The Aviator's Wife (25 page)

T
HE BABY WAS CRYING
. I stirred in my sleep, an automatic reflex; kicking away the covers, I rolled over, eyes still shut but breath held, hoping he would stop. Of course, he didn’t. Now he was crying out, calling my name—my real name, how odd! Not Mama, but Anne. “Anne—Anne—”

I was crying, too. I was calling out his name, calling “Charles, Charles!” I had never
called him Charles before; it was always Charlie, or Little Lamb, or Baby Boy. The poor thing! He didn’t really know his name. So how would he come, if I kept calling it? Now I was running; it was dark and something kept hitting against the house, the wind howling about, filling my ears with its primal moan. I called, “Charles, Charles!” and I realized he wouldn’t know it was me, I realized he wouldn’t
understand his own name, if he could even hear it in the storm. But I kept calling.

“Anne! Anne!” But why didn’t he call me Mama? How did he know
my
name? Was he already lost from me? Had a lifetime passed, and he was grown up now and I didn’t recognize him anymore? Him, this stranger shaking me, calling out my name?

“Anne!”

“Charles!”

My eyes flew open; it took me a moment to realize I was
in bed. My husband was holding me by the shoulders, and I was
struggling against him, because I had to go to the nursery—Charlie was crying. That was what had awakened me. Charlie’s cry.

“Is he up already?” I asked, bewildered. Why was Charles still wearing the clothes he’d worn yesterday?

“Anne.”

“Did Betty feed him?” I yawned, rubbing my eyes—astonished to feel tears on my cheeks. I looked
at my wet fingers, and knew that even as I did so, I was still crying.

And then I remembered.

“Oh. Oh!” And the grief was real and raw, as if all that had happened the night before was happening all over again. I struggled to get up, to run to his room, but Charles pinned me down.

“Stop it! Let go of me!” I was shouting, and he looked uneasily toward the closed bedroom door, as if someone was
standing just outside. “I mean it—let me go!” I actually kicked at my husband, allowing myself a tiny burst of triumph. It felt good, even for so childish a moment, to lash out at someone.

“Anne, hush. I woke you because there’s someone I want you to see.”

I stopped squirming instantly. I held myself perfectly still, allowing his words to penetrate first my mind, then my heart. Then I laughed,
pure joy bubbling out of me; it
had
been a dream, after all!

“The baby? You found the baby? Oh, where is he?” I threw my arms about him. His body remained rigid; he plucked my arms from around his neck.

“No, no. Not the baby.” His eyes narrowed, as if I had somehow challenged his authority—no, his
competence
. “Pull yourself together, Anne. There’s a man outside I thought you should see—or, rather,
he wanted to see you. He might have some information.”

“Oh.” I nodded, looking away; I couldn’t let him see my disappointment. “What time is it?”

“Eight o’clock.”

“You look terrible. Did you sleep at all?”

“No. We’ve been searching outside—although we couldn’t keep the reporters out, not at first, so quite a lot of evidence might be trampled over.”

“Did you find anything?”

“A ladder. Broken
in pieces.”

I nodded, not really understanding. What did the pieces of a ladder mean?

“And some footprints, men’s footprints, on the ground beneath the—his—window. The press, of course, is having a field day. You’d better—well, I don’t know. You’ll find out anyway. If you want to read the newspapers, they’re in the kitchen. I would advise you not to. But get dressed now, please, for this gentleman.”

Charles joined whoever it was in the hall while I went through the motions; I splashed water on my face, ran a comb through my hair, and pulled on a housedress, only to find that I couldn’t get it all the way over my hips. I had to wear an ugly yellow-and-black checked maternity dress that I’d somehow thought to pack instead. The first one I’d worn for this pregnancy; I couldn’t help reflecting
on the irony—that the new life I was carrying was making itself visible on this, of all days.

Then I opened my bedroom door and stepped into the hall, wholly unprepared for the chaos outside. Men were running in and out of my son’s nursery. Even more were tramping mud all over the front hall carpets. There were tables set up in the hallway downstairs. As I hung over the upstairs railing and peered
down through the open front door—shivering in the frigid air; had it stood open all night long?—I could see a small army of cars
parked haphazardly, as if all had been driven in a great hurry and then urgently abandoned on the drive.

