The Double Bind (16 page)

“Are you sure he was talking about the Champlain Valley Fair, Pete?” she asked.

“Not completely. You can’t be sure about anything when you’re talking about Bobbie. Maybe it was a carny in New York. Or Minnesota. Or Louisville. You said he had family there, right?”

“I did.”

“Look, you want a story?” Pete asked.

“I do.”

“Then here you go. This is the Bobbie Crocker who was my friend. Our friend. This past summer, we were watching the cranes as they put up that new building by the lake. The one that will have the luxury condos and the shops. It was just me and Bobbie, and we were sweating like pigs. It must have been July. I don’t drink anymore, but I was really hungry for a beer. I could just taste it. An ice cold beer—in a bottle. Maybe even one of those Budweiser liters. I haven’t had a drink in three years—not quite three years then—but I had a couple bucks in my wallet and there’s that convenience store right near where the apartments will be. And I was thinking: a beer. What the fu—heck? Really, what’s one lousy beer? Even a liter? What, is it gonna put my ass back on the streets? Well, of course the answer is yes, it will—because I can’t have just one. I have to have, like, a case. But I was gonna do it: I was gonna get me a beer. And Bobbie, thank God, read my mind and got me out of there. Took me to a shady bench and sat me down with a couple of Yoo-hoos. You know, that chocolate milk in a bottle?”

“Yogi Berra used to drink ’em,” said Howard.

“Well, he used to say he did in the ads. I think he probably drank beer, too,” Paco observed.

“Those Yoo-hoos kept me clean. Sometimes cold sweets help. And it was Bobbie who was looking out for me.”

Laurel thought about this for a moment, and she remembered what David had told her to try as a researcher the other night when they were in bed. “Uh-huh,” she said simply, nodding. And then she went silent.

Sure enough, Pete—even cool and jaded and skeptical Pete—continued. “We were sitting in the shade under one of them maples they didn’t cut down, looking at the water and the Adirondack Mountains, just sipping our Yoo-hoos. And Bobbie says, ‘You think this view is grand? You should have seen the view I had from my bedroom when I was a boy. The Long Island Sound out one window and a mansion with a turret out the other.’ A turret! Imagine! Course, I was sure he was in Bobbie Crocker la-la land, so I just smiled and changed the subject.”

Suddenly, Howard pushed his plate aside and clasped the fingers of his hands together on the table. “You know what was the best thing about Bobbie?” he said meaningfully.

They all waited.

Finally: “He was just a regular guy.”

Pete allowed himself another of his hard, short, bitter laughs: “Yeah, that was Bobbie Crocker. While some old codgers are playing golf in Fort Lauderdale, he was summering behind a Dumpster on Cherry Street and spending his winters in the state mental hospital. Just a regular guy, that Bobbie Crocker.”

When Laurel looked back at Howard he was nodding in agreement, his eyes wistful and slightly downcast, absolutely oblivious to the anger and the irony that laced so much of what Pete Stambolinos said.

M
ID-MORNING,
K
ATHERINE
put her head into Laurel’s office. Laurel was with a new client named Tony, a young man who claimed to have been a high school football star from Revere, Massachusetts, eight or nine years ago, and had spent last night in the men’s wing of the shelter. He was estranged from his family—like Pete and Paco and Howard and (yes, she thought) Bobbie. The only difference was that he was a lot younger. He fidgeted in his seat and had a habit of flexing and fanning his fingers, and he had bitten his nails to the point where all of his cuticles seemed to have bled in the night.

“I’m sorry to interrupt, but I have to leave right now for a meeting in Montpelier and I wanted to snag you before I left,” Katherine began. She gave Tony a small wave of apology, and held up her hands in a gesture that suggested she was helpless to do anything but interrupt. Laurel joined her in the hallway.

“You may get a call from a New York lawyer asking you to stop printing Bobbie Crocker’s photographs,” she said. “He might even ask you to turn them over to him—or to someone. And you are not to do that, do you understand? Do not feel intimidated.”

“Whoa, lawyers? When did we bring in the lawyers?”

“We didn’t,” said Katherine, and Laurel understood instantly who had—and why Katherine’s demeanor was slightly frenzied. She was feeling coerced, and she wasn’t going to stand for it. Nor was she going to allow what she perceived to be the desire of one of her clients to be cavalierly ignored. She told Laurel about her conversation with the city attorney, and then continued, “The woman didn’t phone herself, of course. The entitled never do. Her lawyer did. He called Chris Fricke. Anyway, this old crone believes the photos belong to her family because she’s in some.”

