Melanie Benjamin - The Aviator's Wife

But there came a time when there was no use pretending; his body stopped responding to the treatments, and we finally told the children. After a terrible month in the hospital during which it became apparent that his white cells were just as stubborn as the rest of him, he said, “I want to go home to Hawaii. I want to go home and die in peace.”

Dana told him it was suicidal. “You won’t make it,” he said bluntly. “You’re much too weak, and it’s a hell of a long flight.”

“I’m going to die anyway. I want to die at home.” Diminished as he was, lying in the hospital bed, his painfully thin body barely making an outline beneath the blanket, Charles set his jaw in that determined way of his and looked, fleetingly, like the hero in the photographs of ’27. Even though I had tears in my eyes, because the head oncologist had just informed Charles he only had days to live, my heart did that crazy, balletic leap as I gazed at his still-handsome face. The flesh, wasting away, gave up the strong lines of his face in only greater relief. His hair—thin even before the radiation—was the snowiest of white, which, when he was healthy, contrasted with the permanent ruddiness of his skin after so many years outdoors—first in the open cockpits of airplanes, then in the Pacific during the war; finally after these last decades spent in jungles and rain forests and remote, untamed beaches.

His physical beauty, our physical attraction—that had never faded. In bed, we had always been able to understand each other. If only he hadn’t stopped coming to it, years ago.

I shook my head. It was wrong to think such thoughts now. I listened as Charles argued with Dana, who finally gave up and barked at Jon, standing like a tall, watchful Norse god, to make whatever the hell arrangements he had to.

Finally, after everyone else had gone—the platoon of doctors, the boys back to their hotels—I kissed Charles good night. “Do you want me to stay?” I asked, suddenly weary beyond reason. I could have slept on the floor, I was so exhausted, pummeled by the last few days.

“No,” he said, frowning. “That would be unnecessary. I will be perfectly fine, and you will sleep better in a bed.”

“All right.” I gathered up my purse and coat, stopping to wave good night from the door. Now, alone save for the IV bags and machines, he struck me as helpless, small—he, who had been a giant all my life. But he did not give me any indication that he needed my company; he opened a book—a medical book—and put his glasses on, pushing them halfway down his nose. Licking his index finger, he turned a page.

Walking down the hall, I was so weighed down by my weariness that I wondered if my legs would hold out until I reached the elevator. I was almost there when I felt a hand on my arm.

“Mrs. Lindbergh?”

“Yes?” A young nurse, with red hair, was holding some papers in her hand. She bit her lip, then looked worriedly down the hall, back toward Charles’s room.

“I shouldn’t do this. I know I shouldn’t, it’s very wrong. But you—I loved your book, you see. It means so much to me, I thought you should know about these.”

Then she thrust the papers into my hand, and ran off down a hall. Confused, I put the papers into my purse, assuming they were medical release forms. Then I got into the elevator, hailed a taxi, stumbled up to my hotel room—I had long since given up my apartment—and called down to room service for a drink.

It was only after it arrived that I remembered the papers. Sipping my gin, I took them out of my purse and smoothed them on my lap. These were no medical forms. They were letters—no, copies of letters, the words slightly smudged from the mimeograph machine. And they were from Charles. I recognized the handwriting, small, slanted purposefully to the right, although it was spidery now. The letters were short, uncharacteristically brief for usually, Charles wrote very detailed letters. They were letters of farewell, of finality, of shared remembrances and hopes, no longer to be fulfilled.

They were not addressed to me.

AND NOW, FINALLY, we have reached our destination, the end of our journey together. He is awake once more, aware of my presence, and he coughs; I hear the nurse walking softly toward his closed door but I beat her to it.

“I’d like a few more minutes alone with him, please.”

“Oh, of course, Mrs. Lindbergh!” And she retreats, eyes brimming sympathetically.

“Charles, it comes down to this. I deserve to know why. It’s not just the women—that, I could almost understand. But the children—why these other children? How many?” I thrust the letters in his face, and he brushes them away with his frail hand.

“Seven. I fathered seven other children.”

I stagger at the number; until I heard it, they hadn’t seemed real, these others. His bastards. For a moment, I can’t catch my breath.

“How many years, Charles?” I finally ask, still breathless. “How many years have you kept them from me? What do they look like? Do they look like you?” For some reason this is important; I need to know they do not look like our children. My children.

“I don’t know. I suppose they do. It began—sometime in the fifties.” He closes his eyes, as if remembering.

“So that’s why you were always gone. That’s why you never wanted me to come with you, that’s why you kept me hidden away, too.”

“Not at first. I was working. I met Greta at Pan Am in Berlin. The others, through her. It was a lonely time. You were preoccupied with the children, as you should have been. You were home. You were—”

“Old,” I finish for him, and he does not contradict me.

“Our children, you did a good job with them. You . I wanted—another chance, perhaps.”

“Why didn’t you give our children that chance? They would have welcomed it. All you had to do was ask. Instead, you chose to fly away, to leave us. To have these other families. For the last time, Charles— why? ”

He doesn’t answer, and I don’t know what else to ask, what else to say. I am only a woman, a woman with so much to do; even as I’ve been pacing this room, grasping for one last chance to understand the man I married, I’ve been thinking ahead to all the people I’ll need to call, the statements I’ll have to make, the practical business of sorting and filing and putting things in order.

Right now, I simply cannot absorb this, the enormity of it, what it means to my children, what happens next. The rage I’ve nurtured for years against him is finally gone, leaving me empty—and terrified of what will replace it; I can’t imagine an emotion big enough, terrible enough.

We are silent, and his breathing is so heavy that I fear he has fallen asleep again. But then I feel his hand—icy, the tips of his fingers already puckered—on my arm, gripping it desperately, fearfully. He opens his eyes, and I see that he is just like any other man would be at this moment—a man frightened, sorrowful, regretful. Tears pool in his lower lids, then trickle down his cheeks; his lip trembles, and he whispers, “Please, please, forgive me, Anne. Forgive me, before I die.”

And the words are on my lips; words of confession, which would double as his absolution. I know I have it in my power to forgive him because I, too, have sinned. Finally I am his equal; we are equal in our betrayal of each other.

But I have not sinned like he has. I have never betrayed my children. I have only betrayed him.

“It’s too late now,” I reply, denying him the comfort I alone can give. It’s taken me forty-five years to earn this moment—and I wish, desperately, that it had never come. “You’ve hurt us all, beyond measure.”

“You won’t—you won’t tell the children?”