Anne Morrow Lindbergh: Her Life (11 page)

Two years later, in 1899, Betty’s father lost his job at the Ohio and Pennsylvania Coal Company and had little promise of further employment. Camouflaging their financial problems, the Cutters went abroad, where living was cheaper and Papa would have a chance to regain his strength and perspective. Betty used her language skills and her practicality to settle the family into a comfortable routine, but she was lonely, much as she had been as a child. Surrounded by relatives, she communicated with none. Now, however, she had the solace of a responsive mind. Through the steady flow of letters to and from Dwight, Betty found a means of self-scrutiny. Expressing her disappointments and her hopes, she tested her ideas against the touchstone of Dwight’s growing confidence.

Excited by the prospect of seeing Dwight, Betty returned home in May 1901, only to find herself incapable of responding to the demands of the relationship. Dwight’s need for emotional and sexual intimacy frightened her, summoning up memories of her mother’s consuming needs after the death of her sister Mary and the pain of her father’s constant failures. An explosive confrontation left Betty and Dwight exhausted
and bereaved. What might have been a passionate reunion turned into a metaphysical dissection of the nature of love.
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But Dwight, “a fatalist,” continued to pursue her. When they found themselves invited to the same Massachusetts resort the following summer, Dwight was the first to recognize the irony of their chance reunion. He wrote, “I’m coming, unless you object … If our little flower isn’t entirely dead.” Claiming it would do their “flower” good, Betty agreed. With “internal nervous prostration,” she met Dwight in her most becoming blue Swiss cotton dress. Whether it was the breeze from the bay, the beauty of the sun on the Ipswich pastures, or the sheer exhaustion from seven years of fighting the inevitable, Miss Cutter and Mr. Morrow ended their day in “perfect understanding.”
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On June 16, 1903, Betty and Dwight were married at the Cutter home in Cleveland, surrounded by their parents, their sisters, and their college friends. As soon as they returned from their honeymoon in the hills of Vermont and the Connecticut Valley they had come to love, they quickly defined their aspirations. Nothing, said Dwight’s friends, was good enough for him and his young bride, and yet no place good enough was also affordable. It would either be east of Fifth Avenue or not at all, Dwight declared. As a compromise to “not at all,” the Morrows chose Englewood, New Jersey, a mere ten miles across the Hudson River from Times Square.

Even as they sat in their Cottage Lane house on the other side of Englewood’s tracks, they knew hard work would carry them up the rolling terraces of the Palisades and into the fine stone houses occupied by the young Olympians of government and Wall Street. Men like Thomas A. Lamont and Henry P. Davison of J. P. Morgan and Company, Seward Prosser of Banker’s Trust, and Cornelius Bliss, former Secretary of the Interior, dominated the political and social circles of this northern New Jersey enclave, still untouched by bridge or highway. Once rolling farmland, occupied by the Calvinist Dutch and the Presbyterian British, Englewood, at the turn of the century, had been molded by the rich into huge manicured estates with stables and greenhouses, proper English gardens, and well-placed decorative trees. The large lawns sloped gently
and unmarked into one another’s back doors, and the owners’ lives intertwined like partners in an intricate minuet, nonetheless passionate for their stately elegance. The men traveled to and from Wall Street on a yacht docked in Englewood. Breakfast was served outbound and cocktails inbound. Of course, one could always take the train to Jersey City and cross by ferry, but the sacrifice of rising early to catch the seven o’clock boat was a small price to pay for hobnobbing with the town’s elite.

