The Double Bind

by Chris Bohjalian

  Before leaving, she took her towel from the spot on the grass by the crab apple trees—an image of the young mothers with their toddlers came back to her from her adolescence—wrapped herself in the cloth like a cape, and climbed the ladder to the three-meter board. She had no plans to return to the water one last time: She had never felt any real proficiency from the higher level. But she wanted to see whether the view of the old Buchanan house was different from this height, or whether she might see more. She couldn’t, not really. But she gazed for long seconds at the rows of French doors and the bay windows, and the bright vines of ivy that positively smothered the brick. She studied the portico off to the side, and the dock that jutted out even now into the cove. She tried to imagine the patch on the country club lawn where Jay Gatsby had stood hypnotized in the dark by the lights across the water, and what in particular that one light at the end of the dock had meant to him. Only after a long time did she finally drive home to have breakfast with her mother.

  While some spouses age considerably when their partner dies, Ellen Estabrook actually seemed invigorated by her husband’s passing. Laurel had no doubts that her mother had loved him. She had no doubts that her parents had loved each other. But her father was a very big presence in all ways: He must have weighed over two hundred pounds when he died, and he towered over most men at six feet three inches. He was well muscled and in excellent condition: His death from a heart attack was a shock to them all. Moreover, he hadn’t had a sedentary cell in his body: He was always in motion, whether he was at the law firm on the Island in which he was a senior partner or barbecuing chicken at a Rotary fund-raiser in the park or meeting with people as inherently charitable as he to help fund the orphanage in Honduras.

  Since his death, Laurel’s mother had begun to henna her hair, and her choices in lipsticks were now the vibrant shades of cherry that Laurel was quite sure the cosmetics companies had designed with girls even younger than her in mind. Ellen had also started to wear lots of black, but not because she was in mourning. She was wearing tight black T-shirts, black jeans, black skirts. As far as Laurel knew, she hadn’t dated anyone seriously (though she did seem to have plenty of male friends), and Laurel didn’t presume she was reinventing herself because she had a particular plan to snare a second husband. But her mother was only fifty-five and she had resolved, consciously or unconsciously, to reinvigorate her life. She was a beautiful middle-aged woman—still imposing and statuesque—and Laurel could see herself contentedly in the lines of her face in twenty-nine or thirty years.

  Laurel had been awake for close to three hours by the time the two of them had breakfast a little past eight. She had told her mother about all of the photographs Bobbie had left behind, with the exception of the one of the girl on the bike. She had shared with no one her suspicions of who the cyclist might have been; the very idea that she was revisiting this part of her life would have profoundly alarmed Ellen Estabrook.

  Her mother had already informed her that she knew almost nothing about Pamela Marshfield, and so they spoke mostly about the trip on which Ellen was embarking that Saturday for Tuscany. This was something else that had emerged since her husband had died: A passion for travel. Laurel’s parents had been to Italy once before, but it had been decades ago and they had spent most of their time in Rome. Now Laurel’s mother was going with a girlfriend to a Tuscan cooking school just outside of Siena for two weeks.

  When Laurel was putting her coffee mug in the dishwasher before heading upstairs to brush her teeth before leaving, her mother cornered her. “Be careful, sweetheart,” she said. “I know some people around here think the Buchanans were this sad, cursed little family. Even your aunt believes that. But I don’t. I think they were all pretty creepy.”

  Laurel studied her mother. The woman was wearing a delicate black cotton T-shirt with scalloped edging around the collar. Clearly, it had cost a bundle at Bergdorf’s. She considered briefly making a joke about being attacked by a geriatric who had to be in her mid-eighties, but she restrained herself. Neither of them was capable of verbalizing the word attack in any context other than out-and-out warfare. The two of them rarely talked about that period when Laurel was living at home after the assault, even on the anniversary. Her mother worried often about her daughter’s safety and the wounds that remained from a very close call, and Laurel knew discussing it with her only made it worse.

