by Laura Smith
Working through their problems was “going to be a long, slow job—almost intolerably so,” Barbara wrote. But chipping his way through the plaque of marital resentment likely didn’t sound very appealing to Nick, who was probably comparing that relationship to the clean slate he had with the other woman. It could take years with Barbara—if it ever happened at all. Nick was keeping a running tab of Barbara’s wrongdoings, and the smallness of some of the complaints suggests that he was looking for reasons to leave. Barbara could do a better job of taking care of the house, she could be more attentive, but she could not make Nick fall out of love.
“I think I am getting to be quite a woman of iron and steel,” she wrote to Alice in late August. “I think I’ve persuaded him to give me my chance . . . I think I’ll get it, and I think I can win if I’ve got the strength. I think he is a steady enough person, and a kind enough person and also enough of an easy-going person, so that he won’t go making drastic plunges if he doesn’t have to; and if I can make a pleasant sort of life for him, I think he’ll hang on.” I think, I think, I think.
At night, she took sleeping pills. “The days I can stand, because they are sort of full of little things; but the nights I could never stand without some kind of help in achieving oblivion!” She had envisioned herself as a brave adventurer. She was the one who left. But now, for the second time, the most important person in her life was on the verge of leaving her behind. The cycle was beginning again and she knew it. In November came her most ominous letter yet, written to Alice:
In my last letter I told you things were going well, and I thought they were. They continued to go well for a time—at least I thought so, and I was happy, and decided that the worst part of the ordeal was over. But that was too easy. No such luck! I don’t know what to say now. On the surface things are terribly, terribly calm, and wrong—just as wrong as they can be. I am trying—we are both trying. I still think there is a chance that the outcome will be a happy one; but I would have to think that anyway, in order to live; so you can draw any conclusions you like from that!
—
By December she was gone.
ELEVEN
It took Nick two weeks to report his wife’s disappearance. Around 10:00 P.M. on December 21, 1939, he walked out of their apartment and into the Brookline police station, an imposing building with large, arched windows and a manicured lawn. He approached the reception desk and told the officer he was there to report a missing person. The policeman recorded his statement in a black leather-bound logbook. Nick went to the morgue on Charles Street too, but he didn’t find Barbara there.
Then he waited some more. Barbara missed Christmas, the New Year, and her birthday in March. Later that month, he moved a few miles away to Cambridge and went back to the police station to give his new address in case anything turned up. In April, he went back again. This time, the police released an eight-state bulletin. Nick gave a more detailed description, which the officer took down in neat, black script:
Missing from Brookline since Dec. 7, 1939. Barbara Rogers, married, Age 26, 5-7, 125, fair complexion, black eyebrows, brown eyes. Dark auburn hair worn in a long bob, left shoulder slightly higher than right. Occasionally wears horn rimmed glasses.
No one responded to the bulletin. Nothing was written in the paper. No real investigation began.
When you walk out on someone it pauses the lives of those left behind. The vanished person’s clothes still hang in the closet, their books still rest on the nightstand, their mail continues to arrive. A long brown hair on Barbara’s pillow could have reminded Nick that she had only just been there. She was gone, but not entirely.
—
It is not clear if Barbara’s parents knew right away that she was gone. Nick must have told them by Christmas, when it would have been strange not to hear from her. When Helen found out, she largely left the details of the investigation up to Nick. He told her that the police in both Brookline and Boston were handling the case and that he would let her know if he heard anything. She was struggling with arthritis and vision issues, and she would later say that she didn’t get involved actively in the search because she was busy raising Sabra, who was now in high school. Besides, she trusted Nick to handle it. None of Helen’s letters or diaries from the time immediately following Barbara’s disappearance survive, so we can only speculate about her thinking.
Wilson didn’t seem to feel he was in a position to intervene. He had seen Barbara and Nick very little over the years and had never been comfortable around Barbara’s husband. Nick was quiet and unpretentious, while Wilson was literary and formal. They were awkwardly at odds.
At first, both Helen and Wilson expected Barbara to return. She had taken off before without notice or explanation, and so they reasoned that perhaps for the time being she did not wish to be found. While they had to admit that something terrible could have happened, they clung to more optimistic theories. Helen imagined that she had gone to sea. Wilson speculated that she had created an entirely new identity somewhere else. But as time passed, these scenarios seemed increasingly unlikely, and more sinister thoughts began to plague them. Helen considered the possibility that Barbara was lying in a hospital somewhere, suffering from amnesia or a nervous breakdown. What if she were dead? What if she had been murdered? Still they did nothing.
A year after Barbara went missing, Wilson heard a car coming down his drive as he was shoveling snow from his walkway in Vermont. It was freezing, just after dusk, and the car got stuck in the snow. He put down his shovel and didn’t think much of it until he heard a female voice call out. His heart skipped a beat. It was Barbara. In a moment he would have her in his arms. He ran over to the car, calling out, “Hullo! Hullo, there!”
