“MAMA! Are we going to live in America now?”
“Yes, darling.”
“With Grandma Bee?”
“Yes, of course.”
“And Uncle Dwight and Aunt Con?”
“Yes.”
“Will Father be there, too?”
“Of course he will! He’s already there, you know that!”
“Will you have to fly away with him again?”
I looked up from my desk, where I was reading over the letter from Charles that I’d just received, full of clippings of various houses we might rent. I also had the latest shipping schedules, although they seemed to change by the minute as the world turned upside down around us. Seated on the floor, playing with some wooden toys that had not yet been packed, Jon looked up at me so wistfully. His reddish hair needed cutting; I reached down and brushed wispy bangs out of his eyes.
“I hope not.”
“Me, too. Land cries when you go away. I don’t. Not anymore.”
“Oh, my boy! Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Because Father doesn’t like it when I cry. Land’s still just a baby, though.”
“Come here!” I opened my arms wide, and he ran to them; I hugged him so tight, his face was red when finally I let him go. “I don’t mind if you cry. I cry, too, sometimes. I hate leaving you. I think about you all the time when I’m gone!”
“You do? Then why do you always go when Father asks?”
Because if I don’t go with him, I’m afraid he’ll never come back—the answer was so ready, it took me by surprise and I almost blurted it out loud. “Because—because that’s what married people do. They do what each other asks. Most of the time.” I gave him a sloppy kiss as he returned to his toys. “But I think that now Father is going to be so busy that we won’t have time for any trips. Let’s both hope, very hard, for that, all right? So no more crying! And Grandma Bee is so happy we’re coming home!”
“Will Violet be there? And Betty Gow?”
“Where did you—How did you hear of those names?” I asked him, shocked.
Charles had forbidden me ever to speak of the events of ’32 to our surviving children. He had decided they did not need to know what had happened to the brother they would never meet. As far as Jon knew, he was our firstborn. As far as he knew, there’d never been a Betty, or an Elsie, or an Ollie. Or a Violet.
“I heard someone talk about her,” Jon replied, even as he was terribly absorbed in rolling his wooden truck, so that it made little tracks in the pile, across the carpet.
“Who?” Who would talk about this in front of my son? I wanted to shake some sense into such an idiot.
“Germaine and Alfred.”
“Oh.” Our Parisian couple. Who, I decided in that instant, would not be accompanying us to America.
“Betty. That’s like Grandma’s name,” my son continued in his measured way. Jon was patient, obedient, utterly unlike any other six-year-old; I often wondered if he had absorbed all the terror and drama surrounding me, while in the womb. And so knew that he must make up for it, once born.
Land—my little Land, my Coronation baby, as he was born in London the day King George VI was crowned—was playing less obediently on the other side of the room, systematically destroying a plant, leaf by leaf. I was too stunned to stop him.
“What did—what did they say about Violet?” I tried to keep my voice casual but it did waver; I could not think of her without wanting to cry—guilty tears, more than anything. While I had disciplined myself not to weep for my child, I was not able to do so for the others whose lives were also cut short that terrible May. That so many were wrecked, ruined—tragedy following tragedy, innocents destroyed because Charles and I flew too high, too close to the sun—was truly more than I could bear.
“Germaine said Violet killed herself. Mama, how can someone do that? Is it true?” Now Jon did stop playing; he looked up at me with eyes so pure and innocent, I flinched; I did not want to be the one to introduce these awful notions.
“Someone can do that, yes, but it’s a terrible, terrible thing, darling. A weak thing. Now, let’s not talk about this—it’s not very nice. Someday, maybe, you can ask me again. But let’s not talk about it now, especially not in front of Father when we see him again. He has a lot on his mind, these days. Promise?”
Jon smiled; there was nothing he liked better than having to promise. He squared his little shoulders, adjusting them to take on this newest responsibility. When he was satisfied he was fully prepared, he nodded.
“Promise, Mama!”
WE WERE NOT MOVING to Germany, after all. Not after the evening of November 9, 1938. Kristallnacht. The Night of Broken Glass.
