The Aviator's Wife

by Melanie Benjamin

  “Do you like the cabin?” Charles had to bend in order to get through the door; he had designed it, with considerable thoughtfulness, for my much smaller frame. So the windows were lower, the roof cozy. He could stand, just barely, once he got inside; the top of his head, now almost completely gray, with just flecks of reddish gold, was only an inch from the ceiling.

  “Yes, I do. Thank you so much.” Unlike some of Charles’s gifts—like the motorcycle he had expected me to learn to ride, forgetting that I had a balance problem that made it impossible for me even to ride a bicycle—so far the cabin had remained a symbol of his thoughtfulness; any sense of failure to make good use of it was only on my end, not his. While he urged, he did not criticize, as he might once have—and perhaps I’d been too reliant on his criticism, after all? For left to myself, I couldn’t make any progress. Despite the peacefulness of the setting, the waiting sense of calm, almost as if the very beams, made from ancient pine trees, were content to bide their time until I was ready, I felt guilty every time I entered. I had done nothing worthy of such a gift other than sign permission slips and write out grocery lists. And read trashy novels.

  “I wanted to talk to you about that special project. The one I spoke to you about when I called last week.” Charles pulled up a chair; in his hands were three thick notebooks. “I’ve been working on something, as you know, for quite a while. It’s a narrative, an account of my flight to Paris.” He colored a little, and looked nervously out the window—but he laid the notebooks gently in my lap.

  “But—you wrote an account back in ’twenty-seven, didn’t you?”

  “Oh, that.” Charles snorted, leaning back in his chair until it creaked dangerously. “I would prefer to forget all about that. A publisher paid me a small fortune to spend a weekend in a hotel scribbling something down that they then had a real writer translate. I was so green, I didn’t know any better. This was right after I returned to America. So many people wanted me to do this, go there, speak here, put my name to that, and I hadn’t yet learned to say no. But that account is not right. It’s not—true. Only now can I look back and see that young man, see what the odds truly were, the dangers, and the importance of it all. I’ve been working on this for a long time, since before the war, when we were in England.”

  “You’ve been writing since England?” I couldn’t help it; I felt a punch to the gut, as if I’d been betrayed, somehow. How had he found the time, amid all his flying, the politics of America First, the work on the profusion pump, the war? When I, merely bearing and raising children, found it so difficult to focus on writing about anything other than the insipid details of my day?

  Fresh evidence, once more, that I was less than him.

  Swallowing my wounded pride, I managed not to hurl the notebooks to the floor. “So, what do you want me to do?” I asked instead, opening one of them; Charles’s handwriting filled each page, and there were notes and scribbles in all the margins, little arrows inserted into the text.

  “Be my crew again,” he said simply. “You’re the writer in the family.” I winced at this, but I don’t think he saw. “North to the Orient, the letters you wrote during the war—there was poetry in them, just like in everything you write. I don’t mean that I want you to rewrite anything, but rather, just help me shape it, I suppose—steer me away from merely citing facts and figures. I want this to be a real book, not just a dashed-off account like the other was. And you’re the only person I trust to help me make it that.”

  I was silent, paging through the notebooks, not really seeing them at all except as evidence of his accomplishment, of the different expectations of men and women. Why hadn’t I found the time to write my great book? Because he had stuck me out here in Connecticut to watch over his children while he flew all over the world, busy with his work—rehabilitating his image, I understood with breathtaking clarity, remembering all the photo opportunities he had allowed while he worked for the Strategic Air Command, the unexpected interviews he had granted the press recently. And now, his memoirs. Why now, all of a sudden?

  Because in two years, it would be the twenty-fifth anniversary of his flight to Paris. Charles Lindbergh was no fool.

  As I studied my husband, leaning forward in his chair, his hands nervously gripping his knees, a pleading softness in his eyes I hadn’t seen in so long, I felt myself as helpless as always in his presence. There were nights when I dreamed of our early pioneering flights, the closeness, the reliance on each other, only to wake up in my empty bed so lonely I hugged his untouched pillow to my chest, just to have something to hold on to. There were nights when the fury of abandonment surged so forcefully through me I couldn’t sleep, let alone dream, and I paced the terrace instead, a wild-haired creature, smoking a cigarette precisely because he wasn’t there to disapprove, even though normally I had no taste for it.

  But seeing his need for me, a miracle, a mirage I was afraid might disappear once I stepped outside of this enchanted cabin, I had no choice but to acquiesce. Or so I told myself; I was, after all, the aviator’s wife. I had made that decision, once and for all, back before the war.

  “What kind of schedule do you have in mind?” I knew, of course, that he would have one. His face cleared; he grinned and squeezed my hand in approval.

  “Good girl. Well, I thought that you can go over what I have so far—it’s merely a draft, of course—and then make some notes. I’ll go over what you’ve noted and incorporate it, and then—so on. There are a couple of publishers interested; I put out some feelers. I wasn’t completely sure that anyone would want to publish this after—well, my reputation, in some circles. There are certain—there are some Jews in the publishing world, you know.” He frowned, and picked up a pencil off my desk, twirling it around in his long, tapered fingers. “I do feel as if—as if things got a bit out of hand. I truly believed what I said at the time, however, and what else could I do but speak what I felt was the truth? But people change. I’ve changed. I’m not sure, though, that the public will necessarily believe that I have. I can only hope this might help.”

