“MOTHER!”
“What is it, Reeve?”
“You tell Father he must stay home. You go find him and bring him back and tell him he must stay this time!” She stamped her foot, shook her blond ringlets, and thrust her jaw out in perfect imitation of her father.
“I’m afraid I can’t do that, dear. You tell him next time he comes home, all right?”
“All right. But when is he coming home?”
“I don’t know.” I pushed myself up off the kitchen floor; the drain was leaking beneath the sink again. Dropping the wrench down on the table, for a moment I couldn’t help but think, I have a trust fund. I could just go off and take the children to a nice hotel in the city, where we could have room service and go shopping, and see plays. Why am I on my hands and knees in a drafty old house in Connecticut, miles away from civilization?
Too busy to answer my own question, I washed my hands, checked beneath the sink to make sure it wasn’t leaking anymore—it was—and shooed Reeve out of the kitchen.
“Go tell your sister to please turn down her record player!” I was weary of hearing “Tennessee Waltz” played over and over, which was a shame, as I thought it was a very pretty song. The first hundred times I heard it, anyway.
The phone rang in the front hall; I waited for the stampede of feet to run to it, the cries of, “I’ll get it!” But for once, no one did; the phone kept ringing, so I headed for it, picking my way over the piles of skates and cleats and Ansy’s field hockey stick that had all been tossed just inside the entryway in the usual after-school rush.
“Hello?”
“What took you so long?” Charles asked on the other end, clearly irritated. “It rang for nearly a minute.”
“No, not quite an entire minute. Where are you?”
“Washington, of course. Strategic Air Command work. I thought I told you.”
“No, you didn’t.”
“Is everything all right there?”
“Yes, of course.”
“No emergencies this week?”
“Not yet, anyway.” Although with four school-aged children, I knew it was only a matter of time.
“Good. Have you taken an inventory lately? We’re due for one.”
“I’ll do it this weekend.” Charles frequently required an inventory of all our household items—blankets, pots and pans, dishes, silverware, even shampoo bottles. It was a holdover from when we flew to the Orient—actually, probably from when he planned his flight to Paris; everything had to be accounted for and discarded if it served no useful purpose. Charles saw no reason why a home couldn’t be packed as efficiently as an airplane; he himself still traveled with only his small, battered bag, the one he’d used since we were married.
“Fine. The children are well?”
“Yes. Would you like to talk to them?” Although even as I said it, I hoped he would not. For one of them would likely say something to displease him, and I would be the one to bear the brunt of it.
“No, I don’t have time. I just wanted to check in and make sure everything was running according to plan.”
According to your plan, I thought grimly. Not mine.
“When will you be home? Reeve was asking just a moment ago.”
“I don’t know. After these conferences, Pan Am wants me to attend their annual shareholders’ meeting. Then I think I’ll be back, and I have a special project I’d like you to work on.”
“Oh, Charles.” My heart sank; the last time he had dangled a “special project” in front of me, like some kind of reward for being, I don’t know, as stupidly loyal as a puppy, I ended up helping him catalog all the trees on our property. Five acres of heavily wooded property.
“I promise, it’s not like last time,” he added, as if he could see my face. “Are you sure everything is all right there?”
“Yes, I’m sure. Now, go to your meeting. I need to start supper.”
“No steak, I hope. Not on a weekday. Roast, I would think, would be the proper meal.”
“It’s chicken pot pie, for your information. Now, goodbye!” And I hung up the phone, cherishing my little triumph. Then I slumped against the wall, disgusted. Chicken pot pie instead of pot roast! How ridiculous.
If I’d really desired a victory, I would have told him that no, everything was not fine. The sink is clogged, Land got a C in English, Jon’s graduation is coming up and he keeps asking me if you’re going to be home for it, I’m tired, irritable, and even though I don’t have a second to myself I’m so bored I feel like jumping into the ocean just outside this godforsaken piece of land you picked out for us and lured me to with the promise that these would be our golden years.
Oh, I had been so ecstatic when Charles first showed me this house! It was in 1946, a few months after my sixth child, Reeve, was born. After several months away in Europe, where he had gone on behalf of the government to study Nazi Germany’s captured rocket program, he was finally home for good. We left the children with Mother and drove out with a picnic lunch to this wooded place on the eastern tip of Connecticut.
