The Double Bind

by Christopher A. Bohjalian

  “Was he living with Reese when he took those?”

  “Oh, no. He only reappeared in Reese’s life the year before last,” the minister said, as two other parishioners, an elderly couple, descended on him. Laurel had the distinct sense that she had monopolized the pastor long enough and so she allowed him to be pulled into their conversation.

  “I hope you’ll come back,” Randy said to her.

  “I will,” she said, though she honestly wasn’t sure whether she meant Bartlett or the church.

  “I just thought of one more thing.” This was Nancy, speaking softly although the nearby parishioners were so engrossed in their conversation that they couldn’t possibly have heard what she’d said. Laurel understood this was an invitation of some sort. It was why Nancy had looked at her so seriously a moment earlier.

  “Yes?”

  “Maybe it was the word trouble that made me think of it. That same day we were playing Scrabble-right over there, as a matter of fact-Bobbie said something about jail. It came up right after he’d turned the word fine into confine. You know, by adding c-o-n? Something about the connection and the moment, I don’t know, it made me sure that he was talking about a prison.”

  “And you thought Bobbie was talking about himself…”

  She nodded. “I did at the time. But now I learn that his son may have been a criminal. Maybe that’s what Bobbie was thinking about. It wasn’t Bobbie who had ever been behind bars. Maybe it was his son who had once gone to jail.”

  “Or, maybe,” Laurel said, thinking aloud, “his son is there now.”

  THAT AFTERNOON, SERENA told Laurel that she, too, had never heard Bobbie Crocker mention a son. She said she could barely imagine such a thing. Now she was gazing at the photographs Laurel had made from the negatives Bobbie Crocker had left behind at the Hotel New England, as well as at the handful of fading, dog-eared prints he had carried with him for years. The waitress was working in Burlington that day, and so she and Laurel were meeting in a booth in the back of the diner, a slightly incongruous world of train-car-slick chromes and panels of dark heavy wood, Bobbie’s pictures carefully stacked in a black portfolio case that-when open-took up virtually the entire top of the table. The restaurant was half filled, but the real rush was over, and so the waitress who was working with Serena that day, a matronly middle-aged woman named Beverly, had insisted that her younger associate join Laurel in the booth.

  “And you want me to hang on to these,” Serena said, her voice hovering on an edge between incredulity and mere bewilderment. She looked older to Laurel in her beige uniform. The dress was too tight across her breasts, and she had pulled her rich mane of hair back in a styleless bun.

  “I do. There are still negatives I haven’t finished working with, and so I’m hanging onto those. For the moment, anyway. But as I print those pictures I’ll bring them to you, too.”

  “I like this one,” she said, stalling for time as she processed Laurel ’s request. She was staring at the image of the Mustang in front of Bobbie’s childhood home. “I know a person up in Stowe who collects vintage cars. He has a Mustang just like that one: White with the black hardtop. Very classic.”

  “Bobbie was a talented guy.”

  She nodded and then looked up at Laurel gravely, her face a vessel bracing for bad weather. “Okay, why?”

  “Why what?”

  “Why do you want me to keep these for you?”

  Laurel took a sip of her soda. She had expected this question, but in a diner in the light of day-away from the darkroom and people like T. J. Leckbruge-she feared that whatever she said might sound a trifle insane. Maybe more than a trifle. But she knew this wasn’t the case. It wasn’t as if she had made up Leckbruge or Pamela Buchanan Marshfield. It wasn’t as if she had manufactured the connections between Bobbie Crocker and a house in East Egg, Long Island. She had the pictures to prove the connection was real, and they were right there between them on the Formica-topped table.

  “Well, his sister wants them,” she answered. “That woman I told you about on Friday. I met with her lawyer yesterday, and I came away with a very bad feeling.”

  “Meaning?”

  “I don’t think they’re safe with me.”

