The Aviator's Wife

by Melanie Benjamin

  Charles and I both rejoiced in moments like these, and built on them; while I logged ever more solo flights on the way to my pilot’s license (which Charles carefully put away with his own, for whatever museum would want them someday), I began to study celestial navigation.

  Like all flyers, I preferred to rely on the instrument panel, but Charles insisted on my learning celestial, as well; he had, in preparation for his Paris flight. I grew to dislike using the sextant, a heavy, awkward instrument resembling a combination telescope/protractor. It was nearly impossible to use while flying, as the plane was never steady enough for me to confidently fix the horizon. And for the longest time, I could not find Polaris to save my soul.

  “Anne, for heaven’s sake, it’s right there,” Charles would hiss out of tight, exasperated lips during a rare evening stroll about Next Day Hill, my mother’s grand new house. Odd, that I thought of it as hers, not hers and Daddy’s. But Next Day Hill was Mother’s dream, a mansion with wings and spectacular entrance halls and even a ballroom. And glorious gardens, through which I loved to walk with my husband, who still didn’t quite seem to be my husband. So much of our married life was lived on the public stage, where he summoned such frenzy and deification, I sometimes found myself staring at him just as adoringly as everyone else.

  It probably didn’t help matters that even though we’d been married for several months, we still used Next Day Hill as a sort of base between flights. No one appeared to expect us to buy a home of our own. We bought planes, instead; a little Curtiss two-seater for me, a much bigger, specially fitted Lockheed Sirius for our planned trip to the Orient. We were, after all, the First Couple of the Air.

  “See?” Charles would grab my hand—not romantically, like a lover on a moonlit stroll, but impatiently, like a teacher does a dreamy child’s—and point toward the night sky. “Polaris. It’s the brightest star in the north.”

  “No, that’s the brightest star.” I pointed to another, lower on the horizon. Charles snorted.

  “That is not a star, it’s a planet. Venus.”

  “Well, it is the brightest!”

  “But it’s not a star. Anne, you’d think you’d never studied astronomy before!”

  “I haven’t! I’ve studied literature and poetry, and I can tell you who first translated Cervantes. You don’t know that, do you?” I knew I was on rocky ground; any mention of Charles’s lack of education might cause him to spin on his heel and leave me in the middle of the garden, without even a single word of explanation. Yet something about the way he stared down at me, so endlessly, tirelessly gifted and superior, made my skin itch and my eyes narrow to meet his gaze head-on. “It was Thomas Shelton,” I continued recklessly, finally tired of the constant lecturing, teaching, pushing.

  Why couldn’t we have a normal marriage? What other young couple walked in a moonlit garden, fragrant with honeysuckle and newly cut grass, and argued over the definition of stars and planets? Never mind that I had known that I was not marrying any mere man, had never for one instant wanted to marry any mere man; at that moment, worn out from weeks spent scrutinized by the public, weary from having strangers knock on hotel doors at odd hours, just to get a glimpse of us, I had had enough.

  “It was in 1612,” I retorted. “That was the first translation of Don Quixote into English.”

  Charles blinked. “That’s admirable, Anne, but I doubt it will come in handy when we’re flying across the Bering Sea at night. Now, which one is Polaris again?”

  Chastened by his patience, not to mention his practicality, I looked back up at the sky. The stars, which used to be so poetic and inspiring, were now simply more things I had to learn because my husband demanded that I do so. I gazed up at them, not seeing the beauty; I saw potential mistakes instead.

  That night, for the first time, I did successfully identify Polaris. It was the one star whose icy gaze reminded me most of my husband’s.

  THE FESTIVE EVENING at the Guggenheims’ was to celebrate our latest aviation triumph, a ten-day flight through the Caribbean with Juan and Betty Trippe for Juan’s new airline, Pan American Airways. Afterward, Charles and I flew for days in a little two-seater open-cockpit plane over the Mayan jungle in Mexico; we had been asked to photograph the ruins of Chichén Itzá for the first time from the air, and in doing so we’d discovered other ruins as well.

