The Aviator's Wife
Page 35
I had always issued a standing invitation for him to stay with me in the apartment, just as he had asked, but he only took me up on it once, in the late fifties. His flight overseas had been delayed and so, for once, we both found ourselves in the city. Absurdly, I was beside myself with excitement; he had never before seen it and, fool that I was, I still craved his approval in some stubborn, uncooperative—and childish—part of my heart. So I bustled about, feeling like a little girl playing house, ordering in a lovely dinner, arranging flowers, inviting some of my most trusted friends, those who would be least likely to irritate Charles.
With only a shiver of shame—and anticipation—I included Dana.
Charles sat, stonily silent, throughout the evening as we all talked about music and theater and harmless gossip. Even after I deftly steered the conversation to airplanes and science—Sputnik had just been launched, using the same rocket science Charles had championed with Robert Goddard—he barely contributed, his answers only a mumble, and he rubbed his eyes tiredly, like a small child forced to stay up past his bedtime.
My friends flashed me sad, sympathetic smiles behind his back. Dana was unusually tight-lipped, and unusually gallant, in the face of Charles’s sullen presence; he kept rising whenever I ran to the kitchen to refill drinks, and offered repeatedly to help me find things I had misplaced, like the corkscrew, or the box of matches I used to light the fire.
“Didn’t you put them in the coffee table drawer?” Dana asked, before clamping his mouth shut and turning white.
Charles, however, did not appear to have heard, and I realized that I could have embraced Dana right in front of him, torn off his clothes and had him right on the living room carpet, and Charles would not have noticed. Charles Lindbergh could never see himself as a cuckold, and I should have been relieved.
I was not. Shaking with barely suppressed rage, I didn’t even bother to frown at Dana, whose eyes were dark with guilt and fear.
Finally everyone left, far earlier than planned. My friends—all except Dana—kissed me on the cheek as they went out the door. After they were gone, Charles finally came to life; leaping off the sofa, he sneered down at me.
“What a lot of orchids you’ve collected, Anne! What a bunch of nothings! Not a person of substance in the bunch, not even Dr. Atchley. I used to think he, at least, was someone sensible. But to hear him go on and on about the theater, of all things!”
“I enjoy spending time with them,” I murmured, still livid. Charles had embarrassed me, he’d not even noticed my lover sitting next to him; he’d not said one nice thing about my apartment since arriving. I concentrated on extinguishing candles, gathering up glasses, as outwardly serene as Mamie Eisenhower herself. “They’re really quite interesting if you would only give them a chance. But of course, you wouldn’t.”
“You’ve changed, Anne. I’m not sure I know you anymore.”
“Well, you read my book, didn’t you?” I laughed acidly. “That was rather the point.”
Charles snorted. “I don’t know why you’ve surrounded yourself with a bunch of New York society types,” he continued as he followed me around, watching me intently, frowning if I clanged a glass or dropped cigarette ash, but pointedly not offering to help. “Haven’t I always told you you’re too fine for that? Too special?”
“Is that why you want me to live stuck out in the middle of nowhere? Is that why you only see me five times a year?” I asked, still smiling, determined not to let him see he had any effect on me. “What do you think I do for the rest of the time, Charles? Sit and wait for you to remember where you’ve stowed me away?”
Charles did not answer me that. And after I had turned out the last light, I led him down the hall to the bedrooms, although I hesitated in the door of mine. Now that he was here, finally here, I did not want him in my bed. Our bed.
“I’ll bunk in there.” Charles pointed to the guest room; he’d already thrown his old gray travel bag on the bed, his sole piece of luggage. “If you don’t mind. I need a good night’s sleep, as I’m leaving for Brussels early in the morning.”
“No, not at all. Well, good night. There’s an extra towel in the guest bathroom.” Flush with relief now that I knew he would not intrude any further, I leaned up to him. With a grunt, he kissed me on the cheek; he gave no sign that he had missed my body any more than I had missed his. We both retreated inside our separate bedrooms, and shut the door at the same time.