The night that even Charles couldn’t justify; the night that the German authorities destroyed any remaining Jewish businesses and all the synagogues, killed an unknown number of Jews, and imprisoned an even greater number in enforced labor camps. It was a night of such brutal violence that Charles was appalled.
“I don’t understand why Hitler had to resort to this. It’s unnecessary. Beneath him,” he muttered, reading the English newspapers; at the time, we were in Iliac, our home near Alexis Carrel and his wife in Brittany. We had no electricity there, we had to use a gas-powered generator and a radio telephone. We were almost a nation unto ourselves. So isolated were we, I couldn’t quiet the suspicion that Charles wouldn’t stop moving until he had hidden the boys and me completely from the world. Which was why I had clung to the idea of Germany, where even Charles believed we could live a normal life; not the life of fugitives.
Until Kristallnacht.
“We can’t move there now, Charles. We simply can’t.” I was disgusted by the images reported; the beaten and bloodied men in the street, the women and children cowering, the senseless destruction. The shards of glass, the Kristall, gleaming ominously, like dangerous teeth, on the pavement.
“No, I don’t see how. If there’s going to be more violence—and I can’t deny that there might be—it’s not the place for us. But where is? These are important times. We need to be more available than we are here, at least during the winter. If there is war, and I’m afraid that despite Chamberlain, there are people in the British government intent upon it, England is not the place to be. Maybe France?”
“Why not—America? Back home?” I looked at him, not hiding the hope in my eyes. The truth was, even in the excitement of planning our home in Berlin, the promises I held out for myself, like little presents to be opened at a later time—promises of shopping and theater and a real social life, unencumbered by the press—I missed my country. I missed New Jersey, primeval and green in the summer, a Currier and Ives painting in the winter. I missed hearing English sloppily spoken, at least according to my veddy, veddy proper British acquaintances.
I missed my family, in particular—what little of it I had left; I still felt guilty for leaving Mother. No amount of letters crossing the fathomless ocean between us could ever make up for the remorse of running away when she needed me most.
“I don’t think so,” Charles said grimly, turning the British edition of The New York Times toward me. On the front page was a photograph of Charles with the German Iron Cross about his neck. The headline below it said “Hitler Annexes Lindbergh.”
“Joe Kennedy telegraphed me last night, Anne. Do you know what he wanted? He wanted me to return the medal.”
“The ambassador asked that? Do you think it’s his wish, or someone else’s?” While the new ambassador to Great Britain, Joseph Kennedy, was known to be a loose cannon, this sounded more like President Roosevelt.
“I don’t know. I don’t think I will, though. Why? It was presented to me on behalf of a government, thanking me for my pioneering flight. If I return it, I might as well return all the other medals on behalf of all the other governments in the world. It’s not political, it wasn’t given to me in that spirit, and I don’t see why anyone would think it is.” Charles frowned, narrowing his gaze, while his fingers drummed edgily on the stack of newspapers beside him.
I agreed with him. But I also knew better. In these days, everything was political; everything was full of significance.
So we packed up again in December 1938 and moved to a little apartment in Paris, right across from the Bois de Boulogne so that Jon could have somewhere to play, and events appeared to calm down. The Munich Pact was still fresh in everyone’s minds; Chamberlain’s little white piece of paper signaling “peace in our time” stopped the ditch-digging, the sandbag piling that had been occurring on both sides of the channel. And we enjoyed the early months of 1939 in Paris; I bought my first Chanel dress, I took the children to museums, and we even dined with the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. Like everyone else, I had been captivated by their romance, and was eager to meet the woman who prompted a king to give up his throne.
She was steel encased in the finest Chanel had to offer; so thin yet with large, masculine hands, a wide, snapping mouth. He had tiny eyes, was more feminine than she was with his slight frame and soft, dainty hands, and was the most boring man I had ever met. Charles yawned openly in his face during an earnest monologue about whether or not white shoes for men were de rigueur for summer.
