The Aviator's Wife

by Melanie Benjamin

  CHAPTER 17

  ONE DAY, WHEN SHE WAS ABOUT TEN, Ansy came into the kitchen with an envelope in her hand.

  It was one of those days when every appliance in the house decided to go on strike—the sink was backed up (again); the washing machine wasn’t draining right; the toaster was mysteriously burning one side of the toast and leaving the other limp and white. Even one of the clocks was acting up, the chime suddenly tinny and flat.

  So I was bustling about, calling repairmen, mopping up suds and water, and stopping in front of the clock every fifteen minutes, as if I could fix it with the power of my gaze. I was wearing a housedress, an apron, bobby socks, and saddle shoes. I hadn’t had time to go to the hairdresser in weeks. I had taken to simply shampooing my hair and gathering it in a net, so that I resembled a truck stop waitress.

  “Mother, is this you?” Ansy asked, thrusting the envelope out to me. On the outside was written Anne Lindbergh.

  “Of course it is,” I answered, irritated. “You’re a big girl. You can read.”

  “So this is yours, too?” She pulled out a small yellowing card and began to read. “This certifies that Anne Lindbergh has successfully completed all tasks necessary to pilot an aircraft for personal use.”

  “Where did you find that?” I put down the bucket I was carrying, heavy with sopping wet towels. I reached for the card, and saw that it was my pilot’s license. “I thought your father had put it away somewhere.”

  “Oh, he did,” Ansy answered brightly. “In a file cabinet.”

  “You know you’re not to look through his things. Anne, if he found out he’d—”

  “Don’t worry. I’m very careful not to leave any evidence behind, like fingerprints. See?” She held up her hands; she wore white cotton gloves, usually reserved for church.

  I had to smile; my golden-braided daughter—the spitting image of Heidi—was going through a Nancy Drew phase. “Oh, I see. Well, please put it back and don’t go through his things again. Please. You know how he is.”

  “I know. But, Mother, really, this is you?” And she laughed.

  “Yes, really, it is. Why are you laughing?”

  “Well, because—I mean, really! You, a pilot, just like Father?”

  “No, not just like Father, because he’s—well, he’s Father. But after we were married, yes, I learned to fly. Oh, you know all that—the trips we made to the Orient, and so on!”

  “No. No, Mother, I don’t.” Ansy’s eyes grew wide, and she stopped laughing. “You never told me.”

  “Well, you probably learned about them at school, anyway—didn’t you? When you learned about Father?”

  “No, the books only talk about him.”

  “Well, I was a pilot, too, and we made some very important flights together. I also happened to be the first licensed female glider pilot in the United States.” I pursed my mouth in that prickly way I had; not sure with whom I was angrier, the historians—or myself, for never sharing this part of me with my children.

  “It’s just so strange, to think of you like that,” Ansy continued, laughing merrily. “I mean—look at you! You’re, well—you’re Mother. Father’s the pilot, the hero. You take care of us, and the house, but to think of you up in the air, in your own little airplane!”

  “I had one—my own little airplane. A little Curtiss. Your father bought it for me, although mostly we flew together in his plane, which was bigger. Mine was just a one-seater. We left it here when we moved to Europe.” I sat down on the metal kitchen chair, remembering. “Out at the Guggenheims’. I suppose it’s still there. When we moved back, somehow, I just never used it. I had the boys then, and soon you came along. And then the war, and Scott, and Reeve, and—well.”

  “When’s the last time you flew like that?” Ansy sat upon the floor, cross-legged, in that fluid, boneless way of the young, and looked up to me.

  “I don’t recall. I really don’t. Your father rarely flies like that anymore, either—it’s all commercial airliners now, for the most part. Although I suppose he does some, for the Air Force, for testing, and you know—sometimes he takes you children up. But it’s not like it used to be, back then, when we were the first. We flew all over the country, mapping out the routes that the commercial airliners all take. And we thought nothing of jumping into our plane to fly down to Washington, or up to New England—the way people jump into their cars today. It was what we did. We flew.”

