Christopher Bohjalian - The Double Bind

“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.”