Down in the subway express, trying not to cry,
terrified of a smash up. All these people—listless, tired, already dead. The pale-faced boy, poking his mother, who read The Mirror . . . I wanted to say, “Which one of you killed my boy!” I spoke to a nice Swede next to me:
“Where do I get off for 39 Broadway?”

—Anne Morrow Lindbergh, January 6, 1933

WHAT SHE FELT was only a sense of suffocating, like lead had overtaken her body and was slowly locking it into place. She knew what was wrong—she knew she was terrified they had taken her baby, because they had taken Colonel and Mrs. Lindbergh’s. If it could happen to them, of course it could happen to her family, and what would she do then? These flickers of recognition would come when she suddenly listened for Anne and heard nothing, when her mind’s eye went to the cradle and, without seeing into it, she saw nothing. Once or twice, she remembered lifting Anne to her shoulder in the middle of the night, she hadn’t known why, she had just done it. It was a bright moon and she could see Henry’s form carving a mountain ridge with the covers pulled up over his shoulder. She had Anne against her shoulder, her little forehead just touching the skin of Ruth’s neck.

The other recognitions—of not hearing Anne, of knowing that she wouldn’t be in the cradle if Ruth looked—seemed like the beginning of an explosion and then the moment would be over and Ruth was again thinking of the Lindberghs, thinking she needed to protect her own. But then the explosion was past, far away, at the wrong end of a telescope, and no one had taken her baby, she was Ruth, she wasn’t Mrs. Lindbergh, and she never would be.

The two days at home were one kaleidoscope, continually turning, of these feelings: suffocation; sadness and furor and fear; a tidal wave of panic; the calm of a tidal wave averted; and great self-loathing.

What she actually saw and remembered included simply the wall and its gentle cream-colored paper with yellow flowers which she and Henry had so carefully chosen; also, the feel of Henry’s arms on her back and the cold side of the bathtub. She remembered hearing her father cry, too.

THE MANY DAYS AFTER, in the hospital, were blank. She slept in long, dreamless fermatas.

Later on, she sat in bed and watched the other patients and the nurses swishing back and forth with bright silver trays. She wondered how much starch it took to get their hats to fold like that. There was a man across the big room who was tied to his bed. Every now and then he would thrash about and curse and spit and a nurse would come to him and speak with him and he would stop. There was a woman about four beds down who was always crying out from a nightmare. An old man who laughed the diabolical laugh of insane people in books. And maybe five other people just like Ruth, who simply stared about all day.

There was a large window with twenty-four panes just a few beds down from Ruth’s. It looked out onto a grassy yard and in the afternoon, sunlight fell directly into the window and made the room warm and yellow. She liked to go there and look at the grass below, which was a pale ebullient green when she arrived and gradually deepened and mellowed during her stay. When she left, there were bright yellow and orange maple and sycamore leaves all around—sycamore leaves so big she imagined they’d float kittens across a pond.

She came out of the great sleep knowing about Anne, knowing calmly. She missed John Henry, who was too young to visit. Henry visited as much as he could, about three times a week. He’d found a job working in the garage in town, fixing car and tractor engines. He also helped his father-in-law with the farm. When he could go to Ruth, he did. The hospital bills were expensive and Dr. Greene had said to plan on a six-month or longer stay. It was important that Ruth get all her strength back.

When Henry came to visit for the first and second and third times that she was awake and sitting up—for he visited many times during the three weeks of sleep—Ruth cried, with quiet tears streaming down her face. They didn’t talk about what had happened or what was happening. They talked about Henry’s work and the farm and about John Henry. The child missed his mother, Henry said, but he seemed to accept that she had a bad case of the flu—and not a weak heart like his younger sister. Ruth knew that he mostly had been afraid she would die, and so once he started coming to visit, he saw that she would live, and he was all right.

The doctor in Iowa City had told Henry that there weren’t many alternatives if Ruth didn’t improve with rest. “You can keep her in a hospital for the rest of her life. A home of sorts. You know, she’s not violent, I don’t think she ever will be. But this could happen again at any time, with just a little stress, and she could stay there. I think you should know this.”

When Henry visited and Ruth was sleeping—she still slept quite a lot—he would pick up her hand and kiss it and whisper, “Stay here with me, Ruth. Don’t go away. Stay.”

By the time summer was in retreat, she had begun to recover. After the fearful silence came a real, gentle calm, and finally warmth and a new patience. They started taking walks outside, and John Henry came. She chatted to him about reading with Grandma and about farming with Grandpa and Daddy. “Daddy took me up in the Swallow,” he gushed.

“Where did you go?” she asked, calmly, feeling only terribly sad that she’d missed it—how could Henry do this without her? Well, she knew the answer to this, and it was all right.

Henry, who had looked a little panicked when John Henry first spoke, not having anticipated the moment or thought about what he’d tell Ruth on this matter, said, “Just to Iowa City one day. Your parents were at your aunt’s, and I needed some fuel. I didn’t see the hurt.”

“Oh, it’s fine,” Ruth said. “Did you like it?” she asked her son.

“I threw up,” he replied.

And Ruth and Henry laughed, and John Henry, too.

She asked Henry how the Iowa City fieldwork was going and the farm, too, and what were their usual days like? “I want to picture it,” she said. Henry told her, from dawn to dusk, as they walked slowly, hand in hand, with John Henry running around trees and chasing after squirrels, and Ruth was reminded of the time before they were married, the walks after supper and Henry telling flying stories—how long ago it seemed! Howsoever improbably, there was a similar optimism now, a similar horizon of possibility and hope.

Sometimes they had picnics—in July, they celebrated John Henry’s third birthday this way. Ruth relaxed against a tree or in the grass, nibbling on cold fried chicken or sandwiches or pie, while the boy played with his father, and one day in September, with a blanket over her shoulders as her husband and son ran around, she startled herself with the desire to give John Henry a new playmate. She prayed that she could have another, don’t let that be taken from her, too. She didn’t dare say anything to Henry or anyone else. She needed time yet—time to rid herself of feeling desperate to replace Anne, to have another Anne. Time to get back, to know who she was now.