  “Yes, but I mean—when did you last fly, alone?”

  “Oh, goodness. I don’t know—probably sometime in England, I suppose. I think I did fly solo, once or twice, while we were there. England is beautiful from the air.” I remembered how green, mossy green and rolling, the land was; how sweet the neat little cottages were, the astonishing length of the hedgerows, seeming to cover the entire island in an orderly, if slightly serpentine, pattern.

  “Do you think you could do it today? Do you think you’d remember?”

  “I don’t know. I suppose it would depend on the plane.” Could I? I shut my eyes, remembering the preflight checklist, recalling the pull of the stick against my hand as I eased the plane gently into the air; the little Curtiss was very sensitive, I remembered. Not like the big plane, the Sirius. It had been an instinct, at one time—the ability to feel the craft, understand its tendency to bank right or left, to know how to navigate the currents.

  These days, my instincts were centered around whether or not we had enough milk to last the week; how to light the pilot light beneath the boiler in the basement without risking an explosion; prioritizing the various broken hearts and wild crushes inevitable in a house full of teenagers.

  “I doubt it,” I admitted to my daughter, still seated, uncharacteristically eager to listen to me. Of all my children, my namesake was the one who knew, unerringly, which of my buttons to push. “And with the new radar—we didn’t have that, you see, when I was flying. Nor control towers. And of course, there weren’t all these planes in the sky, these big passenger planes. It was a simpler time.”

  “But it must have been scarier, too. You were pretty brave then, I bet.”

  “You don’t think I’m brave now?” I narrowed my eyes at Ansy, who laughed again.

  “Mother! You scream whenever you see a mouse!” Still laughing, she pushed herself up from the linoleum and took the pilot’s license back, carefully inserting it into the envelope. “It’s still pretty strange, though. I mean, it must have been so long ago. Because you’re just a mom now, and that’s all I can imagine you as. That’s all.”

  She left, whistling blithely—unaware of the impact of her words.

  But I never forgot them. To my children, I was just Mom. That was all. And before that, I had been Charles’s wife, the bereaved mother of the slain child. That was all.

  But before that, I had been a pilot. An adventurer. I had broken records—but I had forgotten about them. I had steered aircraft—but I didn’t think I would know how to, anymore. I had soared across the sky, every bit as daring as Lucky Lindy himself, the one person in the world who could keep up with him.

  Yet motherhood had brought me down to earth with a thud, and kept me there with tentacles made of diapers and tears and lullabies and phone calls and car pools and the sticky residue of hair spray and Barbasol all over the bathroom counter. Would I ever be able to soar again? Would I ever have the courage?

  Did any woman?

  Or did we exist only as others saw us? My daughter’s unabashed mirth as she tried to imagine me an aviatrix, winging alone above the earth—I never forgot it. And as I spent long afternoons walking along the snow-white beach of Captiva Island, picking up shells just to put them in my pockets, for I was a person who liked to have the feel of something substantial in her pockets, this was the story I remembered. I saw myself through her eyes, I saw myself through Charles’s eyes, always; I never looked into a mirror and saw myself through my own.

  So I did, one evening after a couple of glasses of Dubonnet. I went into the tiny bath
room, and peered into the lopsided mirror above the vanity, and saw myself—a woman. With graying hair, cut for convenience because I had no time for primping. Brown eyes that slanted down at the edges, ever watchful, ever cautious, trying to anticipate my husband’s demands. Olive skin, a bit wrinkled now, even leathery in places, no matter how much Pond’s cold cream I slathered on, because of all those years flying in open cockpits so close to the sun. A slightly prim, pursed mouth, as if always holding something back, keeping something in; grief, I knew. Anger, I very much suspected. But perhaps joy, as well?

  Who was this woman before me, her face imprinted with the expectations of others?