“Mrs. Lindbergh?”

I turned; a small man in a navy blue suit, his thin red hair plastered flat on his head, his eyes small and nervous, stood before me, holding
his hat in his hands. He was barely taller than I was; next to my husband, he looked like a paper doll. He resembled an illustration in one of Charlie’s nursery books—a particularly sinister image of the Pied Piper of Hamelin with long, sharp, ratlike features. The only thing missing was the flute.

“Yes?”

“This is the man I was telling you about,” Charles exclaimed, unable to keep the eagerness
out of his voice. “Please, come into the bedroom.”

He ushered this man—this stranger!—into our bedroom. Our house was being turned into a headquarters for evil, just as Charles had said—but couldn’t I keep one room untouched? Unsullied by the dirt and filth that had blown in through that open nursery window?

“Please,” I said, turning my nose up, folding the corners of my mouth primly. I gestured
for the man to sit on a footstool, while Charles and I sat, side by side, on our bed.

“Mrs. Lindbergh, I thank you from the bottom of my heart for seeing me. But I have information that I am certain you will want to hear.” The little man now crumpled his felt hat in his excitement; there was a gleam in his eyes that almost made his thin, watery face beautiful.

My heart began to pound, and I
reached for Charles’s hand. “Yes?”

“Your child, he is safe.”

“How? How do you know?” Charles asked, gripping my hand tightly.

“He is safe because he is away from here.” The man rose and began to pace before us. “You do not know God, you worship at the feet of false idols. Man was not meant to fly, not meant to have wings. For God created him in His image, not the birds’. Your child has been
taken from you as punishment. Whoever has him must have seen this, must have known this, and I feel it is my duty to make you aware of your sin, and to urge you to repent of your evil ways. If you do, surely God will see fit to return your child to you, but until then—”

Charles gripped the man by the arm; I thought he was going to throw him out the window. Instead he lifted him up, carried him—feet
dangling—across the room, and shoved him out the door, shouting, “Get this idiot out of here!” before slamming the door shut.

I was trembling, sick; my skin was clammy, and I felt my stomach churn—or was it the baby kicking? Desperately, I wanted only to lie down and close my eyes—after first scrubbing every inch of this room, to rid it of that horrible stranger’s presence.

“That was a mistake,”
Charles said, and I had an absurd urge to laugh. It was such an understatement. “I shouldn’t have brought him up to you, Anne—it was my fault. I feel, however, that we must take every person seriously. We can’t possibly know at this point who might or might not have information. That said, I should have interrogated him further. But he did insist—he insisted on seeing you, not me. I thought—well,
I thought. I was wrong. Forgive me.”

“Oh, Charles, I don’t blame you!” Why was he being so distant and formal?

“No, Anne. I am responsible for that. I am responsible for you, especially now, in your condition. I can protect you, at least—” He turned away, and cleared his throat several times before walking to the window.

“Charles—” I moved toward him, aching to reassure him somehow, to remind
him he was not alone in this. But before I could take another step, he turned to face me. “I arranged for your mother to come,” he said briskly. “I thought it best that she be here.”

“Oh.” I, too, was lost; lost once again in my own terror as I looked out the window and saw strange men tramping over some bulbs I had planted last fall. Tulips, I remembered. Dutch tulips, white. Charlie had helped
me; he had carried the knobby tubers in a basket before dumping them all out and arranging them in little patterns, gurgling happily, calling them “bubs.”

“Have you heard from Elisabeth?” I asked Charles, dabbing at the tears on my cheek before turning around. “Dwight? Con?”

“The police have been alerted, and they’re safe,” he replied, and somehow we faced each other while never once meeting
each other’s gaze.

“The police are talking to them?”

“I allowed it; I thought they might be of help. Anne, Colonel Schwarzkopf would like to talk to you when you’re ready. He would like to talk to the servants, as well. Betty, in particular.”

Betty!
“How is she?” I asked, stricken with guilt—I’d forgotten all about her. I hadn’t seen her since last night—since she had run to her room, sobbing,
after Charles called the police. She loved little Charlie so—oh, how could I have neglected her? She must be as frantic as I was. I must go to her at once.

