The Aviator's Wife

by Melanie Benjamin

  “A blow to the head,” Colonel Schwarzkopf replied, that gruff voice incredibly gentle, although he still stood just inside the door, as if afraid his presence could do more harm than his words already had.

  “Oh!” And as he said it, I felt it—that blow. To my heart. I cried out, reeling from it, just as my boy must have. But unlike him, mercifully, I knew I would have to relive this blow, over and over, every day, for the rest of my life.

  “We think he died instantly, Mrs. Lindbergh. Almost immediately, in fact—the night of the kidnapping. For the body was—it had been there awhile.”

  “How, then—how do you know it was him?”

  “Dental records, physical resemblance, his hair, for instance—also, some fabric; it appears to match the sleep shirt that Betty made that night. In fact—Betty helped identify the body.”

  “Oh, no!” Even in my grief, I felt for her, such a young girl having to perform such a horrible task.

  “Your husband is on his way to the coroner’s to do the same. We need a family member, you see.”

  “Charles! Oh, how did you—where was he?”

  “We contacted him on the radio—he was on a boat, waiting for some word from that Curtis fellow. He’s on his way now. These people played him for a fool, Mrs. Lindbergh.”

  “Oh, Colonel, you can’t tell him that. You can’t ever tell him that!” It would kill Charles to think that someone had been laughing at him all along, playing him, as the colonel said, for a fool. He was pride—all pride. His reputation meant so much to him. He couldn’t—

  No! I would not think of Charles now. My thoughts belonged, finally, to my baby. Suddenly I saw him. I saw him lying in the leaves, alone, cold and still, without me. Had he really died right away? Or had he suffered? Had he called for me—his face, tear-streaked, appeared before me, the blue eyes so innocent, the cleft chin quivering, and I couldn’t bear it any longer; I heard a high-pitched wail, a howl of grief, and I knew it was me. I didn’t want Charles, I didn’t want Colonel Schwarzkopf or Mother or air or water or life—all I wanted was my baby. I needed him as he must have needed me; I ached for him against my chest, in my arms; I reached and reached, blindly, clutching nothing but air—empty, useless air.

  At some point Colonel Schwarzkopf left me. Much later, my mother crept out, and I heard her sobbing in the hall outside my bedroom. Then I fell asleep—or collapsed; all I remember was blackness, heat, my clothes sticking to me, my hair plastered in strings down my neck, my breath sour against my fist, which I still held to my mouth as if this was a sorrow that could be stifled.

  When I awoke, I was already sobbing. This time, I had no blissful moment of forgetting; I remembered in an instant what had happened. My baby was dead. My ribs ached, as if from a terrible palsy. My throat felt raw; I didn’t think I could ever open my eyes again, they were so red and swollen.

  I heard a cough, a stir. Too shattered to lift my head, I opened my eyes, and what I saw was my husband, slumped in a chair next to my bed. His clothes rumpled, his face unshaven, his hair uncombed. I wondered if this was how he looked when he landed in Paris, after being awake for more than thirty-six hours straight.

  I didn’t want him to be here. I didn’t want to deal with him, to be strong so as not to displease him, to think hopeful thoughts—to look for Polaris instead of the brightest planet. I hated him, and I wanted to have one thing—my grief—all to myself.

  “Anne.” He rubbed his eyes wearily. I was aware that it was dark outside my window, even though the curtains had been tightly drawn. It was nighttime. How long had I slept?

  Still I lay, my head, my entire aching body, pressed so deeply into the mattress by the terrible weight of all that I now knew.

  “You’re awake,” Charles said. His voice was hoarse and flat. “Anne, they—I decided to have the body—the baby—the body cremated.”

  His body—gone? I couldn’t hold Charlie one last time, couldn’t say goodbye?

  “How dare you?” Rage—finally, blissfully, rage. It pushed me up, clenched my hands, blessed me with speech. “How dare you? Why? Why didn’t you ask me what I wanted? He’s my baby! Mine!”

