I remembered my letter; my reward. A sly, womanly smile nudged my lips—I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror, and I was startled by how ripe I looked, how my eyes sparkled, my skin seemed to glow. I ran back to the entry table, but the letter was not there—although all my other mail was, bills, a few letters from friends and readers—all addressed to “Mrs. Charles Lindbergh.”
“Now, where on earth?” I muttered, turning around to go back to my bedroom.
But suddenly Anne was standing before me, her face red—a piece of paper in her hand.
“What are you—oh.” It was the letter. I stared thoughtfully at her for a long moment. Then I said, “I don’t believe that was meant for you.”
“I—it said ‘Anne Lindbergh,’ and I thought it meant me, so—”
“So you opened it.” I continued to gaze at my daughter, whose face reflected an avalanche of emotions, one tumbling right after the other—guilt, horror, anger, disbelief.
While I was icy calm. Not one bit ashamed—and this did not altogether surprise me. Once, long ago—before I became the aviator’s wife—hadn’t I wanted to be an old lady with a mysterious smile, remembering the scandalous affairs of her youth? It was that girl, that passionate young girl, to whom the letter was addressed.
And it was that girl who stood erect, chin lifted, eyes gleaming with pride and triumph, when confronted with indisputable evidence of her passion. Evidence in the hands of her own daughter.
“Mother, are you—are you in love? With Dr. Atchley?”
“Yes,” I said, then held my hand out. Ansy, her own hand trembling, placed the letter in my palm. “Now, have you tried your clothes on? Are you sure everything fits?”
“Yes,” she whispered. Then we retreated to our separate rooms. And, both excellent pupils of the best teacher in the world—
We never discussed the matter again.
AFTER THAT DINNER WITH CHARLES, I made my peace with the house in Darien. Once, I thought I had to leave him in order to be free; now, I realized, I only had to stay. So I started to invite friends out to spend the weekends. Male friends, mostly. I didn’t think it was a conscious decision, not at first, but soon, to my delight, I had acquired a coterie of admirers; men whom I had known, always, but never seen, dazzled as I was by the shining light of my hero husband.
Now, breaking free from his spell—the spell I had helped him cast—I looked beyond and saw these men, and summoned them. Enthroned upon my cushioned chair like the Queen of Sheba, no longer in the shadow of anyone—not my sister, not my husband—I thrilled to the sensation of being beguiled, instead of beguiling. I nodded thoughtfully, I smiled mysteriously. My laughter purred, my voice acquired a honeyed huskiness.
For the first time in my life, I purchased silk lingerie, luxuriating in the rich sensation against my skin as I reclined, a cocktail in my hand; giddily imagining the astonishment, the tortured gasps, if I allowed it to be discovered.
Corliss Lamont, who had carried a torch for me since we were children, came when I beckoned, eagerly reciting eccentric poetry while I did my best to keep a straight face. But I flushed when he gazed at me in his eager, puppy-dog-like way. So I asked him to recite more.
Alan Valentine, an academic, former president of the University of Rochester; he found his way to my terrace, where we would sip drinks and discuss politics and literature and, oh, just about anything we wanted; there were no subjects off-limits and my skin tingled when he grasped my hand to make a point, or brushed the hair out of my eyes if I argued too excitedly.
And Dana Atchley. He, too, came to my terrace—come into my parlor, said the spider! I was the spider, casting an enchanting web about these men who seemed to think I needed rescuing. Maybe they were right. Although I never allowed more than worshipful gazes, passionate letters. I enjoyed playing, teasing—imagining, just as I used to when I was a young girl. I also enjoyed praying at night for forgiveness, secure in the knowledge I’d not really done anything in need of forgiving.
Until Dana. My dearest Dana.
When did it start with Dana? Emotionally, with my operation, I suppose; the one to remove my gallbladder. Right before I went under the anesthesia, alone, vulnerable, sure that I was about to die, I reached for his hand because my husband wasn’t there. “Call me Anne,” I whispered, convinced that he was the last person who would ever say my name. “Please?”
