The Double Bind

by Chris Bohjalian

  Laurel was glad she had come for many reasons, the most important of which was her desire to say good-bye to this often confused but occasionally charismatic old man. When she had been having breakfast with Talia, she realized that Bobbie had become a mascot of sorts for many of the caseworkers at BEDS: not a poster child—though that was, clearly, something Katherine thought he might become posthumously—but a laudably indefatigable and eccentric spirit. A survivor. He actually liked hanging around the day station. On his good days, he was capable of coaxing smiles from the shell-shocked who stumbled in, once and for all out of options.

  She was touched to witness the friendships Bobbie had made with these other once-homeless men in the short time he had lived at the Hotel New England (but not surprised), and she was glad to see Serena—and to see that Serena was surviving, if not necessarily thriving. Serena remarked that she wanted out from under her aunt’s roof and wanted to do more with her life than to be a waitress. But, still, she looked considerably healthier than the last time Laurel had seen her, and so Laurel told her that she wanted to learn all that she could about Bobbie. Serena agreed to meet her the following week.

  On their way back to the BEDS van they had used to bring everyone from downtown Burlington out to Winooski—everyone, that is, except for Serena and the dignified Korean War veteran who had appeared out of nowhere with that flag—Laurel tromped through the wet grass beside Sam. Sam was only a few years older than she was, perhaps twenty-eight or twenty-nine. He was a former Phish-head with an unruly mop of red hair that he kept back in a ponytail and an unfashionably rotund spare tire on a man so young. But he viewed himself as ample, not fat, and he was capable of quickly making the homeless who arrived at the shelter feel secure—which, for most of the social workers, was no easy task.

  “I’m just curious,” she began. “What do you think: Do you believe Bobbie took all those pictures?”

  “No question. They were all he had with him when he was brought into the shelter. The guy didn’t even have any underwear except the drawers he was wearing—but he had those photos.”

  “But how do you know he was the photographer?”

  “He just knew so much. He could talk about Muddy Waters—”

  “Muddy Waters?”

  “Blues singer from the 1940s and ’50s—when rock and roll really began. I gather there’s a photo of him and his band in that box. Bobbie told me stories about taking his picture at one of the old Chess Records recording sessions. And another time he told me this incredible tale where he was dangled by some crane over a football field to take a shot of, like, two hundred cheerleaders wiggling around inside Hula-Hoops. It was for Time magazine, or something. No, that’s not right: It was for Life. He did a ton of stuff for Life.”

  “Did you ever see the pictures?”

  “He wouldn’t show them to me. It wasn’t safe,” he said, looking left and right histrionically, pretending to check to make sure that no one was listening.

  “Katherine alluded to the same thing. What was he worried about?”

  “Laurel, the man was schizophrenic! For all I know, it was aliens!”

  “He never said—”

  “One time, he said something that led me to believe his paranoia went back to his dad. He wasn’t scared of him—that wasn’t it. But it sounded like Bobbie feared that some people who knew his old man were after the pictures.”

  When they reached the van, Laurel pulled his arm back so she could ask him one more question before they were surrounded by Bobbie’s friends inside the vehicle. “Tell me: How does a person who’s taking photos for Life magazine wind up homeless? I know he was mentally ill. But how did the wheels come off so completely on the poor guy? Didn’t he have any family? Any friends? He was so likable, how could he not?”

  Sam Russo motioned to the men who were piling into the van in their ratty sneakers and thrift-store Oxford shirts, their pants that smelled always of the street: Howard Mason. Paco Hidalgo. Pete Stambolinos. “How do the wheels come off for any of them? Bobbie may have been a pretty good photographer once—you’d know better than me if he had actual talent—but, as you said, he was mentally ill. And, it was clear, he had serious attention deficit problems. Thirty, forty years ago, there wasn’t a whole lot we could do. We had Thorazine. We were just starting to experiment with haloperidol. But that was about it. And let’s face it, Laurel, you only saw him after he was back on his meds. You didn’t see him—or, forgive me, smell him—after he’d spent a night in a parking garage. Or when he was being kicked out of a diner because he’d been there for hours, ordering and eating like there was no tomorrow, but didn’t have a penny in his pocket. Or when he was trying to tell me that he had once hung with Coretta Scott King. I mean, I could see him with some of those musicians. But Coretta Scott King? That’s a stretch. And God only knows what chemicals he ingested in his life—you know, recreationally—or what sort of substance-abuse problems he’d had. Or what kind of demons he brought with him into adulthood. I sure don’t. Emily might. Emily Young. But trust me: The things I don’t know about these people—any one of them—could fill a book.”

