The Double Bind (33 page)

“Yes. That’s correct.”

The prisoner filled his cheeks with air as if he were a chipmunk and then exhaled audibly. A balloon that’s been untied. “He was stayin’ with us, he knew ’bout that road. Liked to take his pictures on it. But he didn’t know you were goin’ to be there that day. He didn’t know me and Hagen were, either. But Hagen knew you would be around. He knew where you parked. He’d followed you, like, two times. Maybe three. I don’t know. Anyway, Bobbie just walked out there from Hagen’s place. It wasn’t that far. Well, maybe to a guy in his seventies it was. But not really. We didn’t even know he had been out there till just before the cops came to the trailer. And then he split just before they arrived.”

“You never told the police.”

“They didn’t ask,” he said, and for the first time she heard a low rumble of evil in his voice. “And I wasn’t about to give them another witness. That wouldn’t a made much sense. And neither was Hagen.”

She looked down at the pictures before her, and held up for him the large print of the Buchanan estate in East Egg. “Do you recognize this house?”

“Nope.”

“But you knew your father took the picture, right?”

“I guess. But I don’t assume nothin’ with Bobbie.”

“Did you ever meet your grandfather?”

“Sure. I knew ’em both.”

She sat back in her chair. “Tell me about them. Please.”

“What do you wanna know?”

“Whatever you can remember.”

“Well, let’s see. My momma’s daddy was a jazz musician. Played trumpet. He lived in the Bronx.”

“And your father’s?”

“You mean the man who raised me? The fellow my momma married? Or Bobbie’s?”

“Bobbie’s.”

“I figured.”

“Please,” said Laurel.

“Bobbie’s daddy lived out on Long Island.”

“Uh-huh.”

“He was a conductor on the Long Island Railroad. He—”

“A conductor?”

“A conductor. That’s right. You know, on a train? His momma was a schoolteacher. First grade, second grade. Something like that. Bobbie used to take pictures of the train platforms out there sometimes. Out on Long Island. I guess ’cause of his old man. And the nice houses out there: He took pictures of them, too. Truth is, I saw Bobbie’s parents more than I saw my momma’s. And I saw them all more than the parents of the man momma finally married.”

Laurel had thought it possible that Corbett wouldn’t have any idea who Bobbie’s parents were. Likewise, she had imagined he might have known his grandmother was Daisy Fay Buchanan and thought mistakenly that his grandfather was Tom. But she had never for a moment entertained the notion that he could be so profoundly misinformed—that he would have it all so wrong.

“A train conductor?” she asked. “And a schoolteacher? Why would you think that?”

“Because that’s who they were, lady. I spent serious time with them as a boy. For a while, my momma thought she could handle Bobbie’s craziness better than his own parents, specially after she let him knock her up good—”

“This is your mother you’re talking about,” said Brian.

“My momma weren’t no different from—”

“Tread lightly,” Brian cautioned the inmate. “Remember—”

Corbett put up both hands in a gesture of resignation. “Fine. ’Nuff said.”

“Is your mother still living?” Laurel asked.

“No. She died a long time ago.”

“Do you have any siblings?”

“That word sounds like a venereal disease,” said Corbett, leering. “Siblings. Siblings. Let me ask you: Do you have siblings, Ms. Estabrook?”

Margot Ann turned to Laurel and looked her squarely in the eye. “Would you like to leave?”

“No.” Then, to Corbett, she rephrased her question: “Do you have any brothers or sisters?”

“I do not.”

“What about the name Buchanan? Does that ring a bell?”

“Nope.”

“Daisy?”

“Like a flower?”

“Like your grandmother.”

“My grandmother was not named after no flower. I had one named Alice and I had one named Cecilia. Bobbie’s momma, the teacher? She was Alice.”

“No,” Laurel said. “She was Daisy. She was married to Tom Buchanan. That was their house in the photo I showed you. And in 1922, in the summer, she had an affair with a bootlegger named Jay Gatsby. Gatsby—”

“As in the novel?” This was Brian. Laurel saw that everyone in the room was staring at her.