Her father came to visit sometimes, too, and he brought the chessboard with him. Ruth smiled and let him spread the board out on her lap, pull a chair up next to the bed.

She mentioned that they could play at a real table down the hall, adding, “I should be getting up and about anyway.”

But he refused: “You rest.”

Ruth knew he had to be thinking that she would eventually take her own life like his father and brother had. But she wasn’t capable of this. She didn’t believe she had either the strength or the courage for it, for her grandfather’s suicide had, in a very strange way, always made her respect him, perhaps because it was an event out of the time of her own life and in some way mythical; her uncle’s act, on the other hand, she despised, because she saw firsthand the sadness it brought her father. “Listen,” she said once, because she thought he needed to hear it, “I’m not sick like your daddy or Matt was sick.”

He shrugged, mumbled that he was glad to hear it. He pretended to simply keep on with the game, but then just before moving his rook someplace, he looked right into her eyes for a moment, looking as if see if he could believe what she was saying, looking and hoping.

After that talk, on pleasant days that weren’t too hot, they played chess at the bench in the back garden.

Finally, just after harvest, she went home. Although her mother came every morning and stayed all day the first two weeks, Ruth gradually returned to a normal schedule. She felt and seemed different—flatter somehow—but it seemed she had recovered. Neither Ruth nor Henry, however, was exactly sure what this meant.

Henry was very fearful. He couldn’t help but think that there was something specific that had set her off, and that it had to do with being in the house, alone, raising John Henry and Ruth Anne. And so he dreamed up plans, changes for them. He thought about moving them all to Chicago, then he’d be able to be home five nights a week at least, if not more. He could get the Chicago–Omaha route back, which meant he’d see Ruth every other day, or he could take the Chicago–Cleveland route, which meant he’d be home virtually every night. Flying among three different Great Lakes meant for crazy weather patterns. But it was a gamble that was perhaps worthwhile. Oswald had pitched the idea to Henry a few days after Ruth got home: “You’re one of the best we got,” he said over the phone to Iowa City. “Haven’t found a true replacement yet.”

“I appreciate that,” Henry said. “And I can’t stand the thought of leaving the company for good—I hope it won’t come to that. But we do need more time to get settled—Ruth’s a bit weak yet.” Oswald, like John Henry, believed it was some renewal of the Spanish flu they had all known someone die from in 1918.

“The fall is an awful nice time to move up here,” Oswald said.

Henry wasn’t so much concerned with the promise he’d made to his father-in-law anymore; Ruth’s health and the family’s happiness were surely more important, and if Chicago, or Timbuktu, for that matter, would make her happy, they would go there and Paul would be all right with it, Henry felt sure. But for the moment, she was remarkably stable right there in Cedar Bluff. She had barely been home for a month, and he would leave her be.

CHRISTMAS CAME, then the New Year, and shortly thereafter, Ruth found she was pregnant again. At first Henry was unhappy because he had been nearly ready to propose a move to her—she seemed strong and rational enough to consider it. And then he was fearful because of Ruth’s unhappiness during her previous two pregnancies. But the look on her face when she reported the news—pure, serene pleasure—persuaded him to put aside his qualms. Everyone else expressed concern at the news—her parents, Dr. Greene, the women in church. To all of them, Henry simply said, “She wants this baby and she deserves some happiness. She’ll be fine and she wouldn’t like you worrying so much.” As for his own disappointment—Oswald and the company couldn’t wait forever for an answer, he’d have to turn them down definitively, at least for now—he told himself he could bide his time well enough.

He wondered about taking her flying again. She hadn’t asked to go, nor had she mentioned flying at any point while in the hospital. Before Anne’s birth, he had refused to teach her to fly the Jenny alone because it was too dangerous and because he felt that she would have flown away eventually, not just around, as she’d said. What if she’d known how to fly the Jenny that night with Ruth Anne? He would have lost both of them, wife and baby daughter. And inasmuch as he knew he had tethered Ruth to him, to her family, to this place, by refusing to teach her to fly alone, he knew it was the right thing, lifesaving, to have done.

She’d said nothing about wanting to fly since her sickness, and Henry didn’t want to upset her by suggesting it, but the further she got into the pregnancy, the more difficult it would become. If she wanted to fly, the time was now. So, over breakfast one sunny Saturday, he asked, “Would you like to go up in the Swallow today?”

“Oh,” she said, surprised. “No. Not with the baby. And I’ve got too much to do today.”

“Tomorrow, then?”

“Henry, no, I said,” Ruth replied, her eyebrows furrowing.

He studied her closely as she stirred her coffee. She didn’t say anything further, nor did she frown with unhappiness. “Let me know when you want to go up,” he said. “Just say the word.”

Ruth looked at him with clear, serious, and rather blank eyes, said nothing.

Henry, surprised, let it go at that.

RUTH TAUGHT JOHN HENRY to play chess that summer. Just as it had taken her father’s mind off waiting to plant, the chess took her mind off waiting for labor. Her belly felt stretched and her belly button was inverted so that it poked out like the tied-off end of a balloon. She was far bigger than she’d been with the previous two. John Henry was five and eager to play a grown-up game. They didn’t have their own playing board—just the hand-carved pieces that Ruth’s father bought, somehow, for her tenth birthday, which were lined up on a shelf in the living room—so they went together to the lumberyard to get a piece of two-foot-square plywood that was sanded at the edges and corners so as not to give splinters. Then they dug out the can of light blue paint Henry had used to paint his name on his plane. Ruth found a ruler and they drew with a pencil a grid of one-inch-square blocks on the board. They painted the board very carefully in the front yard, John Henry crouched low over his work and Ruth kneeling on all fours—using one hand to paint and the other to balance the odd weight of her belly. Anyone who could see her would have thought how strange she looked, crouched like that as if she were shooting marbles.