  I was Mom. I was Wife. I was Tragedy. I was Pilot. They all were me, and I, them. That was a fate we could not escape, we women; we would always be called upon by others in a way men simply never were. But weren’t we always, first and foremost—woman? Wasn’t there strength in that, victory, clarity—in all the stages of a woman’s life?

  The Shells. That was the first title I imagined for a series of essays, the ideas of which I had had, in the back of my mind, for a few years now. I had played with the idea of comparing the stages of a woman’s life with different shells; the Moon shell, the Double Sunrise, the Argonauta, a few others. Each perfect, each different, each serving a singular purpose; individually tempting but as a collection, something like a perfect banquet.

  Or a perfect life. A woman’s life, always changing, accommodating, then shedding, old duties for new; one person’s expectations for another until finally, victoriously, emerging stronger. Complete.

  I didn’t finish the book on that vacation; it took me several trips to Captiva during the early 1950s to work it all out, and many months wrestling with it in my writing cabin.

  Every time I sat down to write, I closed my eyes and said a prayer before beginning. And I didn’t stop until I was done reassembling myself, piece by piece, on the page—jewels and shells and buttons and Cracker Jack prizes; medals and ribbons and Communion wafers. Swallowed tears that emerged now, twenty years later, as the palest, most translucent of pebbles—I held them up, and could see the beauty of the sun shining through the delicate layers, grateful for them, at last.

  I worked with the myopic concentration of an artisan; I would not be hurried, I resisted Charles’s suggestion that I set a schedule, a certain amount of words every day, as he had done. I took my own time, found my own way, lingering over words, searching for imagery. I rebuilt myself as a woman wise, understanding, at peace; I rebuilt myself on the page, praying that I could rebuild myself in life as well. Knowing that if I did, it would be the most courageous thing I had ever done. For I knew my husband too well; I knew that he wanted me to succeed, to be strong and brave, only in the abstract.

  In practicality, he needed me to remain weak. Content to look at the world through his goggles, not my own.

  Right before Mother died, in 1954, I spent an afternoon with her. She had suffered a stroke that robbed her of her speech and memory, but a few days before the end, she exhibited signs of a miraculous recovery. In her suddenly searching brown eyes, I could see her clear mind once more, and I was so eager to say something to her that I blurted out, “You’re my hero.”

  “Anne?” She turned to me with a crooked smile; only one side of her face had movement.

  “I said you’re my hero. You are. Because of how strong you’ve been since Daddy and Elisabeth died, how you reinvented yourself.”

  Mother shook her head impatiently. “You need to … stop looking for heroes, Anne.” Her speech was slow, slurred, but understandable. “Only the weak need … heroes … and heroes need … those around them to remain weak. You’re … not weak.”

  I remembered those words. I knew they were true, all of them. True about me, and true about Charles. I brought them out, every now and then, as I kept working—on both the manuscript and myself. And, perhaps on my definition of my marriage. No, my prayer for my marriage; a marriage of two equals. With separate—but equally valid—views of the world; shared goggles no more, but looking at the same scenery, at the same time.

  All the while I worked, I raised my children until one day, to my utter surprise, they were both finished. And I emerged from my cabin with a book; my book. My Gift from the Sea.

  I couldn’t wait to share it with the world. But most of all—

  I couldn’t wait to share it with my husband.

  1974

  NOW THE SURF IS RAGING OUTSIDE; I rush to shut the doors and windows to muffle it. Then I turn back to his bed.

  “I don’t understand!” I pound the mattress, forcing him to stay awake, stay here. “The house in Darien was your idea. The children—our children! Why could they never keep your attention except to be criticized? You wounded them then, and you’re wounding them now. Forget about me. What about Jon? Land? Scott? The girls? Did you ever stop to think how they will react to this?”

  “It has nothing to do with you, or them. You—you are my family. Our children are my heirs. The other women, I won’t say they meant nothing. But they aren’t you.”

  “How old? How old are they?”

  “I don’t know. Young. They are young—or they were, when we first met.”

