Asking the Wrong Questions

Charles Lindbergh and my mother were on my mind today. When forced not to think about ill family members or a friend having to cope with a mother straight out of hell my mind invariably goes to one place - baseball. GO SOX!! But the Sox are playing Tampa Bay and my sister who is very ill lives there. Lester is back, Schilling is out. Thinking about Lester makes me think about cancer which is one of things I'm trying not to think about, so I tried to think about the Cardinals, whom my mother loves the way I love the Sox. But then I thought about how the Cardinals went and won the World Series while my little sister was ill and my parents and I were nursing her in a house loaned to us by a Baptist church down in Wake-Forest. My mind raced back to the present, to what I need to do now to see that her physical rehabilitation continues, because she is my little sister, though we are both grown women.

Instead of baseball I thought of my mother's love of St. Louis and its absurd manifestations. Her loyalty to Budweiser, for instance. And to Charles Lindbergh.

As a girl I never heard nor read Alice in Wonderland, never saw Bambi or sang campfire songs. I was told all about the Spirit of St. Louis, though, and watched the movie more times than It's a Wonderful Life - which, after all, is only apropos once a year. When I was a bit older tales of the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby entered my nighttime story repertoire. Somehow Lindbergh's Nazi sympathies never made it into the stories.

When I learned about him in college, which seemed late on, as though not only my mother but my entire school system had engaged in a conspiracy, I asked my mother, "Why did he do that? Why did everyone still call him a hero?" But my mother would not talk about it. "Pfft," she'd say, or something to that effect. It bothered me, this unwillingness to discuss what felt like a betrayal. I thought I was disturbed by Lindbergh's betrayal, but it came to be my mother's. How could she set me up to praise a man like that? She never tried to explain him, or her, to me and I decided today this was because she couldn't. She had been a baby when Lindbergh was made a hero. She played war games as a young girl; she and her friends hiding baby dolls in the bushes then venturing bravely out to save the war orphans. Decades later she had trouble sitting next to a German executive at dinner. "Every time he opened his mouth I'd just want to shoot him," she said. She laughed when she said it because she didn't truly want to shoot him, but then again, she did. It was that part of her brain infused early on with the "Germans are our enemy" creed and then given evidence of what they had done. I knew my mother didn't want to shoot him, didn't truly dislike him for being German and she knew I understood this. She is remarkable in the biases she was raised with and overcame. But she would not talk about Lindbergh. She knew, must have, that what he did was evil, but she wouldn't say so. Wouldn't discuss it.

It is hard to let our heroes go. It can be especially hard when they are heroes handed down to us. My mother had no recollection of the flight across the Atlantic. Lindbergh was a hero to her because he was a hero to the adults in her life. Her mother, her father, her grandparents, the clergy she knew and trusted. These, along with her life long friends, were St. Louis to her. They gave her Lindbergh as hero. If later she saw him as something else she had to make sense of it in her young mind. So this is what I think, she did make sense of it, as best she could as a child and there she left it. She had no better explanation ready when I asked her about it so many decades later and she didn't want to be challenged to make one. What if she couldn't? What if she lost this hero? With whom could she replace him?

She had other heroes, of course. Franklin Delano Roosevelt and later John F. Kennedy. Kennedy went on to disappoint her. Not with the Bay of Pigs, nor even merely his philandering - he was a man, after all. But my mother could never forgive him for having it on with Marilyn Monroe. My mother with her blond hair that she dyed brown saw Monroe as cheap. I tried to explain she couldn't be that bad if Arthur Miller fell for her, but my mother would not be swayed. So heroes did lose status in her eyes. Not FDR, I think. She doesn't believe he was unfaithful and, though she'd never say this to me, she'd excuse him if he were. For all the First Lady's works Eleanor Roosevelt never made it into my mother's pantheon. Eleanor out, but Lindbergh in? It doesn't reflect what I know to be my mother's values. But it may reflect her St. Louis.
She grew up feeling unattractive, though she is a beautiful woman, and in a family that worshipped the boy child. My mother though is not remotely antisemitic, and she never talked about antisemitism in her family, though she admitted with disdain to their racism against blacks (whether African American, Caribbean American, Afro-Caribbean - it made not difference, they looked down on them all.) But I recall now that when I went to St. Louis to introduce my husband to that side of our family my grandmother, whom I loved, shocked me with the phrase, "he tried to Jew me." I didn't know what she meant at first. Joo? Ju? I had to work my way through, "gyp, for gypsy, oh" So many people still say "gyp" without knowing where it comes from I chose to believe that my grandmother was using an expression whose origins she did not recognize. I don't think that anymore.

In my mother's childhood abode any Catholic who could it make past the protestant gate keepers was a cause celebre. It was naive of me to think that this meant my mother's family understood the perils of religious bigotry. I forget that there is a reason my Jewish friends are amazed that my CCD classes included lessons on the holocaust and trips to synagogues to hear talks from Rabbis. I choose to forget not because of any loyalty to the Catholic church, to which I no longer belong, but because of the dissonance. My family was part of that church and they never mentioned the turmoil in the church over Hitler, over antisemitism, over pogroms. It is my family I want to protect by not remembering, my racist, antisemitic family. These are, for all their blindness, people that I love. I don't want to always have to see the truth. Neither does my mother. Charles Lindbergh was a family hero. No one talked about his antisemitism because it wasn't worth mentioning. Maybe at some point, even for them, it became unacceptable. Perhaps it was too embarrassing to speak of, like the alcoholic uncle no longer invited to Sunday dinner, best not to say anything.

I haven't asked my mother about Lindbergh in a very long while, and I won't now. For years I wanted my mother to admit that he was not an honorable man. I suspect that privately she has. So we will continue to talk about impeaching the president, and how we are faring, about baseball and who won in Tampa. I feel small for ever needing to challenge her after all she has taught me about me giving in the world. I feel small and frightened and I want to hold my family close and never let them go, no matter how we fail each other.