John Henry’s natural watchfulness and competitiveness made him a very good chess player. Ruth taught him by twice stating aloud her every move—once before and once after. By the end of the summer, she didn’t need to do this anymore. He could play.

IN EARLY SEPTEMBER 1933, labor came on like a slow cold front, visible from a great distance, and they made it to Iowa City with plenty of time to spare. Margaret was born as healthy as a straight, leafy sapling, and six days later—Dr. Greene wanted Ruth to stay two extra days, just to be sure of her strength—Henry brought them home to Cedar Bluff and to John Henry. Strangely, Ruth felt as if this one were a bigger homecoming from the hospital than the last. She felt relieved to be home again and the new little girl slept in Anne’s old blanket as Ruth lowered her into the bassinet Henry had set up in their bedroom. It had seemed right to keep Anne’s things, and seeing new little Margaret wrapped in something that had held Anne made Ruth glad.

She looked around the room with her old eyes, and she recognized memories of the time before the sickness, but it felt like walking through a museum with objective, safe detachment. Nothing threatened to overwhelm her, not even happiness. She sat down on the bed and pulled the bassinet toward her, reaching in and rubbing the teeny baby’s back gently. When she looked up, she saw Henry and John Henry watching her and she gestured for John Henry to come to her, tiptoeing so as not to wake the baby. “Meet your sister,” she said.

“Always sisters!” he said cheerfully, in a full voice despite his recent and careful tiptoe. Margaret awoke and began squawking in earnest. She was lovely and sweet and quiet and watchful and Ruth was more grateful for her than she’d been for the others, not that she loved them any less. This baby lay in one position for hours on end, sleeping, then waking and simply watching the world go by as if she were a census taker. Ruth had dreams for her, she would be able to fly if she wanted to; she could do anything. Amelia Earhart and Mrs. Lindbergh and Jackie Cochran and so many others had made it easier for her.

John Henry doted on Margaret as if he were the mother himself. He wanted to change her diapers; he wanted to put her to bed when she moved on to bottled milk. And he would read to her—stories from his schoolbooks, history lessons, anything. Henry also doted on his baby daughter, taking her downstairs to the kitchen sometimes early in the morning when she was awake and her mother needed more sleep. He would sit by the stove with her and sing the lullabies he had sung to himself every night for years after he stopped being able to remember exactly what his mother’s face looked like, although he could remember her voice. Margaret watched him sing with her shining gray eyes on him and her mouth sometimes formed into a perfect O as if she were sucking on an imaginary straw.

All in all, she was not as much of a shock to Ruth’s system as either John or Anne had been, and this was perhaps because Ruth herself was changed, not wholly, of course, but something, some tension wire, had been clipped. Watching her everywhere around him, with him and without him, intimate and not, it seemed to Henry like something in Ruth had been numbed, or decimated. She was calmer, this was true, and he was thankful for it, but he didn’t know whether to believe it or not, or what its full ramifications were.

“Take it easy on yourself, Ruth,” Dr. Greene had said the morning before she checked out after her sickness. “Keep in touch with me, do you understand? Come in and talk if you need it.”

“Oh, I will, Dr. Greene,” Ruth assured him.

“Well, if you ever need anything, if you ever start to feel bad again—be sure to come to me right away.” He squeezed her hand.

Ruth thought of the man across from her in the mental ward who had been turned into a child after they cut into his head. It was a new surgery, the nurse had said.

“I’ll be fine,” Ruth said firmly, and Dr. Greene said good-bye.

November 23, 1933

Mrs. Charles Lindbergh

England

Dear Mrs. Lindbergh,

Although we’re barely to Thanksgiving, the cold’s already familiar this year. It set in early, mid-September, and some of my pumpkins froze on their stalks before Halloween. You always grow more pumpkins than you want to anyway, they’re like weeds, so it was all right that a few perished. Anyway, it does seem like a year when cold would set in so early. It does not seem like a year when God is sitting on the porch, letting the warm, sweet twins, August and September, trundle around endlessly in the grass, chasing fireflies. No, He seems more interested in His more severe daughter, Winter, and all her accompanying thrift and chill, and she’s come for a good long stay this time. From the window over my kitchen sink, I can look out over the field where we rotate corn with soybeans. I look at the stalks hunkered down onto the ground, and the field looks so tired I want to go out and sing to it. I want to think of a song to sing that will make us all feel better about the cold and this wretched world. We’re due for snow tonight.

Henry’s airstrip is just in the middle of the north field and he says the ground has been rough as rocks for nearly a month now. We didn’t have much rain this fall, which is too bad because it’s tough when everything freezes dry. My father prays most nights for a wet spring.

I’ll tell you a beautiful sight I have, no matter what season: a nearly perfect row of maple trees, bounding the top of the farm. They were a fiery red-orange a month ago, but now most of those leaves have fallen on the ground and been blown around. From now until March, this line of trees will stand as dark as pencil drawings up against the early winter gray sky.

Henry manages to get up and fly quite a bit, even though he’s not flying the mail anymore; instead he’s a mechanic at the Iowa City field. He quit his route several months ago after being away too much. You can’t blame a man for wanting to see his wife and children every night, I suppose, and after four years of me and John Henry staying home while Henry piloted for Mr. Boeing, he said it was time to find some aviation work closer to home. You see, when he flew the mail, he had to stay in Chicago through the week and then come home to Cedar Bluff on the weekends. Now, Iowa City is only about twelve miles west of us. There is a good road nearby, and in our Ford, he can get there in less than a half hour. His work there means they’ll let him put his Swallow in a hangar from time to time. And the runway there, of course, has a beacon and some lights. After seven years of tying the plane up in the open field, rain or snow, heat or frost, our Jenny is much worse for the wear and hasn’t moved in a few years. Now that Henry’s got his Swallow and his job in Iowa City, I think he’s wise to use the hangar space.

