The Schrödinger Girl

by Laurel Brett

  I wondered what Jerry would have said if I’d tried to discuss the scientific aspects of the case with him. I imagined him leaning hard on the idea that without evidence, these weren’t really scientific theories.

  I had to admit to myself that I didn’t have much to go on: just the single snapshot that seemed to prove that one Daphne was in Boston when one was in New York, with me. But as I’d realized early on, the snapshot could be hoax. I had to accept the possibility that Daphne was creating this entire drama.

  If Galen had taken Daphne to Boston in the middle of June, perhaps I could find some reference to that in a newspaper article. After all, Galen Green was a celebrity. I asked the librarian for the microfilm for the Boston newspapers for June. The Vassar library had microfilm for both the Boston Globe and the Boston Herald.

  I loaded the roll for the Boston Herald into the reader. I had struck out with the Globe, but I got lucky with the Herald, finally finding this article: “June 16, 1967: Galen Green at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.” The report noted that one of Galen’s paintings, Hudson Autumn, had been acquired for the museum’s permanent collection, and he’d been present at the museum to mark the occasion. I could see him and Daphne standing before a semiabstract painting of the river and a stylized autumn scene. Unfortunately, the black-and-white newspaper photograph did not do justice to the canvas. His autumn scene must have been spectacularly colorful; I had grown to appreciate Green’s palette.

  The article revealed that Winslow Homer, Claude Monet, and John Singer Sargent had also been honored during their lifetimes, but Galen Green’s painting was the first work of a living artist in many years to be included in the museum’s permanent collection. According to the story, Galen had given a talk on Friday the sixteenth, the same day I was with Daphne at the Forester Gallery. I experienced a shiver up my spine. Here was proof that my idea was not just an idle theory. The caption of the picture even identified Daphne as Green’s newest muse. The snapshot she had given me was no hoax. And I had Caroline’s recollections to prove that a Daphne was with me in New York on the same day. Could I be crazy when this objective evidence really existed?

  The angry girl at the recruiting center could have been merely a separate personality of the first Daphne, even though she seemed so different from the girl in the bookstore and the girl in the coffee shop. Just because there were two Schrödinger girls didn’t mean that there were three. The girl I’d met at Bryant Park could have been a manifestation of Daphne’s anger and mental confusion; or my belief that she was a new incarnation of Daphne could have been a manifestation of my own confusion.

  I didn’t think there was anything else in Vassar’s library to help me figure out the Daphne mystery. I was sure that library wouldn’t collect copies of local Long Island papers, and even if SDS Daphne did exist, she’d just entered a new school, and I was pretty certain Vassar’s library wouldn’t archive arcane Long Island yearbooks.

  Okay. So the girl I’d met in front of the public library lion told me that she’d moved in with an SDS organizer and changed high schools. I came up with a plan to check out her story.

  From my office at school I had the department secretary place calls to the schools Daphne claimed to attend. I devised a story about her contacting me while doing research on psychology departments at schools she might choose for college. Guidance counselors aren’t usually around for the summer, but I gave it a try and struck gold when the first guidance counselor was in. She was happy to talk to me.

  “Oh, you’re from New Paltz,” Mrs. Winter said. “New Paltz is a safety school for many of our students, though to be honest, I don’t really see Daphne attending there. She is an excellent student and wants to study writing and literature. She did really well on the SATs too. Who did you say you were?”

  I saw no harm in giving her my real name. “She told me she is interested in psychology when she called. She wanted to know about our program. She seemed so bright and engaged that I must admit I was intrigued, Mrs. Winter. Is she involved with any extracurricular activities at the school?”

  “She is the assistant editor of our literary magazine, Ken. And she published two poems in the magazine too. We are very proud of her.”

  “Is she involved with any other activities?”

  “She is in the Choraleers, our advanced choir. She sings soprano. As a matter of fact, they sang at a local Summer Fest last week. Daphne sang a small but lovely solo.”