As for my increasingly political husband, he continued to shuttle between Paris and London, giving his advice concerning their military air fleets. He even went, secretly, back to Berlin; France enlisted Charles’s aid in persuading Germany to sell them some planes in order to shore up their nonexistent air force. Charles, doubtful, did use his influence, to no avail.
Yet our lingering presence on the continent, our now highly publicized and scrutinized past visits to Germany, were cause for much discussion back in America. At least, according to the worried letters, full of newspaper clippings, I received from my family.
One night, Charles and I went out for a romantic dinner at La Tour d’Argent. Just as the third course arrived, we heard an overdressed American couple at the table next to us say, too loudly, “I guess America’s not good enough for them! So what if their baby was kidnapped—we’ve all had hard times, but none of us ran away from them.”
I froze, my fork halfway to my mouth. I looked at Charles, who raised an eyebrow, forbidding me to react in any way. I continued to eat, as I heard the woman say, “I guess sauerkraut’s more to their taste, not apple pie.”
“Sauerkraut and iron crosses,” her husband agreed.
The pressed duck was tasteless in my mouth; the wine turned to vinegar. Charles was right. If this was what was waiting for us in America, we could not return.
Charles, however, was smacking his lips with gusto, tearing into his duck as if he hadn’t eaten in days. His eyes gleamed with purpose. I knew he had just recognized his latest mission.
Two days later, he was on the phone to Cunard, arranging our tickets home.
AND SO WE RETURNED, leaving a continent about to be torn apart by war for the safer shores of America, or so we thought. Charles went first, to report directly to Washington about all he had seen—and to caution them as well. He firmly believed that Germany would easily overtake Poland; he thought England and France were foolish to declare war outright, and had even written a secret paper to Chamberlain and to Daladier urging them not to. I wished he hadn’t done that; he was already being maligned as an appeaser, even a spy, in some quarters.
But Charles, single-minded as always, did not appear to notice. After he reported to Washington, he looked for suitable homes near Mother but delayed taking one until I got there. It was a good thing that he did, for none of the clippings he had sent me mentioned schools, and when I chastised him for this, he was honestly perplexed. It had not yet registered with him that our children were growing up, needing schooling and friends and doctors and all the other things children required. Beyond the fact of their births, that primal inclination to protect them from harm, he did not seem much interested in parenting. I wondered if it was because of what happened to little Charlie; if he couldn’t see the point of getting too involved, only to have them taken from us. Or if he simply couldn’t understand the needs of a child beyond the age of twenty months, the age of his firstborn, forever. I understood this, had feared it in myself when Jon was first born, but found my heart miraculously expanding along with our children as they grew. I rejoiced that I was able to love and care and worry just like any other mother.
Yet other mothers did not pin whistles to their children’s pajamas so that they could call for help in the middle of the night.
In April 1939, I trudged down the gangplank of the Champlain, clutching Land with one hand, Jon with the other. Dozens of police escorted the children and me to a waiting car amid the usual blinding torrent of cameras, which terrified the boys, who had never before faced such an onslaught. Land turned his face to me and wailed, while Jon held tightly to my hand, his face pale and grave.
“Mrs. Lindbergh! Mrs. Lindbergh! Are you glad to be back? Where is the colonel?” I shook my head at the usual questions, but then froze when confronted by new ones.
“What do you think of the Nazi Party? Did your husband really meet secretly with Hitler? Is it true that he was offered a commission in the Luftwaffe?”
I started to get in the car but turned around, unable to keep quiet.
“My husband has been recalled to active duty as a colonel in the Army Air Corps. He’s unable to meet me because of his work.”
Then I ducked inside the car, my heart pulsing daringly; I knew I shouldn’t have answered them. Charles had forbidden me to do so; he felt it best that he always be the one to speak for us in public, and normally I was only too happy to let him. He wasn’t here, however, and I heard the hostility behind those questions, and felt that I had to defend him—even though I knew he would not see it that way. But I was proud of the work he was doing now; because of his knowledge of the European situation, the military had him flying all over the country, inspecting air bases, suggesting which factories could be modified to turn out the type of planes necessary to make America the leading air power in the world.
