by Laura Smith
I considered the idea that I was at another turning point, that now my life was operating on a fairly predictable cycle in which every couple of years I was faced with a decision: stay or go. I could ignore the itch for something new, continue with things the way they were, or I could make a drastic change. The possible lives that would result from those two options were very different, and this excited and scared me—it excited me because, at nearly thirty, the facts of my life were still malleable. It scared me perhaps for the very same reason.
—
Helen’s book about her sailing voyage with Barbara was called Stars to Steer By. The book ends at a dock in Gray’s Harbor, near Hoquiam, Washington. The five-masted, two-hundred-foot Vigilant they had sailed in on was moored. They stood on its deck alone. All of a sudden, Barbara announced that she wanted to climb the rigging and sit on the crosstrees—the T-shaped wooden beams at the topmast, over one hundred feet in the air. When she reached the top, she stood suspended above the decks, the harbor, and the other ships. In the distance, she could see the evergreen hills of pine, fir, and spruce. She thought about a Tongan prince who had proposed to her during the voyage, but that thought was soon eclipsed by another: the sea. Why would she marry a Tongan prince when she could have the whole world? They were only just to shore and she felt a fierce hunger to set sail again. Helen ends the book with the question Barbara always asked when they were on land too long: “When do we go to sea again?”
One night, between Honolulu and Washington, Helen and Barbara stood on the deck. Clouds sped across the night sky in front of the moon. “Everything was racing,” Helen wrote, “sea, moon, clouds, ship.”
“On like this forever and ever . . . ,” Barbara said, feeling the thrust of the ship, the wind against her face and through her hair.
Helen turned to Barbara and asked, “Are you satisfied now, shipmate? Have you everything?”
“Everything,” Barbara said. “It’s perfect.”
She wanted everything. In her novels, she imagines that satisfaction can be found in a place. But we don’t see the place in The House Without Windows. In Lost Island, Barbara is dishonest about what could really satisfy her protagonist. Jane was a thinly veiled version of herself, and she never would have been content to stay on any one island forever. But that moment on the deck of the Vigilant, as she stood in the dark, heading off to a new adventure, Barbara had finally found what she was looking for. She wanted motion. There was no single place for Barbara, no single life. She wanted all the places so she could be endlessly stirred by wonder.
Wanting everything seems like an excellent way to set yourself up for disappointment. But what if you accept the yearning, what if the yearning is the only thing that can satisfy? Wilson had sought to describe this idea in No More Sea, settling on a hunger for perpetual motion between land and sea.
Teju Cole wrote of fernweh, “The cure and the disease are one and the same.” Once you satisfy the need to be in the faraway place by going there, the place is no longer far away. It is like the horizon—a place you can never reach. What you need is a vessel—something to transport you, push you onward to the next island and the next and the next.
TEN
What went wrong with Barbara and Nick depends on whom you ask. I found a record of their divorce papers in the archives at Columbia University. It lists Barbara’s absence as the reason for the divorce. She had, at that point, been missing for three years. I had always found this length of time surprising, mostly because Nick had actually wanted a divorce months before Barbara vanished, so waiting three years seemed like a long time, though perhaps it was understandable under the circumstances. But one day, while searching another newspaper archive, I found an article showing that he had, in fact, tried to divorce Barbara once before, two years after she vanished. Barbara’s family, as far as I could tell, did not know about this divorce attempt. I quickly contacted the Middlesex Probate Court and requested the documents. A few weeks later, they came in the mail. They were different from those he filed the second time, most notably for the reasons he stated for wanting a divorce. They neglected to mention the fact that, at this point, no one had seen Barbara in two years.
December 12, 1941, the day Nick testified at the Middlesex Probate and Family Court in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was one of the coldest days of the year. He told the judge that Barbara had been “cruel” to him. His examples were that she had vetoed his suggestions for entertaining guests at a party, “failed to cooperate at home,” and went on summer vacation without him. The judge, John C. Leggat, interrupted.