  I thanked her for her time and asked Ruth, our secretary, to place a call to the guidance department at the high school near the house Terry rented, the one the new Daphne had mentioned. The secretary at that school confirmed that Daphne was a student there; she’d have Jonathan Tyler, her counselor, call me back when he checked in for his messages, which he did on weekdays during the summer.

  My suspense mounted steadily until Ruth put his call through to me.

  “Jonathan Tyler here, how can I help?”

  I introduced myself and asked the same questions I’d asked of Mrs. Winter, explaining that we might be interested in giving Daphne a scholarship to study psychology at New Paltz.

  “Yes, Daphne is a student here,” Mr. Tyler confirmed. “Who did you say you were?”

  “I’m Dr. Adams,” I answered, subtly pulling rank. I could almost hear him nodding.

  In response to my question about her extracurricular activities, he explained, “Our school is number one in the region, and we take debating seriously here. From what I’ve gathered through the grapevine, Daphne is brilliant. The debate team adviser has already recruited her, and she was the star of the showcase debate with another highly ranked school. Apparently her ability is going to take our team to another victory.”

  When I asked Tyler for the date, I got the confirmation I needed—the debate showcase was the same night the first Daphne performed in the Choraleers concert.

  Since Daphne couldn’t be in two schools at the same time or two places on the Tuesday night in question, these phone calls supported the idea that these girls were really separate people. Perhaps the most logical explanation was that they were triplets, the conclusion to which my mind naturally jumped, but as usual I reminded myself that this conclusion didn’t fit the facts of the case. In both instances, these new Daphnes seemed to have just suddenly and recently appeared. None of these three girls had ever mentioned being a twin or a triplet, and in the gallery, my Daphne certainly had no idea of a twin who may have sat for Galen’s portrait. If she had, she wouldn’t have been so shocked and upset. Even more significant, each Daphne remembered meeting me in the bookstore and joining me at the coffee shop. The evidence would indicate that if they were triplets, then they knew each other. Perhaps the girls played pranks. But no one had mentioned triplets at all—neither of the guidance counselors—and they wouldn’t all have the same name. If they didn’t know each other and adoptive parents had given them all the same name, they couldn’t all know the details of our first meeting. The situation as they presented it to me was that at one point one girl met me in the bookstore, but at another point their experiences diverged. They shared a past, but they traveled different trajectories.

  Maybe a new Daphne came into being the same way the original Daphne transformed in response to Apollo’s chase? Perhaps she’d stood at the door of the Russian Tea Room, uncertain about whether or not to enter. For a sixteen-year-old girl, crossing the threshold into that glittering world may have been daunting. So, one Daphne had turned back, and another had been born, who went in to lunch and met her future, Galen Green.

  The demeanors of the second and third Schrödinger girls suggested that Galen might have shaped his own muse, and Terry his own disciple. That left me to wonder if I had created the original Schrödinger girl from a nondescript teenager wearing a rain slicker. But wasn’t I giving men too much credit? The girls could be distinguished from the destinies they were spinning out. They were their paths, their incarnations a complex locus of personality, proclivity, behavior, and
goals. Now I was sounding like a psychologist again.

  My work in the library revealed that in 1957 Hugh Everett III postulated the relative state formulation. I wasn’t sure yet what that meant, but I knew it had to do with the many-worlds theory, as it came to be known, which said that all possible future histories are real. According to my research, the many-worlds theory asserted the objective reality of the universal wave function and denied the reality of wave function collapse, the idea that probabilities finally become just one reality. In other words, all the Daphnes were real. Before Everett’s work, reality had always been viewed as a single unfolding history. But the many-worlds theory, devised to resolve all the paradoxes of quantum theory, imagined an infinity of futures. For Everett, both futures existed simultaneously: one in which Schrödinger’s cat was alive and one in which it wasn’t.

