The Aviator's Wife (27 page)

But nothing could have prepared me for the headline I saw one frigid afternoon, when a few late-season snowflakes fell halfheartedly
outside my window. “Spurned Sister Suspected in Lindbergh Baby’s Disappearance. Why Hasn’t Miss Morrow Been to Comfort Mrs. Lindbergh?” And next to it was a jarring photograph of Elisabeth taken years ago; uncharacteristically,
she was not smiling. Instead, the ink so smudged and dark, she looked almost malignant.

Oh, Elisabeth! How had she been dragged into my nightmare? All of a sudden the months fell away; I forgot the awkwardness between us, forgot how sick and frail she had been lately. I remembered, instead, the sister who had always been there to laugh with me, coax me, pull me into the bright sunlight constantly
surrounding her, even when I insisted I was happier in the shadows.
She
was the one who urged me to try to stand up to Mother when I wanted to go to Vassar instead of Smith.
She
was the one who insisted, when I was ten and wanted to put lemon juice on my hair so that it would look more like hers, that brown hair was prettier than blond.

She
was the one who was supposed to marry the hero, not
me. I needed to tell her that I understood why she hadn’t, now.

I started toward the telephone in the front hall, but when confronted with its black, solid efficiency, I wavered; I couldn’t pick up the receiver. Fortunately, my mother chose that moment to bustle around a corner with a pile of blankets in her arms.

“Mother, I was thinking. Could you—do you think Elisabeth could come down? Is
she strong enough for all this, do you think?”

“You saw the newspaper.” It wasn’t a question, and I realized I still was gripping it in my hand.

“Yes. But that’s not the reason, truly. I miss her, and I want her here with me. I need her.”

Mother put the blankets on a bench and sank down next to them. She rubbed her eyes until they were red, and the lines
around them carved themselves even deeper
into her skin. I realized suddenly how selfish I had been. So many people’s lives, not just mine—all tainted forever. Like the ripples on a pond when you toss a pebble in; the aftershocks kept moving farther and farther away from the center.

“Anne, I know something happened between you two. I’ve never asked what it is.”

I couldn’t reply. What on earth could I tell her?

“So I think you should
call her yourself. Don’t you?”

“Oh, Mother, I—” But even as I protested, Mother had dialed the number and handed me the telephone receiver. “Next Day Hill,” a wary voice answered. Violet Sharpe’s.

“This is Anne—”

“Oh, mercy!” And with a strangled sob, she put me through to Elisabeth’s bedroom.

“Anne? Is there any news?” Elisabeth’s voice was panicked.

“No—no, nothing. I only wanted to—I want
to ask you to come out here. To stay for a while. To stay with me, I mean. For a while.”

“Oh, Anne! My poor darling! Of course. I’ll come at once.”

“You don’t mind? After all this—”

“Anne, stop it.”

“I’ve missed you.”

“I’ve missed you, too, dearest. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

“Thank you,” I whispered, as if Mother could hear, in those two words, the reason why we’d been estranged.

“Shhh,” my sister murmured into my ear. “Shhh. Now go lie down, Anne.”

“Stop telling me what to do,” I protested, just as stubbornly as when I was ten and she was twelve.

“Never!” As she hung up, she was laughing. And the years and distance between us disappeared.

Mother took the telephone and placed it back in the wall nook. “Sweetheart, you must get some rest. You look dreadful. Where’s Charles
gone off to?”

I shook my head and rubbed the small of my back. “He wouldn’t tell me. He takes phone calls at all hours, he meets late at night with men he won’t let me see. He’s—he’s having a difficult time.”

Colonel Schwarzkopf, while still respectful, careful never to contradict Charles in public or in the press, no longer asked Charles for permission to proceed. The colonel conducted rigorous
interviews with our household staff every day, and he no longer hid them from Charles. He seemed particularly interested in the staff of Next Day Hill; he was paying special attention to Violet Sharpe. Mother was very upset at the questioning; she felt protective of Violet, as the girl was so excitable and simple. I liked Violet; despite her occasional hysterics, she had always been sweet and
loyal, given to happy tears whenever she received a present or a bonus or even an unexpected day off.