  “Well, Pamela’s father was, I guess,” Laurel said instead.

  “Her mother was awful, too. Don’t forget: It was her mother, Daisy, who actually killed that poor woman. Ran her over and left her to die in the street. Your father always said that if Myrtle Wilson’s sister had been better educated—or more litigious—she would have sued Daisy in a wrongful death lawsuit.”

  “I don’t think she’s going to run me over. I don’t even think she drives anymore.”

  Instantly, she regretted her glibness. Her mother took a long sip of her coffee, and Laurel could tell she was envisioning, once more, her daughter clipped to her bicycle while two men backed over her before speeding away. “She’s richer than God,” her mother continued after a moment, recovering. “But she never gave a cent to any of the charitable projects your father worked on. Not even the orphanage. He himself went to her house one afternoon and was part of the ask. That’s what they call it in fund-raising, you know. The ask. She agreed to see him and someone else from the Rotary. It might have been Chuck Haller. But she was absolutely unreceptive when they arrived. Uninterested in the whole endeavor. Your father had no idea why she took the time to see them.”

  “How long ago did Mr. Marshfield pass away?”

  “Not long after they sold the house. Twenty-five or twenty-six years ago, I guess.”

  “Why do you think they never had any children?”

  “Oh, I couldn’t begin to answer that one. Maybe they couldn’t. Maybe they didn’t want any,” her mother said. She raised her eyebrows and added melodramatically, “Maybe they knew enough not to continue the demon seed.”

  Laurel smiled and watched her mother as she girlishly checked the post on one of her earrings with her forefinger and thumb. Then she leaned forward, kissing Laurel on the cheek and purring, “Ummm. Chlorine. I love the smell of chlorine in your hair. It makes me think you’re still my little girl.”

  “Is it that apparent?”

  “The chlorine? Only if she gets very close. And I don’t believe she gets very close to anyone.”

  Laurel was returning to Vermont the next day and she didn’t know if her mother had something special in mind for them for dinner: Her sister, Carol, was joining them that evening. And so she asked if there was anything in particular she should pick up on the way home.

  “Nope. You just drive safely. And—and I mean this—stay on your toes around that woman.”

  “You’re really worried about me, aren’t you?”

  “I guess a little. I don’t like that family. And, yes, I don’t like you getting so caught up in this fellow’s work. There’s that, too. It makes me a little anxious. I know…”

  “You know what?”

  “I know how seriously you take your job. I know how much you care about the people who come to the shelter.”

  “You don’t need to worry, Mom. I liked Bobbie, and I’ve been impressed by the work he left behind. I want to understand how he wound up at BEDS. But at this point it’s all just academic curiosity.”

  Laurel felt her mother’s fingers entwining themselves among hers, the older woman’s slim and elegant hands squeezing hers softly. Her mother gave her a fretful, tender smile. Laurel honestly couldn’t tell whether she was more concerned that her brittle little girl was involving herself in a project that was going to upset her, or whether this instinctive maternal concern was grounded firmly in what she knew about Pamela Buchanan Marshfield.

  AMONG LAUREL’S FIRST THOUGHTS? Mrs. Winston was completely mistaken: Pamela Marshfield didn’t need or want to be carried anywhere. The woman was elderly, but
she was far from frail. Like her brother, she was in astonishing shape for someone so old. Say what you will about the Buchanans, Laurel thought when she first laid eyes on Pamela, it was one hell of a good gene pool. The woman was eighty-six, but she was formidable, entitled, and confident—and just caustic enough to keep Laurel uncomfortable. The social worker kept her guard up, because it was clear that Pamela never let hers down.

  “I’m surprised it took me so long to extricate myself from the North Shore,” she said soon after Laurel had arrived in East Hampton. She was wearing a sleeveless white blouse that revealed the seashell-sharp points of her collarbone, and a flowered skirt that fell almost to the Italian tile on the terrace where they were sipping their tea. A manicured swath of lawn perhaps two hundred yards wide separated the terrace from the beach. The sea was calm, and the waves at the shore were more ripples than breakers: a bucket of foamy water overturned on a suburban driveway. “I never get back there.”