  None of Everett’s theory explained why I could see three possibilities, these three girls, at the same time in my universe. As a behavioral psychologist I was ill-equipped to understand or explain the phenomenon I was observing, but I didn’t think I was crazy, even if Jerry or Caroline did.

  Two days later, I met Caroline at the Poughkeepsie train station. She wore a denim skirt, and her city-white feet were slender in her sandals. She had a large straw bag slung over a shoulder. Before she even reached the car, she shouted, “Oh Garrett, you didn’t tell me you had a T-bird. It’s gorgeous!”

  A woman after my own heart.

  I had put the top down on this glorious August morning. We were a bit shy of each other, so I was grateful for the noise of the wind from the car as I navigated the short trip across the river to New Paltz. When we arrived home, nothing escaped Caroline’s attention. She admired the porch, the garden now blooming gaily with dahlias—a gift of previous tenants—and she eagerly entered the house. I had already set the table for brunch, and we feasted on salad with mozzarella, red peppers, cherry tomatoes, and green olives. I brought out peach cobbler I had actually made myself with local peaches and my mother’s recipe.

  “Let’s wait till after,” Caroline said. “I don’t want to get too full.”

  “After?” But I was just being coy.

  We climbed the narrow stairs together so quickly we were both almost breathless when we reached the top step. My bedroom had a brass headboard and a colorful patchwork quilt I had bought at a local fair the first year I got to New Paltz. She folded back the quilt and got out of her clothes as easily as she had the first night in New York. The room was bright with lemon-yellow sunlight. Our bodies were familiar to each other, and we fit together perfectly. Caroline came with her same singing sounds, but instead of crying, she laughed, and her voice sounded like happiness.

  Making love had worked up our appetites for the peach cobbler. After she had taken her last bite, she jumped up quickly to look around and lurched out of the dining room ahead of me to enter my small study. She faced the time line, and stopped dead.

  “What the hell is this?” she asked, her voice suddenly guarded.

  I wasn’t sure why she was wary. We had talked about Daphne at the Met, just before we studied all the paintings about the myth. She hadn’t seemed at all upset then.

  “Caroline,” I said as gently as I could, “you knew I was exploring this mystery. You helped me. I don’t get your reaction.”

  “You don’t?” she replied with a sardonic edge. “You really don’t see how crazy you look?”

  There was more to her feelings than her uneasiness at my time line. What was she hiding? Or did I just see mysteries and complexities everywhere?

  “Is that why we’re dating? So you can explain this Daphne mystery?”

  “No. I am not dating you because of Daphne. Maybe at first when I called you, but not once I saw you again.”

  “But at first. When you called me at the gallery you were thinking about her.”

  I thought she already understood this. I said nothing. What was there to say?

  “Are you interested in her?”

  “Not in the way you mean. She is a child, whatever Galen Green thinks. I’d like to punch him in the nose, in fact. It’s just that I like the way she surprises me and teaches me about the present—you know, the Beatles and the war. And I have to understand her mystery.”

  “Her mystery?”

  “You know. That Daphne is one person but three people too.”

  “God, Garrett. I didn’t know you really believed that. I thought it was just a great story.”

  “Come on, Caroline. You saw her run out of the gallery. You of all people know that there are different Daphnes.”

  She avoided my direct plea for her corroboration and simply said, “I want to get dressed now, and I want get out of here and away from that graph.”

  Giddy after sex, we had raced downstairs barely dressed. She had worn only my shirt, to my great satisfaction, and I wore only a pair of boxer shorts. Now, as if we were strangers, she didn’t want to be uncovered in front of me. We went back upstairs, dressed, came back down without speaking, exited the house, and got into the car. The beauty of the August afternoon now felt like an accusation. I crossed back to the east side of the river and drove north.

  To ease the tension I made small talk. “We’re going to Rhinebeck,” I said. “It’s only about a half hour away. I love the Dutch names for places and things. They remind me of when the entire Hudson Valley was Dutch. Did you know that the Dutch settled Albany before the British settled Boston?”