After the Morrows arrived in July of 1903, Dwight took the train and the Hudson ferry. While they were still on the outer rim of the town’s social circle, Betty and Dwight felt much at home in this civic-minded, staunchly Presbyterian, five-mile-square oasis of woodlands and meadows, fine private schools and prestigious clubs.
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By the time their first child, Elisabeth, was born in March 1904, Dwight’s diligence had begun to pay off. Within three years, he had doubled his salary and advanced from junior clerk to partner in the law firm of Reed, Simpson, Thacher and Barnum. Now, with a salary of nearly $4000, the Morrows moved across the tracks to Spring Lane, a small street in the foothills of town, and dubbed their Victorian house “Number 1.” “The house is fine, fine,” Dwight wrote to his college friend, Charles Burnett. It had a parlor, a library, a dining room, and a kitchen on the first floor, four bedrooms on the second floor, a cellar with a laundry, and even a porch. “In the morning,” he wrote, “we take our chops and eggs off doilies … Elizabeth has been fortunate in getting a good girl from Richmond, Virginia—a colored girl who makes fine rolls and good buckwheat cakes … I feel like a grownup.”
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Betty, too, had everything she wanted—a husband, a home, a maid, and now a child. Shortly after Elisabeth’s birth, Betty celebrated their good fortune in her diary. She and Dwight were as happy as two people could be. His name went on the office letterhead, and life seemed nearly “perfect.”

The birth of Anne Spencer Morrow, on June 22, 1906, seemed incidental; a pause in the movement of a well-oiled machine. Well into her thirties, Betty no longer ached to become a writer, just as Dwight no longer flirted with academia. Their childhood aspirations had become
avocations, placed aside by convention and responsibility. They knew what they wanted from each other and from life: winters in Englewood, summers on Long Island, and the social prestige and opportunity for public service that accompanied the affluence earned by hard work.

The birth of another daughter was not greeted with enthusiasm. Cutter women seemed to produce girls, and Betty may have worried that, like her mother, she would never have a son. Anne’s arrival had confirmed that fear. Their first daughter, Elisabeth Reeve, was frail, irritable, and difficult to control. But if Elisabeth was willful beyond reason, she was also beautiful beyond words. “Perfection” was the word Betty used to define her finely cut features and porcelain skin, framed by golden ringlets. She had an aura of delicate feminine beauty that assuaged Betty’s fears of her own inadequacies.

Anne, neither the male child they desired nor a female beauty to rival Elisabeth, sensed from the beginning her tenuous place in the family circle. The best she could do was “fit in.” And fitting in meant nothing short of the strict self-discipline and good deeds that had brought the Morrows so far so fast. Not fitting in would not be tolerated, as though the wildest of weeds could become a rose, simply by an act of will.

But Anne required little prodding to conform to Morrow standards. Compared with her sister, she was obedient and angelic—pure gold. But her docile nature worked against her; she was promptly rewarded by being ignored.

At two years old, her mother found her curious and attentive, constantly talking and pointing at objects, hungry to know the names of things. But often, Anne was serious and withdrawn, refusing to participate or even to smile.
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If the dear little girl was aware that she was good, she may also have been aware that she would never be good enough. Sickly Elisabeth grew more beautiful, witty, and clever each year, casting a shadow over Anne. While Elisabeth received constant praise from her parents and her peers, Anne received perfunctory tolerance.

“Nobody,” Anne would later say, “said I was good at anything.” Her
grandmother Clara Morrow would repeat, over and over, “Praise to the face is open disgrace.”

But as Anne grew, her shroud became her mantle. In bed at night, separated from her sister by a screen with blue roses, Anne would invent stories, a fantasy world of royalty and adventure, in which she was always beautiful and over which she always reigned. She imagined herself as Queen Bessie, like her mother, endowed with magical powers to change the course of the Morrow household with no more than the turn of a phrase.
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But the real Queen Bessie was feeling less than regal. With the birth of a second child, and not quite as much wealth as she had hoped for, she began to see her life as resembling her mother’s. The confinement to home and nursery, without the domestic help she wanted, made her bored and restless. But, like her mother, Betty knew how to “stage” her life, to give the impression of ease and wealth while waiting for her husband to make them realities. Being in the right place at the proper season was an important aspect of the show, and summers in Englewood would not suffice. Beginning in 1907, the summer after Anne was born, Betty took her two daughters to Quogue, a small town seventy-five miles east of New York on the southern shore of Long Island.
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Once a desertlike stretch of sand and pastures in a cove between two bays, Quogue had become a fashionable summer resort. By the time the Morrows made their trek east from Brooklyn through the town of Riverhead and on to Quogue, the stagecoach had given way to the railroad, and the God-fearing hamlet of farmers and fishermen was lined with carriages and boardinghouses. And though the hotels lacked the status of the private clubs and cottages that dotted the sandy lanes down to the beach, they offered a genteel life with public bathhouses set on the broad white dunes of the newly established public beach. Considered socially, even morally inferior, the boarders were barred from the clubhouse golf courses, the afternoon teas, and the evening dances, but they cultivated an elegance of their own, with horse-drawn surreys to the beach, parties and teas, bike rides through pastures, and boat rides in the bay.

