The Double Bind

by Chris Bohjalian

  “I just saw the pictures as publicity, David, that’s all. Maybe a little cash for the organization—assuming the collection is actually worth something. But it’s all proving too much trouble, isn’t it?”

  “Could be. It certainly doesn’t seem worth the anguish it’s causing Laurel.”

  “As you said: She’s fragile.”

  Her father looked down at her and Cindy and smiled, as if he had suddenly remembered they were there. Right away he noticed the Junior Mint.

  “Cindy, sweetheart, do you know there’s a Junior Mint in your ear?”

  “It’s an earring,” said Cindy, and she offered him what she must have presumed was the cutest, most pixielike smile in the world.

  “Yeah,” Marissa said, unable to contain herself a moment longer, “and the popcorn beside your mouth is a lip ring.”

  Her sister stuck her tongue out at her. She rolled her eyes, but decided everyone would be better off, including her, if she took the high road and put her arm around the kid. Her sister was as shaken as she was by the reality that soon Mom and Eric were getting hitched. “When we get home, Dad and I will help you take your earrings off—if you want us to. Sometimes, it’s hard, you know.”

  Katherine smiled, but it was clear that she wasn’t really focused on them. She was still thinking about Laurel. “Of course,” she continued, “it might be even worse at this point to take the pictures away from her.”

  “I think it would be best if we could get Laurel involved in another project,” their dad said. “Another photography project, maybe. No, not maybe. Definitely. And I know one. It’s not very big. But it is important to someone.” His voice had brightened considerably and he sounded almost playful.

  “And that would be what?” the woman asked.

  “A headshot for my young diva here,” he said, squeezing Marissa. “Laurel offered to take a headshot of my rising young star this Monday. Late afternoon, maybe. Or early evening.”

  Marissa felt a surge of electricity, downright elation, and stood up a little taller against her father’s side. She hadn’t realized that her father had taken her idea so seriously. “Really? This Monday?” she asked him.

  He nodded. “She offered. I said I’d get back to her. You’re done with singing lessons by four, but since you’d be the subject of the pictures, I figured I should double-check. Will Monday work?”

  “Yes, Monday’s perfect! Thank you, thank you, thank you!” She pulled him down by his arm and kissed his cheek. She was already thinking about the headshots she had seen in playbills and beside the résumés of the older girls she knew, and what she would wear. What she would do with her hair.

  “David,” Katherine began, her voice absolutely flat. “You’re treating Laurel like a child. I think we need to confront this head-on—not try to distract her like she’s a toddler.”

  “I’m simply trying to be efficient. Accomplish two tasks at once.”

  “Look, I think it’s very sweet that she offered to photograph Marissa. But you can’t possibly believe for even a nanosecond that taking your daughter’s portrait could begin to replace her interest in Bobbie Crocker.”

  “No, of course not. But maybe if we view this obsession a day at a time and keep her busy with other things, we can wean her from the project.”

  “Wean? That’s exactly what I’m saying!”

  “It’s an expression.”

  Almost on cue, as if she knew on an instinctive level precisely how to drive her older sister crazy, Cindy interrupted the grown-ups. “She can take my headshot, too! I want a headshot, too!”

  “See,” their father said, much to Marissa’s horror. “The project has already doubled in scope.”

  A FEW MINUTES LATER, as the two girls were walking with their father down the Burlington street toward their apartment near the lake, Marissa asked, “Dad, is Laurel sick?”

  “Laurel is a swimmer, remember? Very healthy. I don’t think you have anything to worry about. Why do you ask?”

  “You said she was fragile. That was the word you used when you and Katherine were talking.”

  “I didn’t realize how carefully you were listening,” he said.

  “I didn’t mean to eavesdrop.”

  “Oh, you weren’t eavesdropping. Katherine and I were just, I guess, a bit indiscreet.”

  “So why is Laurel fragile?”

  He seemed to think about this, his long strides slowing. “Well, I don’t want to scare you. But I also want to be truthful with you. Always. You know that, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Okay. Seven years ago, she had something bad happen to her. She’s fine now. Mostly, anyway. She’s just been a little delicate ever since.”

