Anne Morrow Lindbergh: Her Life (26 page)

If Betty felt that her “center” had dropped, Anne felt her own center had been restored. The truth was, her father’s death was bringing her home—home to the baby and a life of her own. Her grief couldn’t quell her feelings of joy, which brought on moments of guilt and despair. On October 8, she and Charles had left their plane in Shanghai for repairs, and crossed the Japanese islands by rail. After sailing to Seattle, they borrowed a plane and they arrived home in Englewood on the nineteenth.

Anne kept her father’s death at a distance, wishing like a child that he could be there to comfort her. But even as she felt robbed of his strength, her spirits were buoyed by the vitality of her son. Finally, she was home with her baby, and what a beautiful boy he was.

In her letters to Evangeline, she began to refer to Charlie as “the boy,” much as Charles’s father had referred to him. To Anne, it confirmed his proper place. He was categorically male—confident, bold, and independent.

The praise for Charlie’s strength belonged to Betty Gow. She had been alone with him for more than two months. Betty Morrow, busy with her husband’s campaign, rarely came to North Haven. She relied on news of the baby’s health and progress from the diaries Betty Gow sent to her in Englewood. The only other servant in the house, Emily, the cook, apparently ignored the baby. The days passed slowly, and the
nights were long, and much as she enjoyed the beauty of the house and the island, Betty felt abandoned by the Lindberghs and the Morrows.
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She began to spend her evenings with Henrik Finn (Red) Johnson, who had been introduced to her at a dance by Alfred Burke, the Morrows’ chauffeur. Johnson was a seaman with restless energy and little ambition who had “jumped ship” in March 1927, when he was twenty-two. He flitted from job to job, using his paychecks to fund vacations and living off his brother and the kindness of relatives. A year before he met Betty, in April 1930, he had secured a job on Thomas Lamont’s yacht in Brooklyn Harbor and was aboard when Lamont sailed the following August to North Haven. He and Betty went to several village dances and, in the company of other Morrow and Lamont servants, to night parties at the local beaches. Soon, Red was visiting Betty alone in the evenings at the Morrow estate. She was taken with his fun-loving manner, his dimpled cheeks, and his shock of red hair. Well built and dapper, he had an easy and mischievous smile that spread through the corners of his eyes. While he wasn’t the marrying kind, Betty was pleased with the attention he paid her. They talked about the baby and the “little different things he did,” and Red quickly became her confidant and friend.

Red stayed in North Haven until the second week of September, when he sailed back to New Jersey with the Lamonts. After the boat was docked in Brooklyn at the beginning of October, Red was once again out of a job. Hoping to maintain their friendship, Red and Betty corresponded while she remained in North Haven with Charlie. When she returned with the baby to Englewood shortly after Morrow’s death, Red took a room in town in order to be “near to her” again.

Anne, arriving on October 19, found the baby healthy, sturdy, and strong. Betty had seen to it that Charlie looked his best. Since he had outgrown his nightclothes and his shoes, she spent part of her wages to buy him new clothes. The family had not given her money for expenses, but she feared that she would look neglectful if Charlie was not well dressed.

Anne was grateful to Betty for her care of the baby; Charlie had the
warmth of a child who had been loved and protected. Although he did not recognize his parents on their return, neither was he afraid of them. Best of all, Charles adored “the boy.” To her surprise, he spoiled him with treats.
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Anne hoped to move into their new house in Hopewell, New Jersey, shortly before Thanksgiving and was determined to be Charlie’s full-time mother. For the moment, Charles consented. She allowed Betty Gow to take a three-month holiday, and, for the first time since their marriage, Charles traveled alone. Anne relished the time in her mother’s company, falling into a domestic routine, bound to the rhythms of her child and the slow-moving pace beyond the boom and rush of the city.
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Her quiet life prompted rumors in the press that she was pregnant again. When she did not accompany Charles on the survey routes, Walter Winchell blasted the news over the radio, as if challenging Anne to respond. She and Charles denied the report—but it was true; they were expecting their second child.

Terribly nauseated again, Anne welcomed the help of the Morrow servants, as well as Elisabeth’s invitation to have Charlie attend her school. In mid-November, at the age of seventeen months, Charlie, nearly half a year younger than any of the other children, started at the Little School. On his first day, all the children gathered around him and made a fuss, but the boy previously the youngest became jealous and punched Charlie in the back.
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“Charlie sat down and cried.” No one had intentionally hurt him before. With the objectivity of a Watsonian mother, Anne stood by as the other boy hit him five times for five different reasons before anyone intervened. The faculty, she wrote, tongue-in-cheek, called a conference with the psychologist. He suggested that Charlie play alone for a while to become “accustomed to his environment” before he tried to “make social adjustments.”

