by Laura Smith
Suddenly Helen didn’t trust Nick anymore. She wrote to the Brookline police. “It seems incredible to me that my daughter’s husband did not turn the country upside down to find his wife.” And then, perhaps sensing that someone could say the same of her, she added, “Certainly, over the years, I have taken it for granted that such a course was being pursued.” She explained that she had been busy with an illness and raising Sabra.
Helen wrote to an old sailor friend of Barbara’s, who wrote back to say he hadn’t seen her. She met with Barbara’s former colleagues. They didn’t have anything new to tell her. The police sent Helen a section of a letter from Ruth Isabel Seasbury, who had worked with Barbara at the American Board for Commissioners for Foreign Missions in Brookline. “[Nick] and Barbara are to the best of my knowledge and belief very happily married, but for some time had had a very sharp difference of opinion on a matter which both regarded as of fundamental importance. Barbara had seemed very unhappy about it especially in her last day at home.” It’s a frustrating letter that raises more questions than it answers. The “matter of fundamental importance” is never revealed—perhaps for propriety’s sake, as Seasbury was likely referencing the affair. But what if it was something else? The only new detail the letter reveals is that on the day Barbara vanished, one of the last people to have seen her sensed that she was upset. Barbara would presumably have been agitated at work if she were about to run away from everyone and everything in her life. She might have also been agitated if she was afraid her husband might harm her. Or maybe her unhappiness was a sign that she intended to harm herself. Whatever it was, something was noticeably off.
Without new information, the search soon ended. Alice thought it was useless to try. “Helen, I believe—let us believe—that she lives somewhere, still enjoying sunsets and mountains and water.” Any time Helen brought up a lead or clue, Alice dismissed it, saying, “But it is no use to think of that—now. The dark waters closed over her long ago.” In her letters she seems eager to talk about Barbara, but only up to a point. She does not really want to look for her, or do anything that might reveal new information.
In 1960, Helen contacted a child psychologist, Harold McCurdy, who specialized in child prodigies. She wanted him to analyze Barbara’s letters and writings. McCurdy’s eleven-year-old daughter had recently died, and he was moved by the story of the brilliant lost girl. Helen and McCurdy decided to cowrite a book about Barbara, which consisted of Barbara’s letters alongside McCurdy’s analysis, entitled Barbara: The Unconscious Autobiography of a Child Genius. If Helen could not have her daughter in the flesh, she would have to settle for her on the page. She was also preserving Barbara’s memory for Sabra, who was deeply wounded by her sister’s disappearance.
Despite her turbulent childhood, Sabra had done well for herself. She was Phi Beta Kappa at Barnard and became Princeton University’s first female graduate student in 1961, entering the history PhD program as a “test case” despite the fact that she already had a master’s degree from Columbia and was a history professor at a college in New Brunswick. She married the son of her mother’s friend Anne, and they had three children together.
Decades later, Sabra would be haunted by a memory, telling her husband about the time Barbara had come to New York for Thanksgiving, the month before she vanished. Sabra and Helen had walked her to Grand Central Station, where Barbara would take the train back to Boston. They had stood at the crowded station at one end of the platform waving, and Barbara had turned around and waved happily back. Then she had boarded the train. It was the last time they ever saw her. She was gone just like that. It’s an unremarkable moment, though perhaps that is the point—how fragile life is, how quickly and unceremoniously someone can be whisked away forever.
At one point or another, Sabra had been left behind by everyone in her family. First her father, then her mother, then Barbara. Alice wrote to Helen, “She did love, she did value Sabra. Sabra must know that.” But in the total silence after Barbara disappeared, it must have been hard to remember this. It was easier for Sabra to see herself in the role Barbara had written for her: Eepersip’s little sister, a “gigantic burden,” the one to whom Eepersip says, “If I were to go back home now, I should just die—even with you.”
Years passed and one by one Barbara’s friends and family began to die. Wilson died in 1963 and Alice in 1964. In 1970, thirty-one years after Barbara vanished, Sabra and Helen carried several large boxes of Barbara’s papers—her letters, novels, poems, education materials, and drawings—to the Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Columbia. The two women sat with the archivist and signed a blue piece of paper giving ownership of Barbara’s papers to the university. It was the nearest thing to closure they would ever get. Helen died later that year.
I thought about what Alice had written to Helen: “I have always felt that Nick could if he had wanted to, have told us more about his last talk with her and given us perhaps some clue.”
There are no letters to or from Nick, no accounts from Nick’s perspective. When Barbara described him, she called him “a simple person, and his family is simple.” But she had also said he had “unsuspected depths.”
Who was Nickerson Rogers and what role did he play in Barbara’s disappearance?
TWELVE
When I first saw a photograph of Nick Rogers, I knew instantly it was him. One of Barbara’s letters mentioned that his picture had appeared in a 1938 issue of Life. I had no guidance beyond that. As I sat in the library and scrolled through the pages on my computer, I came across a photo and stopped. It’s not a single image but a triptych, and in each frame Nick is demonstrating Polaroid’s technology by holding up two large circular lenses in front of his face. The first frame shows much of his face, but he is squinting in concentration, and his eyes are darkened by shadow. In the second frame, he moves the two lenses closer, like a Venn diagram, and the area where they overlap is semiopaque, obscuring some of his face. In the final frame, he is completely obscured. The photograph seemed to be taunting me.
