by Laura Smith
So when a Cuisinart was delivered to our apartment, my stomach dropped. It wasn’t going to be that kind of marriage. My uncle had given us matching camping backpacks, and I had found that gift extremely gratifying. It aligned with the person I wanted to be: someone on the move, ready to jet off to some exciting adventure at barely a moment’s notice, someone unencumbered.
Yet if I truly hadn’t wanted the Cuisinart, I would have given it away. Instead I left it in its box above the kitchen cabinets, where I eyed it with suspicion and, occasionally, longing. Domestic objects had a mysterious power over me. I was both attracted to them and repulsed by them. The Cuisinart was sort of beautiful, with its sleek metal base. It promised homemade salsas and soft serve made of bananas and Nutella. How bad can life be when you are making your own soft serve?
I purged my life of household items with fervor. In limiting my exposure to them, I was hoping to cauterize the desire at its source. The longing for a beautiful teacup would never be satisfied by buying just one teacup. Once I had it, I would want some other beautiful thing, setting off a chain of longing and acquisition that would drag down my whole life. Even a single day spent around the house made me nearly frantic. I worried that I could, without realizing it, build a domestic life and become mired in it. So I renounced it all. No beautiful teacups ever.
Other kinds of household items—the ones you need in order to live—filled me with joy. I enjoyed seeing my toothbrush beside P.J.’s, his shoes mixed in with mine. I enjoyed grocery shopping with him, knowing that he liked the grainy mustard more than the smooth kind, the hard cheeses more than Brie. I felt the seductive appeal of controlling my surroundings, of nesting among picturesque things.
I told myself that it didn’t matter if I was ambivalent about the wedding because I wasn’t ambivalent about P.J. And though I didn’t want to admit it, I craved the security of marriage. A handsome, kind man had agreed to tie his life to mine, to mix his shoes in with mine, to grocery shop with me, to list my name on his emergency contact forms forever. It was a vote of confidence in me and in my vision of how to live. The comfort that this knowledge provided released me from the pressure to find other forms of stability. I started taking on more ambitious writing projects because if they didn’t work out I would still have P.J. I could live anywhere in the world because P.J. would be there. We had very little money, but being broke with someone else is far preferable to being broke alone. Surely between the two of us we would figure out how to make enough money to scrape by. I did not view my impending marriage as a constraint. I told myself that it was a means of escape from the constraints of the rest of the world.
—
On the Thursday night before the wedding, my side of the family began to arrive for a casual dinner at my parents’ house. On the other side of town, P.J.’s aunts and uncles were beginning to arrive at his parents’ house. Friends and family were settling into hotel rooms, guest bedrooms, and pullout couches. They came from Arkansas and California, South Korea and England. They took trains, planes, and buses. My parents’ living room was abuzz with eager chatter and the sound of clinking glasses. My dad set up a cocktail bar in the study, and I stood beside P.J. talking to his best friend from college. In the living room, my aunt from England was perched on the couch laughing with one of P.J.’s groomsmen. A group stood by the mantel talking animatedly. The woman who babysat me as a toddler was there. The doorbell rang and more friends and family were hugged and ushered in. Their coats were added to an enormous heap on my parents’ bed. My mother’s best china and wineglasses covered every table and lap. The dog skittered from room to room, hoping that someone would drop a morsel of food.
I was moved. I had thought that the wedding was only about P.J. and me, and now I understood that it was also about everyone we knew. I had previously been embarrassed at the idea that people were traveling for our sakes, but now I saw that it wasn’t about us, but about a group of friends and two families coming together. I had acted as if this wedding were a burden and now I was ashamed at my ingratitude. I had been afraid of something, but standing in the living room that night, I suddenly couldn’t recall what it was.