  Charles looked away. “They took photographs of him, Anne. The press. Before I got there, they broke in and someone took a photograph of his body. There wasn’t—he wasn’t—our baby, not as we want to remember him. I couldn’t let that happen again. Do you understand me? I had to prevent that from happening—they can’t take him away from us like that. They have no right.”

  I tasted horror and revulsion as they rose up in my throat, and I thought I was going to be sick. I shut my eyes against the spinning room.

  Charles brought me a glass of water, placed it carefully on the bedside table, then took his seat once more. He did not reach out to me, and I did not reach out to him.

  Sometime later, I fell asleep again; it was a fitful sleep from which, occasionally, I found myself swimming up, as if I were afraid to drown in it, before deciding it didn’t matter.

  And all the while, my husband sat watching me. Once, I heard him whisper, “I thought I could bring him back home. I thought—I knew—I would bring the baby back to you.”

  I did not know to whom he was talking, whom he was trying to convince; himself, or me.

  IT IS A TERRIBLE THING when you can’t see your dead child. When you can’t touch him, play with his hair, put his favorite toy in his sleeping arms and whisper goodbye.

  You are doomed, then, forever to look for him. Because you can’t help but think, in unguarded moments when you release the tight grip of your own hands upon your sanity, I don’t know for sure that he is dead. I don’t know, because I didn’t see him. And so you look for him wherever you go. On the subway. In crowds. At playgrounds.

  Inescapably, time passes. And you know that while you still search for the sunny toddler, the golden-haired angel, if he really was alive he would be five. Then ten. And now—

  An adult.

  Men write to me, still, and tell me they’re my son. The Lindbergh baby, they write, as if there was only the one. Grown men who have lived their entire lives tell me they miss me, and wonder how I could have given them up. They assure me it was all a mistake, a hoax, a practical joke gone wrong. That they have waited all their lives for me to find them.

  For a long time, I wanted to see these people. Almost immediately after Charles took off alone one cruelly sunny May afternoon, flying over Long Island Sound, near where we first honeymooned, to scatter our child’s ashes, we started receiving letters, phone calls, unexpected knocks on the door. And I wanted to meet them all, each and every one. Even when Mother, when Elisabeth, told me I couldn’t put myself through the strain, that these were sick people, bad people who wanted more of us than we had already given. Even when Charles forbade it, threatening to lock me in my room while he went downstairs and kicked more than one adult grasping the hand of our “son” off the front steps with his own well-placed boot.

  There was always a sliver of my best, most optimistic self that wondered, What if Charles was wrong, that day in the morgue? What if the dental records were wrong? What if my baby is still alive?

  I never did meet them; I never let these people into my house. I never answered any of the letters. Although I read them all.

  I resigned myself to looking for that face that I clearly recalled—until the day when I couldn’t. It happened so suddenly. His dear little face was before my eyes even as I opened them in the morning—and then it was gone. Vanished, just as the thief who had stolen him intended. From that moment on, I could recall only him frozen in one of the photographs we had, usually that one taken on his first birthday. The one that we had released to the public, that had ended up on the “missing” posters that once dotted an entire nation, uniting them in prayer and then—in grief.

  The nation didn’t move on, for a long time. It didn’t allow us to move on, either. Anniversaries came and went. Laws were enacted to protect children; laws with my son’s name on them.
There was a trial. A sensational, horrible trial—the Trial of the Century, the newspapers called it; and the souvenir salesmen proclaimed it; and the celebrities who attended, just for fun, trumpeted it. I testified one day, and I saw tears in every person’s eyes. Except for the man who was on trial for murdering my son; the man who was finally discovered because he spent the money that Colonel Schwarzkopf had insisted be marked. It turned out that at least one of the crackpots who led my husband on a merry chase, even as our child lay lifeless in a half-dug grave in the woods, was involved, after all.

  Him I couldn’t look at, not after my first glance at his flat, expressionless face. So I never knew if he wept for me or not.