Charles was gone the next morning before I was up. He had stripped the sheets off his bed and folded them up neatly, like a good houseguest.
AFTER ANNE JUNIOR DISCOVERED the letter from Dana, things were different between us. We went through the next few days as planned, getting her ready for college; I kept a serene smile on my face and would have answered any question she asked. But she asked none.
It wasn’t until a couple of years later, when she finally persuaded her father to let her study in Paris—something he had resisted for reasons he did not care to share with anyone—that she acknowledged it.
I took her to Idlewild, and together we wrestled her three mammoth suitcases into the terminal where they were checked. Her hat bag and makeup case would accompany her in her coach seat; Charles forbade any Lindbergh to travel first class. He always sat in the very back of a plane, himself.
My daughter would not meet my gaze when I kissed her goodbye in the terminal; she had not met my gaze once since she found that letter. So I turned to go with a heart as heavy and cumbersome as the luggage she was carrying.
Abruptly, I felt a tug at my sleeve; Ansy embraced me from behind, with more than a trace of desperation, and whispered into my ear, “I understand, Mother. You know, I really do.”
When I turned around, the only thing I saw was her white hatbox slipping through the crowd, and then she was absorbed into the line of other passengers waiting to board a Pan Am Stratocruiser to Paris. A Lindbergh bound for Paris—I couldn’t help but smile.
There were tears in my eyes as I watched the plane take off; tears of happiness and of relief. I felt as if my own daughter had given me absolution.
I prayed for her, on her way to the rest of her life, to the other side of the ocean her father had crossed so long ago. I prayed for us all. And I couldn’t help but hope that her journey would be less eventful than his—and mine—had been.
CHAPTER 20
1968
RECLUSE THOUGH HE WAS fast becoming, there was one invitation that Charles Lindbergh could not turn down. When asked to attend the launch of Apollo XI, my husband accepted, although he refused to appear on television, even when Walter Cronkite personally asked him to.
Instead, we breakfasted with the crew the day before. The launch facility in Florida was a stunning compound, with men driving around on golf carts wearing headphones, huge hangars where the crew had worked in the flight simulators, computers everywhere.
Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins would soon be flying to the moon. But only one man’s entrance prompted an earthquake of excitement and salutes. Powerful, intelligent men with crew cuts and thick black glasses all jostled, like little boys, to have their photographs taken with him. For once, Charles Lindbergh acquiesced with gracious humility.
Despite his stooped shoulders, his white hair, the deep lines around his eyes, to them he was still Lucky Lindy, the Lone Eagle. The man who had, one long ago day in May, made this incredible journey possible. I was not the only one in the room moved to tears, thinking about it.
Astronauts are manly; they are the closest thing we now have to what Charles was then; true explorers, just like Cortez and Columbus. Still, after Charles, right before we left, placed his hand upon Neil Armstrong’s shoulder and said, “Son, I’m proud of you,” the young astronaut’s voice wavered a bit when he answered, “Thank you, sir.
“You were the first,” Neil continued after a moment. “We only follow in your footsteps.”
The room broke into applause, and Charles took a step back
as if surprised, bumping into me. He turned and only then appeared to remember that I was there; he was, I thought, grateful for my presence so that he could simply be one of a couple, an old man and his wife.
We didn’t speak as we were driven back to our hotel. For once in his life, I believe, Charles Lindbergh was overwhelmed by his legacy.
After the successful return of the crew, we were invited to the White House officially to welcome them home. Richard and Pat Nixon insisted that we stay in the Lincoln Bedroom, and after the formal dinner, I convinced Charles to remain for the dancing in the East Room, where Count Basie and his orchestra played until the wee hours. The magnificent surroundings, the champagne—my new satin gown—all went rather to my head. I found myself dancing the Monkey with Buzz Aldrin, who was surprisingly light on his feet. Jumping around to the music, embracing that once-familiar release from myself that I had always experienced on the dance floor, I caught a glimpse of Charles. He was standing on the sidelines, uncomfortable as ever, looking at me. Simply looking at me. Without a frown or a disapproving glare.
