the Double Bind (2008)

by Chris Bohjalian

  She had felt herself physically tense when he'd said the word Underhill, and she considered erasing the message and going about her day as if she'd never heard it. Moreover, it was so early that she really didn't need to return his call for hours. But she couldn't resist knowing precisely how Pamela Marshfield was going to try to bully her for the pictures. And so before she had even changed into clean clothes or sat down with a bowl of yogurt and a banana, she decided she would ring him back. She imagined there was at least a chance she would pull him from bed.

  A woman answered, wide awake, and Laurel thought her voice was nothing like the genteel-sounding attorney to whom she was married. She actually had an accent reminiscent of some of Laurel's neighbors on Long Island. Quickly, the social worker introduced herself and explained that she was looking for a lawyer named Leckbruge. Terrance Leckbruge. The woman asked her politely if she knew what time it was, and Laurel said she would only be home for a moment and that her father had been an attorney.

  "When lawyers call me," said Laurel, "I call them back as soon as I can." This was actually a complete fabrication: The only times lawyers--other than her father--had ever called her had been in the year after she nearly was raped, and usually she procrastinated as long as possible before calling them back. She hated rehashing the incident, but she seemed to have done so endlessly in those months. A moment later, she heard a screen door whine open and then clap shut.

  "So, Laurel, pleasure to speak with you," said Leckbruge, his voice the reassuring drawl that she had heard a moment before on the answering machine. "You're an early riser, too? How are you doing on this glorious day?"

  "I'm doing okay, thanks. What's up?"

  "Let's see now, what's up? Well, I had a very nice, very cordial conversation the other day with one of your Burlington attorneys who represents BEDS. Woman named Chris Fricke. I have to tell you, I am mightily impressed with the work you all do at that shelter. You're an inspiration," he said, and then he took a sip of his coffee just loud enough for Laurel to hear it in the pause.

  "Thank you," she said.

  "I don't know all the details about this gentleman--your Mr. Crocker--but it appears to me as if your group really was his saving grace."

  "We found him a home. It's what we do."

  "You're modest. Trust me: The work you do is infinitely more important than the work I do."

  "That's nice of you to say."

  "I mean it," said Leckbruge, and Laurel had the distinct sense that he did. "I was wondering if we might have coffee together while I'm in Vermont. You could come to our place out here in Underhill. It's not flashy, but it's nice. Used to be, of all things, a giant sugarhouse. Woodsy on three sides, but I have a stellar view of Mount Mansfield to the east. The dirt road will beat the dickens out of your car during mud season. But it's fine the rest of the year. I am presuming you have a car. True?"

  "I do," she said. "But I'm not coming to Underhill."

  She spoke with such unmistakable finality that for a moment he was silent. Eventually, Leckbruge said, "Well, then. Should I read anything particular into your...firmness?"

  "Nothing I care to discuss." An image: the fingernails on the thinner of her two assailants. He had just wrapped his hands underneath the handlebars of her mountain bike as he lifted it--lifted her--off the dirt road, so the nails were facing the sky. There were black lines of grime beneath the tips. Her stomach already was queasy from the way she had been lurched up and into the air, as she heard once again that appallingly stupid joke. Liqueur Snatch. Meanwhile, the one who would prove to be the real bodybuilder was calling her a cunt, roaring the word at her through the mouth hole of his wool mask.

  "Very well, very well," Leckbruge was saying. "Shall we meet in Burlington? Would that be possible?"

  "What do you want to talk about?"

  "The photographs that were in the possession of your late client. But I'll bet you knew that."

  "I have nothing to say. I'm sorry. And even if I did, my sense is I should only be talking to Chris Fricke--as should you."

  "Burlington has a lot of eccentric little coffee bars. I love them all, especially one near that theater. The Flynn. Has a hot chocolate that's downright indecent. And I also know of a gloriously idiosyncratic wine bar. How 'bout we meet at five o'clock? Your choice: coffee or wine."

  She thought she heard stirring behind Talia's closed door. Suddenly, she had a vague notion that she and her roommate had some outstanding business together--a nagging sense that the two of them were supposed to do something that very day. Perhaps something as simple as shopping. But Laurel didn't believe that was it.