“He was Dan Corbett’s grandfather: Bobbie Crocker’s father. That’s who Jay Gatsby was!” Had she raised her voice? She hoped that she hadn’t. But the exchange had happened so quickly and she had been unprepared for this prisoner’s recalcitrance and denial. For his bizarre fabrication. A train conductor? A schoolteacher? She could only presume he had made up such a story to torment her. Torture her further.

There again was that voice. His voice. A recollection: Liqueur Snatch.

“Laurel?” She turned. It was Margot Ann. Otherwise, the room was silent. The drumbeat in her head was the only other noise she could hear. “Laurel?” Margot Ann said again.

“Yes?”

“Would you like a break? Mr. Corbett isn’t going anywhere. But we can leave.”

She heard someone in the room sniff. Realized it was herself.

“May I still hear the letter?” she asked.

“Still? Of course you may,” said Margot Ann. “If you want to.”

Corbett looked away, glared at the clock on the wall. Brian tapped the tips of his fingers gently together, and the inmate looked at his therapist—a trained dog, she thought—and then at her.

“Do I just read this out loud?” he asked.

“Just like we did in the group. Just like you did with me,” said Brian. Then, to Laurel, he added, “He’s becoming accountable for his actions.” Laurel thought it was as if he were speaking about an ill-behaved child.

Margot Ann asked her once more if she really wanted to hear this, and she heard herself saying she did. She did. She…did. She didn’t believe she had repeated herself, but she feared that she might have.

And then, just after that, Corbett started to read. His voice was at once sycophantic and condescending. He wanted, she decided, to demean her while somehow garnering the approval of his therapist. She knew this was an impossible task, and it dawned on her that if he couldn’t have both he would choose to make her suffer. That, perhaps, was for him his moment of arousal.

“Dear Ms. Estabrook,” he began, holding the paper before him with both hands, as if it were a hardcover novel. “I am writing you this letter to say I am sorry for what me and Russ Hagen did to you seven years ago. I was on drugs, but that’s no excuse. I left home early, but that’s no excuse neither. Neither is the time I spent just drifting around. I take full responsibility for what I did. And that means I take full responsibility for hurting you. These are hard words for me to write because they are so evil. Sodomy. Rape. Mutilation. But they say the truth will set you free and I will not mince words. And so while I don’t remember everything, I remember enough. And I know what came out in the investigation. It’s all true, I know. That means that first of all I am sorry for the ways we broke your collarbone and your fingers and your foot. And I am sorry for holding you down while Russ raped you in those two places. I am sorry I raped you there, too. And I am sorry that we forced you to have oral sex on us. And most of all I am sorry that I held you by your arms while Russ Hagen cut you so badly. I do not believe that he really planned to cut out your heart, and I did not really believe it then. But I know I was scared you would be able to figure out who we were, and so I think a part of me was hoping Russ really would kill you when he cut off your breast. And so much of you was bleeding so badly when we left, I thought you really might die back there in the woods. But I was glad then and I am glad now that those men on the bicycles found you and you are alive. I am sorry about your breast and the other scars. I wish I could make it up to you. I wish I could go back in time and not do those awful things to you. But I can’t. And so all I can do, Ms. Estabrook, is say that I am sorry. Sincerely, Dan Corbett. P. S. I will never do this sort of thing to another person. I promise.” When he finished, he glanced over at Brian. “Do I give this to her?”

“You stay seated. We’ll give it to her,” the therapist said.

Beside her, Margot Ann’s eyes were closed. She was, Laurel realized, fighting back tears. Brian was staring down at the floor. There was again the pulse of her heart in her head and she felt herself sweating. She felt oddly, unaccountably naked. And she wondered why this inmate had been allowed to fabricate so much in what was supposed to be a letter of clarification.

P
ATIENT
29873

…patient showed me a copy of
The Great Gatsby,
the paperback with the deep blue cover and the flapper with the nymphs in her eyes, and yet continued to dispute that it was a work of fiction. Referred to it as a memoir, a true story. Little reaction when shown the publisher’s page with author, publishing date, fiction disclaimer, etc.