  “What happened?”

  He glanced down at Cindy, who wasn’t listening to a word they were saying. She was far too busy licking the tip of her finger. For a moment Marissa wasn’t sure why, but then her sister brought the finger back to her ear…and then back to her tongue. And then she got it: The Junior Mint was starting to melt, and Cindy was scraping her fingernail against the chocolate and cream and tasting it. She shook her head. On the one hand, she was appalled. There was nothing—Just nothing!—this kid wouldn’t eat. On the other hand, at least this meant that she and her dad wouldn’t have to get out the tweezers to extract the piece of candy. Body heat was actually doing the heavy lifting on this one. Thank God it wasn’t a SweeTart or something hard. Then they might have had to go back to the doctor tomorrow.

  Her father was saying—quietly, so Cindy would have to start listening actively if she wanted to hear—“I know at school you’ve learned about strangers and how you shouldn’t get into cars or vans with them. Right? In health class, you watch all those movies about how to stay safe. How there are really bad people out there.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Well, seven years ago, when she was in college, Laurel went biking in Underhill. She was on a dirt road and it was pretty deserted.” He paused, but only briefly, to make sure that her sister was still safely ensconced on Planet Cindy. Then, after a long sigh, he resumed his story. Marissa could tell that he was condensing it to all but its basics, abridging it considerably: He was trying so hard to convey the tale in a way that would not make the world unbearably frightening to her that she really wasn’t completely sure what had occurred. Still, it sounded scary, and when he was finished she found herself folding her arms against her chest as they walked. She understood that he had told her even the barest bones of the tale because he was trying to answer her original question, explain to her why—in his opinion, in Katherine’s opinion—Dad’s athletic young girlfriend was fragile. Nevertheless, it was still a profoundly ominous story to hear as they strolled down the sidewalk in the night, and somewhere in the back of her mind she was dimly aware of the crackle of newspapers as they blew in the wind and the scuffle of footsteps before anyone would pass them on the street.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  WHAT DID THE neighbors think? Sometimes Laurel tried to imagine. Did the Buchanans care? First, in 1922, there was that nastiness near the ash heaps, the hit-and-run car accident, followed by the investigation and the inquest. There had to have been newspaper articles noting that Daisy was in the passenger seat of that bootlegger’s car when he slammed into Myrtle Wilson and left her to die in the street, her left breast literally ripped off by the front of the vehicle. Surely, the neighbors must have pondered, why was she with him? Most, Laurel presumed, came to the most likely of conclusions. Then, a few years later, there were the allegations that it was actually Daisy who had been behind the wheel that steamy dusk. Not Jay. The neighbors must have discussed those stories, too.

  Likewise, Laurel was sure that they whispered about Tom Buchanan’s extramarital dalliances. The girl in Santa Barbara (a chambermaid), the woman in Chicago. And those were merely the affairs that occurred in the first three years of Tom and Daisy’s marriage. Even Pamela Marshfield had wondered that morning over tea why her parents had ne
ver moved.

  And yet, somehow, the marriage had endured.

  Saturday night, Laurel stared at the snapshot of Pamela and Bobbie as children beside the tan coupé, the portico towering high above their small, entitled shoulders. For the first time, it dawned on her that Bobbie might have been a reconciliation baby. A child conceived and birthed to show the world that the Buchanans’ marriage was fine. Rock solid. And the neighbors needn’t waste any energy at all wondering whether it could or it should be saved.

  THE CHURCH SAT ATOP a small ridge perhaps a mile and a quarter beyond the village of Bartlett. Laurel stopped at a gas station on the main street to ask for directions, and found it easily within minutes. It was a classic New England church with a pair of tall, stately sugar maples out front, their colors just starting their transformation into what soon would become a phantasmagoric rainbow of reds. It had a modest, unadorned steeple, and clapboard the color of bone. The stained glass was more ornate, with most of the windows depicting crowns and scepters and crucifixes. The deacons, an elderly man and woman, welcomed her warmly when she arrived: They smelled fresh young blood.

