Anne Morrow Lindbergh: Her Life (49 page)

Charles was planning a trip to India at the end of the month on behalf of Pan Am and British Imperial Airways, which wanted to link India’s cities to a worldwide network of air-mail flights. Torn by her need to write and her desire to take care of Jon, Anne, now five months pregnant, reluctantly agreed to accompany Charles.
¹⁰
On the evening of January 21, Anne left Jon asleep in his bed, thinking how little he cared that they were going and how much it meant to her. As they flew across the Alps, in their new low-wing Miles Mohawk plane, they were wrapped in a shroud of fog. Lost and out of control, they dropped to earth, flying blindly, suspended between life and death. Caught, once again, in the nexus of “the timeless with time,” Anne was no longer afraid. Later, the incident would become the core of her book
Steep Ascent
and a metaphor for her relations with Charles.
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They flew to Pisa and then to Rome, basking in color and sunlight after the gray days of an English winter. Anne delighted in the architecture of the ancient buildings and ruins, but her pleasure brought an
unexpected loneliness. The richness of its history was lost on Charles, she wrote, who lacked the knowledge of those who had had a classical education. If only Elisabeth were here, she mused.
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They flew through Italy, across the Mediterranean, into Egypt and Palestine, and finally to Calcutta. While Charles was being treated with the deference of a religious icon,
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Anne, in her letters home, analyzed the social texture of India. The size, the complexity, and the diversity of the people, along with the economic and social discrepancies, made it a land of injustices that would take generations to resolve. She was instinctively drawn to the Indian intelligentsia, yet she sensed their bitterness toward the English. But again, affirming the value of aristocracy, Anne wrote that the British had brought India peace, order, and a sense of national pride.
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For the moment, Charles had little patience with social analysis. He was worried about American military power in comparison with the developing German forces. Although America was still ahead, he wrote to his friend Harold Bixby, its lead was narrowing with “amazing rapidity.” Russia’s progress was unknown, but Italy was becoming another important competitor.
¹⁵

Back at Long Barn, the spring passed quietly. The aubretia and daffodils bloomed in the soft April sunshine, and every morning the thrushes and the blackbirds sang. With her window open to the sounds of the spring, Anne sat at her desk with maps and photographs, trying to weave the facts and memories of their transatlantic flight into metaphor and narrative. She was happy to be pregnant, happy to be home with Jon, and grateful for her clarity of mind and the time to write.

As she had done in her early days in Princeton, Anne set up the nursery and counted her towels and blankets. She delighted in domesticity and spending time with Charles and Jon.
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Seeing Jon in his “ragged red raincoat, thumping along with his boots,” was consolation for anything.
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She sat in the sun and walked slowly around the paths, cutting tulips, content to be waiting.
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On May 11, after two days of irregular pains, wondering whether
she was going into labor, Anne asked Charles to drive her to the London Clinic. It was Coronation Eve,
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and the crowds in the flag-draped streets were in holiday mood. Charles concentrated on getting through the mobs and traffic jams; Anne, overjoyed with excitement, looked at the candle-lit trees and remembered the beauty of her wedding night. Her labor continued through Coronation Day as she listened to the cheering crowds lining the streets. As her contractions came and went, she counted her breaths and read
The Years
by Virginia Woolf. By nightfall the pain was overwhelming, but she was determined to be conscious at the birth of her child. Between the whiffs of chloroform she caught Charles’s eyes; his presence in the birthing room was enough to make the pain bearable. She was no longer tormented by fears of inadequacy and death, and the voice that had taunted her through the birth of Jon was silent. By morning, her third child, a son, was born. They named their “Coronation baby” Land, in memory of Charles’s maternal grandparents.