  “Younger than me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is that why you chose them? Because they’re young—because they’re German?” I want to laugh; but it’s far too tragic. After all these years, it still comes back to this? A man who has spent over thirty years trying to change the notion that he’s a Nazi—having a secret German love nest? “Your own master race—I should have known! Was I not pure enough? Our children not good enough for you?”

  “Anne, you’re hysterical.” Charles coughs, his entire body racked with the effort, and I hand him the water before the nurse stationed in the next room can hear. He sips, his Adam’s apple, so prominent now, sliding up and down, and when he waves his hand, I take the water away. “A man can still spread his seed, no matter his age. That’s all I did. I followed my instincts.”

  “That’s such a typically male thing to say.”

  “Are you telling me you were happy all those years? Are you telling me you never desired companionship when I was gone?”

  Now he looks like the old Charles, the healthy, untouchable Charles; his gaze is clear and precise as it pierces right through me.

  “I never wanted you to leave in the first place,” I reply truthfully, not flinching from his gaze, even as I ponder my own secret.

  And wonder, for the first time, if he’s ever guessed it.

  CHAPTER 18

  IT’S THE QUIET THAT YOU NOTICE, first, when the children begin to leave.

  And not just the practical fact that the record player is unplugged, the radio turned off. Not simply the lack of some instrument being practiced behind a closed door. Not merely the silent phone, the absence of stampeding feet up and down stairs, the slamming of doors, the constant rush of water in the bathroom.

  It’s more than that—and less than that, too. It’s a hum, a vibration that leaves when they leave. For all of a sudden the very air in the house is slower, duller; gentler against your eardrum.

  First Jon left, to go to Stanford in 1950. Dutiful as ever, he came home every vacation, anxious to see the wreckage his siblings had done in his absence and to put it right again. But he also married young, in 1954. He did not come home so much after that.

  Land followed him west to Stanford two years later. Our last son, Scott, burst out of the house like a caged animal released; he started at Amherst in 1959, but it was soon apparent he was the one who would have to learn life’s lessons the hard way.

  Scott rarely came home for the holidays, and I never even looked for him to. His teenage years had been typical—had his last name not been Lindbergh. But Charles simply could not understand the fluctuating grades, the late-night pranks, the minor brushes with authority. He could not understand the lack of focus, the inability to see past tomorrow. Whenever the two of them wer
e together, it was explosive; the girls tiptoed about, trying not to get hit by the debris.

  I, however, did not tiptoe.

  “You can’t talk to him that way,” I shouted at Charles, my hands balled into fists, my heart wrecked with pain for my son, who had just been called a lazy idiot by his father. “Words like that can never be forgotten! He’ll carry that with him his entire life!”

  Charles remained maddeningly calm. “Of course you’d defend him. He’s just like you. Your whole family, you Morrows—all so stubborn and perverse. Had I only known—”

  “What? Known what?”

  “The things you didn’t tell me when we were courting. Dwight and his problems. Elisabeth.”

  “Elisabeth? What about Elisabeth?”

  “Her weak heart. Her emotional state.”

  “Because she felt? Because she loved? Oh, don’t make this about my family. We’re talking about your son.”

  “It’s only that it’s no surprise to me he’s such a mess, given his genetic history. Still, I’m determined to make him into a real Lindbergh.”

  “And what does that mean? Someone who has no feeling?”

  “It means I have to be tough on him, just like my father was tough on me. You’re his mother, and you coddle him. Well, your work is done now. I’m his father.”

  “Did your father toughen you up by making you feel worthless and, and—less? Was he that cruel, as cruel as you are? Tell me. I want to know, because you never tell me anything. You go off and leave me here to raise your children, and you tell me nothing about your life. I don’t know anything about your childhood. I don’t know what you did yesterday. I don’t know what you’re going to do tomorrow. I’m your wife—talk to me! We used to, don’t you remember? Don’t you remember talking over things, when you’d come home from working in the city with Carrel? Don’t you remember our conversations on our flights, how much we shared? What happened to that? I miss it, I miss it so much that—”