Anna Maria Hitz was at school in Washington on the day President Kennedy was killed. It was November 22, 1963, and everyone around her was weeping. She was fifteen, and what struck her was not the news but the emotion: the naive shock of classmates and teachers who had never had reason to expect the world to be unsafe. She had learned that lesson long before.
2620 Foxhall Road
An identification card from that year places mother and daughter at 2620 Foxhall Road, a handsome house just north of Georgetown, a short walk from the Maret School. Somehow Anna Spring, working as a cook at the German embassy, had found the money to send her daughter to one of the most prestigious schools in the city, where the children of diplomats and royals sat beside her. By then Anna Maria was fluent, and without accent, in Spanish, Swiss German and American English.
A year that was added
Officially, according to the paperwork she now carried, she was sixteen. Her documents had been altered on the way to the United States to make her a year older, giving a January birthdate in place of her true one in December. Perhaps it was to move her ahead in school. Perhaps it was to bring the inheritance within reach a year sooner, if it ever appeared at all.
It seems a small thing, a month moved on a page. Two years later, when she vanished twenty-six days before her eighteenth birthday, exactly how old she was would matter more than anyone had planned.
You model every day of your life
Five years after her father’s death, Anna Spring had graduated from dressing her daughter in frills to dressing her as a young model. She enrolled her at the Cappa Chell Finishing School and Model Agency in nearby Tysons Corner, Virginia, a school founded in 1934 and bought by a Ms. Gladys Davis in 1950.
Washington had never been anything like a fashion capital, and the surviving modeling photographs show a striking girl visibly uneasy in the role of paper doll, gazing warily into the camera in conservative wool suits no teenager would have chosen. They stood for a confinement she already knew well.
In a later New York Times feature on the school, Davis explained the mission. Any imperfection, bad posture, downcast eyes, shyness, poor manners, was quickly whipped into shape. Lessons in table etiquette, skincare and polite conversation were exhaustive, and Davis boasted of teaching forty-five distinct introductions for greeting diplomats from around the world.
“Our philosophy is that you model every day of your life,” Davis told the Times. “Somebody is watching you, and somebody is remembering what you do and what you say.”
“What the training does is leave you free to forget about yourself,” she added. “It has become you.”
For a girl already fluent in the manners of three countries, taken from her mother once and taken back by force, it must have been a strange thing to be formally taught how to be looked at.
And yet the family kept the mementos of those years: photographs, clippings, little notes and postcards, and a poster for the Bethesda Budget Store’s Teen Queen Contest from May of 1963, a man and a woman dancing at a proper distance beneath a great yellow sun. Whatever else those years were, some of it was happy.
Two years later she was gone. The opening chapter of the book begins on the night it started.