So you see, things are working out for us small-town, country aviation types. Henry’s had quite a few people come down to the field for lessons. I think that in thirty years or more we’ll see equal numbers of people with pilot’s licenses as driver’s licenses. When you see planes like our little Swallow, you see how easy it can be. We don’t have anything so fancy as your Sirius, Mrs. Lindbergh, but then again we don’t need one. Henry hardly flies out of Iowa much, let alone across oceans, like you do. So the Swallow does him just fine. Henry says that if we ever wanted to fly to California in the Swallow, we certainly could. I don’t fly these days so I don’t know myself, but Henry seems to like it.

I’m sure you don’t know that I sent a condolence letter right after Charles Jr.’s disappearance, a year and a half ago, in the spring. You must’ve gotten so many letters, from important people, the Guggenheims, President Roosevelt, the Morgans, the Rockefellers, and the Astors, plus all the other people you must know from your father’s life as a diplomat. I know you’ve been all over the world, Anne. Before you met Charles, even. I have often been envious of you. Very envious. And so I’m sure you received so many letters wishing you comfort in the sadness of your loss, that you could never have known my letter was among them.

I had a chance to go to a good women’s college, St. Catherine’s in Minnesota, but my father would not let me go, even as yours encouraged you so much. How I wish that my father raised me as yours raised his daughters! My father believes that a woman does not need education because she should stay on the farm, raising the family and helping her husband her whole life. College does not help with these things, he says. He is a good man, my father. Simple and direct and full of love he doesn’t always know quite what to do with. I guess that’s men for you. But also, he is stubborn as a mule in tall grass next to a clear, cool pond. The things I could have done or been if I had a college education like you, Mrs. Lindbergh. I could be a better writer and I could write things that influence people, as you and Mrs. Amelia Earhart Putnam have done. Maybe I could’ve been as good on a radio as you and maybe I could’ve convinced some man, my husband even, that I was indispensable in the rear cockpit.

You know, I had a baby who was nearly exactly the same age as Charles Jr., her name was Ruth Anne and maybe you remember the letter where I told you that her middle name came from you, even though Henry didn’t know it. She was taken from me right after Charles was taken from you. At first I thought this was a terrible, terrible coincidence—that we were both victims of the same tragedy of fate. But then I realized my baby was taken because I had been ungrateful at the beginning of my pregnancy and because I was angry with you for having Charles Jr. You see, I have always envied you immensely because you have remained your husband’s navigator while I could only fly for one short year and a half before John Henry’s arrival kept me home. I saw that I was burdened with children and family responsibilities and you were not. And then I thought, maybe one can never have everything and so maybe Mrs. Lindbergh’s flying all the time would mean that she would never have children.

I consoled myself with this; yes, I wished that you never would have children. I wished there was one part of your life that I didn’t envy so much my eyes burned when I looked at photographs of you and Charles, next to the Sirius in Greenland or Cuba or London. I love my children, you see, I love my children with everything that I am, because they are all that I am. I might have chosen to do more flying, more navigating, but I was not able to do both, as you are. You have continued to be able to fly—and my gross envy caused me to think that maybe you weren’t given a choice, either—maybe it was your destiny to fly and not have children as it was my destiny to have children and not fly. I trusted in the law of things by which I was a woman meant to have children; you were a woman meant to fly. This was well before Charles and Ruth Anne were born—this was after you and Charles were married and mapping all those transatlantic and transpacific routes around the world. You can see how it was easy to be convinced that you were destined to fly, not to have a family. I believed, at the time, that no woman could do both. This made my terrible, aching desire to fly hurt less.

When you gave birth to Charles Jr., I was proven wrong. I was angry and jealous and confused. I hated you, even while I admired you most of anyone in the world.

I was always a good woman, not perfect or pious or any one of many better things I could have been. But I was always, at the very least, kind and benevolent. But you, the things you experienced, the gifts you received such as only God in heaven could give—my envy of these things changed my onetime goodness. Drained it entirely out of me.

I became pregnant and gave birth to Ruth Anne. Even then I still loved you as much as I hated you and I gave her your name for her middle name. And I was happy and at ease with my baby even though the pregnancy was very difficult. I felt blessed. I had a beautiful baby girl and a sweet little boy. I thought the pregnancy had been a trial and my lovely Ruth Anne was a reward for passing.

Jealousy is a natural emotion, Mrs. Lindbergh, and although it may upset you to hear me say I envied you so much, you should also know that I always corrected these emotions. But when your baby disappeared, I couldn’t halt or stop or control the way I felt anymore. I felt so terrible because I believed that I had wished for the horrible fate your baby suffered—no, not the fate he suffered, but the fate you suffered as his mother. I was getting what I darkly imagined at one point—a measure of fairness, which declared to you, as it had to me, that we could have one but not the other. Children or flying, not both. You got the strife that it somehow seemed I had hoped for. And I knew, almost immediately, that I would have to repair my thoughts, even though I never said them to anyone, even though I would hardly let myself have ill will towards you and your family except in the very darkest of dark Iowa nights in my own dark heart. And almost immediately, my repair was made. Ruth Anne was taken from me.

It was April, although brisk even for April—two nights earlier, my daffodils froze and keeled over, stiff as blades. Sometimes I think, we don’t realize how dark our hearts can be, how much goodness can run out of us, until a mirror is lifted, until our darkest wishes are granted and we can see them in real life in all their wretchedness and shame.

We have been blessed with a brand-new baby just two months ago. Margaret Elizabeth. She carries the grace and beauty and peace of her older sister, who, I have no doubt, is navigating baby Charles around the heavens in some gleaming silver plane like the one Howard Hughes has been flying.

