FATHER AT HOME

In 1946, Charles and Anne purchased a permanent home—their first since the Hopewell house. Located on Long Island Sound in Scott’s Cove near Darien, Connecticut, it had nine bedrooms, six and a half bathrooms, and plenty of space for the family, which had grown in October 1945 with the birth of their second daughter, Reeve.

Anne envisioned them a settled family at last. No more moving every few years, no more glaring national spotlight. She and Charles would be together, peaceful, walking through the birch grove or open fields. He’d be home for good.

But Charles was incapable of staying still for long. It was as if he’d bought the house as a safe place to stow his family while he left and returned…left and returned…left and returned. Sometimes he didn’t even come home for Christmas.

He packed his postwar schedule. He took a consultant job with Pan American World Airways and remained on constant call for various surveys and reports to the army. He became a special adviser to the chief of staff of the United States Army Air Forces, renamed from the earlier Army Air Corps and now its own separate branch of the military. He visited and reported on air bases in Alaska, Japan, Europe, and the Philippines. He flew the newest American jet fighters and accompanied bomber missions on polar flights. And he continued to adapt new equipment for commercial airlines.

His family never knew when or where he was going. They didn’t know how long he’d be away, or even when he’d be returning. For the first hours after Father’s leaving—they never called him Dad—there was a “deflated feeling in [the] house, as if the air had been let out of all its tires,” recalled Reeve.

Soon, though, there came “a sense of release, an exhalation of long-held family breath.” The house relaxed and grew noisy again. Ansy would play her records loudly. Scott and Land ran in and out, tracking mud and sneaking snakes and turtles into the house. Jon, now a teenager, spent hours out on his dinghy, setting up lines of lobster pots, while Reeve squished barefoot through the mud around the cove. At dinnertime, the children talked over each other, making jokes, sharing their day, teasing, laughing. Anne sat, listening for the most part. Charles’s absences left her depressed, and little cheered her. Still, the children’s antics amused her. She was not a stern disciplinarian. Certainly, the children followed a routine—they went to school and basketball practice or music lessons. They did their homework, brushed their teeth, had regular bedtimes. But Anne didn’t lecture them if they left the rake out under the tree overnight or used a bath towel instead of a beach towel to go swimming.

Then Charles would walk through the front door, and everything “snapped…[to] military alertness.” His presence sent waves of tension through the house. The boys would nervously shake his hand. The girls would hug him—but not too exuberantly. If they showed too much affection—giggling, hopping, flinging their arms around his neck—he would stop them with a stern “Now, now! Watch out for my hat!” He’d look around to make sure his house was shipshape.

He made sure his children were, too. That was why he made a checklist for each of them. Not long after his arrival, he would call them one by one into his study. Sometimes he simply wanted to chastise them for eating cookies or reading comic books, neither of which he allowed in the house. Other times, he felt they needed a lecture. His favorite topics were “Freedom and Responsibility,” “Instinct and Intellect,” and, of course, “Downfall of Civilization.” When they were older he held forth about the importance of choosing a genetically appropriate mate. He forbade gum chewing, preached including fiber in their diets, and frequently said, “Don’t…don’t do this and don’t do that.”

He could be warm and playful. When he took his children for family hikes, the hidden “elves” never forgot to leave candies along the trail. He taught his children to climb trees, shoot, hike, and sail. When they were old enough, he taught them to drive. And on Saturdays, if he was home, he took them flying. In a single-engine, two-seat plane Charles rented (he no longer owned his own), he taught them to take off and land, dip and bank. But only Jon shared his enthusiasm. The others found flying loud, stomach-churning, and monotonous. Charles, however, insisted they take part in these family activities, even if they didn’t want to. If his children grumbled, he pulled rank. “This is not a democracy,” he liked to say. “It’s a nonbenevolent dictatorship.”

Dinner was a serious occasion. A typical topic was nuclear war and what to do in case of one. Don’t go to New York City, he warned. A big city would be a target. And don’t drink the water, because the Soviets were sure to poison it.

Usually the children replied dutifully, “Yes, Father.”

One day, while the rest of the family was having lunch, Reeve and Ansy pulled open the heavy front door to find a thin young man standing on the threshold. Reeve didn’t hear what he said, but Ansy did. Crying out with fear, she slammed the door in the stranger’s face.

Charles came on the run, his face tight and grim. What was the matter?

Ansy repeated what the stranger had said, and Charles’s expression softened. Telling his daughters to stay put, he opened the door and stepped outside. To Reeve’s amazement, he put his hand on the stranger’s shoulder and, speaking gently, walked with him down the path. On Charles’s face, Reeve recalled, was the same look of “open, loose-featured patience with which he approached nervous dogs or very small children. He didn’t have the cold eyes and stern expression of the family disciplinarian….Instead he looked the way I saw him look again once, years later…gazing quietly down upon a stray bird that had just flown at full speed into our kitchen windowpane, and lay stunned and twitching in my father’s hand.”

The young man, Reeve later learned, believed he was the Lindberghs’ kidnapped baby. Through conspiracies and cover-ups, he’d been switched with another child and raised in the wrong family. But he was back now, he claimed. Charles’s long-lost Buster.