Anne felt reborn—at peace and in control. With the pregnancy and birth behind her, she was suddenly “alive,” eager to make up for lost time. Reviewing the year they had spent in England, she felt she had achieved nothing. Nonetheless, her time with Charles and Jon was “pure gold.”
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While Anne dug her roots deep in Long Barn, Charles seemed to spin untethered. Several times a month he flew to Saint-Gildas, an island off the coast of Brittany, to work with Carrel in his summer laboratory.
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After the visit to the Carrels’ the previous August, Anne had little desire to return. The island had had a haunting beauty, bathed in a hazy green-gray light, but the Carrels had been less than hospitable to Anne. Solicitous and deferential toward Charles, they had insulted her with their categorical opinions. At once intimidated and repulsed by their arrogant notions of human types, she was troubled by their sanctimonious air. It was as though they were ordained vicars of God, looking down in judgment on lesser beings. They spoke of “auras,” intangible currents of light and sensation that emanated from the bodies of human beings, defining and classifying personal value. Charles’s aura, they said, was
“deep, deep violet;” hers was “pale, pale blue.”
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Charles was incisive; she was superficial. Charles had greatness; she was condemned to mediocrity. But even as she understood the absurdity of their views, she wondered whether they had hit upon the truth. Were these the ideal measures of the Aryan spirit? Anne had always believed she was lesser than Charles. The Carrels’ judgment was strangely liberating.

Charles’s absence, however, and the consuming routine of caring for two children created a paradox. Anne was both happy and lonely, as if a piece of herself had died. In a letter to her friend Thelma Crawford Lee, Anne paraphrased a thought expressed by Rebecca West in her book
The Thinking Reed
, a rumination on the “price” women pay for their relations with men. A woman involved in a marriage, wrote West, especially a happy, absorbing marriage, seemed to lose her capacity for friendship. West wondered whether men had an unconscious desire to keep their women occupied so that they had no time for anything else. Anne wondered, along with West, whether only a part of her was expressed through marriage and other parts were wasted.

Anne confided in her friend that she had a feeling of emptiness that had no name; her commitment to her family seemed to fall short of happiness. She did not have the nourishment of people and responsibilities beyond her home, the sense of pride and purpose that she had before she was married.
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But if she was torn with conflict, no one around her knew. Two weeks later, on August 16, Margot and Dwight, on their honeymoon, arrived at Long Barn. Their love had germinated in the dark months of the Hauptmann trial, when Margot was a source of sustenance to the Morrow family. After Dwight’s first year at Harvard Law School, assured by his doctors that he had been “cured” by psychotherapy,
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they had married in May. They seemed a perfect union of opposites. Margot was strong, sturdy, and confident; Dwight was nervous, sensitive, and fragile. His neediness had given her a permanent place in the family she had come to love. But after three months, their marriage was beginning to falter, and Margot was desperate. It didn’t take her long to realize that Dwight was still ill.
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While they were touring in Brittany, Dwight received notice that he had not made the school’s law review. He went into a deep depression, hallucinating and talking to himself. Frightened, Margot took him to Long Barn, hoping that Anne would be able to console him. Anne understood him well; Dwight felt better almost immediately.

But the salve of Anne’s presence would not last. Dwight returned to the States and resumed his studies at law school, but before the year was out, he was overwhelmed by paranoia and forced to leave Cambridge for home. Those close to him believed that the “fire and brimstone” of his early church education had filled him with the terror of damnation. As if in compensation, he had delusions of grandeur, imagining himself Jesus, saving the souls of the damned through his corporeal death. Sometimes, he would see himself as a “lighthouse,” illuminating the way for those lost in the darkness.
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There was a certain irony in his brother-in-law’s achieving the public stature to which Dwight aspired.

In a sense, Dwight’s terrors were not much different from Anne’s. An alignment of genes, a biochemical shift, and the same voice that taunted Anne in the aftermath of Charlie’s death might have found a way to consume her. She, too, feared sin and damnation and sought to be an incorporeal saint. In the summer of 1937, while Dwight Jr. succumbed to his fear and desperation, Anne sat in her second-floor office, overlooking the manicured gardens of Long Barn, seeking “salvation” through the written word. Each morning, between trips to school with Jon and feeding Land his milk and porridge, Anne wrote
Listen! The Wind
.

