Free Anne Morrow Lindbergh: Her Life by Susan Hertog

metaphysician with a deep interest in the spiritual aspects of life. Before he left the plane, Charles asked for her address and handed her a copy of “Civilization andProgress.” There was a book he wanted to send her, he said: Lao-tzu’s
The Way of Life
. It was a new translation of the book Anne had given him twenty years earlier.
    For six years, Charles gave Adrienne many books—poetry, philosophy, even the works of Saint-Exupéry—and continued to see her in New York and Paris, London, Hawaii, California, whenever and wherever they happened to be. To Adrienne, he was “a gorgeous hunk of a man,” with piercing blue eyes and a fascinating mind. She was eager to follow his thoughts, to learn what he had to teach.
    Adrienne made life disarmingly simple. She cared about his comfort and understood his needs. And he could talk to her, he said, as he could never talk to Anne. Demanding of him no commitment, allowing him to come and go as he pleased, she was content to live in the moment. When they were together, they talked and laughed, sharing easy pleasures—a long walk, a good meal, and perhaps more passion than they cared to admit.
    When Charles was with Adrienne, his anger dissipated; he was boyish. And though he was sometimes distant and preoccupied, he was a gentle and attentive friend and companion, much as he had been when he courted Anne. But most of all, Adrienne was not afraid of Charles. When his teasing became abusive or he got out of hand, she did not hesitate to throw him out. He would call the next morning, sheepish and apologetic and strangely grateful. If Charles was the hero with a “special” destiny, he was also a boy with lessons to learn who had found, perhaps for the first time, a female mentor strong enough and willing to teach him.
    Anne knew nothing of Charles’s visits with Adrienne. 16 Slipped into the seams of his scheduled flights, the relationship was invisible except to Charles and Adrienne. But Anne did notice the “emptiness” of the hours. Feeling old and tired and not needed by anyone, 17 she sought, as she had so many times before, to make sense of her marriage. Deeper than ever, she plunged into her diaries, hoping to find the “patterns” of their lives.
    By the end of 1963, Anne and Charles had moved into a small house on the eastern side of their Darien property, built closer to sea level, “tucked among the marsh grasses with the shore birds of the Long IslandSound.” 18 Unlike the rambling Tudor in which their family had grown, the house, designed by Charles, was spartan and symmetrical, with stucco walls and teal-blue shutters. Gone were the dark, cavernous rooms, replaced by light-filled spaces and a simple, muted, streamlined décor. The only remnant of Anne’s childhood was her father’s desk from Next Day Hill, piled high with papers and books. They called the house Tellina, the name of a mollusk with a small, delicate body and spindly, powerful legs; it was as if it reflected the new shape of their lives.
    By the end of the decade, Charles had become a strong advocate of wildlife preservation and a recipient of several national awards. As he had done in his early pit-stop flights, he canvassed the United States, meeting local leaders and speaking for his cause. Under the auspices of the World Wildlife Fund, he shifted his attention to the South Pacific, surveying the land and animal populations, lobbying foreign leaders to pass legislation on behalf of conservation.
    In 1967, on one of his flights home from the Philippines, Charles stopped to visit a friend, Sam Pryor, at his ocean-front estate on the eastern shore of Maui, in Hawaii. Sam’s uncle had been the president of the St. Louis bank that backed Charles in his 1927 flight, and he had known Sam since his early days at Pan Am. A man who could deftly handle the press, Sam had been “Trippe’s man on the Hill,” his liaison with government officials. He was a gregarious, hard-driving, salt-of-the-earth