the Double Bind (2008)

by Chris Bohjalian

  Still, some people thought Laurel had grown aloof. She could tell. But she shrugged this off and further curtailed her more casual friendships.

  Of course, the change that mattered most is this: If Laurel had not been fiercely attacked, she would not have resumed swimming laps. That sounds prosaic, anticlimactic. But life is filled with small moments that seem prosaic until one has the distance to look back and see the chain of large moments they unleashed. Pure and simple, if Laurel had not started venturing most mornings to the school's natatorium, she would never have met the University of Vermont alumna who ran the homeless shelter in Burlington and continued to stay fit years later in the UVM pool. And then she would never have wound up working at the shelter, first as a volunteer while she was still in school and later, after she graduated, as a bona fide employee. And if she hadn't wound up at the homeless shelter, she would never have met a patient from the state mental hospital, a gentleman (and he was indeed gentle) fifty-six years her senior who went by the name of Bobbie Crocker.

  LAUREL'S FATHER gave her some advice, too, when she was growing up: Smart is boring. Effort matters. And, yes, she should never forget that while she was being raised in a nice home in an impressive neighborhood with a mother willing to drive her to soccer games and swim team practice, most of the world lived in serious, dispiriting poverty and thus someday she would be expected to give something back. He did not mean to suggest in ominous tones that a karmic payback loomed before her because she always had enough to eat and never came home from the mall lacking in clothes or CDs or boys with whom she might want to hook up.

  Her father knew everything about the consumption, but nothing about the boys. At least nothing of consequence. He died soon after she finished college with nary a notion of either the sexual appetites or the experimentation that occurred in the high school circles in which she had traveled, or the sexual carousel that had marked her first year at the University of Vermont.

  He was a Rotarian, which meant that he was a sizable target for comic abuse. But he was firm in his belief that when his two daughters were grown they would have a moral obligation to reach out to others who lacked their advantages. His Rotary Club actually paid for and built an orphanage in Honduras, and he went there himself annually to inspect it and make sure the charges there were content and well cared for. And so Laurel always was careful to defend the Rotary when people around her made jokes about the organization, making it clear to the glib and sarcastic that in her opinion you didn't make fun of people with full-time jobs who put roofs over the heads of children whose parents had died of AIDS or had lost their homes in a hurricane. Her sister, a stockbroker five years her senior, became an active member of that very same Rotary Club.

  Laurel was twenty-three when her father died abruptly of a heart attack. She was confident that he knew how much she had loved him, but that didn't necessarily make the hole his death had left in her life any easier to fill. He and her mother had arrived at the hospital in Burlington the night she was attacked in less than three hours. How? A fellow Rotarian was a pilot with a small plane, and he flew them north as soon as she called.

  Laurel and her childhood friends were well aware that the country club on Long Island Sound where they all learned to swim and sail and play tennis had once been the home of Jay Gatsby. But, in truth, they didn't much care. Even their parents didn't much care. Their grandparents probably did. But as nine- and ten- and eleven-year-olds, Laurel and her friends didn't care much at all about anything that mattered to their grandparents. The clubhouse and broad, sweeping dining room had been Jay Gatsby's stone mansion, and there were dusty black-and-white photographs of his parties from the early 1920s decorating the foyer. In every image everyone was overdressed. Or pickled. Or both. Laurel sensed that her friends--the boys, anyway--might have been more intrigued by the club's history if the swimming pool in which they spent whole summer days had been the marble one in which George Wilson had shot Gatsby, but it wasn't; that pool was long gone, replaced by an L-shaped monster with eight twenty-five meter lanes along the letter's vertical length, and a twelve-foot deep diving section along the shorter, horizontal span. There was a one-meter board and a three-meter board, and in the grass along the western and northern sides there were long rows of stately crab apple trees. In the high summer, the young mothers would sit among them in the shade with their toddlers. Laurel spent five years at the pool on the swim team and another three as a diver.

  In addition, everyone knew that the northernmost of the three houses across the cove in which they capsized their canoes had once belonged to Tom and Daisy Buchanan. Daisy was the Louisville belle Gatsby had longed for and Tom was her husband. The Buchanans' Georgian Colonial was the oldest of the three homes, the other two having been built when Pamela Buchanan Marshfield--Tom and Daisy's daughter--subdivided the estate in the early 1970s. Where there had once been a half-acre of roses there was now a north-south tennis court that belonged to a family named Shephard; where there had once been a barn housing Tom Buchanan's polo ponies there was a sprawling replica Tudor owned by a family named Winston. Pamela sold the remaining property--the house in which she grew up and where she lived as a married adult until she was almost sixty--in 1978, the year before Laurel was born.

  Consequently, Laurel never knew Pamela when she was growing up. They wouldn't meet until she was an adult herself.

  But her father knew Pamela. He hadn't known her well, but that wasn't because she was an eccentric recluse. Pamela and her husband simply traveled with a much older (and, yes, even wealthier) crowd than Laurel's parent's, and for fairly obvious reasons were not members of the relatively casual country club across the cove. Instead, they belonged to a far tonier marina farther east on Long Island.

