the Double Bind (2008)

by Chris Bohjalian

  "He was such a likable guy."

  "He was."

  "Though also a bit of a lunatic."

  "But a sweet one."

  "Indeed," Katherine agreed.

  "And for an old man, he sure had a lot of spunk," Laurel said, conjuring a picture in her mind of Bobbie Crocker and recalling some of their last conversations. They were, invariably, as interesting as they were demented. They were not unlike the sort of banter she shared with many of the people who passed through the shelter, in that she could safely presume easily half of what he was telling her was a complete fabrication or delusion. The difference--and in Laurel's mind it was a substantial one--was that victimization was rarely a part of Bobbie's anecdotes. This was atypical for a schizophrenic, but she understood it was also likely that she only saw him at his best: By the time she met him, he was once again being properly medicated. Still, he seldom complained to Laurel or lashed out, and only infrequently did he suggest that he was owed anything by the world. Certainly, Bobbie believed there were conspiracies out there: Usually, they had something to do with his father. But as a rule he was confident he had dodged them. "The last time I saw him was two weeks ago at the walkathon," she added.

  "Remember what you talked about?"

  "I do. He told me he'd been at a civil rights freedom march in Frankfort, Kentucky, in 1963 or 1964. We were all about to begin--well, not Bobbie--and he was hovering at the starting line, savoring the crowds and the sunshine and the breeze off the lake. When I asked him to tell me more, he changed the subject. Told me instead how he started every Tuesday and Thursday with a bowl of bran flakes floating in exactly one-half cup of orange juice instead of milk, because he worried about his cholesterol. He said he cut the sweetness of the juice with a sprinkle of soy sauce. It sounded pretty repulsive."

  "You ever hear him bellow hello?"

  "Absolutely." It was common knowledge at the shelter that Bobbie's voice, relentlessly booming even though he was now over eighty, was inappropriate anywhere but a ball game or a bar.

  "Honey, I'm home...less!" Katherine roared suddenly, parroting Bobbie's common cry--a sitcom dad amped on methamphetamines--when he would arrive at the shelter to see if any of the staff he knew were on duty that day. Apparently, he had used that line even when he really was homeless, when he first appeared at the shelter more tired and hungry than he'd ever been in his life. Even then he was no skittish stray cat.

  Slightly paranoid and subject to occasional hallucinations? Yes. Skittish? No.

  "He used to give me so much grief--"

  "Good-natured, I hope," Katherine said.

  "Usually. Whenever he was hanging around the shelter and I was here he would tease me for being so green. I remember when we met he thought I was still in college. Couldn't believe I'd been out for a couple of years."

  "He share with you any patented Bobbie Crocker wisdom?"

  "Let's see. He said I was too young to know the first thing about life on the streets. He told me the only truly safe drinking water left in Vermont was forty miles away in some spring that fed the Catamount River. He told me that Lyndon Baines Johnson--yes, the president--was still alive, and he knew where. He claimed he'd once partied for a weekend with Bob Dylan and Joan Baez. And he said he grew up in a house that looked out across a cove at a castle."

  "I loved that man's fantasies. So many of the people we meet think they're Rambo or the pope. Or they have millions of dollars hidden in Swiss bank accounts. Or the CIA--or Rambo, the pope, and the CIA--are after them. Not Bobbie. He dreamed of castles. Gotta love it."

  "Well, he did see the devil," Laurel said.

  "Excuse me?"

  "He only mentioned it to me once. But he told Emily, too. One time he saw the devil."

  "Did he say what the devil looked like?"

  "He looked like a person, I think."

  "Anyone in particular?" asked Katherine.

  "Someone he knew, I'm sure. But that would be a question for Emily."

  "How serious were the drugs he was taking when he saw him?"

  "Maybe the devil was a woman."

  "Or her?" Katherine said, correcting herself.

  "I'd say very serious. You don't see the devil on Thunderbird."

