The Double Bind

by Chris Bohjalian

  “Such as?”

  Shem rested his head in his hands, his mind a wardrobe of Bobbie’s reminiscences—some real, some imagined. He told Laurel how Bobbie had claimed to have traveled, but the picaresque paralleled his father’s in so many ways that at least some of it, Shem believed, had been fabricated. Ostensibly, Bobbie was looking for Jay’s family. He insisted he had been to wintry upper-plains cities in Minnesota in search of his grandfather, and eventually to Saint Olaf, a Lutheran college in the southern part of the state where Bobbie had heard Jay had spent two weeks as a student and janitor. Like his father roughly three decades earlier, Bobbie said he had worked as a clam digger and salmon fisherman on Lake Superior. He’d tracked down the remnants of Camp Taylor, scrupulously avoiding his cousins and his grandparents who still lived in that corner of Kentucky. (He said that years later he had returned to Louisville to see what remained of the Fays, and there he had participated in—and chronicled—a freedom march an hour to the east in Frankfort.) As a young man, Bobbie had briefly considered taking his real father’s name, but he wanted anonymity as he visited the states and towns that had even the smallest cameos in the story.

  When the United States entered the Second World War, he enlisted. This was, after all, what his father had done. His real father, the one who was a captain, fought in the Argonne, and eventually would be given command of the divisional machine guns. The man who had raised him, on the other hand, had spent most of 1917 playing polo and most of 1918 romancing Daisy.

  This entered Bobbie’s mind when he signed up to join the Army. He felt he couldn’t be a Gatsby given the preconceived notions people had of his father, but he no longer wanted to be a Buchanan. He no longer wanted to be the son of a patrician and bully. He no longer wanted to be Robert. On his way to the recruiting station on a main street in Fairmont, Minnesota, he passed a grocery store which had a window display with a poster of a fictional housewife named Betty Crocker and decided, almost on a lark, to commandeer the name. Why couldn’t he be Bobbie Crocker instead of Robert Buchanan? Hadn’t his own father changed his name, too?

  Moreover, he realized that if he changed his name, it would be that much more difficult for them to follow him—though who, precisely, they were Shem couldn’t say. Still, it wasn’t merely nascent schizophrenia and paranoia that caused him to shed the skin of a Buchanan: It was also a desire to distance himself from the whole hollow, sullen, and morally insolvent little clan.

  If the Army had any doubts about the mental health of a recruit whose moniker must have reminded them of a cake mix, they weren’t sufficient to prevent them from allowing him to wade ashore at Omaha Beach in one of the very first waves behind the demolition teams. Bobbie would fight that year and into the next in France and Belgium and Germany, somehow escaping the war unscathed. Physically, anyway. He had an affair with a French woman who was in many ways even more scarred than he was, given how much of her family had died in the first German offensive in May 1940 and then fighting in North Africa in 1943. She lost two brothers, a cousin, and her father. He wanted to bring her back with him to the United States, but she wouldn’t leave her family—the living and the dead.

  And so he returned alone to America with his unit, and after his discharge got work in a photography store in lower Manhattan. He sold cameras and film, and in the evenings he took pictures himself. Sometimes he’d visit nightclubs, largely because he was living alone in a squalid apartment in Brooklyn and wanted to spend as little time there as possible. He didn’t have a lot of money, but he spent what he had to keep his seat warm at places like the Blue Light, the Art Barn, and the Hatch. He drank heavily—which only intensified his isolation and exacerbated his mental illness—and found that he could drink on the house if he took the performers’ pictures. He didn’t have a studio, and so these were all shots of the musicians and singers while they were on stage or relaxing in their dressing rooms. They loved the photographs and (more important) their managers loved them, especially the candids, and in 1953 he took his first assigned photograph of Muddy Waters, a profile of the musician for Chess Records that showed the master with the head and tuning pegs of his bottleneck slide guitar resting against the tip of his elegant, aquiline nose.

  Eventually, Bobbie’s work came to the attention of editors at Backbeat and Life, and soon he had become friends with a young photo editor who called himself Reese.