The morning of the wedding, I woke up in my childhood bedroom feeling alert. The sky outside my window was a sharp, autumnal blue. Something large was about to happen. My parents’ kitchen was filled with the flowers we had arranged the day before, and my uncles, cousin, and dad were whisking them off to the reception hall. The wedding party and I drove to the town hall, where the ceremony would be held, and I put on the dress, the first one I had tried on. A friend’s mother who was acting as the ceremony coordinator had left snacks on a table with a sign that read: “No hypoglycemia on wedding day!” The room was a flutter of people putting on makeup and taking pictures. My little niece sat in my lap while I drank a beer. I bickered with my mom about whether I should be having a beer before the ceremony and then felt bad for snapping at her. Just beyond the door, I could hear people gathering in the hall.
Before I knew it, P.J.’s cousin started playing the violin. The wedding procession marched out, leaving my dad and me alone in the room. We were rarely overtly affectionate, preferring joking to outright displays of love, but the moment called for him to say something profound and fatherly.
“Everyone keeps asking me if I’m sad,” he said, blushing. “I don’t understand. Am I supposed to be sad?”
“No,” I told him. But I wondered if he realized the reason why he wasn’t sad. My mom once told me that on strolls around the neighborhood when I was a toddler, I would make her walk on the other side of the street, saying, “I walk by myself.” As she told this story, I thought I detected a note of pride in her voice, but also of loss. Her toddler hadn’t wanted to be near her—not because of anything she had done, but because of something constitutional.
When I went to dinner at friends’ houses, I pretended I was their daughter, that they were my sisters and brothers, preferring my many imagined lives to the singular weight of one family. How could one family, one life lived in one place ever satisfy? I slept over at friends’ houses on most weekends and played outside until dark on weeknights and this thrilled me. But I also knew that my insistence on independence had hurt people. Maybe my dad wasn’t sad because he felt he had never really had me.
“I’m glad you’re not sad,” I said. “There’s no reason to be.”
I took his arm and opened the doors. Inside the cozily lit room were over a hundred people sitting close together, and there was P.J. at the front. I walked toward him. Everyone stood. A roomful of hushed people rising in unison, all of that brushing fabric, is a beautiful sound.
FOUR
Why would a little girl want to run away from a perfect childhood? Barbara intended the world outside to be the house without windows, the place she was running to, but every time I read the title, I imagined someone in a windowless box banging on the walls, twisting the doorknobs, and trying to get out. According to her parents, Barbara already had her freedom—so why was she so obsessed with escape?
While combing through the Folletts’ accounts of Barbara’s childhood, I came across an inconsistency. It has to do with how Barbara learned to type. She did nearly all her writing on her typewriter, and her father hypothesized that this was what allowed her to communicate so eloquently at so young an age. It is easier to type than to labor over handwriting when your hands are small and not particularly dexterous. Barbara’s mastery of the typewriter enabled her to write stories so exquisite that they broke the hearts of adults. That was Wilson’s theory, at least.
The first account of Barbara’s learning to type is from an article Wilson wrote for Harper’s magazine. Then one day in the archives at Columbia University I came across Helen’s account in an essay on Barbara’s education that ran in The Parents’ Magazine in 1932. In her version of the story, Barbara was five—a more believable age than Wilson’s three. Helen says Barbara came up to her, not
Wilson, and said, “Tell me a story about it.”
Whose version is true? Barbara’s father was more commonly at his typewriter, but her mother was around more. Barbara was almost impossibly young in Wilson’s account, but then again, she was academically precocious.
There are, in many accounts of child prodigies, elements of wishful thinking, exaggerations, and sometimes even outright lies. Wilson and Helen had likely heard the story of William Sidis, the child prodigy mathematician who attended Harvard at age eleven and gave a lecture on the fourth dimension to a small group of slack-jawed mathematicians at the Harvard Mathematical Club. He was roughly Barbara’s contemporary, fifteen years her senior, and after he died his sister claimed he had the highest IQ ever recorded—which is strange considering that there is no evidence he ever took an IQ test. There was no doubt that Sidis was remarkably smart, a genius by all accounts, but even he was not immune from adults’ desires to embellish an already fantastic story.