Spreading the blanket on a cliff overlooking the ocean, the rambling farmhouse behind us, we sat and discussed our plans, just like every young family was doing. Although we weren’t quite as young as some: Charles was forty-four; I, just forty.
Charles was still working in an unofficial military capacity, as an advisor to the Army Air Corps, which was concentrating mainly on high altitude jets now, and Charles was an expert on high-altitude flying. Pan Am also hired him to be a consultant as they began to expand their overseas routes. His postwar schedule was rapidly filling up; already I suspected he wouldn’t be home as much as I had hoped.
Still, that day, it seemed as if we had found a permanent home of our own—no more moving every two years, not with a brood of school-aged children. Finally, I thought, we had found our way back to the family we set out to be, before “the events of ’32.”
“See that spot of land?” Charles pointed to a far-off dip in the ground, surrounded by young birch trees. “That’s where I’ll build you a little house. A little writing house. That’s where you’re going to write your book, Anne. The one I know you can write.”
“Really?” I turned to him; he was reclining on the ground, propping up his head with his hand. He grinned, and the confidence he always radiated fell, like a precious ray of sun, upon me. My face flushed, and I almost felt a pencil between my fingers, saw the sheaves of paper spread out on a desk. It would face east, I thought, so I could write in the morning—always my favorite time to gather my thoughts. I would rise early, before the children got up, before they pulled at me, tugged at me, stretched me thin as taffy, as children had a way of doing.
“Remember, how you said you wanted to write one great book? The war got in the way of that, didn’t it?”
I nodded. I had published, after Wave of the Future, a fictional account of one of our flights, called Steep Ascent. But I wasn’t happy with it, and I suspected I never would be as long as I kept writing our past. I needed to find something bigger, something worthwhile—but all the moves, the children; so many pregnancies; all kept muddying my mind, claiming my energy.
“Well,” Charles continued, “now you can do it. Here, in this house, we will raise our family, and I’ll go off to work and you’ll go off to write, and we’ll make history again, the two of us. We should be able to hire some decent help, now that the war’s over. The schools are good here in Darien—I knew you’d want to know that, so I checked. What do you think? We can fix up the house—I’ve already talked to a contractor.”
“What do I think?” I beamed up at him, thanking God for the miracle of this man who had made it home from the war, back to me—me, of all people! “I think it’s perfect!” I touched that deep cleft in his chin, kissed it before he could pull away, then pushed myself up and hiked over to that spot where my writing house would be. Charles remained where he was, staring out at the ocean that threw itself up thunderously on the rocks, far below. Halfway to the birch trees, I turned around to look at him, and my heart skipped a beat; he was so gorgeous, still. I remembered how, on our long flights, seated behind him just like a girl in school seated behind her secret crush, I used to memorize everything about the back of Charles’s head, his neck, his shoulders. Cramped as I got sitting in my crowded cockpit, there were moments I was overwhelmed with physical longing for my husband. It might be brought on simply by the way he cocked his head first left, then right, to relieve some tension. When he did so, the muscles of his neck would lengthen and tighten; this glimpse of his bronzed, taut flesh, tinged with reddish-blond hairs—the only glimpse I would have of his flesh for hours on end—would cause a sudden stirring of longing in my belly and between my legs, my breasts tingling as if brushed with tiny, electric feathers.
I felt that way still, when I looked at him; electric, young. Supple and pliant and girlish.
And this—this unexpected generosity, as he remembered my dream after all this time. A cabin, all to myself! We deserved this. We deserved this place, this peace. We’d live the rest of our lives here, together; we’d walk together through the birch grove, and lie together on the cold ground, finding a way to keep warm. Together.
Soon, though, I was reminded that we weren’t as young—or, rather, I wasn’t as young—as I’d imagined. I became pregnant again, to my dismay—a dismay I tried to conceal from Charles and from myself. But for the first time I was afraid; I had been relieved when my doctor warned me not to have any more children after Reeve. This time, I was afraid for my physical well-being, as well as my creative; I felt, somehow, that if I had this child I would never write again, cabin or no cabin. My thoughts always seemed to fling themselves in every direction, farther and farther afield with each child. I would never be able to corral them now.
And it was not an easy pregnancy; I developed gallstones and was advised to have an abortion, which I could not bring myself to do. But nature delivered me from the purgatory of indecision and pain, and I miscarried. Soon after, I underwent the necessary gallbladder surgery.