  From there, Laurel realized, she could almost tell the story herself. She didn’t need Shem’s help. He was merely corroborating her suspicions and the details she’d already gleaned: Bobbie’s mental equilibrium had never been one of his cardinal strengths, and his instability and schizophrenia were amplified by the alcohol. He grew less dependable. Over the next decade, he would make some deadlines and miss others. He was immensely talented, which only made working with him that much more frustrating. There were seasons in the 1960s when Bobbie actually would vanish off the radar screen so completely and for so long that Reese would finally conclude that this time Bobbie had died. Usually when he reappeared, Reese would insist that Bobbie find a place where he could dry out once and for all. Shem guessed that Bobbie probably had been hospitalized during some of those disappearances. During others, he was in all likelihood trying to find his family. That meant scavenger hunts in odd little towns throughout the Midwest and Chicago, and brief conversations with the sons and daughters of people who may (or may not) have met the strange men his father knew and who passed, specterlike, through Jay Gatsby’s life: Meyer Wolfsheim. Dan Cody. A boarder named Klipspringer.

  Occasionally, Shem said, Bobbie had girlfriends. The photographer was, when he was sober, eccentric and talented and interesting-looking—though not traditionally handsome because the alcoholism had reddened his skin and his mental illness caused him to care less and less about hygiene. Still, there was a backup singer who never quite made it and a dancer who never quite made it and a secretary at Life magazine who actually would make it, joining Helen Gurley Brown to help edit Cosmopolitan, and each time Reese had high hopes that this was the woman who would provide Bobbie with the grounding he needed to settle down. It never happened.

  “And his son?” Laurel asked. “Which of these women was the mother of his son? Do you know?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know much. I know she wasn’t one of those more serious relationships he had. She did something in theater, I think—but not on the stage. A costumer, maybe. A seamstress. She died a long time ago.”

  “Do you know anything about the boy?”

  “Bobbie didn’t like to talk about him. It was one of those subjects—and Bobbie had a lot, of course—that were off-limits.”

  “But he said something.”

  “His son was homeless. I know that.”

  “Like Bobbie?”

  “Worse. Did drugs. Didn’t work much.”

  “Might he have been a carny?”

  “Like in a circus?”

  “Like at a county fair. At a midway.”

  “It’s possible.”

  “And eventually he wound up in Vermont?”

  “So it seems. Seven or eight years ago. But by the time Bobbie returned two years ago, he must have been long gone. Bobbie never mentioned going to see him.”

  “There were two men who…”

  “Go on.”

  She shook her head; she couldn’t. She was surprised that she had even begun to reveal what had happened to her seven years earlier, and guessed that she had spoken only because Shem was such a wondrous and unexpected resource, and because his face was so unthreatening and kind. Even the deep lines around his lips were patterned like the ridges on a scallop seashell. Still, she had to know if Bobbie’s son was indeed one of the two men who had attacked her, and—if so—which one.

  “Do you believe his son might be in jail?” she asked instead. “Jordie thought he might have been a criminal.”

  “If he was, he was no petty thief. Bobbie spent serious time on the street, too, remember. He wouldn�
��t have cut his kid off for stealing a sandwich or because he had a substance-abuse problem. It woulda had to have been something much worse.”

  She gathered herself. Then: “Rape? Murder?”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  “Is rape really a possibility? Or attempted rape?”

  She felt him studying her intently, sympathetically, a grandfather’s anxious gaze. “I guess anything’s possible,” he said after a moment.

  “Did Reese know?”

  “About the son? Or the possibility that the boy may have grown into a very bad person?”

  “Either.”

  “He knew Bobbie had a son. But not much else. Don’t forget, it’s not as if Bobbie was a great father himself. He had his own devils, his own mental illness. He told Reese and me that the boy’s mom had kept him away from the child when he was growing up. Didn’t want Bobbie to have anything to do with him. Maybe this saddened Bobbie. Maybe he just wrote it off to one of the many conspiracies that surrounded him. Maybe he understood he couldn’t help the boy. Who can say? Reese probably thought this was a wise course of action on the part of the mother. He knew Bobbie’s limitations.”