  His brow was furrowed, his path obviously not as clear as it had always been. He was thinking only of himself, and his own reputation; he had never once bothered to think about mine, even after he saw the damage done by my essay.

  But the truth was the world did not wait breathlessly for my apology. I had been welcomed back into my old circles with a pat on the head and a whispered understanding that I had merely been Charles’s puppet in that “unfortunate business.” Who would believe a mere wife could ever act on her own?

  Anger, anger, anger. I was enormous with it these days; constantly stifling one grievance only to feel another pop up in its place. My skin felt twitchy, trying to contain them all. Sadness, I had known; terror, anxiety, occasionally joy. But anger was novel, it was frightening. It could also be, I was only beginning to suspect, exhilarating.

  I swallowed this latest grievance and placed the notebooks on my desk, piling them up so that their black spines lined up, like a stack of dominoes. “All right. When would you like my notes?”

  “I have to leave tomorrow for Germany, to Berlin, for Pan Am. I’ll be back in a month.”

  “A month? You’ll be gone an entire month?” My heart sank even as I silently cursed him for doing something so unexpected as to make me miss him again.

  “Yes. That should give you plenty of time, I trust?”

  “I should think so. Jon can drive the girls to piano lessons, and if Land doesn’t make the baseball team this spring, then I don’t have to—”

  “Anne.” Charles held his hand up. “Stop. I don’t want to hear all that. You’ll manage it all, you always do.”

  I waved his hand away, my skin twitchy once more. “It’s not as easy as you think it is, Charles. But you don’t know, because you’re never here. You just assume I can manage, when really you have no idea—”

  “If I assume so it’s because you always do, which should be taken as a compliment
. And I’m here now, Anne,” he said mildly. And I understood that this was supposed to be enough.

  But was it?

  I wanted it to be. Didn’t I? I wasn’t sure anymore, but I was afraid to break this spell, this rare moment of the two of us spinning in the same orbit, sharing the same view once again. So I made myself believe that it was. With a wave, I managed that forced, fake grin again as he left my cabin; then I opened the first page of the first notebook.

  And I began to read.

  OH, WHY COULDN’T I have known this boy! This brave boy of ’27, this pure, simple, unspoiled boy? When I met him, he was already on the other side of the ocean; already guarded, aware of his place in the history books.

  Somehow, Charles had found a way to throw off the layers of expectation and disappointment that the years, the world, had thrust upon him, and to reclaim the heart and the voice of that boy he once had been. I didn’t know how he had done it. I knew that I could never again recapture my own innocence, my belief in the goodness, the rightness, of things. The baby’s kidnapping had forever changed me, and finally I understood that was why I had such difficulty writing my book. Because I still wasn’t sure who that young girl, grinning like crazy in all those photographs prior to “the events of ’32” had turned into. And I could never quite grasp her; she kept grinning, capering just beyond the picture frame of memory whenever I tried.

  But in his recounting of the singular event of his lifetime, Charles Lindbergh had found a way to go back, almost like a hero in an H. G. Wells novel. He had time traveled, truly and honestly, almost twenty-five years in the past.

  Writing with a simplicity that was almost poetry—and befitting the farm boy he had been, not the tarnished god he had become—he wrote of the dangers facing him as he prepared for his historic flight, the difficulty finding backers, the ridicule he found at every turn as more experienced men than he laughed at the notion of a fair-haired boy taking home the greatest prize aviation had to offer. He described the hours spent flying the mail route over a country that was no more, a country of barns and dusty roads and a few telephone poles, people running out of houses at the strange sight of his biplane in the air, only a few hundred feet up. The hours he spent going over the practicalities of such a flight, the lists he made on the back of receipts and maps.

  And then the flight itself—Charles had built a masterpiece of suspense, the reader perched on his shoulder, holding his breath even though, of course, the outcome was assured. And the landing, when it came—the explosion of joy, yet always this young boy standing in the midst, perplexed, still so focused on his flight that he wanted to stay with his plane, and had to be forcibly removed from it by the mayor of Paris.

  His brilliance was in ending the narrative there, in that moment—the moment before he understood that the world was now forever in his cockpit. The moment before he started to suspect that there were punishments for those who dared to dream so big, to fly so high.

  I was stunned by his draft; stunned, and envious. Yet it was still unpolished; there were gaps in the narrative, particularly before the flight began, and I had ideas of how to fill them.

  And so we began to work together, for the first time in years, even if we were seldom in the same space. He would be gone, I would read what he had left behind and make notes, filling in gaps; he would return, taking my notes with him when he left, and work while he traveled. He would deliver his next draft to me, and so forth, like a duet; we were writing in tandem, just as we had flown, so long ago.

