The Aviator's Wife: A Novel

by Melanie Benjamin

  “Hello?”

  “What took you so long?” Charles asked on the other end, clearly irritated. “It rang for nearly a minute.”

  “No, not quite an entire minute. Where are you?”

  “Washington, of course. Strategic Air Command work. I thought I told you.”

  “No, you didn’t.”

  “Is everything all right there?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “No emergencies this week?”

  “Not yet, anyway.” Although with four school-aged children, I knew it was only a matter of time.

  “Good. Have you taken an inventory lately? We’re due for one.”

  “I’ll do it this weekend.” Charles frequently required an inventory of all our household items—blankets, pots and pans, dishes, silverware, even shampoo bottles. It was a holdover from when we flew to the Orient—actually, probably from when he planned his flight to Paris; everything had to be accounted for and discarded if it served no useful purpose. Charles saw no reason why a home couldn’t be packed as efficiently as an airplane; he himself still traveled with only his small, battered bag, the one he’d used since we were married.

  “Fine. The children are well?”

  “Yes. Would you like to talk to them?” Although even as I said it, I hoped he would not. For one of them would likely say something to displease him, and I would be the one to bear the brunt of it.

  “No, I don’t have time. I just wanted to check in and make sure everything was running according to plan.”

  According to your plan, I thought grimly. Not mine.

  “When will you be home? Reeve was asking just a moment ago.”

  “I don’t know. After these conferences, Pan Am wants me to attend their annual shareholders’ meeting. Then I think I’ll be back, and I have a special project I’d like you to work on.”

  “Oh, Charles.” My heart sank; the last time he had dangled a “special project” in front of me, like some kind of reward for being, I don’t know, as stupidly loyal as a puppy, I ended up helping him catalog all the trees on our property. Five acres of heavily wooded property.

  “I promise, it’s not like last time,” he added, as if he could see my face. “Are you sure everything is all right there?”

  “Yes, I’m sure. Now, go to your meeting. I need to start supper.”

  “No steak, I hope. Not on a weekday. Roast, I would think, would be the proper meal.”

  “It’s chicken pot pie, for your information. Now, goodbye!” And I hung up the phone, cherishing my little triumph. Then I slumped against the wall, disgusted. Chicken pot pie instead of pot roast! How ridiculous.

  If I’d really desired a victory, I would have told him that no, everything was not fine. The sink is clogged, Land got a C in English, Jon’s graduation is coming up and he keeps asking me if you’re going to be home for it, I’m tired, irritable, and even though I don’t have a second to myself I’m so bored I feel like jumping into the ocean just outside this godforsaken piece of land you picked out for us and lured me to with the promise that these would be our golden years.

  Oh, I had been so ecstatic when Charles first showed me this house! It was in 1946, a few months after my sixth child, Reeve, was born. After several months away in Europe, where he had gone on behalf of the government to study Nazi Germany’s captured rocket program, he was finally home for good. We left the children with Mother and drove out with a picnic lunch to this wooded place on the eastern tip of Connecticut.

  Spreading the blanket on a cliff overlooking the ocean, the rambling farmhouse behind us, we sat and discussed our plans, just like every young family was doing. Although we weren’t quite as young as some: Charles was forty-four; I, just forty.

  Charles was still working in an unofficial military capacity, as an advisor to the Army Air Corps, which was concentrating mainly on high altitude jets now, and Charles was an expert on high-altitude flying. Pan Am also hired him to be a consultant as they began to expand their overseas routes. His postwar schedule was rapidly filling up; already I suspected he wouldn’t be home as much as I had hoped.

  Still, that day, it seemed as if we had found a permanent home of our own—no more moving every two years, not with a brood of school-aged children. Finally, I thought, we had found our way back to the family we set out to be, before “the events of ’32.”

  “See that spot of land?” Charles pointed to a far-off dip in the ground, surrounded by young birch trees. “That’s where I’ll build you a little house. A little writing house. That’s where you’re going to write your book, Anne. The one I know you can write.”

  “Really?” I turned to him; he was reclining on the ground, propping up his head with his hand. He grinned, and the confidence he always radiated fell, like a precious ray of sun, upon me. My face flushed, and I almost felt a pencil between my fingers, saw the sheaves of paper spread out on a desk. It would face east, I thought, so I could write in the morning—always my favorite time to gather my thoughts. I would rise early, before the children got up, before they pulled at me, tugged at me, stretched me thin as taffy, as children had a way of doing.

