The Aviator's Wife

by Melanie Benjamin

  Oh, how did I know? Did I smell it, like an animal smells an intruder in the wind? Hear it, like an animal hears danger in a branch snapping? For we were animals, Charles and I, trapped, caught; as soon as we left the shack, still clinging to each other in the haze of our astonishing, teasing intimacy, we were surrounded by people and reporters and photographers.

  “It’s them!” somebody cried, and we sprang apart, caught—doing what? I didn’t know; I felt only the shock of confusion, of guilt, as my heart beat wildly and my knees began to shake.

  “Charles! Charles Lindbergh!” “Colonel!” “Anne!” “Mrs. Lindbergh! Annie!” “Look here!” “Look over here!” “How’s married life?” “Get any rest last night?” Guffaws, applause, questions, questions, and everywhere, people looking at me, staring at me, gaping at me from my head to my toes, and I blushed, knowing why. I’d heard of old-fashioned shivarees, when relatives and friends spied on newlyweds, rousing them out of their beds, making crude jokes of their intimacy. This was a shivaree, a most public shivaree, and I was mortified by what I knew they were all thinking.

  “Charles? Charles?” I spun around, blindly; the flash powder was exploding and I could feel the crowd pressing closer and closer. What would happen when they got to us? Would they chew us up and spit us out, our bones picked clean? What was it Shakespeare had said about “a pound of flesh”? I couldn’t control my fears; I was imagining us both trampled on the dock, and I knew I was on the verge of my very first hysterics. I could feel everything moving faster and faster, utterly out of control, and I reached, blindly, for my husband.

  “Move, Anne! Now!” Charles was pushing me ahead of him, simultaneously trying to shield me from the crowd and using me to clear a path. I twisted around to look back at him, but he hissed, “Go on!” His eyes were wild, but his face was that closed-off mask that I had first glimpsed in Mexico City.

  I clutched the soggy bag of groceries to my chest, worried that I might break the eggs. Absurdly, I wondered if my hair was combed and knew that it wasn’t; it was streaming down my back, unkempt, like my clothes—a baggy sweater, dungarees, tennis shoes. I would be seen like this in every newspaper in the land. My heart sank. For this, ironically, would be my official wedding portrait. We had taken none at the ceremony, for fear someone would sell them.

  So this was to be the photographic evidence of my marriage—this mad sprint through a shrieking, clutching gauntlet of reporters, fishermen, businessmen, women, and a startling number of children; people who, for some reason, had run to see us, who felt they had a right to see us, on our honeymoon. No one would remember my exquisite pale blue gown of French silk, the bouquet of lilies of the valley picked from the garden at Next Day Hill—all was a dream, a beautiful dream, now. So I ran, my head bowed, tears streaming down my cheeks.

  Finally we reached the Mouette—the crowd chasing us as if we were fugitives—but discovered any escape was impossible. A mismatched flotilla of vessels—dinghies, canoes, fishing boats—were bobbing in the water just beyond the dock, boxing us in, their passengers standing on the decks and even, in one case, hanging from a mast. Simply to get a look at us.

  “What do we do?” I turned around, sniffling, wiping my tears.

  “Now I wish we had a plane,” Charles growled. “We’ll have to wait them out. Surely some policeman will eventually come and make them go away. I’ll radio for help once we’re inside the boat.”

  A woman broke through the crowd and ran up to me.

  “Charles!” Before I could understand what was happening, she reached out to me; Charles tried to step between us, but not before she had wrapped her arms around me and smothered me in an embrace.

  “You dear girl, you! You keep him safe and happy, you hear? And may God bless you with a little Lindy as soon as possible!”

  “I—I—” I squirmed out of her arms; she was round and smelled of fresh yeast, and her handbag kept hitting me on the side of the head.

  “Please,” Charles said, pulling her away from me. “Please, leave us alone, all of you. We appreciate your good wishes, but we’d like to be left alone now.”

