Anne Morrow Lindbergh: Her Life (50 page)

The wind dwindles to a distant roar, and Anne continues her struggle. As with the wave in her dream after Charlie was kidnapped, and the voice that taunted her during the birth of Jon, Anne is caught in a moment of terror. She can run, but she cannot be free. Their only hope is to get off the island—to radio Bathurst and get permission to land.

Released from the force that governs the island, the plane rises easily above the sea. But as they approach the coast of Africa, Anne the
narrator lulls the reader into delusion. They are safe, she writes, in British territory—safe from the barrenness and decay of French colonialism. They are connected again to life and to time, to the running of the clock and to the rhythm of ordinary moral perception. People bustle and then stop to rest, policemen patrol the sunny streets of Bathurst in tropical attire, and the British flag waves in the soft wind.

But it is hot, Anne writes, incredibly hot; the seductive heat permeates their bodies and forces them to surrender. In spite of its veneer of civility, Bathurst, Anne implies, is just another ring of Hell. At least the French man and the girl on Cape Verde had succumbed to evil. The English people of Bathurst, numbed by convention and affluence, lack even the pretense of moral struggle.

Like Jacob, Anne does not know whether she wrestles with God or Man. The Almighty, she writes, can see everything. He has the vision and he has the power. Human perception is both partial and feeble. But the mention of God embarrasses her; she must pretend that Charles is still in control. She must help Charles harness and outwit the wind.

Systematically, they lighten their plane, stripping themselves of supplies and clothing and the aircraft of maps and charts. They discard the anchor and thirty miles’ worth of fuel. Retaining only what they’ll need for safety in the tropics, they prepare to leave with the morning wind.

That morning, an attempt at take-off fails, as do their efforts later in the day. In one of the most lyrical passages, Anne describes their surrender to the power of the elements:

A point of balance, the faith to surrender—these are the keys to salvation. They harness God’s power and bridge the gap between man and the divine.

That night, as the wind rises with the moon, they take off into the “fathoms” of the night. Wrapped in layers of darkness, they plunge through the night with only the stars to guide them. Now stripped of all illusion, Anne the protagonist merges with Anne the narrator. The wind, as if in accord with Anne’s self-knowledge, rises to lift them over the sea. They sail at daybreak, thanking God “as if we had been living in eternal night, as if this were the first sun that had ever rose out of the sea.”

But Anne the narrator, powerful and visionary, must hide her journey through the rings of Hell, both from the reader and from her husband. As in the beginning, she affirms their heroism. Their visibility is unlimited, she declares, and her husband remains indomitable. Like Odysseus, they are sailing home. As though winking at the reader through her metaphor, Anne ends her story with a quote from Homer: “The men are sailing home from Troy and all the lamps are lit.” But beyond the pretense, Anne’s message is clear. Like Dante, she has made her pilgrimage through Hell. She has humbled herself in the face of God and is deemed worthy of salvation.

A
nne on Illiec, 1938
.

(Lindbergh Picture Collection, Manuscripts And Archives, Yale University Library)

W
hile Anne sought salvation, Charles sought immortality. Three times in five weeks, in July and August, Charles flew to Brittany to work with Carrel.
²
Behind closed doors, they wrote their book,
The Culture of Organs
.
³
Carrel’s vision had expanded beyond the mere sustenance of life. He prophesied a time when organs could be removed and healed at hospitals, when human life could be frozen and revived at will, when organs could be transplanted and reconfigured to create superior animal species, and when medical techniques could carry physicians into the realm of the living dead. Lindbergh’s task was to develop the technological apparatus to support Carrel’s theories of a new human breed. Labeled modern “Frankensteins” by the press, sea-locked on a wind-swept island, Carrel and Lindbergh tried to turn fiction into scientific reality.

Their flurry of activity elicited the unceasing interest of the press. The more secretive they were, the more the press intruded, until Carrel became enraged. In a letter to the Associated Press, he wrote, “You know that for scientific work, peace is a requisite. The attention of the public should not be attracted to this spot where we are working and on us.”
⁴

Europe was on the brink of war, and Lindbergh and Carrel knew that victory would be won on the battlefield, not in the laboratory. The spoils
would belong to those who could master military technology. In a letter to Ambassador Robert Bingham, the English envoy to Germany, Charles wrote that one must “cost” devise such effective forms of counterattack as to make an offensive by the enemy prohibitive. One must deal with the enemy aggressively. “As civilization progresses, safety lies more in the ability to attack than in the ability to defend.”
⁵

