Anne Morrow Lindbergh: Her Life (66 page)

Charles contemplated the strength of prewar Germany and the potential “goodness” of Hitler’s power. He was a man whose “dreams” had simply gone awry, resulting in evil and devastation. The best of Germany’s youth, Charles explained, was dead. The population was not only homeless and hungry; it was vulnerable to what Hitler feared most: the Bolshevik armies of Soviet Russia. There was pathos in his words for the German people, but there was no hint of apology. To Charles, Hitler’s demise was the very stuff of tragedy.

Only a trip to a concentration camp, and a tour through the rubble led by a “skeleton” boy, moved him to condemn the brutality of the
Germans. This kind of human destruction, he wrote in his diary, was not worth the fulfillment of political ends. But his questions remained. Was German brutality really very different from the American atrocities in the Philippines? “Only in the sky is there hope,” he wrote, “only in that which man has never touched and which God forbid he ever will.”

When Charles returned home to Connecticut in mid-September, he and Anne walked for hours among the trees, stopping at dusk in an open field. Again, they had been apart for six months, and yet, Anne wrote, the lines of their thoughts moved in parallel course. Was it the sight of the “skeleton” boy, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or was it Anne’s newfound clarity? This, their public record doesn’t reveal. But by year’s end, Charles had made a spiritual turning, confirming his belief in a Christian God.

Charles had told Congress and the press of the need for Christian ideals in a technological society that had the power of mass destruction. In a statement that echoed his warning to the Germans on that July afternoon in Berlin a decade earlier, he pleaded for the restraint of a world organization to monitor military power with Christian ideals.

For the moment, at least, the devastation wreaked by the Nazis humbled him. If Charles saw the error of his judgment, he glimpsed it, in part, through the eyes of Anne. And if one listened carefully to his words, one could hear Anne’s voice pushing through his darkness.

Beach across the road from Anne’s cottage on Captiva Island, where she wrote
Gift from the Sea.

(Photographed by the author)

C
harles’s homecoming was an intrusion. For the first time in fifteen years, Anne had planned her days to suit her own needs, balancing her work with the demands of the children. She had tasted not only the sweetness of solitude but the camaraderie of artists who were also friends. And just as she was feeling separate and whole, finding a language and a culture of her own, Charles was back and omnipresent.

As a special consultant to the air force, teaching pilots long-range fuel efficiency, Charles had a scattered and unpredictable schedule. Anne never knew when to expect him, but when he arrived, he took over the house, disciplining the children and demanding her attention. The placid quality of suburban Connecticut life, first in Westport and, a year later, in Darien, had deepened Anne’s isolation and resentment.
She was thirty-nine years old; this was their tenth move in fifteen years; and she still didn’t feel she was “home.” The needs of four children under the age of thirteen and the household chores were consuming and incessant. Drives to music and dance lessons, PTA meetings and visits to the school, Saturday sports, doctors appointments, meals, laundry, buttons to be sewn and seams to be repaired—the everyday mechanics sapped Anne’s strength and creativity. She may have glimpsed “the changeless light,” but the gift of “grace” still alluded her.

Feeling captive to her husband’s and children’s lives, Anne buried herself in another pregnancy. Their sixth child, a daughter, Reeve, was born on October 2, 1945, on the fifth birthday of Anne Jr. The baby, named for her grandmother’s great-uncle, urgently needed a blood transfusion from Charles; it was a gift for which Reeve would always be grateful.
²
But the fragility of the baby was evidence of Anne’s physical exhaustion.

The following fall, at the age of forty, Anne conceived her seventh child, but this pregnancy was more difficult than the others. As usual, Anne felt weak and nauseated, but this time she had constant abdominal pain. At the suggestion of friends, she consulted a physician, Dana Atchley, a neighbor in Englewood who practiced in New York City at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital. He diagnosed the presence of gallstones, and recommended surgery to remove the obstruction. It was a routine operation, he explained, but it could jeopardize her pregnancy, and he suggested the possibility of an abortion.
³
The deliberate termination of a pregnancy, however, must have weighed heavily on Anne. The burden was relieved when, shortly before Christmas, she miscarried.

In February, following surgery for the removal of the gallstones, Anne spent many hours in Dr. Atchley’s office, talking about her conflicts as an artist and a woman. Atchley was warm and engaging, with a smile that filled his face and his eyes. Fourteen years older than Anne, he had a paternal air, heightened by his thinning gray hair and rimless spectacles. He summoned up, perhaps, memories of her father.

