Anne Morrow Lindbergh: Her Life (74 page)

But as if he could not bear his own vulnerability, Charles stopped short of the next verses:

Tired and weak, but alert and talkative, Charles juggled the apparatus to the end. He wanted to believe his inability to breathe was a matter of technical adjustment. Surrendering to a sedative and a painkiller, Charles slipped into a coma on Sunday evening, August 25. He died the following morning at seven-fifteen. Barefoot, clad in khakis, and wrapped in his favorite New England blanket, Charles was lifted into his eucalyptus coffin and set in the back of Tevy’s pickup truck for the seven-mile journey along the winding seacliff road to the Congregational church in Kipahulu. The church was decorated with boughs of bougainvillea, stalks of ginger, and hibiscus and plumeria blossoms. One of his nurses, barefoot and silent, carried flowers in her apron to the coffin and scattered them, one by one, across its surface. His friend Henry Kaluhu led the singing of “Angel’s Welcome” as Tevy lowered the casket into the grave alongside Sam Pryor’s buried pet gibbons. Interred one hour earlier than stated on the public schedule, Charles, one last time, outwitted the press.

Anne was grateful to Charles’s physician, Dr. Milton Howell. Because of him, Charles had been able to choose the rhythm and pace of his death. He wanted to confront it on his own terms, to maneuver its currents as he went, and to plan its details in the embrace of his family and the beauty of Maui he had come to love. Now it was time for Anne to grapple with her sadness and rebuild her life. One must have the courage to stay open and keep trying, she said, using nature and
one’s family as means of renewal. She felt fortunate she had children and a large family who cared for her.
²⁵

The children, too, had to reconcile themselves to their father’s death. Reeve felt as if “half the world was gone.” Even as her mother moved toward the center of her life, the “airless hollow” of her father’s absence set the family adrift. While her mother loved and understood her, Reeve wrote, her father had seemed to hold and protect her. Without his lectures and frequent letters, like newsworthy bulletins yelled through a megaphone, the family felt fragmented and disconnected.
²⁶

Anne would rarely return to Maui alone. She felt the swift passage of time and was determined to define the pattern of her years. She chose to live instead in the comfort of her nest in Darien, surrounded by her birds. She visited her children and grandchildren in France, Vermont, Washington, and Montana, settled the affairs of Charles’s estate, and dedicated herself to the editing of her diaries and letters and Charles’s
Autobiography of Values.
²⁷
With the unflagging help of Helen Wolff, Anne published her third volume of diaries and letters,
The Flower and the Nettle
, in 1976 and the fourth volume,
War Within, War Without
, in 1980.

Her diaries and letters show us a nineteenth-century female mind grasping for consciousness amid the strictures of Victorian virtue. Magnificent testimony to her capacity to present scene, character, and dialogue, they are the “great American novel” Anne never wrote. In the end, the only protagonist worthy of her gifts was herself. While her diaries provide us with a window into the beginnings of twentieth-century feminist thought, they leave the image of her husband’s heroism untouched. In the end, as in the beginning, Anne loved Charles passionately, and, though willing to forgive his frailties, she could not bear to portray him as he was. If meeting Charles was Anne’s moment of rebirth, exposing him would be akin to suicide.

When Charles died, so did Anne’s courage to write. Without his “rational” mind and his commanding presence, there was nothing for her to push against. She would record her experience in the quiet of her diary as if it were a daily offering to God, but she would never write another book.

Anne, 1979
.

(Minnesota Historical Society)

T
he train hugs the bank of Lake Geneva, wide and crystalline under the majesty of sky and mountains. Town after town punctuates the lake with stucco houses, clotheslines, and boats turned upside down in the morning sun. But the town of Vevey has been less than the enclave the Lindberghs anticipated. Once a village tucked into a valley, Vevey is a city in transition. Garishly colored high-rise department stores are neighbors to nineteenth-century cafés. Motorcycles and buses, cranes and bulldozers, disturb the tree-lined quiet of the village green. Only the mountains remain true to themselves.

The road cuts broadly up the hill, crisscrossing the lush vineyards and rolling farmlands. The cows graze in the pastures while the lake blurs through the mist. Like so many places where the Lindberghs have lived—Illiec, Maui, Martha’s Vineyard, even Scott’s Cove—the grandeur of the open sky dominates. Riding along the mountainside is like moving in a low-flying plane.

It has been two years since my first visit to Anne at her chalet. Her
frail, bent body and angular face, with its wide-set brow, are fixed in my mind. I can describe the 1960s cut and color of the clothes she will be wearing, the cadence of her greeting, and the birdlike feel of her hand. I know that she will probably have coffee yogurt with her soup for lunch, tea with her afternoon croissant, and that any mention of the kidnapping will turn her face to stone.

