The Aviator's Wife: A Novel, Page 5

  The plane leveled out. Now I couldn’t stop looking, craning my head this way and that; below, on my right, were hills. Tops of hills! And houses that looked like dollhouses. Fields were laid out neatly in geometric shapes, squares and rectangles.

  The clouds remained above us; it appeared we wouldn’t be touching them, after all. But it didn’t matter; there was too much to see, anyway. Too much for me to absorb—I didn’t feel weightless; there was no danger of me floating out of the plane, as I admit I had feared. Although I did feel curiously light, above. Above all the troubles of the world, above all my fears and doubts. Just as Charles had said.

  Charles! My heart thrilled at my casual memory of his name, as if, for a brief moment, I was one of the golden people, too. And he was behind me! Again, I had almost forgotten about him even as I trusted him completely. Without a single doubt, I had placed my very being in his hands, certain he would take care of it, of me. And in that moment, that first moment of flight, of my breaking of the rules of gravity—I broke the rules of my heart, as well. For I had strictly governed it until this moment; this moment when I gave it, literally and figuratively, to the man seated behind me. The man steering me through the air, making sure I didn’t fall. No longer did I need to be responsible for my own destiny, to worry about what to do today, tomorrow, next year. I needed only to give in and be, like the simplest of creatures. Like the birds flying miraculously below me.

  I wasn’t frightened. Hadn’t I always wanted to be carried away by someone stronger than me? As much as I had told myself that life was no fairy tale, I had always hoped, deep down, that it was. What young girl doesn’t dream of the hero rescuing her from her lonely tower? I had been no different, only more diligent, perhaps, than others in constructing that ivory tower of my own design—a foundation laid of books, the bricks formed of the duty drilled into me by my parents; dreams may have been the paintings on my walls, but doubts and fears were the bars on my windows.

  Yet here I was, swept away through the very atmosphere—higher than any tower, far beyond any bars—by the most heroic one of all.

  Fiercely, urgently, I needed to see his face, to see if he was real, after all. I didn’t dare turn around, however; I didn’t know how I could. The wind was pinning me to my seat. It took all my strength to look left or right; up or down. It was easiest simply to look ahead.

  And so I did. I relaxed, gazing in delight at the rolling land coming up beneath us, marveling at the shadow of the plane racing us on the ground even in this half-light, like a tagalong friend. My ears adjusted to the engine until it was simply background noise. My eyes still stung and watered, but I was used to the cold now. My limbs were stiff, but I didn’t care. I would have been happy to remain up in the sky forever, circling this valley. I was glad for the smooth ground below, the fields in which we could land, if necessary. I couldn’t imagine how he had flown across that endless, forbidding sheet of water for all those hours. How could he have landed, if there was trouble? He couldn’t have. Yet he had taken off anyway, knowing that.

  At some point, I became aware that we were gradually descending; what had been blocks and ants were becoming houses and even a few people, once more. Now I could see that the people were jumping up and down and waving; I laughed, they looked so joyous and strange, like primitive cave drawings come to life. I tried to wave back, but my hand was almost ripped from my wrist; sheepishly, I stuck it back into the cockpit, and hoped that Charles hadn’t noticed.

  The airfield was now on the horizon, far ahead but getting closer, closer, as the trees began to grow again, the tips just below us, now even with us, now higher … and now we touched the ground. We sped down the runway as swiftly as when we’d taken off; once more I felt the ground, the bumpy, rutty ground, and my teeth rattled in my head. Even though I had been chewing the gum the entire time—it no longer had any flavor, and was the consistency of rubber—my ears popped again.

  We slowed; the engine sputtered, and then, with a shudder, the plane came to a stop. It took me a long moment to realize the engine was silent, save for a stray hiss; my ears continued to ring with the noise of it.

  I heard a vague sound behind me, as if the wind were speaking. But I was afraid to move, afraid to break my enchanted spell; I was suddenly overwhelmed by sadness. I didn’t want to be back on the ground, back to being cautious, careful Anne. I loved the carefree, even wild, girl I had felt myself to be in the sky. Like a lover, I didn’t want to say goodbye to her.

  Someone was talking to me; someone was shaking my shoulder.

  “So? Did you like it?” It was Colonel Lindbergh; he was standing on the wing right next to me, reaching in and unbuckling my harness so that his face was just inches from mine. The sudden warmth of his nearness, his hands on my shoulder, then grasping my own as he pulled me from my seat—I was abruptly dizzy, my stomach bouncing about as if it were still riding the currents.

  Then my feet were somehow on the ground and a babbling, laughing voice filled the air; it took me a moment to recognize it as my own.

