The Aviator's Wife: A Novel

by Melanie Benjamin

  “How silly! I’m the same as ever—plain old Anne.” I laughed at my own reflection in a mirror, and patted my stomach. I hadn’t yet started to show, but soon, I knew, I would be a dumpling once again.

  “No, you’re not. You’re a mother, not just a wife; the second one really makes you understand that. There’s a difference—and I’m not entirely sure your husband will ever understand. Mine didn’t.”

  I looked at my mother—my surprisingly wise mother—in astonishment. Why hadn’t she been so honest and straightforward when I was growing up? Then, her inner life was hidden not only from the world but from her children. All I ever saw was the perfection of my mother’s marriage, the impossibly shiny surface that reflected my own doubts and fears back to me a hundredfold. Daddy alone was allowed to have his faults; he was loved, indulged for them, while my mother stood smilingly, soothingly, supportively by.

  Were we women always destined to appear as we were not, as long as we were standing next to our husbands? I’d gone from college to the cockpit without a chance to decide who I was on my own, but so far, I was only grateful to Charles for saving me from that decision, for giving me direction when I had none. Even so, I suspected there were parts of me Charles didn’t understand; depths to my character he had no interest in discovering. I wasn’t resentful; he was so busy. I was so busy. We were young. We still had time to appreciate each other; we still had time to develop the marriage I’d only imagined my parents had had.

  “I’m so sorry,” I blurted out, before I could stop myself.

  “Sorry? Whatever for?”

  “Sorry for you, that Daddy died before he had a chance to know you like this—know you for yourself, not just his wife.”

  “Oh, Anne.” Mother smiled, touching my cheek, ever so gently. “Don’t feel sorry for me. No one knows the truth behind a marriage except husband and wife. Especially not the children! We knew each other, darling. You can be sure of that. Like I said—don’t worry about me. Worry about your own marriage. We’re the caretakers, we women. Left on their own, men would let a marriage run itself out, like one of Charles’s old rusty airplane engines. It’s up to us to keep things going smoothly. And, my dear, life with Charles is never going to be easy. You have much more work ahead of you than I did.”

  “How do I know I can manage it?”

  “Because you can. Because you have to. Because you don’t have any other choice; no more choice than any wife. Now, hand me some of those towels to fold, will you?”

  We busied ourselves with folding the towels and placing them in a basket, and I wanted to ask my mother, “At what cost? What did it cost you, all these years? What will it cost me?”

  But I didn’t. She was right. Children didn’t need to know everything about their parents’ marriage. And my mother, for all her surprising attributes, was no fortune-teller.

  “I do hope you won’t be lonely if we’re not here so much, now that the house is just about done,” I said instead.

  “That’s the way it should be,” Mother said briskly. “Two captains of the same ship—it never works. You two need your own household, finally. And I still have Elisabeth and Dwight and Con, you know. My family still needs me, I should hope!”

  “I know Elisabeth does.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “No reason, just, you know—her health.”

  “Well, doctors don’t always know what they’re talking about. Elisabeth will be fine. Perfectly fine.” Mother smiled, a bit too fiercely, and folded a towel with such vigor, I feared the crease might never come out.

  I nodded and patted her hand—and was surprised when she clung to mine longer than was necessary. The shadow of losing her child was in my mother’s eyes; so frail, so fragile was Elisabeth these days, she didn’t seem a whole person anymore.

  “We’re not quite out of your life yet,” I reminded my mother with a laugh. “We still don’t have all the furniture, and it’s easier to stay here during the week until we have a full staff. It is so nice here!” I admit, I rather thought of Next Day Hill as a luxurious hotel, a place where I could lounge around, have my meals brought to me, not worry about the details. I also knew my son was safest here, with all the guards, the dogs. The police in Englewood were almost our own private security detail. And, flattened with the nausea accompanying my new pregnancy, I enjoyed being cared for and pampered—instead of having to organize and run my own household.

  “Well, of course you’re always welcome to stay, dear. I love having you! But do think about Charles. I don’t think he’s quite so content.”