It comforts me a bit to think that you have not suffered alone, that I have suffered with you. For I have suffered a similar tragedy, even though you bear no blame for Charles Jr.’s death and I bear every blame for Ruth Anne’s. I know what it is to hear a cry in the middle of the night and you think, half awake, “Oh, little Charles is hungry.” And you then go in to the nursery and it is only when you open the door that you remember it is Jon, not Charles, that Charles is gone. I know what it is like to stand there and close your eyes and ears and to try and conjure up the sound of little Charles’s cry, to imagine his face. And you realize you cannot.

I try to put Ruth Anne square and forever in my memory. I try to be sure that she is there. That I know how she was different from John and Margaret. But she’s faded already. I see Margaret’s little pale face and big gray blinking eyes and she reminds me of Ruth Anne, but I couldn’t tell them apart. I have already nearly forgotten Ruth Anne but for the ache, which is, I know, of guilt and selfish longing, that seems a new organ in my side. When their absence is more than three times as long as their lives, how can we say we do not forget them?

The doctors and Henry tried to tell me that Ruth Anne had a hole in her heart. She was born with it. It was amazing she lived as long as she did, Dr. Greene said. But I don’t believe him. I put the hole in her heart with my envy and my ungratefulness. I know this. And the only consolation I have for this little angel who used to sleep with her lips puckered, as if waiting for my nipple or a finger or another set of puckered angel lips to meet hers—the blisters she used to get from sucking so hard!!—the only consolation I have is knowing that she is with Charles Jr.

I do feel that I have paid my debts and this gives me strength. I will never be so greedy or envious again. I will never again wish more for myself than that I be a good and loving mother. It is quite a lot to bring children into this world and to love them and raise them to think well of the world, to love each other. It is not so much for me to give up fiddling around with maps and compasses and sextants in order to love my children, the children I have been blessed with.

I will not write again, Mrs. Lindbergh. I admire you still and I will always admire you and think of you, not least because our babies are together in heaven. There are many things about our lives that have brought us close together. And if I could go back and change my foolish, envious, young heart three years ago, oh, I would. I would do that before any other single thing—I would turn down any chance at being the first person to fly around the world nonstop if I could simply go back and change what I wished for you once upon a time. I would rather have our babies back than be Amelia Earhart, Colonel Lindbergh, and the Wright Brothers combined. Man in flight is a wondrous, lovely thing. But nothing, nothing, can compare to the wonder in a newborn’s eyes or the eagerness in a one-year-old’s reaching grasp. Nothing, no science, no discovery, can match these things. It is my great shame that I ever wanted anything more than these children, these beauties.

Forever in your regret,

Ruth Gutterson

Cedar Bluff, Iowa

Margaret was halfway through her first year when Oswald called Henry one more time, said there was one last job he’d offer him and then he’d stop trying. It was his old route again; the young kid who’d replaced him—the same young kid, awfully enough, who’d asked Ruth for directions to St. Louis even though she’d never been there—had crashed just outside Omaha in a bad storm, and died. “I know you’d like something to keep you closer to one field—but it’s all I’ve got.”

Later that night, as he stood with Ruth in the kitchen, folding bed linens, both of them enjoying the relaxed silence of sleeping children and tired adults left to themselves at last, he mentioned the phone call. “What do you think about moving to Chicago?” he said. “Oswald offered me a job a year back, and I had to turn it down, and now he’s offered me my old route, which I’d only accept if we lived in Chicago. As soon as something comes up where I can be home every night—like Cleveland—I’ll take it. But with this, you’ll see me four or five nights.”

Ruth considered this, working still, not looking at him. “And if we stay here?”

“Well, I think I won’t take the job if we stay here. I don’t want to be gone so much as I used to be. And he’s said it’s the last job he’ll offer me.”

Ruth folded a towel and brought it into her chest, hugging it there. “I’m fine, Henry,” she said. “I’m truly fine. Fly for UAT if that’s what you want to do—I think I could endure your absences. But I’ll not move to Chicago.”

Henry sighed and looked into his hands. “Why not? Once upon a time, it’s all you wanted, to leave Cedar Bluff. I’ve half wondered if any of—” He stopped short of blaming Ruth Anne’s death on their living on a farm outside a small town—it was both cruel and inaccurate. “I’ve just wondered what might have gone differently for us if we’d moved to the city right away and we weren’t apart so much.”

“If you’re asking me to explain what happened and why,” Ruth said, her face darkening, clouding with every second, as she set the towel atop a stack of towels and started to pick them up, “or what’s changed—I can’t say I know. I just know I want to stay here, next to my parents. This is home to me and it’s a good place for the children to grow up. It’s what feels right. ”

Henry sighed, feeling weak and overwhelmed. “I don’t want to go back to how it was,” he said.

“Then find a job that will let you come home to Cedar Bluff every night, because I’m staying right here. Daddy’s going to give us the big house in a few years when Margaret’s grown bigger.” She took the stack of towels then and left the room, leaving Henry alone with one of the dogs asleep near the stove. He’d offered her a real plan, a real offer, sensible, even, and they could do it if they wanted. It seemed like the natural time, the natural advancement in their lives, and a little exciting besides. There was sense in her reaction, if it didn’t contrast so clearly with what she’d wanted before her sickness. It was the difference, so stark, that bewildered him. Ruth’s new quiet calmed Henry to a certain degree, but he missed her spark, her insatiable energy and enthusiasm, her bravery. It was these things that he had first fallen in love with that day at the end of the drive; these things that he had imagined would sustain them through his own less brave and honorable moments. Some nights, now, since the sickness, he watched her sleep. Other times he watched her move about the house, putting the children to sleep, finishing up the dishes. In watching, he searched for any sign that she hadn’t lost her old self, that she was merely storing it away for a time when she could bear to feel it again.

