The Aviator's Wife

“Oh, mercy!” And with a strangled sob, she put me through to Elisabeth’s bedroom.

“Anne? Is there any news?” Elisabeth’s voice was panicked.

“No—no, nothing. I only wanted to—I want to ask you to come out here. To stay for a while. To stay with me, I mean. For a while.”

“Oh, Anne! My poor darling! Of course. I’ll come at once.”

“You don’t mind? After all this—”

“Anne, stop it.”

“I’ve missed you.”

“I’ve missed you, too, dearest. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

“Thank you,” I whispered, as if Mother could hear, in those two words, the reason why we’d been estranged.

“Shhh,” my sister murmured into my ear. “Shhh. Now go lie down, Anne.”

“Stop telling me what to do,” I protested, just as stubbornly as when I was ten and she was twelve.

“Never!” As she hung up, she was laughing. And the years and distance between us disappeared.

Mother took the telephone and placed it back in the wall nook. “Sweetheart, you must get some rest. You look dreadful. Where’s Charles gone off to?”

I shook my head and rubbed the small of my back. “He wouldn’t tell me. He takes phone calls at all hours, he meets late at night with men he won’t let me see. He’s—he’s having a difficult time.”

Colonel Schwarzkopf, while still respectful, careful never to contradict Charles in public or in the press, no longer asked Charles for permission to proceed. The colonel conducted rigorous interviews with our household staff every day, and he no longer hid them from Charles. He seemed particularly interested in the staff of Next Day Hill; he was paying special attention to Violet Sharpe. Mother was very upset at the questioning; she felt protective of Violet, as the girl was so excitable and simple. I liked Violet; despite her occasional hysterics, she had always been sweet and loyal, given to happy tears whenever she received a present or a bonus or even an unexpected day off.

But I couldn’t forget that she was the one who had answered the phone when I called to have Betty come down to us that fateful Tuesday. Violet was the most logical person to have alerted someone to our change in plans. Charles was furious at having his authority and his judgment questioned. He never knew that I was the one responsible for it. I wouldn’t have denied it if he’d asked, but he never did. Perhaps he didn’t want to know.

His fury couldn’t disguise his despair, however. I pretended I didn’t see the smudge of exhaustion under his eyes, the way his clothes hung off him now, the exhausted blinking that overcame him at times.

This morning, Charles had mumbled something about a new lead before rushing off to meet another stranger. I nodded trustfully and, as I had every day since my child had gone missing, told my husband that I believed in him. Then I went into the cold, empty nursery and stared out the window as Charles started up the car and roared down the drive, all the policemen standing respectfully at attention.

At times like that, I missed believing in my husband almost more than I missed my child.

“You go upstairs,” Mother insisted again, taking the newspaper with that awful headline out of my hand. “Rest. Take care of that baby you’re carrying.”

I nodded. I was so weary of people telling me what to do. Yet I went upstairs, intending not to rest but to write. In these last weeks, I’d started writing poetry again. Dark poems, hopeless poems. Poems of loss and despair; sonnets of impending grief I prayed I would one day find and laugh at for their absurdity.

“Mrs. Lindbergh?”

I looked up, startled; Betty was standing outside my open door. Still in a denim nurse’s dress, a white apron around her waist. But I looked at her now through new eyes; our roles were finally as they should be. I was the mother. My loss, my grief, was so much more monumental than hers, and I felt, finally, older. Ancient, actually; every day my child was missing seemed to add years to my life so that I was surprised, when I saw my reflection, that I was not stoop-shouldered and arthritic. Surprised to find my hair still dark brown, and not turned white overnight.

Betty, on the other hand, seemed much younger; uncertain, finally, for the first time I’d known her. Uncertain of her role in a childless home; uncertain of her grief; how much to show, how much to hide. Uncertain of our loyalty, Charles’s and mine. And although I did not blame her, I could not look at her without anger and recrimination.

She had held him, been privileged to care for him, far more often than I had. For so much of his life, I’d been gone, and I resented her bitterly for it. But I was most angry at myself. For following Charles whenever he snapped his fingers at me; for abandoning my son, over and over and over.

“Mrs. Lindbergh, I must talk to you,” Betty whispered, shutting the door behind her. I motioned to a chair just by the window, and I took the one opposite. The woods that surrounded our house were still stripped, naked; spring seemed an eternity away. And I hoped it would remain so; I couldn’t bear to see the world come back to life if my child wasn’t with me to share it.

“What is it, Betty?”

She moved her chair closer to me and took my hand; startled, I drew back. She’d never touched me before; she, who had showered my baby with kisses and hugs, had never even shaken my hand.

“Please, please, forgive me, Mrs. Lindbergh!”

“Forgive you? Forgive you for what?”

“For not checking in on him enough that night. For not making sure the shutters closed. For—”

“For telling Red that we’d be here? For telling someone else?”

“No! No, I don’t think—you don’t believe Red is involved, do you? Or anyone else at Next Day Hill? Mrs. Lindbergh, of all people, you don’t believe—why, the colonel doesn’t believe any of us is involved! How can you?”

“Because I’m Charlie’s mother! Because I don’t know what to believe anymore! No one knew we stayed here at the house that night except you, and Elsie and Ollie, and the people at Next Day Hill. No one else knew! If anyone had been planning this, they would never have planned it for a Tuesday night, because we’d never been here on a Tuesday before!” Unleashing all my darkest suspicions, I lunged toward Betty. “But you knew. You told Red. Who else did you tell? Who?” Now I was shaking her, and she was crying, “No one, no one!” over and over again, but still I shook her, demanding an answer.

“Anne!”

Betty and I jumped apart; she whirled away from me, weeping; I spun toward the window as Charles charged into the room, a package in his hands.

“Anne!”

Still breathing raggedly, I clenched my fists, which still itched to lash out at someone—my fury, smothered for so long, was blazing. My husband ran toward me.

“Anne, you remember James Condon?”

“Ma’am,” Mr. Condon said with an absurd bow. “Mrs. Lindbergh, it is my privilege to greet you again.”

“Yes,” I said, as I retreated a few steps, my mind whirling, still reworking the conversation with Betty while now forced to absorb a stranger in my bedroom. And then I glared at Charles. What else was he going to put me through? How many crackpots was he going to bring me?

Last week, he’d presented to me a psychic, a woman clad in perfumed scarves and cheap jewelry, who grabbed my palm with her dirty hand and told me that it foretold a great joy sometime soon. The week before, he’d introduced me to a medium who proposed holding a seance in the baby’s room.

Condon was just the latest in a series of shysters and charlatans, an obsequious person who had gallantly (his own word) volunteered to serve as go-between between “the hero of our age” and the “odious kidnappers.” Last week Charles had brought him here to meet me, even allowed him to sleep in the nursery and take one of the baby’s toys with him, in case he had a chance to meet with the kidnappers in person.

“Anne, you remember, I told you this morning about a new lead. Condon here put an ad in the paper, and what do you think? They contacted him! He met with them!”

“It is my patriotic duty, madam.” Another bow. “I am just a citizen, a private citizen. The kidnappers, however, must feel my sincerity, for they did indeed meet with me.”

“Anne, sit down,” Charles said breathlessly. I’d never seen him so excited; his eyes were wide, his face