  “No, you’re right.” Charles was solicitous of my second pregnancy—although not quite so solicitous as he had been with the first—but it was true that with my father gone, he chafed a bit at what he called the “harem” of Next Day Hill.

  “Take care of your marriage, Anne, like I said.” She laid the towel down on the stack and rose to go. I had to smile; she looked so Victorian at that moment in her sensible dress, old-fashioned hairstyle, watch pinned to her shirt. “Charles is not like Daddy.”

  “I know,” I assured her with a rueful smile. “That’s the one thing you don’t need to tell me. I know.”

  I WAVED GOOD NIGHT to my son and went downstairs to see to my husband’s meal, wishing my mother could observe me acting as the lady of the house. Even if it did seem just that—acting. Or playing. It didn’t seem real yet, that this house was actually mine, so used was I to the back cockpit of a plane.

  But I did love it, our home on four hundred acres atop a rocky mountain outside of Hopewell, New Jersey. The reason we’d chosen this location was precisely because it was so challenging to find. Charles and I still sometimes got lost ourselves, driving out—even though the newspapers had “helpfully” printed a map of the location, complete with the names of the few marked roads. Still, we no longer feared people simply “dropping by,” as they did at Next Day Hill; our driveway alone was a mile long. Charles hoped we could give our children a taste of the carefree rural childhood he had known, unencumbered by security details and guards.

  I paused for a moment in the entryway of our first real home together. It was a big house, although somehow cozy; a center hall with two perpendicular wings, one for the drawing room and study, the other for the kitchen and dining room. The staircase led up to five bedrooms and a nursery—I blushed when Charles insisted, saying that we would need them for our “dynasty.” The nursery was in the room adjacent to ours, although Charles had not liked this. I’d held my ground, and insisted.

  Most of the house was papered and painted by now, although a few bedrooms remained unfinished. Not all the rooms had a full complement of rugs for the stone floors, some of the furniture was still delayed, and we’d hired only two people so far who lived here full-time—Elsie and Ollie Whateley, a middle-aged English couple.

  Charles was due back from the city at any moment; while he wanted a chauffeur so that he wouldn’t waste even a minute of the day, for the time being, he was driving himself in his old roadster. We had a new Ford on order, although it hadn’t yet been delivered.

  “Elsie?” I stepped into the kitchen; it was snug and bright, everything painted white, with the exception of the sunny yellow tiles for the backsplash. Tonight, with the March wind howling outside, it positively glowed with warmth and security.

  “Yes, Mrs. Lindbergh?”

  “I think we’ll eat in the dining room tonight, so can you please light a fire?”

  “Yes, ma’am. When will Mr. Charles be back?”

  “Any minute, I’d think.”

  “Oh, no, Mrs. Lindbergh.” Ollie popped his head into the kitchen. “Colonel Lindbergh called. He’ll be late tonight.”

  “Well, keep dinner for as long as you can. I’ll wait for him.”

  I started back upstairs, pausing halfway up; I heard thumping against the side of the house. “Ollie?”

  “Yes’m?”

  “Do you hear that?” Something banged against the ho
use again.

  “Oh. Must be a shutter that’s not fastened. Or maybe that flagpole bangin’. I’ll look at it first thing in the morning.”

  “Thank you.” I continued upstairs to the nursery, papered with blue sailboats, a pattern that Charles had picked out. “What will we do if the next one’s a girl?” I’d teased him.

  “It won’t be,” he’d growled, with a proud, masculine swagger, and I’d laughed.

  Betty was on the floor, a needle in her mouth, a piece of flannel in her lap.

  “The poor lamb spit up on his sleep shirt,” she explained, removing the needle. “I was afraid he’d ruin this new one with all that oil on his chest, so I made him an undershirt. I used an old flannel petticoat of mine.”

  “Very clever.” I went over to the baby, who was standing in his crib clad only in his diaper.

  “Mama!” Charlie crowed, reaching up to me. Then he coughed, a barking little cough that turned his face red.

  “Poor little lamb!” I rummaged around in a cupboard until I found a jar of Vicks VapoRub; I was surprised that we had it, actually. I was forever leaving things behind while we juggled the two households. “Now Mama must rub some on his chest.”