The kidnapping occurred sixty years ago, yet Anne Morrow Lindbergh still has the manner of a violated woman. The murder of her infant son has become the recurring psychodrama that dominates her life. She still feels as though something will be taken from her; something innocent will be stolen and destroyed without her knowledge or consent. She is no longer wife or caretaker-mother; her fears have become insidious and symbolic. Her only legacy is her words, the feelings and thoughts that are testimony to her past. At eighty-two, she still plays the “victim,” like the beautiful and chaste Unicorn of her poetry. Imprisoned by the sins of others, Anne finds strength in her martyrdom, hiding behind a mask of weakness and self-deprecation. When Charles was alive, this role sufficed, calling forth his paternal, protective instincts. But his death has cast her in a dual role: victim and guardian of their past. “Anne is the only citadel to their history,” says one of her friends.
²
But, in truth, she doesn’t guard it well. She is too humble and gentle to be a guard.

I walk the narrow stone steps to the house, welcomed only by the bark of Anne’s Scottish terrier. Anne, aloof, greets me politely. Antennae up, she pauses for a moment. “You are early,” she says, eyebrows raised above her blue-tinted glasses.

Her body seems swathed in darkness. Her shoulders bend inward as she draws her blue sweater around her. She raises her hand to her collar as she speaks, fingering its button as if it were a key in a lock.

She seems distressed, like an actress who has missed her cues. She apologizes for her hair and lack of lipstick and then goes into the next room to look at her clock.

“My clock stopped,” she says, obviously embarrassed.

Anne has aged since our last visit. Her walk is tentative and slow. She is bent, dry as a fallen twig, now and then holding on to furniture as she walks.

“Old age,” she says with an ironic smile, “isn’t for sissies.”

I have been told that she is impatient with herself, frustrated by her loss of memory and waning ability to care for herself. And yet she takes pride in her modest self-sufficiency, choosing to prepare our lunch of soup and salad. She putters around the kitchen, fumbling with the pot cover, forgetting the tea, not sure whether she should toast the bread.

“I’m not at all mechanical,” she says apologetically. But mechanics, I realize, is not the problem. It is my presence—my unending questions, my unfathomed intent—that unnerves her. Our lunch is eaten among a medley of ideas, tossed between two women separated by a generation of attitudes and experience, yet bound by a kinship neither could explain.

As a biographer, I have dared to lift her mask, seeking her true self. I have come to know Anne not intimately but in ways she herself cannot or does not want to. I can see patterns, continuums, and curves of growth. I can correct her on dates and paint stories around her memories.

At times she delights in my knowledge, sinking into thought as we explore the origins of her ideas. But more often, my presence seems to threaten her. I am an intruder, a potential “thief” who may violate the integrity of her words. Recording her words on my high-tech machine, I am one more reminder that it is time to pass on. The idea of biography pains and burdens her. She is too enlightened to deny its necessity, but she is too tired to embrace its challenge. My presence reminds her of people long gone and things she might have done.

I must be like a voice from a distant past. Some people say Anne has lost touch with herself now. The passionate and prolific days of Anne Morrow Lindbergh—flyer, writer, and mother—have an air of unreality, like a story that she once read but can no longer remember, says a daughter. She has been known to recite words from her books and to forget that she is their author. She says she “can no longer think of myself as a woman.” She is drawing closer, she says, to what Indian law
calls “the great mysterious,” to that pool of life to which children belong. The past no longer interests her, she says with a sweep of her hand. It is living in the present, enjoying each day “like a child,” that gives her life meaning.

“There is a certain lack of responsibility in being old,” she says. “I’ve made a lot of mistakes. I’ve done what I could. I have tried, and I think life is a journey toward insight, and that is all I can hope for.”

But like the sudden conversions of the protagonists in her novels, Anne’s words seem more wistful than true. Not even her work is a source of pride, says one friend. She is apologetic, as though her writing has no value. She acknowledges her work as if she wrote because she couldn’t do anything else.

She still regrets that she did not write an actual work of fiction. It would have “let me be a little freer.” Now she writes only in her diary, but she thinks of writing about widowhood. Publicly, she has compared it to adolescence, a stage in life when one finds one’s true center alone. But widowhood is a quiet distillation. It is a relief, she says, a time of shedding excess baggage, possessions, ambitions, vanities, and duties. Stripped of the delusion of one’s “specialness,” one is more capable of understanding and of compassion. Privately, she acknowledges the loneliness and the pain; it takes so much to retain one’s vigor and openness. The support of her children carries her along.

The dog starts barking. He is a gray, unkempt terrier, uninhibited, demanding, possessive, and insistent. “Okay, okay,” she says with sweet annoyance, as one would talk to a young child. “You want to go out?” His presence gives her purpose and a sense of intimacy otherwise lost. She lets the dog out the door, and within minutes he is around the verandah, barking and clawing at the screen door.