Anne Morrow Lindbergh: Her Life by Susan Hertog Page B

years since my first visit to Anne at her chalet. Herfrail, 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