In adulthood, Sidis would battle for control over his story, suing the New Yorker for libel over an article entitled “Where Are They Now?” about the boy genius’s fall from grace. The magazine described his lonely later years, “living in . . . Boston’s shabby end.” If onlookers had originally rejoiced in elevating him, they now delighted in tearing him down. His complaint contended that the article had caused him “grievous mental anguish [and] humiliation.” Sidis wanted to be left alone, to see himself as he wished to be seen. Seven years later, he won a settlement.
Wilson tried to temper his enthusiasm about Barbara’s talents, claiming in Harper’s that she was not a prodigy or a genius but “an example, as it seems to us and to others who know her, of absolute and beautiful normality in mind, disposition, and body.” It was her education that had allowed her to flourish, he argued. But he may not have been able to resist small embellishments, turning a five-year-old typist into a three-year-old, and casting himself in the role of master teacher, to make her story—his story—a little grander.
What matters more than whether Barbara was three or five when she learned to type is that both parents had claimed the moment as theirs. Their vying affections, their expectations, may have been the burden she wanted to escape. Expectations certainly became a burden for William Sidis, so much so that he became estranged from his parents and recoiled entirely from the public eye. He began collecting streetcar transfers and rarely engaged in mathematics. He took the civil service exam but got a low score and died of a cerebral hemorrhage at the age of forty-six.
To be loved as ardently as Helen and Wilson appear to have loved Barbara is life affirming and confidence building. No wonder she felt she could tear off into the wild: she was constantly reminded that she was strong and capable. But such love can also be suffocating, especially if you want to be the one telling your own story. The person in the room wishes to be left alone. Barbara’s desire to be productive was almost feverish and could make her surly. She once scolded a playmate: “You don’t understand why I have my work to do—because, at this particular time, you have none at all.” When your work matters to you a great deal, and people seem to be interfering, it’s easy to see how life-affirming love could transform into the “gigantic burden” that Eepersip was relieved to escape. “We watch you,” Wilson wrote in his baby book entry to Barbara. “She would be invisible forever” might have been her answer.
Parents technically can’t divorce children, but they can and sometimes do abandon them. We will never know the full extent to which Wilson shaped his daughter’s novel, but even if it was just on the sentence level, some part of Wilson may have yearned to see Eepersip vanish—to undo his perfect child.
Barbara’s parents were demanding, and she made demands of her own. While most parents shuttle their children off to school and let someone else worry about the finer details of their education, Barbara’s parents felt they had to constantly innovate in order to challenge their insatiably curious daughter. Then, when her lessons were over, she wanted her favorite playmate: her father. Wilson had literary ambitions of his own and a demanding editorial career. He meant to write a novel. But as he stated in his Harper’s article, “It may be best in the long run to pour yourself into your child, as we are trying to do.” Did pouring himself into Barbara feel like an act of self-obliteration?
Wilson’s love was complicated. In one of the early baby book entries, he refers to himself as Barbara’s “most unsparing critic.” She was one year old. There is another passage in which he describes his desire to understand Barbara’s baby talk: “We admire, we gloat, we adore, we worship—but O! how we want to understand! Perhaps you are the sole being in our cosmos whom to understand perfectly would be not to love less.” Wilson preferred love at a distance. Intimacy diminished love’s power.
Barbara wasn’t Wilson’s first child. He had another daughter, Grace, from an earlier marriage. When Grace’s mother died in childbirth, Wilson sent Grace to live with his mother. He hardly ever saw her. A relative would later say of their relationship, “They were acquainted, but remotely.” Perhaps he sent her away because she was a painful reminder of his wife’s death; perhaps he blamed her for it. Barbara knew about Grace. Did she worry that her father’s love for her could chill as well—that he might also banish her from his life? What if Barbara wanted to run away because it was easier to leave than to be left?