The diagnostic problem has been referred to before. Regarding stressors preceding this episode (whatever it’s an episode of), there are photographs of a young woman on a dirt road on a bicycle in the collection that appear to have been taken near the spot seven years ago where the rape and mutilation occurred. It is beyond current knowledge to determine whether it would cause the delusions by being found among images of the childhood swim club, i.e., suggesting to the patient a biographic or even karmic connection…

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

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY
-N
INE

P
AMELA HAD NEVER
told anyone what she had seen, not even her confidant and attorney, T. J. Leckbruge. Partly, this was because she sometimes wondered if she really had seen anything at all. It might have been a memory that in point of fact she had conjured completely. Still, it was vivid, crisp, altogether cinematic in her mind.

One excruciatingly hot summer afternoon, James Gatz was at her parents’ home, and her nanny, the young Irish girl with the hair as red as a crayon, was going to walk her down to the cove so she could dip her young charge’s pudgy legs into the water. Tom Buchanan was gone somewhere for the day. Gatz was wearing a suit as sparkling white as Pamela’s little smock dress, and sitting in a chair opposite her mother, his legs crossed. Daisy Buchanan was draped languidly across the couch as if she were a model who was about to be painted. They both had drinks in tall glasses resting on the coffee table, but the ice had long melted and there was condensation running along the sides and actually puddling atop the coasters. Daisy looked especially enervated, her body seeming to melt into the cushions of the couch.

The nanny had waded into the water with Pamela, holding her fingers as she lifted the child in and out of the surf, dipping her up to her waist, then her shoulders. The day was so steamy that even the cove had reminded Pamela of a tepid bath, and neither she nor her nanny had been especially refreshed by the dunking. Moreover, they had neglected to bring either her small floating boat or her toy seal because the plan had never been to submerge themselves completely—to go for a real swim—and so she had quickly grown bored.

Fortunately, her nanny had brought a stale baguette, and she broke off little pieces for Pamela to feed to the seagulls they’d seen from the house. There may have been a dozen of them, maybe more. The birds swooped down around the child’s ankles and at first Pamela had been afraid, but once she understood that all they wanted was the bread she had a delightful time and felt like a circus performer with a flock of trained animals around her.

And then, all too soon, the bread was gone and once more she was aware only of the oppressive heat of the afternoon. She would guess later that the bread had lasted barely five minutes when they returned to the house.

They entered through the living room, one of the many rooms that overlooked the bay, slipping through the French doors that were slightly ajar. They were both still so hot and tired—they were, perhaps, even more uncomfortable than when they had left because the long walk up the hill to the house had been completely in the sun—that they hadn’t spoken since they had emerged from the water, and they moved almost noiselessly across the terrace.

In the living room, Pamela noticed instantly that Gatz was no longer on the chair. He, too, was on the couch. And he was hovering over her mother, lifting his head from hers as if they had been…telling secrets. That was how close his face had been to Daisy’s. Abruptly her mother bolted upright so she was sitting beside Gatz, rather than lying beneath him, the pencil-thin straps of her crepe dress dangling close to her elbows instead of slung tight over her shoulders. She looked more flushed than before they had left as she sheepishly tried to adjust the straps, while—and here was a part that led Pamela to wonder if she were embellishing the details much later in her mind—covering her bare breasts with her forearms as she worked to compose herself.

Sometimes the image was fuzzy, as if it were only a dream Pamela had concocted as an adolescent; other times, however, it was as clear in her mind as if it were happening that very moment. Eventually, she would begin to recall (or, perhaps, to imagine) that she had actually seen James Gatz’s hand emerge from underneath her mother’s dress. In college, when she would think back upon that afternoon, she would even begin to conjecture that her half brother had been conceived that very day. It was possible. She was immediately taken upstairs for her nap. Her father didn’t return home until after dinner.

And the nurse? Soon, very soon, after that she was replaced. This, Pamela knew, was not a detail that was subject to the frailties and vagaries of memory. That nurse had disappeared completely from her life.

M
ARISSA WAS TRYING
to do her homework in the bedroom, but Cindy was watching television in the living room with their aunt and her dad’s condo just wasn’t that big. This was the third day their aunt had been with them, and it had grown painfully clear to Marissa that the woman had spent way too much time at rock concerts when she was young, because her hearing seemed worse than their grandfather’s. Almost as if it were a ballet, her sister—still beaten up from her fall off the swing—would climb off the couch to turn the volume down on the movie they were watching, and then their aunt would go and get something from the kitchen and turn it back up so the TV was loud enough to drown out a jet engine.

