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.
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 briefcase 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.
Wrapping myself up in a warm robe, I emerged from the bathroom with flushed skin, damp hair, so ready for bed I could already feel myself surrendering to the feathery, bottomless mattress. Just as I was turning down my covers, Betty burst into the room without knocking; she was breathless, as if she’d been running.
“Do you have the baby, Mrs. Lindbergh?”
“No. Maybe the colonel has him?” Without replying, she had wheeled and was out of the room and down the stairs. After a moment, during which I could only stand, strangely rooted to the floor as if my legs had forgotten how to move, Betty and Charles came running to me.
“Do you have the baby, Charles?” I asked, still puzzled. Why were we looking for little Charlie, at ten o’clock at night?
My husband pivoted and sprinted toward the nursery. I followed, and for a second I held my breath, remembering that the night-light was still on. But then I saw that
“Mr. Lindbergh, you’re not playing one of your jokes, are you?” Betty was wringing her hands.
Charles didn’t answer; with a grim look, he ran back to our bedroom.
“I came in to check on him like I always do, and it was cold,” Betty babbled. “So cold! I went to the crib, but he wasn’t there, and then I switched on the light and saw that the window was open. Where is he? Oh, where is he?”
Seeing her wild eyes, I began to tremble. Then Charles came back, a rifle in his hand—and my knees buckled. My baby was not where I had left him. For the first time in his life, I did not know where he was.
“Charlie, Charlie, where are you?” I shouted it, running to and fro, picking up the oddest things—a handkerchief, a book—as if he could somehow be hiding beneath them.
I tore through the upstairs, dimly aware that Charles and Betty, and now Ollie and Elsie, were doing the same thing; we were all running from room to room, meeting and bumping in the hall, and for a moment I had the strangest urge to laugh, for we resembled nothing more than characters in a Marx Brothers movie.
Then we swarmed downstairs, peeking under tables, inside cupboards, even looking up the chimney.
We moved upstairs again, to the nursery, where suddenly we all stopped just inside the door, simply staring, and I finally registered the open window, and what it could mean. And I saw, for the first time, the envelope—a small white envelope, the kind I might use for an invitation to lunch, or a thank-you note—on the windowsill.
“Charles!”
In a flash he was by my side; he saw what I was pointing to, and his jaw set in an awful way. He started to the sill, but then, with a visible effort, stopped himself.
“Call the police,” he barked, and Ollie dashed downstairs.
“The police? Open the envelope! See what it says, Charles—if it says where the baby is!” Oh, how could he not be ripping it open? I lunged past him to do it myself, but he grabbed me by both arms and held me back.
“No! Anne, no! We can’t—we have to wait for the police. This is—this is evidence. They have experts who can examine it for signs, even for fingerprints. We can’t touch it until they get here.”
“Evidence?” A horrible realization was trying to worm its way into my heart, my brain, although I fought against it, fought for one last precious moment of innocence. Reluctantly, I turned to face my husband; behind him I saw the small, sobbing outline of Betty; the plump, uncomprehending face of Elsie. I forced myself to meet Charles’s gaze; I found no shelter from my growing knowledge in his eyes—muddy with doubt and fear for the first time in our life together.
“Anne, they have taken our baby,” my husband told me, and I felt his grip on my shoulders, ready to catch me as I fell.
But I did not fall. I only nodded, and felt a coldness in my heart and an emptiness in my chest where my child’s head normally fit cozily, helplessly. Oh, so helplessly—Charlie was just a baby, he needed me, surely he was crying for me right now—
I ran to the open window, leaning out into the black, cold night with the wind howling, no stars, no moon, no comfort anywhere for my baby—
I called for him, over and over, until my throat felt like sandpaper, until my eyes were raw with tears, lashed by the cold wind.
And when I finally stopped, collapsing back into my husband’s arms, the only sound I heard was the thumping of that shutter, banging relentlessly against the house in reply.