But I couldn’t forget that she was the one who had answered the phone when I called to have Betty come down to us that fateful Tuesday. Violet was the most logical person to have alerted someone to our change in plans. Charles was furious at having his authority and his judgment questioned. He
never knew that I was the one responsible for it. I wouldn’t have denied it if he’d asked, but he never did. Perhaps he didn’t want to know.

His fury couldn’t disguise his despair, however. I pretended I didn’t see the smudge of exhaustion under his eyes, the way his clothes hung off him now, the exhausted blinking that overcame him at times.

This morning, Charles had mumbled something about
a new lead before rushing off to meet another stranger. I nodded trustfully and, as I had every day since my child had gone missing,
told my husband that I believed in him. Then I went into the cold, empty nursery and stared out the window as Charles started up the car and roared down the drive, all the policemen standing respectfully at attention.

At times like that, I missed believing in my
husband almost more than I missed my child.

“You go upstairs,” Mother insisted again, taking the newspaper with that awful headline out of my hand. “Rest. Take care of that baby you’re carrying.”

I nodded. I was so weary of people telling me what to do. Yet I went upstairs, intending not to rest but to write. In these last weeks, I’d started writing poetry again. Dark poems, hopeless poems.
Poems of loss and despair; sonnets of impending grief I prayed I would one day find and laugh at for their absurdity.

“Mrs. Lindbergh?”

I looked up, startled; Betty was standing outside my open door. Still in a denim nurse’s dress, a white apron around her waist. But I looked at her now through new eyes; our roles were finally as they should be. I was the mother. My loss, my grief, was so much
more monumental than hers, and I felt, finally, older. Ancient, actually; every day my child was missing seemed to add years to my life so that I was surprised, when I saw my reflection, that I was not stoop-shouldered and arthritic. Surprised to find my hair still dark brown, and not turned white overnight.

Betty, on the other hand, seemed much younger; uncertain, finally, for the first time
I’d known her. Uncertain of her role in a childless home; uncertain of her grief; how much to show, how much to hide. Uncertain of our loyalty, Charles’s and mine. And although I did not blame her, I could not look at her without anger and recrimination.

She
had held him, been privileged to care for him, far more often than I had. For so much of his life, I’d been gone, and I resented
her bitterly
for it. But I was most angry at myself. For following Charles whenever he snapped his fingers at me; for abandoning my son, over and over and over.

“Mrs. Lindbergh, I must talk to you,” Betty whispered, shutting the door behind her. I motioned to a chair just by the window, and I took the one opposite. The woods that surrounded our house were still stripped, naked; spring seemed an eternity away.
And I hoped it would remain so; I couldn’t bear to see the world come back to life if my child wasn’t with me to share it.

“What is it, Betty?”

She moved her chair closer to me and took my hand; startled, I drew back. She’d never touched me before; she, who had showered my baby with kisses and hugs, had never even shaken my hand.

“Please, please, forgive me, Mrs. Lindbergh!”

“Forgive you?
Forgive you for what?”

“For not checking in on him enough that night. For not making sure the shutters closed. For—”

“For telling Red that we’d be here? For telling someone else?”

“No! No, I don’t think—you don’t believe Red is involved, do you? Or anyone else at Next Day Hill? Mrs. Lindbergh, of all people, you don’t believe—why, the colonel doesn’t believe any of us is involved! How can you?”

“Because I’m Charlie’s mother! Because I don’t know what to believe anymore! No one knew we stayed here at the house that night except you, and Elsie and Ollie, and the people at Next Day Hill. No one else knew! If anyone had been planning this, they would never have planned it for a Tuesday night, because we’d never been here on a Tuesday before!” Unleashing all my darkest suspicions, I lunged
toward Betty. “But
you
knew.
You
told Red. Who else did you tell? Who?” Now I was shaking her, and she
was crying, “No one, no one!” over and over again, but still I shook her, demanding an answer.

“Anne!”

Betty and I jumped apart; she whirled away from me, weeping; I spun toward the window as Charles charged into the room, a package in his hands.

“Anne!”

Still breathing raggedly, I clenched
my fists, which still itched to lash out at someone—my fury, smothered for so long, was blazing. My husband ran toward me.

“Anne, you remember James Condon?”

“Ma’am,” Mr. Condon said with an absurd bow. “Mrs. Lindbergh, it is my privilege to greet you again.”