But of course it wasn’t Barbara. It was just a young woman trying to find a shop to repair her typewriter. A phantom Barbara. His spirits plunged. But his disappointment transformed into hope. His certainty that it could have been Barbara had revealed something important to him.
In May 1941, a year and a half after Barbara vanished, Wilson published an anonymous letter in the Atlantic. It’s addressed to Barbara. He began by explaining that he could not believe she had been gone for a year: “It is preposterous that such a one should just drop out of existence for that length of time, as if she were one of the indistinguishable crowd.” He tells her about the woman with the typewriter: “Up to that evening, cold reason had made me partly doubt myself. Others to whom I should have looked for equal or greater faith had said that you were surely dead. When I told them steadily that you were surely not, did I quite believe my own words, or was I silencing with protest a conviction in my own mind that these others must be right—a certitude more dreadful than I could muster the courage to face quite yet?” But the woman had shown him what he truly believed: “It was brought home to me in February a few weeks after you vanished how deep, instinctive, and unshakable is my faith that you live and remember and in your own time will let us know how you fare. . . . I knew that you are you, that you would come.”
“I have seen you at best, for only a few days of any year, a few hours of any day. Yet then, as in the long interval and always, you were one of the permanently important persons in your father’s cosmos—the cosmos, you will at least grant, of someone to whom the few human beings who are necessary are very deeply necessary. What would it mean to the dweller in a mountain valley if a peak that he had contemplated steadily for a quarter of a century were suddenly blotted from the landscape? I do not have to tell you, to whom everything above the timber line is both thrilling and familiar.”
Wilson was now living in the myopia of family he had sought to avoid. The world was at war. The radio brought news of the Blitz and Hitler’s order for the invasion of the Soviet Union. Plans were already under way for Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor. But Wilson, who typically followed the news closely, suddenly didn’t care. “I say to myself in the morning, ‘This may be
the very day when she will come, or word from her or of her,’ and it seems that the sun is riveted in situ, that the hour for the mail stage will never arrive, that the moments are not successive drops in the flow called time, but each a frozen eternity.”
Barbara’s disappearance was a stunning reversal of the plot Wilson had imagined in No More Sea. In the book, the women lived their lives on the near end of a telescope, staring out to sea, waiting for men who would never come home. But now Wilson was the one who waited. He was learning that waiting for someone you love, when you’re not sure they will return, is agony.
He looked out his kitchen window on the cornfield behind his house, standing where Barbara had stood just a couple of years before when she had declared the garden too weedy. They had spent the day side by side, sweating as they pulled weeds out of the patch. The “eternal Now,” the wonderful feeling of total absorption in the present moment, had been destroyed by a “crawling agony of suspense.” He came across a book he thought Barbara might like and set it aside for her. When she came back, she might want to read it.
—
Wilson’s letter to the Atlantic seemed to take for granted that she had run away:
I think you launched your one-woman strike against a system of deferred payments and for the right to live richly, fully, fulfillingly in the continuous present.
It would profoundly interest me—I say it in admiration and love, without ironic intention—to know this: Have you found that right so simply obtainable? Or are you perhaps still assuring yourself that life will soon begin to assume the shape of your demands?—as soon, say, as you have recovered from the unavoidable wrench of separation, ceased to be hounded by a feeling that you are a deserter, and created for yourself a new place, a new identity?
He is shaming her, but there is a trace of envy in his tone—she had done what he had tried to do—and also of guilt. After the divorce, he had wanted to create a new life. He began a new family with Margaret. They had three children. He almost completely lost touch with the children from his previous marriages. He had even gone so far as to change his name. Roy was what Helen had called him. He had gone by Wilson (his middle name) professionally, but after the divorce he started using Wilson in all areas of his life. Margaret called him Wilson. Their children together thought of him as Wilson. In a new name, there is the wish for a new life—and the belief that we can start fresh if we make some gesture of demarcation.
In his letter, Wilson pleads with Barbara to understand the pain she is causing him, “Surely you will not recoil from knowing just this: that simply, humanly, sorely, I miss you.” He admonishes her, “To pretend that one could freely loop back, begin over, reverse oneself, be born again—that was to decimate, not to fulfill, oneself . . . life being so short and we not granted the option of trying its imperfect passages over again.”
Wilson repeated the refrain of his novel: “a normal woman cannot be herself without giving herself. Whatever she holds back, on some theory of saving her independence, her freedom of initiative, her selfhood, she holds back first of all from herself. There are two-person relationships—parenthood, marriage, all friendship worth the name—that by their very nature constantly ask you to throw yourself wholeheartedly into serving the other person’s necessities.” But Barbara was not like the Teaswith women. She was more like the Teaswith men.
—
In 1947, eight years after Barbara vanished, Helen also wrote to her. It was an anguished poem that slips uncomfortably between her dueling beliefs that Barbara was alive and that she wasn’t:
Where are you, child of the mountains and of the sea?
Did you climb the heights
To reach for the sun?
Did you sail over the horizon
To touch a lonely star?