  WHILE LAUREL HAD been at the funeral, Katherine’s assistant had dropped off the small envelope with Bobbie’s other pictures in her office. There were a dozen snapshots, some browned and yellowed with age. Laurel had just begun to thumb through them when she paused with a flutter in her chest and sat perfectly still. There, in a black and white so old the edges were scalloped, was the house across the cove from the country club where she had spent so much of her childhood. Pamela Buchanan Marshfield’s mansion. She recognized instantly the terrace and the adjacent portico with its eight wide columns. The balconies that overlooked the water. The dock. Behind it was a second, different image of the house.

  It had never crossed her mind that Bobbie Crocker could somehow be related to the Buchanans of East Egg. Why would it? She hadn’t thought much about either Jay Gatsby or that family across the water since she’d left for college and stopped spending her long summer days at the club. She hadn’t really thought much about any of them even when she had been living in her Speedo suits there.

  She placed the photos upright against her computer monitor and turned to the next one. There it was, the country club itself, complete with its thick, massive stone tower. Behind that print was one of the original swimming pool—Gatsby’s swimming pool. And then there were a pair of images from the parties, one of which was dated in pencil: Bastille Day, 1922. There was a man she presumed was Gatsby himself, standing with a look of almost subdued bemusement beside his canary-colored roadster. And, finally, one of the children: a girl Laurel guessed was nine and a boy perhaps five, posed beside the Buchanan portico with a tan convertible parked behind them. It was evident that this image, too, was from the 1920s.

  She recalled what Bobbie had once told her, one of the many remarks that Laurel had presumed were phantasms founded on nothing. He said he had grown up in a house that looked out across a cove at a castle. The Gatsby place wasn’t a castle, but it was made of stone and it had that tower that looked a bit like a turret.

  She picked up the phone that moment and called her mother, hoping she didn’t have bridge or tennis that afternoon, or she hadn’t taken the train into the city to go shopping with friends or visit a museum. Since her husband—Laurel’s father—had died, she had taken an existing tendency toward busyness and allowed it to become all-consuming: She was always out somewhere. Sure enough, Laurel heard her mother’s voice on the answering machine and hung up. Next she phoned her aunt Joyce—her cousin Martin’s mother—because she, too, had lived in the area since she’d been married and was a member of the club. Aunt Joyce hadn’t spent the time there that either Laurel’s mother or father or certainly Laurel herself had, but she knew the local history and the social land mines that peppered the terrain as well as anyone.

  Martin answered, his voice the tirelessly good-natured mush that Laurel’s family alone could translate with anyt
hing that resembled accuracy. Because Martin had been born with both Down syndrome and partial deafness, he spoke like his mouth was filled with a giant popover. But Laurel understood him most of the time, even over the phone, and he might have been the only person she knew who would probably live an entire life without ever speaking badly of anyone. His heart was huge, his soul nonjudgmental. He called her Daughter Laurel instead of simply Laurel, since she was named after their grandmother, (who had passed away when Laurel was in high school). For Martin, that much older woman had always been Granny Laurel.

  After Laurel had reassured him that she would visit him soon and suggested that they see a musical over Thanksgiving, he put her aunt on the line. The two of them probably spoke more often than many grown nieces and their aunts both because Aunt Joyce lived near Laurel’s mother and because of Laurel’s friendship with her cousin. The woman was, in some ways, a second mom to her, and so she didn’t presume when Martin told her who was on the phone that Laurel had especially interesting news.

