The Aviator's Wife

I gasped, then laughed out loud. Was she serious? I could see by the earnest look on Amelia Earhart’s face that she was.

“Excuse me?” I asked politely.

“Virginia Woolf’s latest. You should read it sometime. It was written for someone like you.”

“Someone like me? What do you mean?”

“Oh, Anne, you’re such a sweet little thing!” Amelia laughed her great honking horse laugh. Next to me, Charles stiffened. He did not like Amelia; he’d said many times that I was twice the pilot she was, although he never criticized her publicly. Now he watched me, seeing if I could pass this latest test.

I hesitated. I could fly a plane, be hurtled off a mountain, navigate by the stars, but I shrank from defending myself. In this crowded room full of people I didn’t care for yet didn’t want to disappoint, I met the Great Aviatrix’s bemused gaze. She had only disdain for me in my flowered frock, silk stockings, and high heels, and suddenly, I understood it. I didn’t look like an aviator; I looked like an aviator’s wife. His exceedingly decorative wife.

Then I felt a fluttering within my belly; something turned over, reminding me, in the most elementary way, that I was earthbound after all.

So it was with pure joy—and even, I admit, a little superiority—that I smiled up at the Great Aviatrix, so earnestly boyish, so fiercely alone.

“Thank you for the suggestion, Amelia. I’m always looking for something new to read, you know. I had no idea you were so well read!”

Carol Guggenheim stifled a laugh, and Charles turned away—but not before I caught the grin on his face.

“Charles, may I talk with you a moment?” I turned away from Amelia, took my husband’s arm, and firmly led him to a private alcove, away from the glare of the Great Aviatrix’s embarrassed smile. I heard her say something to the room that was received with a burst of laughter, but I didn’t care.

“You should have said something more, Anne,” Charles began. “You should have really put her in her place. You’re a better flyer than she is.”

“It’s silly, in the grand scheme of things. She’s silly. I don’t care what she thinks of me. There are more important things in the world,” I replied lightly, almost flippantly.

And then I placed my hand on my husband’s arm and tiptoed up to whisper something in his ear. While the party in our honor continued noisily behind us, I informed him he was soon to be something other than an aviator.

He was soon to be a father, as well.

CHAPTER 6

May 1930

THE SIDEWALKS OF THE LOWER EAST SIDE were chaotic; so noisy, crowded, steamy, and dirty that for a moment I faltered, overwhelmed. Bile rose in my throat, and I wondered if I would faint right in the middle of Houston Street, and if it would be reported in the newspapers if I did, and if so, how would Charles react?

Oh, I thought I was through with morning sickness! After a few deep breaths, however, I realized that I wasn’t used to being in New York; that my life was so very different than it was when I used to walk these sidewalks with confidence. Back then, the constant honking of horns, the wailing of children, the hum of perpetual conversation, the ever-present drilling of a jackhammer—all were merely background noise. Just as the roar of an airplane engine was to me now.

I wasn’t used to being jostled about by people; that was it. Isolated as I was, either in the air with Charles or in the warm cocoon of family at Next Day Hill; protected by chauffeurs or maids or police escorts at public events—I hadn’t been out in public in forever. The last time Charles and I had gone out had been months ago, to the theater, to see George S. Kaufman’s June Moon. I had a false hairpiece with bangs and glasses; he pasted on a fake mustache and wore glasses as well. We looked so silly we giggled like children playing dress-up; still stifling giggles, we’d entered the theater separately and sat a row apart in our own disguises. Yet we’d been discovered anyway, and the play had to be stopped because of the furor in the audience. After police escorted us to our car, I’d been so humiliated, sorry for the actors, that we hadn’t ventured out in public since.

So I had forgotten what it was like being simply one in a crowd—how claustrophobic it could sometimes be.

Still, even for one used to the city, taking a stroll in the Lower East Side was an adventure. Farther uptown, Manhattan might be pushing into the future—the nearly completed Chrysler Building stood tall and proud even as the new Empire State Building was rushing to eclipse it—but here it might as well be the turn of the century. Immigrant mothers wore ankle-length black dresses and head coverings; raggedy children played with wooden toys, if they had toys at all; horses still pulled delivery wagons. The stock market crash of last autumn might be starting to affect the other parts of the city—there were reports of breadlines even as far north as Washington Square—but here, it couldn’t make any difference at all. These were the tenements, and why Elisabeth and Connie thought they might find students here for their new progressive school was a mystery to me. Although I couldn’t help but admire their charitable impulse.

I turned a corner onto Allen Street and walked a few blocks until I came to Delancey. Charles did not know I was out walking alone; he would never have allowed it, and he forbade me to take the train into the city. So I told him I was taking the car. Which, technically, I had; at least until I got to Houston Street. Then I asked Henry, the chauffeur, to let me out.

“I’d like to walk the rest of the way,” I explained, as I removed my coat, for it had turned unexpectedly warm in the May sun.

Henry pulled over and carefully put the car in park; despite the fact that he was the only person who drove it, Henry treated the Rolls as if it was on loan to him, as if he didn’t quite have a claim to the driver’s seat. His whiskered chin was set in a stubborn square, just like a cartoon character. Daddy required all the staff to be clean- shaven, yet for some reason he allowed Henry to be the one exception. “Miss Anne,” Henry began, with the familiarity of an uncle, and indeed, that’s how I thought of him, “Mr. Charles won’t like this. Neither will your parents. I was told to take you directly to the agency. That’s where you’re supposed to be, not in this—part of town.”

“Yes, and I’m telling you to let me out here, because I’d like the exercise. And the air.”

“In your condition, Miss Anne, I don’t think—”

“In my condition I require exercise.”

“You know how people can get, now. You know how Mr. Charles—”

“Yes, Henry, I know. But it’s been so long since I was out on my own like this. It’ll be an adventure, and our secret. I promise I won’t tell a soul! And if there’s any trouble, I’ll make up some story for Charles. No one will blame you.”

“Miss Anne.” Henry shook his head, then sighed. He did not know how to treat me now that I was expecting; no one really did. Mother was the only person in the family who didn’t look at me as if I was about to break into pieces at any moment. All the men—Charles included—were suddenly very afraid not only for me but of me. And while I didn’t feel fragile—indeed, now that I was nearing my eighth month, I felt more invincible than I ever had in my life—I was slyly learning to take advantage of their reluctance to contradict me.

“Henry, please. I need to walk for a bit—it’ll do me and the baby good. You understand, don’t you? That it’s for the baby?”

Henry removed his spectacles—a recent necessity, and he was very embarrassed by it—to give me one last paternal squint. Then he put them back on, sighed again, just in case I hadn’t quite registered his disapproval, and opened his door, walking around to open mine. “I’ll be in front of Miss Elisabeth’s office in exactly one hour.”

“Thank you—you’re a dear!” I pushed myself up and started to skip down the teeming sidewalk, feeling like a