“All right. Do you want me to—I don’t know, what else can I do?”
“Nothing. I don’t want you to come here until tomorrow because I don’t like you driving in the dark. Please don’t tell the children. There’s no reason to worry them and of course we don’t want any publicity. If anyone asks, just say I have a virus I caught in the jungle.”
“I will. Charles, I—have a good night. Try to get some sleep. I’ll be there in the morning.”
“You, too. And enjoy your evening.”
I hung up the phone, and laughed again.
The door to the kitchen swung open and Dana greeted me with a merry smile on his face, a tray of cocktails in his hand.
“Do you want to see a show tomorrow in the city? A patient of mine offered tickets to A Little Night Music. Finally, I’ve wanted to see this for—What? What’s wrong, Anne?”
I shook my head, and tried to catch my breath, but let out a ragged sob instead. “It’s Charles. He just called. Dana, he—he’s sick. Leukemia. I don’t remember what kind. But he’s in the city and he asked me to ask you—to ask you, of all people!—if you could recommend—”
But I broke down, unable to say the words, falling into Dana’s familiar arms. He held me to his chest, and clucked soothingly before settling down with me on the sofa.
I laid my head on his shoulder, waiting for my tears to dry.
And I tried not to think about my husband.
CHARLES RESPONDED WELL to the initial treatments, and we had a few good months. Months in which we were finally together, as I had desired, so long ago. But I couldn’t help but remember the old adage: Be careful what you wish for. I was the caretaker, now; the healthy one. And Charles was not a compliant patient; he envied me my strength when he couldn’t even climb a staircase without needing a nap. He wanted to keep up his hectic schedule but when he no longer could, he goaded me into his newest project: the extensive editing of my diaries for publication. I’d stopped writing them, years ago—after the war. But observing Charles’s urgent interest in them now, I couldn’t help but think he was writing his own obituary using my words. Rearranging them, pruning them until they portrayed someone I no longer recognized.
But there came a time when there was no use pretending; his body stopped responding to the treatments, and we finally told the children. After a terrible month in the hospital during which it became apparent that his white cells were just as stubborn as the rest of him, he said, “I want to go home to Hawaii. I want to go home and die in peace.”
Dana told him it was suicidal. “You won’t make it,” he said bluntly. “You’re much too weak, and it’s a hell of a long flight.”
“I’m going to die anyway. I want to die at home.” Diminished as he was, lying in the hospital bed, his painfully thin body barely making an outline beneath the blanket, Charles set his jaw in that determined way of his and looked, fleetingly, like the hero in the photographs of ’27. Even though I had tears in my eyes, because the head oncologist had just informed Charles he only had days to live, my heart did that crazy, balletic leap as I gazed at his still-handsome face. The flesh, wasting away, gave up the strong lines of his face in only greater relief. His hair—thin even before the radiation—was the snowiest of white, which, when he was healthy, contrasted with the permanent ruddiness of his skin after so many years outdoors—first in the open cockpits of airplanes, then in the Pacific during the war; finally after these last decades spent in jungles and rain forests and remote, untamed beaches.
His physical beauty, our physical attraction—that had never faded. In bed, we had always been able to understand each other. If only he hadn’t stopped coming to it, years ago.
I shook my head. It was wrong to think such thoughts now. I listened as Charles argued with Dana, who finally gave up and barked at Jon, standing like a tall, watchful Norse god, to make whatever the hell arrangements he had to.
Finally, after everyone else had gone—the platoon of doctors, the boys back to their hotels—I kissed Charles good night. “Do you want me to stay?” I asked, suddenly weary beyond reason. I could have slept on the floor, I was so exhausted, pummeled by the last few days.
“No,” he said, frowning. “That would be unnecessary. I will be perfectly fine, and you will sleep better in a bed.”
“All right.” I gathered up my purse and coat, stopping to wave good night from the door. Now, alone save for the IV bags and machines, he struck me as helpless, small—he, who had been a giant all my life. But he did not give me any indication that he needed my company; he opened a book—a medical book—and put his glasses on, pushing them halfway down his nose. Licking his index finger, he turned a page.