Moreover, Marissa was still disappointed that Laurel hadn’t taken her photograph on Monday, and worried that something strange was going on between her dad and his girlfriend. She wasn’t sure what, but it was more than just the idea that Dad was troubled by the way Laurel had gone home to Long Island, where she lived. She had the sense there was more to the story than he was letting on, and it all went back to whatever it was that he and that woman named Katherine had been talking about on Saturday night. She thought it was distinctly possible that her dad was about to break up with Laurel. She didn’t think this was fair, but when he had picked her up at school the other day he had seemed more angry than anxious. It was like he didn’t believe Laurel’s mother really was sick. It was as if he thought she was this crazy girl, and he didn’t want her around his kids anymore.

Well, she could appreciate that if Laurel really were insane. That would make sense. But Laurel wasn’t. She’d just been through a lot. It was too bad no one, not even her dad, seemed to understand.

M
ARGOT
A
NN HAD
asked Laurel whether she felt up to returning to work after the draining ordeal of the clarification hearing. They were standing in the parking lot outside the correctional facility, the fence with its coils of concertina wire looming high above Margot Ann’s shoulders.

“No,” Laurel had answered. “I think I’m going to go home.”

“Take the rest of the day off—I agree.”

Laurel smiled wanly, hoping to convey emotional fatigue. But the truth was, she wasn’t exhausted. She was confused—but she was also energized. She didn’t like misleading Margot Ann, but she also didn’t believe she had a choice. Her plan was to have Margot Ann drop her off at the parking garage in Burlington where they had met that morning, but she certainly wasn’t about to drive to her apartment in the hill section after that. Home, in this case, meant West Egg. If Bobbie hadn’t given his son the next clue, then she would follow up on a hunch that had been growing stronger ever since she and Shem Wolfe had parted company in Serena’s diner on Sunday: Perhaps she herself was the link to the final evidence. The final proof. Perhaps it wasn’t a coincidence at all that she had been given responsibility for Bobbie’s images once he had passed away. Hadn’t he photographed her himself that day seven years ago on the dirt road in Underhill? Hadn’t Katherine asked her to research the images he had left behind?

And if she were a critical link for Bobbie Crocker, then it was surely because he had understood that she had spent her summer afternoons as a girl lingering in the shade of the trees behind Jay Gatsby’s house. His father’s house. Swimming not exactly in Gatsby’s pool, but in the one that had been hollowed out in the very ground where Gatsby’s had been.

Perhaps Bobbie had singled her out because he realized that she alone was capable of understanding both his life and his work.

Consequently, she would return once more to his home.

Because if she were Bobbie Crocker and wanted to leave behind the proof of who her father really was, she would place it there. Where Gatsby had lived and, yes, where he had died.

S
HE SPENT THE NIGHT
in her house in West Egg. She listened to the messages that Talia and Katherine and David had left on her mother’s answering machine. They were checking up on her. Checking up on the notes she had left them.

But she slept little that night, because she had detoured to the country club in West Egg on her way home, arriving just after the dining room had closed for the evening. There she studied the pictures on the walls, including the old black and whites of the small circuses that Gatsby called parties. As the busboys cleared the final tables and the dishwashers in the kitchen inadvertently clanged the heavy pots against the sides of the sinks—as the steam from the hot water slid like mist underneath the swinging doors—she wandered around the dining room and the hallways that linked it with the main entrance and the library. She studied carefully the images of the original swimming pool, trying to envision precisely where Gatsby had been when he had been shot, and where that smaller pool rested in the midst of the Olympic-size one that existed there now. She noticed there were no crab apple trees in the old prints and remembered a story she’d been told as a girl: A mysterious donor had given the club the crab apples. Then the trees had appeared in Bobbie’s photographs—including one picture of a tree with a small mound of crab apples beside it.

That was, she realized with an emotion as close to elation as she was capable of experiencing in her current state, the marker. The symbol. The totem.

By the time she climbed into bed it was midnight and her plans for the next morning were rumbling inside her head like the din inside a theater moments before the curtain is finally raised into the fly space. She had studied the print with the tree and the pyramid of fallen fruit, and knew precisely where her search was going to end.

