Melanie Benjamin - The Aviator's Wife

After a moment, I followed Mother.

“You’re doing the right thing,” I whispered to her. “Dwight does need professional care. I’ve seen it. What can I do? I don’t care if Daddy doesn’t approve. I want to help.”

“My daughter.” She smiled gratefully. “You’re such a rock sometimes, Anne, so quiet yet so steadfast. I don’t know if you’re aware of how much I rely on you.”

I turned away, tears in my eyes; all my life, I’d wanted my mother to recognize me, alone; outside of Elisabeth’s shadow. Knowing that she had was my greatest graduation present, more precious to me than any awards.

“Now, I know you probably have loads of plans.” Mother’s voice was back to its normal soothing tone. “But if you could stay in Englewood this summer to oversee the building of the new house, instead of coming back with us to Mexico City, it would be such a help, Anne. Elisabeth and Connie have their school plans, and I would feel better knowing you were home, so that Dwight might be able to—well, if he’s up to travel, I know he’d like to come home for a while. You don’t mind, do you?”

I shook my head, grateful, actually, to have been asked. I still had no idea what I was going to do with myself. Watching over builders, helping my brother, even in his fragile state; both seemed a blessed alternative to sitting around, brooding and reading newspapers full of articles and photos of a certain Colonel Charles Lindbergh. And wondering what on earth I was going to do with the rest of my life.

“Of course I don’t mind—I said I would help,” I assured my mother, and was surprised to see a tear in her eye. She blinked it away almost before I could convince myself it was there, and she called, gaily, to Elisabeth and Connie—who were walking so close together that their heads, both so blond, nearly touched—“Now, what are you two whispering about? Connie, is Elisabeth telling you secrets about the colonel?”

Elisabeth and Connie sprang apart, laughing—too loudly, it seemed to me. As if my mother had accidentally touched a nerve.

“Yes, Mrs. Morrow, that’s exactly what we were doing,” Connie called out brightly, as she squeezed my sister’s hand. And I couldn’t help but notice that Elisabeth’s face was suddenly scarlet, her eyes shining, as she squeezed Connie’s hand in return.

Mother turned to me with a smile that suddenly crumbled, like a sand castle overwhelmed by an unexpected tide. She pretended to read my diploma, but then gave up and hugged it briefly to her chest, squeezing her eyes tight, and this time I knew there were tears.

But when she opened them, her gaze was clear and bright as always; what was startling was how it was focused entirely on me. For once, I didn’t have the feeling she was thinking of someone or something else as she looked into my eyes. “Anne, dear, I really am very proud of you,” she said, so strangely earnest. “Very. I tried for the Jordan prize, you know, when I was a senior. But I didn’t win, and you did.”

I smiled, touched and humbled by her confession. My mother didn’t often let slip a disappointment; it simply wasn’t in her nature to dwell on the past. She was changing, it seemed to me, almost before my very eyes. Maybe it was Dwight’s illness, forcing her to stop and reflect, consider, maybe even to blame.

Or perhaps it was just my graduation; another childhood milestone over, my very last one. Maybe she felt older, more vulnerable, clutching my college diploma as if she could clutch all her children to her one more time before we all scattered and flew away.

Whatever accounted for this rare vulnerability, I didn’t question her. I didn’t feel privy to know what was in my mother’s heart, despite my new college degree. I didn’t want that much knowledge just yet, and the responsibility that must come with it.

But neither did I want to let go of her hand, for I sensed she needed someone strong to cling to; we held on to each other as we walked to the waiting car.

“DWIGHT, DO YOU WANT ANYTHING special for dinner tonight?” I stood in the doorway of the study; my brother was sitting at my father’s empty desk, staring out the window.

I didn’t like him staring in silence, but it was better than the strange, forced laughter that too often took its place these days. Since I had last seen him at Christmas, something had changed inside him, although on the outside he appeared much as usual. Still solidly built, low to the ground like a football player, with hair some indeterminate brown shade that was halfway between my dark tresses and Elisabeth’s blond. He dressed the same, groomed himself as ever, was interested in the same things—he followed the Yankees and would have argued the respective merits of Lou Gehrig versus Babe Ruth all day with me if I had even an ounce of knowledge about either.

But his stutter was worse. That odd, strangled laughter burst out of him at the most inappropriate times—usually when he was in session with his tutor—and he sullenly stared out of windows far too often. Sometimes, I actually shook him; I told him to snap out of it or at least tell me what was wrong, for no one else seemed to be able to. The only thing he had said so far that was true , that wasn’t part of the typical Morrow family banter, had been, “It’s awful being Dwight Morrow Junior. You don’t know, Anne. It’s just too much for me.”

I didn’t know. I was becoming painfully aware that there was so much I didn’t know. Now an adult, allowed a glimpse of these first cracks in my family’s perfect surface, I couldn’t help but wonder what else I didn’t understand about us all. My childhood had seemed charmed, privileged, and not only because our parents took pains to remind us that it was. We were always together, never farmed out like other children of wealth, although naturally, governesses and nurses took care of our everyday needs. Our parents, we understood from an early age, were dedicated to more important pursuits than ensuring that our teeth were brushed and our scraped knees bandaged.

But Mother read to us an hour a day, every day, no matter how busy she was. Even when we were so small we had to sit on encyclopedias in order to reach the mahogany table, we children dined with our parents in the evening, and were expected to understand the politics and philosophies discussed. There were picnics on the sound and summers in Maine; travels abroad where Daddy read from Shakespeare in London, Voltaire in Paris. Somehow, though, we never were allowed to feel rich or special. Our money—how much? It never even occurred to me to ask; it was a cushion on which we could land, if necessary, once we reached for ourselves. But we were, always, expected to reach. Maybe that was the key to Dwight’s troubles; perhaps, being the son, he was expected to reach higher than Elisabeth or Con or me.

“Dwight, I asked you what you wanted for dinner.” I repeated the safest question of all that I wanted to ask my brother, as he gazed at a robin hopping on the terrace, just outside the study window. At least he had the draperies open today; the room wasn’t quite so gloomy and stuffy with all its dark paneling.

“Whatever you want, Anne.”

“Isn’t it odd, just the two of us here?” I sat down on an overstuffed chair, picking up a pillow and holding it to my chest. “Like we’re playing house or something. How did we get so adult?”

“You’d better get used to it—playing house. Once you’re married, that’s all you’ll be doing. Lucky.”

“Oh, don’t say that—what’s lucky about it, anyway?”

“That’s all you’re supposed to do, Annie. That’s all they expect.”

“I don’t think that’s particularly lucky—even if it was true.” Although I knew, of course, that it was; already I had received five wedding invitations from my just-graduated classmates. “Anyway, I’m not going to get married.” I shook my head defiantly.