Lindbergh Page 6

  Control of money, tactics of secrecy, and “other forms of domination” were abuses of which the Pujo committee found such bankers as J. P. Morgan guilty. As early as 1908, the same charges were being leveled against C. A. Lindbergh—by his wife. Antagonism had replaced antipathy in their marriage; and by the end of the year, they decided to take one last stab at keeping the family together by separating. Evangeline would return to Minnesota—not to Little Falls, but to Minneapolis, where she could oversee Lillian as she transferred for her second year of college at the University of Minnesota and Eva as she completed high school.

  “The crisp days of autumn were interesting enough,” Charles would remember of that year, though, in fact, he never did pinpoint which year of his life it was. He could recollect only that it was dreary without his knowing why. Around this time, Lindbergh developed what became a lifelong practice of internal conversations, a series of questions he would pose to himself. “I spend hours on end in dry heated rooms, with stuffy head and whitening skin,” he recalled of the period.

  I grow tired of books and toys, and pressing my face against a frosted window. I move aimlessly about, experiment in strange new fields. Why can’t I hold ten marbles between ten toes? How long can a cream-filled chocolate last if I eat it with a pin—

  He came down with measles that season, and he remembered being visited in bed by a doctor—the only such visit that would occur for sixty-five years—and taking bitter medicine. “The zero-cold months which followed left colorless space in my mind.”

  Charles also obliterated from memory the years of tension between his mother and his half-sisters. Ever since their mother’s death, Lillian and Eva—four years apart in age—had been living out of a portmanteau, always being shipped off to Lindberghs in Minnesota or Lands in Detroit. While Evangeline had been able to deal with them when they were small, she could not cope with two headstrong teenagers at last rebelling against their years of neglect. Once settled at the University of Minnesota, Lillian became fond of pretty dresses and parties and a fellow student, Loren Roberts. One night after he kept her out until three o’clock in the morning, Evangeline scolded them both, insisting that it was “not a decent thing to do.” Eva sided with her sister and said she just did not see how they could possibly go on living together any longer.

  Increasingly, Evangeline took out her anger toward C.A. on his daughters. She became furious at his indulging them with clothes allowances but crying poverty when she asked for the same thing. She resented having to discipline his daughters, to play the role of the wicked stepmother. One night that spring, Eva returned home late, violating a new curfew, only to be greeted by Evangeline’s slapping her in the face. “What was that for?” the sixteen-year-old girl asked, only to be told: “That’s what you deserve!”

  Like her sister, Eva had the good sense to get out, to disengage from Evangeline and get on with her own life. She would attend Carleton College and intern in her father’s Washington office before marrying a journalist, George W. Christie. But for all intents and purposes, from the night of that slap, Evangeline had effectively ended her relationship with her husband’s daughters. They never lived together again, an explanation for which was never given to Charles. Through it all, Eva had long resented Charles’s being so indulged; but she later realized the price he had had to pay—that his youth must have been deeply “troubled,” for “there was no normal family life.”

  In early summer 1909, Evangeline told C.A. that she wanted a divorce. Knowing it would prove unacceptable to the voters of Minnesota’s Sixth District, C.A. appealed to her better judgment, urging her to “let things slide” and continue living as they had been.

  Evangeline discussed the matter with her mother in a series of letters written largely in numerical code. Each letter of the alphabet was assigned a number—A=7, B=16, C=21, and so forth; and whenever she had something to say about 21-7, she broke for paragraphs at a time into numbers. “I doubt that he can be held to anything and he will offer as little as possible,” Evangeline “enumerated” that June; “all I can see is that if a definite settlement can be made now it will be better—just because he has not the traits that can allow dependence.” She admitted that she no longer was even expecting to find happiness, “but as things are it seems that no one is justified in living as he proposes.” C.A. argued that if she tried to shake him down in court she would probably end up getting less money out of him than he was allowing her already. Fearing the loss of his congressional seat, he promised to treat her fairly so long as they remained married.

