Anne Morrow Lindbergh: Her Life (38 page)

On their first night in America, the Nicolsons dined with the Lindberghs at a private dinner at the Waldorf-Astoria. Nicolson was “shy to meet them,” he wrote in his diary, after all they had been through. Charles was more complex than he had imagined. Nicolson was struck by Charles’s physical beauty, as well as his “intellectual forehead, shy engaging manner, and his thin, nervous, capable fingers.” His wife, wrote Nicolson, not referring to Anne by name, was “shy and retreating rather interested in books, with a tragedy at the corner of her mouth.” Anne felt an immediate kinship with Harold. Vita appeared “veiled,” but Anne found him open and warm, interested in her and in literature. Their conversation, which moved quickly from author to author, finally centered on Virginia Woolf. They talked about her books, sharing one another’s impressions. Nicolson was admiring of Woolf’s work, though critical.
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Anne was puzzled by his comments on Woolf’s books. She did not then know that Woolf was one of his wife’s lovers.

As March 1, the anniversary of Charlie’s death, grew near, Anne could not stop the flood of memory. Try as she did to dam it up, it swept over what she most wanted. And every night Anne recounted to herself the events in the last moments of her boy’s life.
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But the reddening maples and the crack of the tulips through the frozen soil relieved her pain. She walked through the woods and sat on a log in the sun. In lyrical cadence, she wrote an ode to the eternal flow of life.
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Writing and flying were her only consolations. Flying, like art, Anne would later write, cut her free from the “strings” of memory and her daily routine.

Cut her free. This was the puzzle, one she had not yet solved. How to be grounded in daily life, yet be alive and creative, open to the beauty and adventure of flying and art? Her instincts pushed her into solitude, and her desire to fly took her away from Jon. While her writing had brought her self-reflection, she had not applied her insight to life. She knew she had to separate Charles’s needs from her own, but for the moment, her ambivalence was paralyzing. She could neither commit herself fully to the care of Jon, nor could she ignore Charles’s demands that she fly.

On April 16, she did consent to accompany Charles on an inspection tour for Transcontinental and Western Air. In October of 1930, Transcontinental Air Transport and Western Air Express had merged, establishing America’s first all-air coast-to-coast passenger service.
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Charles continued to work for the new conglomerate, purchasing planes and mechanical parts. On this trip, Charles was to inspect a new super-speed transport that would carry passengers between New York and Los Angeles in eighteen hours. Anne dreaded the publicity and the long hours in the back cockpit, but soon the sheer beauty of the countryside won her over. Distracting herself by reciting poetry, and delighted by the good weather and their safe landings, Anne relaxed. Once again, as she had during her early flights west with Charles, she felt that “the world was made for us.”
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Baltimore, Washington, Pittsburgh, Columbus, St. Louis, Kansas City, Kingman—thousands of people came out to greet them each time they landed. As if to help them leave their tragedy behind, the public cheered their heroes on. After twelve days, Anne and Charles arrived in Los Angeles, the Promised Land—and she found that the broad green
valleys, neat orchards, and big highways reminded her of Charlie. She had been pregnant with him on their flight to Los Angeles in 1930, and Charlie was still more real than Jon, even though Jon waited at home. Feeling like Alice in Wonderland, growing big and small, Anne tried to get back to “the right size” by amusing herself on the beaches of Los Angeles Bay. While Charles met with technicians and officials, Anne walked the shoreline, absorbed by the “unfold and slide” of the waves. Disguised in beach pajamas and smoked glasses, she roller-skated on the big concrete walk above the Palisades.
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But quickly her mood turned grim when, three weeks later, they were caught in a fog while flying back east. They were playing hide and seek with death and she closed her eyes and cried in terror that Death would “flow” right through her.
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She chastised herself for not having faith in Charles; she believed her terror grew from her lack of faith.

