Anne Morrow Lindbergh: Her Life (36 page)

A
nne Lindbergh with Jon at Next Day Hill, 1934
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(Lindbergh Picture Collection, Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library)

A
nne was so pleased to have a child—strong and male, a Lindbergh. But his birth was not the miracle she had expected. Anne found death everywhere—even in the breath of her newborn son. Conjuring up images of the night of the kidnapping, she wrote, “Nearer at night than morning, nearer in winter than in summer, nearer when the wind is howling or when I hear a child breathing peacefully asleep.”
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“Death [is] the answer,” Anne reminded herself, quoting again the words of Charles Morgan. Death was part of a natural cycle; the pinnacle of a life in service to a larger ideal. It was no different from the fulfillment of love or work; it was a consummation with immortality.
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On August 30, after two weeks of rest at the Morrows’ apartment in New York, Anne and the baby returned to Englewood. Charles carried Anne out to the lawn, where she sat beneath a tree and watched her baby take his morning bottle from the nurse. The dogs, excited to see her after so many weeks away, leaped wildly up to greet her, and licked the toes of the baby in the nurse’s arms.

Home from England, Elisabeth sat in the shade beside Anne. In her new chic hair wave, her black dress, and her black-and-white Paris hat,
Elisabeth related the simple joys of life in the English countryside, so different from the frenzied pace of New York.
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As they passed the last days of summer at Next Day Hill, Elisabeth dared to talk about a man she had come to know in England. Anne sensed that Elisabeth was in love again.
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Elisabeth had first met Aubrey Morgan in London in the winter of 1930, at a party given by a family friend. While Anne and Charles were flying on their inspection tour for TAT, Elisabeth had sailed to England with her parents for the Disarmament Conference. Aubrey pursued Elisabeth with letters and later “came courting” to the Morrows’ apartment in New York. Aubrey, so unlike the reclusive minister Clyde, was a big man, “a real presence,” not so much handsome as good-natured and jovial.
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He was a practical man of commerce, descended from a family of wealthy merchants from Cardiff, Wales, and he had the breeding of a gentleman. Restrained, proper, and cultivated, he was exactly the husband Betty Morrow might have chosen to care for her sick, precious girl. Marriage, she may have reminded Elisabeth, was the “crown” of a selfless female life. Elisabeth understood that her time was short and that she had no future with Connie. Afraid of being sick and alone, Elisabeth saw marriage as a ticket out of her parents’ house and a statement of her social legitimacy. With Aubrey, Elisabeth said, she felt sturdy and confident, as though “anything seem[ed] possible.”
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To an observer, it may have been another charade: the pretense of health and new beginnings just as her illness was about to tighten its hold. And sex was no longer an issue. The severity of the damage to Elisabeth’s heart valve precluded frequent sexual intercourse; Aubrey would have to get her doctor’s permission each time they wanted to make love.
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Even as Anne rejoiced in Elisabeth’s happiness, she was beginning to understand that most of her life was beyond her control. Two weeks later, Elisabeth’s announcement of her engagement to Aubrey was another sign that Anne’s childhood was far behind. Elisabeth, too, was slipping away. Her mother was still at the center of their lives, but she
and her sisters and brother looked outward toward the world, building new loyalties and establishing new patterns of living.
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The presence of her new baby softened everything. She would catch herself thinking of him as Charlie. She had to remind herself over and over that this baby was separate and different from him.
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He was quick, lean, and muscular—not her “fat little lamb.” They named him Jon, a name they had found in a Scandinavian history book. Jon, she implied, would be his own person—nobody’s brother and nobody’s junior.
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Once again, Anne measured the beauty of her son by his resemblance to Charles.
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As the leaves began to fall from the tulip trees, Anne wrestled with the idea of “time.” Time was not linear, she concluded; it was determined by associations, moods, and sensations.
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As usual, she searched for literary paradigms with which to clarify and crystallize her thoughts. She attributed her understanding to her reading of Proust, but she had also discovered Freud’s notion of memory—a web of memories encircling a core. One wrong thought, one dark feeling, and she was caught in the net of the kidnapping. Unfortunately, Anne’s fears were continually confirmed.

A week after she arrived at her mother’s with Jon, a deranged man broke through the guarded gate and called to Betty Gow at night through the window. Anne and Charles decided immediately to have someone with Jon at all times. Perhaps she was right; the kidnapping was “eternal.” Perhaps they would always live in its shadow.
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But at least the press had slackened its pace. Charles had made a public plea that reporters leave their new son alone. Publicity, he said, may have brought about the death of their first child. Their children had the right to grow up like “normal Americans.”
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Anne still felt hunted. When she left the confines of the estate, even for an afternoon in the city, she felt out of place and in danger. One day, as she shopped in Macy’s, someone recognized her, and a crowd of thrill-seekers began to pursue her. It was a “madhouse,” she wrote. Catching herself in the store mirror, Anne was shocked by what she saw. She looked pale, worried, and out of shape. Barely twenty-six, she felt haggard
and old. She rushed back to Englewood where she belonged—to her family and the fortress of her mother’s home.
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Safety, however, exacted its price. Anne was rarely alone with Charles. Even though Jon was only a month old, on September 13 she left him in the care of Betty Gow at Next Day Hill and flew to North Haven in the same rented biplane Charles had used when teaching her to fly. When they reached Portland, Anne took the controls. As always, flying gave her balance and perspective.
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During these early days of September in North Haven, tinged with the red-leafed promise of fall, Anne sharpened her skills of observation. Everything was vulnerable, so she tried to preserve each moment in images—of Elisabeth and her mother walking the dogs, golf among the shimmering birch trees, tennis on the lawn, the fiery northern lights of a summer night, an afternoon picnic with Charles on the White Islands. Her diary had almost a pointillistic pattern, bathed in the refractions of soft island light. They were literary portraits, family tableaux, hung in sequence as if in a museum, preserved in the art of her words.