“She’s in one.”

“And her brother’s in some.”

“Her brother’s in one.”

“And there are some of her old house.”

“Yes.”

“Anyway, she’s claiming that Bobbie must have stolen a box full of photos and negatives from her family or found it somewhere, and she wants everything returned intact—exactly as Bobbie left it. She wants to see what else is there that might belong to her.”

“Bobbie didn’t take anything from her family: He is her family! He’s her brother!”

Katherine paused and studied her closely. “Do you honestly believe that?”

“I don’t believe it,” she said quietly, irritably. “I know it. I am absolutely sure of it.”

“Well, don’t be. Please give up that notion right now. Do you understand?”

“What? Why?”

“If Bobbie really was her brother—which, I gather, is completely impossible—then we might actually have to turn everything over to her.”

“I have news for you, Katherine, I have no doubts whatsoever,” Laurel said, trying (and failing) to keep her voice calm. “Everything fits, it’s obvious. Just this morning I had breakfast with some of the guys from the Hotel New England—”

“Let me guess, Pete and his pals? That must have been a trip.”

“It was great. They made me a feast. But my point is that even the things they shared with me indicate that Bobbie is this woman’s brother.”

“Really?”

“Bobbie told them he grew up on Long Island. He told them he had family in Kentucky!”

“I understand the Long Island connection. What’s in Kentucky?”

“It’s where his mother was from. His mother was born and raised in Louisville.”

Katherine sighed and gave her arm a small squeeze. “When you first told me what you recognized in the snapshots, I thought he might have grown up near your swim club, too. Really, I did. And you might still be proven right. Who knows? But—”

“He was taking pictures of the house—his childhood house!—as late as the mid-1960s! I printed a couple just last night!”

“Or someone else was—perhaps at this woman’s request.”

“Look—”

“Laurel, this woman’s lawyer was pretty clear that his client’s brother died years ago. Decades ago. No one knows how Bobbie got the pictures and the negatives, but this woman wants you to leave them alone. And she wants us to give them back. Which we do not have to do—at least not yet—precisely because she insists that Bobbie wasn’t her brother. No relation. That’s the key, and that’s my point. As long as this Long Island dowager keeps saying that she and Bobbie aren’t related, then she isn’t an heir and thus can make no claim on the estate based on family.”

Laurel contemplated this for a moment: The irony wasn’t lost on her. If she acknowledged who Bobbie was, then Pamela Buchanan Marshfield would have reason to demand—and, perhaps, be given—the photographs. Apparently, there really were people out there who wanted them. Bobbie’s fears might have been disproportionate to reality, but they were not wholly delusional.

“If BEDS keeps the prints once I’m done working with them—” she began.

“Not BEDS, the City of Burlington. The legal term is
escheat
. Because Bobbie died without a will, his possessions go to the city to dispose of. And in Burlington that means selling the assets with the money going to the school system—though in this case I’m pretty sure the city will sell them to us for, say, a dollar, so we can use them as a fund-raiser.”

“Which is why you want us to hang on to them.”

“That’s part of the reason. But I also want them because they were the only thing in the world that mattered enough to one of our clients that he brought them with him wherever he went. We need to respect that. And I want us to give Bobbie the show he deserved. I love the idea of an exhibition reminding the city that the homeless are people, too, and have talents and dreams and accomplishments.”

“And so I can continue to print them.”

Katherine paused, and for a moment Laurel feared that she was going to tell her to stop. Finally: “Yes. Just…just remember that these photos belonged to a man who…who wasn’t who you imagine he was. And”—she looked at Laurel in a way the young social worker recognized because it was precisely the way her mother gazed at her when she was worried—“try not to talk to any lawyers who call you. But, if you must, certainly don’t insist that Bobbie was anyone’s brother. Okay?”

Laurel nodded, but she was so angry that she felt the corners of her eyes start to quiver. She was furious both because she felt she was being muzzled and because it was clear that not even Katherine believed what she knew was a fact.

Katherine gave her a hug and waved into her office at Tony, but he glared at the director with a look of such condescension and contempt that Katherine rolled inside like a wave and apologized to him formally. Then she turned from the two of them and started down the corridor. Before she was around the corner and gone, however, she stopped and added, “And I’m serious about this identity thing. Okay?”