This time, though, I did not stop dancing, embarrassed. I smiled back, then coaxed Spiro Agnew into trying the Twist. Which he did, to the amusement of all.
That night, as we climbed into the enormous canopied bed, big enough so that we didn’t have to touch in our sleep, Charles cleared his throat.
“You looked very happy tonight.”
“It was fun, wasn’t it? All that dancing?”
“I don’t like this sort of thing.”
“I know you don’t.”
“Where did you learn those new dances?”
I was silent; Dana and I had gone to the Peppermint Lounge once, right before it closed, just to see what it was like. Utterly silly after a couple of martinis, we had watched the young people doing all the latest dances, before getting up to try one or two, ourselves.
“Oh, on television, I suppose,” I finally answered.
“Television.” Charles snorted. He, of course, never watched.
He cleared his throat again. Lying on his back, his arms crossed behind his head, he continued. “It did occur to me, however, tonight—watching you dance, if that’s what they call it these days—that if I hadn’t married you, this is the kind of life you would have had. You were an ambassador’s daughter, after all.”
“That’s true,” I said, sleepily. Rather tipsily, to tell the truth; my fancy hairdo—Reeve had insisted on taking me to her own hairdresser for the occasion—had escaped its prison of hairpins and Aquanet, and was leaning to the side of my head as I lay down.
“It occurred to me that you might have missed that kind of life. Do you? Do you ever wish you hadn’t married me?”
“That’s a ridiculous question.”
“No.” Now he turned over on his side, away from me so I could only imagine the look on his face. “It’s not a ridiculous question, at all.”
I rolled back over, staring up at the canopy, and didn’t answer, not for a long time, and eventually I heard him snoring. But I did not fall asleep so easily; I lay awake, blinking in the dark, surrounded by imposing portraits of Abraham Lincoln, wishing that I had had the courage to ask Charles the same question.
The next day, we left to go our separate ways. He was preparing to return to the Philippines, to a remote island where he was spending more and more time trying to understand nature as well as he had once understood technology. I thought I might go back to Darien, or maybe Switzerland, to a little chalet he had built for me, a present intended to entrap, not liberate. It was just one more place to squirrel me away from the part of life he did not understand—which was most of it.
But before we went to the airport, he asked, so politely, which was unlike him, if I might like to stop by the Smithsonian Institution. I agreed, and he thanked me, again, courteously, and I was reminded of how he had been when we first met; how formal, how old-fashioned. I almost felt as if he was courting me all over again.
Once inside the main museum building, I followed Charles as he made his sure way through the labyrinth of halls and rooms, finally climbing a wide set of stairs until we were standing almost nose to nose with an airplane.
A little monoplane, silver, suspended from the ceiling on slender wires so that it appeared airborne, as if gliding on a nation’s collective memory. That jaunty Spirit of St. Louis painted in bold letters across the nose.
Below, crowds of schoolchildren, families on holiday, a few stray men, gazed up at it. A schoolteacher read aloud the words from a plaque beneath it:
“On May twenty-first, 1927, Charles Lindbergh completed the first solo nonstop transatlantic flight in history, flying the Spirit of Saint Louis three thousand six hundred and ten miles from Long Island, New York, to Paris, France, in thirty-three hours, thirty minutes.”
I studied Charles as the teacher spoke; his face did not betray any emotion. He gazed at his plane with that clear, determined look of his, unchanged despite the fact that the boy was finally an old man. But his skin did flush, faintly. I wondered what he was thinking; what he was seeing. Did he look at this plane—an antique now, almost a toy, inconceivable that it had once represented the most modern of technology—and wonder at himself, at his bravery, at the impudence of that boy? Did he wish himself back to that time? Did he wish it had never happened?
