The Art of Vanishing by Laura Smith

Author:Laura Smith
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2018-02-06T00:00:00+00:00

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 phone, 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.

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