  Oh, but she did, and she got to it right away. She told her aunt about Bobbie Crocker and the photos and snapshots he had left behind, her voice just a little bit giddy, building to what she thought was her big discovery: “And Pamela Buchanan Marshfield had a younger brother, didn’t she?”

  “As a matter of fact, she did,” her aunt replied with supreme calmness. “He died when he was a teenager. I must have been an infant at the time. Obviously, I never knew him. It’s just one more way that poor family was cursed. More money—and more bad luck, it seems—than anyone you could ever meet. What made you think of him?”

  In the background, Laurel heard the strings that announced the beginning of the overture to The King and I. Martin had just slipped the disc into the CD player, and in her mind she saw him climbing into the regal Siamese vest and silk trousers his mother had sewn for him.

  “He died as a teenager?” she asked her aunt, a little stunned. She picked up the photo of the two children. The boy was wearing plaid shorts with suspenders. The girl was in a summer party dress with a scooped neck and poufed ballroom sleeves.

  “I’m quite sure he did. Why does that surprise you?”

  “That homeless man I told you about. That very old homeless man. Bobbie Crocker. I was thinking—I guess I am thinking—that he was really a Buchanan.”

  “Bobbie might have been the boy’s name. But it might also have been William. Billy, perhaps. Yes, Billy rings a bell. But so does Robert. Of course, none of it matters because that boy was killed in some accident when he was sixteen or seventeen years old.”

  “The man I’m talking about spent a couple of weeks in the shelter before we found him an apartment,” Laurel continued. “But he hung around the offices and the day station a lot. He died the other day with absolutely no family that we know of, but the social worker who went through his possessions came across that envelope with the old snapshots. And there are some of the Marshfield mansion—the place where Tom and Daisy Buchanan had lived—and one of a little girl and a little boy with the old house in the background. They’re standing beside a car from the 1920s.”

  “You’re sure it’s the same house?”

  “Yes, absolutely! And there’s another one of Jay Gatsby’s place—the country club—and the man himself with that sports car of his.”

  “Well, I still don’t see why you would jump to the conclusion that this homeless man was a Buchanan. The son died. It’s common knowledge that Tom and Daisy’s son died. And you said this fellow’s name was Campbell, didn’t you?”

  “Crocker,” Laurel corrected her.

  “I think that effectively closes the case. Why would he be calling himself Crocker if his last name was Buchanan?”

  She sat back in her chair and took a deep breath to calm herself. She could see her aunt’s nose and lips scrunching together the way they did whenever the woman was discussing something she considered unpleasant. Laurel’s mother had the same tendency. They both looked like they were eating lemons, and it was an extremely unattractive family tic.

  “Maybe it closes the case. But maybe it doesn’t,” she said. “Why do you think he had all these pictures?” Laurel knew that she sounded argumentative. But she kept thinking about what Bobbie had said about his childhood. She feared for a moment that she was bunching up her face, too.

  “Oh, Laurel, please don’t be disappointed with me.”

  “I’m not.”

  “You are, I can hear it in your voice. You’re angry because I don’t share your belief that this homeless man—”

  “He wasn’t homeless. We found him a home. It’s what we do.”

  “All right, then: formerly homeless. You’re angry because I have my doubts. Maybe the children in that picture really are Pamela and Billy—or Bobbie. Whatever. But how do you know that this person didn’t come across the pictures in a Dumpster somewhere? Or some antique store? Maybe he found a photo album in the garbage and saved a few of the images. As you’ve told me yourself, the homeless—excuse me, formerly homeless—sometimes save the damnedest things.”

  She stared for a moment at the little boy, trying to find a resemblance to Bobbie Crocker. A glimmer in the eyes, maybe. The shape of his face. But she couldn’t. It wasn’t that there might not have been a resemblance. But it was hard to discern one because so much of Bobbie’s face was obscured by that impenetrable beaver beard.