  She was gaunt in the way that many wealthy, elderly women are: Her skin was pulled back tight from her eyes, but it hung like drapes from her upper arms and her neck. Her hair was the white and gray of old fireplace ash, and it was cut as short as a man’s. Laurel saw white patches on her arms and the backs of her hands where once she presumed there had been moles and age spots and precancerous growths.

  “I liked growing up there,” said Laurel. “I don’t expect to settle in West Egg—”

  “No one settles in West Egg,” the old woman said with a slight, dismissive sweep of her hand. “The very word, settlement, implies a pioneering spirit and a desire to put roots into the ground. There are no roots there. People pass through there as they…climb. It has always been that way.”

  Laurel understood the reference: West Egg had never been as fashionable as East Egg—it had always been a world of newer money—and like Tom and Daisy, Pamela Marshfield seemed to view everyone who lived on the other side of the cove as a Gatsby-like interloper.

  “My family has always been happy enough there,” Laurel said, hoping she sounded serene and self-possessed.

  “I’m glad. I understand you’re a swimmer.”

  “It’s how I keep fit, yes.”

  “I believe you told Julia—my secretary, the girl you spoke with on Saturday—that you used to swim at the club across from our old home.”

  She had to restrain a small smile at the way her hostess had referred to Julia as a girl: In addition to speaking on the phone two days earlier, they had met while she had been waiting at the estate, and this girl was at least five years older than her mother.

  “I did. I spent most of my summers in that pool and in the cove behind your old house when I was growing up.”

  “I was always a bit surprised my parents never moved. I would have thought the…the view…might have been troublesome.”

  “Did it bother you?”

  “The view?”

  Laurel nodded.

  “No.”

  In the distance to the south the horizon was interrupted by a line of cauliflower-shaped cumulus clouds, a row of great Doric columns supporting the sky. Pamela watched them with her for a long moment before adding, “I understand you have some photographs you want to show me.”

  “Yes, I do.” She reached into the leather bag that her mother had given her for her birthday that summer, and took out the envelope with the pictures she had brought with her from Vermont. The first one she placed on the glass table between them was the image of the little boy and girl near the portico at the woman’s childhood home. Laurel tried to gauge the dowager’s reaction to the shot, but she revealed little. Finally, Laurel asked, “Is that you and your brother?”

  “It is indeed. I’d say I’m nine in it, wouldn’t you? That would have made my brother”—she paused for just the slightest moment, perhaps trying to pull from the air precisely how much older she was than her sibling—“five.”

  “Do you remember when the picture was taken—what you were going to do that day?”

  “Oh, it could have been taken anytime. Clearly, we were off to someplace rather interesting. But we were always off to someplace rather interesting.”

  “I imagine you had a lovely childhood,” Laurel said, but she didn’t mean it. She was merely trying to say something polite to fill the silence that seemed to envelop the terrace whenever one of them finished speaking.

  “I think it’s fairly common knowledge that my parents had a deeply troubled marriage. And so they did things. We did things. We went places, we were a body in constant motion. It was how my parents dealt with the rift. My brother and I understood this early on, and so while I would say that we had a privileged childhood, I would not have called it lovely.”

  “I see. I’m sorry.”

  “You have other pictures?”

  As if Laurel were telling the woman’s fortune with tarot cards, she laid the few others she had of the house down on the table before her. She had brought with her the photos of Gatsby and his parties as well—and of his home and his pool—but she decided at the last moment to keep those tucked snugly in the envelope. They could only antagonize Pamela Marshfield.

  “I loved that room, there,” the woman said, pointing at a pair of mullioned windows on the second floor in one of the images. “It was a game room. There was a card table where my mother sometimes played bridge—with her friends and with mine—a Victrola in a cherry cabinet, and a billiard table. Robert loved billiards. Bridge, too. He was a very good cardplayer, even when he was a very little boy.”