“Did she ever strike you? Are you afraid of her?” he asked.
“No,” Nick said.
“Did she take care of the home?”
“No,” Nick answered, adding that it was he who had installed their curtains—not she.
“That is no cause for divorce,” Judge Leggat said. He dismissed the case.
Reading these documents recalled the passage in The House Without Windows when Eepersip comes across a little cottage in the woods and is momentarily entranced. But she snaps out of it and sees “those useless decorations called curtains. To think of it! when there was a carpet so much lovelier of green grass or of white sand—and no windows to be curtained!” It was an uncanny detail, a coincidence, but it showed that Barbara had been prescient, had imagined as a twelve-year-old child that houses would be snares for her. But were housekeeping details really what ended the marriage?
—
The year before Barbara vanished, Nick was traveling often with Edwin Land, a cofounder of Polaroid, experimenting in polarizing light for photography. Barbara was working at the American Board for Commissioners for Foreign Missions, a Christian missionary society, as a secretary. The offices were on Beacon Street, just around the corner from their apartment; her daily comings and goings had contracted to a few blocks. She had only recently started speaking to her father again and had not published a book since the age of fourteen, though she continued to write regularly. She had spent five years, off and on, working on Lost Island, but those days were over. She had hoped to sell it to Harper & Brothers, but they didn’t take it.
Thanks to Nick’s job, they had financial stability. Barbara’s family had never been fiscally savvy, mostly because they weren’t very interested in money. The security Nick’s job provided seemed to have a flattening effect on her. Without something to struggle for, she was reminded of what she was missing. She wrote to Alice, “My greatest worry now, when I have time to stop and think about it, is that I am in a rather difficult position as far as Adventure is concerned where that evasive spirit may have trouble locating me! Life right now is a very quiet adventure, though pleasant, at that.”
She was studying dance and growing weary of her work. “I am at the same job, doing much the same things as before, and liking it just well enough to hang on; or, rather, not disliking it quite enough to leave.” She had a vague sense that something more to her liking was out there. “If I had any bright ideas about what to leave it for I might actually leave,” she wrote, but she couldn’t muster the urgency she had once felt. The world seemed to be constricting—the adventures on ships, the dramatic mountain scenery, the long, action-filled days spent discovering new wooded paths seemed so distant to her now.
In the summer of 1938, she and Nick couldn’t get coinciding vacation time from work, so they spent much of the summer apart. Or at least that’s how Barbara told it. In letters she makes it sound like an unfortunate but unavoidable matter of mismatched work calendars. She doesn’t mention that Nick was upset. But this was the summer that Nick cited in his divorce papers—when Barbara went on vacation without him.
Barbara was given a month off from work. She went on a canoe trip in Canada with a friend. She was in touch with her father again, so she visited him, Margaret, and their two children for a week in Bradford, Vermont. Wilson and Margaret’s daughter, Jane, was three, an
d their son, Wilson Tingley, whom they called “Ting,” had just been born. They were living in a house overlooking the Connecticut River “with not an ugly thing in sight,” as her father liked to say. Margaret and Wilson had been married for four years, and Margaret and Barbara were on good enough terms to now regularly write letters to each other, though the letters no longer exist. Barbara and her father spent an afternoon gardening together. She described that day as “heavenly,” though she still remarked, “I can never really be myself with them, they are so sort of formal without at all meaning to be.” Wilson and Margaret were in extreme financial distress—they were at risk of being evicted from their home—but Barbara noted that their children were thriving, and she mostly recalled the visit fondly.
The next summer, the summer of 1939, she went on vacation alone again. Nick was traveling all across the country for work. Barbara visited Alice and her friend Marjorie Houser Susie in California. (Marjorie was a close but relatively recent friend of Barbara’s, though little is known about their relationship since their letters no longer exist.) While in California, Barbara also attended a dance program. Modern dance was her new obsession and she took classes with “big shots” at Mills College, in Oakland. She had planned a longer stay with Alice, but while she was there, a letter arrived from Nick. The marriage was over, he said.