“Of course, it’s absurd,” Charles continued, as if he hadn’t heard my question. “The staff, naturally, is above suspicion. I told Schwarzkopf that. He agrees but still needs to ask basic questions in order to establish some kind of timeline—I’ll
be present, regardless. But I refuse to let him administer a polygraph test on any of them, or the family. That would be unnecessary. And the press might get wind of it, and inflate it, as usual.”

“Good,” I quietly agreed.

“I’ll send some breakfast up,” Charles said. “Try not to wear yourself out. The important thing is to remain hopeful. For the baby’s sake.”

“I know,” I said, and once more,
I longed to reassure him, to be the strong one, for once. But I felt that if I were suddenly to move, to make any unexpected, careless gesture, I would fly apart. Molecules and cells and bones would fragment, splintering all about the room—Humpty Dumpty, indeed.

Oh, why could I not stop recalling nursery rhymes and fairy tales this morning? Everything reminded me of my child. Everything good,
and everything bad.

Charles stood for a moment, his back to me. Then his shoulders finally squared, his head snapped up, and he strode out of the room without another word—that famous Lindbergh discipline on full display once more. My husband, the father of my child, vanished before my eyes. Now he was the hero we all needed; that
he
needed, most of all. It was as if I was seeing him again for
the first time, in a newsreel.

All the king’s horses and all the king’s men
, I sang to myself, walking slowly back to my bed, carrying my hope and terror both, one fragile, the other already so stolidly familiar I couldn’t remember life before it, within my heart. Within my womb, as well; next to my unborn child, who would have to make room for them now, and for the rest of his life.

Could they
put the Lindberghs together again?

WAITING. WAITING. WAITING
.

That was all I could do. That was all that was expected of me.

The next day, we received a postcard postmarked from Newark, addressed to
Chas. Linberg, Princeton, N.J
. The scrawled
message read,
Baby safe, instructions later, act accordingly
. It did not have the same three-hole signature as the initial letter, but the handwriting
was similar enough for the police to take it seriously.
Baby safe
—I repeated the words to myself, my mantra, as another day passed with no further communication from the kidnappers. Although it brought masses of communication from everyone else in the world—phone calls, telegrams, letters. The Boy Scouts of America were on full alert, every member pledging to scour roads and paths across the country
in search of my child. Women’s institutes and other organizations, too, volunteered; they went door to door, looking for him.

President Hoover—who had just lost reelection—offered the services of a new United States Bureau of Investigation, headed by a man named J. Edgar Hoover. Colonel Schwarzkopf turned him down, which I thought wise (even though Mr. Hoover insisted on setting up some kind
of headquarters in town, where he gave interviews to anyone who would listen). But I couldn’t imagine how more well-intentioned men, milling about my house, knocking things over and looking grim, could help the situation.

The National Guard was called out. Our child’s photograph—the one that Charles had taken on his first birthday—appeared on the front page every single day, and every newspaper
vowed to keep it there until he was found. Charlie was on the cover of
Time
magazine. Fliers were plastered on every telephone post in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut. Roadblocks were set up across three states as well. Anyone who looked remotely suspicious—although that description seemed to change by the minute—was pulled over, their vehicles searched.

For the second time in five years,
the name Charles Lindbergh was on everybody’s lips. For the second time in five years, everyone prayed for him, as special church services were called throughout the land.

The same radio commentators who had broken the miraculous news of Charles’s 1927 landing now broke in every ten minutes with an urgent bulletin about the kidnapping of his son. No reporters were allowed on our property after
that first horrific morning, but that didn’t stop them from writing as if they were. Every day, I insisted on reading what I had worn on my walk the day before (dresses I had never owned in my life), what I had thought, what I had eaten, if I had napped. I read columns and columns of purple prose praising my “Madonna-like patience” as I “awaited the safe return of my little Eaglet.”

Was I patient?
I suppose I appeared that way, compliant in my stone jail, leaving only for short walks in the gray March weather, always shielded by a respectfully silent contingent of police. It was numbness, though, more than patience. I could not believe that this circus—people were selling photographs of my child as if they were souvenirs, right at the end of our driveway!—had anything to do with my precious
baby. Or my husband. Or my life. So I removed myself, mentally. To participate fully would have endangered the child I was carrying—of that, I had no doubt. And I couldn’t bear to lose both of my children; I couldn’t bear to do that to Charles.