A blown tire. A migraine. An unexpected case of the “for whatever reason, I simply cannots.” Life happens, and sometimes, even the most fastidious among us are tempted to go off the grid to deal with it. Still, even the least fastidious among us know that, especially in matters of employment, an unplanned absence requires, at minimum, a brief text of explanation. And yet, such a text (or, in this case, a higher-security-clearance-requiring equivalent) went unsent at the beginning of 2024, when Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin checked into Walter Reed National Military Medical Center to deal with complications from prostate cancer treatment he underwent in December.
While elsewhere, Americans recovered from their New Year’s Eve hangovers, committed to (and possibly already broke) their fitness-related resolutions and generally went about the business of starting off anew, Washington was gripped by a run of bureaucratic chaos so bumbling that it might have amused, were the stakes not so high. Would we all have been so aghast had the Secretary of Agriculture, Tom Vislack, gone so oddly incommunicado? (Yes, I had to google.) Despite the validity of Austin’s absence – a serious health issue that necessitated immediate, and hopefully, successful, intervention – the resultant comedy of errors should have been avoided. Austin’s chief of staff, Kelly Magsamen, who was apparently in Austin’s loop, was too debilitated by the flu to share his whereabouts with the White House. The Secretary’s deputy, Kathleen Hicks, though out of said loop and out of town, on vacation in Puerto Rico, ended up stepping in.
That the White House didn’t deny being unaware of Austin’s hospitalization until January 4th does little to burnish President Biden’s image as a canny Commander in Chief. The mini-saga, finally revealed to the public on January 9th, keyed off rounds of questions in the press: What was the National Security chain of command? What medical disclosures should reasonably be expected of government figures? And, in a twist on the iconic query of the Watergate of all DC scandals: What didn’t the President know and when didn’t he know it?
Bipartisan pundits urged Biden to fire Austin, but for the time being, the President is sticking with his guy. On one hand, a head-scratcher; anyone who goes AWOL from work without explanation or contact for three days can reasonably expect a welcome-back pink slip. On the other hand, the world is full of unexpected stresses, unplanned emergencies, and even unexplainable spooky stuff. Sometimes you just gotta disappear.
One of the most notable literary vanishings of the 21st century lies at the heart of Gillian Flynn’s 2012 page-turner, Gone Girl. As always, spoilers abound from here, so if you have yet to cross the book, or the ensuing 2014 film adaptation, off your “Great Thrillers of the New Millennium” list, stop reading now. Otherwise, consider the tale of Amy Dunne. Amy prides herself on being the kind of woman other women resent: “Of course [she] can cook French cuisine and speak fluent Spanish and garden and knit and run marathons and day-trade stocks and fly a plane and look like a runway model doing it.” Unfortunately, through a string of bad luck, she and her husband Nick find themselves relocating to his hometown of New Carthage, Missouri, where “the women shop at Target, they make diligent, comforting meals, they laugh about how little high school Spanish they remember. Competition doesn’t interest them.” To say that Amy does not acclimate happily to her new surroundings would be an understatement (she is, at heart, a coastal snob of the worst order). Adding injury to insult, Nick cheats on her with one of his journalism students.
What to do when stifled, unhappy, and newly betrayed? Divorce is for amateurs, and Amy is no amateur. Instead, she embarks on a yearlong plot to destroy Nick, ultimately faking her own disappearance and death, painting a prime suspect target on his back. Her work is as meticulous as it is full-blown psychotic. Sure, some of Amy’s qualms are valid – Nick is callous, and has little regard for her. But the fact that your husband had an affair after using your trust fund to open a bar with his sister is a matter better hashed out with a marriage counselor or divorce attorney than with the FBI. At one point during her time in absentia, Amy ruminates disdainfully about Cool Girls who are “not even pretending to be a woman they want to be, they’re pretending to be the woman a man wants them to be.” Despite Amy’s toxic narcissism, it’s a sentiment that struck a chord for many. Its big-screen iteration, brought to life by Rosamund Pike, turned Amy into something of a pop-feminist anti-heroine for those who support women’s wrongs just as much as women’s rights.
At least Amy Dunne gets to dictate the terms of her own disappearance. Winifred Froy, the missing person at the center of Ethel Lina White’s 1936 mystery The Wheel Spins, doesn’t luck into that level of agency. Adapted by Alfred Hitchcock into the 1938 film The Lady Vanishes, White’s book follows Iris Carr, a young Englishwoman who, after a series of travel mishaps, finds herself on a crowded train to Trieste. Disoriented and stymied by the language barrier between herself and her fellow passengers, Iris is relieved to encounter Miss Froy, a fellow Brit in a frump-a-dump tweed suit and matching hat. That relief doesn’t temper Iris’s judgment; she thinks to herself that Miss Froy is “a negative type in every respect—middle-aged, with a huddle of small indefinite features, and vague colouring.” After a lengthy, chatty lunch, Iris departs for a nap, only to discover upon waking that Miss Froy is no longer on the train and, according to many of the other passengers, had never been there at all.