I was proud of it, and wanted to tell the world about it—for I didn’t know how long it would last. Already, I could see that Charles was on a collision course, torn between his sense of purpose and his sense of duty. They were very different things; I saw that clearly. I wasn’t sure that he did, however.
“You spoke very well, Mama.” Jon patted my hand. “They were such nasty men.”
“I did? Well, thank you, darling.”
“Are we home now?”
I looked out the car window; we were still surrounded by strangers peering into the windows, trying to catch a glimpse of my children, flashbulbs popping, blinding us. I hugged them both to me, and sighed.
“Yes, we are, darlings. We’re home.”
AS WE DROVE OUT of the city, across the bridge into New Jersey, my stomach fluttered. And with every mile we drove toward Next Day Hill, my head began to throb, my skin to feel clammy.
“What’s wrong, Mama?” Jon asked.
“Nothing,” I said, trying to smile. My son frowned, knowing that I had lied to him.
Now that we were almost there, I was dreading coming home. Being away for three years had kept the ghosts at bay, but now I was about to encounter them in their own setting. For it was at Next Day Hill that Violet Sharpe—poor, excitable Violet Sharpe, barely older than myself—had taken her life a few weeks after the baby’s body was found. After being summoned for yet another round of questioning about her involvement in the kidnapping, she had swallowed a glass of chlorine cyanide.
I was horrified and sickened at the news. And racked with guilt. I should have known; I should have realized that Violet didn’t have a Charles to bully strength into her, to force her to look ahead, to forbid her to dwell in the past. She didn’t have anything in her life but my mother’s protection and shelter, but even my mother couldn’t protect her from Colonel Schwarzkopf’s ugly interrogations; interrogations instigated, originally, by me.
I made myself look at her body, even though Charles flat out forbade me to. I couldn’t explain to him why I needed to see her, register the thin, worried face, the sad little ribbon tied in her hair, her mouth blistered and stained from the poison. The whites of her eyes, still visible beneath half-closed lids, staring at me accusingly.
When I saw Violet’s broken body, as twisted as the wreckage of the plane I had once located in the mountains of New Mexico, I wept. How could I have ever believed this fragile girl was involved? No matter that I was desperate, insane with fear for my child; I should never have told Colonel Schwarzkopf to question her or any of the servants. Who was I to play God?
Too late did I believe in her innocence. Only days after her suicide, the police determined that the only thing poor Violet was guilty of was being foolish. She had been involved with a married butler in my mother’s household. Her frantic tears, her inability to stick to a story about her activity that awful night; it was all a cover-up for trysts with her lover.
So Violet would not be at Next Day Hill to welcome us home. So many of the servants, familiar faces to me since childhood, were gone now, chased from the house by the police, or retired, grown old in my absence. Even Ollie Whateley had passed away.
And Betty Gow. She would be absent as well. I don’t remember if any of us actually spoke of it, but somehow, in those weeks after Charlie’s body was found, it was agreed that Betty had to leave the household. I knew she would never love the new baby in the same way; she knew it as well.
Violet, Betty. And Elisabeth, my sister. She, too, was gone. There were still times I found myself picking up the telephone to call her, before remembering.
She’d looked so vibrant on her wedding day in December 1932. Jon was just a cooing baby in my mother’s arms as I stood with my sister in the same room I had been married in. It was a rare moment of celebration for my entire family; we all spoke and wrote about it for weeks after, reliving the beauty, the poignancy. The relief that Elisabeth seemed well, loved, cared for. Although I never saw her look as happy, as joyful, with Aubrey as she used to, when she was laughing and scheming with Connie.
Elisabeth’s goodbye kiss was a promise to me; a promise that despite her marriage, I would never be alone. I would always have someone willing to listen, not judge; sympathize, not urge me to action. And I would do the same for her.