“All right. Anne.” And he grabbed my hand, instinctively knowing I needed to feel someone warm and alive and reassuring. His eyes—behind his thick glasses—were the kindest I had ever seen, the most sympathetic. They did not judge; they did not challenge. They simply saw. And found beauty in everything; even a frightened housewife with unkempt hair and a sheet for a dress.
Up until that point, we had been “Mrs. Lindbergh” and “Dr. Atchley.” Afterward, we were “Anne” and “Dana.” After my regular appointments, we found ourselves lingering for hours in his office at Columbia-Presbyterian, talking about everything. Once, I even scolded him for spending time with me instead of his wife. “Don’t do this,” I cautioned him, after we’d exclaimed at the lateness of the hour. “Go home to her. Don’t make your work your life.”
“I’d hardly call this work, Anne.” He smiled. But then he removed his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “It’s hell at home. You don’t know.”
Oh, we discussed—everything! Everything our hearts were weary of containing. My writing, his patients, the world, our children. It didn’t seem wrong to discuss our children with each other, at least not then. We were friends, we assured each other solemnly. Friends who corresponded almost on a daily basis, sending letters back and forth. His “blue pills,” he called mine, for I wrote on a light blue stationery.
As friends do, we even sometimes vacationed together with our spouses; Charles liked and admired him, although neither of us really cared much for his wife. The children all knew and loved him as the family doctor. And we might have gone on that way; he might have remained one of my small coterie of chaste admirers, those men who knew that they could never really compete with Lucky Lindy, but enjoyed sipping cocktails on his terrace with his neglected, charming wife and wondering, “what if?”
But there came a time when I wanted more; my skin longed to be caressed by something warmer than silk lingerie. I wanted, I desired, I sought—so I took. I took more than I thought I was allowed, for the first time in my life; no longer the disciplined little girl my father admired, or the obedient wife my husband trained. I stepped through the looking glass to find the passionate woman who had been waiting for me, all these years.
Buoyed by the slightly tipsy flattery of a few middle-aged men as unhappy in their marriages as I was in mine, one day I took the train into New York and checked in at the Plaza. I came to the city frequently, of course, but it seemed that always I was either accompanied by a child or lunching with Con at the Cosmopolitan Club.
For the first time, however, I truly felt on my own, an adult, with adult decisions to make. My heart beat fast, as if on a grand adventure. Silly, I scolded myself; you’ve visited here a thousand times before. But not since I was a girl, coming in on the weekend from Smith with my college friends, had I felt so defiantly independent. I was going to rent an apartment, and even though Charles knew and approved, still I felt reckless and daring. And I had the entire city from which to choose! I threw myself into apartment hunting as I’d never thrown myself into house hunting before, when Charles had made most of the decisions.
This time, I was in charge, and I loved it. I loved every minute of it—the running up and down stairs with the tireless apartment agent, the nights spent going over brochures, the excitement of putting a bid in and having it accepted; a two-bedroom apartment with a dollhouse kitchen on the Upper West Side, just a block away from Central Park. Then the decorating—the picking out of curtains, wallpaper, furniture—this last, in Charles’s opinion, a luxury since we had more than enough surplus furniture in Connecticut. Why didn’t I jus
t take some?
Why, indeed? Because I wanted a fresh start. I didn’t tell him that, however; I explained that with the cost of shipping it wouldn’t be that much less than buying new. Then I assured him I was keeping track of every expense in my accounting book. That seemed to mollify him.
Soon all was ready, and the first person I wanted to show it to was Charles. I felt, surprisingly, like a bride waiting to be carried over the threshold. It astonished me that still, after all that had happened, he was the first person I wanted to share everything with; good and bad. Somehow, a thing never seemed real until he saw it or experienced it, too—and then told me how to think about it.