  “No—no!” He pushed my hand away with surprising strength, and I laughed, holding his sturdy little body down on the changing table and rubbing the greasy, camphor-smelling stuff all over his chest. Betty handed me the new shirt, and I pulled it over his head.

  “There. All better.”

  “Bettah,” he agreed, immediately compliant.

  “Now we go night-night,” I cooed, as I bundled him into his new Dr. Denton sleep suit, gray wool.

  “Nigh-nigh,” he agreed again, with a crooked, dimpled smile.

  I carried him over to his crib, placed against the interior wall so that he had a lovely view out the windows. His room faced east, out of the back of the house, so the sun was the first thing he saw every morning.

  “Go right to sleep, baby boy, and Papa will come in and kiss you when he gets home,” I promised. Charles sometimes spent more time in the nursery than I did; he delighted in lining up all the baby’s wooden soldiers, and then watching as little Charlie knocked them all down with a rubber ball—a military version of bowling. And this man who was so restless that not even the skies seemed big enough for him spent countless hours teaching his son the names of all the animals in his menagerie. The sight of the two heads bent together in such serious contemplation never failed to cause my heart to swell, as if to capture and contain them both.

  Part of this paternal interest, though, still took the form of toughening up his son; once, Charles placed the playpen outside and left the baby out there for an hour, all alone. Fighting back tears, I watched the entire time, knowing I couldn’t rescue little Charlie as he first played, then tired, then wailed once he realized no one was there. He stumbled around the playpen, clinging to the rails and shaking them in his rage and fear, until finally he collapsed in a corner and fell asleep sucking his thumb for comfort. Only then would Charles let me rush outside and pick him up, tears still wet on his hot cheeks, his sweaty curls plastered to his head.

  “It’s good for him,” my husband insisted, as he followed us upstairs to the nursery. “The sooner he learns to rely on himself, the better. You coddle him too much.”

  I couldn’t speak. He honestly believed what he said. After all, he had been treated much the same way, he assured me—and look what he had accomplished!

  How could I answer that? I couldn’t. I was sentimental, I was weak—I was a mother. And I no longer wondered why Charles’s own mother preferred to live her life away from her son; Evangeline lived in Detroit, and visited us only once a year. When little Charlie was born, she sent him a set of encyclopedias. She, obviously, had not coddled her son—and so she had his admiration, as well as the admiration of an entire country. What she didn’t have, as far as I could tell, was anybody’s love.

  Would my son love me, when he was old enough to know what love meant? I smiled down at him as I covered him up with his quilt; I couldn’t resist touching that dimple in his chin. I wasn’t sure I knew what love meant, even at my age. Except for this—my child snuggling down to sleep, clutching my finger trustfully in one hand. He closed his eyes obediently and let out a soft, contented sigh.

  I bent down to kiss his forehead, then carefully pulled my finger out of his moist grasp, and let Betty ease the metal thumb guards over his thumbs; Charles insisted we try to cure him from sucking them in this way. They looked like medieval torture devices to me, but they didn’t seem to bother the baby; they clamped to his sleeves, and the metal caps fit neatly over his thumbs. Betty turned off the overhead light, switching on a soft night-light, of which Charles did not approve. But he wasn’t home yet; wordlessly, the two of us agreed that it wouldn’t do the baby any harm if it was left on until then. There was a chill in the air, so I went to pull the shutters over the windows. But the ones at the corner window were warped. Maybe that’s what I’d heard, banging against the house.

  Betty came to help, but even the two of us, leaning out the window and tugging with all our might, couldn’t shut them, so we left them open and closed the windows. Outside, I could see the low moving clouds, occasionally giving up a glimpse of the moon. We shut the door softly behind us, then paused in the hall. As always, when faced with a Betty who was not busy caring for my child, I didn’t quite know what to say to her.

  “Well, I’ll wait downstairs for the colonel,” I said. “If the nursery gets stuffy, open one of the windows halfway.”

