by Laura Smith
Barbara found this out in a letter that arrived on her fourteenth birthday, in March. She was frantic. She thought her father had lost his mind. Knowing that he was logical and unsentimental, she made a logical appeal to him rather than a sentimental one. They had plans, she argued. He couldn’t possibly leave them when they were supposed to go hiking in Maine and boating on Lake Sunapee. The argument was not, Don’t leave me because I love you.
Wilson telephoned the house and spoke to Barbara. He was reassuring. “Hold your horses,” he told her. “Everything will be all right.” Barbara brightened. The only possible interpretation of “everything will be all right” was that he would reconsider and come home. He knew that Sabra, who was only four, needed him. He knew that Barbara needed him. She let this idea console her.
But the next day, a letter arrived that made it clear he was not coming back. He told Barbara that his marriage to her mother was poisonous and destructive and that it had always been this way. Barbara had to admit she had noticed a strain in the last year, but not always. He was rewriting history, and Barbara was furious. She saw now that he had deceived her on the telephone. His reassurances were part of his plan to keep her out of the way while he went off plotting a new life without her.
—
Barbara and Sabra were playing at a neighbor’s house when their mother telephoned and told them to come home. When Barbara got to the house, she found Margaret Whipple in their living room. Margaret wanted to speak to Barbara alone. She was pretty, in a sharp, angular way, and wore her blond hair loosely collected in a bun. She had a long, elegant neck. Barbara eyed her suspiciously.
It’s not clear why Helen granted her husband’s mistress a private meeting with her fourteen-year-old daughter, or why Margaret thought it was appropriate to ask. Perhaps Margaret saw that Barbara held more sway with Wilson than Helen did. It was a strategic move to get the blessing of the beloved daughter. Barbara recorded what followed in a letter to her father.
Margaret began soothingly. “You see, Barbara, I think he would be happy and contented with me; and you wouldn’t object to his being happy and contented, would you?”
“You think you can make him happy?” Barbara asked.
“I do,” said Margaret.
“Well, but is that a very honorable sort of happiness?”
“I don’t know; you see, I suppose I’m in love with him.”
“Well, then I think you ought to try and get out of love just as quick as ever you can. Besides, can’t you be on friendly, happy terms with him, without taking him away from his family?”
Margaret was baffled. The daughter was worse than the mother. “People in love just don’t do that—that’s all.”
“Then what do you want; what do you expect?”
“I want to marry him.”
“Yes; but I might raise objections to that.”
Margaret tried another tactic. “You see, your mother told me that if I married him I’d ruin your whole life, smash all your ideals, and all that. Well, I don’t want to do that; you may not believe it, but I don’t. Would it ruin your whole life?”
It must have been tempting to say yes, but Barbara’s reply was remarkably reasonable under the circumstances. “I don’t see how I can tell whether it would or not. It might not ruin the whole of it; but don’t you see?—it isn’t that—it’s simply the fact that it’s dishonorable and unfair, that’s all. Good heavens, Miss Whipple—don’t you see what you’re doing? Can even you, ‘in love,’ as you say, think that it is fair to take a man away from his family as you’re doing? You can realize that you are not in the right of it, can’t you.”
“Unfortunately, I’m not,” Margaret said.
“Indeed, and I think it’s extremely fortunate that you’re not. Besides, do you want to know what I think? I suppose you don’t, but here it is, anyhow: I think you’ve taken an unfair advantage of him when he was and is in a physically low condition—exhausted with work, powerless to resist your ‘love,’ as you call it. Because I can tell you I am absolutely sure that, if he were in his right mind, he would never think of such a thing—never even listen to it for a minute.”
Margaret shrugged in defeat. Just then, Helen came into the room. Margaret turned to Helen and said, “Well, Barbara’s been trying to give me advice.”
“You can’t blame her,” Helen said sharply. “She’s only fourteen, and she’s having her father taken away from her.”
