the Double Bind (2008)

by Chris Bohjalian

"No."

  "Do you recall the town?"

  "In North Dakota?"

  Laurel nodded.

  "It was near Grand Forks. It may even have been in Grand Forks. It was on old Highway 2. I do remember that."

  "Would any of your cousins know anything about the accident--or about your brother?"

  "Oh, we both played often with our cousins from Louisville. The Fays, William and Reginald. But they've passed away. Maybe they told their children something, but contacting them would be a lot of work for little gain."

  "So you don't believe this homeless person, Bobbie Crocker, was your brother."

  "Why would you believe that he was? My Lord, even if Robert hadn't died, why would he have disappeared? Why would he have changed his name?"

  Laurel had to restrain herself from answering simply: mental illness. Suddenly, she was nervous that if she didn't scoop up the pictures that very moment Pamela Marshfield would, and so she slid the images toward her and then dropped them into her envelope. She saw the woman was watching her.

  "You have more pictures with you, don't you?"

  "No," she said simply. Technically, she knew, she couldn't give the pictures to Pamela anyway because they weren't hers to dispose of. But would anyone really have cared? Unlikely. Nevertheless, Laurel couldn't bring herself to part with them--neither the snapshots she had with her, nor the material back in Vermont--and there was one critical reason why. She had the sense that Pamela was lying. The woman was denying that Bobbie Crocker was her brother and dismissing a BEDS client as a person. Laurel considered this unforgivable. Here she was living in an estate on the ocean while her brother had died in the stairwell to his small, single room in what had once been a run-down hotel. Withholding the photos was a way of penalizing her.

  Besides, if she was going to unravel the mystery of how the man had gone from the mansion across from her childhood swim club to a dirt road and a homeless shelter in northern Vermont--and Laurel wanted to know now more than ever--she might need those pictures in her research.

  Did she think there might be consequences? It crossed her mind. But she understood as well as anyone that often the trajectories in one's life were built entirely upon unintended results. Obviously, none of her clients ever planned to wind up at BEDS.

  "What else then is in that envelope?" Pamela was asking her.

  "Oh--"

  "If they're pictures of my brother, don't you believe I have a right to see them?"

  "They're not, they're--"

  "Child, please, hand them to me now. I insist," the old woman said, and then she reached across the small table with the speed of a snake and simply pulled the envelope from Laurel's fingers as if the twenty-six-year-old were a toddler who had hold of a piece of precious crystal. Laurel was too surprised to stop her.

  "Well," Pamela said, drawing the single syllable out into a short sentence as she began to flip through them, lingering on the one of Jay Gatsby. "I shouldn't have doubted you. They're not of Robert now, are they?"

  "No."

  "My brother, of course, never knew this awful man. Apparently, I met him once or twice, but I was too young to remember anything."

  "Where did you meet him?"

  The woman glanced up at her, offered a small practiced frown, and then proceeded to ignore the question completely: "People only know his side of what happened, you know. Gatz's, that is. That, of course, was his real name. James Gatz. He changed it to Gatsby. That's the sort of man he was. And yet everyone was always completely under his spell. See? Just look at the people at this party. Or this one. Gatz hypnotized people with his money."

  "And your parents didn't?"

  "No."

  She seemed to be contemplating the image of the old pool, the one in which Gatsby was murdered, before returning the pictures to the envelope. Then she leaned it up against her cup and saucer. Reflexively, Laurel reached across the table to retrieve it, inadvertently toppling her hostess's teacup as she did. It fell into the woman's lap, but it didn't break and it was, fortunately, empty. Still, it was an awkward moment, and Laurel rose to apologize.

  "I am so sorry," she said, fumbling. "Please tell me it didn't spot your skirt."

  "You might simply have asked for the pictures, Laurel," she said, her voice a low rumble of condescension. "Trust me: I had no intention of stealing them. Merely touching that one of Mr. Gatz has left me with an almost overwhelming desire to wash my hands."

  "Your skirt?"

  "My skirt is fine."

  "I'm really sorry," Laurel repeated, aware even as she spoke that she had allowed whatever power she had to be eroded completely by one paranoid rush. Nevertheless, she still had the sense that had she not grabbed the prints back, Pamela Marshfield would indeed have held on to them.

  Now the woman shook her head and folded her arms across her chest. "So, tell me," she said. "What do you plan to do next?"

  Laurel wasn't precisely sure what she meant, and so she told Pamela of her intention to try to restore Crocker's work and see what images existed in the negatives. She admitted that she hoped someday BEDS would give the man the solo show that his photographs deserved. When she was finished, Pamela rose and she knew they were done--or almost done.

  "I presume you understand now that this photographer was not my brother?" she asked, and they started through the French doors and into the living room, the heels of their shoes echoing along the strip of gleaming white hardwood floor that separated two great, thick Oriental carpets. The ceiling was vaulted, and from it hung a massive art deco chandelier, the hundreds of bulbs encased in globes the shape of delicate angel wings.

  Laurel thought for a moment about the woman's question. She believed just the opposite was true. "Where is he buried?" she asked, instead of answering her directly.