  Betty nodded and retreated to her own room adjacent to the baby’s, while I went downstairs to the study, where Elsie had lit a fire. I sat down at my desk and pulled out my notes. I was trying to shape a narrative out of our trip to the Orient, at Charles’s urging.

  “You’re the writer in the family,” he reminded me after we returned, and magazines began to clamor for articles about the trip. “I’m busy, and besides, you need to start writing something more substantial than your endless letters to your family. This is something you should do, Anne.”

  So, as always when he urged me to do something, I was doing it. Or, rather, attempting to. Hazy with pregnancy, enjoying the cozy domesticity of my child and my husband and my new house, I was not making much progress. I was happy, I admit; happier than I had been for a long time.

  I wasn’t so sure, however, about Charles.

  Lately, he drove into the city more often than he flew, forced to preside over board meetings for TAT and Pan Am, gnashing his teeth as bureaucracy inevitably obliterated the pioneering romance of flight. He was also tinkering with an idea for a mechanized heart; with Elisabeth’s illness claiming her more and more each day, my husband had wondered why a damaged heart couldn’t simply be replaced, just like a damaged motor. To this end, he was working with a man named Alexis Carrel, a Frenchman, a Nobel Prize winner who, Charles claimed, was a genius. And my husband did not use this word often.

  Lucky Lindy. He’d conquered the skies; now he was conquering medicine. Was there nothing Charles Lindbergh couldn’t master? I could only sit, one child in my womb, another mainly cared for by a more competent woman than myself, and marvel at him while I tried to stir myself to some kind of creativity, to master the written word, as my husband expected me to. And failing, failing, failing; more often than not, I found myself napping instead of writing, or reading, or simply walking outside, content to breathe deeply, admire my sturdy footprints in the muddy ground, and simply—be. Happy. Settled. Content. New words for me to ponder and explore, even as I knew that my husband derided such unimposing vocabulary.

  Certainly, despite his accomplishments, his busy schedule, Charles was never content. The other morning, I happened to glimpse him as he left for work; he stood in front of the long mirror in the hallway of Next Day Hill, a slim, tense figure in his tweed suit. He stared at himself for the longest time, as if he didn’t quite recognize the ordinary businessman, carrying a brief
case instead of a parachute, staring back. And I felt uneasy watching him leave, wondering, for the first time, if today was the day he would decide to jump into a plane and fly away from me for good.

  Sitting at my desk, I must have dozed off once again. I found myself startling to wakefulness by the sound of a car in the drive. Our terrier, Wahgoosh, who was snoring softly at my feet, did not move, however.

  “That must be Charles,” I said, even before I was fully awake, to no one in particular. I shook my head, pinched my cheeks, and picked up my pen, trying to look alert and busy.

  But Charles did not walk inside the house, so I must have heard something else, not a car. That wind, perhaps.

  It was another twenty or so minutes before Charles finally arrived home. I heard him come into the kitchen from the garage; Betty and Elsie both said hello to him. I looked at the clock; it was nearly eight-thirty.

  “Was the drive terrible?” I asked Charles, as he came into the living room.

  “Not too bad. I’ll have to get used to it. An hour and a half, just about. Have you gotten a lot done today?”

  I hastily turned over my pages, so he couldn’t see how little I’d accomplished. “A fair bit. The baby took a lot of my time, you know, until Betty came out.” Charles had been in the city for two days, working with Carrel; I hadn’t seen him since Sunday.

  “How is he?”

  “Better.” I followed Charles up the stairs to our bedroom, where he quickly washed up for dinner. Then we ate together in the dining room, chilly even with the gaily dancing fire. After dinner, I fought back my encroaching drowsiness as we sat, talking over our day; normally I cherished this ritual. But tonight, as I attempted to follow his discussion of his work on the mechanical heart, I couldn’t prevent my eyelids from drooping. Finally, with an understanding smile, Charles suggested I go to bed.

  “I’m afraid I should,” I admitted, and we both went upstairs; Charles had a quick bath and then went downstairs to his study to work. I settled into a nice long bath with a book, trying to warm my chilly bones. Even with the most modern of furnaces, this house was drafty.