  Serena leaned forward across the tabletop. “What are you really saying, Laurel? Do you honestly believe Bobbie’s sister or this lawyer is going to send some goon to break your legs for a couple of ancient black and whites of dudes playing chess? Do you really believe someone wants a picture of a Mustang that badly?”

  Laurel considered tapping the side of the portfolio case and correcting her: This was far more than a couple of images. But that wasn’t Serena’s point. “I don’t think anyone would hurt me,” she said evenly. “I wouldn’t ask you to hang on to them for me if I thought someone would hurt you or your aunt. But, yes, I do think it’s possible they might have someone try to steal them-or resort to more aggressive legal tactics.”

  “Which would be?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “So my having the pictures would be a secret? No one would know?”

  “No one but us.”

  Serena sat back in the booth and rested her hands in her lap. “You know, if I didn’t know you and what you did for a living, I might have thought you were the one who had just stumbled in off the streets-or come here from the state hospital.”

  “Look, I know I seem a little irrational. But I’m not. And until I know why Bobbie Crocker changed his name or why his sister wants these pictures so badly, I need your help. Okay?”

  “Of course it’s okay. Of course I’ll help you. But, Laurel, doesn’t this all seem a little, I don’t know, beyond irrational? A little…”

  “A little what?”

  She smiled sheepishly. “I’m just worried about you. That’s all.”

  “Why does it seem that strange and absurd? Good Lord, Serena, you were homeless. I would have thought you would have understood as well as anyone just how strange and absurd life can get!” She was aware that her tone sounded defensive and sharp and just a little bit whiny.

  “I was only saying-”

  “I know what you were saying. You and David and my boss and my roommate are all treating me like I’m insane. Like this is all something I’ve completely made up!” She hadn’t planned on raising her voice, but she had, and she could see that the other customers were now watching them.

  “I didn’t say you’d made anything up,” Serena murmured.

  The waitress was trying to pacify her, and this only made Laurel ’s frustration more pronounced. But she didn’t want to get Serena in trouble by making a scene in the woman’s restaurant, and so she tried to make light of her outburst. “I didn’t sleep well last night,” she said, making a conscious effort to keep her voice friendly and calm while acknowledging that in Serena’s eyes (though most certainly not in her own) she had overreacted.

  “I understand,” Serena said, and then she looked past Laurel, over her shoulder. Laurel turned and saw arriving at her side a short, older man with milky blue eyes. He was wearing a red V-neck sweater with a white polo shirt with an unfashionably large, pointed collar beneath it. The collar looked like the wings on a paper airplane. Although he had little hair left on his scalp, he had dwarf topiaries emerging from his nostrils and his ears. Laurel knew she had seen him somewhere before, but she wasn’t sure where. Almost instantly he ended the mystery.

  “So, I saw you at church just now, talking to my friend Jordie,” he said. “Ain’t she a peach?”

  “She is a peach,” Laurel said, glancing quickly at Serena and then starting to rise to be polite.

  “Don’t get up. Not for an old wolf like me. Are these Reese’s or Bobbie’s?” he asked, sweeping his hand over the portfolio case as if he had a magic wand in his fingers.

  “They’re Bobbie’s,” she answered. “I’m sorry. I must have missed your name.”

  “Hey, I’m the one who should be sorry. It’s Shem. Short for Sherman. My name is Shem
Wolfe. I go to the church you were just at. It’s a nice church. I used to like a place closer to Burlington. But now I go to Bartlett Congregational. I don’t mind the drive. What are your names?”

  The two young women introduced themselves. Then, one at a time, he surrounded their fingers and palms with his own oddly meaty, age-spot-ridden hands. “So tell me, how is Bobbie doing? Where is he these days?”

  Laurel wondered if the news that Bobbie had died would be a blow, because it was possible that he and Bobbie had been friends. But Shem was old and Bobbie had been even older, and so she simply forged ahead and told him. “He died. But he died quickly-a stroke-and so he didn’t suffer. He was living in Burlington. Only five or six blocks from here, actually.”

  He nodded, absorbing the news. “Oh, that’s too bad. I’m sorry. When did he pass?”

