I can still hear my mother saying “I would never read anything written by that woman!”

As a child I was a precocious reader, and people were talking about a book called Gift from the Sea. So many praised its beauty and its poetic thoughts about love and life. So I asked my mother, who liked to spend evenings in her favorite chair with a book, whether she had read it.

That’s when my mild-mannered mother delivered her blistering comment. The disgust on her face discouraged me from asking her what was wrong with the book or the author, and even if I had, I’m sure she would have told me I was too young to understand.

That was true. At some point, of course, I went to the Carnegie Library and paged through the book, not daring to bring it home. It seemed to me like a book of devotionals of the sort Mother read regularly in the Methodist booklet The Upper Room. I didn’t see anything objectionable.

The mystery persisted. In time I found that the author was the wife of Charles Lindbergh, the famous aviator. He had once been my mother’s hero, and Amelia Earhart her heroine. Maybe she thought they should have gotten together, and that woman interfered.
Very far off base.

My mother had named me “Ann” on my birth certificate. When I asked if I’d been named after anyone, she said family names didn’t work for one reason or another, and she’d always liked the name of one of her college friends.

I later found out the friend spelled her name “Anne.” I began to suspect that Mother didn’t want anyone thinking she’d named me after "that woman" and lopped off the “e.” I felt cheated, because there was now a princess who spelled it “Anne.” I added the “e” in high school and never looked back.

In time, I read A. Scott Berg’s excellent biography about LindberghLindbergh, and found that the hero had become tarnished because of his opposition to entering World War II and admiration for Hitler’s Germany. Aha, I thought, that’s the reason. She was "that woman" because they were appeasers. My father had served in the war and some of their friends were still in the military. Still, it didn’t quite explain the vehemence.


Finally, in The Aviator's Wife, I read excerpts of the essay Anne Morrow Lindbergh had written supporting her husband’s position. I was appalled. I was sickened. Like my mother must have been when she’d read those words in 1941. I finally understood, after all these years, her reaction to my innocent question. Even Smith College didn’t want Anne Lindbergh to tell people she was an alumna after she’d written that pamphlet.

The understanding was made doubly difficult because in reading The Aviator’s Wife, I’d been walking in the shoes of a woman who didn’t quite understand what she was getting into when she married Lindbergh, didn’t understand the choices she’d be called on to make. Didn’t know she’d be required to repudiate values she’d been taught by her father. Didn’t know how her heart would be broken.

I hope what I read was close to the truth.