In August 1947, after months of frustration with her work and
bouts of depression, Anne was offered an assignment from
Reader’s Digest
to write about the survival of “Christianity, Western Civilization, and Democracy” in postwar France, Germany, and England. Reluctant to leave home and the children, but encouraged by Charles, Anne gratefully accepted the time to write and travel, and to test the limits of her independence. When she arrived home two months later, Anne wrote daily in a trailer parked in the woodlands bordering Long Island Sound.

“Western values,” she concluded, “were crumbling in the rubble” of a weary Europe devastated by war. Honing her material into five articles, some of which would later be published in
Life
and
Harper’s
magazines, as well as
Reader’s Digest
, Anne was pleased with her accomplishments. Hoping her work was the beginning of a new period of productivity, she wrote a poem called “Second Sowing,” published in
The Atlantic Monthly
. Reminiscent of Psalm 24, which she believed hailed the second coming of Christ, it pulsed with the loss of her unborn child and her inability to nourish and sustain its life. She prays for the courage to break down “the bolded door” and harvest the “golden” crop “now hoarded in the barn, a sterile store.”

But Anne’s optimism was short-lived. Her miscarriage, linked inextricably with Charlie’s death, triggered her anger and her self-contempt. She felt physically and mentally ill, fearing she would go “mad” and wanting to “die.”
⁴
After so many years of guilt for not preventing Charlie’s murder, for not taking a stand against the war, Anne’s need for separation from Charles was finally breaking down her defenses. But the more she pulled away, the more frightened and helpless she became, the angrier Charles grew. When Anne sought the help of Dr. John Rosen,
⁵
the psychiatrist who had treated her brother Dwight, Charles punished her by moving out of the bedroom. For two months he refused to talk.

In Dr. Rosen, Anne found a sympathetic mind. He had saved her brother from being subjected to a frontal lobotomy and refused to diagnose him as hopelessly ill. At a time when schizophrenia was treated with bromides and “shock,” Rosen applied the theories of Freud to the symptoms of psychosis. “Insanity” he considered the far end of a neurotic
continuum, not a disease. Ascribing it to a developmental lag caused by “malevolent” mothering, he sought to counter that cause with “good” mothering—to become, in short, a foster parent. Driven, he would say, with a “Messianic” fervor, he would remove the patient from her “toxic” home and take control of her life. The most severely disturbed would move in to his quarters; others were given his part-time care.

Playing “father” to his child-patients, Rosen was as likely to swathe and bottle-feed them as he was to shame, curse, or tackle them to the floor; intimidation, he believed, was the key to cure. His theories, like Freud’s, smacked of misogyny, but though his aim was to liberate a patient from the distortions of the mother’s psyche, he had no taste for defying convention. Little boys were boys, and little girls were girls, and the nuclear family was a sacred institution. Because he also believed that the neurotic person could use his dreams as tools for understanding, he told Anne that she was not “sick” but was trapped in a developmental lag caused by her upbringing. She should leave behind the “toxins” of family and home and, instead, pay heed to the “demons” that haunted her dreams. His desire to foster Anne’s independence directly opposed Charles’s desire to punish her. Once the salve to all her wounds, Charles now seemed poison.

Undaunted by Anne’s illness, Charles continued to seek his place on the public stage. As much as he hated the “political game,” he insisted on pressing his message. Ironically, his prewar pro-German position underwent a new interventionist twist. In April 1947, Charles declared the defeat of Germany a Pyrrhic victory.

Russia was strengthened, but Charles was wrong. The “quality of Western Civilization” was about to flourish. One year later, the American Marshall Plan and the British cosponsored Berlin airlift would save the German people from starvation and economic chaos.

In his 1947 book,
Of Flight and Life
, Charles wrote that the war had been a conflict between brothers damned by the same demon. Science and Technology, not the Germans, were to blame. A world disconnected from Nature and from God had bowed to a golden calf, wreaking death and destruction, and solving nothing with its pain. Surely the Bolsheviks would inherit the earth, now that the German spirit was crushed. Hope lay in the heart of Man if he turned himself inward toward the light of Christ. Charles was beginning to wonder whether that was possible.
⁷

In 1948, Anne and Charles revisited Captiva Island with their children, staying in a house rented by Jim Newton. Anne recalled, from her first visit a decade earlier, the island’s primeval beauty, which seemed to belong to another world.