  “Remember, how you said you wanted to write one great book? The war got in the way of that, didn’t it?”

  I nodded. I had published, after Wave of the Future, a fictional account of one of our flights, called Steep Ascent. But I wasn’t happy with it, and I suspected I never would be as long as I kept writing our past. I needed to find something bigger, something worthwhile—but all the moves, the children; so many pregnancies; all kept muddying my mind, claiming my energy.

  “Well,” Charles continued, “now you can do it. Here, in this house, we will raise our family, and I’ll go off to work and you’ll go off to write, and we’ll make history again, the two of us. We should be able to hire some decent help, now that the war’s over. The schools are good here in Darien—I knew you’d want to know that, so I checked. What do you think? We can fix up the house—I’ve already talked to a contractor.”

  “What do I think?” I beamed up at him, thanking God for the miracle of this man who had made it home from the war, back to me—me, of all people! “I think it’s perfect!” I touched that deep cleft in his chin, kissed it before he could pull away, then pushed myself up and hiked over to that spot where my writing house would be. Charles remained where he was, staring out at the ocean that threw itself up thunderously on the rocks, far below. Halfway to the birch trees, I turned around to look at him, and my heart skipped a beat; he was so gorgeous, still. I remembered how, on our long flights, seated behind him just like a girl in school seated behind her secret crush, I used to memorize everything about the back of Charles’s head, his neck, his shoulders. Cramped as I got sitting in my crowded cockpit, there were moments I was overwhelmed with physical longing for my husband. It might be brought on simply by the way he cocked his head first left, then right, to relieve some tension. When he did so, the muscles of his neck would lengthen and tighten; this glimpse of his bronzed, taut flesh, tinged with reddish-blond hairs—the only glimpse I would have of his flesh for hours on end—would cause a sudden stirring of longing in my belly and between my legs, my breasts tingling as if brushed with tiny, electric feathers.

  I felt that way still, when I looked at him; electric, young. Supple and pliant and girlish.

  And this—this unexpected generosity, as he remembered my dream after all this time. A cabin, all to myself! We deserved this. We deserved this place, this peace. We’d live the rest of our lives here, together; we’d walk together through the birch grove, and lie together on the cold ground, finding a way to keep warm. Together.

  Soon, though, I was reminded that we weren’t as young—or, rather, I wasn’t as young—as I’d imagined. I became pregnant again, to my dismay—a dismay I tried to conceal from Charles and from myself. But for the first time I was afraid; I had been relieved when my doctor warned me not to have any more children after Reeve. This time, I was afraid for my physical we
ll-being, as well as my creative; I felt, somehow, that if I had this child I would never write again, cabin or no cabin. My thoughts always seemed to fling themselves in every direction, farther and farther afield with each child. I would never be able to corral them now.

  And it was not an easy pregnancy; I developed gallstones and was advised to have an abortion, which I could not bring myself to do. But nature delivered me from the purgatory of indecision and pain, and I miscarried. Soon after, I underwent the necessary gallbladder surgery.

  But I underwent it alone. Charles, who had been present for the birth of each of our children, was strangely absent at the death of my childbearing years.

  Our new family doctor, Dana Atchley, a gentle, slightly soft-looking man with thinning gray hair and the warmest, most understanding eyes I had ever seen, was kindness itself. I was in the hospital in Manhattan for two weeks, and found myself dissolving into tears whenever I turned my head, which throbbed and ached almost as much as the incision beneath my belly. But I did my best to dry those tears whenever Dr. Atchley checked in on me, and put on a brave, cheerful face, as Charles urged me to do by telephone, every day. I don’t think I fooled the doctor, for he sometimes paused on his busy rounds to sit next to me for long minutes at a time. Often he turned my radio on, and we listened to classical music together, not saying a word, before he got up to resume his rounds. And I would resume my bewildered contemplation of my husband—or, rather, his absence.

  For so long it had been just the two of us, together against all foes—wind, weather, the press, the kidnappers, the swirling darkness of world war. Now I was sick, ailing; facing an abyss of confusion and finality that I simply couldn’t comprehend and I needed him, needed his forbidding strength, his ruthless, forward-looking vision. Without them, all I could do was lie in my hospital bed for two weeks, waiting pathetically for him. Wondering why he couldn’t take the train into the city; wondering why, even with me in the hospital, he’d accepted an invitation to fly to Switzerland and give a speech, leaving the children in the care of secretaries. Leaving me to heal on my own.