I decided to make a call I had been dreading. I had tracked down Nick’s daughters, and a little over a month earlier I had sent one of them a letter about Barbara. She had either ignored it or never received it. I preferred to believe it was the latter.
I knew very little about Nick’s eldest daughter except that she was seventy years old and lived with her husband near a state park in Alaska. It is a striking place, with snowcapped mountains and over twelve hundred square miles of wetlands and boreal forests. I imagined that she shared a love of the outdoors with her father and that this might make her more susceptible to Barbara’s story.
My letter, I imagined, might be the first she had ever heard of Barbara. Would her stoic, woodsman father have taken the time to explain his previous life to his daughters? I imagined my letter would ignite a fever of curiosity, that she would pull down boxes from the attic, that maybe she would sit at her computer at night, scouring the Internet for clues about Barbara.
I felt bad about calling up an aging woman in her home with a question I would never state outright, but that would be lurking in the back of my mind: What was your father capable of?
I dialed her number quickly and listened to the phone ring. A strong female voice answered.
“Is this Carol?” I asked.
“It is,” she said curtly.
“This is Laura Smith. I sent you a letter a month ago about your father’s first wife?”
She said nothing.
“Did you get it?” I asked.
“I did.”
There was a long pause.
She sighed. “I meant to answer. I meant to write to tell you that my sister and I talked it over for hours and decided nothing good would come from it.”
Carol’s sister, Melissa,* lived in a French town in the foothills of the Pyrenees. I pictured the two sisters standing in their respective kitchens talking on the pho
ne, looking out on their magnificent vistas. If they had talked for hours, perhaps they had seriously considered sharing their story. But there was none of that wondering in Carol’s voice now. She sounded like a tough lady, the kind who didn’t appreciate the prying of strangers and who, when she got an idea in her head, didn’t budge.
But then again, she stayed on the phone.
“I feel skeptical of why you’re doing this,” she said.
“I know,” I said. “To be perfectly honest, I don’t always feel sure why I’m doing this.”
This seemed to soften her slightly. “You know,” she said finally, “you’re never going to figure out what happened to Bar. Things were different then. Sometimes people just disappear. I know people who have disappeared.”
She knew people who had disappeared? I didn’t know a single one. My life was filled with people whose whereabouts were known. But more than all her vanished friends, it struck me how she had called Barbara “Bar.” It was so familiar, it rolled off her tongue so naturally, like Barbara was just another friend or family member.
“You seem to know a lot about her,” I said.
“No, I really don’t.”
“How did you find out about Barbara?” I asked.
“My mother and father told me,” she said.
“When?” I asked.
“When I was a teenager.”
“What did your parents say?”
“I don’t know. It was a long time ago.”
“It must have been strange to hear about this mystery in your father’s past. I know that if I had been a teenager, I would have been very interested in a previous life of my father’s.”
She paused. “I think you’re reading too much into it.”
Maybe I was.
And then, at some point in our conversation, Carol said two things that stunned me.
She mentioned a private investigator—one who her father had hired—and told me that if that guy couldn’t find Barbara, I probably wouldn’t be able to either. I told her this was a valid point. But I flagged the detail in my mind. This was the first I had heard of any private investigator. Helen must not have known about it either—or surely she would have contacted him and included her letter to him in the materials she had submitted to the Columbia archive. She was fastidious about Barbara’s papers and had included unremarkable letters to police, coworkers, and former friends. One gets the sense, going through Helen’s files, that she had deliberately chosen to include all leads, perhaps anticipating that someday someone would seek to retrace her steps. She and Nick were not on good terms and there was no evidence of correspondence between them following her threatening letter in 1952. Perhaps Nick had hired the private investigator after their last correspondence, and she had never known.
Why would you hire a private investigator if you had committed a crime? Perhaps to cover your tracks, to make it look like you were doing everything you could to look for your missing wife. But if that were the case, why hadn’t he told her mother he was doing it? I decided I would need to follow up on this, but I would need to tread cautiously, winning Carol’s trust slowly over time. She might eventually be more amenable to sharing details, but I could feel her clamming up over the phone and feared that a wrong question would result in a dial tone.
The second surprising thing she told me was that she had sent a box to Barbara’s archives at Columbia.
“What was in the box?” I said.
“Letters between my father and Barbara.” And then she paused. “They never even acknowledged getting it.” She sounded a little hurt. My pulse quickened. Barbara’s letters to friends and family had revealed so much. What if I could now see into her relationship with Nick?
Eventually I decided to end the conversation. I knew I might regret it, that I might never hear from Carol again, but I was uncomfortable and wanted to make a gesture of good faith, in the hope that she might be willing to talk to me more later, perhaps when she was feeling less defensive. I had likely ruined her day, dredging up who knows what memories. My interest in Barbara didn’t seem to justify another person’s pain.