  “Oh, did I! I never had such fun nor felt so free—oh, it was wonderful! I wasn’t afraid, not a bit! It was like church, better than church, like being close to God, like seeing the earth the way He intended. Everything looked so different, so much more manageable from up there, didn’t it? And did you see the people waving? Do you think they knew it was us? I can’t wait to go again—oh, will you take me up again? Will you?”

  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?

  CHAPTER 3

  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?”

  “We get married. That’s what we bright, promising young Smith girls are supposed to do. That’s what it’s all for. We marry equally bright, promising young men from Princeton or Cornell or Harvard or Yale. We collect silver and china; we begin to entertain, modestly at first, you know! Then we have babies and bigger houses and more silver and more china and entertain lavishly. Our husbands come home every night at the same time, and we get bored looking at their faces over the dinner table. Maybe, if we’re very lucky, they take us to Europe once in a while. If we’re very unlucky, they become politicians and we have to move to Washington. Meanwhile, we play tennis and golf and try to keep our figures and our sanity.”

  “It all sounds so awful!”

  “Well, it is. And it isn’t. I wouldn’t mind a house on Long Island and a charge account at Tiffany!”

  “But what about love? What about passion? What about—more?” I flung my pencil down with a dramatic gesture that surprised both of us. Bacon picked up the pencil and handed it back to me, her eyebrows—dramatically darkened, just like a film star’s—arched in amusement.

  “What about it? What’s gotten into you, Anne?”

  “Well, I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to be one of those dried-up matrons you see at bridge parties, scowling at the younger generation. I want to be one of those marvelous old ladies covered in scarves who rock in their chairs with mysterious smiles, remembering the scandalous affairs of their youth!”

  “Why, Anne Morrow!” My roommate’s green eyes deepened. “You sly creature! I guess still waters really do run deep!”

  I shrugged, blushing, and Bacon returned to her magazine with a chuckle.

  Tapping the pencil against my teeth as my briefly soaring soul returned to my normal, earthbound body, I couldn’t help but wonder. As awful as Bacon’s scenario sounded, at least she had some kind of vision for her future. Whereas I—fanciful thoughts of scandalous affairs aside—did not. I saw myself drifting about, like an actress in a play, waiting forever for her cue.

  Beyond graduation, I truly couldn’t see; I had always possessed some vague notion of “writing,” but what on earth would I write about? Didn’t one have to have experiences first? While the short essays and poems—many of them, lately, singing of wind and clouds and sky—I had written for the Smith Review had been well received, my words seemed like fluff to me; dandelion fluff, ephemeral, not substantial enough to remain in anyone’s memories, let alone mine. Already, I couldn’t remember half of them.

  And where would I do this so-called writing? I had no plans except a smattering of invitations to classmates’ summer homes for a weekend of sailing or tennis. Which was one more reason to envy my sister; as soon as Elisabeth graduated two years ago, she’d made a real life for herself with Connie Chilton. Between the two of them—and with Mother and Daddy’s quietly proud blessing—they were single-handedly going to revolutionize early childhood education. They were already planning to start their own nursery school.

  Unless, of course—or rather, until—Elisabeth married. Which suddenly seemed a v
ery real possibility, one I couldn’t bear to contemplate.

  Seized with an impulse to act instead of think for only the second time in my life—the first time having taken place in an airplane—I grabbed a fountain pen. Scribbling quickly, before I lost my nerve, I signed my first graduation announcement with a short note, then slipped it into an envelope. For a sickening moment I realized I had no idea where to address it—until I remembered, my heart soaring with joy and empowerment, that we were dignitaries now. All I had to do was pick up the telephone and someone would find out for me.

  Privilege, I was not ashamed to admit at that moment, had its perks.

  OF COURSE, HE DIDN’T COME.

  During the entire graduation ceremony, even when my name was announced not once, but twice, as the winner of both the Montagu and Jordan prizes, my only feeling was of disappointment; childish, selfish disappointment. What were those prizes to me when the one I desired the most was withheld from me? I searched and searched the crowd for his lanky, yet imposing, figure, those blue eyes that had seen me, and I searched in vain.

  To make matters worse, after I received my diploma and joined my family, I was told that he had recently visited our home in Englewood.

  “Colonel Lindbergh came to call two weekends ago, just after we got back from Mexico City,” Mother said, after she hugged me and whispered how proud she was. She was wearing her alumni pin; so were Elisabeth and Connie, who, naturally, had driven up together.

  “He—he did?” I tried to conceal my hurt by opening up the sheepskin cover and studying my diploma. Anne Spencer Morrow.