But he didn’t come when I invited him. He had some Pan Am conference in Germany. He would visit soon, though, he promised. Meanwhile, would I remember to clean out the utility room, as the last time he was home he had noticed some old boxes of soap on a shelf in the corner?
No. No, I would not.
So I spent the first evening in my apartment alone, curled up on my new sofa nursing a solitary glass of wine as I gazed out over the city: the lights, the traffic, the bustle, the verve. All day I had felt queasy, a bit drowsy and thick as a terrible feeling crept over me; the feeling that I’d made a foolish, irreversible mistake. What right did I have, to strike out on my own at my age? What was I thinking? To live for oneself is a terrifying prospect; there is comfort in martyrdom, and for years, my hair shirt had been more comfortable than the silk brassiere I was currently wearing.
Then I heard voices outside my door, disappearing down the hall toward the elevator; the voices of people going out for the evening. All of a sudden I couldn’t—wouldn’t—sit there feeling sorry for myself. So I picked up the phone and—knowing full well what would transpire next—I called Dana.
He came over, and we sat in the growing shadows of evening, neither one of us turning on the lamp; content to have the lights from the city illuminate us as we bent our heads together, for the first time finding ourselves without words, only glances and touches.
Did I feel guilt? Shame? Regret?
Of course I did. I was married; he was married. We both had children that we vowed never to hurt; I couldn’t even bear to have pictures of mine in my apartment, after that night.
Oh, but I was ready. After a lifetime of being with a man who did not want to hear me speak unless I was mimicking his own views or assuring him he was right, I was ready. More than that, I was desperate to share the parts of me that Charles never wanted to know were there. The weak parts: that was how he viewed them and it took me a very long time not to view sympathy, grief, doubt, the ability to be moved to tears by love and happiness and sadness and music—as weak, despicable traits.
Dana taught me that the ability to grieve deeply also meant that a person had the capacity to love deeply, laugh deeply, live deeply—and that this was a capacity to be cherished. And that was, finally, why I loved him—because he never complained when I had a headache or changed my mind about something. He never shut down when I revealed my fears, my worries. He never tried to make me feel less, weaker, than he was—because he shared his own emotions with me, as well.
This honesty—this total freedom; it was as if I’d been living in one of those oxygen-deprived chambers that Charles used to test in the war. Until finally, I passed out. And when I awoke, it was to flowers and music and warm brown eyes—and all the air, all the space in the world; not just what was visible in the sky. I believed then that I could never get enough of it.
We were discreet, and it helped that I’d made few adult friends since my marriage. It also helped that the children were far too absorbed in their own lives to imagine I had one of my own.
Dana and I began to gather around us a small circle of his trusted friends, those who understood the nature of his marriage. Although most were astonished to discover the nature of mine. And I found, to my surprise and delight, that I was something of a literary star; I became a sought-after guest now suddenly available for dinner parties.
Of course, I knew my publisher was pleased with Gift from the Sea. It was continuing to go into extra printings, in both hardcover and paperback. I received lovely, warm letters from women all over the world. They wrote thanking me, asking me how I knew what they had been going through, assuring me that I was a friend for life.
Tucked away in Connecticut, I had not had a chance to taste the literary life—the life I had imagined back at Smith, when I had fancied myself, perhaps, a second Edna St. Vincent Millay or a member of the Algonquin Round Table. So it was with some disbelief, but mainly pure joy, that I found myself invited to speak at banquets and fund-raisers, or to give readings at libraries or wonderfully dusty little bookshops in the Village. I was asked not because I was Mrs. Charles Lindbergh, the aviator’s wife; I was asked because I was Anne Morrow Lindbergh, the latest literary sensation.
I rejoiced in every minute of it. And only occasionally did I wish that Charles was there to witness my triumph.
