The Art of Vanishing

by Laura Smith

  Anderson’s death seemed to create more questions than it provided answers. What was he doing on the other side of the country? It had been a month since he was last seen. What had he done in the meantime? Was there any significance to his being in Massachusetts, albeit eighty miles from Barbara? I now knew he was from Maine, though he had lived mostly in Seattle. Why had he been in Massachusetts at all? I was struck by the similarities of his and Barbara’s stories, both of them walking out on their spouses and then disappearing a mere two years apart. One body was found. One was not. The sea had been essential to both of them. It seemed that Anderson, in an apparent state of despair, had gone back to the sea to die. The extreme alienation of the last months of his life—his dreams of Alaska thwarted, his own dramatic exit replete with its striking scenery—was unsettling. It made me rethink Barbara’s story.

  Had Barbara known about Anderson’s death? It seemed highly unlikely. If she had known, she would have told their mutual friends. At the very least, she would have told her mother, who had been close to him, or Alice. But none of them knew.

  While Anderson was missing, Barbara had been traveling to New Hampshire on the weekends, where she and Nick were renting a little farmhouse near Squam Lake. They were busily decorating, bringing old furniture from Nick’s family’s attic. Wilson had given them a kitchen range. They were repairing the floors, plastering parts of the walls, and building fires to keep warm while they worked. They hoped that when winter came, the little farmhouse could be a skiing headquarters.

  It is possible that after her disappearance, Barbara went to Seattle, or to the last address she had for Anderson, and there she would have found out the truth. Or maybe she hadn’t tried to contact him at all. Maybe she had never given him a second thought after that final letter. I had wanted to believe a different story, which now sounded cliché: girl is rejected by her husband, but says screw you, leaves him, and returns to her true love. But Anderson’s death revealed that unless someone was lying, it appeared she had never spoken to a soul she had known from her previous life. It was a total severing that, while certainly possible, was hard to imagine.

  TWENTY-THREE

  Shortly before Thanksgiving, I went to Charlottesville for the weekend for my college roommate’s thirtieth birthday. I drove two friends and their husbands. P.J. stayed home and worked. The whole weekend I felt solitary, aware of myself as distinct from the other couples, though not necessarily in a negative way. I observed them closely. Traveling reveals the inner workings of a relationship in a way that can be hard to otherwise observe. How they make plans, how they pack, and how they deal with money is telling. I found myself marveling at them in the way that a floundering swimmer might admire a graceful one.

  My friend’s birthday celebration was a surprise party thrown in a lavish resort by her significantly older boyfriend, whom none of us had met. The bartender wore a tuxedo. Filet mignon was on the menu. There were ornate flower arrangements. None of us really belonged in that formal environment and this became increasingly apparent as the night wore on. Much to the horror of the staff and the other, mostly middle-aged, plaid- and argyle-wearing clientele, we got very drunk—my best friend from college incredibly so. I recalled all the fights we had gotten into as a result of her drinking. I had never known how to deal with her when she was like that; all my attempts to convince her to stop drinking or calm down, or just leave, had been met with ire. But the years since college had distanced us. We hardly saw one another anymore. She got increasingly drunk and took off her dress to go skinny-dipping in the resort’s outdoor infinity pool hot tub. She wasn’t my problem anymore, I told myself. Her husband was there. He could deal with her. On her way back to the great chandeliered hall, she slipped and fell on a slate in the garden, badly bruising her thigh. She sat next to me on the leather couch, her hair sopping, speaking too loudly, exhorting me to touch her bruise, which was swelling and giving off heat. I waited for something mortifying to happen. I had visions of the immaculately dressed doormen grabbing us by our coats and tossing us into the night. But her husband appeared and, with total grace and patience, convinced her to lower her voice, to ice the enormous bruise, and to get in a cab and leave. I sat on the couch alone watching what was perhaps to most people a sordid scene of a marriage in the throes of substance abuse. But I saw something else. I saw a man who viewed his life as utterly tied to his wife’s. Leaving wasn’t an option. Yelling wasn’t practical. He knew exactly what she needed to hear. He understood the minute fluctuations of her temperament. He would take care of her. As I watched him put her shoes on, drape her jacket over her shoulders, and help her through the enormous front door, I was suddenly aware of exactly what I had lost.