Two years later—almost to the day—she was dead. The harsh Welsh climate was too much for her; doctors ordered her to sunny California. Aubrey whisked her away, but she died of pneumonia, Mother and Aubrey by her side.
I would never stop missing her.
So lost in my thoughts, I didn’t realize that we were home until we were turning into the private drive of Next Day Hill. There was a new man on duty, but he recognized us and pressed the lever for the gate to open. As the gates closed, two black cars that had been following us—reporters and photographers, I realized—parked outside. I sighed. Now we were well and truly home.
“Mama, is this where Grandma lives?” Jon was climbing over me, eager to get out. “Can you please move?” He gave me a playful shove, so I did. I pushed myself out of the car; Land and Jon scrambled after me. We walked up the steps, the boys scampering ahead.
The door swung open; my mother appeared. Before I could blurt out my apologies for leaving her all these years, and for bringing photographers back to her home, she had me in her arms. “Welcome home, my daughter,” she sang out. “Anne, Jon! And you must be Land!” She released me, reaching for the boys. “I haven’t seen you since you were a baby, when I visited you in England. Do you remember me?”
“No.”
My mother laughed. She threw back her head and laughed. This was no sad old lady, as I’d imagined her; no Miss Havisham surrounded only by memories, grieving her life away. No. My mother looked ten years younger than she had when I’d last seen her; she was trim, stylish in her own club lady way, although her hair was still corralled in that severe Edwardian manner. But she was electric with energy and drive; it was I who felt old and feeble, exhausted by travel, overwhelmed by being back in my native land.
“You look terrible, dear,” she confirmed my assessment, shaking her head at me. “You’ll have your old suite again, of course, and the boys can go up in the nursery. There’s room for your nurse—where is she?”
“She had to come on the next boat; there were things she had to arrange before sailing.”
“Of course, of course. I can’t imagine the chaos over there! Charles is here already; he drove straight through from Washington overnight. He’s upstairs, sound asleep.”
“He is?” I was stunned; I hadn’t expected to see him so soon, and, ridiculously, I longed to powder my nose and put on a fresh frock before I saw him.
Mother must have sensed my bridal jitteriness, because she suggested I have a glass of brandy first. So I followed as she marched down the hall into what used to be Daddy’s office, but which was now redecorated. No—reborn.
Flowers bloomed in vases; the stuffy leather furniture was replaced with comfortable chintz. There was a Picasso on the wall, which worked surprisingly well with the cabbage roses of the fabric. Where Daddy’s enormous banker’s desk had been was now a delicate French writing desk. It was piled with papers.
“I thought you’d be surprised.” Mother’s eyes twinkled.
“Surprised? I’m lost. Is this the house of the very proper ambassador’s wife?”
“No, it’s the house of the very busy former suffragette.” She laughed, and the boys laughed with her. She bent down to hug each of them. “Oh, I won’t be able to get enough of these two! Do you want some cookies? Milk?” She looked at me, and I nodded.
“Get those children some cookies, would you, dear?” She turned to a young woman who appeared out of nowhere. The girl nodded and ushered the boys toward the kitchen.
“Who was that?” I couldn’t seem to move my legs, couldn’t sit down—even after my mother gestured to a comfortable armchair.
“Oh, that’s Marie. She’s part of my staff.”
“You have a staff?”
“Of course! One needs a staff when one is about to become acting president of Smith College.”
“What? Mother—when? How?”
“Naturally, the world situation is making the search for a new president more difficult, so I was asked to step in during the interim. The college has so many ties, you know, overseas. We cannot turn our backs on our friends, and I’m going to see to it that we don’t.”
“Mother, it’s just me you’re talking to—you don’t have to make a political statement!”
“Oh, goodness! Did I? I’m sorry, I suppose I’m practicing!” My mother laughed, and I laughed along with her. I was so happy for her, so happy she was busy and engaged and not grieving, as I had imagined. I shouldn’t have, I realized; when had she ever stopped long enough to give in to an emotion?
But she seemed so different now. She reminded me of Charles, that was it; they both had that purposeful gleam in their eye, a secret, a goal, that only they could recognize.
