[T]he pioneering pilot Charles Lindbergh wasn’t one for public disclosure. Take the time he was asked where he was set to fly, spurring him to answer “Up.”
Lindbergh’s daughter Reeve is different. In her first memoir, “Under a Wing,” she wrote about how her father’s reluctance to share much about himself had caused her to panic when, still a child, she watched film star Jimmy Stewart re-create the aviator’s historic first solo nonstop flight across the Atlantic.
“Does he make it?” she remembers asking.
Her second memoir, “No More Words,” detailed the last months of her mother, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, who was revered for penning the meditative bestseller “Gift from the Sea” then rendered nearly speechless by a series of strokes.
Her third memoir, “Forward From Here,” told of the recent discovery that her father, who endured the kidnapping and killing of his firstborn son, went on to have affairs with three German women who gave birth to seven children.
Lindbergh now is releasing a fourth book on another personal subject: Her present days in Vermont.
“I have a real or normal life in the country, where my husband and I live on an old farm at the end of a dirt road,” the 73-year-old writes in her new essay collection “Two Lives.” “There is also an entirely different ‘Lindbergh’ life, which requires putting on somewhat less comfortable clothes and traveling to places away from the farm, where I attend meetings and give talks and where there are no chickens except for the kind on the menu followed by words like ‘cordon bleu’ and ‘a la king’ and ‘Kiev.’”
The youngest of her father’s six American children, Lindbergh was born in 1945, grew up in Connecticut and moved to the Green Mountains upon graduating from Radcliffe College in 1968.
Her “two lives,” she says, are differentiated by who asks what. In the Northeast Kingdom, locals tend to limit themselves to “Do you want a bag?” Elsewhere, people inquire about everything from “What can you tell us about the kidnapping?” to “Did your mother teach you to write?” to “Did your father really have other families?”
“These questions are now so familiar that they don’t trouble me much, though I can remember when some of them did,” she writes in her new book. “I always say that I will answer any question I’m asked to the best of my ability.”
Then again, she has to remind people she wasn’t yet born when her father launched the “Spirit of St. Louis” into the New York sky on May 20, 1927, and landed in Paris 33½ solitary, scary, sleepless hours later. She also wasn’t around when her father met her mother on a post-flight global goodwill tour, or when they married and had their first child, Charles Jr., before the baby’s headline-grabbing abduction in 1932.
Her parents worked hard to shelter their other children from the past — so much so that Lindbergh didn’t initially understand their place in history. That said, she has acted as family representative for the public since her father died in 1974 and mother died in 2001.
Inheriting a bit of Lucky Lindy’s reserve, she’d rather identify herself as a Vermonter than pinpoint her specific town of Passumpsic, although that’s partly because her Caledonia County home is so hard to find, she once gave a reporter directions that advised “drive north forever!” and “don’t lose heart!”
Likewise, when her phone rang off the hook with press calls after the news broke of her father’s affairs, she replied with the statement, “The Lindbergh family is treating this situation as a private matter, and has taken steps to open personal channels of communication, with sensitivity to all concerned.”
The 5-foot-3 daughter of the 6-foot-3 flyer went on to translate that to mean, “We don’t know any more than you do, but we’re trying to figure this out while causing as little pain as possible.”
Attend one of her readings and she’ll answer most any other question about her famous father — even about his infamous words just before World War II, when, supporting U.S. isolationism, he said one of the greatest dangers to the nation was the influence of Jews in prominent public positions.
She’ll also talk about losing her own first-born son to a seizure. And going on to raise two girls and another boy. And envisioning what’s left unsaid when people ask, “Are you still writing?”
“Are you still writing,” for example, “or have you finally, thank goodness, retired?”
After she edited four decades of her mother’s previously unseen work into “Against Wind and Tide” six years ago, Lindbergh wasn’t sure she’d release another book. Her longtime New York publishers are increasingly wary of printing anything that isn’t guaranteed to sell tens of thousands of copies.
She told this to friends at Brigantine Media, a small firm based in St. Johnsbury.
“If we sell 1,000,” she recalls them saying, “we’re happy.”
She will be giving a series of readings at bookstores around the state, including Phoenix Books in Burlington, Green Mountain Books in Lyndonville, Bear Pond Books in Montpelier, Phoenix Books in Rutland, Village Square Booksellers in Bellows Falls, Northshire Bookstore in Manchester, Next Chapter Bookstore in Barre, a Star Cat Books event at the Colatina restaurant in Bradford, Vermont Book Shop in Middlebury, Galaxy Bookshop in Hardwick, Bookstock in Woodstock, and at the Burlington Book Festival in October.
“There is a real dance between privacy and revelation,” she writes. “But I have completely lost my fear of answering questions, and have gained the great freedom of simply telling the truth.”