But I underwent it alone. Charles, who had been present for the birth of each of our children, was strangely absent at the death of my childbearing years.
Our new family doctor, Dana Atchley, a gentle, slightly soft-looking man with thinning gray hair and the warmest, most understanding eyes I had ever seen, was kindness itself. I was in the hospital in Manhattan for two weeks, and found myself dissolving into tears whenever I turned my head, which throbbed and ached almost as much as the incision beneath my belly. But I did my best to dry those tears whenever Dr. Atchley checked in on me, and put on a brave, cheerful face, as Charles urged me to do by telephone, every day. I don’t think I fooled the doctor, for he sometimes paused on his busy rounds to sit next to me for long minutes at a time. Often he turned my radio on, and we listened to classical music together, not saying a word, before he got up to resume his rounds. And I would resume my bewildered contemplation of my husband—or, rather, his absence.
For so long it had been just the two of us, together against all foes—wind, weather, the press, the kidnappers, the swirling darkness of world war. Now I was sick, ailing; facing an abyss of confusion and finality that I simply couldn’t comprehend and I needed him, needed his forbidding strength, his ruthless, forward-looking vision. Without them, all I could do was lie in my hospital bed for two weeks, waiting pathetically for him. Wondering why he couldn’t take the train into the city; wondering why, even with me in the hospital, he’d accepted an invitation to fly to Switzerland and give a speech, leaving the children in the care of secretaries. Leaving me to heal on my own.
Looking back, I see that was the beginning. I would spend the rest of my life waiting for him, wondering why. Until it was too late.
Even after I recovered from the surgery, Charles did not reach for me as he once had. It wasn’t as if he was afraid to hurt me; that, I would have understood. Instead, it was as if he had decided he had no more use for my body, as it was of no more use to him. No more children, no more little Lindberghs; his dynasty was complete—what physical need did he have for me now?
I didn’t have much desire at first, either. But gradually it returned, and I was able to coax him, occasionally, into making love, but he always seemed to be holding back. No longer could he lose himself in my arms; no longer could he expose himself so nakedly, crying out into my breasts. We had always had that between us; our bodies could speak when our hearts could not. Now, that was one more thing I had lost.
Was that why he began to withdraw from the children, too? Did he lump us all together as something finished? All I know is that he began to fly farther and farther away from us all, rarely asking me to accompany him; only occasionally remembering to come back.
To be sure, his presence was always felt even when he was away. He had made out a personalized schedule for each child to follow, starting from the hour they were to awake to the number of snacks they were permitted throughout the day, including chores—and the precise way each was to be performed. (The trash could not simply be emptied into a bin and then taken to the garbage dump; it must be sorted through first to make sure nothing of value had been accidentally thrown away.)
Mandatory reading lists were drawn up for each child, according to whatever flaw in his or her character Charles felt was prominent. Jon was given books to read that praised humility, Land ones that encouraged focus; Scott was deluged with books that spoke of the virtues of discipline. Ansy had to read about little girls who got into trouble because of their tempers. And Reeve, even before she started kindergarten, had to sit down for an hour a day and page through picture books about baby animals who came to a sad end because they were too curious.
Nor was I exempt; far from it. I had to account for every expenditure, even down to the shoelaces for each pair of tennis shoes and the box of toothpicks in the junk drawer. Naturally, I was expected somehow to intuit the exact hour of his homecoming, even when he failed to tell me; if he walked in the door and I wasn’t there to take his hat and coat, he would berate me for ten minutes before finally remembering to kiss me on the cheek.
Still, when Charles was gone, the house was noisy, relaxed; Ansy played her records or practiced her flute all day, the boys ran in and out in various sports uniforms; Reeve scampered about, clutching after her siblings, demanding that they include her in their activities. Dinnertime was like a zoo, as I simply sat and let them chatter to one another, knowing that I’d inadvertently hear the important things. This way, I learned that Jon was going to ask Sarah Price to prom; that Land had blown an axle on the Studebaker and had to borrow money from Grandma to get it fixed; that Scott was keeping a toad in his sock drawer; that Ansy’s best friend had told the rest of the cheerleading squad that she had halitosis; that Reeve was not going to get married, ever, because boys, especially boys like her brothers, were horrid.
