Anne Morrow Lindbergh: Her Life by Susan Hertog Page A

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 andone’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.

34
Coda
     

     

     
Anne, 1979
.
     
(Minnesota Historical Society)
     

B ARE T REE 1
     
    Already I have shed the leaves of youth
,
Stripped by the wind of time down to the truth

Of winter branches. Linear and alone

I stand, a lens for lives beyond my own
,
A frame through which another’s fire may glow
,
A harp on which another’s passion, blow…

Blow through me, Life, pared down at last to bone
,
So fragile and so fearless have I grown!
    — ANNE MORROW LINDBERGH
     

A UGUST 1989, S WITZERLAND
     
    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