In mid-May, a month after they had left, Anne and Charles returned to Englewood and Anne was happy to be home again with Jon. Charles, encouraged by the success of their California trip, began to plan another long-range survey. This time, he decided, they would fly across the Atlantic, first to Greenland and Iceland, and then to the continent. From France, they would fly south through Africa and circle home by way of South America. Charles estimated that the trip would take five months and planned to leave in early July. Jon would be eighteen months old when they returned, and their flights would have taken them from him for a third of his life. Yet Anne agreed. Perhaps her acquiescence was not merely to please Charles. Those around her believed she was afraid of getting too close to Jon.

They painted the Lockheed Sirius they had flown to Asia red and black and equipped it with a 710–horsepower Wright Cyclone engine and pontoons for landing on water. Their goal was to “link the continents by water routes,” the last remaining barrier to commercial flight. They would test new equipment and gather slides of airborne microbes at high altitudes. Charles designed the plane for “total independence,”
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with sophisticated radios and large fuel reserves, ensuring their safety in the icy north and along the sweltering Equator.

By June, Anne was back to practicing her Morse code. But all her preparations for the flight were infused with memories of Charlie; she worried about the safety of Jon in their absence. This time, her mother-in-law agreed to keep watch in Maine, along with Betty Gow, Elsie Whateley, and hired guards. Evangeline’s presence, along with the promise of an escort ship and a radio base in Greenland, eased her fears.
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By month’s end, however, death was again on her trail. Elisabeth had suffered another heart attack at her home in Wales. This time, Anne resolved not to be afraid. She had rehearsed everyone’s death, even her own. Determined to leave a written legacy should she die in flight, Anne wrote a statement on July 8 and tucked it into her diary; it outlined her philosophy of mothering and her hopes for Jon. She wanted him to be sensitive and self-sufficient, but she feared he would be over-protected and lose the strength to stand alone. She hoped he would “meet [life] with optimism and courage and zest like his father and his grandfather.”
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Anne and Charles left on July 9 from North Beach, New Jersey, stopping in North Haven to say good-bye to the Morrows, just as they had done two years earlier. Once more the townspeople crowded the harbor in their boats to greet them. Anne was struck by the frailty of her family alongside the permanent beauty of the islands. And yet she knew they would always protect her, and she could always come home.
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Anne would write home often, she promised her mother; her letters would give a purpose to her trip.
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As they flew east through Greenland and Iceland, though, Anne’s letters glazed with distance. She sent home detailed descriptions of the mountains and the sky, the buildings and the houses, the lush gardens and the colorful dress of the Eskimos, but there was little expression of her emotions. While it was Anne’s duty to keep a record of her impressions, she had left at home all that was real. Only when she watched the Eskimos dance did she begin to feel alive again. Expressing a theme which permeates her writing, she compares the perfect pattern of their music to the rhythms of the cycles of life.
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As they flew through the Shetland Islands toward the Continent, Anne’s fears did become manifest; they were like an animal “hunger.” Now deep into the trip, nearly six weeks, Anne realized it would be months before she could return home. All at once, her rage at Charles surfaced. He was asking her to live a life that was not her own. She had wanted to “stand alone” and survive in Charles’s world, she wrote, but she knew she would always, in other people’s eyes, be an extension of him, an appendage.
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And her love for Charles was not the same, she concluded in her diary. It was no longer the “young-girl love” built on a dream and an ideal.
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“Damn, damn, damn! I am sick of being this ‘handmaid to the Lord.’”
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She wanted the “world of her own” she had tasted with Charlie during their first summer in Princeton—a world of creativity, home, and children. She wanted to “live simply, and have a garden and sun and work and a little girl—to play with Jon.”
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But as they carved their circle from the Shetland Islands across Denmark, Norway, Russia, and back to England, Anne had little hope that this world would ever be. She knew Charles would not accept her need to stay home.

Arriving in Cardiff on October 5, Anne and Charles visited Elisabeth and Aubrey. The weather was damp and dreary, but Elisabeth’s rented house was “ablaze” with flowers. Beyond the white gate and fence, the drive was lined with fiery dahlias, and the old stone-wall house was covered with webs of tangled ivy. Elisabeth, at the door, looked as long and thin as a painted “portrait.”
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All her vitality flowed from her eyes—her eyes and her flaming red shoes, which clicked along the stone path as she ran to greet them.