Walking down the hall, I was so weighed down by my weariness that I wondered if my legs would hold out until I reached the elevator. I was almost there when I felt a hand on my arm.
“Mrs. Lindbergh?”
“Yes?” A young nurse, with red hair, was holding some papers in her hand. She bit her lip, then looked worriedly down the hall, back toward Charles’s room.
“I shouldn’t do this. I know I shouldn’t, it’s very wrong. But you—I loved your book, you see. It means so much to me, I thought you should know about these.”
Then she thrust the papers into my hand, and ran off down a hall. Confused, I put the papers into my purse, assuming they were medical release forms. Then I got into the elevator, hailed a taxi, stumbled up to my hotel room—I had long since given up my apartment—and called down to room service for a drink.
It was only after it arrived that I remembered the papers. Sipping my gin, I took them out of my purse and smoothed them on my lap. These were no medical forms. They were letters—no, copies of letters, the words slightly smudged from the mimeograph machine. And they were from Charles. I recognized the handwriting, small, slanted purposefully to the right, although it was spidery now. The letters were short, uncharacteristically brief for usually, Charles wrote very detailed letters. They were letters of farewell, of finality, of shared remembrances and hopes, no longer to be fulfilled.
They were not addressed to me.
AND NOW, FINALLY, we have reached our destination, the end of our journey together. He is awake once more, aware of my presence, and he coughs; I hear the nurse walking softly toward his closed door but I beat her to it.
“I’d like a few more minutes alone with him, please.”
“Oh, of course, Mrs. Lindbergh!” And she retreats, eyes brimming sympathetically.
“Charles, it comes down to this. I deserve to know why. It’s not just the women—that, I could almost understand. But the children—why these other children? How many?” I thrust the letters in his face, and he brushes them away with his frail hand.
“Seven. I fathered seven other children.”
I stagger at the number; until I heard it, they hadn’t seemed real, these others. His bastards. For a moment, I can’t catch my breath.
“How many years, Charles?” I finally ask, still breathless. “How many years have you kept them from me? What do they look like? Do they look like you?” For some reason this is important; I need to know they do not look like our children. My children.
“I don’t know. I suppose they do. It began—sometime in the fifties.” He closes his eyes, as if remembering.
“So that’s why you were always gone. That’s why you never wanted me to come with you, that’s why you kept me hidden away, too.”
“Not at first. I was working. I met Greta at Pan Am in Berlin. The others, through her. It was a lonely time. You were preoccupied with the children, as you should have been. You were home. You were—”
“Old,” I finish for him, and he does not contradict me.
“Our children, you did a good job with them. You. I wanted—another chance, perhaps.”
“Why didn’t you give our children that chance? They would have welcomed it. All you had to do was ask. Instead, you chose to fly away, to leave us. To have these other families. For the las
t time, Charles—why?”
He doesn’t answer, and I don’t know what else to ask, what else to say. I am only a woman, a woman with so much to do; even as I’ve been pacing this room, grasping for one last chance to understand the man I married, I’ve been thinking ahead to all the people I’ll need to call, the statements I’ll have to make, the practical business of sorting and filing and putting things in order.
Right now, I simply cannot absorb this, the enormity of it, what it means to my children, what happens next. The rage I’ve nurtured for years against him is finally gone, leaving me empty—and terrified of what will replace it; I can’t imagine an emotion big enough, terrible enough.
We are silent, and his breathing is so heavy that I fear he has fallen asleep again. But then I feel his hand—icy, the tips of his fingers already puckered—on my arm, gripping it desperately, fearfully. He opens his eyes, and I see that he is just like any other man would be at this moment—a man frightened, sorrowful, regretful. Tears pool in his lower lids, then trickle down his cheeks; his lip trembles, and he whispers, “Please, please, forgive me, Anne. Forgive me, before I die.”
And the words are on my lips; words of confession, which would double as his absolution. I know I have it in my power to forgive him because I, too, have sinned. Finally I am his equal; we are equal in our betrayal of each other.