  “Two weeks ago.”

  “I wish I’d known. You know? I woulda gone to the service. There was a service, right?”

  “A small one.”

  “I bet Jordie woulda gone, too. Really, I’m sorry. Still, I always say you should be a man’s friend when he’s living. Not after he’s passed.” He made a clicking sound with his tongue against his dentures, then sighed. “I’d join you two beautiful girls-well, I’d ask to join you, I wouldn’t be so presumptuous as to suppose you wanted more company-but I was just leaving. I teach a journalism class at the community college. I know, I know, I’m too old. I shoulda retired. But I wrote for newspapers when I was younger and I love a good story. Finding one, telling one. Teaching others how to tell ’em. Anyway, I still have lots to do before class tomorrow.”

  “And I should go help Beverly,” Serena said, rising. “That’s a pretty big family that just pulled into the parking lot. I’ll be back in a couple of minutes, Laurel, okay?”

  “I’m not driving you away, am I?” Shem asked.

  “No, not at all. I’ll be back.”

  Shem bent over the table to stare at the top picture in the portfolio case, the one of the Mustang beneath the Buchanan portico. He studied the photograph and then exhaled loudly.

  “That Bobbie sure grew up with one big silver spoon in his mouth,” he said.

  Laurel was taken aback. Had this Shem Wolfe really just implied that he knew this was the home in which Bobbie Crocker had grown up?

  “You know this was Bobbie’s parents’ house?” she asked him, wishing she could rein in her enthusiasm and make her voice sound more casual.

  “Well, it was his mom’s house. The old Buchanan place, right? But Bobbie’s old man-his real dad, anyway-lived over the water in West Egg.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Oh, I guess I’m slicing hairs, you know? Very fine hairs. But maybe not. Tom Buchanan raised Bobbie for a while and put a roof over his head. Bobbie lived with the man for what, sixteen, seventeen years? Something like that. But his real allegiance, once he figured it out, was always to his real dad. Or, I guess, to the ghost of his real dad. Because, of course, they never met. But Bobbie told me twice-really, two times-that he’d never stopped wishing he’d got to meet that Jay Gatsby.”

  SHEM WOLFE WAS indeed a remarkable storyteller, and that afternoon he told Laurel what he knew of Bobbie Crocker’s youth. Apparently, Reese had been aware all along of who the periodically homeless man’s father had been, and in the year that Bobbie had lived with Reese in Vermont, Bobbie had grown sufficiently comfortable with Reese’s friend, Shem, to share with him his life story, too. The three of them-the two old photographers and the one old reporter-reminisced often.

  “Reese always cut Bobbie a little extra slack,” Shem said. After Serena had left, he had taken her seat across from Laurel, deciding that his class preparation could wait another half hour.

  “He was an addled man, and I guess he had been an addled boy,” he told her. “Sometimes even voices-in-his-head-addled. And always a little unfocused, a little edgy.” Shem had learned that Bobbie hadn’t been much of a student and he’d never been much of an athlete. As a result, he had never had much of a relationship with Tom Buchanan, the man he assumed was his father. The family rarely mentioned the baronial estate across the cove, and no one ever dared bring up the car accident. Adult neighbors and schoolteachers never discussed it around Bobbie when he was a child. The other boys, however, occasionally would flaunt the rumors they’d heard, for no other reason than the reality that boys can be cruel. Usually, the tales bordered on the fantastic and had only the most tenuous connection to the all-too-prosaic truth. At least one first-grader liked to insist that Bobbie had Martian blood coursing inside him. A third-grade boy announced to the class that the man Bobbie still believed was his father-Tom Buchanan, of all people-had made his fortune with a string of speakeasies. In the fourth grade, there were stories swirling about him that his mother had killed a man-a tale that Bobbie would later realize had at least a semblance of truth, since his own father might not have died if his mother had told Tom Buchanan who had been driving that tragic afternoon. And, though it was an accident, his mother really had killed Myrtle Wilson.