  A few months of truce followed, during which C.A. spent time with “the boy” and treated his wife with the utmost respect in public. Evangeline and Charles often lunched with him in the House dining room and sat in the gallery when the legislature was in session. For Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration, C.A. got Senator Nelson of Minnesota to make ten-year-old Charles a Senate page for the day, so that he could observe the entire ceremony from a special seat. C.A. even took his wife to two formal receptions at the White House.

  But in private, the Lindberghs reverted to their old quarrels, mostly over finances. Evangeline’s trump cards remained C.A.’s fear of public exposure and the happiness of “the boy.” Even then, C.A.’s behavior was not always predictable, as the strain of his domestic situation often got the better of him. During one visit to his wife’s apartment, Charles began fidgeting, punching C.A., until Evangeline said, “You see, C.A., he’s cooped up here and needs an outlet for surplus energy.” C.A. said, “Get up on the chair, Charles, and I’ll fight you.” Charles did and kicked him in the groin. C.A. grabbed him by both arms and called him a “fool.” On other occasions C.A. teased Charles until he cried.

  C.A. meant no harm. This was just his own frustrated way of trying to make a man out of the boy. Like Evangeline, he never scolded or disciplined Charles; and he never spoke down to him. “Shall we go for a tramp, Boss?” C.A. would ask when he wanted to take a walk in the country.

  Both parents believed in giving Charles adult responsibilities, obliging him at an early age to exercise judgment. He was only seven when his father gave him a Savage .22-caliber repeating rifle; and the boy surprised them both when his first shot at a duck, more than fifty feet away, hit it right in the head. He received a Winchester 12-gauge automatic shotgun the year after that, before he was even big enough to steady it against his shoulder. C.A. taught him to fish and to swim naked in the chilly waters near the house in Little Falls. Charles especially remembered one day when he slipped on the slimy stones of the Mississippi’s bottom into a hole deeper than he was tall. “When I broke surface and coughed in a breath of air,” he later recalled, “I was startled to find that my father wasn’t running toward me. He just stood on shore and laughed. And then I realized that I was swimming by myself.” Within a few summers, Charles was able to swim across Pike Creek in flood and down the Mississippi’s rapids.

  Charles grew up fast, becoming a rugged individualist like his father. And for all C.A.’s severity, Charles admired his unexpected wit. “Contrary to the impression of many people who knew him,” Charles later explained to his father’s biographer, “he had a great deal of humor,” which he masked with a serious expression, leaving most people unaware that he was enjoying himself tremendously. “A Swedish sense of humor,” Evangeline called it. “He could laugh wonderfully,” Charles observed; “but he had an extraordinary ability to control his facial expression when he wanted to.” Like his father, young Charles grew to gauge the funniness of a situation by how much laughter he suppressed.

  The Lindberghs swallowed most of their emotions—except their increasing anger, which Charles learned to ignore. Although he did not recollect ever having to take sides, one parent or the other occasionally dragged him into the fray. After one testy exchange between them, Evangeline asked Charles if he considered it “quarreling” when she responded to C.A.’s insults as she had. “No,” he said, “you answered him just right. I don’t see what ma
kes Father act so.”

  Neither did Evangeline, who endured years of escalating humiliations. On two occasions C.A. called her a “bloodsucker” right in front of Charles. He took to questioning her mental condition … and, on at least one occasion, he struck her.

  As painful was Evangeline’s realization that the persistent rumors about C.A. keeping company with another woman—his stenographer, who had moved from Little Falls to Washington—were true. After yet another overheated argument, she grabbed a gun and held it to C.A.’s head. “O.K., Evangeline,” C.A. said, “if you must do it, do it.” But she could only bring herself to throw the gun down and run off. In the end, she always caved in for the reason her mother reminded her: “As to divorce—you know that on account of Charles we must be careful …”

  Through it all, the boy was spared the worst of his parents’ behavior. “I cannot recall my father ever saying a word against my mother,” Charles would later record. “She encouraged me to be with him as much of the time as possible and I believe that both my mother and my father always continued to care for each other although they were seldom together. One of the reasons my mother went to Washington seven or eight out of the ten winters my father was in Congress, was to give me the opportunity of seeing him frequently.” But Charles became chronically restless—finding that his parents’ living under one roof only bred greater contempt.

