IT WAS MID-MAY. More than two months since my child was taken.
The house was so quiet now. The switchboard was still operative, but we received only a hundred calls per day. Police and other strangers no longer camped out in the house; Elsie had had all the rugs cleaned, the floors polished, the camp beds removed.
I was terrified by the silence, the orderliness. All those people had been working to bring my baby home because they thought there was a chance. It was impossible not to recognize the more sedate atmosphere as resignation.
Colonel Schwarzkopf still maintained an office in the house, working independently of Charles, although Charles had listened to him in one matter; he had paid the ransom to Condon’s man in marked gold certificates, so they could be traced.
But the colonel no longer believed my baby was alive. He hadn’t told me, and he certainly hadn’t told Charles, but I knew it, even as I didn’t quite register it. It was like a particularly difficult math equation from school: I could recognize the symbols and letters. But what they represented simply would not penetrate my understanding.
Over the last month, the investigation had taken a grotesque turn. Without Colonel Schwarzkopf’s knowledge, the state police sent a man to inspect the incinerator in our basement. He had insisted that Charles and I accompany him. Eyes flickering suspiciously over us both as we stood beside the glowing furnace, he sifted through the ashes with a shovel. “Searching for fragments of bone,” he informed us icily. I recoiled, falling against my stony husband; neither of us spoke a word for hours after the man—reluctantly—left, empty-handed but still glaring our way, accusing us of the unthinkable.
Another time, I heard a repeated thumping outside; looking out the dining room window, I saw several broken ladders on the ground, and an intact one leaning against the house, beneath the nursery window. A policeman was halfway down it, about five feet off the ground, carrying a flour sack the size of an eighteen-month-old child. With an ominous groan, the ladder split exactly where the original broken ladder had split; in three pieces. The policeman clung to one side of the ladder, held firmly by his compatriots on the ground.
But the sack tumbled to the ground with a sickening thud, hitting the stone façade of the house on its way down as the men whooped with accomplishment—“It’s broken like that every time, just like the ladder we found! That sack weighs what the kid weighed, right?”
I crumpled to the floor, hitting my chest with my fists, shaking from the force of the unleashed scream that echoed furiously within.
Spring had persisted in arriving, cruelly unaware of our desolation. On the walks I took about the house, accompanied by Elisabeth, I looked for meaning in everything. So did she.
“Look, Anne, look at the new leaves! The tulips are coming up,” she said one afternoon, when the sun was healing and the wind was coaxing.
“But they’re coming up wrong. All bent over.”
“Only because all the policemen stepped on them,” she chided. “They’ll be all right next year.”
“Next year.” I shook my head, unable to comprehend it. “Where will we all be next year?”
“Charlie will be almost three, and the new baby will be crawling around!” Elisabeth laughed. “Can you imagine what a mess these flowers will be then?”
I forced a smile, trying to picture it. But the new baby looked like Charlie in my mind. And Charlie at three—to my horror, I couldn’t see his face; the toddler in my imagination had his back to me, running away. Never coming back.
“Oh!” I couldn’t help it; I stopped in my tracks, terrified to go any farther.
“What? Anne, are you ill?”
“No, it’s just—silly. But for a minute I couldn’t see it. I couldn’t see him. Charlie. Oh, Elisabeth, what if—?”
Unlike my husband, unlike my mother, both of whom were relentless in their refusal to allow me dark thoughts—my sister allowed me this question.
“I don’t know, Anne. I don’t know. Somehow, you’ll go on, though. You’ll have to. But you won’t be alone. You’ll have Charles, and Mother, and Con and Dwight. You’ll have me.”
“I know.” And I grasped her hand; her frail hand, the skin so thin I could feel her pulse. I prayed for her, right then; I needed God to spare her, because if she left me, there would be no one to talk to. How foolish we’d both been, before!
“I have a secret to tell you,” she confided, as we began to stroll once more. “I’ve fallen in love. With Aubrey. Aubrey Morgan, you know him. We’re going to live in Wales, at his estate. After our—marriage.” She said it shyly, as if it were a wish that would vanish when spoken.
“Elisabeth, are you sure? I mean, what about Connie? And it’s not easy, you know. Marriage. Even if you’re—uniquely suited—to it, like—”
“Like you?”
“I believe you did call me out on that once, if you recall. Although I think you used the word ‘sweet.’ ” I raised an eyebrow, and she grinned. “You know, I always thought when we were young that you would be the one to marry, but now—I suppose I’ve grown to think of you as above it, somehow. Are you really sure?”
“Yes, Anne. Yes, this is what I want. That struggle, with Connie—I’m not strong enough for it, and so I released it. It’s simpler this way. And Aubrey is a kind man. He wants to make life easy for me. Not harder, like with Connie. But easier.”
I glanced up at Elisabeth’s face; she looked radiant. Like a bride already.
“Then I’m so happy,” I assured her. “Does Mother know?”
“No. We—we’ve thought it best to wait until—until Charlie is back.”
“Do you love Aubrey?” It was ridiculous to ask if he loved her; of course he did. Everyone loved Elisabeth.
“Yes. Oh, Anne—yes! He’s always fussing over me, saying I have to listen to my doctors. But what do they know? They want me to live like an invalid, but I won’t do it. I’ve waited too long for this—this contentment.”
I squeezed her hand, and didn’t lecture that I, too, wanted her to listen to the doctors. Or that contentment can be a prelude to tragedy. She allowed me my despair; I had to allow her happiness. So we continued to walk, arms linked; lost in our own, very different, thoughts.