Laurel nodded, but her mind was already on the photos and the work she would do that weekend in the university darkroom.

P
ATIENT 29873

…no interest in the other patients or socializing in the dayroom. Auditory hallucinations appearing to diminish, but still has denial of key event and significant gaps in memory compatible with dissociation.

From the notes of Kenneth Pierce,
attending psychiatrist,
Vermont State Hospital, Waterbury, Vermont

C
HAPTER
F
OURTEEN

D
AVID
F
ULLER
was sitting in the pediatrician’s waiting room with his older daughter on Friday morning, painfully aware that every plush animal, plastic toy, and glossy magazine was a veritable petri dish of infectious agents. Worse, the small children in the room with them were coughing and wheezing and sneezing. He wanted them quarantined somewhere far, far away from Marissa—who, at the moment, felt just fine. In fact, she was practically the only kid in her class who did not have strep throat. The only reason they were here was because a cut on the pinkie toe on her right foot wasn’t healing: too much time, he guessed, with sneakers, tap shoes, and ballet slippers rubbing against it.

Marissa, of course, was absolutely thrilled that the only moment their HMO-sanctioned pediatrician could see her was on a Friday morning—when she was supposed to be in math class. She sat beside him now on the orange Naugahyde couch, her uninjured foot curled up on the cushions beneath her thigh and her head buried in a
Cosmo Girl!
magazine that her father thought was completely inappropriate for this waiting room. ( Just where, he wondered, was
Highlights
when you needed it?) He feared her silence had to do with the usually forbidden things she was getting to read about in the magazine. Consequently, to break the periodical’s spell, he asked (ponderously, he feared), “Other than your pinkie toe, how are you doing?”

“Okay.”

“Is the magazine really that enticing? I certainly hope you’re not taking too much pleasure in whatever decadence you’ve found—if only so your mother doesn’t kill me.”

“She won’t.”

“Anything on your mind?”

She looked up from her magazine. “You mean, like, right now?”

“Sure. What are you thinking about…like, right now?”

“Well, since you ask, Mom thinks Laurel is way too young for you.” His ex-wife, an attorney, was in court that morning.

“Why is your mother even worrying about the age of the women I’m seeing?”

“I don’t know.”

“Wrong question. Forgive me. Does it bother you that your mother is, suddenly, unnecessarily interested in Laurel’s age?”

“Oh, it’s not sudden.” She dropped the magazine back into the rack beside the couch and yawned, then stretched. She leaned her head against the side of his arm.

“Thank you for letting me know,” he said simply.

“No problem.”

“So…does it bother you?”

“Laurel’s age? Nope.”

“Does it bother Cindy?”

“She is, like, totally unaware of age. For all she knows, Laurel is Mom’s age.”

“I think you can give your sister more credit than that.”

“Not much.”

“For a kid with a sore toe, you are impressively sassy this morning,” he said.

“Hey, it was pretty gross last night.”

“Uh-huh.”

“So?”

He pulled his arm free and wrapped it around her in a hug. “So, nothing. I’m glad we’re taking care of this.”

After a long moment in which neither of them said anything, she asked, “You seeing Laurel this weekend?”

“I am.”

“Tonight?”

“Yes.”

“Saturday, too? Or Sunday?”

He thought carefully about her inquiry. Was she asking because she wanted to see Laurel, or because she was worried that his girlfriend was going to impinge upon their time as a family? She and her sister had both been more clingy ever since their mother had announced she was going to marry Eric Tourneau, another lawyer in her firm, in November. Marissa probably didn’t view Laurel as an impediment to her parents ever reconciling—a reconciliation that was wholly inconceivable even before his ex-wife and Eric had fallen in love, but an idea that he understood a child might cling to tenaciously nevertheless—but perhaps she felt Laurel was stealing away her father’s attention.

“I’m going to be with you and your sister this weekend,” he said, hoping he sounded casual. He had the girls, as usual, from the moment he picked them up on Saturday until they left for school on Tuesday morning. He hadn’t planned on Laurel and his daughters spending any time together in the next couple of days: He was having dinner with Laurel that evening precisely because he wanted to be able to focus entirely on his girls over the weekend. He had carefully compartmentalized his life, and an advantage, he had discovered, to dating a woman as young as Laurel was that she made no demands that he contemplate marriage. She felt no pressure yet to have children because she still had lots of time. Whenever he dated women even close to his age, he felt on the first date that he was being scrutinized as a marriage prospect; if he passed—which invariably he would because he was breathing and employed—by the second or the third the subject of children would arise. And the reality was that he had no intention of becoming a father again. It was not that he didn’t love children; rather, it was that he was devoted to his two girls and would never do anything to make them feel replaced or replaceable. His own father had a daughter and a son from his second marriage when David was still shuttling between his parents’ homes as a child, and he always felt like a second-class citizen after they arrived.