  As much as she enjoyed Talia--as much as she loved Talia; the woman had been more of a big sister to her than her real sibling for years now--she realized that she had to be gone by the time her friend emerged from her bedroom. She needed to get to the darkroom. She had to get to the darkroom. Which meant that she couldn't possibly linger over this phone call. And so, much to her own surprise, she agreed to meet Leckbruge at a wine bar in Burlington at five, if only so she could get off the phone and out of the house. Then, without showering or changing her clothes or even grabbing a piece of fruit for breakfast, she silently raced down the stairs and out the old Victorian's front door.

  WHERE ONCE HAD SAT the ash heaps and the billboard of Dr. T. J. Eckleburg--the optometrist whose looming, roadside ad had eyes that were massive, vacant, godlike, and cold--there was now a corporate business park. The buildings were all four and five stories, antiseptic blocks of tinted glass surrounded by parking lots that were dotted with islands of small, stunted trees. There was one fountain, an uninteresting spigot that fanned water into an umbrella near the building that housed a cell phone company. Laurel recognized the complex instantly from the photographs Bobbie had taken, because she had seen it from the highway. That meant that somewhere in the ground beneath one of the buildings was some small remnant of George Wilson's gas station. A tiny shard of glass, maybe. A trace of the cement that once had supported the gas pump. In addition, there was probably a relic or scrap from the coffee shop managed that awful, steaming summer of 1922 by a young Greek named Michaelis--the principal witness at the inquest that followed Myrtle Wilson's death.

  Had Laurel not known Bobbie's real identity, she might have puzzled over why the photographer had bothered to snap pictures of an office park on Long Island. It was profoundly far afield from the musicians and actors and news stories that seemed to be his primary subject matter. She might have thought it was possible that toward the end of his career he had been reduced to shooting office parks for real estate ads--and, based on the age of some of the vehicles in the lot, she guessed these were taken in the late 1970s--but she knew just enough area history to understand what he was actually doing. He was chronicling the location where his mother had accidentally run over her husband's lover and then fled the scene.

  She paused for a moment, staring at the images of the office park as they bathed in the chemical trays. How hard must it have been for him when he learned the truth about his parents? How old was he? Certainly, everyone discovers things about their mothers and fathers that make them a little uncomfortable, that leave them a little wobbly. Laurel had read enough psychology to know the importance of accepting one's parents' inadequacies, and how we use them unconsciously as a part of our adolescent separation from them. Individuation. Growth. It was, alas, a part of growing up. But it was one thing--in her case, for example--to realize that her otherwise hardworking, disciplined, profoundly giving father gorged on occasion like a Roman emperor. It was quite another to learn that both of your parents were adulterers, and your mother had slammed into a woman while driving her lover's car and left the victim to bleed to death on the side of the road.

  She wondered: Was it when Bobbie learned of his parents' reprehensible cowardice and selfishness--Daisy driving on as Myrtle died, and then Tom telling George Wilson who owned the yellow car so Gatsby would absorb the despairing man's wrath--that he ch
anged his last name?

  She didn't know a lot about schizophrenia, but she knew a bit from her master's in social work and from her years at BEDS. You couldn't work with the homeless and not pick up something. She found it revealing that Bobbie was sixteen when he ran away from home, since schizophrenia often begins to manifest itself between adolescence and young adulthood, and on occasion there is one traumatic, precipitating event. A term came to her that they used on occasion at BEDS: the double bind. The expression had a clinical origin, referring to Gregory Bateson's theory that a particular brand of bad parenting could inadvertently spawn schizophrenia. Essentially, it meant consistently offering a child a series of contradictory messages: telling him you loved him while turning away in disgust. Telling him he needed to go to sleep when it was clear you merely wanted him out of your hair. Asking him to kiss you good night and then telling him he has offensively bad breath. Over a long period of time, Bateson hypothesized, a child would realize that he couldn't possibly win in the real world, and as a coping mechanism would develop an unreal world of his own. The double-bind theory had not been completely discredited, but Laurel knew these days that most clinicians viewed nature--brain chemicals--as a much more significant determinant than nurture in whether a person became schizophrenic. Nevertheless, at the shelter they used the expression in much the same way that they would a term like catch-22.