In bed that night, Ruth spoke into the moonlit darkness: “I don’t know why it is I’ve changed my mind about this, about feeling like I can’t leave Cedar Bluff. But it is the way I feel, and I’m sorry if it angers or disappoints you,” Ruth said, and tears began to slip down her face.

In that day’s mail, to boot, she had received back the final letter she’d written to Mrs. Lindbergh, the first since the hospital, since Margaret, and the last, she had vowed, overall. But the letter came back to her “return to sender” and it was difficult, impossible, to tell whether it’d even been opened. Not across the top, anyway, as with a letter opener. And now, much as Ruth wanted to write again, apologize, she knew there could be no more. It was dangerous, this letter writing. She could make a diary with such letters, yes; but she’d write to no real person, from now on, if she must write at all. What, after all, if the Lindberghs came after her? They could contact the police if she tried to write again. She had to stop, and she could stop. Yet the weight of it all, the imagined humiliation, the sadness and longing she already felt for the friends she would have to abandon. She wept harder.

Seeing the reflection of her tears in the moonlight, Henry rolled toward her, gathered her in his arms, pulled her as close as he could, kissed her head, her ear, her neck. “No, Ruth. No,” he said. “That’s not it.”

She cried softly, cried out what she had, and then slept, for which he was grateful. He lay awake, listening to an owl hoot from high up in the oak tree over the garage. Could they stay in Cedar Bluff forever, and would she fly again? Would he?

HENRY STARTED THINKING about crop dusting and about teaching flying lessons not too long after he turned down the job with Oswald. One of the guys in Iowa City reported that they’d had some inquiries about flying lessons, after the local newspaper ran a little story on Henry and the Air Mail. As for the crop dusting, he’d heard that some of the mail pilots did it on the side, and there was a man in central Illinois, over near Springfield, who had a big business going now with work across the whole region. It was actually Paul who’d heard about him from another farmer with family down there—and he told Henry about it, who called immediately.

“The money’s good, real good, especially after the first season, when farmers see their yields go up—double, even,” the man said over the telephone when Henry called to see if he could ask him how he got started. “And I’m not charging farmers so much—it’s just that it’s easy and fast, so I can do five or six farms in a single day.”

The man was kind—more so once he determined that Henry was far enough away never to compete with him—and he invited Henry down to fly with him for a day. “You have an old Curtiss Jenny?” the man said. “That’s what I fly. And I know where you can get one for a hundred dollars or so—less, maybe—and she’ll do you just fine.” Henry told him it was a Swallow he hoped to use and the man, somewhat surprised, said that would be fine, too. Henry eagerly accepted. He told Ruth he was going to an old pilot friend who was sick and that he would be back the following morning—he wanted to be sure the money was good and the plan was viable before telling her and, by proxy, the rest of the family.

The crop duster was named Martin McDonough and he had come to Illinois from Ireland only fifteen years before. “But I fell in love with flying right away,” McDonough said. “Of course you know they’ve got a nice airfield here at Springfield, and I used to come over and get free lessons in exchange for delivering coal for their stoves and occasionally looking at their linen wings—my family knows textiles, you see. So I learned and then I read about some fellow in Texas spraying his wheat for grasshoppers with an airplane!” McDonough had a long, chortling laugh that emanated from his belly and shook his voluminous beard—Henry wondered how he could fly, in fact, with such a beard. “I could hardly imagine it,” he added, still laughing. “But I looked into it, and now here I am, ‘Martin McDonough, Farmers’ Friend, Insects’ Enemy.’”

They were standing in the Springfield airfield office and he gestured to an empty table, where they both took a seat. He took a folded-up newspaper out of his shirt pocket and showed Henry an advertisement with McDonough’s plane and the slogan written across it.

“That’s nice,” Henry said. “Did it work?”

“It’s the results that work,” McDonough exclaimed, leaning forward. “I’ve got a waiting list, my friend.” He continued talking, explaining to Henry what sort of farms did well with crop dusting, how frequently dusting was needed, how to sell this idea to the farmer. “They’re beginning to hear about this. So hopefully people won’t think you’re as crazy as they thought I was at first. And even if they do think you’re crazy—it just takes one season of results for them to stop laughing. These are hard times,” McDonough said. “No farmer can scoff at what our work can do for them.”

Next he took out a piece of paper on which he had drawn a very careful diagram of his plane: there were two long barrels attached to the belly of McDonough’s Jenny and wire pulls that ran from the barrels into the cockpit such that he just had to pull on one side or both and the pesticides would spill out over the crops as he flew over. “You’ll see it for yourself in just a few minutes, but I thought I’d lay out the plans for you here—you can take this with you, too, if you want. I’m sure it’s adaptable to the Swallow.”

“That’s very generous of you,” Henry replied, putting the plans into his own pocket. They walked out to McDonough’s Jenny, and they climbed in, took off, and dusted three farms over about two hours. Just as amazing to Henry as the actual dusting mechanism was the closeness to the ground at which McDonough flew. He couldn’t have been more than twenty feet up. And the low, precarious turns he’d have to make at the end of the field! Sometimes a tree was there, or a utility line—this wasn’t easy flying and Henry didn’t like the feel of some of McDonough’s moves—McDonough missed some of the Jenny’s cues of protest and Henry found himself white-knuckled in the second seat. He also didn’t like the smell of the stuff that was coming out of the belly of the plane. McDonough had a fancy mask; Henry had only his handkerchief tied over his mouth and nose. Despite all this, it was nice to be in a Jenny again—since Ruth Anne’s death, the new Swallow gave him as good a reason as any to leave the Jenny where he’d pushed her to one June day several years before—in the shadow of the barn.