You who created for all of us a shining world
of freedom and of radiance in words of
startling beauty,
Did you try to find that land?
Did you yearn for its beauty, its freedom?
’Tis well for you, my precious one. But for me, your mother?
You left me chained to fear and awful imaginings,
To a constant searching on
Buses, street cars, subways, trains, ships, planes—for
Your face among the millions,
The deep brown eyes, the hair, copper-tinted in the sun,
the puckish nose and laughing mouth,
You left me chained to despair and to a fading hope.
Come back, child of the mountains and of the sea!
—
Three years after Barbara vanished, Nick’s request for a divorce was finalized. He married Anne Bradley, the woman he’d had the affair with, though the affair was never mentioned in the divorce proceedings. Both times he filed, he said Barbara was at fault. She hadn’t taken care of the house. She had deserted him.
It’s not clear what year Anne met Nick, or under what circumstances. Another journalist who interviewed Anne shortly before she died in 2008 told me that Anne had met Barbara, though she didn’t say when or how, just that she had found Barbara charming. Was Anne a former colleague? She had taught in Vermont, as Barbara and Nick had briefly. Regardless, Nick appears to have found a steadier wife in Anne. She taught in a Head Start program in Connecticut beginning in 1932, and worked in preschool education throughout her life. Later she volunteered at the Exeter Library. They raised two daughters and had three grandchildren. They would remain married for the rest of Nick’s life.
—
In the days, months, and years following Barbara’s disappearance, everyone who swapped theories about what had happened came to this conclusion: that she had run away. It was what they wanted to believe. Marjorie, who was “as close a friend as Bar had, and certainly knew as much as anyone of those last few weeks,” told Alice that “Bar boasted to her that she could disappear if she wanted to, and never ‘leave a single trace’; that she’d dye her hair, pull out her eyebrows, completely change her personality, and that she could always take care of herself. Marjorie believes she did just that and still lives, really becoming by now a completely different Barbara.” Marjorie died in Anaconda, Montana, in 2004 at the age of ninety-three. But her daughter told me that for the rest of her life her mother continued to believe that Barbara had run away of her own free will.
Only Barbara’s closest friend, Alice Russell, came to the conclusion that Barbara was dead. The last letters from Barbara in the Columbia archives are written to Alice, and in 1949, ten years after Barbara vanished, Alice wrote to Helen arguing that Barbara couldn’t be alive because “it was impossible that she would have treated you, and Sabra, and all whom she loved with cruelty deliberate, for so long a time.”
But then one day Alice was sitting on a public bus in Pasadena when she looked up and saw a woman with Barbara’s chestnut-colored hair. A jolt of recognition surged through her. She would know that head anywhere. It was Barbara. The woman turned her head slightly to the side and Alice caught a glimpse of her profile. The woman who had so certainly been Barbara transformed into a stranger. All of Alice’s hopefulness drained from her. But just like Wilson’s experience, this incident made Alice reconsider her previous conviction. It was possible. Some part of her expected Barbara to knock on her kitchen door. She told Helen that she had even planned the wire she would send her when Barbara came. She didn’t reveal what it would say, probably out of sympathy for Helen, for whom it would have been too much to read: “Bar LIVES!”
Alice began to reevaluate what she thought Barbara was capable of. She wrote that her son-in-law “said she may well have got herself into a situation which she did not want to tell anyone in her former life about. As time went on, it would have grown harder and harder to do so. There was a streak of hardness in her—‘cruelty,’ as Sabra said—that would have acted as an iron deterrent.” Barbara could be very st
ubborn. Maybe she was capable of ditching them all.
“I think she meant to hurt Nick,” she theorized. “I think she meant to get away from a situation that was crucifying her, even if it meant cutting herself off from everything and everybody she loved and knew. She had ‘jumped hurdles’ before,” she wrote, quoting a phrase Barbara had used to describe her previous runaway experiences. “With you, I believe we will not now ever see her again; but I think she lives.”
Alice was torn by her love for Barbara and her belief that Barbara had committed “an act of egoism.” In one letter, she wrote, “I will always love Bar—she was one of the highlights of my life.” Rereading Barbara’s letters caused Alice acute pain. “Almost every line of hers makes you feel this vivid creature she was. She comes alive again, you see her.” In other letters to Helen, Alice was harsher, “Bar was a supreme egoist—perhaps it was partly her genius that made her that. She was completely centered in self and blind to the needs of others.”
One morning thirteen years after Barbara vanished, Helen woke up and decided to search for Barbara herself. Sitting in her apartment on the Upper West Side, she typed a letter to Nick requesting a detailed account of everything he had done to look for Barbara.
He didn’t respond. Helen wrote him a second, more threatening letter, “All this silence on your part almost looks as if you had something to hide concerning Barbara’s disappearance.” She went on, “You cannot believe I shall sit idle during my last few years and not make whatever effort I can . . .” She appealed to him as a father—his two daughters were young; how would he feel if one of them vanished? She signed off, “Kindness to others is often a rewarding experience to ourselves.”