This turn of events embroils Iris in a dangerous, thorny conspiracy involving a Communist baroness, a malicious doctor and a railway car’s worth of gaslighting. Amidst these perils and distresses of transit, a valuable lesson emerges for Iris about generosity of spirit. When a kindly, if dowdy, woman devotes her quiet travel time to keeping you company, it’s best not to refer to her internally as the “tweed spinster.” However wanting her style, you’ll miss her when she mysteriously disappears.
Sometimes, a vanishing is a group affair, and sometimes, its causes go unanswered. Such is the case in Joan Lindsay’s 1967 eerie classic Picnic at Hanging Rock. Set in Australia in 1900, Hanging Rock tells the story of a group of students at the all-girls Appleyard College who take an idyllic Valentine’s Day outing to the countryside. Something strange is afoot in the Outback, and three of the girls and one of the school’s governesses do not return. Panic ensues as a search comes up empty. Perhaps Appleyard’s chaperones are at fault. As Ben Hussey, the grizzled carriage driver who ferried the girls out on their day trip, notes, “Even the lowest and most accessible levels of the Rock are exceedingly treacherous, especially for inexperienced girls in long summer dresses.”
The scandalous possibility arises that they may have ditched those frocks. A fourth student, Edith Horton (uncharitably described as “the College dunce”), had originally accompanied the three missing girls on a daring ascent up the rock. She later rejoins the larger picnic group, disoriented and terrified. Though she provides little in the way of helpful information about her now-missing schoolmates, she does mention that she saw Miss McCraw, the governess, walking up the hill as Edith was fleeing down it. Edith offers one perplexing detail – the normally buttoned-up mathematics mistress “was not wearing a skirt – only les pantalons.” Later, an amateur search party recovers one of the girls, Irma Leopold, alive, but in a similar state of deshabille – barefoot and “without a corset.”
The novel offers no further explanation about the schoolgirls’ fates, focusing instead on the longtail communal effects of their disappearance. Lindsay initially intended less ambiguity. The original draft she submitted to her publisher included a chapter set at the top of the Rock, in which the girls and Miss McCraw divest themselves of their corsets and hurl them into the air. Rather than falling, the corsets levitate, at which point the ladies step into an alternate dimension. Floating undergarments as harbingers of otherworldly portholes – perfect fodder for a Tossing Shirts investigation, but perhaps less fitting in an unsettling exploration of a community’s reckoning in the face of unexplained terror. Wisely, the publishers opted to omit the flying undies in favor of a vaguer, but perhaps more timeless, narrative.
There are, of course, disappearances with happier endings; look no further than the real world of contemporary fashion. After departing as Celine’s creative director in 2017, Phoebe Philo, one of modern fashion’s great enigmas and always intensely private, receded into a silent life in London. In our age of social-media oversharing and constant spotlight-grabbing, her public reticence only adds to her mystique. Since her ascent at Chloe in the early aughts, few other designers have inspired a similar level of rabid devotion from their customers; the Philo woman is always hungry for her work and ready to pay a premium for it. Yet post-Celine, Philo effectively dropped off the fashion map, leaving legions of fans to mourn and to speculate endlessly about a potential return. That came triumphantly last October, when her new, eponymous brand, launched in partnership with LVMH, became shoppable at phoebephilo.com. The collection, a perfect, updated display of Philo’s heady signature of considered, minimalist cool, is a hit with critics and consumers alike – with many styles selling out immediately.
Can Austin, our briefly wayward Secretary of Defense, take any lessons from these fictional masters of the vanish? Likely not. Drawing from the narratives of an obsessive scorned wife, lost forever-schoolgirls and a kindly-frumpy train lady would likely do little to restore faith in the seamless functioning of our national security apparatus. Phoebe Philo’s real-life situation, however, may offer hope. Typically, when designers fall off the clothes-producing grid, their supporters move on, which is the approach many observers think the President should take with Austin. Yet for years, Phoebe’s acolytes mourned her absence and now passionately celebrate her return, proving that sometimes, absence can indeed make the heart grow fonder – even in the toughest of professions. If it works for the runway, why not the Beltway?
Witty, wacky and wonderful, Grainne!