"Why did he go back? Was there a woman?"
"So he said."
"Did he tell any of you her name? Or the name of the town?"
The three men looked at each other blankly. Clearly, he hadn't.
"Okay then, what did he tell you about Minnesota?" she asked. "When did he live there?"
"Look, maybe live there implies too much. I don't know if he was there a month or a year."
"Either way: Why?"
"He said he had family there. Course, that don't mean a damn thing, because he also claimed he had family in Kentucky," Pete said, lifting his plate to a jaunty angle and then using the side of his fork to scrape the very last of the Mexican pie from the plastic. "Ask him on the right day and he'd have told you he had family on Mars."
"Well, I think he really did have cousins in Kentucky. Who do you think he had in Minnesota?"
"That I don't know," Howard murmured, and his voice almost instantly grew deflated.
"Did he ever mention a town?"
"No. Yes--yes he did. Saint Paul. Is Saint Paul in Minnesota?"
"Absolutely."
"And..."
"Yes?"
"Now that I think about it, maybe he did say something about a grandfather living there," Howard continued, the act of remembering so physically taxing that he was scrunching up his forehead with the effort. "Is it possible that he had a grandfather living in Minnesota?"
"Certainly it is. What else? A neighborhood? A name? A street? Anything?"
"Oh, I wish I knew more. He mighta said more. But my memory? You know? It's not what it once was."
"What about Chicago? Did he ever say anything about Chicago?"
"Maybe," Howard said, but Laurel could tell both from his voice and the way that Pete was glowering at him that he was stretching the truth for her benefit. He was telling her what he thought she wanted to hear.
"Okay, here's one of the main things I can't figure out," she said when the awkward silence had grown too much for her. "Perhaps he left behind a clue with one of you: How did a guy who may have come from a very wealthy family wind up without a cent to his name? I know he had schizophrenia. I know he had emotional problems. I know he drank way too much. But why didn't his family take care of him? Isn't that what families do?"
"Not mine," Pete said.
"Or mine," Paco agreed.
"Besides, you're assuming that ol' Bobbie liked his family," said Pete.
"And they, in turn, liked him," Paco added, as he leaned back in his chair and lit a filterless cigarette off a burner on the gas stove behind him. He inhaled deeply, and then blew a halo of blue smoke into the air.
She thought about the Buchanans for a moment--Daisy and Tom and Pamela--and how dislikable they all really were. Likewise, she considered how much people seemed to enjoy Bobbie. Perhaps he was the black sheep of the family for the simple reason that he was a nice guy. A decent fellow. It was possible that the Buchanans had cut him off, but perhaps it was more likely that he had untethered himself from them--from the rampant thoughtlessness and casual lack of decency that seemed to mark that whole awful tribe.
"Tell me a story about Bobbie," she said.
"A story?" Howard asked.
"Something he once did--or you once did together."
"Anything?" Paco inquired, squinting against the smoke from his cigarette.
"Anything. Something to help me understand who he was as a person."
The men looked at each other, not exactly stumped but unsure what Laurel was searching for.
"He was scared of the devil," Paco said finally, shrugging.
"Aren't we all," said Pete.
"No, really. Bobbie once saw him."
She sat forward in her chair. "You know, he told Emily that, too. Emily Young--his caseworker. What did he say to you, Paco?"
"He took the devil's picture."
"He did?"
"So he said."
"What did it look like?"
"I don't know. Maybe it's why he went crazy. You know how we can't ever see the face of God? Maybe we can't see the face of the devil, either."
"Oh, please," said Pete. "He was crazy long before he took the picture of some carnival freak he thought was the devil."
"A carnival freak?"
"Yeah. A carny. This was some time ago. But from the little he said that made sense--and, trust me, Bobbie did not make a whole lot of sense in this case--our late friend met the devil at the fair they have in Essex at the end of the summer."
"The Champlain Valley Fair."
"Right. Eight, ten miles from here. Whatever. It goes till Labor Day. You got the sheep shearing and the milking and the giant pumpkins. The farming stuff. And then you got the midway with the carnies. The geeks who run the games and the rides. I am sure Bobbie met his so-called devil there. Maybe it was someone who hurt him--you know, physically. Beat him up. Or stole what little money he had. Or maybe it was just some creep who in Bobbie's eyes looked even scarier than he was."
"Maybe you'll find him in those pictures of his you got," Howard said.
She considered this for a moment. So far she hadn't come across anyone demonic. Nor had she found any images from the county's annual end-of-summer exposition and fair. She wondered, based on the photos she'd printed, if Pete was mistaken and it was actually someone from Bobbie's childhood she should be looking for, perhaps an image of someone he'd known growing up. Someone from his own family.
"Are you sure he was talking about the Champlain Valley Fair, Pete?" she asked.
"Not completely. You can't be sure about anything when you're talking about Bobbie. Maybe it was a carny in New York. Or Minnesota. Or Louisville. You said he had family there, right?"
"I did."
"Look, you want a story?" Pete asked.
"I do."
