never learned to make more than scrambled eggs and grilled cheese sandwiches—did the same. With a copy of Betty Crocker in one hand and my ration book in the other, I tried to find some way of feeding a family of five. Six, soon, for I was expecting once more; Charles’s vision of a dynasty seemed to be coming true, at least. I was providing him with his own brood of blond-haired, straight-teethed children, none of whom looked at all like me except for Ansy, who inherited my unfortunate nose (which looked much less unfortunate on a rosy-cheeked face framed with white-blond curls).

  I had no time to go on walks with him, as he suggested coaxingly, almost flirtatiously, for the first time in ages—since before we’d come back to America. It pained me to have to say no to him. But there was always a meal to prepare; it astonished me how frequently my children required nourishment, now that I was the one to provide it.

  And there was no time to sit in the den with him at night and listen as he read from drafts of speeches he wrote but had no opportunity to give, for there was always a child to cajole into bed, a glass of water to fetch, the last bit of a story to read. If I had a minute to myself, I was darning clothes and letting hems out, for everyone was predicting a clothing shortage.

  “I despise seeing you like this,” he said one day, and he sounded sincere, which only made me angry, busy as I was—and as he was not. “I despise seeing you waste your potential, no better than any other housewife, worrying over casseroles and coupons. What about us, Anne? What about you—your writing? Whatever happened to that?”

  “Well, I’m not enjoying it much myself, but I don’t see any alternative,” I snapped, and went back to the preserves boiling on the stove, studying them closely, wondering why on earth they wouldn’t jell. Shaking his head sorrowfully, Charles left me to the stove—and the pile of dirty dishes that I couldn’t help but notice he had not offered to help wash.

  So I was grateful—almost to the point of hysterical laughter—the day I picked up the phone and heard a wheezy voice say, “Henry Ford here. Is Colonel Lindbergh home?”

  If there was one man capable of defying Roosevelt and giving my husband a job, it was Henry Ford. Despite Ford’s own isolationist—and more obviously anti-Semitic—background, the government needed him. Or, rather—it needed his factories. Detroit was being turned into a wartime machine, and Ford was calling to ask Charles to help oversee the aviation operations, which would be responsible for building bombers, B-24s.

  Charles left the next morning, a blustery March day, and drove straight through to Detroit on a special gas card issued to him by Ford; essential war work, it declared. I rose at dawn to see him off, and I admit I felt relief at seeing him go, despite all the work ahead of me—closing up this house, packing, finding another in Detroit, moving the household, finding a new doctor for me, one for the children, dentists for us all, schools.…

  But mostly, I felt relief. Not only at being parted—there was some of that, I had to admit; his presence in the house had been oppressive these last few weeks, an annoying, spiteful shadow nipping at my heels wherever I went. But mainly, I rejoiced at the knowledge that for once, we were like everyone else. Not heroes, deified; not demons, vilified.

  Just a man and wife saying goodbye because of the war, unsure when we’d see each other again, because housing was difficult to find in Detroit—and Charles made it clear to Mr. Ford that we were to be given no special favors. We would exchange letters, call occasionally when we could get a long distance line. I would take photographs of the children so that he did not miss anything. I would encourage them to write to Daddy, and help them sign their names in cursive, even though they did not yet know how.

  As I waved goodbye to Charles, I had tears in my eyes. Tears of pure, soul-cleansing joy, for I felt an honest happiness in sending my husband off to war—as if this one small sacrifice could somehow make up for all the wrong I had done, in both our names. Yet at the same time, I also felt the lightness of anticipation, believing that somehow, the worst was behind us. And that from now on, Charles and I had only good times to look forward to together. Strange, I know, to think that; to feel relief, not sadness; happiness, not horror.

  Especially against the backdrop of a world split asunder by war.

  CHAPTER 15

  “MOMS?”

  I looked up, startled. I was writing a letter to Charles, using the thin, small V-Mail sheet I abhorred; I always ran out of room before I ran out of things to say. Jon was standing in front of me, just home from school. He was neat and tidy as always; Land was the one who always had a slingshot in his pocket, a half-eaten apple in his hand. The only sign that Jon was a normal eleven-year-old was his new vocabulary of slang that he sometimes tried out. “Hi-de-ho” for “hello,” “creep” for his brother, “Moms” for me. Although his father was never “Pops”; even to his children, there was something about Charles Augustus Lindbergh that did not lend itself to slang.