  Pamela stopped. "You want proof? You want the body, is that it? Would it put your mind at ease if we exhumed my dead brother's corpse and had strands of his hair DNA-ed?"

  "I'd just like to see the plot...if I may."

  "No," said Pamela. "You may not."

  "Because..."

  "Fine, go see the plot. I can't stop you. It's in the family mausoleum in Rosehill."

  "Rosehill?"

  "Chicago, young lady. It's a cemetery in Chicago--where my father's people are from. You can go there and see it for yourself. It's not far from the crypts for the Sears family and Montgomery Ward. My advice, however, is that you leave this alone. Just let go of this bone--and, yes, I am aware that was a rather grisly pun--and leave it alone. Surely you have better things to do with your life. And I would hate to see you compromise your years with a dangerous obsession."

  "Dangerous?"

  She smirked. "Unhealthy, perhaps, might have been a better choice of word. Nevertheless: my brother and your homeless people. It doesn't sound like a promising combination."

  Laurel didn't feel threatened--not yet--but she did have the distinct sense that she had been warned. And that only made her want to continue her search with more vigor. When she climbed into her car, she found it interesting that her hostess had never once asked how a homeless man had come into possession of the family pictures.

  CHAPTER NINE

  AFTER THE SOCIAL WORKER had left, Pamela Buchanan Marshfield sat alone in her study and flipped dolefully through the only photo album that remained that still held pictures of her brother. Her--and now it was official--late brother. He had been gone, literally or metaphorically, for so long that she was surprised at the depth of her grief.

  Her father had thrown away or destroyed all of the other books with photos of Robert, or they had been lost over time. This one album she had was ancient, nearly as old as she was. Many of the photographs were no longer even attached to the dusty pages, and there were two- and three-inch-long yellow stripes where once there had been pieces of Scotch tape. Her mother had never thought much about archival preservation. In truth, her mother had rarely thought much about tomorrow. In most of the images, Robert was a very little b
oy; in a good many, he looked just about the way he had in the snapshot that Laurel had brought by the house.

  Clearly, the girl had the negatives. And it sounded as if she had a lot.

  When she had met with the social worker, she had chosen to wear a pair of earrings that once had belonged to her mother. She was quite sure they had been a gift from James Gatz, because the diamonds--and there were many--were set in big, ostentatious daisies, and her mother only seemed to wear them when her father was out of town or with the latest in his unending string of mistresses. Moreover, virtually every other piece of fine jewelry her mother owned seemed to have a story attached to it. "These rubies were Grandmother Delia's"--her grandmother, a Louisville Fay--"and she was given them by her own parents when she debuted in 1885. Your father gave me these pearls on our ten-year wedding anniversary. This diamond? A gift from him after he fucked that awful Lancaster woman." Her mother's language had actually grown considerably more colorful as she had grown older, and she had started to drink on occasion even when she was alone. Daisy had always been a heavy drinker, but usually she had been able to hold her alcohol well. Tom Buchanan, too. They would be drunk, but you wouldn't necessarily know it until they grew violent.

  For a few years, in that period when he had been friends with an advertising executive named Bruce Barton, her father had stopped drinking altogether. Barton was the second B in BBDO, and the author of a slim little book that became a massive bestseller, The Man Nobody Knows. In it, Barton portrayed Jesus Christ as the world's first great businessman: the sort of decisive individual who would have been welcomed into the boardrooms of the decade's biggest corporations and who would have felt right at home at the parties that peppered the era--perhaps even those Dionysian debauches that James Gatz threw for strangers across the cove. In Barton's view (and so, for a time, in her father's), Jesus was a man's man, a reveler who would turn water into wine, and a most impressive storyteller--the creator of parables that were models for ad sloganeers everywhere.

  In hindsight, Pamela really was not all that surprised that her father had glommed on to The Man Nobody Knows and then to its author, and for a few years had tried to live a more exemplary life. Her father was often looking for what he referred to without a trace of irony as "scientific stuff," and Barton was a serious improvement over some of the other titles to which he had attached himself: Goddard's The Rise of the Colored Empires. Melckie's Commandeering the Oriental. And a particularly angry, brutish little screed called The Pure American by someone named C. P. Evans. She could still recall their dust jackets, and the angry fights her parents would have when her mother would say something catty about one of the books and her father would grow defensive.

  She honestly hadn't expected the girl to comment on her earrings. But she had still hoped she might. It was why she had worn them in the first place. Big, garish daisies. She had wanted to see how much the social worker knew, and she thought the jewelry might provide an opening. She found it interesting that Laurel hadn't planned on showing her the pictures she had brought with her of Gatz and his parties, and Pamela wondered now if this detail alone didn't tell her all that she needed to know. The child was still worried about her feelings. Hadn't wanted to dredge up her mother's infidelity.

  Still, it was very clear to Pamela that she had to get the pictures back. All of them. The negatives, too. She had spent a not insubstantial part of her life salvaging her parents' reputation, and she shuddered when she imagined what sort of truth might be conjured from among those old photos. Perhaps her father did not deserve rehabilitation, but her mother did. Her mother always had done the best she could.