Perhaps because of Elisabeth and her perfect understanding, I had begun to write in my diary again. Finally, something unspooled within me and I had to release it on the page and I didn’t care what my husband said about it. When I married Charles, he had asked me to give my diary up, for fear someone would steal it and sell it to the newspapers. And I’d agreed.
How laughable now, to remember a time when my thoughts were considered something to be guarded as closely as my child!
Now, sitting prisoner in this unfinished building, I looked forward to taking up my pen once more. I could rage, cry, pray with it, as I could not allow myself to do in real life. Sometimes I was terrified by the emotions I released, for Charles did not escape my rage. Those pages I burned, a good little acolyte. The rest I kept hidden, not ever wanting to read them again but not wanting to destroy them, either. They represented something to me; some small triumph, some battle won.
“Have you seen Colonel Schwarzkopf today?” I asked Mother the evening of May 12. I was in my room, writing in my diary; she brought me some tea.
“He got a phone call about half an hour ago and went out.”
“Maybe it was Charles?” I looked up.
My mother smiled her sad smile and shook her head. “I don’t think so, dear.”
I nodded, but I wasn’t really disappointed. I was too full of disappointments to register any more. Every note that appeared in the paper from Condon, begging for further instruction from the kidnappers now that the ransom had been paid. Every week that went by without a reply. Every crackpot who said he had some new information. Every wild-goose chase that Charles followed, with that same determined, grim set to his jaw, the heartbreakingly resolute way he put his hat on as he left—a sharp bend to his elbow, a resigned pat on the top of his head, almost for good luck, I thought.
He had been gone for several days now, piloting his plane off Cape May, searching for a boat that yet another man—this one named Curtis—with a craving for publicity had tipped him to. Why it was always a boat, I had no idea. But maybe, just maybe, this time—
“Has Charles called at all today?” I asked, but this time I did not look at my poor mother’s face. She was kindness and patience and suffering and despair; she—along with Elisabeth—was everything to me these days. Everything my husband could not allow himself to be; not until he brought little Charlie back home.
“No, dearest,” my mother said with a sigh. Then she bent to kiss my cheek, and left me alone.
Taking the teacup, I picked up a book; a book I had been reading before: The Good Earth. I’d had to stop reading after O-Lan killed her daughter because of the famine. Now I wondered if I’d ever be able to finish it. I dropped it to the floor and grabbed something else, something mindless, frivolous. The Inimitable Jeeves.
Stretching out on the bed, I tried to read. But after only a few minutes my eyes fluttered. Sleep was a refuge. Hours could pass and I wouldn’t have to know, wouldn’t have to feel. So I let the book fall off my lap, and I buried my head in the pillow, shutting out the world with eyes squeezed tight. But before I could fully surrender myself to unconsciousness, there was a knock on my door.
“Charles?” I sat up clumsily, guiltily; he did not like me to nap so often. “Charles? Is it you?”
The door opened, but Charles wasn’t there.
Mother was in the doorway, and behind her stood Colonel Schwarzkopf. I didn’t even glance at Mother’s face—I looked right past her, my gaze drawn to the colonel. And I knew, before I could even catch my breath and prepare myself; before he said a word. With shaking hands, I grabbed a pillow and pressed it to my chest, as if it could shield me from what he had to say.
“Mrs. Lindbergh,” he began, in a voice thick with unaccustomed emotion. “Mrs. Lindbergh, I am so sorry to have to tell you this.”
“Anne, Anne,” Mother whispered, and she began to cry. I began to tremble, violently.
“A body was found this morning,” the colonel continued. “By a driver. A truck driver,” he corrected himself, as if this detail was important. “Five miles away. The decompo—the body of an infant. Deceased. Approximately eighteen months of age—”
“Anne, the baby. The baby—he’s with Daddy now.” My mother wept, and it was as if the two voices, one so clinical, the other so sympathetic, were a fugue, weaving in and out of my understanding; tearing apart my heart.
“Oh—oh!” I looked to each of them for confirmation. It was there, in Colonel Schwarzkopf’s suddenly glistening eyes, his jaw working back and forth; in Mother’s terribly aged face, sadness pulling every feature down like a giant hand had erased everything good that had ever happened to her.
My heart—it disappeared. Disappeared with my child; I knew I’d never know either of them again. I was simply an empty vessel, a shell, and my spirit was floating away from it. From somewhere near the ceiling, I saw myself sitting on that bed, my mother’s arms around me—
And then, still floating, drifting above—but not quite flying—I saw the empty crib. The empty room. My empty arms. And my heart reminded me angrily, vengefully, that it would not disappear so easily as my child; it shattered, piercing my soul, the shards then splintering into diamonds with sharp, unpolished edges. “I knew,” I heard myself say, gasping for air, for reason. “I think I knew from the beginning—”
He was gone. My golden child, my sweet, serious little man. Gone. No more on this earth, no more in my life. Taken.
Taken. Taken. Taken. Dashed.
“How—how did he—?” I was having trouble breathing. I fought to stay conscious—I fought to hurt, to feel. I had to do it, for my child. It was the only thing I could do for him now—or ever. Forever. It yawned ahead of me, a great abyss of darkness and sadness and I knew, in that moment, that forever I would be searching for him. Forever I would see an empty crib, an empty place at the table, an empty date on the calendar that should mark a birthday, a graduation, a wedding.
I will love you forever and ever, I used to sing to the babe in my arms—oh, he was so little! So dear! Forever had seemed like a gift then. Now it was a prison sentence.
“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.