  I stepped onto the slippery deck of the cruiser, miraculously managing to hold on to the groceries while falling hard on my knees. Charles helped me up and followed me down to the galley. He assisted in putting the groceries away, not commenting on my trembling hands, the tears that kept springing to my eyes even though I tried to blink them away.

  I waited for him to comfort me, to wrap me in his arms and tell me it would be all right. He didn’t; he looked at his watch instead.

  “Try to have dinner on the table at eighteen-hundred,” he said, ducking his head as he disappeared into our little cabin bedroom, where the ship-to-shore radio was. After a moment I heard his voice, calm, soothing, as he transmitted. Outside, there was still a great scuffle of feet on the dock, muffled, excited voices, but miraculously, no one came aboard the boat. Apparently everyone was content merely to stand on deck and watch and wait.

  I twisted my hair into a knot at the back of my neck and splashed some water on my face. Charles came back into the galley with his arms full of books and charts; he spread them out on the little wobbly table while I cooked, or rather heated a tin of beef stew over the tiny gas burner and opened a loaf of that awful white bread.

  “Don’t let them get to you, Anne,” he said, as he studied a page in one of the books and scribbled something on it. “Don’t let them make you cry. Never let them win.”

  “I didn’t know we were at war.”

  “Well, we are. I have been, ever since Paris. I’m sorry that you have to get caught up in it, too. But I’m also grateful that I no longer have to go through it alone.”

  “You are?”

  “Yes.” Then he did look at me, and smiled; it did what all his smiles—so few, I was beginning to understand; so precious—did to me. It made my heart soar, my skin prick with warmth and attention; it dried my tears and gave me courage.

  So I served up our dinner in that impossible wobbly galley, illuminated only by one battery-powered lantern hanging from the ceiling, swinging hypnotically, casting long shadows across our faces.

  After I cleared up, my husband began to teach me how to fly.

  Once, I leaned over to get a better look at a diagram of an engine, and paused, ever so briefly, to rub my face in the sleeve of his sweater. With a soft sigh, he stroked my cheek and hugged me to him before he continued his instruction.

  Meanwhile, just outside the boat, strangers kept chanting our names, an eerie incantation that plucked at my nerves.

  And I knew that this was the bond we would share, that would bind us together forever. Not the experience of losing a wheel on takeoff. Not the passion of the night before, nor even the vows we had uttered, the promises we had made before our families.

  No, it was the experience of being hunted. Of being two animals, prey, trying our best to fight off those who would do us harm, even as they wished us well.

  TAILWIND. Vertical stabilizer. Longitudinal axis. Yaw.

  Keep moving. Eyes down. Never smile. Never engage.

  The list of things I needed to learn grew longer with each passing day. Yet I mastered them all. I had to. Without them, I never would have been able to survive in my new role as the aviator’s wife.

  CHAPTER 5

  October 1929

  THE GREAT AVIATRIX paused in the doorway as she entered the room. She was clad in her usual trousers, shirt, and scarf, despite the fact that this was a formal affair. Her sandy hair cropped short, her body lean and long, her resemblance to my husband was obvious—and obviously calculated.

  “It’s a wonder she didn’t change her name to Charlotte,” Carol Guggenheim murmured, as the rest of the room burst into applause. The Great Aviatrix grinned, ducking her head in a bashful way, but I saw the glimmer in her eyes. Unlike my husband, she enjoyed the attention.

  “Here she comes,” I whispered, as she made a beeline toward us. Charles, Carol, Harry,
and I were standing in the middle of the Guggenheims’ drawing room at Falaise, their country estate, that enormous Normandy castle I had first glimpsed last summer. The party was for us, to welcome us back from our latest cross-country flight. Only Harry and Carol could persuade Charles to attend such a grand soiree.

  “Welcome back, sir.” The Great Aviatrix saluted my husband and flashed her toothy grin.

  Charles saluted back with a faint smile, then shook her hand. From some corner of the room, a camera flashed, and Carol immediately stepped in front of me, protectively, and frowned; she always reminded me of a young lioness, fiercely guarding her young—in this case, Charles and me. Carol and Harry were always looking out for us, weeding out the climbers, those interested in exploiting us, from those who could genuinely help us or simply be our friends. And their home on the sound, with its acres of land and forest, had become a haven for us from the press; we were welcome anytime, no questions asked.