  Robert hadn't believed that, of course, which was among the reasons why he had run off. What did he see when he saw Daisy or Tom or her? Clearly, he saw something more. Something different. There was the periodic laughter when there hadn't been a joke. Or before there was a punch line. There were the occasional off-color asides he would offer at inopportune times. At a dinner party. The debut of one of her friends at the Plaza. When the cousins were in town from Louisville. She recalled the occasions when she or one of her parents had found him alone in a room in the house as an adolescent--the kitchen or the living room or his bedroom, the door open--muttering to himself, once rocking in a ball on the dining room floor, half in and half out of the cold fireplace, the fingers on both hands clenched tightly around his windpipe. Another vision she would never forget, and among the worst: The amount of blood--his blood--he had left on his bedspread after he had smashed the kings and queens of his cherished glass chess set and then collapsed atop his mattress. She had just come home from shopping for college with one of her girlfriends when she heard him sobbing, went upstairs to investigate, and wound up pulling the daggerlike shards of black and blue glass from the palms of his hands, while the two of them waited for the ambulance. He would never tell her precisely what had occurred, or why, but it appeared that he had been trying to decapitate the pieces.

  And yet there were still long periods of perfect lucidity and charm. He was strikingly good-looking, and he always had girls interested in him. He danced as well as any of the boys in East Egg, and he was invited to parties often. He was always very funny. When he was fifteen and sixteen--while she was at Smith--she understood he had actual girlfriends. There was one who, with Daisy or the girl's mother as a chaperone, he would take into Manhattan for movies or stage plays or concerts. He had no interest in learning to play an instrument, but he liked Duke Ellington and Artie Shaw and Horace Heidt and his Musical Knights. Her mother had told her one time that a monitor at a dance had reported that Robert had kissed a neighbor girl named Donelle while the two of them were dancing to a ballad by Billie Holliday. It was clear that Daisy was pleased.

  And the occasional violence--such as that chess set? Well, wasn't Tom violent, too? And certainly Daisy herself could be mercurial. She had thrown her share of plates and wineglasses--usually, but not always, at her husband.

  Unfortunately, Pamela had only the vaguest outline of what her brother had been up to in all the years he had been gone. She lacked the specifics. For most of their lives, she hadn't even known where he was--what he was doing or where he was living. It was a testimony to the measure of his distaste for her parents and her. He did not merely avoid them, he had not merely shunned them: Over the years, he had resisted completely her sporadic efforts to get him help.

  No, that wasn't accurate. Once--one time--she had convinced him to check himself into the Oakville Retreat.

  Still, each of the photographs in her album was rich with memory. She paused over one that her father had taken of her mother and Robert and her when she was sixteen. That meant her brother would have been twelve. She and her mother were seated on the side of the sailboat her father had bought in one of the brief and (as always) not completely sincere periods when he was trying to find things for the four of them to do together. It was, she believed, the last time he would make such an effort. The boat was anchored in the sand on the beach behind their house that her father had created soon after that pathetic George Wilson had murdered James Gatz. Within days, as if to signal to the world that he didn't give a damn if people wanted to stand around the mansion across the water and gawk at the light at the end of his own family's dock, her father had buried the part of the lawn that sloped into the cove beneath a small mountain of soft, white sand. One morning, three dump trucks arrived filled with the makings of his new shoreline, accompanied by a half-dozen men with shovels and rakes, and by the end of the day the dock jutted into the cove from beach instead of lawn.

  Most of the time they rarely bothered to tie the boat to the dock, because it was easier to simply drag it up onto the sand. The craft was far too small to take much beyond the secluded walls of the bay. And really only three of them could safely sail it at one time anyway, a further indication in Pamela's mind of the disingenuousness of her father's contention that he had bought it for the Buchanan family.

  In the image, she an
d her mother were wearing suitably modest bathing suits. She was struck--as she was often when she saw pictures of her mother--by how much more beautiful Daisy was than she. Daisy Buchanan was only thirty-six then, a mere twenty years older than her daughter.

  Pamela saw her brother was barefoot in the photo, but he was wearing long khaki pants and a shirt with horizontal sailor stripes. No doubt their mother had bought the outfit for him as a part of her codependent attempt to support her husband's halfhearted effort to convince the world (to convince themselves) that this boat was just one more indication of the great fun they always had together as a family.

  Soon after the picture was taken, her brother and her father fought. Again. By the time Robert was twelve, they were fighting often. This one was particularly nasty because it marked the first time that her brother had physically tried to intervene in one of their parents' venomous little spats. Even now, Pamela could remember vividly what had triggered it. By accident, her father had positioned the three of them for the photograph in such a fashion that he could see in the background the house that once had belonged to James Gatz. Apparently, her father didn't want that. At least that's what he said. He said he wanted only blue sky and water behind them. And so, when he discovered what he had done, he had them all pose on the other side of the sailboat. But then the sun was going to be a problem. Consequently, he and Robert dragged the boat a few feet farther up in the sand so one would see only the gently rolling waves and the high summer sky, and the picture in the photo album finally was taken.