  “But he liked Bobbie…”

  “Very much. Oh, very much. Years ago—before you were born—he made it clear to Bobbie that if he ever needed anything, he shouldn’t hesitate to ask. And so one day, decades later, Bobbie did. That would have been a little more than two years ago now,” Shem said, his voice growing rueful. He explained that Bobbie had come to the Green Mountains in search of Reese. He was old and out of options. But he didn’t find Reese right away. First, there was an incident of some sort in Burlington, and Bobbie was brought to the Vermont State Hospital. It was from there that he asked a member of the staff to track down his old editor; two months later, he was released into Reese’s care. Bobbie’s attention span had diminished to the point that he could barely sit through a half-hour sitcom on the TV Land channel, and Reese had the impression that Bobbie had been in and out of state hospitals in New York and Florida and North Dakota. But he no longer drank. And, properly medicated, he was the same good-natured, well-intentioned, not wholly presentable misfit he’d been thirty-five and forty years earlier.

  “What are you gonna do with those pictures?” Shem asked when he had finished this part of the story. He was staring at the print of Julie Andrews as Guinevere and seemed startled by the image, even touched. “I saw this show. It was 1960. The Majestic Theater. I was a newlywed. Has Julie Andrews ever looked prettier?”

  Laurel assured him that she hadn’t. And she added that unlike most women her age, she actually knew the words to “The Simple Joys of Maidenhood.” Then she told Shem of her boss’s plan for a retrospective, the idea of giving Bobbie Crocker the show that he had never had in his life.

  “Oh, I’ll bet his sister will just love that,” Shem said, a small wary chuckle punctuating his remark. “She still living? Or did she pass, too?”

  “She’s still alive. But she tells people her brother died when he was a teenager—at least that’s what she told me. She even dared me to fly to Chicago to see where he was buried. Do you think she knows about Bobbie’s son?”

  “I doubt it,” he said. “You know, she won’t be happy about your show. I got the impression from Bobbie that she was very loyal to her mother and father. Very loyal. Not just a daddy’s girl and not just a mommy’s girl. Both. Bobbie and Reese thought it was a stitch the way she worked so hard for so much of her life to rehabilitate her parents’ reputation. She’ll go to her grave telling anyone who will listen that all those stories about her mom and Jay Gatsby were a lot of malarkey—and all completely unprovable.”

  She laced her fingers together on the table before her and thought about this. “What are you suggesting? Do you think there’s a picture in this pile that somehow proves Jay Gatsby was Bobbie’s father?”

  “Maybe not in this pile, but in some pile! Absolutely! That’s what our paranoid schizophrenic was doing, don’t you see? View those pictures like a crazy man’s Post-it notes. Post-it notes in a code. Those pictures Bobbie kept with him? They’re like a treasure map.”

  “Or an autobiography.”

  “Exactly! You remember that old program, This Is Your Life? Actually, you probably don’t. It was way before your time. It was an old TV show. From the 1950s. Ralph Edwards was the host. Guests would be paraded out—Nat King Cole, maybe, or Gloria Swanson—and friends and family would come out one by one to surprise them. Well, Bobbie was sort of doing his own This Is Your Life with his pictures. He was taking photos of the Gatsby side. Reese told me it was like an obsession with Bobbie.”

  “Did Bobbie himself ever tell you he was doing this?”

  “No. But I do know this: You know that day back in 1939 when Bobbie found the picture Jay gave his mom? The one where Jay’s decked out as a soldier boy? Bobbie took it with him. Reese saw it many, many years ago, when he and Bobbie were still working at Life. Said Bobbie was still young enough that you could see the resemblance. It was unbelievable. After that, the photos Bobbie took are like the clues in a scavenger hunt. At least some are. You know, maybe you find the house. Then maybe you find the bureau. Then you open the drawer. And there it is—the picture.”

  “There what is? The photo of Jay from Camp Taylor?”

  He put out his hands, palms up. “Oh, I don’t know for sure what’s in the drawer. I don’t even know if it is a drawer. Or a bureau. Or a box. I was just using that as an example. But Bobbie told Reese and Reese told me that it’s all in the pictures. That’s why he took them with him, no matter where he went or how bad things got for him. They were the proof of who he was, the proof that his old man was that good old sport we’ve heard all about—better than the whole damn bunch on the other side of the cove.”

