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
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
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