“Yes,” I said, as I retreated a few steps, my mind whirling, still reworking the conversation with Betty while now forced to absorb a
stranger in my bedroom. And then I glared at Charles. What else was he going to put me through? How many crackpots was he going to bring me?

Last week, he’d presented to me a psychic, a woman clad in perfumed scarves and cheap jewelry, who grabbed my palm with her dirty hand and told me that it foretold a great joy sometime soon. The week before, he’d introduced me to a medium who proposed holding
a séance in the baby’s room.

Condon was just the latest in a series of shysters and charlatans, an obsequious person who had gallantly (his own word) volunteered to serve as go-between between “the hero of our age” and the “odious kidnappers.” Last week Charles had brought him here to meet me, even allowed him to sleep in the nursery and take one of the baby’s toys with him, in case he had a
chance to meet with the kidnappers in person.

“Anne, you remember, I told you this morning about a new
lead. Condon here put an ad in the paper, and what do you think? They contacted him! He met with them!”

“It is my patriotic duty, madam.” Another bow. “I am just a citizen, a private citizen. The kidnappers, however, must feel my sincerity, for they did indeed meet with me.”

“Anne, sit down,”
Charles said breathlessly. I’d never seen him so excited; his eyes were wide, his face flushed. “This is it, the break we’ve been looking for. The kidnappers did not want to speak with the mob, but for some reason they do want to communicate with this man.”

“How do we know it’s them? After—after your contact sold the ransom note?” Just as Schwarzkopf had feared, Charles’s underworld contact had
sold the ransom note with the authentic signature to the newspapers. Now we received notes by the bushel with that odd three-hole signature. It was impossible to know which were real and which were not.

“Because there’s something else,” Charles said quietly. He placed the brown package in my lap, then reverently unwrapped it, revealing a piece of gray wool fabric. A gray Dr. Denton wool sleep
suit. Size two.

I lifted the fabric to my face; eyes squeezed tight, I inhaled it, wanting desperately to smell the innocence of my child, the downy hair, the apple scent of his shampoo, the grease of the Vicks I rubbed on his chest that night. I so wanted to smell these things that for a moment I did—and then I knew it was only the desire of memory. This fabric did not smell like any of those
things; it actually had very little scent at all. Only a faint whiff of damp, as if it had been freshly laundered.

But it had been so long; two weeks now. If Charlie had been disguised somehow, in different clothing, then they might have laundered his sleep suit—

I handed the fabric back to Charles and looked at Betty, hard.

“Is this his suit? What do you think? I need you to tell me the truth,
Betty. Always.”

“I think it is! I really do, Mrs. Lindbergh! I think I recognize it!” Betty’s cheeks were scarlet as she reached out a tentative hand to stroke the fabric.

“Then it is it! We are on the right trail, at last!” Charles strode about, energized, nearly knocking over a lamp on the table. He crossed the room in one giant stride.

“Anne, this is it,” he said to me—only to me; it was
as if there was no one present but us, now. He knelt, and smoothed the fabric in my lap, speaking softly, urgently. “Betty recognized this right away. And you did, too—I saw it in your face. I know you want to be absolutely sure, Anne. I know what a strain this has all been, and how confused you must be—and how hard it must be, now, to hope, after everything. But Condon here spoke with the man who
gave us this. He said this had been planned for a year, that the baby was in good health, was being taken care of on a boat by two women. Two women! Think of that! He seemed very sure of himself, and he had this.” Charles grasped my hands tightly, as if he could transfer all his confidence to me.

I shook my head, still hesitant to believe. He was right. I
was
afraid to hope. Even though that’s
all I had been told to do—the only job entrusted to me—deep in my heart, I hadn’t. But now—oh, Charles was so sure of himself! Finally, after weeks of dashing about, playing a desperate game of cloak and dagger, he looked like the old Charles. The clear-eyed boy. The best pilot he knew; the best there ever was.

“Will you—if Colonel Schwarzkopf can verify this—” I took the fabric once more, slowly
claiming it, allowing its worn folds to soften my heart. Charles paled at my mention of Colonel Schwarzkopf, but I didn’t care. As much as I wanted to believe him, I needed to hear Colonel Schwarzkopf’s opinion even more.
My heart beat fast, my face flushed, as if he’d discovered me in an indiscretion—but I did not flinch from his gaze.