In the middle of August, Charles planned his fourth visit to Saint-Gildas. This time Anne decided to go with him, but, discouraged by the thought of traveling with two children, she took the baby and left Jon behind. It was the first time she had left the serenity of Long Barn since the trip to India, before the baby was born. Sadly, she wrote, Charles had chosen to go during the week of Jon’s birthday.
⁶

In mid-September, when they were home, and Britain was condemning the Japanese attack on the Chinese cities of Nanking and Canton,
⁷
Kay and Truman Smith came to visit at Long Barn. In her diaries, Kay noted that the Lindbergh home was less than harmonious. She detected a sadism in Charles that extended even to his friendship with Truman. He once set Truman’s newspaper on fire as they sat together reading in the car. Most obvious was his harsh treatment of Jon, who, at the age of four, was expected to behave like an adult. His meals and activities mimicked his parents’; if he did not follow their schedule, he was punished. In a bizarre reflection of Charles’s life as the only child of an estranged marriage, alone with his mother in his father’s absence, Charles compelled Jon to undertake the responsibilities of a man.
⁸
By intimidating him with adult standards, Charles expected to make Jon confident and self-sufficient. As a consequence, Jon developed the pose of maturity while hiding his fears in silence.

Kay also noted Charles’s paranoia. The Lindberghs’ German shepherd, Thor, policed the garden as the baby slept, alerting Anne and Charles to people who wandered in and out of his purview. When the dog barked, Charles would take his gun from the closet with eerie nonchalance.

In spite of their differences, Charles and Truman had work to do together. Since the Reich ministers had confidence in Charles, Truman
wanted him to return to Berlin and inspect more engine and aircraft factories. Within a week the Lindberghs, with the Smiths, were in Germany; Jon and Land were at home. They arrived in Frankfurt on October 10 and in Munich on the eleventh. In an effort to shelter Anne and Charles from Nazi Party politics, the Smiths arranged for them to stay in the mountains of Bavaria, miles away from Berlin, at the home of Baron Cramer-Klett.
⁹
As Charles was shuttled to and from Munich by official car to attend meetings of the Lilienthal Aviation Society and to tour aircraft factories, Anne hiked through the mountains with the “ageless” baron, speaking of human frailty and the divinity of truth.
¹⁰
For Anne, this was a journey into the Middle Ages, a beautiful fairyland, insulated from the political turmoil of the German cities. Yet she found the atmosphere unsettling, as if something she could not discern lingered beneath the surface.

While Anne was charmed by the baron’s manner, Kay investigated his political status. She found that he was in danger of being arrested by the Reich. A devout Catholic with a papal title, Cramer-Klett was passionately anti-Nazi. He had agreed to house and court the Lindberghs in exchange for his continued freedom.
¹¹

Minister Udet, eager to show Lindbergh his country’s progress, took him to the testing bases of all the major aircraft—bombers, fighters, and training planes. He allowed him to fly the Storch, which Charles found comparable to American planes. For the second time, Lindbergh helped Smith write a formal report for the War Department, a general estimate of German air power as of November 1, 1937. Smith later admitted that they had dramatized their data, hoping to capture high-level attention. They reported that

As Charles was being shown through factories and fields and military air installations, Hitler was planning to take over Europe. In a reversal of policy, he now announced that
Lebensraum
, “living space” for his people, could be gained only by force. And he made clear his plans to annex Austria. When Italy and Japan joined Germany in a pact to annihilate communism, the military triangle—the Axis—evoked alarm in some quarters, but appeasement still reigned in Britain. That gave Hitler the confidence to proceed.
¹³

Home once again, Anne busied herself. Delighting in the beauty and nearness of her children, she charged through her mornings writing at her desk, only to fall into breathless afternoons, racing Jon, wild with joy, through the mist and mud of the English autumn.

At night, she and Charles and Thor walked miles in the moonlight through open fields. In the soft light, with trees laced against the sky, they sat on the gate and looked through the tangled oaks toward the moon. When their reverie was disturbed by the roar of planes, it mattered little; they trudged toward the bright lights of Long Barn, tingling with excitement.
¹⁴

As Britain and France announced a joint pact of neutrality, the Lindberghs traveled to the States for Christmas. The trip was hastily conceived, and it confused and mystified those around them. Charles had business in New York with Pan Am and experiments to complete at the Rockefeller Institute with Carrel.
¹⁵
But he left England, after two years there, with an air of urgency, as though it were time to accelerate his work.