  Katherine smiled ruefully, tilting her head back toward the screen in the one tiny window in Laurel's office, hoping to catch a wisp of the wind. She was, it seemed to Laurel, summoning a memory of the man herself. Bobbie--and he was always Bobbie to the social workers and the residents of the Hotel New England--was a human skeleton when he arrived at the shelter, but he recovered quickly: One of the side effects of his antipsychotic was weight gain. He never became truly rotund, but within three or four months he had regained the paunch of the poor who live on fast food and the carb-laden breads and pastas that were heaped onto plates at the emergency day station and the Salvation Army. Food heavy enough to help the hungry feel full and keep warm. Lots of peanut butter. He'd shrunk with old age, but he still had presence and bulk. His face was hidden up to his eyes with a white beaver beard that retained a few small patches of black, but those eyes were what everyone noticed because they were deep and dark and smiling, and his eyelashes were almost girlishly long.

  "He was quite a character," Katherine purred after a moment. "Did you know he was a photographer?"

  "I know he said he was," Laurel answered, "but I don't think there was much to it. I assume it was a hobby or something. Maybe a part-time job he had before his mind went completely. Shooting class pictures at elementary schools. Or babies at Sears."

  "There might be more to it than that. Bobbie didn't have any cameras or photo stuff in his room, but he had these. Look in the box," Katherine said, waving languidly down at the carton at her feet.

  "These being...?"

  "Pictures. Photos. Negatives. There's a ton in there. All very retro."

  Laurel peered around the side of the desk. Katherine pushed the box toward her with her foot, so she could reach it and pull apart the top flaps. The first image Laurel spied was an eleven-by-fourteen black and white of easily two hundred teenage girls in identical white button-down shirts and black skirts on a football field playing with Hula-Hoops. It looked like it was some sort of halftime extravaganza: Synchronized Hula-Hooping, maybe. The next one, based on the modest two-piece bathing suit the subject was wearing, was from that same era: A surfer girl was posing atop her surfboard on the beach, pretending to ride an actual wave. Laurel picked it up and saw scrawled legibly on the back in pencil, "Real Gidget, not Sandra Dee. Malibu." She thumbed through a few more, all black and white, all from the late 1950s or early 1960s, until she came upon one she thought might have been a very young Paul Newman. She held it up for her boss and raised her eyebrows.

  "Yup," Katherine said, "I think it's him, too. Unfortunately, there's nothing on the back. No annotation or clue."

  She put Paul Newman back in the box and pawed briefly through the prints. Toward the bottom, she discovered long strips of negatives, none of which had been placed in sleeves. Like the photos, they had been dumped unceremoniously into the carton.

  "And you think Bobbie Crocker took these?" she asked Katherine, sitting back in her chair.

  "I do."

  "Why?"

  "They were in his apartment," Katherine said. "And when he was brought in off the street last year, he had this old canvas duffel with photos in it that he insisted were his. I assume most of these were in it. He wouldn't take a bed until he was sure that the lockers were safe--that his locker would be safe. He was literally going to sleep with them, but there were only top bunks left in the shelter, so he couldn't."

  The homeless often brought an object or two into the shelter of totemic (and, to them, titanic) importance--that single item that either reminded them of who they were or what their life had been like before it began to unravel. A certificate from a spelling bee they'd won as a child. An engagement ring they'd been unwilling to pawn. A teddy bear--and even the veterans from the Vietnam and
Gulf wars sometimes had a stuffed animal with them. Laurel had seen plenty of family snapshots in the mix that was checked into the lockers, too. But she'd never before seen anything that resembled either serious art or professional accomplishment. And she had taken enough photography courses and snapped enough pictures herself to know with confidence that these photographs were interesting from both a journalistic and an artistic perspective. She thought it was even possible that somewhere she had seen the image of the teen girls with their Hula-Hoops--if not this exact photograph, then perhaps one from the same shoot.