Anne was happy again, but even in North Haven, the wind and darkness brought their terror. She still could not accept the death of Charlie.
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Sadly, Anne was alone in her grief. Except for the investigation, Charles had put the kidnapping behind him. It was only seven months since the baby was taken, yet Charles could not tolerate Anne’s sorrow or tears. She was beginning to see that their emotional needs were pushing them apart. Charles’ persona of “strength” lay in his denial of the very emotions which might have healed her. Depriving herself of the right to mourn, Anne prayed for the courage to survive.

When she returned to Englewood on September 27, after two weeks away, Anne saw Jon with fresh eyes; he was big, round, pink, and long. She was thrilled to tend to him again—and his nose even looked smaller.
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But the vulnerability of their fame was made evident. In November, Charles L. Jodney, an unemployed carpenter and father of
nine children, was jailed for threatening Betty Morrow.
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Destitute and unemployed, Jodney had sent Betty two letters, pleading for money. When Betty wrote back that he must ask his community for help, he threatened her and her family with bodily harm. It was the first case in New England under the new federal extortion statute, enacted after the kidnapping.

Afraid for Jon’s safety, Anne and Charles decided not to return to Hopewell. It was Charles who made the final decision; they would give the home and the land to the state to be used as a sanctuary for children.
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It made Anne feel she was giving something back—restoring the life that Charlie had lost. Helping children would “make good out of evil.”
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Charles, Anne wrote, was working hard and seemed happier and more productive than he had in a long time. He continued his research at the Rockefeller Institute, under the direction of Alexis Carrel. By the fall of 1932, the Nobel Laureate, impressed by Charles’s intelligence and skill, had invited him to join the technical staff.
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At sixty, Carrel was old enough to be Charles’s father, and while there was a mentor-student quality to their relationship, he treated Charles as a peer.
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Charles and Carrel were refining the perfusion pump, which perfused animal organs in such a way as to mimic certain aspects of the body’s biochemistry. They hoped to devise a method for repairing human organs outside the body. When Carrel was chided in the press for his flamboyance—his strange habit of wearing a black robe and cap in the operating room—Charles publicly applauded him for his innovative methods and his generosity of spirit. Anne would later say that Carrel gave Charles the chance to fulfill the dream he had had as a child, working with his grandfather in his laboratory in Detroit.
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Fall moved swiftly into winter, but Christmas didn’t bring its usual consolation. It was eclipsed by preparations for Elisabeth’s wedding, which took place on December 28 at the Morrows’ home in Englewood. On the day of the wedding, preoccupied with memories of her marriage to Charles when her father was alive, three years earlier, Anne quietly set out the glasses and the wine, recorded presents, mingled with the
guests. Relieved not to be the center of attention, Anne was pleased to play a secondary role; it was her true nature. Consonant with her father’s notions of “composing differences,” Anne tried to harmonize the varied strains of the guests, to orchestrate the voices and memories. She greeted every guest with a smile and introduced each to the other. Balancing the numbers on each side of the room, she made certain that everyone felt important and comfortable. In her parents’ home, among her family and friends, she had the luxury of just being “Anne.”

Suddenly the music began and everyone found a place to view the procession. Aubrey and Uncle Jay, her father’s brother, strode down the aisle. Uncle Jay tried not to cry.
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And then came the wedding march: Con, a bridesmaid, enveloped in blue velvet and pink orchids, looked serious and demure. Even as Elisabeth came into view, Anne’s eyes could not leave her little sister.

Dwight Jr. escorted Elisabeth down the aisle, reminding Anne of her father. A flood of emotion overtook her as she focused her eyes on Elisabeth. But it wasn’t only Elisabeth she saw. In her sister’s clear and penetrating beauty, Anne saw the essence of Elisabeth, the prototype of femininity. As so many times before, Anne was content to be in her sister’s shadow. Yet even at this joyous occasion, one of rebirth and communion, Charlie’s death haunted her. As she watched the wedding procession, she chastised herself for her baby’s death. Over and over, she repeated to herself that “it could not have happened. It could have been another way.”
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For now, Anne tried to run from her feelings, busying herself with activities she usually shunned. She went shopping, often, “like a man to drink.”
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She visited sick friends in the hospital and dined in New York with Charles’s colleagues and visiting dignitaries.

As she rode the subway in Manhattan, she bitterly scanned the crowd. “Which one of you killed my boy?” she thought to herself, trying not to cry. These people—these horrible street people who read the tabloids; they were already dead, she wrote.
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By the turn of the year, Anne knew she could no longer hide. She had to permit herself to feel and to think. She had to write.

C
onceived in December 1931 and completed in January 1934,
North to the Orient
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is the account of Anne’s 1931 flight with Charles through Canada, Alaska, Russia, Japan, and China. But it is also an allegorical prose poem filled with the clarity and spirituality that grew out of her sorrow. It is an act of faith inextricably linked to the birth of Jon. While the kidnapping of Charlie stole the meaning of words, the birth of a new son resurrected Anne’s faith in the creative process. It is not a book Anne could have written before the death of her father or the kidnapping of her infant son. It is too free-ranging in its speculation, too assertive, too metaphysical to be other than the product of profound suffering. It is, in fact, the very act of suffering that imbues the Lindberghs’ flight with meaning and converts Anne’s simple diary notes and letters into moral allegory. It is Anne’s rage diffused and codified to achieve reconciliation and universality. It is an odyssey, written by one with an almost “animal desire” to find her way “home.”