Melanie Benjamin - The Aviator's Wife

Charles’s mouth was open this entire time; finally I had to take a breath, giving him a chance to speak. There was something new in his eyes; not that faint arrogance from last night, nor that probing scientific gaze. “You don’t feel sick? You’re not dizzy?”

I shook my head, for now I was not. “No, not a bit!”

“Good girl. I’d better get you back home before your parents wonder where you are. But I would be honored to take you flying again, Miss—Anne.”

“Oh, good,” I said, falling silent again. I couldn’t think of anything else to say; for once in my life I’d said all that I knew, all that I’d felt.

We walked back to the building in silence; we got in the car in silence. We rode back through the awakening streets of Mexico City in silence.

What need was there for words, when we had just shared the sky?

BACK TO EARTH.

I fell, with a thud, back into my life. After leaving Mexico—on a train once more, such pedestrian means of travel; I couldn’t help but imagine flying back north, like a migrating bird, instead—I returned to Smith. Classes, papers, the frenzy of that last semester before graduation, with all the meetings and forms to fill out and final projects to plan—all reached out to me, like clinging tendrils of ivy, pinning me to the ground.

I told no one but my roommate about my secret solo flight with Colonel Lindbergh. Elizabeth Bacon didn’t believe me. Why should she? The newspapers had been full of accounts of the official flight the next day; the one in which Elisabeth, Con, Mother, and I had gone up in the large Ford Tri-Motor plane that had brought his mother south to Mexico City. Studying the grainy newspaper photographs, I couldn’t help but smile at the rather grim look on Elisabeth’s face in some of them; she had been a bit green when we landed. She had still managed to face all the photographers and reporters with graceful aplomb, while Charles had stood, smiling that slightly frozen smile I was beginning to recognize as his public face, beside her. It had seemed to me he was happy to have someone else to share the spotlight, and how I wished, then, that it had been me! But I was too paralyzed by all the cameras and people; I had hung back with Mother and Con, dull, dry Anne once more.

So I cherished the memory of our private flight together, and tried to convince myself it meant more to him than the staged, public exercise with Elisabeth and Con and Mother. But as time went on, and winter melted into spring, I heard no more from the colonel. The newspaper interest in him had not abated; if anything, it had only escalated as he continued to fly around the country and Latin America, linking countries and spreading the gospel of passenger flight, mapping out routes, breaking new speed and distance records with almost boring regularity. And every other day there were rumors of an engagement. For now that the world had found its hero, it was impatient that he find his heroine.

Elisabeth’s name appeared more than once as a likely candidate. Mine never did. Apparently, Ambassador Morrow had only one daughter worthy of notice.

So I immersed myself in my work and did my best to ignore the newspapers and newsreels. I turned, even more hungrily than usual, to my diary. I had always been like this; only able to recognize my world by reassembling it on the page. Everything felt topsy-turvy; overnight, long-held notions, dreams, ideas were alien to me, now that I had flown with Charles Lindbergh, trusted him with my body, my soul—my heart.

My fears, however, remained the same; after the astonishing intimacy of my flight with the colonel, the rest of our time together over the holiday had been one of marked politeness, nothing more. I was certain he had forgotten all about me, even as I clung to a memory growing wispier by the hour until I couldn’t remember which parts I had dreamed and which parts had truly happened.

One Saturday in April, tired of books, tired of papers, tired of myself, I borrowed Bacon’s Oldsmobile and drove to the tiny airfield outside of Northampton. I paid a man five dollars to take me up in a biplane smaller than the one I had ridden in with Charles. I strapped myself inside, fastened a pair of goggles around my head, and still it felt as if I had never done this before. But then—that dance, that balletic moment when the plane leaped from the bumpy ground and, as if it were holding its breath, hovered a moment before pulling up, up, up…

That moment brought back everything I had felt during my first flight with Charles. As tears rolled down my face, I tried to convince myself they were happy tears; happy because I hadn’t dreamed it, after all.

That flight was shorter than the first—merely a quick pass over the college, during which I imagined all my friends scurrying around in the buildings below like a colony of ants—but when we landed, I felt better about life. I retrieved the heart I had given to Charles Lindbergh so impulsively, and tucked it safely inside my earthbound bones once again. One day I would be able to give it to someone else. Someone who wanted it.

“Anne? Anne—hello, Anne?”

I shook my head and shuffled in my hard desk chair; reflexively I stretched, only now aware that my entire body was stiff, my fingers cold. I must have been sitting, dreaming, for ever so long.

“What time is it?” I asked Bacon.

“Five o’clock,” she said, turning on a lamp, twirling her ubiquitous strand of pearls, just like Clara Bow’s; she even styled her thick auburn hair like the movie star’s. “The announcements are here.” And she tossed a small white cardboard box down on my desk.

“Oh.” I opened the box and removed a card; it was bordered in our class color, purple, with the seal of Smith: Education is the key to the future .

“Can you believe it’s almost here? Graduation? Gee, I didn’t think I’d ever graduate, really!” Bacon plopped down on her narrow bed, the ancient mattress springs creaking like old, rusty door hinges.

“No, I’m sure you didn’t,” I said wryly. “I have no idea how you made it through French literature!”

“I might not have, if it hadn’t been for you! Anne, do you think you’ll win any prizes this year? I bet you win one of the writing ones!”

“Oh, I doubt it.” Biting my lip, I tried not to think of it. I had been asked to try for both the Elisabeth Montagu Prize for essays and the Mary Augusta Jordan Literary Prize for prose or poetry. But, of course, I wouldn’t win. “I’m sure I won’t be known for anything other than being the ambassador’s daughter,” I mused out loud. “The ambassador’s other daughter, at that.”

“What?” Bacon looked up from the latest copy of Vanity Fair . “What on earth are you talking about?”

“Oh, you know. After college—after everything. What happens next, Bacon? I can’t imagine it. I can’t imagine that I’ll ever be known for anything great, like—” I caught myself just in time; I didn’t want to say his name, say “Charles” out loud, as if I had a right. I didn’t want to let it slip that perhaps, for the first time, I was tempted by feats grander than literary prizes and ambassadorships; those staid, respectable feats endorsed by my parents.

“Well, who does imagine that?” Bacon said, returning to her magazine. “No one I know.”

“That’s just it!” It burst out from me, this unexpected passion and desire stirred up by that slim, tall boy with blue eyes and a hero’s laurel in the shape of a flying helmet. “No one I know ever does, we’re all so, so—content! But what’s it all about—what’s it all for? The studying and the reading and the trying so hard? What are we supposed to do with it all, other than be exactly like our mothers?”