  Now, was Bobbie's childhood one long no-win proposition? It certainly seemed possible. Laurel began to imagine a scenario in which the son of Tom and Daisy Buchanan learns in high school what his parents had done the summer before he was born, and then all the bad behavior he has witnessed for a decade and a half--the snobbish arrogance, the marital duplicity, and, yes, the petty carelessness--becomes small change when compared with this nightmare. And so he confronts them. He asks them how much of the story is true and how much is conjecture. His father denies it all, he argues that Jay Gatsby was driving that twilight afternoon in 1922. But Bobbie sees through him, can tell he is lying.

  And his mother, that woman whose voice was full of money: What of her? What does she do? Does she confess to her son? Or, like her husband, does she continue to insist that Gatsby was behind the wheel of the car? Or does she simply remain silent?

  Either way, Bobbie knows the truth. And that part of his gray matter that had kept his behavior in check--that, to some degree, had kept the schizophrenia at bay--was no longer able to stem the onset of the symptoms.

  It was possible, she guessed, that by then even Daisy herself had begun to believe the lie that she and Tom had been telling the world. Who could say? Perhaps Daisy Buchanan had gone to her grave in complete denial, in the end viewing the rumors that swirled about her as a mean-spirited fiction concocted by distant cousins and jealous neighbors.

  Memory, after all, can be kind: If you're not schizophrenic, she knew, sometimes a forgiving memory was the only way to get by.

  THE REFERENCE DESK at the library was open all day Saturday, and so Laurel worked steadily in the darkroom through the morning and the early afternoon, subsisting on bottled water and a muffin she bought at the UVM snack bar. She was feeling weak, but she couldn't bring herself to stop working. There was always one more picture to print. The images from the World's Fair Bobbie shot that she recognized with certainty were of the New York State Pavilion--the 250-foot tall towers designed by Philip Johnson--and the symbol of the celebration itself, the U.S. Steel Unisphere. She had seen the towers and the Unisphere probably a thousand times from the highway in Queens, and she had had an American history teacher in ninth grade who remembered the fair well from his own childhood and once brought the whole class to Corona Park as part of a unit on the 1960s.

  She didn't emerge from the darkroom until almost two-thirty, and she left then only because there was work for her to do at the library.

  Quickly, the reference librarian found for her the microfilm spool of Life magazines from 1964, and she began to move forward from January. She saw a story about Pope Paul VI becoming the first pontiff to ride in an airplane, and a profile of Secretary of Defense John McNamara. There was an article about the conviction of Jack Ruby, and another about the way some woman named Kitty Genovese was savagely murdered outside her Queens apartment one night, and how her screams for help were heard by over thirty neighbors--none of whom came to her aid.

  Finally, in an issue in April, she saw the first photos from the World's Fair in Flushing. The fair was formally opened on April 22 by President Johnson, and there were photographs of actual-sized models of rockets--surrounded by visitors clad either in jackets and ties or dresses and skirts, many of the women wearing white gloves--as well as the exhibit buildings constructed by General Motors and Chrysler and IBM. There was a half-page image of the New York State Pavilion (though not the one she had just printed herself in the UVM darkroom), as well as a picture of the monorail with a photo credit--though the photographer was neither Robert Buchanan nor Bobbie Crocker.

  She was disappointed but moved on, and within moments she found herself leaning forward in the seat and squinting at a black-and-white image on the microfilm screen. There in the following week's issue was a photograph on the second-to-last page of the magazine, the page opposite the inside back cover, of the Unisphere. The view of the orbital rings from the pedestal and the prominence of Australia reminded her of the one Bobbie had taken. She read the caption, and there he was--waiting patiently for her at the very end.