Dana rarely attended these events as my escort—I had other married male friends who were happy to step in—but he was always there as part of our circle of friends, and when the evening was over we’d all go back to my apartment, where Dana would sit in a special chair near the fireplace, and I would sit in my special chair opposite, and we all would talk and laugh and play games through the night. My intellect, my wit—I’d forgotten I’d even possessed them, and they were dull and neglected, to be sure. But in the company of others who prized thought over action, laughter over brooding, they blossomed and sharpened. My tongue fairly tripped with sparkling phrases, insightful comments. Once, I looked in a mirror in the middle of a game of charades; I was smiling that carefree grin, the one that used to look so unfamiliar in photographs. I laughed; finally, the face I presented to the public was the one I wore in private. Charles had done the same thing, only he had become a stone monument over time. I had become a real person. A happy person.
Sometimes, Dana would be the last of our friends to depart, and it would not be until after breakfast the next morning.
“You have no idea how beautiful you are,” he breathed into my ear the first time we made love. I was terrified and transported, both; to be touched by another man’s hands, not Charles’s? To be looked at, examined, all my flaws—my too-round breasts, heavy with age; my pouchy stomach, after six pregnancies; my thighs, though lean, now dimpled with cellulite. And my scars—but of course he knew those better than anyone, more intimately than Charles, even, and it was that moment, when he ran his forefinger gently, teasingly, along the scar from my gallbladder operation, so close, so dangerously close, to the most tender part of me—
That was the moment I was transported. I stopped comparing him to Charles physically, because he could never compare, and it wasn’t fair to him, or to me. I simply gave myself up to his loving, insistent examination of my entire body, and, frighteningly voracious, found myself unable to stop examining his. And it was the differences that excited me; different hands probing, different lips bruising, different sounds, different smells, different methods—
My body had been yearning for a change as desperately as my heart had. For I responded with a passion that first surprised, then enflamed Dana; that night, two middle-aged people who had each, in their own way, thought themselves beyond the pleasures of the flesh discovered that they weren’t, after all.
That night, I slept in his arms. I had never slept in a man’s arms before. This was not something that my husband ever allowed me, not even early in our marriage.
I discovered that there is no pleasure sweeter than timing your breath to match another’s until you both rose and fell at the same pace, drifting, drifting along together—finding peace, everlasting.
The only sadness I allowed myself was the realization that it had taken me over fifty years to find this out. And when at last I did, it wasn’t with my husband.
CHARLES NEVER SUSPECTED—at least, that was what I told myself. How could he? He con
tinued to drop in and out of my life like an annoying mosquito, on his way to Washington or from the West Coast or across to Europe—Pan Am business kept him going to Germany quite a lot—or, more puzzling, to places like the Philippines, the Galapagos Islands, the Australian outback. Occasionally he summoned me, declaring it was time we had a vacation together, and I went, keeping up, grinning for the occasional photographers—fewer and fewer as the years went on; acting the role of the aviator’s wife once more. Counting the days until I could shrug it off and return to what was now my real life with Dana.
Occasionally the children accompanied us on one of Charles’s enforced family outings. These always happened to be in some Godforsaken jungle or rain forest where we had to sleep in tents and use outhouses, and follow him on endless hikes through humidity and bugs as big as pigeons.
“It’s good to explore worlds different from our own,” he declared, even as sweat soaked through his khaki shirt and he slapped at mosquitoes. “Isn’t this wonderful, for us all to get away like this? This is how people should live!”
One by one, the children married—I almost thought out of desperation, so they would have a good reason to excuse themselves from these miserable “vacations.” Charles and I showed up at weddings, playing the role of proud parents; he was more and more uncomfortable with any kind of spotlight, barely concealing a scowl when people fawned over him, even if those people were his new in-laws. I found myself soothing ruffled feathers as expertly as my mother once had.
Civilization, Charles said, with a disgusted grunt, wanting no more of it. Once he had pored over scientific manuals; now he read Thoreau. If he hadn’t been Charles Lindbergh, most would have called him an eccentric old coot.
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