The Point of Vanishing - Maryka Biaggio (large ebook reader TXT) 📗

shores in a trusty schooner and live and love with the simplicity and curiosity of nature wanderers. Let’s imagine doing just that, as I am in my novel. It shall be a tribute to a different kind of life. I yearn to turn my back on the maniacal side of civilization and float like a butterfly in the airstream of life.

But I’ve turned philosophical and given you not a jot of news. Helen perseveres with Magic Portholes. She’s discovered a new way of telling the story. Wilson recommended she get it into the hands of an agent who knows all the big editors, so we’re hoping that strategy will succeed. I like my new job at the Personnel Research Federation well enough. At least I’m not reading abominable fiction for Fox. It’s full-time, and I earn $25 a week. I turn it all over to Helen. She’s the one who pays the bills.

Helen and I are looking forward to a Woolworth’s foray to buy some trinkets for Sabra for Christmas. It’s lovely having my little sister again, though she’s such a CHILD. And it’s hardly right to celebrate Christmas with several million people out of work and struggling to feed themselves, not that Sabra is capable of grasping suffering on that scale.

That’s quite enough for now, especially if I’m to fit these pages in an envelope and deposit them in tomorrow’s mail. I remain,

Your devoted shipmate,

Barbara

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

HELEN

New York City, November–December 1931

She should have known. Her lawyer had predicted it. As soon as Wilson marked a year of residency in California, he filed for divorce. There’d be no reconciliation. Her marriage was over. It had died three years earlier—when Wilson walked out on her and the girls.

Heaping depravity on top of neglect, he claimed cruelty as the grounds. That doused the last embers of any desire to patch things up with him. She couldn’t possibly abide a man who ruthlessly twisted the truth for his selfish gain.

She hired an attorney in New York to collaborate with her California lawyer. They requested a declaration of Wilson’s assets, which amounted to little: one beat-up Lincoln L parked in Maine; a nearly depleted stream of income from The Atlantic Monthly; and a modest advance on his soon-to-be-published novel. Wilson offered her half his advance, three hundred dollars, “out of kindness and consideration for my daughters,” and reminded her he was also signing the house over to her.

She asked her attorney: Could she press Wilson for more than the house and three hundred dollars, for instance, for ongoing alimony? Her Los Angeles attorney explained that California required some reason for divorce; if she wished to contest the terms or grounds, she’d have to countersue. In essence, she’d need to pay dearly for the sake of a dubious exercise. Even if she won a countersuit, there was little the court could order him to hand over, destitute as he was. In December, she told Barbara and Sabra she was granting their father a divorce. Barbara, who’d regularly urged her to resist divorce, just shrugged and said, “I don’t care about that low-down weasel anymore. The Follett family is a meteor that has blazed and crashed.”

The three of them would make the best of a bad situation. The divorce left them on their own financially—which, for all practical purposes, they’d been for the past three years anyway. She’d urge her agent to keep sending the book around to publishers and, when the renters’ lease ran out in the spring, sell the house. What choice did she have but to look for work and start writing a new book? The next book would pick up where Magic Portholes left off and recount their South Seas’ adventure.

Finding work, with unemployment rates as high as they were, would require hours and hours of beating the streets, and she couldn’t encumber herself with an eight-year-old. For the second time in three years, she’d need to turn the care of Sabra over to others. Anne and Oxford agreed to take Sabra in and send her to school in Hanover. Helen took some comfort in knowing Sabra would have old family friends for guardians and their two well-bred sons for playmates.

Her heart broke as she hugged Sabra goodbye. Damn Wilson and his profligate ways, splintering the family to satisfy his lascivious cravings.

In December, she received a letter from Alice Russell reporting that Wilson and Margaret had married in Arizona, apparently in a civil ceremony. She told Barbara: “They must have packed for Arizona before the ink dried on the divorce papers.” All Barbara said was, “He doesn’t deserve to be considered a father. He’s the prince of fools.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

BARBARA AT EIGHTEEN

New York City, March 1932

“Dinner is ready,” her mother called.

Barbara joined her mother at the kitchen table in their new apartment. She inhaled the sharp scent of Castile soap and, with a smile, regarded the gleaming clean walls. Recent developments pleased her. Helen had signed the papers on the sale of the New Haven house, proclaiming, “God, I’m glad to be done with that place and its oppressive memories.” Macmillan had agreed to publish Magic Portholes, so they’d decided they could afford roomier quarters. Best of all, Barbara turned eighteen on March 4—that oh-so-welcome age of emancipation.

Their new apartment wasn’t far from the old one, just around the corner on Claremont Avenue, not that that made it easy to move. In the snowy slush of March, Barbara and her mother had packed up eleven boxes of belongings, hauled them down three sets of stairs, across the street, and up two flights. Her mother arranged to have the contents she’d distilled from the New Haven house shipped to the new apartment. Then she coaxed the delivery men into hauling their furniture over from the old place.

Her mother plopped down across the table, shaking her head. “Must you keep those ragged old dungarees?”

Barbara wore a pair of faded pants that came halfway up her calves. “They’re loaded with memories.