She awoke well before dawn, went to the garage for the long shovel her father had used around the house and her mother’s small garden trowel, and returned to the country club. She parked in the space nearest the stone Norman tower. For a moment, she sat in her car because she was crying once again, and didn’t know whether it was because she was exhausted beyond words or because no one believed her, or whether she was sobbing for a homeless man who had learned as a boy how callous and cruel grown-ups could be. How capable of delusion. Distortion. Disdain.

She listened to the birdsong and gathered herself. She watched the sky lighten to the east and the textured stones on the structure of the clubhouse grow more distinct. A little before six, she climbed from the Honda and started toward the crab apple trees, leaning the shovel against the one where she planned to dig. All of the trees were dramatically wider and taller now, the branches full and broad. At least one tree had been cut down since Bobbie had photographed them, maybe two. But it wasn’t hard to see where the small pyramid of crab apples had sat, and why Bobbie had built the small mound where he had. This tree was the middle of a small group of three that had been planted near the northern edge of where the original pool had been. This newer pool, easily three times the size of Gatsby’s, had been built where the first one had been constructed, but took up considerably more real estate. Gatsby’s pool had existed roughly where the twelve-foot-deep diving section was now, and this tree was about as close as Bobbie could get to the spot where his father had died.

The sun still wasn’t up when she first thrust the shovel into the ground, but it felt more like day than like dawn, and after sitting for so very long in the car she was relieved to stand up and take the shovel in her hands, place her foot on the rolled shoulder—the wooden handle cold against her fingers and the edge of the blade sharp against the arch of her foot—and press it into the earth. Through the grass and the roots. Into the loamy soil. She pitched the divots into a pile to her right, and then the dirt upon them. Occasionally, she would fall to her knees and root around in the hole with her arms: She wanted to make sure that she wasn’t missing something small but important. A locket, perhaps. A monogrammed wristwatch. But she was confident she was merely being thorough when she did this. Bobbie had given her no reason to believe she was looking for a specific piece of jewelry.

She had been digging for close to half an hour and had just begun to worry that any moment a stray golfer with an early tee time would wander by or one of the maintenance men would arrive to skim the fallen leaves off the surface of the pool and check the chlorine levels in the water when she heard the blade hit something solid—but not nearly as solid as a rock. There might even have been a faint echo. Now the hole was so deep that to reach the bottom she had to lie flat on the edge and pull herself partly inside it, and even then she had to stretch out her fingers and hands. She pawed away the dirt that surrounded the object and used her nails to scrape more dirt off the top: She could feel one straight edge, then another. She reached for the garden trowel and gently but urgently quarried along the sides. Finally, she felt a clasp. A hinge. And then with both hands she was able to pull from the ground the wooden jewelry box, the one with the scalloped mirrors along the lid.

She knew next to nothing about wood, but when she brushed off the dirt she thought it was cherry. Her parents—now her mother—slept in a bed with a cherry headboard, and it was the same color as this jewelry box. Carefully she used her thumbnail to press open the hook, her heart galloping, oblivious to the sweat that was turning the dirt on her cheeks and her forehead to mud. It was jammed with soil and rust, but finally she was able to pop it open and lift the lid. For a moment, she was disappointed. She had expected to find the inscribed photograph, the one Jay had given Daisy in Louisville, when the two had been young and in love and their lives had not yet begun to unravel. But it wasn’t there. Instead, she found an envelope—once beige, now brown. When she flipped the envelope over she saw the single word
Daisy
written in a man’s hand on the front, and when she opened the flap she noticed the letter
G
had been embossed on the back. Inside was a photograph of Gatsby and Daisy, taken that summer of 1922. They were sitting together on the stone steps that led from his house to the pool, perhaps a mere thirty yards from the very spot where she was kneeling that moment. Daisy was wearing a black Empire dress, sleeveless, and strings of pearls. Her earrings were daisies. He was wearing a tuxedo, his bow tie slightly askew. Daisy’s arm was hooked through his, her head was leaning toward him but not quite touching his shoulder. In the image, they looked slightly flushed, as if they had just been dancing. They were smiling. No, Laurel decided, they were more than smiling. They were beaming. It was night, but their smiles alone might have been enough to illuminate the grounds.