  Michael once said of our relationship that I was a blue planet and he was a solitary space traveler passing by who had been pulled into my orbit and had suddenly found that he was home. “I’m still just passing the beautiful pale blue dot of another planet that I almost got to live on,” he said to me when I broke it off.

  I was touched by the analogy. But I didn’t like my role as some bulky planet while he got to be the space cowboy. And now I thought of P.J. We were like two planets orbiting each other, too close and then too far. We had inched out of each other’s orbit and then found ourselves alone in the dark. I have heard that this is what will happen to the universe. It won’t gather in on itself and implode. It will disperse, its celestial bodies gradually drifting apart into the abyss. This gentle annihilation is somehow much more terrifying. I missed the pull of P.J.’s planet.

  I recalled how, on a recent trip to Arkansas, my ninety-year-old grandfather had declared that he needed someone to trim his toenails. Normally, he went to a podiatrist to have them cut, but he said he was too tired to go out. Without hesitation P.J. offered to clip them. He pulled out a kitchen stool, laid down a bed of newspaper below my grandfather’s feet, and gingerly worked away while my grandfather, a retired Navy captain who is quite comfortable giving orders, reclined in his La-Z-Boy instructing him. “That nail is hard to get,” he said, telling P.J. to use the other clippers, which looked like pliers. It had been unpleasant. P.J. told me afterward that strange things happen to the feet of old men. But he had embraced the job and acted as though he handled old men’s feet all the time. He hadn’t let my grandfather feel ashamed. I remembered watching the scene, feeling bowled over by his kindness.

  After Charlottesville, I went to my parents’ house in D.C. P.J. was supposed to meet me a couple of days later so we could do Thanksgiving at his parents’ house. My nerves were ragged. I wasn’t sleeping and didn’t have the energy to play the happy young couple. But now, after the trip, I felt stronger. Everything wasn’t going to be horrible forever. I called him from my childhood bedroom.

  “Can I be yours again?” I said. I didn’t care about freedom anymore. I didn’t care about whether it was possible to be bound but independent, loved but not possessed. I cared nothing for marriage in general, only for my marriage. The infinite possibilities of a life without attachment had left me and the people I loved floating in the infinite darkness of space. I could call it an anchor. I could call it a cage. But either way, I wanted it back.

  “Yes,” P.J. said. “I want to be yours again too.”

  TWENTY-FOUR

  One morning before that Thanksgiving, I called Conor McCourt again, the former NYPD detective. I gave him a quick overview of Barbara’s story: the childhood, the early publishing success, the runaway incidents as a teenager, the ship adventures, the marital problems. I was thinking that things were sounding pretty bad for Nick when I asked him, “Does anything immediately jump out at you?”

  He paused. And then: “Suicide.”

  “What?” I said.

  “Suicide,” he repeated. Then the call dropped.

  Barbara had seemed too buoyant for suicide. I took the end of Lost Island as an example of this. Even when Jane is forced to leave the island and return to Ne
w York, and Davidson leaves her, Barbara writes that Jane “will stage another rebellion”—but also that Jane was “saved for a more glamorous doom.” I had brushed aside the doom part, chalking the language up to youthful melodrama. Barbara could be extravagant with her phrasing, sometimes preferring terms that were more colorful than precise. She described the father figure in Lost Island as having “dreams of luxurious senility.” It sounds nice. I imagine an older gentleman lolling about on velvet chairs, savoring his senile fantasies, but I doubt that’s what she meant. Similarly, maybe she liked the sound of a more glamorous doom but didn’t quite mean it. Or did she?

