“Me, too. Land cries when you go away. I don’t. Not anymore.”
“Oh, my boy! Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Because Father doesn’t like it when I cry. Land’s still just a baby, though.”
“Come here!” I opened my arms wide, and he ran to them; I hugged him so tight, his face was red when finally I let him go. “I don’t mind if you cry. I cry, too, sometimes. I
“You do? Then why do you always go when Father asks?”
“Will Violet be there? And Betty Gow?”
“Where did you—How did you hear of those names?” I asked him, shocked.
Charles had forbidden me ever to speak of the events of ’32 to our surviving children. He had decided they did not need to know what had happened to the brother they would never meet. As far as Jon knew, he was our firstborn. As far as he knew, there’d never been a Betty, or an Elsie, or an Ollie. Or a Violet.
“I heard someone talk about her,” Jon replied, even as he was terribly absorbed in rolling his wooden truck, so that it made little tracks in the pile, across the carpet.
“Who?” Who would talk about this in front of my son? I wanted to shake some sense into such an idiot.
“Germaine and Alfred.”
“Oh.” Our Parisian couple. Who, I decided in that instant, would not be accompanying us to America.
“Betty. That’s like Grandma’s name,” my son continued in his measured way. Jon was patient, obedient, utterly unlike any other six-year-old; I often wondered if he had absorbed all the terror and drama surrounding me, while in the womb. And so knew that he must make up for it, once born.
Land—my little Land, my Coronation baby, as he was born in London the day King George VI was crowned— was playing less obediently on the other side of the room, systematically destroying a plant, leaf by leaf. I was too stunned to stop him.
“What did—what did they say about Violet?” I tried to keep my voice casual but it did waver; I could not think of her without wanting to cry—guilty tears, more than anything. While I had disciplined myself not to weep for my child, I was not able to do so for the others whose lives were also cut short that terrible May. That so many were wrecked, ruined—tragedy following tragedy, innocents destroyed because Charles and I flew too high, too close to the sun—was truly more than I could bear.
“Germaine said Violet killed herself. Mama, how can someone do that? Is it true?” Now Jon did stop playing; he looked up at me with eyes so pure and innocent, I flinched; I did not want to be the one to introduce these awful notions.
“Someone can do that, yes, but it’s a terrible, terrible thing, darling. A weak thing. Now, let’s not talk about this—it’s not very nice. Someday, maybe, you can ask me again. But let’s not talk about it now, especially not in front of Father when we see him again. He has a lot on his mind, these days. Promise?”
Jon smiled; there was nothing he liked better than having to promise. He squared his little shoulders, adjusting them to take on this newest responsibility. When he was satisfied he was fully prepared, he nodded.
“Promise, Mama!”
WE WERE NOT MOVING to Germany, after all. Not after the evening of November 9, 1938.
The night that even Charles couldn’t justify; the night that the German authorities destroyed any remaining Jewish businesses and all the synagogues, killed an unknown number of Jews, and imprisoned an even greater number in enforced labor camps. It was a night of such brutal violence that Charles was appalled.
“I don’t understand why Hitler had to resort to this. It’s unnecessary. Beneath him,” he muttered, reading the English newspapers; at the time, we were in Iliac, our home near Alexis Carrel and his wife in Brittany. We had no electricity there, we had to use a gas-powered generator and a radio telephone. We were almost a nation unto ourselves. So isolated were we, I couldn’t quiet the suspicion that Charles wouldn’t stop moving until he had hidden the boys and me completely from the world. Which was why I had clung to the idea of Germany, where even Charles believed we could live a normal life; not the life of fugitives.
Until Kristallnacht.
“We can’t move there now, Charles. We simply can’t.” I was disgusted by the images reported; the beaten and bloodied men in the street, the women and children cowering, the senseless destruction. The shards of glass, the
“No, I don’t see how. If there’s going to be more violence—and I can’t deny that there might be—it’s not the place for us. But where is? These are important times. We need to be more available than we are here, at least during the winter. If there is war, and I’m afraid that despite Chamberlain, there are people in the British government intent upon it, England is not the place to be. Maybe France?”
“Why not—America? Back home?” I looked at him, not hiding the hope in my eyes. The truth was, even in the excitement of planning our home in Berlin, the promises I held out for myself, like little presents to be opened at a later time—promises of shopping and theater and a real social life, unencumbered by the press—I missed my country. I missed New Jersey, primeval and green in the summer, a Currier and Ives painting in the winter. I missed hearing English sloppily spoken, at least according to my veddy, veddy proper British acquaintances.
I missed my family, in particular—what little of it I had left; I still felt guilty for leaving Mother. No amount of letters crossing the fathomless ocean between us could ever make up for the remorse of running away when she needed me most.
“I don’t think so,” Charles said grimly, turning the British edition of
“Joe Kennedy telegraphed me last night, Anne. Do you know what he wanted? He wanted me to return the medal.”
“The ambassador asked that? Do you think it’s his wish, or someone else’s?” While the new ambassador to Great Britain, Joseph Kennedy, was known to be a loose cannon, this sounded more like President Roosevelt.
“I don’t know. I don’t think I will, though. Why? It was presented to me on behalf of a government, thanking me for my pioneering flight. If I return it, I might as well return all the other medals on behalf of all the other governments in the world. It’s not political, it wasn’t given to me in that spirit, and I don’t see why anyone would think it is.” Charles frowned, narrowing his gaze, while his fingers drummed edgily on the stack of newspapers beside him.
I agreed with him. But I also knew better. In these days, everything was political; everything was full of significance.
So we packed up again in December 1938 and moved to a little apartment in Paris, right across from the Bois de Boulogne so that Jon could have somewhere to play, and events appeared to calm down. The Munich Pact was still fresh in everyone’s minds; Chamberlain’s little white piece of paper signaling “peace in our time” stopped the ditch-digging, the sandbag piling that had been occurring on both sides of the channel. And we enjoyed the early months of 1939 in Paris; I bought my first Chanel dress, I took the children to museums, and we even dined with the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. Like everyone else, I had been captivated by their romance, and was eager to meet the woman who prompted a king to give up his throne.
She was steel encased in the finest Chanel had to offer; so thin yet with large, masculine hands, a wide, snapping mouth. He had tiny eyes, was more feminine than she was with his slight frame and soft, dainty hands, and was the most boring man I had ever met. Charles yawned openly in his face during an earnest monologue about whether or not white shoes for men were de rigueur for summer.
As for my increasingly political husband, he continued to shuttle between Paris and London, giving his advice concerning their military air fleets. He even went, secretly, back to Berlin; France enlisted Charles’s aid in persuading Germany to sell them some planes in order to shore up their nonexistent air force. Charles, doubtful, did use his influence, to no avail.