  “I have some snapshots Bobbie had with him at the end. There’s one of Bobbie and his sister, and there’s one of Jay beside a flashy car. But that photo you told me about—the one of Jay in his uniform. I don’t have that one.”

  “Maybe the boy knows where it is,” Shem said. “Or maybe the boy knows how to find it. Maybe that’s the real reason why Bobbie came here seven years ago. To plant that final clue.”

  Laurel knew where the two men were serving their time. The more violent of the pair, the one who had murdered a schoolteacher in Montana, was in the maximum security compound of the state prison forty miles northwest of Butte. The other, a fellow with no previous criminal record, was still in Vermont, at the correctional facility just outside of Saint Albans. She hadn’t anticipated ever seeing either of them again once they had been escorted from the courtroom after their sentencing, one to a prison in Vermont and one to be tried next for a murder in Montana.

  “It’s possible that his son has the picture, isn’t it?” she said. “Or some proof of some kind?”

  “Sure. But how do you even begin to find the boy? All you know is that he might have done something awful. You don’t even know for certain he’s in a jail somewhere.”

  Oh, but I do, she thought. I just don’t know whether the jail is in Montana or Vermont.

  PATIENT 29873

  I brought up the book this morning. I expected enthusiasm, but patient was defensive and derisive instead. Eventually settled down. When I asked for elaboration, was told I didn’t know what I was talking about.

  At this point, the benefits of discussing the book outweigh the risks.

  From the notes of Kenneth Pierce,

  attending psychiatrist,

  Vermont State Hospital, Waterbury, Vermont

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  WHIT HAD BEEN EXHAUSTED when he’d had dinner with his aunt and uncle on Saturday night, but the serious paintball-induced pain was still a half day away. By Sunday morning, it had come in with the sweep of high tide. It wasn’t, in all fairness, a searing, debilitating, white-lights-dancing-against-his-eyelids sort of pain. But his day in the paintball woods had left him limping gingerly around his apartment. There was a steady
throb in his lower back, his calves were almost too sore to stretch, and he felt a sharp dagger slicing into his side whenever he tried to breathe deeply. He wondered if he had cracked a rib. Still, it was a beautiful morning today and he had an evening in the library before him, and so about twelve-thirty he decided he would hoist his bike onto the top of his slightly battered Subaru (battered because his mother was a careless driver, oblivious to curbs and parking meters and great cement columns in parking garages, and the vehicle had been hers before she had passed it along to her son), and drive out to Underhill. He hadn’t gotten there the previous weekend as he’d hoped, and so he figured he might as well head out there today. He guessed the most difficult part would be lifting his bike onto and off of the car’s roof rack. But the frame was so light he figured even that should be manageable.

  He hadn’t been out to Underhill since early August, perhaps a month after he’d moved into this house. That day he’d spent time in the state park and then ridden for a while on the logging trails in the nearby woods. He liked the way a ride there was peppered with long stretches beneath a vaguely claustrophobic canopy of leaves, followed by picture-postcard-like vistas of Mount Mansfield and Camels Hump.

  Tentatively, he tugged his bike shorts over the grapefruit-sized black and purple bruise on his hip, and then held his breath and closed his eyes as he pulled a tight long-sleeved jersey over his chest. Reflexively, he moaned aloud. He wondered briefly if this ride really was such a good idea, but he couldn’t imagine spending a day like this inside. Not with seriously cold weather barely a month or two in the distance.

  As he was passing Laurel and Talia’s front door, he paused. He heard music inside and decided to knock. He wanted to ask Laurel about yesterday, inquire why she hadn’t joined them for paintball. Talia answered, and it didn’t appear she had been up very long. He guessed she had walked the pony that their neighbor Gwen claimed was a dog and then gone back to bed for a couple of hours, because her hair was wild with sleep and she was wearing a pair of pink and black polka-dot pajama bottoms with the drawstring so loose that they hung far—erotically far, hip bone low far, a wisp of mons pubis far—below her waist and a silk camisole that neither matched her pajama bottoms nor hid the vast majority of her breasts. He felt far more guilty than aroused, however, because in the long strip of flesh between the bottom of her top and the top of her bottom he saw a machine-gun line of welts across her abdomen. Even her navel looked bruised.