Christopher Bohjalian - The Double Bind

Pamela really didn’t know much about either mental illness or teenage boys. How much of Robert’s behavior those days was attributable to the insanity that eventually would envelop him completely and how much was the result of being a testosterone-fueled male adolescent was never quite clear to her. She knew he didn’t just wake up one day as a madman. It had been a slow and steady deterioration that may have escalated in speed when he was fifteen and sixteen years old. She was no longer sure. Who in their circle even thought about such things in the 1930s? Clearly, Daisy and Tom Buchanan weren’t about to. They had plenty of growling demons of their own. But there had been talk of hospital stays (and it was only talk), and at some point they’d made the decision that Robert would be the first Buchanan who could not be trusted at a boarding school. His mood swings were far too intense, and he was completely incapable of focusing on traditional schoolwork. And-far worse, in Tom’s opinion-he had no enthusiasm for sports. Only his photography interested him. When he was in one of his periods of absolutely frenetic activity, he would stay up all night in the darkroom their mother had built for him when it was clear he was never going to attend an Exeter or a Hotchkiss or a Wales. Instead, he would go to a private day school in Great Neck.

Then Pamela left for college, which meant that she no longer saw Robert daily. Consequently, she may have noticed the changes even more clearly than her parents. One holiday when she returned from school, he told her he was relieved: He said he had been quite sure she had been kidnapped-and he was serious. Another Christmas, he said he saw things in his pictures that no one else did. Initially, Pamela had hoped that he was merely evidencing a newfound hubris as an artist or critic; when he showed her his photos the next day, however, she realized that he meant it literally. On some level, he was aware of this inconsistency, and her heart sank for him.

When Robert left home, he took few clothes with him, reserving the limited space in his suitcase and their uncle’s large Army duffel for his cameras and negatives and stacks and stacks of his photographs. Among them, she knew, was a portrait he had taken of her, because he showed it to her when she tried to calm him down and stop him from packing. But she could only guess what other images-either family snapshots or his own work-he had with him when he departed. She tended to doubt he had any pictures that included either Daisy or Tom.

Would things have been different if, as their mother had begged when she’d returned from her card game, Tom had gone after Robert that evening? Pamela honestly didn’t think so. The two men, one still a teenager, would simply have found another night to continue their interminable, unresolvable conflict, and Robert would have chosen another night to storm out. Besides, they all expected he would return in the morning. And then, when he didn’t slink back in by breakfast, that he would be with them once more by dinner. Even her own effort to convince him to stay had been brief and halfhearted, both because she presumed he would not be gone long and because she would always be loyal to her parents. She knew who they were and what they did. But there was also less for her to forgive.

Still, someone probably should have gone after Robert in those first hours when, in all likelihood, he was still on Long Island. She was home from Smith for the summer, and she knew who Robert’s friends were and the places where he was likely to find refuge. She could have retrieved him-or, at least, she could have tried. She did wander down to the dock to see if she could detect a glowing shaft from a flashlight or a campfire near the empty house across the cove. The old Gatz estate had been bought and sold at least a half-dozen times since 1922, but once more it was on the market and empty. Nevertheless, she spent only a moment at the shore: The image in her mind of a solitary figure looking for a light across the water was far too reminiscent of James Gatz’s desperate behavior that spring he was stalking her mother. And so she returned to the house and her father’s now-silent rage.

A year later, her father announced that he no longer cared if Robert ever returned. The boy was all but dead to him. Soon after that, she heard him remarking gravely to an acquaintance from college whom he hadn’t seen in twenty-seven or twenty-eight years that Robert had died. In a car accident. In Grand Forks.

Apparently, their mother had hired a detective to find Robert, and he had been sighted there six months after he had left home. The rest, of course, was a spontaneous, arguably sociopathic fabrication: After Grand Forks, the trail had disappeared.

Eventually, Pamela would hear the story repeated at dinner parties in their elegant dining room in East Egg: The Buchanans’ wayward, runaway son had died when his car had overturned in a ditch. By the time she was married in 1946, friends of friends were actually claiming at the wedding reception to have been at her brother’s memorial service in Rosehill.

It would be decades before she would see him again, because he did not return for her father’s funeral. It was years later, about a month after Daisy was buried, that he reappeared. Pamela came outside one afternoon when she saw him photographing -documenting was the word he would use-their house. She hadn’t recognized him at first: It had been a long time and he hadn’t aged well. He smelled like the homeless she passed on the streets in Manhattan, vinegar-like and sour. He boasted proudly of an idea he was hatching, and she offered to get him help. She couldn’t even get him to stay. His disgust with her hadn’t diminished in the slightest over time.

Which was why she knew she had to retrieve those photos from the social worker. She could only speculate how far her deranged younger brother had taken his plan.

She watched a wave retreat and dug her toes into the sodden sand. She presumed the girl hated her. Fine, she thought. Let her lionize Robert. The fact was, it was she-not Robert-who had found it in her heart to pardon her parents.

And now she had to forgive herself. Even if she had gone after her brother that night, she couldn’t have saved him. He would still have gone mad, he would still have resisted every attempt the family made to help him. Nevertheless, as she looked back on their lives, she couldn’t help but wish that she had been able to reel him in-if only for the sake of their mother.

If only so he hadn’t wound up…homeless.

The idea stunned her when she contemplated it. Homeless. In the end, her unstable, unhinged, self-destructively self-righteous little brother had actually wound up on the street. It was almost incomprehensibly needless and sad.

Before her, a small flock of seagulls landed en masse in the hard, moist part of the beach where the sea had just been, and began to strut and peck. She sighed and tried to remember specifically what had triggered her father and Robert’s finishing quarrel. Then, almost ruefully, she shook her head. She didn’t have to think long at all.

W HILE LAUREL WAS walking to the bar, slightly fortified by the juice and the scone, it dawned on her that agreeing to meet with this lawyer might prove to be an egregious mistake. He was, essentially, the opposition counsel. And Katherine had specifically asked her not to speak to him. Yet here she was, largely-but not entirely-on her way because early that morning she had wanted to get off the phone. Of course, she had also agreed to see him because she was interested in what he had to say, and she thought she might be able to learn something more about Bobbie Crocker. Nevertheless, she was anxious, and she found herself brooding upon the consequences and all the things that could go wrong.