The Double Bind (26 page)

“Reese was a successful photojournalist, too,” the pastor said. “He worked for newspapers, magazines, even
Life
in its heyday. This was the
Life
that my parents—and your grandparents—pored over weekly.”

“And what about Bobbie?” she asked.

“Well, like you said: He took some pictures for Reese. For
Life.
The problem was that he wasn’t very dependable. Both Reese and Bobbie made jokes about that, too. The man was his own worst enemy in terms of a career.”

“Because of the schizophrenia,” she said.

“And the drinking. He was an alcoholic, and he was irresponsible. He’d get into trouble.”

Nancy glanced quickly at Laurel. When their eyes met, the schoolteacher looked down at the tile floor.

Laurel turned back to the pastor and asked, “Did you ever see any of Bobbie’s photographs?”

“I saw the ones he took when he was living here. When he was staying with Reese, Reese would loan him his camera and chauffeur him around. And I saw a bunch Bobbie said he took in Vermont years before that. Fall foliage stuff. A batch of a dirt road up in Underhill—one that might have had a bicyclist in it, I think.”

“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.”

T
HAT AFTERNOON,
S
ERENA
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.”

S
HEM
W
OLFE 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.