Was this fair to Laurel? Probably not. In this regard—and, yes, in other ways, too—he knew that he was not an especially suitable companion for her. For many women. What he viewed as a mere compartmentalization, other people had told him was coldness. He was emotionally indifferent, one girlfriend advised him when they were breaking up. Given Laurel’s own wounds, this may have been a particularly damning flaw. But he was confident that she didn’t see it this way. He thought that precisely because of her own need to cocoon, she saw his distance as an indication that he was an apt partner. And, of course, his age helped. He knew she desired only older men, and he understood why.

Did he feel badly about the way he remained so detached? Yes, on occasion. But not badly enough that he had any intention of changing.

As early as that morning in the pediatrician’s office, however, he had begun to question Laurel’s interest in Bobbie Crocker. And so when Marissa brought her up, it crossed his mind that it might actually be good for his girlfriend to be spending a little more time with his kids. Anything to focus her interest away from that old photographer who had died.

“Why are you wondering about Laurel?” he asked Marissa.

“I need a headshot.”

“Excuse me?” He honestly wasn’t sure he had heard her correctly.

“You know, a picture that makes me look really professional. I’m going to audition for
The Miracle Worker,
and I’m going to be up against like fifty other girls for Helen Keller. It will be a real cattle call, so I figure I need all the help I can get.”

“And you want Laurel to take your picture?”

“I could pay her my allowance for the next couple of months.”

“Oh, good Lord, I doubt she’d accept money.”

“Do you think she’d mind? I don’t. I know it’s a huge favor and all…”

He exhaled, relieved that the whole reason she was bringing up his girlfriend was because she wanted a headshot. “I wouldn’t call it a huge favor,” he said.

“Well. It would still be a favor. Especially if I didn’t pay her. And Laurel has already done tons for me.”

“Tons?”

“She knows every cool clothing store in town, and she must have taken me to them all. You saw the skirts and scarves she got me when we were together.”

“I remember.”

“I think that’s what got Mom really jazzed up. The idea that your college-aged girlfriend—”

“Laurel finished college four years ago. Your mother knows that. She has a master’s in social work. Your mother knows that, too.”

Marissa thought about this briefly. Then: “I have a question.”

“Yes?”

“Laurel sometimes seems a little, I don’t know, faraway.”

He knew his older child was perceptive and empathetic, and so he wasn’t surprised that she had sensed that something was slightly wrong with Laurel. A little off. In his opinion, Laurel was always going to be a beautiful but wounded little bird. Nevertheless, he wasn’t about to discuss what had happened in Underhill. Not that moment, anyway. Someday, maybe. Marissa needed to know that the world was a dangerous place. Even Vermont. But he wasn’t about to go into any details. “Oh, I guess like the rest of us she can be sad sometimes,” he answered simply, hoping he didn’t sound evasive.

“Not sad. It’s different than sad.”

“Then what is it?”

“It’s that she’s…wispy.”

“Wispy?”

“Like the curtains in Mom’s dining room? The ones you can sort of see through?”

“I know the ones.”

“But I really do like her. You know that, right?”

“I do.”

A woman with a clipboard—a nurse Laurel’s age—gently called, “Marissa?” and scanned the small crowd for a reaction.

“That would be us,” he said, raising an arm, and then—because it struck him as funny—his daughter’s.

Marissa giggled at the idea she was a puppet, but turned to him as she rose to her feet. “So, Laurel can take my headshot?”

“We’ll ask her,” he said, but he guessed she would. And he was glad. Suddenly, he was intrigued by the idea of Marissa sharing her interest in drama with Laurel. And he liked the notion of Laurel doing something—anything—in her free time that did not involve the work of a schizophrenic photographer.

“Really?”

“Sure.”

She jumped up and down two or three times in quick succession and pantomimed a short staccato clap with her hands. Then, abruptly, she flinched and closed her eyes because, clearly, she had just landed exactly the wrong way on her toe.