L
isten! The Wind,
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like
North to the Orient
, is a travel book suffused with myth. The book narrates ten days of the Lindberghs’ five-month tour, from November 27 to December 6, 1933, to the Cape Verde island of Santiago off the coast of Africa and on to the English colony of Bathurst in Gambia. Anne struggled to write the book from her return home to Englewood in December 1933, through the Hauptmann trial in 1935, and their self-exile in England through the summer of 1937 at Long Barn.

While
North to the Orient
is a confrontation with death and a statement of loss,
Listen! The Wind
is an encounter with evil and an act of penance. Death is not “the answer” that will take Anne “home.” She has to acknowledge the evil inside herself, renounce her moral righteousness, and come to terms with the “fallen” nature of man. Still hiding behind the façade of Charles’s heroism, careful not to expose his vulnerability, Anne speaks for both of them. She unmasks the “sin” of their arrogance and carries the burden of insight and atonement.

Listen! The Wind
is a sophisticated work with a strong narrative and an unyielding vision. It is written in layers to camouflage Anne’s intent, but the linear narrative is precise in detail, time, and place. The second layer meshes two governing metaphors: Odysseus’ descent to Hades on his journey home, and Dante’s pilgrimage through the Inferno. The third layer is the relation between the two “Annes”—Anne the narrator, omniscient and omnipresent, and Anne the protagonist, living in the moment and vulnerable to the vicissitudes of time, place, and events. Using the literary technique of “doubling,” Anne preserves her public image while subjecting herself to moral scrutiny and condemnation. Through the veil of the written word, Anne exorcises her demons and saves herself, pulling Charles, unaware, behind her.

While Anne the narrator, detached and confident, establishes the authority of herself and Charles, the certainty in her voice erodes her argument from within. She and Charles are equipped for everything, she tells the reader. They are independent and in control. They came like “giants on the wind,” jumping from island to island, as though stepping on stones across the Atlantic.

As the Lindberghs descend from their “Olympian heights” to the wind-swept waters surrounding Cape Verde, Anne’s narrative vision constricts and, with it, her sense of space and time. In the blazing heat of the African sun, Anne, like Dante, meets her counterpart in the world of the damned. Again, Anne the narrator “doubles” her characters as they approach a girl standing with a man on the pier. In spite of their race, age, and culture, they are mirror images of Charles and her.

But immediately Anne feels the presence of death. The man and the
girl are thin, sick, reeking of decay. The man is a skeleton in an elegant suit; his child-wife is a phantomlike creature of burden. Like Anne, the girl is dressed in men’s gear, too heavy for her delicate form. Her masquerade threatens to destroy her. Ruling the island with demonic force, sheathed in the grace of French hospitality, the man and the girl are instruments of evil, satanic creatures intent upon seducing Anne and Charles. While Anne resists, she knows she is no more righteous than they. She feels like a leper in the Bible, unclean—as though no amount of washing could remove her sins.

While Anne the narrator penetrates beneath the surface of the characters and events, Charles merely squirms in discomfort. Immediately, he distinguishes himself from the hosts, whose decadence he is forced to confront. Like Dante, Charles protests that he is just a pilgrim in a foreign land.

Charles is a shadowy, one-dimensional character, a thin figure of inflated stature, physically and morally absent. Unlike the “Charles” in
North to the Orient
, he is no longer the superior moral being, the contrast to Anne’s inadequacy and weakness. In
Listen! The Wind
, they are partners in sin, roaming aimlessly in the land of the damned. Charles, the pilot, has the power to liberate them through flight; Anne, the narrator, has the vision to distill the meaning.

Time stops as life rushes like the wind above their heads. The wind, like a chorus, is a relentless presence that presages their actions and imbues them with meaning. The wind becomes the measure of their physical and spiritual vitality, the determining force of their salvation. It is the same wind that howled in Hopewell, obscuring the sounds that might have saved Charlie.