  McCourt’s suggestion made me reconsider an incident that had occurred during the sea voyage with her mother. I had never really known what to make of it because of the vagueness of Helen’s descriptions in her letters, but it appeared that Barbara had suffered some kind of psychological breakdown during the trip. “Bar has had a smash—emotional and nervous,” Helen wrote to her friend Anne. “She has lost interest in things, in living, in writing. She says, herself, she is ‘homesick.’ But there’s a reason. She has missed her father terribly.” And then she added more ominously, “She is in a critical condition, and likely to do anything from running away to suicide.”

  The voyage hadn’t been the idyllic mother-daughter adventure that Helen had portrayed in her books. Barbara had been “in bad shape for some months.” While I didn’t doubt that something serious had happened, I wondered if Helen had made the situation sound more desperate than it was because of whom she was writing to. Anne and her husband were in touch with Wilson, and Helen often urged them to pass messages along to him. Had Helen hoped she would tell Wilson, and that he would feel bad and maybe finally send some money? Or at the very least emerge from hiding and voice some interest in his daughter?

  But it was not a simple case of homesickness. Helen wrote to Anne, “The details in which this obsession worked itself along are not pleasant, are quite awful, in fact. They must wait.” Helen repeatedly told Anne that she needed to talk to her about what had happened but that she would have to tell her later.

  Upon landing in California, Barbara was placed in the care of a psychiatrist, Dr. Schoultz. Her mother left her in Pasadena with friends and then went to Honolulu alone. Then Barbara ran away, which resulted in her arrest at the San Francisco hotel. In 1994, over sixty years after the incident, the Boston Globe wrote that she had “tried to kill herself by jumping out of a window.” I had always understood that incident as a foiled escape attempt; until I came across this article I had never seen it characterized as an attempted suicide. Considering the length of time between the incident and the article, and the fact that the article contained other factual errors (for example, that Barbara’s parents had separated after the incident when they had really separated before), it seemed unreliable.

  But still, it seemed worth investigating the relevant details. Even if she hadn’t been attempting suicide, I wanted to understand the level of her desperation and recklessness. Had she tried to climb out of a twelve-story window to avoid capture, it would still suggest some mental instability.

  First I contacted the Los Angeles police (the case was handled by the LAPD because Barbara had run away from Los Angeles) to see if they had any records, but they did not.

  I didn’t know which boardinghouse Barbara had stayed in, but one article mentioned that it was on O’Farrell Street in the Tenderloin. I reviewed the buildings on the street and found that they were all between four and six stories—perhaps a reasonable height at which to try hiding on a fire escape. Her mother, father, and friends, who wrote to each other about the incident, never characterized it as a suicide attempt. I decided to think of it as an indicator of instability, but not conclusive proof that Barbara had been suicidal.

  I had never known how much weight to give Barbara’s breakdown in her later vanishing. Adolescence is often enough to drive anyone a bit mad. But in light of the private investigator’s reaction, I knew it was time to consider that possibility more seriously.

  There were several ominous lines in Alice’s letters after Barbara’s disappearance that suggested suicide. Every time Helen brought up a possible lead, Alice dismissed it, saying that there was no point in looking. I recalled her writing, “The dark waters closed over her long ago,” in an obvious attempt to end the conversation. Her reluctance to search for Barbara suggested that she believed that something tragic had happened. Alice had meant this as a metaphor, but what if, as with Anderson’s case, water did have something to do with it? Earlier, Alice had described Barbara’s last letter, writing, “You see in it she was definitely thinking of the future.” But the fact that this had ever been in question was revealing. She went on, “I refuse to believe anyone with so rich and deep a vitality would have ended her own life.”

  I flipped back through my files to reread Barbara’s last letter for traces of “thinking of the future,” or despair, and discovered something startling. Alice had sent the letter to Helen after Barbara had disappeared. According to Alice, it had been written in “the last two or three days before she vanished,” but the very last letter in the file at Columbia was from over a month before her disappearance. So the last letter, perhaps the last one Barbara had ever written, was not in the archives, which was noteworthy considering that Helen had donated almost every scrap related to anything Barbara had ever done. The archives were so obviously a mother’s attempt to undo her daughter’s disappearance by including all traces of her and preserving them for future generations. To withhold such a significant letter—her last known words—was strange. There had been talk of the future in it, yes, but according to Alice, it had also revealed that Barbara “was suddenly overtaken by despair.” I wondered if Helen had seen something in the letter she hadn’t liked and decided to withhold or destroy it.

