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one
I have long been in the habit of passing by houses and wondering about the people who live inside. I grew up in a residential neighborhood in Washington, D.C., the kind where the homes are close together and neighbors often wind up knowing more than they might like to. Before dinner, I would escape my house to walk our little white lapdog. The predictability of the ritual-setting the table, filling water glasses, the sight of my parents' briefcases in the hall-filled me with dread. A day had ended exactly as it had the day before, and it would end the exact same way the next day and possibly forever.
This wasn't how I wanted my life to be. I imagined that when I grew up, I would live all over the world. I would be an explorer of the wilderness, an observer of animals, a connoisseur of cultures, a collector of the unfamiliar. I envisioned hastily packed suitcases, maps, binoculars, huts in the mountains, spare hotel rooms in dusty cities, Jeeps tearing down muddy roads into the jungle.
As I wandered the streets of my neighborhood, I was shopping for other possibilities, other lives lived in other houses. But those lives appeared to be exactly the same as mine. In well-lit dining rooms and kitchens I saw other families setting the table, calling the children downstairs, washing their dishes in the sinks. Television screens illuminated family rooms where exhausted parents slumped on couches after a long day in the office. Children did their homework by the glow of Pottery Barn desk lamps. I imagined that after their parents went to sleep, when the loneliness of those quiet hours became too much to bear, they whispered to each other beneath their sheets.
During the day they roamed the perimeters of their neighborhoods on bicycles and were driven to soccer and piano practice. They learned about faraway places in textbooks and on the news, but it seemed as if there had never been anything but this, no other place than here. Thirty years on they would come back to houses like these and do the same things all over again.
I wasn't sure what my mother did for a living, though I had memorized her job title because it sounded important and I was proud that it might be. "She's a health policy analyst," I told a friend. "What does that mean?" the friend asked. "It means she saves lives," I said, feeling fairly confident that this wasn't true, except perhaps in an abstract sense. But I wanted it to be true. I wanted the stakes of daily life to be more exciting than desks, screens, and fluorescent lights.
I passed by house after house, each one a nighttime domestic diorama: Homo sapiens suburbae. These people had nothing to do with the world of mystery, dark deeds, and wilderness that I was sure was out there somewhere. My house-if I had a house-would be different. It would be in the mountains, or the jungle, or maybe in the middle of a city. My children and I would eat ice cream before dinner and play freeze tag at night by the light of fireflies. We would have a menagerie of animals. If you stood outside our house at night, you would hear peals of laughter. You would see tickle wars and pillow fights in warm, glowing rooms. But then another thought struck me: what if the reason all these people lived the same lives was that this was the only way?
As I grew older, the fantasy began to erode. Where would the money come from? Would I have a partner, someone to help me? Where would the Jeep in the jungle take me and for what purpose? Where would my children go to school? Would I even have children?
When I was in my midtwenties, I heard a story about a young woman who had also dreamed of leading a life of adventure, and I could not get it out of my head. Her name was Barbara Newhall Follett. She was a child prodigy and had published an acclaimed novel at the age of twelve. People called her a genius. A photograph was taken as she corrected her proofs with a quill, smiling proudly at someone to the left of the photographer. When she was thirteen, she left her parents and traveled the high seas with a hardened crew. Later that year she published a memoir about the experience. She was deeply knowledgeable about botany, butterflies, and much of the natural world. She was an accomplished violinist and a talented poet, but above all she was a writer. She had been writing short stories since the age of five.
"She's your kind of person," my friend Robert said when he pointed me to an article about her. I had led an ordinary childhood and no one has ever accused me of being a genius, but Barbara and I shared a love of literature and the outdoors. There was something else too: a certain temperamental similarity-a restlessness. Later I began to wonder about Robert's true motivation for telling me about her. When she was almost exactly my age, she vanished without a trace. He knew I would want to find her.
It happened on December 7, 1939. The residents of Brookline Massachusetts were busily preparing for Christmas. Miss AyersÕs shop on Beacon Street was selling Christmas wrapping paper, ribbons, and stationery. HendriesÕs offered ice cream sculpted in the shape of Santa Claus. The Village Flower Shop was stocked full of poinsettias, and all around town people were placing orders for turkeys at nineteen cents a pound. As night set in, the temperature hovered around freezing and the gas lamps flickered in the darkness. Families prepared for dinner in their clapboard houses on Walnut Street and their Victorian houses with trellised porches on Cyprus Street.
For some, the looming holidays brought a twinge of pain, their sadness cast in sharp relief against the holiday cheer. A fifteen-year-old boy ran away from school that day. A middle-aged woman didn't come home that night. Four people reported their dogs missing, and a twenty-two-year-old girl slit her wrists and then disappeared.
On Kent Street, Barbara's marriage was coming to an end. The young couple's apartment was comfortable but modest, with a fireplace and a rounded row of windows overlooking the quiet street below. She was twenty-five, fine featured and tomboyish, with a long auburn bob. She hadn't planned on this kind of life. She hadn't planned on bickering about who would hang the curtains or what music to play at a dinner party. She had never intended to sit in an office all day, a large round clock ticking the minutes away. She hadn't planned on having a husband or a house.
The Boston and Albany Railroad had a depot around the corner and Black Falcon station, with its enormous ships fastened in the harbors, was just five miles away. There were ways to escape from Brookline, to get out of a marriage, to alter the patterns of a life. Barbara gathered her notebook and thirty dollars. She walked out of the apartment, down the engraved wooden staircase, through the front door, and disappeared into the night. She was never seen or heard from again.