"Then here you go. This is the Bobbie Crocker who was my friend. Our friend. This past summer, we were watching the cranes as they put up that new building by the lake. The one that will have the luxury condos and the shops. It was just me and Bobbie, and we were sweating like pigs. It must have been July. I don't drink anymore, but I was really hungry for a beer. I could just taste it. An ice cold beer--in a bottle. Maybe even one of those Budweiser liters. I haven't had a drink in three years--not quite three years then--but I had a couple bucks in my wallet and there's that convenience store right near where the apartments will be. And I was thinking: a beer. What the fu--heck? Really, what's one lousy beer? Even a liter? What, is it gonna put my ass back on the streets? Well, of course the answer is yes, it will--because I can't have just one. I have to have, like, a case. But I was gonna do it: I was gonna get me a beer. And Bobbie, thank God, read my mind and got me out of there. Took me to a shady bench and sat me down with a couple of Yoo-hoos. You know, that chocolate milk in a bottle?"
"Yogi Berra used to drink 'em," said Howard.
"Well, he used to say he did in the ads. I think he probably drank beer, too," Paco observed.
"Those Yoo-hoos kept me clean. Sometimes cold sweets help. And it was Bobbie who was looking out for me."
Laurel thought about this for a moment, and she remembered what David had told her to try as a researcher the other night when they were in bed. "Uh-huh," she said simply, nodding. And then she went silent.
Sure enough, Pete--even cool and jaded and skeptical Pete--continued. "We were sitting in the shade under one of them maples they didn't cut down, looking at the water and the Adirondack Mountains, just sipping our Yoo-hoos. And Bobbie says, 'You think this view is grand? You should have seen the view I had from my bedroom when I was a boy. The Long Island Sound out one window and a mansion with a turret out the other.' A turret! Imagine! Course, I was sure he was in Bobbie Crocker la-la land, so I just smiled and changed the subject."
Suddenly, Howard pushed his plate aside and clasped the fingers of his hands together on the table. "You know what was the best thing about Bobbie?" he said meaningfully.
They all waited.
Finally: "He was just a regular guy."
Pete allowed himself another of his hard, short, bitter laughs: "Yeah, that was Bobbie Crocker. While some old codgers are playing golf in Fort Lauderdale, he was summering behind a Dumpster on Cherry Street and spending his winters in the state mental hospital. Just a regular guy, that Bobbie Crocker."
When Laurel looked back at Howard he was nodding in agreement, his eyes wistful and slightly downcast, absolutely oblivious to the anger and the irony that laced so much of what Pete Stambolinos said.
MID-MORNING, KATHERINE put her head into Laurel's office. Laurel was with a new client named Tony, a young man who claimed to have been a high school football star from Revere, Massachusetts, eight or nine years ago, and had spent last night in the men's wing of the shelter. He was estranged from his family--like Pete and Paco and Howard and (yes, she thought) Bobbie. The only difference was that he was a lot younger. He fidgeted in his seat and had a habit of flexing and fanning his fingers, and he had bitten his nails to the point where all of his cuticles seemed to have bled in the night.
"I'm sorry to interrupt, but I have to leave right now for a meeting in Montpelier and I wanted to snag you before I left," Katherine began. She gave Tony a small wave of apology, and held up her hands in a gesture that suggested she was helpless to do anything but interrupt. Laurel joined her in the hallway.
"You may get a call from a New York lawyer asking you to stop printing Bobbie Crocker's photographs," she said. "He might even ask you to turn them over to him--or to someone. And you are not to do that, do you understand? Do not feel intimidated."
"Whoa, lawyers? When did we bring in the lawyers?"
"We didn't," said Katherine, and Laurel understood instantly who had--and why Katherine's demeanor was slightly frenzied. She was feeling coerced, and she wasn't going to stand for it. Nor was she going to allow what she perceived to be the desire of one of her clients to be cavalierly ignored. She told Laurel about her conversation with the city attorney, and then continued, "The woman didn't phone herself, of course. The entitled never do. Her lawyer did. He called Chris Fricke. Anyway, this old crone believes the photos belong to her family because she's in some."
"She's in one."
"And her brother's in some."
"Her brother's in one."
"And there are some of her old house."
"Yes."
"Anyway, she's claiming that Bobbie must have stolen a box full of photos and negatives from her family or found it somewhere, and she wants everything returned intact--exactly as Bobbie left it. She wants to see what else is there that might belong to her."
"Bobbie didn't take anything from her family: He is her family! He's her brother!"
Katherine paused and studied her closely. "Do you honestly believe that?"
"I don't believe it," she said quietly, irritably. "I know it. I am absolutely sure of it."
"Well, don't be. Please give up that notion right now. Do you understand?"
"What? Why?"
"If Bobbie really was her brother--which, I gather, is completely impossible--then we might actually have to turn everything over to her."
"I have news for you, Katherine, I have no doubts whatsoever," Laurel said, trying (and failing) to keep her voice calm. "Everything fits, it's obvious. Just this morning I had breakfast with some of the guys from the Hotel New England--"
"Let me guess, Pete and his pals? That must have been a trip."