  There was one fact about Barbara’s disappearance that had always suggested to me that she had run away. The story went that she took thirty dollars with her the night she left, which equates to about five hundred dollars today. It was not enough money to live on for long, but enough to hold her over until she found work, and she had always been able to find work.

  But then a startling thought occurred to me. I went to my notes and pulled out a copy of the police reports. There was no mention of the thirty dollars in them—and it seemed an important detail to omit. The only place I had ever seen the thirty dollars mentioned was in Barbara: The Unconscious Autobiography of a Child Genius, the book by Harold McCurdy, the child psychologist who had analyzed Barbara’s letters and childhood materials. McCurdy had worked on the book with Helen. Helen must have been the one to tell him about the thirty dollars—and she must have heard it from Nick. Who else would have told her? But its absence from the police files made me wonder if somehow this detail had been invented. Maybe it was an offhand guess Nick had made about how much she could have taken and Helen had misunderstood it or wanted to believe it. Or maybe Nick had reason to give Helen false hope—to tell her something to throw her off the trail—but then why not mislead the police as well? The only certainty was that one of the key pieces of evidence that Barbara had gone off to start a new life was in question.

  I called Conor McCourt back. He wasn’t buying the idea that Nick had killed her. Barbara desperately didn’t want Nick to leave, but she wasn’t threatening to prevent him. She wanted him to give her a month before making his decision. He could divorce her, and divorce, generally, is easier than murder, Conor said. Of course we both agreed that this didn’t rule out a crime of passion.

  Conor also wasn’t buying the idea that Barbara had run away and never gotten back in touch with her family. Her relationship with her father had improved. She had her sister, her half sisters, a bunch of friends, and her mother. I had to agree. Though the characters in her fiction vanished without saying good-bye, I wasn’t sure Barbara herself was capable of this. In the past, she had always come back.

&nb
sp; “Were those last letters despairing?” Conor asked.

  “No,” I said. “They were anxious and desperate, but not despairing.” I paused, trying to consider the difference between despair and desperation. “Actually, I don’t know,” I said. Alice had described that final letter as despairing.

  I reconsidered one of Barbara’s last letters: “I still think there is a chance that the outcome will be a happy one,” she wrote. But then there was the line after that, the one I had always read straight through, “but I would have to think that anyway, in order to live; so you can draw any conclusions you like from that!” In order to live. I had always taken “live” to mean “cope.” “You can draw any conclusions you like from that” now sounded more ominous.

  “Were there any bridges near her house?” Conor asked.

  There were lots. Longfellow Bridge. Harvard Bridge. The Bunker Hill Bridge. The Boston University Bridge. The John W. Weeks Bridge. The Mystic River Bridge. They were all less than five miles from her apartment. She could have walked there. Harvard Bridge was closest, only 1.4 miles.

  “Why a bridge?” I asked.

  “Men shoot themselves, women jump,” Conor said.

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe they don’t want to mess up their faces. What time of year was it?”

  “December,” I said.

  “Bodies sink in December and aren’t found until the spring—if they’re ever found at all. By spring they aren’t identifiable. Things were different then. We’re better at finding and identifying bodies now.”

  I thought back to one of the letters Barbara had written to Alice saying she had not been able to sleep after Nick had told her about the affair. She took sleeping pills every night because “the nights I could never stand without some kind of help in achieving oblivion.” Achieving oblivion. Yes, if things were bad enough, oblivion could be tantalizing; nothingness preferable to mourning the end of your marriage. The desire wouldn’t have to last long, just long enough to stand on the edge of a bridge with the frigid, choppy water below you. You could let yourself fall.