  Aside from the archaeological significance, for me this trip had been noteworthy because finally, after we parted ways with Juan and Betty, we had much-needed time alone; precious time, away from adoring eyes and expectations and ceremony and the hectic bustling of my family. Only when Charles and I were alone—which usually meant aloft in the sky, seeing the world in a way no one else could—did I ever feel as if I was truly his partner, and not just an adoring appendage standing slightly off to his side. Seated behind Charles but sometimes taking over for him whenever he grew tired, my hand was sure on the stick as I piloted the Lone Eagle over jungles and mountains.

  Two years ago I had been just another Smith coed, unable to make up her mind about anything. Now here I was in the sky, charting new paths, breaking records—pushing myself in ways I never would have without him. How on earth did mere mortals live? Soaring, dipping, waggling the wings of the plane, I felt nothing but pity for the girls I had gone to school with. They had settled down on earth into dull, ordinary lives. They had married dull, ordinary men.

  But it was on the ground, camping beneath the Mexican sky, that I began to know my husband—not the famous aviator or my schoolgirl crush. He told me stories of camping alone on the banks of the Mississippi River in Minnesota when he was a boy, his father never around to accompany him, for C. A. Lindbergh was a congressman by then, away in Washington most of the time. Although he rarely spoke of his father, I got the sense that there was something missing between them; some break in their relationship. His mother he spoke of with more affection.

  “She raised me,” Charles said one sultry evening, amid the cackling of macaws, the sudden, surprising scampering of tiny lizards in the underbrush around us—a setting so strange and exotic, yet it was merely stage dressing; my attention was firmly fixed, as always, on my astonishing husband. “My mother and my uncle. My father wasn’t quite—responsible in that way. And my stepsisters, well—I won’t get into it all. Of course, that’s one reason why I married you.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’re from such a fine family, with good blood. No irregularities—our children will be pure.”

  “Charles! You make me sound like a broodmare! As if that was the only reason you married me!” I laughed, craning my head to look up at him.

  He smiled down at me, touched the tip of my wide nose, and said, “If that was the only reason I married you, I would never have been able to get past this.”

  “Oh!” I brushed his hand away, although I didn’t mind his teasing, wrapped as it was in the warm cocoon of our surprising intimacy, so far removed from others. Without our aircraft, we never would have been able to find our way back to civilization, and for the moment, anyway, I didn’t want to. “What do you mean, no irregularities? I might have a spooky great-aunt tucked away in an attic, as far as you know.”

  “Do you?” The smile faded away. He was looking at me in that clinical way he sometimes did—I never failed to feel like a butterfly pinned to a specimen board.

  “No, of course not!” For a fleeting moment, Dwight came to mind—over Daddy’s protests, Mother had arranged for my brother to leave Amherst for a while, after another “difficult” time, during which he again began to hallucinate. She put him in a rest home in Massachusetts and told my father to stop sending his son letters urging him to take control of his mind, as if it were only that simple.

  Charles didn’t know anything other than that my brother had simply taken a leave of absence, and for the first time I decided he should not know more than that—not yet, anyway. I had never kept a secret from my husband before and didn’t quite understand why I chos
e to do so now; with a guilty little smile, I stirred uneasily in his arms.

  He didn’t notice; his thoughts were still with his own father. “You know, he did provide me with the money to attend flight school. And I admired his principles, for he took some difficult stands during the war years. He was against our involvement; because of that, he lost his seat in Congress. But there’s really no further need to discuss him, Anne. You know all you need to know. He died a few years before my flight to Paris.”

  “So he never knew how much you’ve accomplished.”

  “It wouldn’t have mattered to me,” he insisted. “At least Mother has lived to see it all. As I said, she’s the one who raised me.”

  I thought of his mother; Evangeline Lodge Lindbergh was a cold, distant woman with the same startling blue eyes of her son, who had sat with her brother during our wedding, a stony expression on her face. I didn’t feel that she disapproved of me, or of our marriage—rather that she simply had her own life, apart from her son’s. She seemed so removed always, refusing my repeated invitations to visit with cordial, if impersonal, letters. Yet Charles once told me that she had been quite anxious when he left for Paris, even though she scolded a photographer who asked her to kiss her son goodbye for the camera. “We Lindberghs don’t do that,” Evangeline had chided the poor man, to Charles’s delight.

