the work on the profusion pump, the war? When I, merely bearing and raising children, found it so difficult to focus on writing about anything other than the insipid details of my day?
Fresh evidence, once more, that I was less than him.
Swallowing my wounded pride, I managed not to hurl the notebooks to the floor. “So, what do you want me to do?” I asked instead, opening one of them; Charles’s handwriting filled each page, and there were notes and scribbles in all the margins, little arrows inserted into the text.
“Be my crew again,” he said simply. “You’re the writer in the family.” I winced at this, but I don’t think he saw. “
I was silent, paging through the notebooks, not really seeing them at all except as evidence of his accomplishment, of the different expectations of men and women.
Because in two years, it would be the twenty-fifth anniversary of his flight to Paris. Charles Lindbergh was no fool.
As I studied my husband, leaning forward in his chair, his hands nervously gripping his knees, a pleading softness in his eyes I hadn’t seen in so long, I felt myself as helpless as always in his presence. There were nights when I dreamed of our early pioneering flights, the closeness, the reliance on each other, only to wake up in my empty bed so lonely I hugged his untouched pillow to my chest, just to have something to hold on to. There were nights when the fury of abandonment surged so forcefully through me I couldn’t sleep, let alone dream, and I paced the terrace instead, a wild-haired creature, smoking a cigarette precisely because he wasn’t there to disapprove, even though normally I had no taste for it.
But seeing his need for me, a miracle, a mirage I was afraid might disappear once I stepped outside of this enchanted cabin, I had no choice but to acquiesce. Or so I told myself; I was, after all, the aviator’s wife. I had made that decision, once and for all, back before the war.
“What kind of schedule do you have in mind?” I knew, of course, that he would have one. His face cleared; he grinned and squeezed my hand in approval.
“Good girl. Well, I thought that you can go over what I have so far—it’s merely a draft, of course—and then make some notes. I’ll go over what you’ve noted and incorporate it, and then—so on. There are a couple of publishers interested; I put out some feelers. I wasn’t completely sure that anyone would want to publish this after—well, my reputation, in some circles. There are certain—there are some Jews in the publishing world, you know.” He frowned, and picked up a pencil off my desk, twirling it around in his long, tapered fingers. “I do feel as if—as if things got a bit out of hand. I truly believed what I said at the time, however, and what else could I do but speak what I felt was the truth? But people change. I’ve changed. I’m not sure, though, that the public will necessarily believe that I have. I can only hope this might help.”
His brow was furrowed, his path obviously not as clear as it had always been. He was thinking only of himself, and his own reputation; he had never once bothered to think about mine, even after he saw the damage done by my essay.
But the truth was the world did not wait breathlessly for
Anger, anger, anger. I was enormous with it these days; constantly stifling one grievance only to feel another pop up in its place. My skin felt twitchy, trying to contain them all. Sadness, I had known; terror, anxiety, occasionally joy. But anger was novel, it was frightening. It could also be, I was only beginning to suspect, exhilarating.
I swallowed this latest grievance and placed the notebooks on my desk, piling them up so that their black spines lined up, like a stack of dominoes. “All right. When would you like my notes?”
“I have to leave tomorrow for Germany, to Berlin, for Pan Am. I’ll be back in a month.”
“A month? You’ll be gone an entire month?” My heart sank even as I silently cursed him for doing something so unexpected as to make me miss him again.
“Yes. That should give you plenty of time, I trust?”
“I should think so. Jon can drive the girls to piano lessons, and if Land doesn’t make the baseball team this spring, then I don’t have to—”
“Anne.” Charles held his hand up. “Stop. I don’t want to hear all that. You’ll manage it all, you always do.”
I waved his hand away, my skin twitchy once more. “It’s not as easy as you think it is, Charles. But you don’t know, because you’re never here. You just assume I can manage, when really you have no idea—”
“If I assume so it’s because you always do, which should be taken as a compliment. And I’m here now, Anne,” he said mildly. And I understood that this was supposed to be enough.
But was it?
I wanted it to be. Didn’t I? I wasn’t sure anymore, but I was afraid to break this spell, this rare moment of the two of us spinning in the same orbit, sharing the same view once again. So I made myself believe that it was. With a wave, I managed that forced, fake grin again as he left my cabin; then I opened the first page of the first notebook.
And I began to read.
OH, WHY COULDN’T I have known this boy! This brave boy of ’27, this pure, simple, unspoiled boy? When I met him, he was already on the other side of the ocean; already guarded, aware of his place in the history books.
Somehow, Charles had found a way to throw off the layers of expectation and disappointment that the years, the world, had thrust upon him, and to reclaim the heart and the voice of that boy he once had been. I didn’t know how he had done it. I knew that I could never again recapture my own innocence, my belief in the goodness, the rightness, of things. The baby’s kidnapping had forever changed me, and finally I understood that was why I had such difficulty writing
But in his recounting of the singular event of his lifetime, Charles Lindbergh had found a way to go back, almost like a hero in an H. G. Wells novel. He had time traveled, truly and honestly, almost twenty-five years in the past.
Writing with a simplicity that was almost poetry—and befitting the farm boy he had been, not the tarnished god he had become—he wrote of the dangers facing him as he prepared for his historic flight, the difficulty finding backers, the ridicule he found at every turn as more experienced men than he laughed at the notion of a fair-haired boy taking home the greatest prize aviation had to offer. He described the hours spent flying the mail route over a country that was no more, a country of barns and dusty roads and a few telephone poles, people running out of houses at the strange sight of his biplane in the air, only a few hundred feet up. The hours he spent going over the practicalities of such a flight, the lists he made on the back of receipts and maps.
And then the flight itself—Charles had built a masterpiece of suspense, the reader perched on his shoulder, holding his breath even though, of course, the outcome was assured. And the landing, when it came—the explosion of joy, yet always this young boy standing in the midst, perplexed, still so focused on his flight that he wanted to stay with his plane, and had to be forcibly removed from it by the mayor of Paris.
His brilliance was in ending the narrative there, in that moment—the moment before he understood that the world was now forever in his cockpit. The moment before he started to suspect that there were punishments for those who dared to dream so big, to fly so high.
I was stunned by his draft; stunned, and envious. Yet it was still unpolished; there were gaps in the narrative, particularly before the flight began, and I had ideas of how to fill them.