I gazed at it, and couldn’t help but think of the launch site in Florida, and Mission Control in Houston; of the hundreds of men, the computers, the constant contact between the earth and the spaceship—the final destination, the moon itself, always in sight. Then I thought of Charles, flying alone in a fog most of the time with no clear view out of his side window. And with no one to talk to, no one to monitor his position, his coordinates, his vital signs. He had no one but himself to rely on; no one but himself to blame if something went wrong.
And I knew, as I had always known but somehow forgotten to remember in these past years, that I could never have done it, that no one else could ever have done it. That I would never know anyone as brave, as astonishing—as frustrating, too, but that was, I was forced to admit finally, part of his charm—as the slightly stooped elderly gentleman standing beside me in the shadows, listening while schoolchildren read of his exploits. The man who was, for better, for worse, my husband. The man who I loved, in spite of himself.
“No,” I said softly, so as not to call attention to us.
“No, what?” He turned to me, startled out of his own contemplation.
“No, I’m not sorry I married you.”
“Oh.” After a long moment, he smiled, almost in surprise; as if recognizing in me a long, lost friend.
Then he turned back to look at his plane. And he reached for my hand, as he did.
CHAPTER 21
1974
ACUTE PROMYELOCYTIC LEUKEMIA—that was the diagnosis. For months, Charles had been tired—so uncharacteristic for him. He’d lost weight, sweated profusely at night. With his attention to detail, his methodical way of dealing with things, he made a list of his symptoms, monitored them over time, then checked himself in for tests.
He called me, late one evening in 1972. I was in Darien, relaxing in the living room, a fire burning in the fireplace. Charles spent fifteen minutes asking how the weather was, if I had enough firewood stacked, were the raccoons getting into the trash cans, if I had remembered to get the mail in. He wanted to know if I had eaten an early dinner (much better, in his view), or would I dine late, how much it had cost, and reminded me to enter the amount in my accounting book.
All that settled, there was a pause on the other end of the phone line. Through my kitchen door I heard the sound of cocktails being made; the tinkle of glassware, the cracking of ice cubes. Impatiently, I glanced at the clock over the fireplace; I didn’t want to spend this precious time on the phone.
“Charles, if that’s all—”
“I have cancer. Acute promyelocytic leukemia. The doctors were very forthcoming in their prognosis, at my insisten
ce. It is in the early stages, and they recommend radiation treatment.”
“My God.” I plopped down on the davenport as if someone had kicked my legs out from under me.
“I know this is an inconvenience, but could you come into the city tomorrow?”
“Where are you? When did you get in? I thought you were in the Philippines!”
“At Columbia-Presbyterian. I arrived two days ago. Can you get in touch with Dr. Atchley? Apparently he’s not on call today.”
“Yes, I believe so.” Even though he couldn’t see me, my face glowed.
“Could you please ask him for the name of the best oncologist in New York? I think my doctors are adequate, but given the diagnosis, I would feel it shortsighted not to get another opinion.”
“Of course, Charles—are you … are you all right? I mean, of course you’re not. But how are you taking this?” Although I knew how. After forty-five years, I knew.
He was making a list of the things he wanted to ask the doctors. He probably already had contacted Pan Am to rearrange his schedule. I was sure he had his battered traveling bag, with its small medicine kit and a couple of changes of old clothing that he planned to wash out in the bathroom sink, for he didn’t believe in unnecessary baggage. Although none of his clothing—island clothing; threadbare shorts and tennis shoes—would be appropriate for New York in March. I would have to bring him some things from here.
“I’m fine. I’ve known for a few hours now, so I’ve had time to absorb it.”
“A few hours? That’s all you need?” And despite the sick, cold terror filling the pit where my stomach used to be, I laughed.
“Yes.” His voice was stern now; he did not understand my laughter.
“Charles, try not to worry. It may be the wrong diagnosis. Let’s just wait until the doctors here see you.”
Now he was annoyed; he snarled into the phone, “It’s not the wrong diagnosis. I asked for a medical book and researched the symptoms myself. My hope is that it will respond to the radiation, as many cancers do.”