  “Yes, dear?”

  “The teacher was telling us about Father’s flight to Paris today. It’s in our history books, you know.” He blushed; so scarlet you could see a rosy glow beneath his fine reddish hair. So this was why he had been uncommonly quiet in the car on the way home. “It was kind of embarrassing, because everyone looked at me. Even Polly Sanders.”

  I stifled a smile; Polly Sanders had hit him in the school yard yesterday. A declaration of love if ever there was one.

  “But then the teacher started talking about a kidnapping. She said that Father’s first baby was stolen and died. Charles Lindbergh Junior. And when I told her she was wrong, that I was the oldest, she got real quiet, then she shut the book and told me to go home and ask you about it.”

  “Oh.” Without thinking, I tore up the letter I was writing to Charles. Writing to him was my lifeline, as it was his; I often felt we were courting again through V-Mail, sharing our fears, our hopes—everything that we hadn’t been able to tell each other in person. Forced to live apart now, after so long huddled together against various storms, the war had given us a chance to tell each other who we were again. To reinvent ourselves, even. On the page, I sounded strong and resourceful.

  He sounded reflective and kind.

  Even though I missed him so much that I had taken to sleeping on the chaise in my bedroom just so I didn’t have to see his pillow every night, I was suddenly, violently furious with my husband. Why was he not here to address this? After all, it was a situation of his own making; Charles had decided that we would never display our lost baby’s pictures, never tell his siblings about his existence. “I don’t want any reminders,” he had declared, a lifetime ago, when we were packing up the house in Hopewell. And that was it. I gathered all the baby’s photos into one shoe box that I still kept beneath my bed. Now and then, when I was alone, I sat cross-legged on the floor and spread them all out before me, a jigsaw puzzle that would never be complete.

  Baby. I sighed. Of course, he would not be a baby now. He would be two years older than Jon. A teenager.

  “So, I’m asking you,” Jon said, ever patient—although I could see that he was shaken. He had a difficult time looking at me directly, and his hands, in his trouser pockets, were balled into fists. “Did I have—have a big brother, I guess? And he died?”

  “Yes.” I pushed myself away from the desk and went to my bed; I patted the coverlet, and Jon sat down next to me.

  As I sorted through my t
umbled emotions—anger at Charles; the tender sadness that any mention of “the events of ’32” still invoked; frustration at the teacher, for having introduced the subject in the first place—I glanced about the bedroom. It was a woman’s bedroom, not a man’s, with dainty lace curtains, dresses in the closet, lipstick on the vanity. No tie rack, no shaving kit, very few suits, and those in the back of the closet. I wondered how many other wives lived in such a bedroom; how many other wives had subtly, over the last couple of years of war, remodeled their homes, their lives, around someone’s absence.

  Most, probably. I was not remarkable enough to be the only one.

  Our house here in Bloomfield Hills had not been exactly to either of our tastes, but given the housing shortage, we leaped at it. Four bedrooms, three acres, only $300 a month in rent. It was decorated in an ornate, fussy style that I longed to change but couldn’t; our landlady, who was living with her sister for the duration, had a habit of popping over unannounced, just to make sure we hadn’t touched anything. The boys shared one room, Anne had another, and the new baby had a separate nursery; and then the master bedroom, in which I slept alone. For Charles was now, finally, at the front.

  During the past two years he had worked tirelessly for Henry Ford, insisting on being paid only what he would have earned in the army. He had made himself into something of a human laboratory rat. Volunteering for everything, Charles tested high-altitude chambers, oxygen-deprivation chambers, sound chambers; he usually came home at night slightly ill, or with his ears ringing, but always with a satisfied smile. And as the war marched on, and so did time, and memories, he crossed the country, testing bombers for other companies as well—North American Aviation, Curtiss-Wright, Douglas: all companies that had turned down his services after Pearl Harbor. Finally, he convinced Lockheed to send him into the Pacific theater, where he used his experience to teach pilots how to fly at high altitudes in the P-38. Officially, he was not allowed into combat, which should have quelled my worries. But I knew my husband too well; I also knew how other pilots idolized him. Whenever we flew commercial—even during the worst of the America First ordeal—Charles was treated like a hero. The pilots, grinning like schoolboys, always came back to shake his hand, stuttering that it was a privilege to fly him, of all people.