A taxi arrived for Margaret, but Barbara couldn’t contain herself any longer. She moved in closer and said menacingly, “Besides, I have another thing to say to you, and it’s this: If I were in the painful position you’re in; if I were doing what you are trying your best to do, I wouldn’t stand up there, so extremely unashamed of myself.”
“Thank you,” Margaret said mockingly. “That’s all I can think of to say.” She got up to leave.
“Good-bye, Miss Whipple,” Barbara said. “I’m going to swear at you behind your back when you’ve gone.”
Barbara had outmaneuvered her father’s mistress and made her feel like a fool. She had the nerve to fight for what she believed in. She was unfolding her wings, flexing her muscles.
—
The letter to her father was much more than an attempt to showcase her debating talents. She hoped to convince him to come home. It was nearly spring in New Haven, just the season when her father missed the mountain air most. If she could paint the picture of the two of them tramping around together in the woods, she might lure him back. The letter begins:
Dear Daddy,
I did receive your letter, yesterday afternoon, and I read it (as you must suppose) a good many times before I came to any conclusion or conclusions concerning it. . . .
Aren’t we ever again going to cross ranges of mountains in all weathers, or play about in Sternway, or steer a real windjammer through the seven seas, or take sailing-lessons from Mr. Rasmussen—as we once planned?
Such things do not reconcile themselves. For instance, if you now finally and determinedly drop all that, leave it behind, kick it out of the way, then how am I to believe that they actually and truly meant all to you that they seemed to at the time? And if they did, then how am I to believe that you don’t feel any more the lure of The Maine Woods—the lure of that mountain that we have always had vaguely in our minds? . . .
I depend very much on you; and I trust you to give another heave to the capstan bars, to get the family anchor started toward the surface again. After all, you have the strongest shoulders for heaving of us all!
The letter didn’t work.
—
Barbara had dedicated The House Without Windows to her father as well as to Sabra, and now he wanted nothing to do with their adventures. He was on his own adventure without her, and she was arguing against wild impulses, coaxing him to come home. In that moment, she didn’t want freedom. She wanted her family.
In the months after her father’s departure, Barbara was drawn to people who gave her absolute assurance of their devotion. She had found it at sea among the ship hands, sea captains, and cooks she met during her Nova Scotia voyage, and she corresponded hungrily with them after her father left. “Sailors are the most delightful beings on earth,” she wrote. They swapped stories about their drunken shipmates, tyrannical captains, gales, and shipwrecks. “Dear Shipmate,” “Dearest Shipmate,” “Hail Shipmate,” their letters read.
The Follett home was becoming an increasingly unhappy place and Barbara was itching to return to sea. Helen was constantly fending off Wilson’s requests for a divorce. At night, she hardly slept. One morning Sabra wandered into the kitchen and asked her mother, “When is Daddy coming home? He’s been gone for so long.” Helen couldn’t tell her that the answer was never, just as she couldn’t tell either of her daughters her darker secret: that she blamed them for Wilson’s leaving.
“They have been th
e cause of my losing him,” she wrote to Anne, a close friend of the Folletts. Helen had dedicated her life to Barbara and Sabra, forsaking her own ambitions, and she had felt the burn of that sacrifice long before Wilson left her. “It’s a pity mothers are [such] busy people,” she had written in the baby book when Barbara was three, “it’s a pity they can’t leave the ugly details of dish washing, floor cleaning and all the rest to Mrs. O’Neil and those who love the sloshing sloppy water; it’s a pity mothers can’t do what they want to.”
Helen’s resentment of her children reached fever pitch after Wilson left. “I am frightfully jealous of the person who has usurped my place,” she wrote to Anne, “the particular place I have always longed for—of living with him and writing alone. I think, perhaps, it all accounts for my indifference to the children. . . . Without him, they seem to touch me so vaguely.” She added, “I do promise, however, not to dump them on the world without taking adequate justification.”
A few months later she wrote, “The farther away I am from homes, families, houses that resemble my own—the happier I am.” There was, it seems, a little bit of Eepersip in all of the Folletts.