  And she was Charles’s caring, nurturing parent! My heart surged toward my husband, wanting to give him everything he had lacked before he met me: love, affection, the warmth and constancy of a family circle. Despite his insistence that his father’s approval wouldn’t have mattered, I felt his shoulders heave, as if shifting a burden, and I couldn’t help but remember Dwight. It seemed to me that sons always needed the approval of their fathers. Much more than daughters.

  We stared into the fire, or up at the stars, which, now that I had proved my mastery over them, were given back to me as objects of fascination and wonder once more. I could enjoy their beauty and trust in their discretion as they observed a man and a woman come together as husband and wife.

  And this was the greatest gift that aviation could ever give me; not the sense of freedom but the sense of permanence, coupling, of being absolutely worthy, absolutely necessary to the one person in the world who hadn’t needed anyone. Before.

  I even, at his urging, recited a few of my poems. Although I was so far removed from my previous life I couldn’t have mapped it even with a sextant, my words came back to me readily; those same words I had always insisted I could not remember. But for my husband and lover, I could. And watching Charles’s face as he listened, his brow faintly creased, his eyes soft and thoughtful in the firelight, I heard my words as if for the first time, and believed that there was something in them. Something fine, something incipient; some talent worth pursuing.

  He was silent for a long while after I finished; then he nodded once, slowly. “Sometimes,” Charles said, his voice ragged with astonishment, “I can’t remember what my life was like before I met you.”

  I was overwhelmed with this unexpected gift. My husband rarely spoke of his emotions or even his moods; I had learned to navigate them by instinct, just as I had learned to navigate his plane. His silences could be frosty, intended to shut me out; I knew this by a certain way he set his mouth, a stubborn tilt of his chin. But more and more in the months since our marriage, I had felt his silences to be welcoming. It was as if he was standing by an open gate, waiting for me to walk through it to join him, allowing me all the time in the world.

  “I can’t, either,” I assured him, touching the cleft in his chin that I so loved. He gently kissed my finger, then pulled me to him until all I could see were his eyes, all I could hear was his heart, which he guarded almost as watchfully as he guarded me. And I knew I never wanted that trip to end. I wanted to keep singing him songs with my poems, like Circe; to remain flying above the rest of the world, untouchable, like Icarus.

  But we did have to come back—down to earth! Standing in the Guggenheims’ drawing room, we were an ordinary, if extraordinarily celebrated, man and wife; intrepid explorers alone in the world no longer. The tinkling of glasses, the throaty laughter of society matrons, the ridiculous questions of those who had never traveled except in first class on a luxury liner—all signaled we were back in civilization; what a deceitful, disappointing word!

  The Great Aviatrix—after first making sure the entire room overheard her discussing motors with my husband—finally remembered my presence. Nearly as tall as Charles, she smiled down at me with a patronizing air.

  “That’s a very pretty frock.” Her voice sounded brighter, more musical; more suited to the nursery than to the airfield.

  “Thank you.”

  “Tell me, Anne, have you ever read A Room of One’s Own?”

  I gasped, then laughed out loud. Was she serious? I could see by the earnest look on Amelia Earhart’s face that she was.

  “Excuse me?” I asked politely.

  “Virginia Woolf’s latest. You should read it sometime. It was written for someone like you.”

  “Someone like me? What do you mean?”

  “Oh, Anne, you’re such a sweet little thing!” Amelia laughed her great honking horse laugh. Next to me, Charles stiffened. He did not like Amelia; he’d said many times that I was twice the pilot she was, although he never criticized her publicly. Now he watched me, seeing if I could pass this latest test.

  I hesitated. I could fly a plane, be hurtled off a mountain, navigate by the stars, but I shrank from defending myself. In this crowded room full of people I didn’t care for yet didn’t want to disappoint, I met the Great Aviatrix’s bemused gaze. She had only disdain for me in my flowered frock, silk stockings, and high heels, and suddenly, I understood it. I didn’t look like an aviator; I looked like an aviator’s wife. His exceedingly decorative wife.