“What do you think of Aubrey and Con?” I asked, abruptly changing the subject to one that had been festering in my mind for a while now. Elisabeth’s widower had married her youngest sister in 1937.
“I think it’s wonderful. Aubrey was lost, the poor man. Widowers always have to remarry, have you ever noticed that? Women are fine on their own, but men… anyway, Con will keep him on his toes. She needed a project like him.”
“And what about love?”
“Oh, they love each other, Anne! I’m not sure that’s the most important thing in their case, however. Not like with you and Charles. If you didn’t have love, I’d worry more about the two of you. But Con and Aubrey, they’ll be fine.”
“Thank you. I think.” I sipped my brandy and, despite my resentment at her breezy attitude, knew she was right. “But Elisabeth—isn’t it disloyal, somehow?”
“Elisabeth is gone, dear. The living have to live.”
“But it’s as if she never married him at all—it feels as if they’re erasing her, somehow.”
“I don’t think that’s true, dear. Not for them.”
I shook my head. Mother reminded me of Charles in other ways as well. I was the caretaker, I realized; the caretaker of the dead and of their memory. If no one wanted to think about Elisabeth, then I would. If Charles didn’t want to remember Charlie, then I would have to remember him for the both of us. I admired both my mother and my husband for their energy, their dogged focus on the future.
I also, for the first time, pitied them. For despite the pain of loss, as time went on, the memory of those I’d loved warmed my heart more than grieved it.
“I’m glad you’re so happy for them,” I told my mother. “And I’m very glad about your appointment, Madame President! Now, where are you keeping my husband?”
“Upstairs. Dinner is at eight, as usual. I’ll have something sent up for the boys; I’ve already prepared the staff. Now I must run off to a meeting.”
“Of course you must.” I embraced her, delighted and proud, even as I felt myself unable to keep up with her any more than I was able to keep up with Charles. The world was falling to pieces around us, and all I wanted was to find somewhere to hide myself and my children from the wreckage. While my husband and my mother came running out, arms open wide, to make something good from it. Something worthwhile.
The only problem was, I knew that their definitions of “worthwhile” were dramatically different.
“I MIGHT HAVE KNOWN,” Charles said that evening. “Your mother. What did she say, about not turning her back on those overseas again?”
“Just that. Nothing more.”
“Nothing more? She said it to spite me. She’s never forgiven me for taking you away to Europe.”
“That isn’t Mother,” I said crossly as we dressed for dinner, turning away from each other, oddly shy—or uncomfortable, I wasn’t quite sure which—in our state of undress, after the weeks apart. He was in his boxers, pulling up his dress socks over his lean shins and snapping them into their garters. I was in an ugly, utilitarian slip, and I felt that way—ugly, utilitarian. After three pregnancies, my figure was losing its elasticity. I had a definite pooch to my stomach now, and my breasts sagged, even as we both hoped for more children.
For some reason, our reunion had not gone well. Almost from the first hello, we had snapped at each other. “Your little speech to the reporters was unnecessary, Anne,” he had said after he pecked me on the cheek.
“You might have remembered to send two cars to pick us up, as we had to leave the trunks behind,” I had retorted.
I wondered if that was how it was going to be, now that we were back in the United States, back among so many others who had claims on us; so many issues suddenly crying out for attention. One thing I had learned—among all the lessons he had set out to teach me, and others he had imparted unconsciously—was that we were at our very best, as a couple, when alone.
“Mother’s not petty like that.” I chose an outdated brown evening dress I had left behind, years ago, as my trunks had not yet been unpacked; even before I put it on, I felt dowdy. I turned around so Charles could zip me up. “She’s like you, actually. You both believe you’re absolutely right about everything.” I was surprised by the bitterness in my voice. Still, I made no effort to hide it. “You forget how active she was in the fight for women’s votes, back when I was a child. And she and Daddy—well, they were both Wilsonians, and passionate about the League of Nations. She hasn’t changed.”