When they were done, McDonough flew them back to the Springfield airfield. They drove to a restaurant in town and McDonough tried to estimate how much money he had spent when he started. He also gave Henry the name of a farm products dealer whom he could call to get good information about which insect killer to use and where to get good barrels—scribbling all of this on the back of the plans he’d given Henry. They ate beef stew and toast and had coffee, and crumbs peppered the Irishman’s thick, coarse beard. “Not everyone has the stomach for this work, you know,” McDonough said. “It’s dangerous, a bit,” and Henry thought, Not everyone flies as badly as you do.

“But you’re still game?” McDonough asked.

“I’ve had some experience,” Henry replied.

“Oh?”

“I flew the mail for a while.”

“Indeed,” McDonough responded. “I’ll say you have experience.” He shook his head, amazed—and annoyed?—Henry couldn’t tell. McDonough got back to eating, and was quiet.

Henry tried, but couldn’t think of another single question to ask. Eventually, McDonough started talking about the airfield and its possible growth and Henry listened, nodding. At last, they paid the bill and McDonough reached out, shook Henry’s hand firmly, and wished him luck. “There are more and more of us all the time,” McDonough said. “I’m glad to help in any way I can. And you stay safe. I’ll try to do the same.”

Henry thanked him and estimated that he’d have just enough time to fly home and surprise Ruth with the good news. The skies had been clear on the way over and there was sun until well after seven in the middle part of May. He felt hopeful and virtuous—he believed he had found a way to continue flying without moving to Chicago. He couldn’t wait to tell Ruth. He would be at home every day; and he would be flying every day; she could perhaps fly with him as much as she wanted. He felt, at last, that they might be all right after all, safe, and maybe Paul, too, would be pleased. Henry wouldn’t be farming, but he’d be helping farmers.

He wondered what Philippe would think of the crop dusting—probably he’d find it both absurd and wonderful. Flying adapted to help something else in daily, mundane life. But then he’d find the barrels on the belly of a plane, ruining her beauty and symmetry, awful. With all the trouble and sadness of the last few years, Henry had looked back to easier times and France quite frequently; flying with McDonough, too, made him think of Philippe and how nice it was to have a partner in the plane. As he flew home to Cedar Bluff that evening, he thought of all the flights they took together when they no longer pretended to be having lessons—down over Marseilles and Monaco, flying low and seeing people look up, interested or worried, not quite used to civilian aviators buzzing overhead. A few times they landed in a bumpy field north of Nice where Philippe had some family and they spent whole afternoons and evenings walking through vineyards and eating magnificent meals with wines and meats and cheeses that Henry was slowly learning to appreciate.

Henry always missed having a partner in the cockpit—he missed Ruth, too. He had never had any letters from Philippe after leaving, and perhaps this was to be expected, since Henry knew that his friend was angry with him for leaving. Why hadn’t Henry stayed? Because France and Philippe did not offer any of the things that Henry wanted from life—a wife and family, and not, preferably, on a war-torn continent. His happiness in France, with Philippe, was the happiness of youth and adventure, not permanency, and there was no logic to staying, although Philippe had done his best to convince him otherwise. “You like it here, I know,” Philippe had said one day to Henry in the stables. “And you could have a bright future here. But you must decide that you want it—that it’s for you. Listen to your feelings.” He pointed to Henry’s heart. “Don’t go back to America unless you feel like you must. In there.” Then Philippe took a long drag on his cigarette, looking away. When he turned back, he said very quickly, “You must also feel that you are sure you want to leave me.”

Henry heard every word of this, and didn’t respond because he knew he would never be sure that it was Philippe he was leaving—and yet he would go anyway, and this insistent departure held the truth and clarity that Henry couldn’t speak. He left France to find a wife and start a family in America, and now he’d done that and he loved her without reserve or doubt; but still he missed Philippe, even after all these years, and especially after all these years—the difficult ones particularly. He missed the ease, the fun, their youth.

Until the day with McDonough, he had never thought of contacting Philippe, but the crop dusting idea got a partnership into Henry’s head and he considered this for a while, about how he might present it to Ruth, to Philippe himself, and he wondered how in the world he would be able to seriously ask Philippe to move from France to Iowa for crop dusting. He would write a letter to Philippe, he decided as he flew home. He composed the letter in his head. But then he landed, came back to his senses as he was chocking the plane, and laughed himself to tears. He didn’t need a partner, anyway, he told himself—and if he did, then surely Ruth would be willing in a few years, when the children were older. She had been enthusiastic about the idea when Henry told her. He explained it all to her over a game of chess and after she asked a few questions, saw how easy and sensible it was, he watched relief and happiness sweep over her. “I think it’s a wonderful idea,” she said. “It’s perfect.”

July 1934

Dear              ,

Henry proposed moving to Chicago, but I refused. I’ve learned, haven’t I?, that Cedar Bluff is where I’m meant to stay, that I should be grateful for it. And so I am. We’re making a life here. A good life. And now, Henry’s had the brilliant idea of using his plane for farming—to spread fertilizer and insecticides. And if I had said I’d go to Chicago—he never would’ve come up with this. We have it all now. Right here in Cedar Bluff.

Mary Hitchens does know how to enjoy herself. She had some of us over for lunch this afternoon and I can’t remember the last time I laughed so much. We played a few card games, first gin rummy, which I like well enough to play with Henry, late at night when it’s quiet, but I don’t enjoy quite so well at a party. After lunch, Mary had us playing charades with song and book titles and film stars and we could hardly breathe for laughing so much, especially when proper Alice Jaczys mimed a baseball player for “Take Me Out to the Ballgame.” She hiked up her skirts and squatted down like she was swinging something and Alice, oh, she’s ever so serious, and she looked serious doing this, too, her dark eyebrows pushed together, so concentrated, so believable. Mary was the first one to laugh and then the rest of us couldn’t resist, couldn’t contain it. No one guessed “Take Me Out to the Ballgame”—Jacqueline suggested “Casey at the Bat” but we all agreed Alice had the best acting abilities of any of us.

