Anne Morrow Lindbergh: Her Life (35 page)

Some blamed Walsh, and others blamed Banks. Anne saw Violet as another figure in a surreal world of dissolving images.
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So many stories,
so many blind alleys, so many reasons to doubt and distrust; Anne tried to wash Violet from her mind.
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The posthumous investigation by Inspector Walsh yielded no evidence to link Violet to Charlie’s death, and within days, she was cleared of any connection. But her tarnished honor was a different story.

Violet’s fear of disgrace came to pass; her parents refused to accept her body. On June 15, Violet was buried at the Brookside Cemetery, not far from the grave of Dwight Morrow. The Sharpe family asked that a wreath of roses be placed on her grave.
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Once again they were front page news. Anne feared that Charlie would be lost forever in the torrent of tragedy that followed his death.
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The next day, Anne and Charles drove to Sands Point, Long Island, to Falaise, the home of Harry and Carol Guggenheim. Harry Falaise
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had taken a paternal interest in Charles ever since they met in 1927. After Lindbergh’s transatlantic flight, Guggenheim worked with Dwight Morrow to protect him from the press and the demands of the public. Lindbergh’s marriage to Anne deepened their friendship, and the Guggenheims opened their home as a haven to the young couple during the early years of their marriage. Anne liked Guggenheim’s wife, Carol Morton, who struck her as someone not seduced by social expectations. Like the woman Anne wanted to become, Carol was creative and steeped in traditional values, uncompromised by convention or prevailing opinion. But more than that, Anne was envious of her faith. She comforted herself with Emily Dickinson’s words: ‘The loss of faith surpasses the loss of an estate.”
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Now, Anne walked in the cool darkness along the shore that bordered the ninety-acre estate on a cliff above the Sound. The peace and beauty of the enclave quieted her mind and fed her courage. It was as though she were “back from the war,” she wrote. She wanted to start over, even though the future was laden with uncertainty.

Harry Guggenheim gave Anne and Charles advice about dealing with publicity:

While Anne agreed with Guggenheim in principle, “we quiver when we’re touched,” she wrote.
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Under a barrage of letters and phone calls threatening their unborn baby’s life, Anne and Charles had to acknowledge that they could not live in Hopewell without armed guards. They had already begun, reluctantly, to return to Englewood instead of Hopewell after their weekends away. Next Day Hill was not immune to danger, but there was a security system in place. The grounds were patrolled around the clock by state troopers and three private guards. Not that this stopped reporters from camping outside the gates, however, or sightseers by the hundreds trying to catch a glimpse of the Lindberghs.

Caught again in the web of her mother’s life, Anne felt like an adolescent struggling to define her values. As though her Calvinist grandfather were thundering at her, she attempted to justify the blasphemy of a writer’s life. Writing implied a narcissistic life with no concern for public service. Was her parents’ ethic of charitable works the only criterion for a virtuous life? Was giving public service the only gift worth making? Paralyzed by guilt, Anne was still unable to write the narrative of the Asian trip. It was as though her writing and their flight had been acts of hubris that called down on them the death of Charlie. Though she believed her inability to write was a lack of connection between the book and her life, it is possible, as some professionals say, that the obstacle was her unexplored rage. It was the nexus between her feelings and her work that crippled the writing process. She would sit for hours on end, unable to find words that expressed her thoughts.
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With a generosity and sensitivity for which Anne would always be grateful, Charles understood that writing was Anne’s lifeline. Aided by his encouragement, she tried to form her notes and letters into a narrative, but her letters and diaries, written in snippets in hotel rooms and the back cockpit of the plane, were of little help. They were devoid of
emotion; they were the empty notations of a dutiful observer who wanted only to return home to Charlie.

As she moved toward her twenty-sixth birthday, she reassessed her life.
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She resolved to capture eternal moments before they were stolen. Her diary flowered with detailed descriptions of everyday life. Every movement of Charles, every gathering of family and friends, resonated with meaning.

She found a kindred soul in the British novelist Charles L. Morgan.
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Her sense of the eternal was heightened when she read his novel
The Fountain
. “This is it,” she wrote in her diary. “This is what I want
—here
. This man knows!”
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“Death is the answer,” Morgan had written: “When someone takes death inside himself, he relinquishes feelings of relative importance to others … He is suffused with humility and born again. He is the true saint and philosopher.”
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Man, is a creature divided against himself. “His desires cry in his silences.” The solution is to withdraw within the circles of consciousness toward the center of one’s being. Only at the core can one find the union of imagination and immortality.

Finding in Morgan’s book a metaphor that would permeate her writing, she copied the lines into her diary: “[One must seek] the stilling of the soul within the activities of the mind and body so that it might be still as the axis of a revolving wheel is still.”
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The axis of the wheel “moves forward but it never revolves. It is the core of sanity in the heart of madness.”
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Unaware that the process had begun, and terrified by the possibility, Anne gradually began to move apart from those around her. She knew that her awareness made her different from those immersed in the world of action. She knew she had to find another way of life, a means by which she could redefine her values and stand alone. But self-confirmation implied a separation from Charles and her mother, a loneliness she could not bear. Abandoned by her Presbyterian notions of God, she reached through Charles Morgan beyond Christianity toward a theology that challenged the duality of good and evil and the boundaries between life and death.