  As he never settled in one place, Charles learned to take comfort in his rootlessness. Over a decade, Washington, D.C., became their official residence, with a breather in Minnesota every summer, and long visits in Detroit during their trips each way. While there was a semblance of regularity to Charles’s vagabond life, it was nonetheless disconcerting having to move every few months and having to spend most of his year in a place he disliked. “Through long winters,” he would later write, “I counted the weeks and days until spring when we would return to our Minnesota farm.” With its never finished house, the family always referred to it as “camp.”

  Where “camp” filled Charles with a love of the outdoors, the Land house at 64 West Elizabeth Street in Detroit opened his eyes to the more interior wonders of science, a world of logic and intellect. “I never had a dull moment at Detroit,” Lindbergh would later recall of his visits, adding that there was “even more to do than on the farm in Minnesota.” Upon entering the small, gray frame house, a narrow hall lay ahead, a door on the left to the patients’ parlor, where there was always an intriguing stack of National Geographic magazines. Upstairs was a small parlor. To the rear of the room on one side was a curtain that opened into the master bedroom; on the other side a small hall led into the tiny bedroom of Evangeline’s brother, Charles; during Evangeline and young Charles’s visits, he turned the room with its narrow double bed over to them.

  The boy’s interests lay downstairs—in Dr. Land’s dental rooms and laboratories. His grandfather’s rolltop desk was always cluttered with papers and pamphlets and plaster casts of patients’ mouths. A box contained a stuffed tarantula, centipede, scorpion, and horned toad; a safe held platinum foil and dental gold; cabinets were filled with polished stones and fossils—even a mammoth’s tooth.

  When his grandfather was not practicing, Charles played in the two operating rooms, with their hydraulic foot-pumped dental chairs. There were drills of all sizes and drawers “for hand instruments, bottles of acid, amalgum powder, rubber sheets, little wads of cotton to put under the tongue”; stuffed birds and a Rocky Mountain sheep’s head stared from all corners of the rooms. A drawing of prehistoric man hung on one wall. And then there was the laboratory that housed a dental furnace, a blowpipe bench-table, shelves full of chemical bottles, and a blacksmith’s anvil.

  The basement below was even more fun. Because Charles’s grandfather and uncle did all their own home maintenance, pipe cutters, threaders, wrenches, coils of wire, and odd lengths of pipe hung everywhere. During each visit, Charles was taught to master a different tool—learning mechanical, chemical, and electrical laws. “Charles,” his grandfather often told him, reiterating the mantra of scientific experimentation, “you must have patience.”

  The basement’s most amusing feature was a shooting gallery. When Charles was six, his grandfather gave him a .22-caliber single-shot Stevens rifle, with which he practiced in a short rifle range he and Charles’s uncle built. It featured a mechanical, steel-faced target about ten inches in diameter with a one-inch bull’s-eye cut out. When a bullet entered the hole, it tripped a mechanism that made an iron bird pop up.

  Every night Grandmother Land prepared a large hot meal, at least one chicken or turkey every visit, served on warmed plates. And the dining room table was always brimming with his grandfather’s theories: the importance of mastication; the deleterious effects of automobiles on society; the deadly nature of cigarettes, which he called “coffin nails.” Lindbergh came to believe that “Science is the key to all mystery.”

  In time, he realized another wonderful attraction in Detroit was his uncle. “I have no brother,” Charles lamented to his mother one day; and she said she would give him hers. From that day forward Charles Land, Jr., was referred to as such. Twenty-three years Charles’s senior, “Brother” had apprenticed to his father in dentistry, graduated from the Michigan School of Mines, and prospected in Canada before drifting into a life of avocations. A social misfit, he considered himself an inventor and had several patents to validate his claim. He was never at a loss for time in teaching Charles how to use his drafting instruments—or any other tools lying around the house. Always busy with some project, Brother’s presence helped make “64,” as the family referred to their residence, a welcome halfway house for Charles, a stimulating stopover between Little Falls and Washington. In all his analysis of why he found Detroit so special, he never considered the possibility that he found pleasure simply in its being the most traditional home he knew—one in which he was but a periodic visitor.