There were adjustments in the Morrow home, too. Now the sole man of the house, Charles played a familiar role. Morrow was dead, and Charles felt both the responsibility and the license to fill the void. For
the first time, he gave public voice to his political views; they echoed the Populist philosophy of his father and struck a consonant chord with the public, which, in 1931, was devastated by poverty and unemployment.

By the end of the year, banks in more than thirty states had closed, and millions of people, homeless and out of work, roamed the land. State and city governments were swamped with welfare cases, and families wandered from place to place in search of hospitable communities. The vagrants were largely agricultural workers and young men who had finished school only to find there were no jobs. The following summer they congregated in Washington, surrounded the White House, and made their squalor a form of protest. President Hoover, unmoved, locked himself in his quarters.
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Just one month after Morrow died, Lindbergh was urging a “readjustment” of the nation’s industrial structure.

The notion of redistribution, which would have been abhorrent to Morrow, appealed to Charles and many of his contemporaries in America and in Europe; it was an answer to what they perceived as the failure of capitalism.

Anne, meanwhile, noticed little beyond her white picket fence. She had planned to settle in Hopewell by the holidays, but the house still needed painting inside, and she was reluctant to stay there alone with the baby. They were not planning much for Christmas, just enough to entertain Charlie. Her father’s death had dampened everyone’s spirits.
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By January, however, Anne was back to her writing and had finished
the first chapter of what promised to be a book, an account of their trip to Asia, beginning with the stopover at North Haven. She was satisfied with her writing because she had been wholly conscious of the joy she felt at that gathering of the family. It was the last time she saw her father, and “like a bee tasting a whole summer in one honey-suckle,”
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his memory now gave her strength and faith.

She was beginning to see her trip as a journey beyond the bounds of ordinary narrative. Like Edward Hopper, she tried to paint the bare sides of barns, hoping that the canvas would reflect her emotions.

While Anne nestled into a quiet life, Charles accelerated his work as technical consultant to Pan Am and TAT, charting passenger routes from North to South America, and inspecting transcontinental routes between New York and Los Angeles. On February 4, he celebrated his thirtieth birthday to more public acclaim, and with more public influence and faith in the future of commercial aviation, than he could have imagined during his transatlantic flight five years earlier. Hailed as the American Prince of Wales, he was urged by foreign leaders to continue his tours. Aviation, Lindbergh advised the United States military, should be added to the curriculum at West Point.
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By mid-February, Anne and Charles were living part time in Englewood, spending their weekends in Hopewell. Anne was finally in her own home with her baby, and everything else seemed a diversion, even her writing. Charles, perhaps thinking of his mother’s entrapment, saw Anne’s domesticity as self-indulgence. He urged her to continue writing her book. Hoping to coax her out of the house, he asked her to help his public drive for flood relief in China and to join him on a short trip to the air races in Los Angeles. Reluctantly, Anne agreed.

On February 7, with Charlie playing at her feet, Anne wrote a letter to Evangeline, describing the child’s every word and move. Charmed by her baby’s determination and sense of humor, and eager to share her joy in his games and laughter, she rambled on for pages, until Charles demanded that the letter stop. He wondered, he teased, whether she was writing another book.
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On February 22, leaving Betty to care for the baby, Anne kept her
promise to Charles. Wooden and doll-like, Anne spoke on behalf of the Federal Council of Churches before the microphones of the Columbia and National Broadcasting Systems and addressed the public on the state of the flooded regions of China.

The
New York Times
reported:

Charles sat by her side, nodding and smiling as she spoke, chatting in whispers with studio executives. Once more, Anne had earned his approval.

A
nne and Charles arrive at Nanking, September 1931
.

(AP/Wide World Photos)

A
continent away, the floods of the Yangtze raged, but two days after Anne’s radio plea for help, she and Charles had left the center stage of New York to spend a quiet weekend in Hopewell. Their four hundred acres of farmland and forest had proven a perfect retreat, far from the highway, along rambling country roads, unpaved and little traveled.
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With a mile of driveway between them and the nearest road, Anne and Charles were comfortable in their privacy; they rarely drew their shutters closed, and had fired the guard who had stood at their gate warding off souvenir hunters during construction.