She was at once strange and familiar, like an actress playing a role in someone else’s dream of the way life ought to be. Elisabeth conducted her life with the skill of “one of Chaucer’s model housewives,” Anne wrote. And there was a new sobriety in Elisabeth’s words. She was beginning to accept the facts of her illness, she told Anne, and was trying to come to terms with her constant chest pain.
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After two days of polite talk and playful banter, Elisabeth said good-bye to Anne and Charles at the door. To Anne, she still looked like a portrait—life arrested
in the glaze of art. Once again, her life had become a sequence of rituals dictated by social propriety. It was as if Elisabeth had traded her parents’ “golden cage” for Aubrey’s country squire landscape. Anne thought the prospect of death had made reality more inaccessible. She did not burden Elisabeth with her doubts about Charles.

They flew east to Southampton, then north to Scotland and Ireland, and circled down the coast of France to Paris. Paris was “one hectic rush,” Anne wrote, full of ceremony and an intrusive press.
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The French still regarded Charles as the Fairy Prince, and she and he had to fight crowds wherever they went. But it was not the crowds who were their enemy. Fog stalked them on their way to Amsterdam, and memories of the “white walls” of Japan gripped Anne with terror. She tried to keep her faith in Charles, but suddenly she lost control. “Wildly” she thought of going home, of taking the train back to Paris, of leaving Charles and never flying again. But imagining the headlines was enough to rivet her in place.
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“Are you getting a divorce, Mrs. Lindbergh?” the reporters would ask.

“Damn the newspapers,” concluded Anne.

Filled with physical terror, Anne resolved never to live this way again. When she returned home, she would find her place. Now, however, it was her duty to go on with the trip, to go “the whole way” with her husband, as she wrote to her mother.
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Impatient to get home, counting the days as Thanksgiving and Christmas approached, Anne forced herself to restrain her emotions. But her letters assumed a haunting quality during the flight through Spain and Portugal toward the islands off the coast of Africa. Anne listened to the wind as it whirled and howled, reminding her of the night of the kidnapping, making them its plaything, determining the course and pace of their flight. Without the wind, they could not fly; once in its grip, they lost control. It became for her a defining metaphor, and Anne hunted for its meaning. The more they were tossed by the whim of the wind, the more frenetically Anne wrote in her diary.

The Cape Verde Islands were parched and brown. The once bustling
French seaport of Praia reeked with disease and death. Now a nearly abandoned port-of-call, to Anne it was a remnant of a dying empire. They were forced to stay overnight in the stationmaster’s house, which Anne feared was contaminated by yellow fever. She felt lost in the land of “the Damned.” Again they were playthings of the wind as they waited impatiently for it to rise. The next day, November 27, it blew cold and hard, and three days later, Thanksgiving Day, Anne held her breath as they took flight, first bouncing and stalling on the choppy sea and then suddenly aloft and free, she wrote, bound for the English colony of Bathurst on the western coast of Gambia.
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Despite the veneer of English gentility and the careful impression of propriety and order, Bathurst was another vacuous land. Even amid the lavish government houses, plentiful food, elegant dress and manners of their hosts, Anne felt no less a prisoner of the wind. And Charles felt his ship had failed him. He tried to lighten the plane by siphoning off fuel and unloading equipment, but the only reasonable course was to wait for the deadening calm of the air to change. The nights at Bathurst once again echoed the night of the kidnapping, when life was snuffed out by the howl of the wind.

“Listen!” Anne wrote in her diary, quoting Humbert Wolf’s poem entitled “Autumn: Resignation”: “The wind is rising, and the air is wild with leaves.”
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But if the wind was the instrument of death, it was also Anne’s only hope for Christmas at home with Jon. Two days later, their plane was up and rising. The engine sounded like “a person breathing, easily, freely, almost like someone singing, ecstatically climbing.”
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