His story came as a shock to the Lindbergh children. Not once had they heard their parents discuss the kidnapping. And while Anne sometimes talked about their first, lost child, Charles never did. Of course, the stranger’s story wasn’t true. In fact, over the years, more than a dozen such “pretenders,” as Ansy came to call them, would make similar claims. Their stories must have caused Charles immeasurable pain. And yet he met their delusions with compassion, speaking with them logically, reasonably, and at length. He did so, believed Reeve, for his firstborn, his namesake. His little boy had not been forgotten. He was tenderly tucked away in his father’s memories.

Inevitably, after being home for three or four days, Charles would pull out the calfskin briefcase he used as luggage. Then, he’d drop a comb, razor, and toothbrush into one of his socks, knot it, and put it in the pocket of his gray pinstripe suit. Into the briefcase went the other sock, a clean shirt, and underwear—he always traveled light. Another round of handshakes. Another round of hugs. Then he walked out the door again, “and left us [children] in peace,” recalled Reeve.

And it would begin again, the waiting. Where was Father going? How long would he be gone? When would he be back?

ANNE ALONE

Charles had abandoned his faithful crewmate, leaving Anne feeling depressed and overwhelmed. Sometimes, she cried the whole day.

In hopes of finding solace, she retreated to her writing trailer behind the house. He’d installed it there as both encouragement and proof of his belief in her writing. But sometimes when she sat in it, her books and papers and pencils spread across the table, she felt guilty. She didn’t feel like she was writing anything worthy. Since the move to Connecticut, she’d given up on two novels and stopped creating poetry.

It wasn’t just because the children took up so much time and energy. She felt frozen with panic every time she tried to write something other than a diary entry or letter. She couldn’t tell Charles this, though. She knew he’d just scold her for giving in to self-pity and not buckling down. “Will I ever feel creative again? With hands full?” she asked herself.

THE SPIRIT OF ST. LOUIS

Sometime in 1950, Charles handed Anne a manuscript. His manuscript. He’d been working on it everywhere—in planes, on ships, in taxis, in Papua New Guinea, in the Florida Keys, in Munich and Darien. For fourteen years it had been in the making—a memoir covering the first twenty-five years of his life, up to the end of his 1927 trans-Atlantic flight. It was ground he’d covered before in We, but he’d never been proud of that book. Since its publication, he’d longed to create a better, more accurate version. And so he’d written and rewritten his story—six drafts—without sharing a word of it with anyone. Until now. He looked forward to Anne’s comments and suggestions.

Anger shot through her. All this time, as she’d been coping with the children with little time for “solitude [and] creative thinking,” he had been writing. “He was being creative in these years; I was not—at least not in a way I could show.” She felt he’d invaded her field, “the only field I had of my own.” And after reading the manuscript, she recognized, with a flash of jealousy, that his book was brilliant.

Could he have written it without her? She believed not. “I know that he would not have told it—could not have told it that way if he had not married me. Twenty years of living with me have gone into that book—before the man who said to me when we were engaged: ‘You like to write books?’ (astonished and curiously condescending) ‘I like to live them’—before that man absorbed my values about the written word.”

But she pushed aside her feelings. “Keep your style, stay in character,” she advised him. “ ‘Your own style’ is the style in which you speak. Imagine you are speaking to me, not writing at all.”

When finished, the book—told almost entirely in the present tense—gave a sense of suspense to the flight that compelled readers—lots of readers.

Published in 1953, The Spirit of St. Louis became a huge success, selling hundreds of thousands of copies in its first year. Critics roundly praised it as a masterpiece and an American classic. “We have known Lindbergh the aviator, Lindbergh the scientist, and Lindbergh the man of action, but we had not known Lindbergh the artful rememberer of things past,” raved the New Yorker. To both Charles’s and Anne’s amazement, the following spring the book won the Pulitzer Prize for biography.

“Boom days are here again,” wrote Anne with a touch of sarcasm. “The Great Man—the Great Epic—the Great Author etc., etc. I am living in the aura of 1929 again. Only I am different….”

GIFT FROM THE SEA

By 1954, Anne was writing again. Slowly, she’d come to grips with the marriage Charles had dictated—the not knowing, not talking, not sharing—and was rebuilding herself.

She did it on the page. “I cannot see what I have gone through until I write it down,” she said. “I am blind without a pencil.” Examining the stages of her life—wife, pilot, mother, victim of tragedy—she compared them with the different types of seashells she found on Captiva Island, Florida (a place she’d begun visiting in the 1940s). The Moon Shell. The Double Sunrise. The Argonauta.

It felt like the most courageous thing she’d ever done, this honest reflection of her life and marriage. And when she finished, she discovered she’d found her voice not only as an author, but also as a wife. After almost twenty-six years of marriage, she could separate herself from Charles. She no longer saw herself through his eyes, but through her own. Of course, that did not mean she’d stopped loving him, but she now understood she didn’t have to give her life over to him.

Gift from the Sea is what she called her reflections. The book, published in 1955, touched a deep chord in women. Anne wrote honestly about the changing conditions of marriage and the “growing pains” of middle age. She sympathized with a woman’s instinct to “spill herself away…the eternal nourisher of children, of men, of society.” And she advised solitude as a way for women to rediscover their “inner spring.” She encouraged them to find something “of one’s own.”

Her book became one of the greatest publication successes of the twentieth century, selling six hundred thousand copies in hardback that same year and remaining on the New York Times bestseller list for eighty weeks.