  “And, of course, this all presupposes that the little boy in the photo is Pamela’s brother and the little girl is Pamela,” her aunt continued. “Why would you make such a leap? Why couldn’t they be two other children visiting the house? Guests, maybe?”

  “I guess they could be.”

  “Yes! Maybe they were friends of the family. Or cousins,” the older woman added, her voice regaining its typically agreeable lilt. In the background, Laurel could hear that Martin had skipped ahead on the CD all the way to the king’s first big number, and was belting out “A Puzzlement” with his usual flair. What Martin lacked in pronunciation, he more than made up for in enthusiasm.

  “But I really have a hunch I might be on to something here,” she said.

  “Then maybe you should talk to Pamela Marshfield. Why not? Show her the pictures. See what she says.”

  Laurel reached for the photo with her phone on her shoulder and gazed at the little girl. The child looked entitled and intense; when she envisioned her as an elderly woman, she saw someone who was more than a trifle intimidating.

  “Do you know where she lives now?”

  “Haven’t a clue. But the Daytons might. Or the Winstons.”

  “The Daytons are the family that bought her house?”

  “That’s right. And the Winstons built that elegant Tudor on some of the land she’d once owned. Mrs. Winston is very old now, too. I believe her husband has passed away. I think she lives there alone.”

  Laurel’s office door was wide open, and she saw a slightly walleyed young man with spaniel ears and a scrawny turkey neck hovering in the hallway outside it. His hair was dyed the color of orange Kool-Aid, and he had long cuts on both emaciated arms, one stitched till it disappeared beneath the sleeve of his sweat-stained gray T-shirt. He was a mess, and Laurel could tell by his deer-in-the-headlights stare that he couldn’t believe he was here at the city’s shelter for the homeless.

  “I have a client,” she told her aunt. “I think I need to go now.”

  “All right. You let me know if you find out anything interesting about your mystery man,” Aunt Joyce said, and they exchanged their good-byes and hung up. Then Laurel rose to greet her new client. She had the sense that he had been hungry for a very long time, and so she suggested that they stroll to the kitchen for peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. The intake forms could wait until after he’d eaten.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  HIS MOTHER NAMED HIM WHITAKER, which was also her father’s name. His older brother recast him as Witless when they were arguing siblings in Des Moines. His resident adviser his first year
at college christened him Witty, because he tended to hide his nervousness and insecurity behind a thick veil of irony. The RA thought this was clever, and for a while the young man had feared the name was going to stick. It didn’t. Thank God. That would have been too much pressure. And so most people simply viewed him as Whit. At least that was how he introduced himself, and that’s what the other tenants in the apartment house, including Talia and Laurel, called him that summer and autumn.

  He had two buddies helping him move his stuff in, including a bruiser with whom he’d once played rugby, but Talia and Laurel were around that Saturday morning and offered to help, too. He was instantly smitten by both. Talia had exquisite, almond-shaded skin and a raven’s black mane that she wore in a single long braid that fell almost to her waist. She managed to make gray sweatpants and a yellow UVM T-shirt look like loungewear from a lingerie catalog. She was disarmingly tall and moved with the grace and poise of a dancer. He assumed that every one of the teenage boys at her church had a crush on her—that is, if she didn’t leave them intimidated and mute—and every one of the girls wanted to emulate her. She was, clearly, a rock-and-roll pastor.

  Laurel was wearing a ball cap with her homeless shelter’s slogan on the front, “Homeland Security Begins with a Home,” and her blond ponytail rose over the plastic fit strap in the back like a fountain. It actually bounced against her neck as she raced up and down the stairs with boxes of his CDs and plastic garbage bags full of his clean shirts and socks. She was wearing a pair of pink Keds and denim capris, and he was mightily impressed by those calves. Gastrocnemius. Soleus. Peroneus longus. The muscles that were extending her feet as she moved. The girl had calves that were glorious. A biker’s calves. A swimmer’s calves. A—okay, he admitted to himself, it wasn’t merely a professional’s appreciation—lover’s calves.