“Thank you for looking after me so well,” she added. “I’m glad I wasn’t too much trouble.”
Carmichael’s memory was off, but only by a bit. Once Nancy was out of diapers, Edie did indeed put her in the care of an aunt and uncle. The aunt—not the place where Nancy landed—was named Virginia.
C. Audley and Virginia Galbraith lived in a modest Dutch colonial in the Battery Park neighborhood of Bethesda, Maryland, on the outskirts of Washington, DC. They converted their sunroom so that the child could have a place to sleep. Virginia was the opposite of her sister, Edie, in almost every way—so proper that she referred to her husband as “Mr. Galbraith” and went into the bathroom to undress at night. The Galbraiths were kind to Nancy; their outgoing daughter Charlotte, later a talented artist and Olympic-caliber diver, became almost a sister to the younger girl. Nancy would be a bridesmaid in her cousin Charlotte’s 1942 wedding, and Charlotte would name a daughter after Nancy.
But the next six years cast a permanent shadow on Nancy’s spirit, leaving her with an insecurity and wariness that lasted. “It was a crucial moment in my mother’s life, and one that she never really got over,” said Nancy’s son, Ron Reagan. “I’m not a psychologist, but I think she suffered from a kind of separation anxiety ever since and was very concerned about being left—being abandoned—her whole life.”
Her daughter, Patti, also discerned that something rooted in childhood trauma haunted her mother: “She always harbored a need to be noticed. I suspect she grew up clamoring for control, because the world was unpredictable, because people left her and hurt her.”
From the time Nancy was two years old until she was eight, her mother was an occasional and fleeting presence. Nancy would later come to understand that the emptiness of those early years without Edie left an imprint that subsequently affected her ability to deal with her own rebellious children. “Maybe our six-year separation is one reason I appreciated her so much, and why we never went through a period of estrangement,” she wrote. “It may also explain why, years later, during the 1960s, I couldn’t really understand how children—including my own—could turn against their parents. I always wanted to say, ‘You don’t know how lucky you are that we had all those years together.’ ”
In September 1925 four-year-old Anne Frances Robbins was enrolled in Washington’s prestigious Sidwell Friends School, where many of the city’s most prominent families sent their children. The Galbraiths paid her tuition at first. A registration form identified her mother as Mrs. K. S. Robbins, though it appears to have been signed in Edie’s absence by Virginia. Chubby, wide-eyed Nancy began kindergarten at Sidwell’s Suburban School, a structure newly built from timbers reputed to have been first used for Woodrow Wilson’s inaugural viewing stand. On her report cards, Nancy was described as smart, engaging, and eager to please. One teacher’s note from June 1927 reads: “A very bright child, very popular with the children, and a blessing to the teacher. Nancy does everything well.”
She held tea parties for her dolls by the Galbraiths’ front steps, less than ten miles from the presidential mansion where one day she would throw fifty-five glittering state dinners. A little boyfriend would cart her around the neighborhood in his red wagon. Nancy made her first trip to the White House when Calvin Coolidge lived there. Her aunt and uncle took her for the annual Easter Egg Roll for children on the South Lawn, where first lady Grace Coolidge was known to appear with a pet raccoon named Rebecca that she kept on a leash.
The brightest moments of Nancy’s life were Edie’s visits, which to her daughter felt “as if Auntie Mame herself had come to town.” The worldly actress taught Nancy and the Galbraiths the latest dances, like the Charleston. She brought gifts that included a wig of long, blonde ringlets, just like those of Mary Pickford, the silent-screen actress known as “America’s sweetheart.” Nancy, whose own hair was bobbed, wore it constantly. Occasionally, Nancy’s aunt took her to New York to see Edie perform, and the child fell in love with the musty backstage smells that she came to associate with her mother. One Christmas, the stagehands built Nancy a dollhouse.
Yet there are spans during this unsettled period in which there is no record of where Nancy was or who she was with. In February 1926, not five months after she arrived at Sidwell, its files show the four-year-old was withdrawn for the remainder of the term. “Left the city,” read a notation in the school’s files. She returned for the 1926–27 academic year but was absent from kindergarten twenty-five days of the third marking period. The explanation: “Went to Trenton, N.J.” Nancy may have been temporarily reunited with Edie, who in March 1926 was starring in Plainfield, New Jersey, in a play titled, ironically enough, Dancing Mothers. Or she might have been with her father, who also lived in New Jersey. Perhaps another relative took her in, or she was ill. What Nancy remembered from around that time was a bout with what she understood to be “double ammonia,” during which the little girl cried for the absent Edie and thought to herself: “If I had a child, and she got sick, I’d be with her.”
Sidwell’s records also include a 1928 anthology of compositions by its students. Where other first graders wrote chirpy little essays about their pets, Nancy offered a fantasy of an intact, perfect family and an image that evoked her own lonely reality: “The little girl was walking with her mother and father. They were looking for flowers, and there was not a flower in the garden.”
As an adult, Nancy bristled when it was suggested that her mother had abandoned her. But a complex set of emotional forces