"It was great. They made me a feast. But my point is that even the things they shared with me indicate that Bobbie is this woman's brother."
"Really?"
"Bobbie told them he grew up on Long Island. He told them he had family in Kentucky!"
"I understand the Long Island connection. What's in Kentucky?"
"It's where his mother was from. His mother was born and raised in Louisville."
Katherine sighed and gave her arm a small squeeze. "When you first told me what you recognized in the snapshots, I thought he might have grown up near your swim club, too. Really, I did. And you might still be proven right. Who knows? But--"
"He was taking pictures of the house--his childhood house!--as late as the mid-1960s! I printed a couple just last night!"
"Or someone else was--perhaps at this woman's request."
"Look--"
"Laurel, this woman's lawyer was pretty clear that his client's brother died years ago. Decades ago. No one knows how Bobbie got the pictures and the negatives, but this woman wants you to leave them alone. And she wants us to give them back. Which we do not have to do--at least not yet--precisely because she insists that Bobbie wasn't her brother. No relation. That's the key, and that's my point. As long as this Long Island dowager keeps saying that she and Bobbie aren't related, then she isn't an heir and thus can make no claim on the estate based on family."
Laurel contemplated this for a moment: The irony wasn't lost on her. If she acknowledged who Bobbie was, then Pamela Buchanan Marshfield would have reason to demand--and, perhaps, be given--the photographs. Apparently, there really were people out there who wanted them. Bobbie's fears might have been disproportionate to reality, but they were not wholly delusional.
"If BEDS keeps the prints once I'm done working with them--" she began.
"Not BEDS, the City of Burlington. The legal term is escheat. Because Bobbie died without a will, his possessions go to the city to dispose of. And in Burlington that means selling the assets with the money going to the school system--though in this case I'm pretty sure the city will sell them to us for, say, a dollar, so we can use them as a fund-raiser."
"Which is why you want us to hang on to them."
"That's part of the reason. But I also want them because they were the only thing in the world that mattered enough to one of our clients that he brought them with him wherever he went. We need to respect that. And I want us to give Bobbie the show he deserved. I love the idea of an exhibition reminding the city that the homeless are people, too, and have talents and dreams and accomplishments."
"And so I can continue to print them."
Katherine paused, and for a moment Laurel feared that she was going to tell her to stop. Finally: "Yes. Just...just remember that these photos belonged to a man who...who wasn't who you imagine he was. And"--she looked at Laurel in a way the young social worker recognized because it was precisely the way her mother gazed at her when she was worried--"try not to talk to any lawyers who call you. But, if you must, certainly don't insist that Bobbie was anyone's brother. Okay?"
Laurel nodded, but she was so angry that she felt the corners of her eyes start to quiver. She was furious both because she felt she was being muzzled and because it was clear that not even Katherine believed what she knew was a fact.
Katherine gave her a hug and waved into her office at Tony, but he glared at the director with a look of such condescension and contempt that Katherine rolled inside like a wave and apologized to him formally. Then she turned from the two of them and started down the corridor. Before she was around the corner and gone, however, she stopped and added, "And I'm serious about this identity thing. Okay?"
Laurel nodded, but her mind was already on the photos and the work she would do that weekend in the university darkroom.
PATIENT 29873
...no interest in the other patients or socializing in the dayroom. Auditory hallucinations appearing to diminish, but still has denial of key event and significant gaps in memory compatible with dissociation.
From the notes of Kenneth Pierce,
attending psychiatrist,
Vermont State Hospital, Waterbury, Vermont
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
DAVID FULLER was sitting in the pediatrician's waiting room with his older daughter on Friday morning, painfully aware that every plush animal, plastic toy, and glossy magazine was a veritable petri dish of infectious agents. Worse, the small children in the room with them were coughing and wheezing and sneezing. He wanted them quarantined somewhere far, far aw
ay from Marissa--who, at the moment, felt just fine. In fact, she was practically the only kid in her class who did not have strep throat. The only reason they were here was because a cut on the pinkie toe on her right foot wasn't healing: too much time, he guessed, with sneakers, tap shoes, and ballet slippers rubbing against it.
Marissa, of course, was absolutely thrilled that the only moment their HMO-sanctioned pediatrician could see her was on a Friday morning--when she was supposed to be in math class. She sat beside him now on the orange Naugahyde couch, her uninjured foot curled up on the cushions beneath her thigh and her head buried in a Cosmo Girl! magazine that her father thought was completely inappropriate for this waiting room. ( Just where, he wondered, was Highlights when you needed it?) He feared her silence had to do with the usually forbidden things she was getting to read about in the magazine. Consequently, to break the periodical's spell, he asked (ponderously, he feared), "Other than your pinkie toe, how are you doing?"
"Okay."
"Is the magazine really that enticing? I certainly hope you're not taking too much pleasure in whatever decadence you've found--if only so your mother doesn't kill me."
"She won't."
"Anything on your mind?"
the Double Bind (2008) Page 14