The Aviator's Wife

eighteen months of age—”

“Anne, the baby. The baby—he’s with Daddy now.” My mother wept, and it was as if the two voices, one so clinical, the other so sympathetic, were a fugue, weaving in and out of my understanding; tearing apart my heart.

“Oh—oh!” I looked to each of them for confirmation. It was there, in Colonel Schwarzkopf’s suddenly glistening eyes, his jaw working back and forth; in Mother’s terribly aged face, sadness pulling every feature down like a giant hand had erased everything good that had ever happened to her.

My heart—it disappeared. Disappeared with my child; I knew I’d never know either of them again. I was simply an empty vessel, a shell, and my spirit was floating away from it. From somewhere near the ceiling, I saw myself sitting on that bed, my mother’s arms around me—

And then, still floating, drifting above—but not quite flying—I saw the empty crib. The empty room. My empty arms. And my heart reminded me angrily, vengefully, that it would not disappear so easily as my child; it shattered, piercing my soul, the shards then splintering into diamonds with sharp, unpolished edges. “I knew,” I heard myself say, gasping for air, for reason. “I think I knew from the beginning—”

He was gone. My golden child, my sweet, serious little man. Gone. No more on this earth, no more in my life. Taken.

Taken. Taken. Taken. Dashed.

“How—how did he—?” I was having trouble breathing. I fought to stay conscious—I fought to hurt, to feel. I had to do it, for my child. It was the only thing I could do for him now—or ever. Forever. It yawned ahead of me, a great abyss of darkness and sadness and I knew, in that moment, that forever I would be searching for him. Forever I would see an empty crib, an empty place at the table, an empty date on the calendar that should mark a birthday, a graduation, a wedding.

I will love you forever and ever, I used to sing to the babe in my arms—oh, he was so little! So dear! Forever had seemed like a gift then. Now it was a prison sentence.

“A blow to the head,” Colonel Schwarzkopf replied, that gruff voice incredibly gentle, although he still stood just inside the door, as if afraid his presence could do more harm than his words already had.

“Oh!” And as he said it, I felt it—that blow. To my heart. I cried out, reeling from it, just as my boy must have. But unlike him, mercifully, I knew I would have to relive this blow, over and over, every day, for the rest of my life.

“We think he died instantly, Mrs. Lindbergh. Almost immediately, in fact—the night of the kidnapping. For the body was—it had been there awhile.”

“How, then—how do you know it was him?”

“Dental records, physical resemblance, his hair, for instance—also, some fabric; it appears to match the sleep shirt that Betty made that night. In fact—Betty helped identify the body.”

“Oh, no!” Even in my grief, I felt for her, such a young girl having to perform such a horrible task.

“Your husband is on his way to the coroner’s to do the same. We need a family member, you see.”

“Charles! Oh, how did you—where was he?”

“We contacted him on the radio—he was on a boat, waiting for some word from that Curtis fellow. He’s on his way now. These people played him for a fool, Mrs. Lindbergh.”

“Oh, Colonel, you can’t tell him that. You can’t ever tell him that!” It would kill Charles to think that someone had been laughing at him all along, playing him, as the colonel said, for a fool. He was pride—all pride. His reputation meant so much to him. He couldn’t—

No! I would not think of Charles now. My thoughts belonged, finally, to my baby. Suddenly I saw him. I saw him lying in the leaves, alone, cold and still, without me. Had he really died right away? Or had he suffered? Had he called for me—his face, tear-streaked, appeared before me, the blue eyes so innocent, the cleft chin quivering, and I couldn’t bear it any longer; I heard a high-pitched wail, a howl of grief, and I knew it was me. I didn’t want Charles, I didn’t want Colonel Schwarzkopf or Mother or air or water or life—all I wanted was my baby. I needed him as he must have needed me; I ached for him against my chest, in my arms; I reached and reached, blindly, clutching nothing but air—empty, useless air.

At some point Colonel Schwarzkopf left me. Much later, my mother crept out, and I heard her sobbing in the hall outside my bedroom. Then I fell asleep—or collapsed; all I remember was blackness, heat, my clothes sticking to me, my hair plastered in strings down my neck, my breath sour against my fist, which I still held to my mouth as if this was a sorrow that could be stifled.

When I awoke, I was already sobbing. This time, I had no blissful moment of forgetting; I remembered in an instant what had happened. My baby was dead. My ribs ached, as if from a terrible palsy. My throat felt raw; I didn’t think I could ever open my eyes again, they were so red and swollen.

I heard a cough, a stir. Too shattered to lift my head, I opened my eyes, and what I saw was my husband, slumped in a chair next to my bed. His clothes rumpled, his face unshaven, his hair uncombed. I wondered if this was how he looked when he landed in Paris, after being awake for more than thirty-six hours straight.

I didn’t want him to be here. I didn’t want to deal with him, to be strong so as not to displease him, to think hopeful thoughts—to look for Polaris instead of the brightest planet. I hated him, and I wanted to have one thing —my grief—all to myself.

“Anne.” He rubbed his eyes wearily. I was aware that it was dark outside my window, even though the curtains had been tightly drawn. It was nighttime. How long had I slept?

Still I lay, my head, my entire aching body, pressed so deeply into the mattress by the terrible weight of all that I now knew.

“You’re awake,” Charles said. His voice was hoarse and flat. “Anne, they—I decided to have the body—the baby—the body cremated.”

His body—gone? I couldn’t hold Charlie one last time, couldn’t say goodbye?

“How dare you?” Rage—finally, blissfully, rage. It pushed me up, clenched my hands, blessed me with speech. “How dare you? Why? Why didn’t you ask me what I wanted? He’s my baby! Mine!”

Charles looked away. “They took photographs of him, Anne. The press. Before I got there, they broke in and someone took a photograph of his body. There wasn’t—he wasn’t—our baby, not as we want to remember him. I couldn’t let that happen again. Do you understand me? I had to prevent that from happening—they can’t take him away from us like that. They have no right.”

I tasted horror and revulsion as they rose up in my throat, and I thought I was going to be sick. I shut my eyes against the spinning room.

Charles brought me a glass of water, placed it carefully on the bedside table, then took his seat once more. He did not reach out to me, and I did not reach out to him.

Sometime later, I fell asleep again; it was a fitful sleep from which, occasionally, I found myself swimming up, as if I were afraid to drown in it, before deciding it didn’t matter.

And all the while, my husband sat watching me. Once, I heard him whisper, “I thought I could bring him back home. I thought—I knew—I would bring the baby back to you.”

I did not know to whom he was talking, whom he was trying to convince; himself, or me.

IT IS A TERRIBLE THING when you can’t see your dead child. When you can’t touch him, play with his hair, put his favorite toy in his sleeping arms and whisper goodbye.

You are doomed, then, forever to look for him. Because you can’t help but think, in unguarded moments when you release the tight grip of your own hands upon your sanity, I don’t know for sure that he is dead. I don’t know, because I didn’t see him. And so you look for him wherever you go. On the subway. In crowds. At playgrounds.

Inescapably, time passes. And you know that while you still search for the sunny toddler, the golden-haired angel, if he really was alive he would be five. Then ten. And now—

An adult.

Men write to me, still, and tell me they’re my son. The Lindbergh baby, they write, as if there was only the one. Grown men who have lived their entire lives tell me they miss me, and wonder how I could have given them up. They assure me it was all a mistake, a hoax, a practical joke gone wrong. That they have waited all their lives for me to find them.