Barbara was stunned. There had been no warning—or at least so she claimed. She handed the letter to Alice and Marjorie and they pored over it, trying to understand. The wording was vague, but something in it—or perhaps the suddenness of the decision—made the women think that Nick was having an affair. Barbara didn’t know it at the time, but Nick was so certain of his decision that he sent an identical copy of the letter to Bennington, Vermont, her stop prior to California, in case she was still there.
Barbara got on the next bus to Brookline. The trip took five days and she hardly slept. The broad flat expanse of the golden prairies rolled by her window, but she didn’t notice it. Instead she imagined scenes from the conversation she would have with Nick, rehashing the things she would say to him, the things he might say to her. She thought about the possibility of another woman. Who was she—if she even existed? If Nick was leaving her for another woman, then history was on repeat. Her marriage was ending exactly as her parents’ had. She was determined not to let this happen. They would work through it.
Maybe she shouldn’t bring up the possibility of another woman, she thought. In her letters to Alice from this time, she argued that she was to blame, not him—though how exactly she didn’t say. Marriages fall apart in pieces—each wrong and misunderstanding, small on its own, adding to the weight of a pile. Nick had declared their pile insurmountable, but Barbara was sure he had acted too soon. She just needed to convince him. She saw saving her marriage as a question of strategy. If she just thought about it enough and behaved intelligently, she could change his mind. It doesn’t seem to have occurred to her that feelings are more unruly than that. She sent Alice a postcard from Kansas City. “Am really feeling O.K. and well under control!” She thanked her for all her moral support and said she would write as soon as she had news. She was scared but hopeful.
Barbara was shaking when she finally arrived at the apartment on Tuesday night. But when she opened the front door, it was dark and still. No one was home. This was better, she told herself; Nick’s absence would give her a chance to take a bath and rest. But as she walked through the rooms, she noticed that Nick’s toothbrush was missing. So was a piece of luggage. She panicked, lunging at the phone, dialing every number she could think of. Nobody answered.
Finally she reached someone at Polaroid. She told the man on the other end of the line that she had come home unexpectedly from vacation and needed to speak to Nick immediately. Nick was in New York, the man said, but would probably be back in Brookline the next day. He told her the name of a hotel where he might be staying. Barbara called the hotel, but Nick wasn’t there.
She got on the phone again and this time she reached a doctor friend. He came right over with sleeping pills, whiskey, and hamburgers. He told her she was lucky that Nick wasn’t home that night, that it would be better to see him when she was more in command of her emotions.
In the morning, the world seemed a shade different. The apartment now appeared well lit and alive with the sounds of passing cars and people from the street below. The frenzy had released her, and in its place was a weary calm. She spent the day quietly tidying up the apartment, reading, and listening to the radio. The coal-fire engine on the B&A Railroad that ran down her street occasionally rumbled by. She didn’t leave the house, waiting for the phone to ring with some news of Nick.
The phone did ring at least twice that day, but it wasn’t Nick. One time it was someone from Polaroid, and the next time it was Nick’s younger brother, Howard. He said he would come for dinner to keep her company and Nick would probably return that night. But Nick didn’t come home that night or the next. Barbara couldn’t recall how she spent the time; all the waiting and worrying seemed to obliterate the present.
Nick finally appeared on Friday. He told Barbara that yes, he was having an affair, though he didn’t tell her if it was serious or whom it was with. Barbara dug her nails into her hands and listened. She didn’t say anything reproachful. “I don’t blame him in the least,” she wrote to Alice. “He really thought I didn’t care; only, instead of saying anything about it so that I could have done something about it before, he just kept quiet and everything slid and slid. But it’s really my fault; I had it coming to me, I know . . . I think that, if I can really prove that I’m different, why maybe things will work out.” It was she who needed to change, she believed, not him. She thought of her mother. She would not wind up like her—left by her husband for another woman. “I think maybe I could teach Helen a thing or two or three at this point!” she wrote to Alice. “I wonder if maybe she could not have won her game, if she had played it cautiously and quietly.”
