Christopher Bohjalian: The Double Bind

As a toddler, he gravitated often to that album, and when he was only four and five years old he and Pamela would pore over the entire collection of their mother’s photo books. They treated them like fairy tales, and Pamela would use the pictures to craft bedtime stories for him. At some point, he began making up stories for her. They usually weren’t violent. And they were considerably less frightening than the traditional stories of giants and witches and fairies that children were spoon-fed back then. But they were strange and largely nonsensical. He was only nine and ten years old, but already Pamela could see that her brother was beginning to live in a boundary-less world wholly lacking in rigid cause and effect.

It was a foreshadowing of what he would become. How he would live the vast majority of his life.

Consequently, as soon as Pamela saw the newspaper ad, she called her attorney and asked him to contact the homeless shelter in Burlington.

K ATHERINE MAGUIRE had luminescent green eyes, and unlike her chlorine-saturated hair they hadn’t faded the slightest bit with age. People actually found them a little unsettling. Laurel certainly did. She guessed that Katherine was fifty, not quite twice her age, but she was toned and trim and passed for a woman considerably younger. The two of them had swum together at the UVM pool for six years, ever since Laurel had returned to the water after the attack, meeting at the changing room weekday mornings at 5:45. Two decades ago, when Katherine was only a few years older than Laurel was now, Katherine had founded the homeless shelter-and she had created the institution virtually on her own. Laurel had always viewed this as a daunting accomplishment. She wasn’t quite sure she could start a lemonade stand on the sidewalk outside her apartment house on her own. Along with her twin boys in high school, Katherine considered the shelter her life’s work.

Katherine strode with her usual confidence into Laurel ’s office a little before lunch on a Monday in September, cradling in her arms a beaten-up cardboard banker’s box. She dropped it with a small thud on Laurel ’s floor, and then sank into the folding chair opposite her social worker’s industrial-strength metal castoff of a desk-a desk identical to the one Katherine used in her own, only slightly larger office.

“There was an envelope, too,” Katherine said, “but I forgot it on my side table. And you can’t believe the piles of newspapers and junk mail he managed to amass in a single year. The guy was an unbelievable pack rat.”

Katherine had a habit that some people (especially men) found annoying, but usually it didn’t bother Laurel: She would begin every conversation as if it had been going on for some time.

“Who?”

“Bobbie Crocker. You know he died yesterday, right? At the Hotel New England?”

“No, I didn’t know,” Laurel said, lowering her voice. When one of their clients died, they all grew a little somber. Sometimes it didn’t even matter how well they had known the person: It was the idea that they were the only ones who stood witness to that life at the end. They all keenly felt how small and spare and diminished that individual’s existence had become. “Tell me what happened?”

“You hadn’t heard?”

“I’ve been with clients or in meetings all day.”

“Oh, Laurel, I’m so sorry. God, I didn’t mean to break it to you this way,” she said. This might have been true, but Laurel knew it was also possible that this was precisely the way Katherine had meant to share this news with her. Because of her history, people either treated Laurel with excessive delicacy when something tragic or sad had happened, or they steamrolled clumsily ahead. Her sister, Carol, was the one who informed her that their father had died, and they must have been on the phone a solid minute before she realized that Carol was telling her in the most convoluted manner possible what had occurred. Her big sister was so evasive at first that for easily thirty seconds Laurel thought she was phoning with the essentially inconsequential information that their father was on a business trip overseas somewhere and they might not hear from him for a while. She honestly couldn’t understand why her sister was bothering to call at all. In the case of Bobbie Crocker’s death, Laurel suspected that Katherine may have chosen the opposite tactic, the inadvertent bludgeon, in which her strategy was to act as if Laurel already knew that one of their clients had passed away.

“Go on, talk. Tell me,” Laurel insisted, and Katherine did, beginning with the way another tenant had found Bobbie on his way to church, and ending with how easily-how tragically easy-it had been for Emily Young, his caseworker, and her to clean out his apartment on Sunday afternoon.

“Took about two hours,” Katherine said. “Can you imagine? Lord, when my parents die it will take about two years to go through all the stuff they’ve amassed in their lives. But a guy like Bobbie? The clothes went into a couple of plastic bags: the plastic bags for the Dumpster and the ones for the Salvation Army. And trust me: The ones for the Dumpster were a lot heavier. Mostly it was just newspapers and magazines.”

“Any letters at all? Any sign of family.”

“Nothing really. I mean, there were some snapshots in that envelope, but I only looked at them for a second. I don’t think they really had anything to do with Bobbie. You knew he was a veteran, right? World War Two. So he gets a little burial plot up at the cemetery by the fort in Winooski. There’s going to be a small ceremony tomorrow. Can you make it?”

“Of course,” Laurel said. “I wouldn’t miss it.”

“He was such a likable guy.”

“He was.”

“Though also a bit of a lunatic.”

“But a sweet one.”

“Indeed,” Katherine agreed.

“And for an old man, he sure had a lot of spunk,” Laurel said, conjuring a picture in her mind of Bobbie Crocker and recalling some of their last conversations. They were, invariably, as interesting as they were demented. They were not unlike the sort of banter she shared with many of the people who passed through the shelter, in that she could safely presume easily half of what he was telling her was a complete fabrication or delusion. The difference-and in Laurel ’s mind it was a substantial one-was that victimization was rarely a part of Bobbie’s anecdotes. This was atypical for a schizophrenic, but she understood it was also likely that she only saw him at his best: By the time she met him, he was once again being properly medicated. Still, he seldom complained to Laurel or lashed out, and only infrequently did he suggest that he was owed anything by the world. Certainly, Bobbie believed there were conspiracies out there: Usually, they had something to do with his father. But as a rule he was confident he had dodged them. “The last time I saw him was two weeks ago at the walkathon,” she added.

“Remember what you talked about?”

“I do. He told me he’d been at a civil rights freedom march in Frankfort, Kentucky, in 1963 or 1964. We were all about to begin-well, not Bobbie-and he was hovering at the starting line, savoring the crowds and the sunshine and the breeze off the lake. When I asked him to tell me more, he changed the subject. Told me instead how he started every Tuesday and Thursday with a bowl of bran flakes floating in exactly one-half cup of orange juice instead of milk, because he worried about his cholesterol. He said he cut the sweetness of the juice with a sprinkle of soy sauce. It sounded pretty repulsive.”

“You ever hear him bellow hello?”

“Absolutely.” It was common knowledge at the shelter that Bobbie’s voice, relentlessly booming even though he was now over eighty, was inappropriate anywhere but a ball game or a bar.