I admire Mary because she seems so at ease with herself, so reasonable and happy. Never moody. Her smile is so genuine, so patient and generous, and she always knows just when to call on me for a chat or a walk. She miscarried a child, her second, and now she won’t have any more, and then, yes, as anybody would be, she was distraught and spent many weeks in her house, going out only when she knew she wouldn’t see anyone. But then, eventually, she was better, and as her friend, I knew she was all right. I wish our children could play better together, but her Thomas is three years older than John, and you know how boys are—they have no time for the too much younger, the too much smaller ones. And since Thomas is their only one, Margaret’ll have no peer there.

It would be best if Henry and Tom Senior were friendlier, but Tom is an (over)careful, judgmental man and he believes Henry is haughty and takes advantage of both my father and myself. Of course, that means we’re letting ourselves be taken advantage of, which is neither correct nor a terribly respectful opinion for Tom to have. But Mary’s so even, Tom’s opinion doesn’t weigh much on her and she tells me it shouldn’t bother me, either. “You’re the most honest woman in this whole town,” she tells me, although I can’t see she’s particularly dishonest. “You should keep being who you are, both of you, and you shouldn’t bother yourself with Tom’s opinion, which is mostly about Henry being an outsider, if you want to know the truth.”

To tell you the truth, I think this was all said to make me feel good. She’s like that, Mary is. She strokes people, makes them feel calm and good and secure.

You’ll like that after “Take Me Out to the Ballgame,” Anna was given Amelia Earhart to charade and after dancing around with her arms spread, as if an airplane, she pointed to me, and Mary cried out, “Pilot!” and Elizabeth said, “Aviatrix,” and Alice said, “Mrs. Lindbergh.”

Margaret’s just eight months old, and what a miracle she is. She’s so perfect I can hardly try to write about her, as I’ll not do her justice.

The early years of Margaret’s life were the early and hectic years of Henry’s crop-dusting business, and time seemed to evaporate around them. He continued to ask Ruth if she wanted a ride; he asked her every few months for several years; he even suggested that she get her private pilot’s license. “I’m the head instructor,” he finally reminded her, pleaded with her, one night in the summer of 1940 as they sat on the back steps watching their children in the yard. He wanted her to fly again. He wanted it desperately, he realized, as he sat there on the step, feeling anxious and a little angry that she hadn’t been up in a plane with him in eight or nine years. Margaret was not quite seven and John, just eleven. They were running around catching fireflies in the lingering dusk of a June evening. Margaret, with more tentative and gentle hands, caught the glowing dots of insects more easily than her older brother did. But then he slowed down, too, and quickly accumulated a colony of five fireflies in his hand cage. Crickets and cicadas clicked and chortled and Margaret squealed a little every time she caught a firefly: “Oh! I got two now!” She came over to her mother and father and opened her hands to show them, but she was too slow and both bugs escaped, glad for freedom. “That’s okay,” Margaret pronounced gamely. “There’s millions out here.” She ran off.

“Have you been thinking about my suggestion?” Henry said to Ruth when Margaret was gone.

“That I get my private license?”

“Yes.”

“Not this whole time, I haven’t been thinking about it, no,” Ruth said.

“So?”

“Oh, I don’t want to do that, Henry,” she said. “I’m not interested.” She looked away from him, at one of their cats, who was stalking something in slow, measured steps along the house. In the dark, Ruth could barely make out a grasshopper leaping forward; the cat pounced, but missed.

“Why not?” Henry said. “You used to love to fly, and—well, you haven’t flown at all in, what, eight years.”

“It’s closer to ten years. I just haven’t wanted to,” Ruth said. “And I still don’t want to. That’s all.”

Henry did not entirely believe what his wife was saying. She seemed remote, even though the rationale for her not wanting to fly was obvious: the night with Anne in the Jenny. He knew that Ruth was angry, frustrated, with him for pushing the point, and he was angry in return. He wanted her to change her mind. He wanted her up there with him. It would ease his guilt. “But you love to fly, Ruth,” he murmured. It was all he could think to say. “You loved it so much I can’t believe you’re able to change your mind about it. It was everything to you.”

If he understood her, Ruth thought, he would understand that loving flying was just the problem, it was what had gotten her in all the trouble and sickness in the first place. She believed it was better if she simply did not fly again. Not in the near future, anyway. She half believed that someday she would wake up and trust rather than fear the burning desire to be back up in the air, with ground spreading out below her and clouds coming down to meet her and her stomach and head doing cartwheels of giddiness and gravity. In her most vivid dreams, she was still flying. She flew alone over an ocean and the blue rippled beneath her with occasional whitecaps and there was no land on the horizon, but she was not afraid. She flew with Henry and they had a plane with pontoons on it and they landed on a lake, a perfect mirror, which they skidded across as if on ice skates. They made love in flight, in the Jenny, the wind rushing around them and the roar curiously absent, so that they could hear each other’s pleasure. She flew in her dreams, and when she awoke, there was a profound calm. Sometimes, she closed her eyes and willed herself back to the dream, and she could get there.

Henry watched carefully, looking for some betrayal of her words in her face, some hint that he was right, that she was pretending, somehow; he looked for some way in. But no. Her mouth cemented in place, her eyes sparkless and tired. And he felt his anger become tinged with sadness. He missed her. He missed that part of their marriage. Watching her hair blow under the helmet; her smelling like flight; and the way she talked after flying, the silky, confident calm that came into her voice.

“Just listen to me, Henry,” she said on the steps that summer night in 1940. “Listen to my words. I’m not getting in an airplane. Not now and maybe not ever.”

Henry listened, felt provoked by her tone, and spoke before he thought what to say: “Don’t be such a coward, Ruth.”

In the echoing silence that followed, it occurred to him, at last, that maybe he’d been wrong about refusing to teach her to fly the Jenny by herself—maybe he’d not saved her after all.