Immediately after Nick’s return, they went to Vermont and then to Cape Cod because they had long-standing plans to do so. They swam and sailed with their friends and tried to snatch moments alone to discuss their “Situation,” as Barbara called it. It must have been awful, to play the happy couple frolicking in the sun but to know all the time that the marriage might be over. In Cape Cod, Barbara asked Nick if he wanted to save the relationship. It’s strange that she allowed ten days to pass before asking this, but guessing at feelings and motives was her method rather than frank conversation. And Barbara knew she might not like the answer. “I had had the feeling up till then that he definitely did not want to,” she wrote to Alice. “So imagine my amazement, my almost hysterical delight, when he said yes, he wanted to make a go of it. Right away he qualified it, of course.”
“Don’t get too excited about that,” he told her. “I’m not sure that I can.” Barbara was thrilled, despite his cautioning. If he wanted to, that was all she needed. She would be on her best behavior. She would win him back. When they got back from Cape Cod, for reasons that her letters don’t explain, they began to look for a new apartment. Nick told Barbara she could do the hunting, which she took to be a promising sign.
During this time, Marjorie counseled Barbara closely. Marjorie had been with her in California when Nick’s letter arrived and Barbara relied on her input. At one point, Marjorie even telephoned Nick to discuss their problems with him and reported the conversation back to Barbara. It’s a telling detail: Barbara didn’t feel she could talk to Nick directly.
Barbara became a sleuth of sorts, trying to figure out what had gone wrong in order to save the marriage. Some days she felt quite hopeful. Others, she thought divorce was imminent. Nick was the laconic type so she had to look beyond his words for clues. “This morning, when he left to go to work, he gave me a sort of rough pat which is absolutely the first gesture of affection of any kind that has come my way!” she wrote at the end of August. She watched h
im when he came home from work. She thought she detected a small change in his demeanor. “He looks a little different, more natural, less strained. He moves more in the old easy manner—not harshly, abruptly, angrily, as at first. And he sounds different . . . the tortured note, and the tortured look, the terrible strain, the angry glowering, have pretty much disappeared.”
Another sign: he encouraged her to quit her job to find a more rewarding one. “He wants to see me live about as fully as possible,” she wrote. At first this concern for her well-being struck her as a good omen. But then a dark thought occurred to her. Housework—and her unwillingness to do it—had been central to their disagreements. If she had a new, more demanding and interesting job, she would presumably do less housework. “It apparently doesn’t mean as much to him as I thought it did, to have me personally doing it.” Now she was confused. If housekeeping was not where she had gone wrong, then what was it? She considered the idea that he was encouraging her to find a better job so that he could feel less guilty about leaving her. She hadn’t been feeling like herself. Even her dancing had changed. “I get tired terribly easily, and am afraid I’ve lost a lot of what I gained this summer in strength and ability.” She wasn’t sleeping. And Nick must have noticed the anxious way she read his every movement. “I feel that maybe the holes into which I fell are still uncharted after all!”
She was right. One hole in particular was still uncharted, but she refused to look there: Nick’s affair. What kind of pull was this new love exerting on him? “I have no way of knowing,” Barbara wrote. “Nick is the kind of person who may very well never tell me just what it was all about.” She didn’t know if the relationship was serious, how long it had been going on, or even if it was still going on. And, perhaps most tellingly, she didn’t ask. Perhaps Nick would have told her but she didn’t really want to know. The threat of someone else was too great—and too far beyond her control. Like a foreign species entering the delicate ecosystem of their marriage, the lover could wildly alter the environment.