  It first dawned on Bobbie in the sixth grade that he had been conceived in the summer of 1922: the summer of his mother’s alleged dalliance with that dead criminal who had once lived across the cove. He wrote this off as coincidence on a conscious level, and for a time even viewed it as corroboration that his mother could not possibly have been involved with Jay Gatsby. Back then, he presumed, his parents had still loved each other.

  It was, perhaps not surprisingly, a photograph that had set in motion the final fight with Tom that would cause him to leave home. When he was sixteen he found a greeting-card-sized image of a young soldier in one of his mother’s ragged old books. The lieutenant was a little older than Bobbie at the time, but the teen couldn’t help but notice an uncanny resemblance between himself and the officer. He could see it in the hard, solemn cast of the man’s face, the high cheekbones, the firm jaw: the restlessness and ambition in the fellow’s dark eyes. There was a note on the back of the photograph in a handwriting Bobbie didn’t recognize:

  For my golden girl,

  Love, Jay

  Camp Taylor , 1917

  For years now, Bobbie had known the specific allegations about his mother and Jay Gatsby. Sometimes he had given the tawdry claims more credence than at others. But he had still been too young to accept with certainty the notion that his mother could be so deceitful and, ironically, that his father could be so magnanimous-at least when it came to raising Jay Gatsby’s bastard son. He just couldn’t quite believe the lurid stories could be true, though he had felt his relationship with his mother begin to change. He had found himself looking upon her differently. Less the victim in a turbulent marriage. Less the frivolous Louisville belle, still years short of serious middle-age. Less unreservedly innocent. But he had nonetheless remained confident that his father-or, to be precise, the man who was raising him-was far too arrogant and cruel to raise his wife’s lover’s baby. It wasn’t possible.

  But this picture he had discovered in the old book suggested that it was. No, this picture proved to him that it was. He was an aspiring photographer, he knew that pictures didn’t lie. At least in those days they didn’t. And Tom Buchanan had to know. If he hadn’t known for sure in 1923, he had to have figured it out by now. The resemblance was unambiguous. Why then did this conceited, brutish man abide having him under his roof, within a stone’s throw of his precious polo ponies and his half acre of roses? And the answer, Bobbie realized, was clear. Pride. Precisely because Tom Buchanan was so arrogant, he was never going to acknowledge aloud that his wife had slept with Jay Gatsby-and thus the rest of the story, including the awful ways George and Myrtle Wilson had died, might be true, too. Tom might allude to the affair, he might allow the subterranean truth a glimmer of sun in a catty remark when he and Daisy were fighting-odd comments Bobbie had witnessed or overheard suddenly made sense-but he would never give public credence to the notion that he had been cuckolded by the low-rent crimi
nal across the way.

  In hindsight, Bobbie told Shem, he wished that he had waited until his mother had returned from her card game before demanding to hear what had really occurred in 1922. It wasn’t as if he didn’t already know. But he was filled with such adolescent rage that when he saw Tom in the kitchen-the very room in which this man and his mother had reconciled mere hours after Myrtle Wilson had died on the street near the ash heaps-he exploded. Here was the man who, in essence, had had his father killed. He took a swing at Tom, but the punch was well telegraphed and Tom decked the boy. Asked him if he wanted to climb up off the tile and take another. His sister made an attempt to calm both men down, but her efforts were doomed to fail because Bobbie knew where her loyalties lay. He understood now why his father always treated her so differently from him. Besides, she had always tried to defend her parents, and their behavior was indefensible. He wanted as little to do with her as he did with Daisy and Tom.

  “And after he left?” Laurel asked Shem. “What then?”

  “Then the story grows sketchy.”

  “How so?”

  “Sometimes I couldn’t tell what were the things Bobbie had actually done and what were the memories he was making up. But Reese knew some details, and between what Bobbie had told Reese years ago and what Reese recalled from the days they worked together at the magazine, you could get glimmers.”

  “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.