On June 22, 1933, Anne celebrated her birthday with thoughts of Charlie. He would have been two years old. Family and friends gathered in the garden of the Morrow estate for supper. As she watched Aunt Alice’s home movies of Charlie, Anne realized that he could live only in her mind. But more and more, her dreams were filled with visions of the new baby. Strange—it always looked like Charlie.
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While Anne was contemplating the birth of her new child, Congress was preparing the law that would transfer the crime of kidnapping from state to federal jurisdiction. The act, known as the Lindbergh Law, stipulated that unless the victim was returned within a week, it would be presumed that he or she had been carried across state lines. The maximum penalty was life imprisonment. (A year later, the law was amended to make kidnapping an offense punishable by death.) Before the enactment of the law, kidnapping had been a misdemeanor punishable by a sentence of five years to life.
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Once Charlie’s birthday passed, a cloud seemed to lift, and Anne’s quest for strength and answers became more determined. She took daily pleasure in the plans for the new wing they would add to the Morrow home for her and Charles and the baby. She felt as if it were a new beginning. But just as she was releasing herself into the present, she and Charles were summoned to Hopewell for the trial of John Hughes Curtis.

Anne dreaded the trip, but when they got there, they saw the house, white and gleaming, cool and peaceful—with little trace of the crime. A picture of the baby, a burn mark from the fingerprinting on the stairway, but, on the whole, welcoming and peaceful. Anne went to the nursery and opened wide the big French window, sinking into the security of her life before the kidnapping. When she walked out of the room, she left the door open behind her.
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Buoyed by the prospect of the birth of her child, Anne began again to write her book. The process exorcised whatever demons remained. She wanted to concentrate her thoughts on a central theme, but was capable only of straight narratives. The themes, the focal point, she wrote, had not emerged.
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She tried to infuse Hopewell with new life, banishing memories of
Charlie’s kidnapping. But just as she began to master her fears, more threatening letters arrived. Now she and Charles decided to hire a guard and buy a police dog, trained to attack intruders, so that they could live in their own home, not in Englewood. The dog trainer explained that it would take two weeks to establish a relationship, but, he assured them, the dog, a trained German shepherd, would be completely loyal and obedient. With the fearlessness of “a liontamer,” Charles got inside the dog’s cage. Within hours, Charles had mastered the dog and taken him out for a stroll on a leash.
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Anne delighted in the absurdity of having a canine bodyguard. He made her feel very important as he followed her up and down the stairs. It was like having a lovesick boyfriend.
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Back at Next Day Hill to spend the remaining weeks of her pregnancy in the comfort of her parents’ home, Anne cherished and enjoyed the baby growing within her. While Charles studied bacteriology at the Rockefeller Institute, Anne sat in the sun and swam in the pool, feeling young and slim in the weightlessness of the water.
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Sadly, she noted she was letting go of Charlie. The “numbness,” she theorized, was a kind of physical protection from the finality of death. She quoted Emily Dickinson in her diary:

Thoughts of death enveloped Anne; it was as though she owed a cosmic debt. There were times when she could not bear the guilt of her survival or the joy of giving birth to another child. Her guilt and rage, still unexpressed, made her fear that she would lose control.

At midnight on August 16, Anne’s birth pangs began. By dawn, she was at her parents’ apartment on East Sixty-sixth Street in New York.
As with Charlie’s birth, she was attended by Marie Cummings, the nurse, Dr. E. M. Hawks, the obstetrician, and Dr. P. J. Flagg, the anesthetist. The gas was administered, and Anne descended into unconsciousness.

While Charlie’s birth had felt like a hazy banishment from youth, this time it was like a fall into an abyss.
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As if her self-contempt were pursuing her, she heard a voice, like the Grand Inquisitor, taunting her with questions.

Sometimes the voice told her the answer: Life was a “cheap trick,” vacant of meaning. She screamed out in rebellion against the lie.

Moving in and out of consciousness, feeling contempt for the petty concerns of those around her, and for men, who could not possibly understand a woman’s experience, she wondered whether the heightened awareness of birth was analogous to the experience of death.
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While Anne struggled for consciousness and release, the doctors worried about the effect her long labor might have on the baby. After several hours, they delivered the baby by cesarean section.
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Finally, Anne became conscious, feeling sore but weightless, and alert to the unmistakable bleat of her baby. Her mother’s voice, quiet, dear, and full of humor, told her, “A little boy, Anne.” That night, Anne wrote in her diary, “Out of the teeth of sorrow—a miracle. My faith had been reborn.”
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