  The U.S. Steel Unisphere surrounded by the Fountain of Continents, the World's Fair, Flushing, New York. The globe stands 12 proud stories high and weighs an Atlas-straining 470 tons. At night the capitals of the world's leading nations are lit, while high above the planet three satellites whiz by. Total cost? $2,000,000, but worth every penny given the glorious way it reminds visitors that for all our political and ethnic differences, we are truly one Earth. The Unisphere is both the symbol of the newly opened World's Fair, and one of its most popular attractions! Photo: Robert Crocker.

  Laurel was, perhaps, as satisfied as she had ever been in her life, and she considered calling David on his cell phone that very moment. But she was afraid after the way they had parted that morning that it would sound like she was gloating. Moreover, she was suddenly tired, very tired. Almost light-headed. Probably too tired to talk.

  She wasn't due to meet Leckbruge for another forty-five minutes, and so she printed out the page and then returned the spool to the reference librarian and sat down for a long moment on a reading room couch to rest. Finally, she rose, and with the little energy she had left she went to the bakery down the street from the library for a bottle of juice and a scone. She knew that she had to be on top of her game when she met with Pamela Marshfield's attorney.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  PAMELA WALKED SLOWLY along the beach behind her house late Saturday afternoon in her bare feet and a pair of khaki slacks she had rolled up into capris. The autumn light fell upon her like a wave, and for a split second she was indeed unsure of her footing, as if the sand below her were shifting. She paused for a moment to watch seagulls surround a small crab in the sand, circling it. One finally grabbed it and soared into the sky over the surf. The other bird squawked angrily and then noticed her, tilting its head quizzically, robotically in her direction, before lifting off after the seagull with the crab. In the distance, perhaps a half mile down the shore, she could see the colorful dots of the much younger people in their blue jeans and windbreakers who rented shares in the more modest homes on that stretch of beach.

  She had not been completely surprised when T.J. had called with the news that the social worker had agreed to meet with him. It wasn't that she thought her attorney was especially charming--though, in her opinion, he was--but because she knew this girl from West Egg was curious. Meddlesome. Nosy. Unwilling to leave her homeless client's legacy alone. And, thus, unwilling to pass up an opportunity to meet with this lawyer from Manhattan.

  In this regard, the girl certainly reminded her
of Robert. Asked too many questions. Didn't know when to quit.

  That was, after all, precisely why Robert had finally had to leave. Or, at least, why he had decided to leave. Either way, it was hard for Pamela to imagine her father and Robert enduring another night together under the same roof after their final brawl. Of course, Robert had gotten the worst of it: Her father had been a football player. A polo player. An all-purpose brute. Had their mother been home, she would have intervened and wound up in the emergency room at the hospital in Roslyn. Fortunately, Tom and Robert Buchanan had saved their last and worst confrontation for a night when Daisy was off playing bridge. Consciously or unconsciously, Robert had probably chosen that moment because their mother was gone--though his anger at her was as deep and dogged and undiminished as the fury he had felt toward Tom. Even at the end, Daisy loved him--he would always be her mercurial little boy--but he simply could not find it in either his heart or his sadly muddled head to forgive her.

  Pamela really didn't know much about either mental illness or teenage boys. How much of Robert's behavior those days was attributable to the insanity that eventually would envelop him completely and how much was the result of being a testosterone-fueled male adolescent was never quite clear to her. She knew he didn't just wake up one day as a madman. It had been a slow and steady deterioration that may have escalated in speed when he was fifteen and sixteen years old. She was no longer sure. Who in their circle even thought about such things in the 1930s? Clearly, Daisy and Tom Buchanan weren't about to. They had plenty of growling demons of their own. But there had been talk of hospital stays (and it was only talk), and at some point they'd made the decision that Robert would be the first Buchanan who could not be trusted at a boarding school. His mood swings were far too intense, and he was completely incapable of focusing on traditional schoolwork. And--far worse, in Tom's opinion--he had no enthusiasm for sports. Only his photography interested him. When he was in one of his periods of absolutely frenetic activity, he would stay up all night in the darkroom their mother had built for him when it was clear he was never going to attend an Exeter or a Hotchkiss or a Wales. Instead, he would go to a private day school in Great Neck.