  She sat in the back, both because she knew no one and because her family had never been big churchgoers. She was, she realized, slightly overdressed in her lone white blouse and the black broomstick skirt she had found in the back of her closet, since everyone else who was there who was even close to her age was wearing blue jeans or khakis or (in the case of a couple of girls who looked to be seniors in high school) the sort of retro-looking miniskirts that Laurel herself often picked up at the vintage clothing stores near the Burlington waterfront. She felt badly that she was here under what had to be considered a false pretense, guilt that was only exacerbated when the family in the pew before her—a salt-of-the-earth farmer and his wife, a schoolteacher, and their four unkempt but well-behaved children between the ages of, she guessed, five and fifteen—greeted her with unnecessary but completely sincere handshakes and embraces. Even the littlest girl, a shy thing with a sticky palm, insisted on pumping her arm wildly during the moment in the service when the pastor asked everyone to say hello to the parishioners around them.

  She restrained herself from asking them how well they had known Marcus Gregory Reese or a man named Bobbie Crocker. She knew she should wait until the coffee hour that, according to the program, would immediately follow the benediction.

  When the service was over, the schoolteacher, a woman named Nancy, asked her how long she had lived in Vermont. The woman was simultaneously handing quarters to two of her children to bring to their Sunday school classes, while gathering up their crayons and coloring books and sweaters. The older kids had shot from the sanctuary to their classrooms the moment the service had ended.

  “Eight years,” Laurel answered. “And you?”

  Nancy kissed her remaining children on the tops of their heads and then watched as her husband brought them across the large, suddenly noisy room to their teachers.

  “My whole life. I was born here. What did you say your name was?”

  “Laurel.”

  “Well, it’s nice to meet you. Did I hear you right earlier: You live up in Burlington?” “I do.”

  The teacher stiffened just the tiniest bit, as if she sensed that Laurel wasn’t here entirely because she was shopping for a church to call home.

  “What brings you to Bartlett? It was probably a pleasant drive this morning. But it won’t be come winter.”

  Laurel smiled in a way that she hoped was at once ingratiating and honest. “I want to learn about a member of this congregation who recently died—and a friend of his.”

  The woman nodded, and then rested a finger—the nail a near-perfect oval, the white at the tip a crisp sickle moon—on her chin. “And that would be?”

  “Marcus Gregory Reese. He—”

  “Oh, I knew Reese. That’s what he went by. Reese.”

  “Can I talk to you about him?”

  “Sure, but I didn’t know him well. I mean, I rarely saw him other than Sundays. A couple of Thursday mornings in the summer, maybe, when the seniors would get together here at the church to play games. Sometimes I’d join them—you know, add a little youth to the mix? Pour the juice, brew the coffee? And I might have run into him once or twice at the grocery store. But that was really about it. Which of his friends do you want to meet? Perhaps I can introduce you.”

  “That’s the problem. He died, too.”

  “I see.”

  “Bobbie Crocker. Ring a bell?”

  “Huh, Bobbie died? I’m really sorry. I’d wondered what happened to him. He just disappeared off the face of the planet, didn’t he? When did he die? And how?”

  “A couple weeks ago. A stroke.”

  “They sat over there,” the schoolteacher said, extending one of her long fingers with the lovely nails in the direction of the pews on the other side of the sanctuary. “Bobbie and Reese. I think they might have lived together, but I’m not sure. Why are you interested in them? Are you related to one of them?”

  “No.”

  “Then why? May I ask? I don’t want to pry.”

  Laurel thought for a moment before answering because there were just so many reasons. There was her curiosity about how Bobbie had gone from the Buchanan estate in East Egg to a single room at the Hotel New England. There was her sense that the two of them were connected since he had grown up in a house across the cove from the very club where she had spent a sizable chunk of her childhood, and then, perhaps, been photographing up in Underhill on that grim, tree-canopied dirt road on the day she had nearly been killed. There was her respect for his talents as a photographer and her desire to annotate his work properly, both for a show and for posterity. And, pure and simple, there were the mysteries: Why had his family cut him off years ago, and why was his sister insisting upon the fiction that they were unrelated today? Why was she claiming that her brother had been dead for so many decades? It was all too much to explain to this sweet woman in the back of a church on a Sunday morning, however, and so she simply told Nancy what she did for a living and that she was researching some photographs that were found in Bobbie’s apartment after he died. She left it at that.