  "Couldn't someone else have taken the photos and given them to him?" Laurel asked. "A brother or sister, maybe? A friend? Maybe somebody died and left them to him."

  "Go talk to Sam," Katherine said, referring to the manager who had been on duty the night Bobbie Crocker had arrived. "He knows more about Bobbie than I do. And talk to Emily. I'm pretty sure he'd told them both he was a photographer. Of course, he wouldn't show them the pictures. Not ever. Apparently, no one could see them--or else."

  "Or else what?"

  "Oh, who knows? Welcome to Bobbie's World. Emily managed to sneak a peek at the pictures pretty soon after he first arrived, just to make sure that he wasn't some horrid child pornographer. But you know how busy Emily is. The woman's life is chaos. Once she saw they were innocent, she didn't think about them again until she was going through his room with me yesterday."

  Laurel considered this for a moment and then glimpsed another photograph. A pair of young men playing chess in Manhattan's Washington Square, surrounded by a half-dozen onlookers all watching the match intently. She guessed this one couldn't have been later than the early 1960s. Something about it definitely felt pre-Johnson to her. Pre-Lee Harvey Oswald.

  Beneath it was an image with a completely different sensibility: a dirt road she recognized in Vermont. A girl in the distance on a mountain bike. Black Lycra shorts. A wildly colorful jersey with an image on the front she couldn't quite make out, but that might very well have been a bottle. It was perhaps a half mile from where she had been attacked, and instantly she was back on that road with the two violent men with their masks and their tattoos and their plans to rape her, and her heart was starting to palpitate. She must have stared for a long moment, because Katherine--her voice sounding as if she were speaking underwater--was asking her if she was all right.

  "Yes, uh-huh," Laurel heard herself murmuring. "I'm fine. Can I hang on to these?" she asked. She knew she was sweating, but she didn't want to draw attention to it by wiping her brow.

  "Do you want some water?"

  "No. Really, I'm okay. Honest. I'm just...it's just hot out." She smiled for her boss's benefit.

  "Well, when you want to go through them--and there's no rush, Laurel--I'd love to know what you think."

  "I can tell you what I think right now: They're good. He--or whoever took them--had legitimate talent."

  Katherine dipped her chin just the tiniest bit and grinned in a manner Laurel knew well: coquettish and ingratiating at once. Katherine had built the shelter and kept it afloat these many years through a combination of inexorable drive and the ability to charm the world with her smile. Laurel knew she was about to be asked to tackle a project.

  "You still have your privileges at the UVM darkroom, right?"

  "Well, I pay for them--the way we do to use the UVM pool. But as an alum, it's a pretty nominal fee."

  "Okay, then. Would you be willing to--and I'm not sure if I have the right word here--curate a show?"

  "Of these pictures?"

  "Uh-huh."

  "Yes. I think I would." She knew she had said yes in part because of that image of the lean, spare girl up in Underhill. She had to know what else existed in those images. But she also understood that she was acquiescing out of guilt: She hadn't taken Bobbie seriously when he had brought up his photography. If these pictures were his, then she had missed an opportunity to validate his accomplishments at the end of his life, as well as the chance, perhaps, to learn something as an apprentice photographer herself. Nevertheless, she did have reservations, and she shared them with Katherine. "Of course, we don't know for sure if Bobbie took these," she added.

  "We'll confirm that. Or you will. And I'm going to talk to our lawyers and our board of directors about spending a little money to make absolutely sure that Bobbie doesn't have some family out there who might want them. Maybe we'll place a small ad in a photo magazine. Or whatever magazine estate lawyers read. Or maybe even the New York Times. You'll see a lot of these seem to have been taken in New York. And maybe we'll put what we found on the Web. There are heir search firms with Web sites."

  "You know, these are in pretty horrid condition. We can't have a show with them like this. And do you have any idea how much effort it would take to restore them? I don't even know if the negatives are salvageable."

  "But you're interested?"