  Nonetheless, when Laurel contemplated her childhood, more times than not the names Gatsby and Buchanan never even entered her mind. If she thought of them at all, she viewed them as insubstantial ghosts, wholly irrelevant to her life in Vermont.

  But then she saw the dog-eared photographs that Bobbie Crocker--indigent, good-tempered (most days), and mentally ill--had left behind after he died at the age of eighty-two. The old man suffered a stroke in the stairwell on his way to his dormitory-like studio in what had once been the city's Hotel New England, but was now twenty-four heavily subsidized apartments the formerly homeless could rent for about 30 percent of their disability benefits or Social Security, and as little as five dollars a month if they hadn't any income at all. Bobbie had no family that anyone knew of, and so it was his caseworker who discovered the carton of old photographs in his one closet. They were badly preserved, the images stacked like paper plates or wedged upright into folders like old phone bills, but the faces were clearly recognizable. Chuck Berry. Robert Frost. Eartha Kitt. Beatniks. Jazz musicians. Sculptors. People playing chess in Washington Square. Young men tossing a football on a street in Manhattan, a Hebrew National billboard towering overhead. The Brooklyn Bridge. A few clearly more recent ones from Underhill, Vermont, including some of a dirt road--one with a girl on a bike--that Laurel knew all too well.

  And in a separate envelope designed for a greeting card, the snapshots: smaller, though equally as distressed. She recognized instantly the home of Pamela Buchanan Marshfield. Then the country club from her childhood, including the Norman-like tower, when it was owned by a bootlegger named Gatsby. The original swimming pool, with the tower behind it. Parties, such as those that were celebrated on the walls of that country club dining room. Pamela Buchanan Marshfield as a little girl, standing beside a boy a couple years younger, a tan coupe off to their side. Gatsby himself, beside his bright yellow roadster--the car that Tom Buchanan dismissed at least once as a mere circus wagon.

  There were just about a dozen of these smaller photos, and hundreds of negatives and larger prints that she presumed Bobbie Crocker had taken himself.

  Laurel did not know instantly who the little boy was beside Pamela. But she had a hunch. Why couldn't Pamela have had a br
other? Why couldn't he have wound up homeless in Vermont? Stranger things happened every day. But she certainly did not suspect the whole truth when she first tried to make sense of the box of dingy pictures, or imagine that soon she would wind up alone, estranged from her lover and her friends, once more pursued and shaken and scared.

  .

  PATIENT 29873

  ...patient still obsessed with the old photographs. Talks of them constantly, wants to know where we've put them. Plans to have a show someday--a "spectacular show"...

  Plan: Continue risperidone 3 mg PO BID

  Continue valproate 1000 mg PO BID

  Given security issues, no off-ward privileges at this time.

  From the notes of Kenneth Pierce,

  attending psychiatrist,

  Vermont State Hospital, Waterbury, Vermont

  CHAPTER ONE

  PAMELA BUCHANAN MARSHFIELD saw the ad the homeless shelter in Vermont had placed in the newspaper before her attorney did. She realized right away it was about her brother and her brother's work.

  Memory, she knew--especially when you were her age--was nothing if not eccentric. Consequently, when she thought of Robert, she did not recall a grown man. Instead, she thought instantly of the infant she would take from the nurse's arms and show off to her parents' guests as if he were her own. And, in some ways, he was. She was helping to change his diapers, she was helping to feed him. She would carry him out to the garden and hold his face up to the roses so he could breathe in their perfume. She would let him sniff the polo ponies, and the polo ponies sniff him. Her parents' marriage grew considerably less turbulent in the first years after he was born, and it was the only period from Pamela's childhood when she did not recall them fighting. They may even have been drinking less. Her mother was perhaps never happier than when her brother was cuddly and small and smelled of talcum; the myriad disappointments that already had marked Daisy's life--and Daisy herself was still very young then--must have seemed considerably easier to shoulder when she cradled her baby.

  Unfortunately, it didn't last. It couldn't. The fissures that were the distinguishing feature of Tom and Daisy Buchanan's marital landscape were far too wide for a baby to bridge. For any baby. Nevertheless, Pamela hoped and prayed and craved nothing less than a lightninglike miracle from that child. That toddler. That little boy.

  Pamela had read somewhere that infants only saw black and white when they were first born. They didn't yet distinguish colors. She thought this was interesting for a variety of reasons, but mostly because of one of her earliest memories of her brother. It was a day the summer after he was born. Her father wasn't home, but her mother had returned from a lunch with some lady friends just about the time that she and her brother were awakened by their nurse from their naps. They didn't usually nap in the same room, but they did that humid August afternoon: They had rested together in the parlor that looked out upon the terrace because the nurse could open the French doors and a breeze would come in off the water.