  Looking back, I see that was the beginning. I would spend the rest of my life waiting for him, wondering why. Until it was too late.

  Even after I recovered from the surgery, Charles did not reach for me as he once had. It wasn’t as if he was afraid to hurt me; that, I would have understood. Instead, it was as if he had decided he had no more use for my body, as it was of no more use to him. No more children, no more little Lindberghs; his dynasty was complete—what physical need did he have for me now?

  I didn’t have much desire at first, either. But gradually it returned, and I was able to coax him, occasionally, into making love, but he always seemed to be holding back. No longer could he lose himself in my arms; no longer could he expose himself so nakedly, crying out into my breasts. We had always had that between us; our bodies could speak when our hearts could not. Now, that was one more thing I had lost.

  Was that why he began to withdraw from the children, too? Did he lump us all together as something finished? All I know is that he began to fly farther and farther away from us all, rarely asking me to accompany him; only occasionally remembering to come back.

  To be sure, his presence was always felt even when he was away. He had made out a personalized schedule for each child to follow, starting from the hour they were to awake to the number of snacks they were permitted throughout the day, including chores—and the precise way each was to be performed. (The trash could not simply be emptied into a bin and then taken to the garbage dump; it must be sorted through first to make sure nothing of value had been accidentally thrown away.)

  Mandatory reading lists were drawn up for each child, according to whatever flaw in his or her character Charles felt was prominent. Jon was given books to read that praised humility, Land ones that encouraged focus; Scott was deluged with books that spoke of the virtues of discipline. Ansy had to read about little girls who got into trouble because of their tempers. And Reeve, even before she started kindergarten, had to sit down for an hour a day and page through picture books about baby animals who came to a sad end because they were too curious.

  Nor was I exempt; far from it. I had to account for every expenditure, even down to the shoelaces for each pair of tennis shoes and the box of toothpicks in the junk drawer. Naturally, I was expected somehow to intuit the exact hour of his homecoming, even when he failed to tell me; if he walked in the door and I wasn’t there to take his hat and coat, he would berate me for ten minutes before finally remembering to kiss me on the cheek.

  Still, when Charles was gone, the house was noisy, relaxed; Ansy played her records or practiced her flute all day, the boys ran in and out in various sports uniforms; Reeve scampered about, clutching after her siblings, demanding that they include her in their activities. Dinnertime was like a zoo, as I simply sat and let them chatter to one another, knowing that I’d inadvertently hear the important things. This way, I learned that Jon was going to ask Sarah Price to prom; that Land had blown an axle on the Studebaker and had to borrow money from Grandma to get it fixed; that Scott was keeping a toad in his sock drawer; that Ansy’s best friend had told the rest of the cheerleading squad that she had halitosis; that Reeve was not going to get married, ever, because boys, especially boys like her brothers, were horrid.

  Usually Reeve would end dinner by saying she missed Daddy, and they would all turn to the empty place at the head of the table, wistful expressions on their young faces—before pushing back their chairs and getting on with the evening, chattering and busy once more.

  They may have missed him—I may have missed him. But when he was home, the air in the house was so impenetrable with tension I sometimes retreated to my cabin to breathe freely, and cry.

  The evening after he returned from the Pacific, we had all sat in the kitchen, the children staring at him like he was a mythical creature who had somehow turned up in the middle of the suburbs, while Charles declared, jovially, “It’s a good thing I’m back, Anne, to whip these youngsters into shape.” I had laughed, the children had laughed; we were just so happy to have him home. But soon, “It’s a good thing I’m back, Anne, to whip these youngsters into shape” became a war cry; it set my teeth on edge, and caused the children to pale. I couldn’t bear to witness how he treated them; scolding Land for his C in English until the poor boy broke down—a thirteen-year-old, sobbing like a baby. Or following each child around for a day, making sure that his schedule was being followed exactly, watching so intently that overnight, Ansy developed a nervous tic, her eyes blinking uncontrollably at times—just like Charles’s had, back when the baby was taken, and my heart caught on the unexpectedly jagged edge of this realization.

  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 sens
e 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.