But I have not sinned like he has. I have never betrayed my children. I have only betrayed him.
“It’s too late now,” I reply, denying him the comfort I alone can give. It’s taken me forty-five years to earn this moment—and I wish, desperately, that it had never come. “You’ve hurt us all, beyond measure.”
“You won’t—you won’t tell the children?”
Oh, my children! My loves, my life. “No, no, I will never tell them. I will never burden them with that. Never!”
“I don’t want this to be how you remember me,” he begs, his voice cracking again, catching on the broken pieces of our shattered memories.
“Then you should have thought of that, before.”
“I only ever wanted to be your hero. These other women, I didn’t care what they thought of me. But you—”
“I didn’t need a hero. I never needed a hero. I needed to be loved.”
“I came back.” The tears are falling down his cheeks. “I always came back to you.”
“Then that will have to be enough, won’t it?” I ask us both, and he nods, and I understand there are no more words. No more explanations. Bending down, I take him in my arms; he’s so light, so fragile. He reminds me of Elisabeth, when she was ill.
We match our breaths together, rising and falling as one. “I love you,” I tell Charles Lindbergh, the last thing he will hear in this world. Such an ordinary phrase.
For an ordinary couple, after all.
Charles sleeps again, a deep, engulfing slumber that appears to consume what’s left of his flesh; he is melting into the bed, his mouth sagging, his skin papery. He sleeps like that for two more hours, until, surrounded by his son and his wife—
He awakes with a start, a gasp, his eyes open, fixed on that distant spot on the horizon, and he inhales sharply, then exhales.
And then is no more.
There is a sharp intake of breath as we lean toward this man, this giant, but he is flesh and bones, finally, just like the rest of us. Land and I look at each other, too shocked for tears; Charles Lindbergh was mortal, after all.
As the doctor comes into the room, stethoscope in hand, I walk away, shaking, although my eyes are dry. I wonder how to begin living the rest of my life without him; without the answers to the questions I will never stop asking.
I spy, on a corner table, Charles’s old traveling bag; already I am hungry for reminders of him. Smiling, I pick it up. However did it last so long? It’s in tatters; the calfskin worn and shiny, the rusty clasp held shut with safety pins.
For some reason, I open it just to smell his scent one last time, finger his old clothes—a polo shirt he’s had since his sixtieth birthday, a present from Reeve. Those horrid, scratchy wool socks he always insisted on wearing, even with tuxedos—oh, how I tried to get him to change! A photograph—I pull it out, instantly on my guard. I’m not sure I can stand any more surprises. But it’s so unlike Charles to travel with a photograph that I have to see. Unnecessary weight, I can hear him bark, as I open the hinged frame.
“Oh!” For in my hand is the photograph of a young woman. It only takes me an instant to recognize her as me.
So young—dark hair, not gray; no lines or wrinkles. The woman in the photo is a girl, really; a thin, solemnly smiling girl, not the grinning idiot of all those early newspaper photographs. This smile—this careful, cautious smile—is the one that reflected my truest self. Especially back when I was so young as to be unformed; afraid of everything because nothing truly terrible had happened to me, yet.
And in my lap is a baby.
My firstborn; the blond curls, the cleft chin, the big blue eyes. With a shock of remembrance that pulls me to my knees, I recall the day Charles took this photograph. He had just gotten a new Kodak, and was forever snapping at everything—when he wasn’t taking it apart and putting it back together, fascinated by all the intricate parts.
That day, I was holding the baby, squirming in a towel. Charlie had just been bathed, and he was smiling, reaching toward me, when Charles snapped the picture.
I don’t want any reminders, Charles had declared after that terrible May. We need to forget.
Yet he has carried this photograph on every journey, every flight since; even to war and back. I picture Charles in the jungle, trying to sleep on a cot or maybe on the ground; oceans away from home, bombs overhead, just one soldier among many, wanting to remember something good, something decent—something to remind him why he is there.
Or, perhaps, something that might allow him to welcome death.