  I saw his heart on the page, and wondered if he knew he had left it there. The plane—the Spirit of St. Louis—was his true mistress. He spoke of it almost sadly, with the regret of a long-lost lover, and I had to correct that, for it was the one part of his narrative that did not feel immediate. But he had trusted this machine in a way he had never trusted anything, or anyone, ever again. Including, I knew, me.

  I wondered why this memoir was written so much more clearly, straightforwardly, than anything else he had written, including his speeches before the war. And I had to conclude that it was because he was writing about a machine. But the others were about ideas, and people—and Charles had always had trouble understanding them.

  The time we worked together on what would be called, simply, The Spirit of St. Louis; the notes that flew back and forth, the evenings, toward the end, when we huddled together in my cabin, leaving the children to take care of themselves—it was the best time in our marriage since our early flights. He allowed himself to be guided. I allowed myself to hope, once more, that we could share space on this earth, share goals, share happiness—and also tenderness, vulnerability.

  He dedicated the book to me. “To A.M.L.—Who will never know how much of this book she has written.”

  My heart soared, just like the stars on the cover, when I read these words. Rarely did Charles ever speak of me in print, and when he did, it was almost always in answer to an interviewer’s question as to why he married me. Charles usually replied that it was important to choose a spouse of good stock. Like a broodmare.

  I was always furious, even though he insisted he meant it as a joke.

  But this—this was truly the first time he allowed the world to see that I mattered to him. And that meant something to me; it meant more than it should have, more than it would have had he been a mere man. But he was Charles Lindbergh, still and always—and I felt like an old biplane that had been left to rust in a barn; once useful—once the newest of technologies!—but forgotten as of late. Neglected.

  But now that biplane had been remembered, dusted off, shined and tuned up. Old-fashioned, yes—but still able to brush the clouds.

  The book sold a million copies in the first year; Hollywood bought the rights, and later, a too-old Jimmy Stewart played Charles in the movie. (We took Reeve to a showing of it at Radio City Music Hall; halfway through, she turned to me with big eyes and whispered, “He makes it, doesn’t he?”) Life magazine visited our home, photographing the two of us, side by side on the sofa, reading the book; Mrs. Lindbergh, ever devoted, approves of her husband’s newest endeavor, the caption read. The success of the book opened the floodgates to a deluge of awards and accolades; America, it seemed, needed heroes more than it needed villains, and was willing to let bygones be bygones. President Eisenhower presented Charles with a medal for his war work. Once again, almost every town had a Charles Lindbergh Elementary School; many had changed their names during the war, only to revert back to them now.

  I beamed for the photographers beside Charles when he was notified he had been awarded the Pulitzer Prize for biography/autobiography.

  My beam diminished, however, when he neglected to thank me, thanking the Wright Brothers, instead.

  It vanished completely when he was given a contract for another book, sight unseen.

  JEALOUSY IS A TERRIBLE THING. It keeps you up at night, it demands tremendous energy in order to remain alive, and so you have to want to feed it, nurture it—and by so wanting, you have to acknowledge that you are a bitter, petty person. It changes you. It changes the way you view the world; minor irritations become major catastrophes; celebrations become trials.

  I was proud of Charles. He had done this—it was his story to tell and he had told it, brilliantly. No matter how much I had worked on it, it was, at its essence, his.

  And I hid in the shadows once more, only this time I paced, finding no comfort in my invisibility. Wondering what was wrong with me, wondering what was keeping me there; keeping me from writing my story. Wondering if I’d ever have a story worth telling that was my own, and not merely reflected or borrowed from him; a story that had nothing to do with our flights or his politics.

  You’re the writer in the family, Charles always said, and he’d even built me a cabin to prove it, when there was no real evidence of my ability other than long ago dreams, my classical education. And I had always clung to that, grateful that there was something that he felt I could do better than him. I could no longe
r cling to that fiction. He was the writer in the family, now.

  So bitter was the constant taste of failure in my mouth, so narrow my vision, I fled. To a place that had always restored me to my best self.

  I fled to Florida, to Captiva Island; a healing, nourishing wilderness that Charles and I had discovered before the war, when our friend Jim Newton urged us to come explore this untouched island off the Gulf Coast of Florida. I’d gone there several times since, sometimes with Charles, sometimes with my sister Con.

  Now I went there alone. I had to find my own courage, and stop borrowing his. I had to find my own voice, and stop echoing his. I had to find my own story. And tell it. And if I failed doing so, I still would be stronger for the attempt than if I continued to sit beside Charles on the dais.

  I packed my bags, bought paper and pencils, kissed the children, and let Charles drive me to the train station.

  He sent me on my way with a handshake; the only sign of parting he could allow himself in public. But he told me, earnestly, that I was doing the right thing. He said it in the exact same way he had once told me that I could learn to fly a plane, master Morse code, figure out the stars.

  And some of my jealousy melted away right then, because I knew he meant it. He had always been certain I could do more than I thought I could do. He had always pushed me to try, even if sometimes he confused bullying with encouragement.

  I thanked him, then boarded the train with a jaunty wave. I was off to Florida, to a ramshackle beach cottage. I did not know when I would return. I only knew that somehow, for both our sakes, for the sake of our children, as well—

  I needed to return with my own story to tell.