  That man burned. Some people said he was the wrong man, or at the very least, not the only man. But just as the nation needed a hero, it needed a villain even more, and this man looked it, with his guttural accent, poor immigrant ways, one eye that drooped menacingly. If others were involved—and there were whispers, rumors, although Charles would not allow them inside our house—this man alone was electrocuted; an eye for an eye. Retribution. I could not feel it.

  I was beyond feeling; even the pain of childbirth couldn’t penetrate my shell. I had a baby, a new baby; a different baby. We named him Jon, after no one in particular; after himself, the one who had to come after.

  As soon as possible; as soon as my body healed itself, I agreed to fly with Charles again. I even urged it, to his surprise and, I think, gratitude. Up in the sky, just the two of us, untouchable, just like before—only then could I feel. Secure in the knowledge that Charles couldn’t hear me from his seat in front, I wept in the back.

  Through all my tears, through all my pain, I never saw signs of his, even as I was always looking for it. That first night, I couldn’t reach out to him, and I didn’t want him to reach out to me. But later, I did. Sorrow was even bigger than the sky we had shared, but hadn’t we charted that, once? We needed to chart our path together through this new, infinite journey.

  On one of our rare aimless flights with no real mission—other than to give us both an excuse to be alone, together, in the air—we landed on an island off the coast of Maine. It was late fall, and Jon was just a couple of months old, well protected by Mother, detectives, and two ferociously trained guard dogs in the nursery at Next Day Hill. Already it was cold, the ocean steel gray. Beneath the huge wing of the Sirius, now repaired, Charles and I huddled together on a blanket, teeth chattering as we tried to sip soup out of a thermos.

  “Charles, do you remember when we took Charlie up for the first time? That afternoon at the Guggenheims’ when Carol had a bad cold?” I smiled, remembering; Charlie had cried at first because of the pressure in his ears, but then he’d settled down on my lap and clapped his hands.

  “I wonder if we should replace the cockpit window?” Charles poured his soup on the ground and screwed on the thermos lid until it cracked. “We’ve put so many miles on this plane, and then there’s the European mapping flight coming up.”

  “If you think so, but—do you remember how Charlie clapped his hands when we landed and said, ‘ ’Gen! ’Gen!’ and you thought he was saying ‘engine,’ but I told you he was saying ‘Again’?”

  “I’ll telegraph out to Lockheed. While I’m at it, I might as well check on your transmitter. I thought you said one of the tubes was giving you trouble?”

  “All right, yes. Go ahead. But, Charles, don’t you remember—?”

  “Yes.” He shoved the thermos into my hand, then walked away so that I couldn’t see his face. I saw only his tall, unyielding figure in his brown flight suit, boldly etched against the gray sky and the gray water. The wind blew his reddish-gold hair—so like Charlie’s, less like Jon’s, which was a bit darker—until it stood straight up on top of his head.

  “Of course I remember. How can you think I don’t?” I heard him ask above the rushing surf, the call of the seagulls.

  “But you never talk about him. I think we should. Sometimes it feels as if I’m the only one who lost anything—”

  “No, Anne. We need to forget. All of it. Now, we ought to be getting back.”

  Stunned, I watched as Charles Lindbergh walked back to his plane with a sure stride, a resolute set to his jaw, just like in all the newsreels. And I watched myself climb in behind him—just like in the newsreels, too.

  Just like before, I sat behind my husband on that flight, and all the rest; charting our course, relaying our position to whomever was listening. Imagining little pinpoints of grief tracked by latitude and longitude.

  But as time went on, and even with my sextant I still couldn’t locate his grief, I knew this would poison me against him. It would poison us—the Lucky Lindberghs, the First Couple of the Air. And I needed the notion of us too much. It was all I had left. I couldn’t let go of that, too.

  So I had to believe, was desperate to believe, that whenever we flew over a certain part of the sound, he looked down at the waves as I did and felt a stab of pain so jagged his vision blurred. And in that tortured moment he remembered a golden-haired boy with a crooked, shy smile.

  I convinced myself that the noise of the engine muffled the sound of my husband’s tears for his lost child; that in the air, soaring, winging; in the skies, where we had always shared the same view, navigated the same course, and where Charles was always so much more—

  My husband found a way to mourn our son.