  “Robert? He didn’t go by Bobbie?” asked Laurel. She realized that she had sounded a little startled.

  “No. He was always Robert, right up until the day he died,” Pamela said, but there was something false in her tone—something more practiced than sad. “Where did you get these?” she continued.

  “They were in the possession of a man who passed away last week in Burlington. A very sweet gentleman who was eighty-two years old.” Laurel watched for a reaction—the tiniest of nods, a sudden intake of breath, an eyebrow raised in sadness or surprise—but the woman held her gaze and said nothing.

  “He had been homeless,” she went on. “We—my organization, BEDS—found him a modest apartment. These pictures were among the only possessions he had when he arrived at the shelter.”

  “Are there more?”

  “Yes. There are a few snapshots and there are some of the prints and negatives he took as a photographer. That’s what he did for a living. He was a photographer—quite good, as a matter of fact.”

  “Did you bring any others with you?”

  “I didn’t,” Laurel lied, and she watched as the other woman studied them, focusing mostly on the picture of herself and her brother.

  “I presume I may keep these,” Pamela said. “I actually have very few photographs of the two of us.”

  “No, I’m sorry,” Laurel told her. “You can’t.”

  “No?” She seemed taken aback. Laurel guessed that people probably didn’t say no to her very often. “Young girl—Laurel—why would you want them?”

  “First of all, they’re not mine. The man died intestate, and as a BEDS ward his photo collection will go to the City of Burlington. The city attorneys will then dispense with the images as they see fit, but I’m sure they’ll keep the collection together. Intact. Even the snapshots, I presume. Bobbie didn’t have much, and those photos are the only thing he had of real value when he died.”

  Pamela’s eyes widened slightly when Laurel said the word Bobbie. “You haven’t told me,” she said. “What was this fellow’s full name?”

  “Bobbie Crocker.”

  “Sounds like a cake mix for men,” she mumbled, and Laurel smiled politely at the small joke.

  “He was a bit of a character. A real social animal. Even after we’d moved him into his apartment, he still hung around the shelter sometimes. He helped make the newcomers feel a little better. Big, booming voice. Good sense of humor.”

  “Well, I don’t
see the value of a homeless man’s photographs and why you can’t indulge an old woman’s request. I’m sure the city wouldn’t care if you gave me the snapshots—especially since, clearly, they once belonged to my family.”

  “I’m sure you’re right. I just can’t leave them with you now. They’re not mine. But I will talk to the city attorney who works with my group. Perhaps you can have them once the whole collection has been archived.”

  “It sounds big. Just how large is it?” the woman inquired, and Laurel realized that she was starting to fish. “Are there many more of my brother and me? Any of my parents?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t believe so. But I haven’t really begun to review all the negatives.”

  “Ah, you’re a photographer,” she said, offering the girl a small sarcophagus smile. “A photographer and a swimmer.”

  “That’s right.”

  “And you’re interested in this because you live in West Egg and see in these pictures a…a what? Help me, please?”

  A flock of seagulls swooped en masse down onto the beach in the distance, and began strutting along the moist sand. “I presumed the man who died was your brother,” she answered carefully. “And I was interested in how a person of such—and I will use your word here—privilege had wound up homeless in Vermont.”

  “Your homeless man was most certainly not my brother. My brother died in a car accident in 1939. He was sixteen years old.”

  “I’m sorry. My aunt didn’t know the details, but she thought he might have died when he was a teenager.”

  “Thank you. But you needn’t feel sorry. That was, quite literally, a lifetime ago.”

  “Were you there?”

  “With my brother? Heavens no. I was at Smith College then. Robert had had a…a somewhat contentious relationship with our parents and left home rather abruptly. He was with a friend, another boy seventeen or eighteen. Their car blew a tire and rolled into a ditch in North Dakota. The both of them were probably too drunk to walk, much less drive.”