  “Well, if you want to talk to someone who knew them better than I did, try that lady over there. Her name is Jordie.”

  “Jordie…”

  “It’s short for Jordan. She’s another senior in the church, and she moved here from New York, too. She was also part of that Thursday morning seniors’ game day I told you about. When Bobbie was living here, he and Reese and Jordie were real staples,” Nancy said, and abruptly called over to a slightly stooped old woman in an elegant cardigan with pearl buttons and a short crop of platinum hair impeccably coiffed and slightly feathered. Her face was deeply furrowed, but Laurel couldn’t tell for a moment if the wrinkles were all due entirely to age or the way she was laughing in response to something a nearby parishioner had said. She looked more like a peer of Pamela Marshfield than a dowager in a small town in Vermont. Laurel could imagine the woman in a spa or a country club or jauntily waving to a doorman as she passed beneath an immaculate awning on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Nancy called again, this time starting down the aisle toward the woman and dragging Laurel with her. Jordie finally noticed them and smiled at Nancy as they arrived at her side.

  “Jordie, I have someone here who wants to meet you,” the schoolteacher said. “This is Laurel. She’s interested in Reese and Bobbie, and I thought you might be able to help her. Do you have a moment?”

  The woman eyed her, bobbing her head and scrutinizing the girl. Appraising her. The seemingly good-natured laugh Laurel had witnessed a moment ago had evaporated completely, and the social worker assumed it was because of the subject of her inquiry.

  “I have a moment,” said Jordie carefully. “What do you do, young lady? Are you a writer?” She said the last word almost scornfully. Are you a pornographer? “I’ve had some bad experiences with reporters in my day, and I’d
rather not have another.”

  “I’m a social worker,” Laurel answered. “I work for BEDS. Up in Burlington?” She had surprised herself by turning a simple declarative into a question. Was she that intimidated? She reminded herself that in the last week she had confronted Pamela Buchanan Marshfield and T. J. Leckbruge, and hadn’t backed down from either.

  “Yes, I’m familiar with BEDS.”

  “Well, that’s how I got interested in them. Bobbie Crocker was one of our clients.”

  At first she thought Jordie was nodding her head in recognition, but then she understood it was the bounce of a person with Parkinson’s. “One of your clients?” she asked, and that glacial veil, part suspicion and part condescension, thawed in an instant.

  “Yes.”

  “He was…homeless?”

  “He was. He passed away two weeks ago.”

  “Oh, I feel horrible,” she said, her voice growing soft. “Just horrible. I didn’t know he had wound up on the streets. I didn’t know he had died.”

  “Jordie,” Nancy said, wrapping one arm around the old woman’s shoulder consolingly, “don’t feel bad. None of us knew.”

  “He’d been living with Reese, you see,” Jordie said, so shaken by the news that she lowered herself carefully down onto the back wall of the pew.

  “Yes, that’s what I thought.”

  “It was Reese’s house. And when Reese died, his sister said he could stay there till she sold it.”

  “When was this?” Laurel asked.

  “At his funeral.”

  “And his sister’s name is Mindy, right? And she lives in Florida?”

  “Yes, I think so.”

  “So Bobbie was at Reese’s funeral?”

  “Oh, absolutely.”

  “Did he say whether he was going to take Mindy up on her offer?”

  “This was all such a long time ago. Two years ago, at least. Maybe three.”

  Briefly, Laurel considered correcting Jordie, reminding her that it was only a little over fourteen months ago that Reese had passed away. But there was no reason. “What do you remember?” she asked, though her faith in the woman’s memory had been shaken a tiny bit by this lapse.