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

How did it happen? Her unbounded curiosity and uncommon intelligence emerged early, before she could walk. We were so proud of her. But when her father pushed her to succeed for selfish reasons, reasons that fed his appetite for fame and glory, I failed to stand up to him. The upbringing we chose for her nurtured the child who loved liberty, butterflies, and the thrill of sailing—but not the youngster who needed to realize the world quickly destroys such ephemera.

Certainly, it’s difficult to judge one’s decisions in retrospect—let alone understand the impact of those decisions. But her father wrote, when Barbara was only five, “Fostering a child’s natural sense of order and beauty may be, for all we can say, a sorry preparation for life in a world of prevalent dullness and ugliness; giving such guidance as we have given may lead only to a more painful disillusionment in a scheme of things in which everyone is ultimately left to flounder undirected.” How prescient his words were. But did we heed them when it might have mattered? No.

Many people have asked me about Barbara. My first inclination has been to turn away from them. But Barbara doesn’t belong only to me. She lives through her books. I understand others are curious about her fate. The fact is, I don’t know what happened to her. I’ve searched every imaginable avenue to gather any lead about her whereabouts. Not a single clue has surfaced. I hold out hope she’ll return someday, even as I struggle to accept the reality that this becomes less likely as time passes.

So, I try to live with things as they are—and envision her happy and free, in a place where warm winds embrace her.

EPILOGUE

On December 21, 1939, two weeks after Barbara’s disappearance, her husband Nickerson Rogers reported her absence to the police in Brookline, Massachusetts. He said he didn’t want any publicity as it might deter Barbara from returning. The police were not able to locate her.

Four months later, Rogers filed a missing person report with the Brookline police and requested a public announcement. On April 22, 1940, the police disbursed a teletype to an eight-state area: “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 reports of her whereabouts came in, and apparently no serious investigation was launched.

One year after her disappearance, Barbara’s father, Wilson Follett, anonymously published an open letter to her in The Atlantic, entitled “To a Daughter, One Year Lost”: “A year! It is very strange to reflect that two Christmases have come and gone, that the entire annus terribilis 1940 has been born and written its fearsome record and died, since any one of us who love you has clasped your hand or received a syllable written by it or unearthed the smallest clue to where you are, even to whether you are living or dead.”

In 1943 Nickerson Rogers filed a Libel for Divorce on the grounds that Barbara, “wholly regardless of her marital duties and obligations,” had been absent for more than three years. His request was granted in 1944. He later remarried.

Barbara’s mother, Helen Follett, renewed the search for Barbara in 1952. She requested that the police reopen the case, expressing considerable frustration at Rogers’ unwillingness to provide a summary of his attempts to locate Barbara. She also wrote numerous persons who might have knowledge about Barbara’s movements. But the police declined to reopen the search, and her efforts failed to uncover any information or evidence about Barbara.

On what would have been Barbara’s 46th birthday, Helen wrote a letter introducing herself to Harold McCurdy, a professor at the University of North Carolina who studied childhood genius. They collaborated on the 1966 publication Barbara: The Unconscious Autobiography of a Child Genius, which analyzed Barbara’s writings and some of the events that shaped her life. Unfortunately, Helen and her collaborator suppressed some crucial aspects of Barbara’s story, and the book offers a somewhat sanitized and idealized portrait of a “child genius writer.”

Helen Follett authored five travelogue books and, later in life, became active in the civil rights movement. She died in 1970 at the age of 86. Wilson Follett preceded her in death; he was 76 when he died in 1963. His best-known work, Modern American Usage, was published posthumously. Barbara’s younger sister, Sabra, married Edward Meservey, the son of family friends Anne and Oxford. She raised three sons, was the first woman admitted for graduate study at Princeton in 1961 and had a successful career as a professor of history. She died in 1994.

To this day, Barbara’s disappearance remains a mystery. But the trail may not have gone completely cold.

For years, Vermont writer Daniel Mills painstakingly researched missing person reports and death records in hopes of uncovering some clue about Barbara’s fate. He has reported (in an article published April 5, 2019, in the Los Angeles Review of Books) on the case of remains found in rural New Hampshire formerly believed to be those of a woman who went missing in 1936. But there were several discrepancies between the findings and known facts about this woman. For instance, horn-rimmed spectacles were found nearby, and this woman didn’t wear glasses. Her family said that on the night she went missing she did not take her pocketbook with her, but a pocketbook was found at the scene, and the shoe size didn’t fit. But the evidence that fails to conform to particulars about this woman happens to fit Barbara. She did wear horn-rimmed glasses, and the shoe size is the same as hers. A medicine bottle with traces of barbiturate was found by the skeleton. Unfortunately, the remains of this skeleton are nowhere to be found so there can be no definitive testing (via DNA) of these remains.

After studying Barbara’s life and writings, I believe Barbara probably committed suicide. And, as Daniel Mills