With its cool winds and its high style, Quogue was the place to be and to be seen. And Betty, always a stickler for propriety, sought legitimacy among her peers.

But many nights, Betty cried herself to sleep, embarrassed by her naughty and willful daughter, Elisabeth.
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Meanwhile, Anne sat quietly by, watching the waves shatter and crash, race and pound against the sand. This was her first glimpse of the blue Atlantic, a “boundless” stretch “beyond the edge.”
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From now on, when she climbed the hills of Englewood up to the tops of the Palisades, Anne would know where the boats on the Hudson went, as they made their way south to the open sea.

On New Year’s Day of 1910, Betty declared that their struggle was over. They finally had the money to live as they wished. Two years before, in November of 1908, she had given birth to a son, Dwight Jr. Now, with three children and Dwight’s yearly income at $25,000, they sold their Spring Lane house for $27,000 and moved up to Palisades Avenue into a larger but still modest home at the edge of Englewood’s finest estates.
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Elisabeth described it as “a mild example of late gingerbread architecture with fancy trimming around the windows and a little tower over the front door.”
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The house stood on an acre of land planted with shapely old trees and a lush garden. Anne and her brother and sister played under the sweet gum trees, listening to the trains hooting in the valley below. From their bedroom window, Betty and Dwight could look west over their neighbors’ sweeping lawns to the curving Hackensack River and the skyline above the hills of Paterson. The couple, feeling they had reached the pinnacle of their aspirations, vowed that, barring “ill fortune,” this would be their lifelong home.

But even as they relished their contentment, Dwight planned his entry into the heady world of Englewood politics, a town that proved to be the right place for someone with “lofty views” and the instinct to make the most of political opportunities. Dwight’s instincts, to his surprise, were flawless.

In 1912, he ran for mayor and lost, but won 90 percent of the
Republican vote and, perhaps more important, the attention of a J. P. Morgan partner, Thomas Lamont. From that time on it was “what to do” with this diminutive, ubiquitous upstart of an unconnected lawyer with no family standing and no banking credentials, but an engaging personality and unquestioned integrity. After weighing the possible effects of Morrow’s physical stature and shoddy appearance—not up to the standards of the fashionable and athletic Morgan men—Tom Lamont, in December 1913, offered Dwight a job as an “understudy,” with the prospect of becoming a partner.

The Calvinist ethic of his father had made Dwight fear the temptation of money. He saw himself, after all, as a waylaid academic, conceding to the marketplace for “higher” ends. His father had never earned more than $1800 a year; Dwight now had assets over $100,000, surely a sum sufficient for his needs. But his work at Simpson and Thacher had become a tiresome set of routines, and his career stretched before him like a “desert” of familiar challengers.

He understood the power of Morgan. The Wall Street panic of 1907 had made it a one-man federal reserve, raising millions in minutes to save faltering banks and New York City’s payroll. The nineteenth-century consolidators of the nation’s rail network, the Morgan partners were now the country’s most powerful trust builders in farming, shipping, and steel. They underwrote foreign government bonds and helped to finance Britain’s war in South Africa. In December 1913, the company was about to become the official wartime purchasing agent for Great Britain in the United States.
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More than the partners’ power, Dwight valued their honesty and good character. The fine reputation of Morgan and Company was as important as its influence. The firm had achieved a rare coalescence—high-minded conscience with international power. Even Teddy Roosevelt, a conservationist who had cringed at the way Morgan bartered railroads for Alaska’s land resources, believed in the integrity of the Morgan partners. There were others, of course, who disagreed; one was the congressional representative from the Sixth District of Minnesota, Charles A. Lindbergh. The year before, Lindbergh had
spearheaded the Pujo Commission to investigate the Eastern “money trusts,” a code term, it was said, for J. P. Morgan and Company.