  "I am. But make no mistake: It will be a lot of work."

  "Well, I think it would be great publicity for the shelter. It would put a face on the homeless. Show people that these are human beings who did real things with their lives before everything went to hell in a handbasket. And..."

  "And?"

  "And these photos--this collection--might actually be worth serious money if we were to restore it and keep it together. That's why I think it's so important we make certain there isn't family floating around somewhere who's entitled to it."

  Laurel carefully reined in the enthusiasm she was starting to feel, because this had the potential to become a task that was daunting. "You said there was an envelope in your office," she reminded her boss.

  "Yeah, but it's not as interesting as this stuff--at least in terms of an exhibition. It's a little packet of snapshots."

  "I'd still like to see it."

  "Absolutely," Katherine said and she rose from her chair. "You know, I am so sorry I didn't get to know Bobbie better. I knew he was old, but he was so energetic for a guy his age that I figured he was going to be around for a while."

  Then she was gone, on to the next project--and there was always a next project because every year there were more homeless and fewer resources to help them.

  Laurel kept trying to return to work herself that afternoon: She had a stack of intake forms to review, and she was in the midst of yet another monumental battle with the VA over benefits for a Gulf War veteran who'd been in the shelter three weeks now and was still waiting for a check, but she really didn't get much more done. She kept going back to the box with the photographs.

  ORIGINALLY, THE SHELTER had been a firehouse--at least the part of the structure that was original. There had been two sizable additions constructed in the last quarter century. The entrance sat largely shielded behind a cluster of statuesque maples on a quiet street four blocks from Lake Champlain in a neighborhood in the city everyone called the Old North End. It was one of the small sections in Burlington that looked tired and felt just a little bit dangerous--though, in truth, there were places all across Vermont that seemed dangerous to Laurel that struck most people as harmless. The houses were all in desperate need of a fresh coat of paint, the front porches invariably were collapsing, and almost without exception the eighty- and ninety-year-old structures had been transformed from single-family homes into apartments. But Laurel knew in her heart that it was a safe neighborhood. If it weren't, she wouldn't have worked there after her experience in Underhill.

  The official name of the organization was the Burlington Emergency Dwelling and Shelter--or BEDS. The acronym was designed for publicity (which the group received in abundance) and fund-raising (which, despite all that publicity, was an ongoing struggle). When Laurel first started volunteering there when she was in college, she liked to read picture books and short novels by Barbara Park and Beverly Cleary to the small children (and, unfortunately, there were always small children) who were living in the special section of the shelter for families. At twenty and twenty-one, she didn't believe there was mu
ch else she could do to help out other than read aloud. Most days, she found three or four mothers and three times that many children residing there. She never once saw a dad. The single adults were in a separate section of the building with a different entrance and massive doors separating the two worlds. There was a large wing for single men and a smaller one for single women. The shelter had twenty-eight beds in fourteen bunks for the men, and twelve beds in six bunks for the women. This wasn't sexism: There were considerably more homeless single men than there were single women.

  The children in the family section where she volunteered always seemed to have runny noses, and so Laurel always seemed to have a runny nose. Her boyfriend her junior year in college, a professor at the medical school twenty-one years her senior, told her there were about 250 different cold germs, and you could only catch each one a single time in your life. If that were true, she responded, then she would never again have another cold as long as she lived. For a time she tried to keep the sniffles at bay with echinacea and antibacterial hand gel, but ethyl alcohol and perfume were no match for the melting glaciers that ran from the noses of suddenly homeless five-year-old girls--especially when those girls were climbing all over her lap and burrowing into her neck and her chest like small, blind kittens in search of a nipple. She knew even then how deeply glamorous she seemed to them: She wasn't much younger than their mothers, sometimes a mere three or four years. But unlike those other women she was going to college, and she was neither frazzled to the point that she would lash out at them with the back of her hand nor so depressed that she was incapable of rising from one of the shelter's moldy couches to get them a Kleenex.