Helen begged Wilson to be a part of the children’s lives, even if he wouldn’t be a part of hers. They needed him, she insisted—Barbara especially. Didn’t he care that Barbara felt betrayed?
Wilson wrote back, “As to Barbara: I will tell you again, as I have always told you, that I’m not going to be party to any competition for her attention or affection. Her attitude of whole-hearted support of your position and hostility to mine is exactly what I most wish it to be, and I wouldn’t for anything in the world curry any sort of favor with her.” Wilson didn’t want Barbara on his side because he didn’t want her in his life. He didn’t want to be responsible for caring for the girls at all: “They must go with you, be yours,” he wrote. If Barbara was angry at him, so much the better. Then she would leave him alone.
If Barbara had wanted to run away before, now she had justification. A house in which one parent was conspicuously absent and the other miserable and blaming you for the end of her marriage could very quickly become a place that a child might want to flee.
And so she did.
In June, about three months after Wilson left the family, Barbara took the train to see him in the redbrick row house he was renting with Margaret on Perry Street in Greenwich Village. It’s not clear exactly what transpired, as the only record of this visit is a brief mention in a letter Helen wrote to a friend. Helen reported that Wilson was cold and indifferent to Barbara and that Barbara was stunned. The next morning, back in New Haven, Barbara didn’t come downstairs for breakfast. Helen went to her room to check on her and saw that she hadn’t slept in her bed. She panicked.
Barbara had snuck out of the house at three in the morning and walked in the dark for three miles. It was a straight shot down Prospect Street to Union Station. She was a shape moving in the darkness, passing under oak trees, in and out of the moonlight, past the darkened colonial homes in which people were fast asleep. Being out and about in the cool night air while the rest of the world sleeps is exhilarating, an excitement tinged with danger. Eventually, she arrived at the train station, a grand, hulking brick structure with large arched windows. She caught the four o’clock train. She would ride it for sixty miles to Pelham, New York, to stay with family friends. When the engine lurched into motion and emerged from the sleepy predawn town, she must have felt a little giddy. She could leave too.
She came home a few days later, but by then Helen was despairing, sensing that the trouble was only just beginning. “You have no idea how she has changed,” she wrote to Anne. “She declares she has as much right to her freedom as her father has to his.” Wilson’s departure had awakened something in Barbara, something jagged and dark—a need to run.
Helen decided to take the girls to the cottage on Lake Sunapee alone that summer. Friends would be there and it would be good to get away from the family house on Armory Street. One day, Wilson showed up at the cottage to discuss a divorce. He and Helen fought bitterly. Barbara was tired of these “Family Scenes,” as she had begun to call them. She walked out of the cottage to float on a raft in the lake. Lying on the raft, looking out at the wooded peninsulas, the rocks and pines that lined the shore, and the sun sparkling on the water, Barbara suddenly understood something. The universe was huge, and Lake Sunapee was just a speck in it. God must have to use a microscope, she thought. She was small, her parents were small, and everything they worried or thought about was small. Why couldn’t they see what she saw? She felt lucky, lying on her raft in the lake, not being drawn into such trivial things. The world was beautiful and they were missing it. It would all be over before they knew it.
—
During this period Barbara developed some cynical ideas about marriage. It was the antithesis of freedom, and freedom mattered most. Not long after her father left, she discovered that one of her sailor friends was getting married. She was outraged and wrote him a scathing letter: “You must not, you must not, YOU MUST NOT! Don’t you understand, mad shipmate? Where’s your freedom now, where will it be later? Where the mad adventures . . . we won’t look at you with a wife.” She signed her letter, “Your enraged shipmate, Blackheart.”
It was only natural that the end of her parents’ marriage had made her jaded. Why would someone give up the camaraderie of shipmates for something so flimsy as marriage? On some level her rejection of marriage and staunch support of adventure was a defense of her father, even if only subconsciously. He wasn’t a deserter; he just had an adventurous soul. She was straining to reconcile the fact that the very thing she loved most about him—his ferocious defense of freedom—had caused her to lose him. After the incident when she visited him and Margaret on Perry Street, Barbara was rarely in touch with him. Part of her still admired her father and wanted to be loved by him, though outwardly she claimed otherwise.