  1974

  I WATCH OVER HIM as he sleeps in this stuffy hut on a lonely beach, just as he watched over me that terrible night, so long ago. Despite my anger, I pull his blanket up to his chin, surprised to find a hidden well of tenderness inside me, still, for this man and what we’ve been through together.

  It is an unexpected, welcome gift, this quiet, peaceful moment, and I decide to let him sleep for a while longer before my betrayal comes roaring back, as inevitable as the waves crashing against the rocks outside.

  It’s been forty-two years, I think, watching over my dying husband.

  And still we can’t quite comprehend all we lost on that terrible March night.

  CHAPTER 12

  August 1936

  “HEIL HITLER!”

  The crowd, as one, raised their arms and shouted it. Stirring uneasily in my seat, I wasn’t sure what to do. Should I join in? I was grateful for the bouquet in my arms; bending my head down, I sniffed at the white, starlike flowers—edelweiss, I had been told by the young girl who had presented them to me with a grave curtsy.

  I glanced at Charles; he sat next to me, erect as always; never did he wonder what to do, how to act. He was simply himself, immune to persuasion, and once more I had to admire him, even in this throng of spectators. Even with Chancellor Hitler himself standing on a platform just a few rows below us. The red flags with the swastika, that black mark that looked like propeller blades bent backward, hung behind him, before him, over him; they hung from every balcony and banister in the enormous Olympiastadion. The white Olympics flag, with its intertwining rings, was also in evidence, but not in nearly the numbers as the flag of the Nazi party.

  Our hosts for the day, Herr Göring and his wife, were seated next to us in a private box; Truman and Kay Smith, the American military attaché and his wife, were with us as well. We’d been in Berlin for more than a week, and today, our last day, happened to coincide with the opening of the 1936 Summer Olympics. Charles had hoped we would be able to speak with Chancellor Hitler himself, but it seemed now that we had to be content with merely sitting near him.

  The sheer spectacle of the opening ceremony, of course, would have prevented any meaningful conversation; the fevered crowd, the endless salutes, the songs; I was hoarse from shouting. And I did not speak German well; I found the language harsh and guttural, my ear simply couldn’t find it pleasing, and so my brain refused to try to make sense of it. I’d relied on Kay to translate during our stay.

  “Is it not a fine day, Herr Colonel? Is Berlin not a fine city? I trust you have found it so—but
of course, you are famous for finding cities, are you not?” Laughing at his own joke, Herr Göring slapped his thigh. He spoke excellent English, although he did so with a thick accent. It was rather a surprise, coming from a man who looked so much like a pig farmer from a children’s book; he was huge, portly, with a shiny, jowly peasant’s face.

  Charles smiled politely. “Yes, yes,” he shouted over more cheers from the crowd as another country’s athletes marched into the stadium. “Berlin is quite impressive. We have very much enjoyed our stay.”

  “We are so proud that you inspected our Luftwaffe—what you in America would call an air force. As you are a military man yourself, we value your insight.”

  “Naturally, I was honored. Although as a military man, I cannot offer any specific insight, you understand. Even if the United States and Germany are allies.”

  “Of course. We are simply happy that you have visited at last. France and England cannot have you all to themselves!” And Göring laughed again—it was more like a donkey bray. He was very jovial, very eager to please. Although not very polished; I wondered how he had risen to such a position—minister of the Luftwaffe—in Chancellor Hitler’s government.

  His wife smiled indulgently at him; she was a pure Brunehilde, a daughter of Norse gods. Fleshy, rosy-cheeked, with blond hair in a braid atop her head, nearly as tall as her husband. I’d found her very cold, however, to me.

  There was another roar from the crowd.

  “Oh, look! It’s the United States team!” Sitting up straight, I was proud to see the rows of American athletes, all in white, as they marched by the stand. Proud to see that unlike the other countries, they did not dip their flag in front of the chancellor’s box, even if this drew a shocked murmur from the crowd.

  “Charles, didn’t they look fine?” I called over to my husband.