The Aviator's Wife

S MOTHER DENOUNCES DAUGHTER

”

I was not surprised by the reaction. And my mother did not denounce me.

She did, however, burst into tears when she first read my little book, a pamphlet, really, called Wave of the Future. Con told me this, later, after she refused to take the money I earned from it for Bundles for Britain. And I couldn’t blame her. I tried to have it both ways, fooling myself into believing I could please both my family and my husband. Of course, I ended up pleasing no one. Least of all myself.

I wrote of the past, and the future; of democracy and its legacy of chaos, of turmoil, of leaders elected promising one thing and delivering another. I compared the democratic leaders to the modern dictator, so unlike Napoleon, Nero, the czars. The modern dictator, I wrote in words suggested to me by my husband, recognized the world was changing, and that a new order was being established, based on new economic principles, new social forces.

I decried the treatment of the Jews in Germany, neatly failing to mention my husband’s views about the Jews in America. I said I could not be loyal to the Nazi government as it existed now, but that beneath its tainted flag had been something good, something optimistic, before it got derailed.

I explained how people who loved this country—people like my husband—spoke out against the futility of fighting this future precisely because of their patriotism; how they wanted America first to be healed, to be protected, to be set on its own glorious path to the future. Not destroyed by a war that was probably unwinnable— or by coming to the aid of an empire long past its usefulness.

I signed my name to all of this. I posed for a photograph at my desk, looking pensive. My husband embraced me and assured me I had done the right thing not only for my country but for myself. This would be the beginning of a true literary career, he enthused, just a tad too eager. Hadn’t I always wanted to write a great book? I was well on my way now.

He was wrong, of course. Although he never admitted it. But reaction against my essay—more than five thousand words, reproduced as a slim volume, most of which ended up in bonfires—was most strong in the very literary community to which I had always aspired. The dreamy young men of my youth were now editors and publishers and critics. More than one wrote to me personally, asking how someone as bright as myself could be poisoned so thoroughly by someone as evil as my husband.

Smith College also wrote, asking me to please stop saying that I was a graduate.

Slings and arrows—bullets and grenades. I felt attacked from all sides; I did not completely understand what I had done, only why I had done it, and that reason did not seem enough in the sobering aftermath of publication. I was shaken, battered, and acutely—surprisingly—resentful. At first, I found refuge in my newborn daughter, delighting in her perfection, hiding from the world in my childbed. But for a week, I found myself unable to say more than “Good morning” and “Good evening” to an annoyingly affectionate Charles, who, for the first time in our marriage, began his day by asking what he could do for me.

The conversations I had with myself, however, were endless—and even less satisfying.

So by 1941, both Lindberghs were hated equally and once, I would have rejoiced in that; that my own actions were finally considered as significant as my husband’s. Our unlisted telephone rang and rang, and every time I picked it up I heard hatred. Often inarticulate hatred; spewing and venom, not real words. But hatred doesn’t require a common language to be understood.

Jon came home from school with a quivering chin, wondering why his father was a traitor. Land came home from school with a black eye, defending his traitor father. The new baby, Anne Junior, called Ansy, was the only innocent in our household; now almost a year, her happy gurglings and funny talk were a balm upon my soul. I loved to pick her up and hold her, walking from room to room, as if she were my talisman against evil.

In September 1941, just a couple of months after the frightening rally at Madison Square Garden, Charles gave another speech, this one in Des Moines, Iowa; a speech that I warned him not to give. A speech I knew would be the one he would be remembered for, despite the hundreds he had given since that night he landed alone in Paris, the world at his feet.

The sinking of the Greer had just occurred; the sentiment of the country was even more resigned to war. Many of those who had initially supported Charles had turned on him; the crowds were smaller, composed equally of those for and those against him. It was a desperate time, a time when the country seemed to be dancing on the edge, knowing that soon, too soon, we would all be hurtled into the abyss. Dresses were gayer that season, more garish, more colorful than I could remember; songs were faster; people laughed louder, as if to cover up the booms of the war guns across the ocean. Charles knew that he had to make his most exhaustive, reasoned case to date; he must leave no question unasked, however painful.

He began the speech by listing the three groups he believed were agitating for war: the British, for obvious survival reasons; the Roosevelt administration, which desired to use war to increase its power.

“It is not difficult to understand why Jewish people desire the overthrow of Nazi Germany,” he continued, moving on to the third group, and I felt my stomach tighten, my breath sour. Sitting in the tiny living room of a rented home on Martha’s Vineyard—we had to leave Long Island when we could no longer walk along the beach without having invectives hurled our way—I listened to my husband on the radio, his voice tinny but sure, confident.

Speaking up at last, I had begged him to rewrite his speech. “This is going too far. You’re going to come off as anti-Semitic. And you’re not.” Are you? I’d wanted to ask, but could not.

“Nonsense.”

“Charles, just by mentioning the Jews, you will color yourself the same as Hitler and the Nazis. You don’t understand what’s happening now. People will accuse you of Jew-baiting. Listen to me! For once, listen to what I’m saying—you do not know what you’re about to do.”

He shook his head. So caught up was he in this mission, he no longer needed any crew. He was flying solo again, right into the cyclone of history.

“The greatest danger to this country lies in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio, and our government,” he continued to broadcast, talking about the Jews. “We cannot allow the natural passions and prejudices of other peoples to lead our country to destruction.”

Other peoples. The Jews—to my husband, they were other people. Not like him. Even if that was not what he intended, it was what would be inferred, and now it was too late. He had said it. Immediately I thought of Harry Guggenheim. Such a dear man; such a good friend.

He’d stopped returning our phone calls a year ago.

I switched the radio off, too sickened to listen to more. I jumped up, desperate to know where the children were; I felt I must gather them close to me and keep them safe. After I made sure that the boys were playing quietly in their room and Ansy was gurgling in her crib, I locked the doors and shut the windows. Whether it was to keep evil inside or out, I could not have decided at that moment.

And if evil was in the shape of a tall, clear-eyed man with stern lips and an unshakable sense of his own right, I could not have decided that, either.

THE PUBLIC OUTRAGE after Des Moines was so vehement that America First almost disbanded. Ultimately, it didn’t matter that they decided to carry on, broken and battered. Soon an event occurred that was larger even than my husband; the headlines, for the first time, more hysterical than they had been announcing his landing in Paris, or the kidnapping of our son.

Pearl Harbor. The bombs dropped—that afternoon, as we huddled by the radio, Charles could only repeat his astonishment that the Japanese had aircraft capable of such long range—and the world changed. America First disbanded after Charles issued a statement urging all Americans to unite, regardless of past differences; he grandly acknowledged that our country had been attacked and naturally we must now fight back. All of us.

Then he telephoned the White House, eager to report for duty; even admitting to the secretary with whom he spoke that his recent political stand might cause complications—such a bitter pill for him to swallow, but he did it manfully, as he did everything else. However, he continued, he hoped the president would agree that differences must be set aside for the good of the country.

While he was waiting for an answer, Charles was asked, offhand, by a reporter about the disbanding of America First. He said, truthfully, that he was saddened for his country. “It was unfortunate,” he added, that the