  “Harry, no cameras,” Carol hissed, eyeing Charles nervously. My husband did not tense, however; he appeared relaxed, even happy, as he chatted amiably with the Great Aviatrix. This evening, anyway, my husband appeared to have called a truce with the press.

  Harry sipped his champagne and shrugged. “Can’t frisk everyone, you know. I’ll go talk to the fellow.” And with his broad shoulders leading the way, he barreled through the crowd of people I barely knew but who had been invited to welcome me—to welcome us—back home. My family was nowhere in sight, although they were fond of the Guggenheims; Con, Dwight, Mother, and Daddy were in Mexico, and Elisabeth always had an excuse to stay in Englewood these days with Connie; they were about to open their dream school.

  Welcome back, The First Couple of the Air! proclaimed a banner hung across the Guggenheims’ mantelpiece. That was who we were now; that was what we did. We flew. No one even bothered to pretend that we were like other newlyweds, who set up housekeeping together, or picked out china patterns, or argued amiably over budgets.

  Charles and I spent the first months of our married life in the air, crossing the country, christening every new airfield that popped up like tulips in this new, springlike era of aviation. Everything was possible, the future as vast and endless as the sky itself—as long as planes kept flying.

  And so we flew, to ensure that they would. Right after our honeymoon, Charles was named to the board of one of the first passenger airlines—TAT, or Transcontinental Air Transport—and like everything in his life, he took his duties seriously. He wasn’t content merely to lend his name for publicity and investors; he insisted on mapping out routes himself, with me in the copilot seat. He even piloted the first official flight. And I was the first official “air hostess.”

  As newsreel cameras whirred to capture the occasion, a group of movie stars and celebrities, including the governor of California, made their toothy way, travel cases in hand, down a red carpet just outside Los Angeles. Only this was not a movie premiere; they were the passengers on that first flight, and at the end of the carpet Charles and I stood in front of a gleaming Ford Tri-Motor plane. While flash powder blinded us, Mary Pickford flirted shamelessly with my husband, and I smiled gamely, pretending not to mind.

  I needn’t have worried; Mary Pickford was too chicken to actually fly. She simply christened the plane with a champagne bottle and remained on the ground as Charles made a great show of putting on his flight jacket, and I made a great show of tying a ridiculous apron around my ridiculously flimsy flowered dress, and we followed our “guests” up a short temporary staircase onto the plane. Charles piloted it to the first refueling stop in Arizona, while I fussed over the ten passengers seated in wicker chairs, five on each side of the plane, each with its own window, velvet privacy curtain, reading lamp, cigar lighter, and ashtray. I handed out magazines, helped two male attendants serve catered meals on real china, and poured coffee out of a sterling-silver coffeepot. When we hit our first air pocket, all the passengers turned instinctively to me, terror in their eyes; I smiled reassuringly, and soon they were all behaving like experienced flyers.

  We also flew to console, to buck up the country’s nerves, when, just two months after the inaugural flight, TAT—now dubbed “The Lindbergh Line”—suffered its first accident. The plane went down near Mount Williams, New Mexico, far from any road or path. Charles decided it was up to him, as the face of the company, to locate the wreckage, so I climbed behind him into the cockpit of a Lockheed Vega and kept my eyes peeled, not sure what I was looking for. My stomach heaved when I found it. The blackened, twisted plane looked broken, like a child’s toy carelessly thrown; my fists balled up, hitting my thighs as if to inflict the kind of pain the passengers must have felt. I knew there were no survivors—how could there be when the plane had burst into flames on impact? We flew as close as we could, but it was not close enough to see the bodies, for which I was ever grateful; unballing my fists, I wrote down the coordinates that Charles barked to me, and, dry-eyed, handed them to the search party when we landed, fifty miles away, in a flat patch of desert. As the First Lady of the Air, I murmured empty words of sympathy to the families at the mass memorial a week later, proud that I did not disgrace Charles by surrendering to my emotions and sobbing with them. Two days later, when I climbed once more into a passenger plane—half empty; the public scared easily back then—I did so with a confident grin for the photographers that I could scarcely believe when I saw it in the papers.