“She knows perfectly well how I feel about the situation.”
“She’s not married to you, you know. She’s her own person.”
“What does that mean?” He turned to me, eyes narrowing.
“Nothing.” I turned away and started rummaging in my travel case for some earrings.
“Well, she’s agitating for war, don’t think otherwise. And now she’ll have the whole of Smith College behind her. She’s beating the drums, just like Roosevelt.” He sneered that last word; Roosevelt had become a bitter taste in his mouth.
“Well, you yourself said it’s inevitable.”
“It’s inevitable in Europe. But not here—unless people like your mother scare the American public into thinking that it is.”
“She’s not scaring anyone—for heaven’s sake, she’s done nothing yet! She doesn’t even take office until next term.”
“She’ll probably join one of those Jewish refugee societies next,” Charles said, as he tied his tie with vengeance.
“So what if she does? You yourself said how awful it was that England was having to deal with so many refugees.”
“That doesn’t mean I think they should wash up here instead. You think we should allow more Jews into America? To influence the press? The government? The movie industry—for God’s sake, they’re all Jews there, every one of them, running all those studios, brainwashing the American public. Any minute now they’ll start making movies portraying Hitler as a clown, or worse. Yet not one of them has been to Germany recently. Not one of them has seen anything firsthand, like we have. Do you honestly think we should send our young men—our sons—to fight because of them?”
“I don’t—no, I guess, not when you put it that way—I don’t think that; I don’t think we should send young men off to fight. But, Charles, Mother believes in what she’s doing. Just as you do. Don’t you see how I admire you both for being so passionate?”
“What do you believe?” Again, his eyes narrowed challengingly. For the first time, my husband asked me this question. Until now, he had always assumed I believed what he did. And I had assumed that, too. Wasn’t that one of the reasons I had married him—because I wanted to be just like him? Heroic and grand and good?
But now I wasn’t sure what “good” meant. Too many participants in this increasingly terrible situation claimed to have goodness on their side.
Anne Morrow—the Smith College graduate daughter of Ambassador and Mrs. Morrow, both advocates for the League of Nations—would answer, “I’m with Mother. The Jews need to be saved. Hitler is a dangerous man.” But I would say these things because they told me to, or hoped, by their example, that I would come to believe them on my own.
But I was no longer Anne Morrow; I was Anne Morrow Lindbergh, the wife of a legend who was an admirer of Hitler—and an increasingly vocal proponent for keeping America out of any European war.
Fleetingly, guiltily, I envied my mother; old enough to have outlived her parents, a widow without a husband to think of. What if, like her, I had the time to think for myself? To have the honest courage of my own convictions, and not the false courage of borrowed ones? My marriage would be different, that much I knew.
But would it be better?
I shook my head, tempted by the notion but not blinded by it. My duty now was to my sons, whose needs I had neglected for their father’s for far too long. I had to settle Jon into school, find a doctor because Land was prone to ear infections, and move us all into a house. I had also just come out of years of purgatory, purgatory I had wandered with only my husband for companionship and security. Once, I had thought I could leave him, but it had only been Jon and me. Now, with two sons and hopefully another child on the way (for I suspected I might be pregnant, although it was too soon to be certain), I couldn’t risk pushing Charles away from me. “I’m on your side, of course. I mean—I’m on our side,” I continued, sitting on the edge of the bed so that I could slip my feet into a pair of evening shoes. “It’s our side. I’m with you. Of course, I don’t think we should go to war. Not over Germany, anyway; not over the Jewish influence.”
“Good girl.” Charles smiled, that rare, prized personal smile, relaxed, so that all his teeth showed. And I smiled back, waiting for that familiar, belonging glow to fill me up, make me better, stronger; as good as him.
But I waited in vain. For the only thing that filled me up was a shameful weariness, an enveloping languor that made me wonder how on earth I was going to make it through dinner, let alone the next few weeks, seated between my husband and my mother. Forced to decide, once and for all, who I was now: the ambassador’s daughter?
Or the aviator’s wife?