The Aviator's Wife

day and page through picture books about baby animals who came to a sad end because they were too curious.

Nor was I exempt; far from it. I had to account for every expenditure, even down to the shoelaces for each pair of tennis shoes and the box of toothpicks in the junk drawer. Naturally, I was expected somehow to intuit the exact hour of his homecoming, even when he failed to tell me; if he walked in the door and I wasn’t there to take his hat and coat, he would berate me for ten minutes before finally remembering to kiss me on the cheek.

Still, when Charles was gone, the house was noisy, relaxed; Ansy played her records or practiced her flute all day, the boys ran in and out in various sports uniforms; Reeve scampered about, clutching after her siblings, demanding that they include her in their activities. Dinnertime was like a zoo, as I simply sat and let them chatter to one another, knowing that I’d inadvertently hear the important things. This way, I learned that Jon was going to ask Sarah Price to prom; that Land had blown an axle on the Studebaker and had to borrow money from Grandma to get it fixed; that Scott was keeping a toad in his sock drawer; that Ansy’s best friend had told the rest of the cheerleading squad that she had halitosis; that Reeve was not going to get married, ever, because boys, especially boys like her brothers, were horrid.

Usually Reeve would end dinner by saying she missed Daddy, and they would all turn to the empty place at the head of the table, wistful expressions on their young faces—before pushing back their chairs and getting on with the evening, chattering and busy once more.

They may have missed him—I may have missed him. But when he was home, the air in the house was so impenetrable with tension I sometimes retreated to my cabin to breathe freely, and cry.

The evening after he returned from the Pacific, we had all sat in the kitchen, the children staring at him like he was a mythical creature who had somehow turned up in the middle of the suburbs, while Charles declared, jovially, “It’s a good thing I’m back, Anne, to whip these youngsters into shape.” I had laughed, the children had laughed; we were just so happy to have him home. But soon, “It’s a good thing I’m back, Anne, to whip these youngsters into shape” became a war cry; it set my teeth on edge, and caused the children to pale. I couldn’t bear to witness how he treated them; scolding Land for his C in English until the poor boy broke down—a thirteen-year- old, sobbing like a baby. Or following each child around for a day, making sure that his schedule was being followed exactly, watching so intently that overnight, Ansy developed a nervous tic, her eyes blinking uncontrollably at times—just like Charles’s had, back when the baby was taken, and my heart caught on the unexpectedly jagged edge of this realization.

Once, Charles went into Jon’s closet and threw every single item of clothing on the floor, simply because one sweater had been hung up and stretched out at the neck.

The children loved him, cautiously, respectfully—or loved the idea of him, anyway. Growing up a Lindbergh meant they had assumptions made of them wherever they went, and one of those assumptions was that they were brave, daring, and capable of great things. They each saw these characteristics in their father, of course, and admired him for them. And there were good times; odd, though, as the years went on, the details of these lost their sharpness, so that they became impressionistic paintings compared to the unmistakably photographic images of the bad.

But Charles organized outdoor games on a scale I never could: scavenger hunts and relay races and football, which he and the boys enjoyed with almost too much enthusiasm. Charles allowed his sons to tackle him with as much force as they had in them; force that grew in intensity as the resentments piled up. But Charles never complained, not even when Scott accidentally cracked one of his ribs.

He also encouraged Ansy’s love of writing, just as he always encouraged mine, even going so far as to print up her short stories and binding them so that they looked like real books. And he delighted in Reeve’s sense of humor, egging her on mischievously, playing silly jokes on her and allowing her to play them on him.

Of course he worried about their physical safety, teaching each basic self-defense when they were old enough to learn, drilling into them the importance of never talking to strangers or getting into other people’s cars, training a succession of guard dogs to watch over them when they were very young.

Still, we all found it easier to love and admire him when he was gone. The first day or so after Charles left again we all would continue to walk tentatively, weigh our words cautiously, looking over shoulders in case he was still there. Then, there would be a collective sigh; the air would be light and breathable, and gradually we would remember how to be ourselves again.

Until the next time he came home.

“Jon! Land! Come pick up this mess.” Still standing next to the telephone, I stared, horrified, at the collection of shoes and equipment in the hall. How had I let this happen? While I knew, rationally, that Charles was days away from coming home, I panicked as if he were about to walk in the front door. “Come down here this instant and pick this up! Both of you!”

Then I ran back to the kitchen, remembering the leaky drain. I’d never hear the end of it if he came home before it was fixed.

“MAY I COME IN?”

I glanced up; Charles was standing in the door of my writing retreat. Hastily I shut the book I was reading and thrust it beneath some papers, just as I had so often done as a schoolgirl. I picked up a pencil and began to scribble something on a piece of paper. “Of course, you can come in,” I replied, turning that brazen grin on him, just as I used to on the photographers.

“I’m not disturbing you?”

“No, not at all.” But I couldn’t bring myself to meet his gaze; I couldn’t let him see how miserably guilty I was. For he had built me a lovely little house out of his own belief in my ability to write, and so far I had done nothing in it but daydream, write in my diary, cry, and read novels. Trashy novels, at that; for some reason, the dense, poetry-filled literature I had loved for so long—Cervantes, Joyce, Proust—muddied my head, these days. I wondered if I had lost brain cells as well as hormones. I buried myself in popular fiction instead; the book I had hidden from Charles was Kathleen Winsor’s latest. Although I didn’t think it nearly so juicy as Forever Amber.

“Do you like the cabin?” Charles had to bend in order to get through the door; he had designed it, with considerable thoughtfulness, for my much smaller frame. So the windows were lower, the roof cozy. He could stand, just barely, once he got inside; the top of his head, now almost completely gray, with just flecks of reddish gold, was only an inch from the ceiling.

“Yes, I do. Thank you so much.” Unlike some of Charles’s gifts—like the motorcycle he had expected me to learn to ride, forgetting that I had a balance problem that made it impossible for me even to ride a bicycle—so far the cabin had remained a symbol of his thoughtfulness; any sense of failure to make good use of it was only on my end, not his. While he urged, he did not criticize, as he might once have—and perhaps I’d been too reliant on his criticism, after all? For left to myself, I couldn’t make any progress. Despite the peacefulness of the setting, the waiting sense of calm, almost as if the very beams, made from ancient pine trees, were content to bide their time until I was ready, I felt guilty every time I entered. I had done nothing worthy of such a gift other than sign permission slips and write out grocery lists. And read trashy novels.

“I wanted to talk to you about that special project. The one I spoke to you about when I called last week.” Charles pulled up a chair; in his hands were three thick notebooks. “I’ve been working on something, as you know, for quite a while. It’s a narrative, an account of my flight to Paris.” He colored a little, and looked nervously out the window—but he laid the notebooks gently in my lap.

“But—you wrote an account back in ’twenty-seven, didn’t you?”

“Oh, that.” Charles snorted, leaning back in his chair until it creaked dangerously. “I would prefer to forget all about that. A publisher paid me a small fortune to spend a weekend in a hotel scribbling something down that they then had a real writer translate. I was so green, I didn’t know any better. This was right after I returned to America. So many people wanted me to do this, go there, speak here, put my name to that, and I hadn’t yet learned to say no. But that account is not right. It’s not—true. Only now can I look back and see that young man, see what the odds truly were, the dangers, and the importance of it all. I’ve been working on this for a long time, since before the war, when we were in England.”

“You’ve been writing since England?” I couldn’t help it; I felt a punch to the gut, as if I’d been betrayed, somehow. How had he found the time, amid all his flying, the politics of America First,