  But, of course, I was confident; Charles was piloting this plane, so I knew nothing would happen. It was those poor people’s misfortune to be piloted by someone else; someone less.

  We also flew to set records, to explore. Not just the world, the skies, but our marriage.

  I never saw my husband smile as readily as he did the day I flew solo for the first time, after months of study and practice flights that had been wedged between our official TAT duties. Taking off was easy; my mind was so full of checklists and procedures that I was too busy to be frightened. It was only once I was up, able to relax after those always tense first moments of takeoff, when I realized that even though I had done this a hundred times before, Charles had always been in the instructor’s seat.

  Now there was no one in the plane but myself. And the enormity of what I was doing—flying alone, relying solely on my intelligence and skill for what seemed the first time in my life, made my veins suddenly fill with liquid lead, my stomach pitch uncontrollably, and beads of sweat break out on my brow. Terrified I would black out, I willed myself to concentrate on the instruments even though, for a sickening moment, they blurred into one smear of lines and circles and numbers. The wind that I always welcomed was now sinister; despite my study of physics and aerodynamics, it seemed a miracle that it didn’t simply fling this insignificant little piece of machinery to the ground. How could I ever have imagined I could do this by myself—keep an airplane aloft?

  Then I remembered that Charles was below, watching me, always watching me—testing me, as well. To see if I would measure up to his standards, because after only a few months of marriage, I sensed he wasn’t quite convinced. Frankly, neither was I.

  But there really wasn’t any other option—so I talked myself through the maneuvers; banking to the right, to the left, circling carefully into the easiest landing pattern, keeping my eyes on that strip of land and my hand on the throttle at all times, trying to ignore the slim figure waiting, his hat in his hands, at the far end of the runway. I landed the plane with just a couple of bumps—I jerked the stick, reflexively, upon touchdown. When I closed the throttle completely, causing the propeller to slowly cease its spinning, Charles came running toward me. His face was open and boyish, his eyes snapping.

  “Good girl! How do you feel?” He helped me step out onto the wing, where I wavered for a second, the wind finally having its say and nearly knocking me off my feet.

  “Wonderful!” And I did, all of a sudden. Because he saw me that way.

  “I’m very proud of you.”

&n
bsp; “I know.”

  And he swept me up into his arms, right there on the airstrip, heedless of the reporters rushing up to us with their notebooks and their pencils. I had passed my test—not just my solo test but my first test of our marriage. He led, I followed, and that meant I had to keep up with him. Now I had proved that I could.

  Sometimes, I admit, I was so terrified I couldn’t form the words to tell him—such as the time I allowed my husband to hurl me off the top of a mountain like a slingshot. Perched on the edge of a cliff, held back by a tight, corded, thick rope, I sat in a new sailplane, frozen with fear, my hands gripping the steering stick so tightly it left an imprint, although I could scarcely feel it. My face was paralyzed, yet I knew that somehow I grinned that carefree grin at Charles and the reporters and photographers standing around, then I shut my eyes as the cord was winched back and cut. I tried to remember the hasty instructions Charles had given me—“Aim high to find the best current, and then trust the wind!”—feeling my heart in my throat, certain that I would be smashed up against the side of some mountain.

  But I was not! Instead, I did catch a current and finally experienced flight as I’d dreamed it—silent, soaring, like a bird, a majestic creature with proud eyes and little use for others. I shouted my joy, unashamed, for there was no one to hear it, and I glided and swooped for what felt like hours but was really only minutes. I circled lower and lower and made a somewhat bumpy landing in a field. Several cars came driving up as I climbed out of the plane; a startled man poked his head out of his window.

  “Where did you come from?” he asked in astonishment.

  “Up there!” I pointed back up at the mountain, and laughed at the look on his face. I had just become the first American woman to fly a glider.