—
When Barbara was thirteen, she persuaded her parents to let her work for ten days as a ship hand aboard a three-masted schooner that sailed to Nova Scotia. She had just published her novel to great acclaim and was feeling emboldened. She could do anything adults could do. Wilson thought it would be an excellent adventure, and Helen alternated between fearing for her safety and not wanting her to wear her hair in braids. At sea Barbara learned to steer the ship and tie the ropes. She memorized the points of the compass, climbed all over the rigging, practiced her pirate slang, and chatted with the sailors about how much it cost to get a tooth pulled on the mainland. When she went ashore with one of her sailor friends her only regret was not getting a tattoo.
One day there was a storm. The rumbling of the swiftly gathering clouds, the sudden temperature drop, the way that everyone stopped what they were doing captivated her and “crowded all feelings out of you except the feeling of its awesome self.” She was experiencing that exquisite mixture of awe and terror, an awareness of one’s own fragility before the ever-churning immensity of nature. One lightning snap, one roaring wave could snatch you from life forever. How beautiful to be here, to feel the crack of lightning as if it were in your bones, to hear the waves crash against the hull—but to live. She wanted to remember this feeling forever.
The photographs of Barbara at sea are the ones in which she looks her most daring—and most satisfied. In one she is standing on a ship’s deck in knickers and a sailor’s cap, her hands on her hips, with a defiant expression. She spent the ten days in a kind of manic ecstasy. The adventures she had dreamed up were finally coming true. It was as though Eepersip had leapt off the page. She came back with enough material to fill another book and wrote it in a white-hot heat. Her account of her time at sea, The Voyage of the Norman D., was published, also by Knopf, to rave reviews when she was fourteen. Her literary career was all but guaranteed. But the voyage had made her hungry for more—perhaps insatiably so.
The year Barbara’s second book came out, Wilson was working closely with Alfred Knopf, the charismatic cofounder of the Knopf publishing house. It was an exciting time to be in publishing. Though Knopf was a relatively young operation, it had a reputation for refined literary taste, thanks in part to the discerning eye of Blanche Knopf, Alfred’s wife and partner. The Knopfs were publishing authors like D. H. Lawrence, E. M. Forster, and Somerset Maugham, and they seemed to have a knack for identifying the books that would move people and shape the culture. Later, Alfred Knopf would write, “I believe I have never published an unworthy book.” Wilson had a good r
apport with Alfred, who in turn seemed to be invested in Wilson’s future. He trusted Wilson’s judgment. Wilson had a promising career ahead of him.
The demanding nature of his job meant that Wilson was spending more time in New York, away from his family. His absences particularly upset Barbara, who wrote: “Nothing ever happens unless you’re here.” Helen might have been the engine that made the family run, but Wilson was the spark. He was Barbara’s co-conspirator, her writing muse, the one whose praise she most longed for. Life was drab without him. He needed to be in the woods with her, not traipsing around in the concrete world, stuck in a sun-starved, seventh-floor office on Fifth Avenue.
Just before Barbara left for her sea voyage, she had written him a letter and told him so.
Dear Daddy,
It seems to us that New York must be a sort of Louis XI’s palace full of snares, temptations, pit-falls, traps, and everything else for enticing and entangling its helpless victims. But now we have a stunning excuse for you to come home.
During one of her solo excursions near the cottage the family rented every summer in New Hampshire, Barbara had discovered a brick wall at the top of a hill, which was overgrown with enormous violets and foliage: “I intend to make a great many visits, basket and shovel in hand, to this veritable Eden-of-cultivated-things-gone-wild, and I hope you will come along.” She saw her father’s work as a distraction from the place where he truly belonged: in nature with her.
One night, the phone rang at two in the morning in the Follett house. Wilson picked up, and Helen listened.
“I tried to, but I couldn’t,” he said to the person on the other end.
What Wilson was trying to do was tell Helen that he had met someone, a younger someone. Margaret Whipple also worked at Knopf and sat at the desk next to his. She was twenty years old, which made her just six years older than Barbara. Wilson wanted to leave his family to be with her.