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.