Usually Reeve would end dinner by saying she missed Daddy, and they would all turn to the empty place at the head of the table, wistful expressions on their young faces—before pushing back their chairs and getting on with the evening, chattering and busy once more.
They may have missed him—I may have missed him. But when he was home, the air in the house was so impenetrable with tension I sometimes retreated to my cabin to breathe freely, and cry.
The evening after he returned from the Pacific, we had all sat in the kitchen, the children staring at him like he was a mythical creature who had somehow turned up in the middle of the suburbs, while Charles declared, jovially, “It’s a good thing I’m back, Anne, to whip these youngsters into shape.” I had laughed, the children had laughed; we were just so happy to have him home. But soon, “It’s a good thing I’m back, Anne, to whip these youngsters into shape” became a war cry; it set my teeth on edge, and caused the children to pale. I couldn’t bear to witness how he treated them; scolding Land for his C in English until the poor boy broke down—a thirteen-year-old, sobbing like a baby. Or following each child around for a day, making sure that his schedule was being followed exactly, watching so intently that overnight, Ansy developed a nervous tic, her eyes blinking uncontrollably at times—just like Charles’s had, back when the baby was taken, and my heart caught on the unexpectedly jagged edge of this realization.
Once, Charles went into Jon’s closet and threw every single item of clothing on the floor, simply because one sweater had been hung up and stretched out at the neck.
The children loved him, cautiously, respectfully—or loved the idea of him, anyway. Growing up a Lindbergh meant they had assumptions made of them wherever they went, and one of those assumptions was that they were brave, daring, and capable of great things. They each saw these characteristics in their father, of course, and admired him for them. And there were good times; odd, though, as the years went on, the details of these lost their sharpness, so that they became impressionistic paintings compared to the unmistakably photographic images of the bad.
But Charles organized outdoor games on a scale I never could: scavenger hunts and relay races and football, which he and the boys enjoyed with almost too much enthusiasm. Charles allowed his sons to tackle him with as much force as they had in them; force that grew in intensity as the resentments piled up. But Charles never complained, not even when Scott accidentally cracked one of his ribs.
He also encouraged Ansy’s love of writing, just as he always encouraged mine, even going so far as to print up her short stories and binding them so that they looked like real books. And he delighted in Reeve’s sense of humor, egging her on mischievously, playing silly jokes on her and allowing her to play them on him.
Of course he worried about their physical safety, teaching each basic self-defense when they were old enough to learn, drilling into them the importance of never talking to strangers or getting into other people’s cars, training a succession of guard dogs to watch over them when they were very young.
Still, we all found it easier to love and admire him when he was gone. The first day or so after Charles left again we all would continue to walk tentatively, weigh our words cautiously, looking over shoulders in case he was still there. Then, there would be a collective sigh; the air would be light and breathable, and gradually we would remember how to be ourselves again.
Until the next time he came home.
“Jon! Land! Come pick up this mess.” Still standing next to the telephone, I stared, horrified, at the collection of shoes and equipment in the hall. How had I let this happen? While I knew, rationally, that Charles was days away from coming home, I panicked as if he were about to walk in the front door. “Come down here this instant and pick this up! Both of you!”
Then I ran back to the kitchen, remembering the leaky drain. I’d never hear the end of it if he came home before it was fixed.
“MAY I COME IN?”
I glanced up; Charles was standing in the door of my writing retreat. Hastily I shut the book I was reading and thrust it beneath some papers, just as I had so often done as a schoolgirl. I picked up a pencil and began to scribble something on a piece of paper. “Of course, you can come in,” I replied, turning that brazen grin on him, just as I used to on the photographers.
“I’m not disturbing you?”
“No, not at all.” But I couldn’t bring myself to meet his gaze; I couldn’t let him see how miserably guilty I was. For he had built me a lovely little house out of his own belief in my ability to write, and so far I had done nothing in it but daydream, write in my diary, cry, and read novels. Trashy novels, at that; for some reason, the dense, poetry-filled literature I had loved for so long—Cervantes, Joyce, Proust—muddied my head, these days. I wondered if I had lost brain cells as well as hormones. I buried myself in popular fiction instead; the book I had hidden from Charles was Kathleen Winsor’s latest. Although I didn’t think it nearly so juicy as Forever Amber.
“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 longer 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.