Through eyes blurred with tears—healing, welcome tears—I look back at the still figure on the bed; rising, I walk over and place the photograph in his arms. And I bow my head, touching my cheek to his, thanking God for this—this unexpected gift of a glimpse into Charles’s heart; the heart he had tried to hide from me, all these years.
This answer to all my questions.
All the king’s horses and all the king’s men, I begin to croon softly, just as I used to do to the babes in my arms, all of them. I thought they’d never be able to put the Lindberghs together again.
Gently, Land reaches over the bed to close his father’s eyes.
As he does so, I pray that at last, Charles has found what he has been looking for, all his life.
CHAPTER 22
I AM FLYING.
Alone, unafraid, high above the blue of Long Island Sound.
I went to visit the daughter of an old friend, who still had an estate with a private airfield. At her father’s behest, she had kept an airplane, a four-seat monoplane, in a barn, all these years. Once, the wheel of that plane had fallen off. Once, a girl too young, too stupid to be afraid, trusted a boy to bring her home safely, and he had. And she had thought that he would, for the rest of their lives.
So did he.
I thanked Harry Guggenheim’s daughter Diane, a slim, nervous, middle-aged woman now. Harry had died a few years previous. While he always asserted that his friend Slim was no anti-Semite in public, in private Harry had stopped returning his calls.
“Are you sure you want to do this, Mrs. Lindbergh? You haven’t flown in a long time.”
“I know. But I have to.”
“You remember everything?”
“I don’t know, but I suppose I’ll find out.”
“How are you doing? Without him?”
“Well. Well enough.”
“Father always said he lost him a long time ago.” Harry’s daughter shook her head. “Before the war. But then he always said, ‘Damn, if I don’t miss him, still.’ Did he believe it all, Mrs. Lindbergh? Did Colonel Lindbergh believe what
he said, back before the war?”
I hesitated, torn between wanting to placate the daughter of a kind, loyal friend, and the truth.
“If you knew him,” I finally said, “you would know Charles Lindbergh never said anything he didn’t mean.”
“That’s a shame.” Diane shook her head, slowly, mournfully. Then she looked at me with a pitying smile. “But you, we never believed that you—”
“Well, I did. I’m tired of people pretending that I didn’t. I was just as wrong as he was. More so, because I didn’t speak out for my own beliefs. I borrowed his, as wrong as I knew they were. I’m no better than the Germans. The Germans who sat by and didn’t say anything, all those years.”
“Oh, no, Mrs. Lindbergh, you’re not like them! I’ll never believe it. My father never believed it!” My old friend’s daughter wouldn’t help; she wanted to absolve me, and I didn’t want to be absolved.
“I’m sorry, Diane. Truly sorry, for the pain we caused you and your family. The pain I caused you, and so many others.”
“It was so long ago.” She shrugged. So did I. Unlike men, women got less sentimental as we aged, I was discovering. We cried enough, when we were young; vessels overflowing with the tears of everyone we loved. All the tears I cried when my son was taken. But I hadn’t shed one tear since my husband died.
“Father always said you were the brave one.” Diane laughed down at me in astonishment; she was a head taller than I was. “He said that the colonel never knew fear, he never understood consequences. You did, but you went along with him, anyway. That was bravery.”
“Or idiocy,” I replied, then I climbed—stiffly, every joint aching—into the cockpit. I pulled my goggles over my head, fleetingly aware of how ridiculous I looked—a graying grandmother wearing old-fashioned flying goggles. Then I shrugged it off, fastened the safety harness, flipped a switch, and opened up the throttle.
Slowly I began to taxi, surprised, at first, by how the propellers cut my vision; I’d forgotten that, about old planes, with the propellers on the noses instead of the wings. Gradually, it all did come back; I pulled on the stick, accelerating, holding my breath, and then it happened—that lovely, balletic, suspended moment, and I had no fear. Why should I be afraid? I was nearly seventy years old, and had begun giving too much consideration to the various ways an elderly person can die. Crashing in an airplane seemed a reasonable alternative to most of them.
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