  “No, I didn’t know that.” Her voice was noncommittal.

  “Some people think it’s why New York is so different from the rest of the country, because the Dutch were so much more liberal. They weren’t Puritans.”

  “What about Santa Fe and St. Augustine? Weren’t they settled even before Albany?”

  “You have me there, Miss Indiana. I guess I’m just a northeast boy thinking the world revolves around New York and Boston. Point goes to Miss Indiana.”

  We were trying to have fun. We both knew that a grenade had been thrown into our fragile new relationship. When we got to Rhinebeck Caroline rewarded me by saying, “What a beautiful little town!” I parked the car and steered us toward the Beekman Arms, a staid old inn where they served high tea, not that either of us was hungry. I chose it because it was the last place where anyone would want to make a scene.

  At a banquette we each ordered tea and scones that we put in Caroline’s bag for later. After the waitress had served us, Caroline insisted that I tell her everything. I started with the rainy day in the bookstore, the mysterious figure in a yellow slicker holding the Schrödinger book, and I ended with leaving the bar after playing pool with Jane.

  She had a lot to take in, but for a moment Caroline ignored most of the story and reacted like the art historian she was. “So, you mean you were in Galen Green’s studio and you saw an entire Daphne series of paintings? Were they really based on Ovid? Do you think you could take me to see them?”

  “I saw them and could probably take you to see them.”

  After that respite, her attention returned to my relationship with Daphne. “So, if I may summarize,” she said, “you believe that you have met three separate girls and that the second two branched off from the first one, that experience and memories diverged.”

  “Exactly. Actually, the idea that universes branch off like the branches of a tree is part of the multiverse theory.”

  “Whatever,” she said, but her sense of irony got the better of her for a moment. “So the universe, like Daphne, becomes a laurel tree? . . . It’s not an idle question,” she insisted. “When clues line up so neatly it usually means that the observer is suffering from paranoia and making up patterns. You should know that. You’re the psychologist.”

  “I’m not that kind of psychologist, and just now you’re the one who saw the pattern. I’m just telling you what happened.”

  “That’s true,” she conceded. “What does Jerry make of all of this?”

  “He hasn’t quite said,
but I can tell it’s nothing good. He hinted that I am projecting unresolved conflicts onto ordinary situations. I don’t agree. I haven’t told him about the last Daphne incarnation at the recruiting center. He wouldn’t like that at all. He hates thinking about Vietnam.”

  “This would sound crazy to almost anyone.”

  “Yeah, I guess so, except maybe Everett. So, I sound crazy to you? I was hoping you would understand.”

  “Yeah, it does all sounds crazy, but I do admit that I saw that girl stare at Galen Green’s portrait and bolt out of the gallery. You have considered the possibility that you are dealing with a mentally ill child or a great actress, haven’t you?”

  “Sure. But neither of those possibilities explains all the circumstances I have uncovered, most importantly that I can corroborate the fact that on specific dates the girls were in different places. Jerry thinks she’s crazy or just plain trouble. He warned me off her, and now he’s treating me like I’m crazy too.”

  “Hmm. Isn’t that to be expected, given these circumstances?”

  “We’ve been friends for eighteen years. I wish he would give me the benefit of the doubt. I am trained to observe and analyze human behavior too.”

  “And he is trained to see neuroses everywhere. Just to be clear, you think it’s a better explanation of events to postulate alternate universes that no one has ever really seen and no one can prove exist, than to accept the idea that there is something fishy with this girl?”

  “Put like that, I have to admit that I do sound irrational, but I’d have to say yes. I believe that the multiverse theory is a better hypothesis than the idea that Daphne is just a drama queen, a liar, or has multiple personality disorder. I’m standing by my experience.”

  “What you need to do, if you can manage it, is get at least two of the Daphnes in a room together at the same time. That would help confirm your hypothesis.”