But more than that, I felt a glimmer of excitement. There was a man—a man who had searched for Barbara. And there was a box of letters. And that box, if it still existed, was on Columbia’s campus just a short train ride from my apartment. I could picture it, tucked in the corner of some dark and dusty storage room, waiting to be found.
—
I went back to Columbia and asked a woman at the front desk about the box Nick’s daughter had sent. The head archivist, a woman in a neat, conservative dress, came to the reception area and looked at the donation records with me. “Yes,” she said, running her finger down the document. “We received a file.” The documents were filed with the materials that related to the child psychologist’s book, under the label “Nickerson Rogers Papers,” which I instantly recognized. I had seen those papers before and it had never occurred to me that these could possibly be the papers Carol had described. I asked to see the file again, in case I was mistaken. When she brought a thin folder to my table, I was disappointed. These weren’t personal letters. They were essays Nick had written in a college classics course, years before he met Barbara. They didn’t have anything to do with Barbara. They didn’t really have anything to do with him.
I called Carol back. There was no answer so I left a message. I told her that Columbia had the papers, but they weren’t as she had described. I asked her to call me back. I didn’t hear anything, and after a few weeks I called again, saying I wanted to talk only about the papers and the private investigator and nothing else. I heard nothing. I sent a long letter explaining that I wanted to know more about the investigator. Still nothing. I never heard from her again.
THIRTEEN
Our first summer in Brooklyn P.J. went away for a weekend to visit a friend in Chicago. When he returned we went to a café in the West Village for dinner and sat at the bar. P.J. seemed electric, bursting with something to tell me.
“What’s going on?” I said.
He explained that early on in the trip, his friend* had revealed to him that he had been curious about having sexual experiences with people in addition to his longtime partner. It wasn’t about dating other people; in fact, he wanted her to be part of the experiences. He said he wanted to explore all aspects of sexuality with her, to share everything with her.
I was shocked. This was one of the last couples I would have expected this from. They seemed so paired, always cooking together, preferring a night at home reading to a rowdy night out. They were traditional seeming, cautious by nature. But then I stiffened, thinking, Oh God, I hope P.J. doesn’t want to do that.
“Is this what you want?” I whispered, looking around to make sure no one could hear us. The restaurant was loud and crowded, but suddenly I felt exposed and certain that the balding man in the black glasses next to us was listening.
“Well, on some level,” P.J. said. “But jealousy seems inevitable. In any case, talking about it honestly seems like a good thing.”
I didn’t like the glimmer in his eye. I signaled to the waiter that we were going to need more wine.
“I don’t think I could ever do it,” I said. Though our friends’ situation had nothing to do with us, it felt personal. Anything I said about their potential nonmonogamy seemed a comment on our own relationship.
An open relationship struck me as messy and dangerous. What was the point? Why imperil a marriage if things were going well? I looked around the restaurant and suddenly felt overwhelmed. The waiters burst through the kitchen doors, weaving between the crowded tables with trays stacked with food. There were plates and wineglasses everywhere and everything was in motion—people putting on and taking off jackets, swinging open the front door, eating, laughing, and gesticulating. I hoped we would keep the conversation just that, a thrill to inject into our imaginations,
but not something we would actually do. I could tell P.J. was enjoying talking about it, and I had to admit that my heart was beating a little faster, though I couldn’t tell if it was from exhilaration or panic.
Eventually the fuzzy warmth of the wine relaxed me. Maybe it was fun to spend the evening in a lively restaurant locked in salacious conversation. The idea of P.J. feeling desires and keeping them secret from me gave them an unsavory, illicit quality, and cast me in the role of naive spouse and thought police. I didn’t want to be someone he had to hide things from. The touchiness of the topic seemed a reason to probe further, otherwise we’d be hiding things from each other and, perhaps even more insidiously, from ourselves. In fact, our friends’ openness seemed to be a sign of their intense closeness. How could they not talk openly about these desires? How could we not? Of course I had felt fleeting attractions in the past, but anything more than harmless flirtation was unthinkable. I could honestly say I had never truly been tempted, always dismissing the idea before it could blossom. Our attractions to others had been admitted only guiltily in the past. I felt suddenly pardoned from guilt.
A few weeks later when I asked P.J. what was going on with our friends, he had nothing new to report. They seemed in no rush to make decisions about monogamy, and I took comfort in their lack of urgency. There’s no reason to do anything drastic, I thought. It’s fun to talk about but maybe better not to do, I told myself.
P.J. and I spent the winter holed up in our tiny apartment, rushing on errands with our hoods up and heads down to avoid the biting wind. I applied for two journalism fellowships, one in Germany and Poland for the first part of the summer and one in the Canadian Rockies for the second part. I thought I would be lucky to get one, but a few months later, I found out I got both. P.J. and I would be spending the entire summer apart. On the rare occasions when he had to travel for work, I always woke up in the middle of the night confused. Where was he? I couldn’t picture getting on an airplane and sitting next to a stranger, shopping in the grocery store for one. I was equal parts nervous and thrilled.