  Daisy got out the album with the larger photographs and portraits, most from her adolescence in Louisville, and brought her two children with her to the couch. There she sat Robert upright in her lap as if he were one of his big sister's teddy bears, while Pamela nuzzled beside her. She smelled of lemon and mint. Then she proceeded to tell her children--mostly Pamela, of course, since her brother was barely a season old--the stories of the people in each one. And while Pamela could no longer recall specifically what her mother had said that afternoon about her grandparents or cousins or aunts and uncles and suitors, she did remember this: Her brother would want to stare at the images long after she and her mother were ready to flip the page, and often he would reach out with his pudgy fingers and touch the black-and-white faces of the Fays from Louisville who had preceded them.

  As a toddler, he gravitated often to that album, and when he was only four and five years old he and Pamela would pore over the entire collection of their mother's photo books. They treated them like fairy tales, and Pamela would use the pictures to craft bedtime stories for him. At some point, he began making up stories for her. They usually weren't violent. And they were considerably less frightening than the traditional stories of giants and witches and fairies that children were spoon-fed back then. But they were strange and largely nonsensical. He was only nine and ten years old, but already Pamela could see that her brother was beginning to live in a boundary-less world wholly lacking in rigid cause and effect.

  It was a foreshadowing of what he would become. How he would live the vast majority of his life.

  Consequently, as soon as Pamela saw the newspaper ad, she called her attorney and asked him to contact the homeless shelter in Burlington.

  CHAPTER TWO

  KATHERINE MAGUIRE had luminescent green eyes, and unlike her chlorine-saturated hair they hadn't faded the slightest bit with age. People actually found them a little unsettling. Laurel certainly did. She guessed that Katherine was fifty, not quite twice her age, but she was toned and trim and passed for a woman considerably younger. The two of them had swum together at the UVM pool for six years, ever since Laurel had returned to the water after the attack, meeting at the changing room weekday mornings at 5:45. Two decades ago, when Katherine was only a few years older than Laurel was now, Katherine had founded the homeless shelter--and she had created the institution virtually on her own. Laurel had always viewed this as a daunting accomplishment. She wasn't quite sure she could start a lemonade stand on the sidewalk outside her apartment house on her own. Along with her twin boys in high school, Katherine considered the shelter her life's work.

  Katherine strode with her usual confidence into Laurel's office a little before lunch on a Monday in September, cradling in her arms a beaten-up cardboard banker's box. She dropped it with a small thud on Laurel's floor, and then sank into the folding chair opposite her social worker's industrial-strength metal castoff of a desk--a desk identical to the one Katherine used in her own, only slightly larger office.

  "There was an envelope, too," Katherine said, "but I forgot it on my side table. And you can't believe the piles of newspapers and junk mail he managed to amass in a single year. The guy was an unbelievable pack rat."

  Katherine had a habit that some people (especially men) found annoying, but usually it didn't bother Laurel: She would begin every conversation as if it had been going on for some time.

  "Who?"

  "Bobbie Crocker. You know he died yesterday, right? At the Hotel New England?"

  "No, I didn't know," Laurel said, lowering her voice. When one of their clients died, they all grew a little somber. Sometimes it didn't even matter how well they had known the person: It was the idea that they were the only ones who stood witness to that life at the end. They all keenly felt how small and spare and diminished that individual's existence had become. "Tell me what happened?"

  "You hadn't heard?"

  "I've been with clients or in meetings all day."

  "Oh, Laurel, I'm so sorry. God, I didn't mean to break it to you this way," she said. This might have been true, but Laurel knew it was also possible that this was precisely the way Katherine had meant to share this news with her. Because of her history, people either treated Laurel with excessive delicacy when something tragic or sad had happened, or they steamrolled clumsily ahead. Her sister, Carol, was the one who informed her that their father had died, and they must have been on the phone a solid minute before she realized that Carol was telling her in the most convoluted manner possible what had occurred. Her big sister was so evasive at first that for easily thirty seconds Laurel thought she was phoning with the essentially inconsequential information that their father was on a business trip overseas somewhere and they might not hear from him for a while. She honestly couldn't understand why her sister was bothering to call at all. In the case of Bobbie Crocker's death, Laurel suspected that Katherine may have chosen the opposite tactic, the inadvertent bludgeon, in which her strategy was to act as if Laurel already knew that
one of their clients had passed away.

  "Go on, talk. Tell me," Laurel insisted, and Katherine did, beginning with the way another tenant had found Bobbie on his way to church, and ending with how easily--how tragically easy--it had been for Emily Young, his caseworker, and her to clean out his apartment on Sunday afternoon.

  "Took about two hours," Katherine said. "Can you imagine? Lord, when my parents die it will take about two years to go through all the stuff they've amassed in their lives. But a guy like Bobbie? The clothes went into a couple of plastic bags: the plastic bags for the Dumpster and the ones for the Salvation Army. And trust me: The ones for the Dumpster were a lot heavier. Mostly it was just newspapers and magazines."

  "Any letters at all? Any sign of family."

  "Nothing really. I mean, there were some snapshots in that envelope, but I only looked at them for a second. I don't think they really had anything to do with Bobbie. You knew he was a veteran, right? World War Two. So he gets a little burial plot up at the cemetery by the fort in Winooski. There's going to be a small ceremony tomorrow. Can you make it?"

  "Of course," Laurel said. "I wouldn't miss it."