  In the fall of 1909, Evangeline and C.A. established separate residences in Washington; but Charles faced a greater dread that year. At almost eight years of age he found himself, for the first time, having to start school. Until then, Evangeline had tutored her son in the rudiments of reading, writing, and arithmetic. (“I like my mother. My mother likes me” were the first two sentences she instructed him to copy.) Entering the second grade at the Force School, he remembered his first year of school as being “forced to sit still in a strange room, amid strange children, and surrounded by strange and unknown conventions … a vague memory of countless hours of sitting at a desk … waiting, waiting, waiting for the school to close.” He was allowed to change schools—as he did almost every year for the next decade. Because Evangeline insisted on their Detroit stopovers, Charles always started the schoolyear late and left early, and was, as a result, always behind in his studies. One of his teachers was distressed enough by his poor penmanship to threaten him with a bad report to his father. “No use to complain to him,” the boy said. “He can’t write even as well as I.”

  After several years of spotty education, Evangeline felt a private school might help Charles buckle down. Although C.A. pled poverty and insisted that boys “must get knocked and knock back in order to stand the world’s knocking later,” he did concede that “it might be an advantage” for Charles to attend a private school because of his “peculiar situation.”

  In 1913, he entered The Sidwell Friends School, which assembled in the Friends Meeting House on I Street in Northwest Washington. Although he never liked the name of the place, with what he considered its hollow promise of camaraderie, he remained for two years. It was “an improvement, but did not by any means end my troubles,” he later wrote. “I did not find much friendship among the children there. I did not understand them, nor they me.” Many of them made fun of his name. nicknaming him “Limburger” or sometimes, more simply, “Cheese.”

  It was later reported that young Lindbergh palled around with his schoolmates Quentin and Kermit Roosevelt, sons of T.R. �
�The Roosevelt Gang,” was known to gather after school at nearby Henry’s drug store, where they would order sodas and charge them to the ringleaders’ father. But, future myth to the contrary, Lindbergh was not part of that gang or any other. He briefly became friendly with his deskmate and nobody else. “I took as little part in the games as possible and went home immediately after school was over,” he recalled. The day the boys were instructed in Greek folk-dancing, Charles caused a ruckus by flatly refusing to join hands. The “Cheese” stood alone.

  “Home” became a series of boardinghouses, as Evangeline was always hunting for the least expensive room she could find for the two of them. One was in a boardinghouse at 1440 Massachusetts Avenue run by a prominent Virginia family on their uppers. The landlords lived in the basement rooms, while the “paying guests” climbed a set of long front steps to the reception room and the dining room, which was available to them only for meals. One flight up was the large front bedroom which Charles and Evangeline shared. Another of their houses offered a curtained alcove for the bed; and still another had a kitchenette, where Evangeline cooked their meals. Surrounded only by strange adults, there was never room for Charles to misbehave, or just be a boy. The boardinghouses constricted his already constrained personality; and at an early age, he became an overly polite silent sufferer.

  To compensate for his obvious loneliness, Evangeline took Charles to all the national shrines and exhibitions. They often returned to Mt. Vernon, the Smithsonian Institution, the Navy Yards, and the Corcoran Gallery of Art, where young Charles was especially drawn to Hiram Powers’s “The Greek Slave,” a white marble statue of a naked girl in shackles.

  It did not bother C.A. that his son lived such a friendless existence in Washington. So did C.A. “You and I can take hard knocks,” he told his son halfway through grade school. “We’ll get along no matter what happens.” C.A. showed him that hard work was more valuable than socializing, as he often became absorbed in his job to the point of obsession. He usually lunched on a loaf of bread and bottle of milk in his office, and he often slept on the black leather couch beside his desk. “Congressmen’s work seemed awfully boring to me,” Charles would later write, but he found the long corridors of Congress entertaining.