Christopher Bohjalian: The Double Bind

Laurel considered this for a moment and then glimpsed another photograph. A pair of young men playing chess in Manhattan ’s Washington Square, surrounded by a half-dozen onlookers all watching the match intently. She guessed this one couldn’t have been later than the early 1960s. Something about it definitely felt pre-Johnson to her. Pre-Lee Harvey Oswald.

Beneath it was an image with a completely different sensibility: a dirt road she recognized in Vermont. A girl in the distance on a mountain bike. Black Lycra shorts. A wildly colorful jersey with an image on the front she couldn’t quite make out, but that might very well have been a bottle. It was perhaps a half mile from where she had been attacked, and instantly she was back on that road with the two violent men with their masks and their tattoos and their plans to rape her, and her heart was starting to palpitate. She must have stared for a long moment, because Katherine-her voice sounding as if she were speaking underwater-was asking her if she was all right.

“Yes, uh-huh,” Laurel heard herself murmuring. “I’m fine. Can I hang on to these?” she asked. She knew she was sweating, but she didn’t want to draw attention to it by wiping her brow.

“Do you want some water?”

“No. Really, I’m okay. Honest. I’m just…it’s just hot out.” She smiled for her boss’s benefit.

“Well, when you want to go through them-and there’s no rush, Laurel -I’d love to know what you think.”

“I can tell you what I think right now: They’re good. He-or whoever took them-had legitimate talent.”

Katherine dipped her chin just the tiniest bit and grinned in a manner Laurel knew well: coquettish and ingratiating at once. Katherine had built the shelter and kept it afloat these many years through a combination of inexorable drive and the ability to charm the world with her smile. Laurel knew she was about to be asked to tackle a project.

“You still have your privileges at the UVM darkroom, right?”

“Well, I pay for them-the way we do to use the UVM pool. But as an alum, it’s a pretty nominal fee.”

“Okay, then. Would you be willing to-and I’m not sure if I have the right word here-curate a show?”

“Of these pictures?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Yes. I think I would.” She knew she had said yes in part because of that image of the lean, spare girl up in Underhill. She had to know what else existed in those images. But she also understood that she was acquiescing out of guilt: She hadn’t taken Bobbie seriously when he had brought up his photography. If these pictures were his, then she had missed an opportunity to validate his accomplishments at the end of his life, as well as the chance, perhaps, to learn something as an apprentice photographer herself. Nevertheless, she did have reservations, and she shared them with Katherine. “Of course, we don’t know for sure if Bobbie took these,” she added.

“We’ll confirm that. Or you will. And I’m going to talk to our lawyers and our board of directors about spending a little money to make absolutely sure that Bobbie doesn’t have some family out there who might want them. Maybe we’ll place a small ad in a photo magazine. Or whatever magazine estate lawyers read. Or maybe even the New York Times. You’ll see a lot of these seem to have been taken in New York. And maybe we’ll put what we found on the Web. There are heir search firms with Web sites.”

“You know, these are in pretty horrid condition. We can’t have a show with them like this. And do you have any idea how much effort it would take to restore them? I don’t even know if the negatives are salvageable.”

“But you’re interested?”

“I am. But make no mistake: It will be a lot of work.”

“Well, I think it would be great publicity for the shelter. It would put a face on the homeless. Show people that these are human beings who did real things with their lives before everything went to hell in a handbasket. And…”

“And?”

“And these photos-this collection-might actually be worth serious money if we were to restore it and keep it together. That’s why I think it’s so important we make certain there isn’t family floating around somewhere who’s entitled to it.”

Laurel carefully reined in the enthusiasm she was starting to feel, because this had the potential to become a task that was daunting. “You said there was an envelope in your office,” she reminded her boss.

“Yeah, but it’s not as interesting as this stuff-at least in terms of an exhibition. It’s a little packet of snapshots.”

“I’d still like to see it.”

“Absolutely,” Katherine said and she rose from her chair. “You know, I am so sorry I didn’t get to know Bobbie better. I knew he was old, but he was so energetic for a guy his age that I figured he was going to be around for a while.”

Then she was gone, on to the next project-and there was always a next project because every year there were more homeless and fewer resources to help them.

Laurel kept trying to return to work herself that afternoon: She had a stack of intake forms to review, and she was in the midst of yet another monumental battle with the VA over benefits for a Gulf War veteran who’d been in the shelter three weeks now and was still waiting for a check, but she really didn’t get much more done. She kept going back to the box with the photographs.

ORIGINALLY, THE SHELTER had been a firehouse-at least the part of the structure that was original. There had been two sizable additions constructed in the last quarter century. The entrance sat largely shielded behind a cluster of statuesque maples on a quiet street four blocks from Lake Champlain in a neighborhood in the city everyone called the Old North End. It was one of the small sections in Burlington that looked tired and felt just a little bit dangerous-though, in truth, there were places all across Vermont that seemed dangerous to Laurel that struck most people as harmless. The houses were all in desperate need of a fresh coat of paint, the front porches invariably were collapsing, and almost without exception the eighty- and ninety-year-old structures had been transformed from single-family homes into apartments. But Laurel knew in her heart that it was a safe neighborhood. If it weren’t, she wouldn’t have worked there after her experience in Underhill.

The official name of the organization was the Burlington Emergency Dwelling and Shelter-or BEDS. The acronym was designed for publicity (which the group received in abundance) and fund-raising (which, despite all that publicity, was an ongoing struggle). When Laurel first started volunteering there when she was in college, she liked to read picture books and short novels by Barbara Park and Beverly Cleary to the small children (and, unfortunately, there were always small children) who were living in the special section of the shelter for families. At twenty and twenty-one, she didn’t believe there was much else she could do to help out other than read aloud. Most days, she found three or four mothers and three times that many children residing there. She never once saw a dad. The single adults were in a separate section of the building with a different entrance and massive doors separating the two worlds. There was a large wing for single men and a smaller one for single women. The shelter had twenty-eight beds in fourteen bunks for the men, and twelve beds in six bunks for the women. This wasn’t sexism: There were considerably more homeless single men than there were single women.

The children in the family section where she volunteered always seemed to have runny noses, and so Laurel always seemed to have a runny nose. Her boyfriend her junior year in college, a professor at the medical school twenty-one years her senior, told her there were about 250 different cold germs, and you could only catch each one a single time in your life. If that were true, she responded, then she would never again have another cold as long as she lived. For a time she tried to keep the sniffles at bay with echinacea and antibacterial hand gel, but ethyl alcohol and perfume were no match for the melting glaciers that ran from the noses of suddenly homeless five-year-old girls-especially when those girls were climbing all over her lap and burrowing into her neck and her chest like small, blind kittens in search of a nipple. She knew even then how deeply glamorous she seemed to them: She wasn’t much younger than their mothers, sometimes a mere three or four years. But unlike those other women she was going to college, and she was neither frazzled to the point that she would lash out at them with the back of her hand nor so depressed that she was incapable of rising from one of the shelter’s moldy couches to get them a Kleenex.