  Then I felt a fluttering within my belly; something turned over, reminding me, in the most elementary way, that I was earthbound after all.

  So it was with pure joy—and even, I admit, a little superiority—that I smiled up at the Great Aviatrix, so earnestly boyish, so fiercely alone.

  “Thank you for the suggestion, Amelia. I’m always looking for something new to read, you know. I had no idea you were so well read!”

  Carol Guggenheim stifled a laugh, and Charles turned away—but not before I caught the grin on his face.

  “Charles, may I talk with you a moment?” I turned away from Amelia, took my husband’s arm, and firmly led him to a private alcove, away from the glare of the Great Aviatrix’s embarrassed smile. I heard her say something to the room that was received with a burst of laughter, but I didn’t care.

  “You should have said something more, Anne,” Charles began. “You should have really put her in her place. You’re a better flyer than she is.”

  “It’s silly, in the grand scheme of things. She’s silly. I don’t care what she thinks of me. There are more important things in the world,” I replied lightly, almost flippantly.

  And then I placed my hand on my husband’s arm and tiptoed up to whisper something in his ear. While the party in our honor continued noisily behind us, I informed him he was soon to be something other than an aviator.

  He was soon to be a father, as well.

  CHAPTER 6

  May 1930

  THE SIDEWALKS OF THE LOWER EAST SIDE were chaotic; so noisy, crowded, steamy, and dirty that for a moment I faltered, overwhelmed. Bile rose in my throat, and I wondered if I would faint right in the middle of Houston Street, and if it would be reported in the newspapers if I did, and if so, how would Charles react?

  Oh, I thought I was through with morning sickness! After a few deep breaths, however, I realized that I wasn’t used to being in New York; that my life was so very different than it was when I used to walk these sidewalks with confidence. Back then, the constant honking of horns, the wailing of children, the hum of perpetual conversation, the ever-present drilling of a jackhammer—all were merel
y background noise. Just as the roar of an airplane engine was to me now.

  I wasn’t used to being jostled about by people; that was it. Isolated as I was, either in the air with Charles or in the warm cocoon of family at Next Day Hill; protected by chauffeurs or maids or police escorts at public events—I hadn’t been out in public in forever. The last time Charles and I had gone out had been months ago, to the theater, to see George S. Kaufman’s June Moon. I had a false hairpiece with bangs and glasses; he pasted on a fake mustache and wore glasses as well. We looked so silly we giggled like children playing dress-up; still stifling giggles, we’d entered the theater separately and sat a row apart in our own disguises. Yet we’d been discovered anyway, and the play had to be stopped because of the furor in the audience. After police escorted us to our car, I’d been so humiliated, sorry for the actors, that we hadn’t ventured out in public since.

  So I had forgotten what it was like being simply one in a crowd—how claustrophobic it could sometimes be.

  Still, even for one used to the city, taking a stroll in the Lower East Side was an adventure. Farther uptown, Manhattan might be pushing into the future—the nearly completed Chrysler Building stood tall and proud even as the new Empire State Building was rushing to eclipse it—but here it might as well be the turn of the century. Immigrant mothers wore ankle-length black dresses and head coverings; raggedy children played with wooden toys, if they had toys at all; horses still pulled delivery wagons. The stock market crash of last autumn might be starting to affect the other parts of the city—there were reports of breadlines even as far north as Washington Square—but here, it couldn’t make any difference at all. These were the tenements, and why Elisabeth and Connie thought they might find students here for their new progressive school was a mystery to me. Although I couldn’t help but admire their charitable impulse.

  I turned a corner onto Allen Street and walked a few blocks until I came to Delancey. Charles did not know I was out walking alone; he would never have allowed it, and he forbade me to take the train into the city. So I told him I was taking the car. Which, technically, I had; at least until I got to Houston Street. Then I asked Henry, the chauffeur, to let me out.