Her divided heart comes through in her letters. In one she writes, “He isn’t exactly what you’d call a Man.” She called Margaret and Wilson “the Farents,” likely a merging of “Folletts” and “parents,” though one could just as easily imagine the F standing for “fake” or “far.” Barbara wrote, “I know nothing of them and I really don’t care a damn now.” But two months later, she couldn’t help but ask a family friend, “Have you seen or heard anything from the Farents? I confess a mild sort of curiosity.” One night she told her mother, “You know I used to pretend I didn’t care, but I did care more than anyone will ever know.” Over the next decade, she would hardly see him at all.
Barbara was developing a philosophy, the root of which contained a contradiction. Everyone should do exactly as they please and run off to the mountains whenever the mood struck them, but they should also be unerringly loyal. She had written, “There should be nothing to make a man or a woman happier than a pack of real honest-to-goodness friends, who will always stand by you in your troubles of which you are sure to have many.” In the real world, complete loyalty is hard enough to find, all the more so paired with its opposite—total freedom. But Barbara fervently embraced these two warring ideas.
—
Wilson’s letters to Helen were becoming increasingly desperate. He must have his freedom, he said. He was anxious to put his marriage behind him so he could create a new life with Margaret. At one point, he threatened to disappear: “And if I am left in my present situation I shall really be forced out of my house and connections and into disappearance from the same.” Helen told a friend that she was worried he would vanish or commit suicide if she didn’t give him a divorce but that she would sooner let him do that.
And then Wilson did disappear. In June, Alfred Knopf fired him. The affair was indecent. There had been gossip, and Alfred felt he couldn’t trust Wilson’s judgment anymore. Alfred knew Helen and the children and told Wilson he had until August 15 to go. Shortly before that, Helen had come to New York t
o see Alfred. It’s not clear what they discussed. The fact that Wilson was fired not long afterward suggests that she may have had something to do with it. Perhaps her meeting was a final attempt to get Wilson back. Or perhaps she knew their marriage was a lost cause and the meeting was purely vindictive. She had lost everything. Perhaps he should too.
Whatever her plan, it mostly backfired. Wilson wrote to Helen, “My career as Wilson Follett is done.” He went on to say that he had every intention of supporting her and the girls, though obviously it would be harder to do now that he didn’t have income. His only hope of getting a reputable job was to marry Margaret. Couldn’t Helen see that this was in her own interest? “I have been extremely ill and feeble,” he groveled. He was “in that condition in which a man is likely to go pathetic.”
Meanwhile Barbara received five hundred dollars from Harper’s to sail around the Caribbean and the South Seas for a year and write about her adventure. In a last-ditch effort to wrench Wilson from Margaret, Helen suggested that he go with Barbara.
“My whole instinct and wish the instant I can shed New York will be to head north not south,” Wilson responded emphatically. “I’ve responsibilities other than financial which wouldn’t be at all well served by my running away with Barbara . . . To this much I might add that if by spectacular luck I should get abreast of the financial difficulties with any margin of ease to spare, I should want to use the margin to make something of myself after all these years . . . I don’t put myself first, but I don’t see any reason for not putting myself next after the discharge of my material obligations.”
The matter was settled. If Wilson was going to start his life over again, Barbara and Helen would too. Helen sent four-year-old Sabra to stay with a family friend, Margaret Tyler, in New Haven and told Barbara she would join her on her journey. Wilson, Helen said, was allowed to visit Sabra at Margaret Tyler’s, but he was not to take her to his apartment with Margaret in New York. She told Anne that should she die on the trip, she wanted her to arrange for Sabra’s care. Before Helen left, she considered burning the letters between her and Wilson. “You see we were never away from each other without a daily letter,” she wrote to Anne. But she couldn’t bring herself to do it. “I want Bar and Sabra to know something of the greatness that was so fine and is so rare.”