The apartment was exactly as I had envisioned it: in a low-rise building with rounded turrets and a plain faade in a quiet neighborhood of small apartments and clapboard houses, with a few shops and restaurants. A few houses down, an old man in a neatly pressed button-down shirt was mowing his lawn. Brookline is a town that seems to belong to another time, giving it a Halloween feel regardless of the season. There was a whiff of mystery, a sense that something more was going on behind those well-kempt exteriors. Or maybe I was reading into it because I knew something had happened in that building seventy-five years before.
I was lurking in front of Barbara's building when a middle-aged Australian woman came out to put her trash in the dumpster. We started talking. I explained that this was the last place Barbara had been seen. "Would you like to come inside?" she asked.
A few moments later, I stood in front of the large, curved living-room windows, wondering if this very apartment had been Barbara's. Below the window, I could hear the man mowing his lawn. I wondered how many Saturdays, for how many years, he had done exactly that. The mechanical hum of the mower was oddly comforting. The woman's boxer, Harry, butted his snout against my legs while I answered her questions. I was looking for Barbara, I said. I doubted I would find her, but I hoped to gather clues and learn more. I had reason to believe that she was the vanishing type, capable of erasing one life and creating another. But there were other, more sinister possibilities to consider as well.
I was just a year older than Barbara when she vanished, and this fact seemed significant to me. I had a sense that the decisions I was making then would determine the rest of my life. Like with a rocket ship, the trajectory set on the ground was critical; a fraction of a degree in the wrong direction could send me to a wildly different place.
Somewhere along the line, in ways barely perceptible at first, things went wrong for Barbara. From my vantage point, her life was both an inspiration and a warning. But I couldn't think of how to explain this to the Australian woman, so I thanked her and left.
two
In 1926, Barbara sat at her typewriter in the second story of a wood-paneled cottage in New Haven, Connecticut. She had freckles, long brown ringlets, an intense gaze, and a puckish upturned nose. Her fingers moved rapidly as she typed. Clackety-clack-clack-clack-clack went the sound of the typewriter's iron keys as they landed on the paper, followed by the metal carriage sliding back. Clack-clack-clack-clack-clack. She had decorated the room herself and had chosen a wallpaper with gold and bronze birds and plants because she wanted to be surrounded by wild things. She was writing a novel about running away, and though she didn't know it yet, it would soon make her famous.
Barbara was born into a literary family. Her father, Wilson Follett, was an English professor at Dartmouth when she was born, and he became an editor at Yale University Press when she was five. He was a handsome man with a serious face, a sharp dresser who favored a Norfolk jacket and a bow tie. He took fastidious care of his clothes because he didn't have many. He had never been good with money. An excellent conversationalist, he'd graduated magna cum laude from Harvard and was said to have had a photographic memory. Women found him charming.
Barbara's mother, Helen Thomas Follett, was a writer and literary critic. She cowrote articles with Wilson that appeared in the Atlantic Monthly and the Yale Review, mostly about literature and composition. When Barbara was four, her parents published Some Modern Novelists, a collection of essays on various authors including Joseph Conrad, whose talents Wilson was early to recognize, and Henry James, whom the Folletts described as "a slender and shrinking youth of incredible unsophistication." But Barbara consumed much of Helen's time. Helen stayed home with her, and as Barbara grew up, Helen's writings shifted to focus primarily on her education. She wrote articles for parenting magazines and manuals on teaching children to type. Barbara had Helen's expressive brown eyes and a strong brow, which gave her a willful, coltish look. She wasn't shy about saying exactly what she thought, asked or not.
Barbara's parents were certain from the beginning that hers would be a remarkable story. They went to great lengths to record every detail. Like many parents, they kept a baby book, and if baby books can be measured on a spectrum of obsession, the Folletts' is toward the far end. It's a codiary written to Barbara that records all the minutiae of her achievements in the first four years of life, even her ability to bring a spoonful of water to her mouth. Her weight was measured and charted every week for her first year. From five to six in the evening, one-year-old Barbara had "organized play time" with both parents. The Folletts observed that she was "strong and determined" based on the way she hoisted herself up using the bars of her playpen.
Wilson wrote a three-page, single-spaced letter to a friend solely about Barbara's "baby mannerisms," which he entitled "Historia Barbarae." She was both specimen and beloved. It seems never to have occurred to him that his friend might not find Barbara's eating and sleeping habits quite so interesting as he did. He even included a diagram of the rhythm at which she stamped her feet as he cooed "ti-tum, ti-tum, ti-tum."
Helen's entries in the baby book are just as doting. "Do you know how a mother's hands smooth out the cover over you, how tenderly, reverently? You will never know till some day the magic time comes for you, my Blessed, to be ever as I am now, a Mother." She wanted her words to be beautiful, her motherhood to be a work of art. The only pause in the baby book was a short period during World War I, when the Folletts worried that Wilson might be drafted.
Helen and Wilson were building a mythology around their baby. Though she was less than six months old, when she tried to roll over in her crib, they saw signs of the adventurer she would surely become. "Spiritually you were an explorer in unknown lands, a voyager in uncharted seas," Wilson wrote. This was just the beginning, "the first of your lives." Like a demigod with many incarnations, there would be other lives just as fabulous to come. "You are an ageless incarnation of spirit, the rarefied essence of Baby, a creature of dream and desire and we know that you could dissolve into a wish and become only a dream-that-was-too-beautiful."
Love this rapturous, a child this perfect, was otherworldly. To love this much was to be reminded of the possibility of enormous loss. Helen and Wilson considered that they might wake up one morning to find the nursery empty, all her playthings gone, a quiet, empty house. "You're so precious a thing," Wilson wrote, "one doesn't see how this world can hold you."
