“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.”
“Did his friend die, too?”
“It was just someone he met in Grand Forks. Maybe
friend
suggests a greater connection than there was. Yes: He died, too.”
“What was his friend’s name?”
“I couldn’t possibly tell you.”
“You don’t remember?”
“No.”
“Do you recall the town?”
“In North Dakota?”
Laurel nodded.
“It was near Grand Forks. It may even have been in Grand Forks. It was on old Highway 2. I do remember that.”
“Would any of your cousins know anything about the accident—or about your brother?”
“Oh, we both played often with our cousins from Louisville. The Fays, William and Reginald. But they’ve passed away. Maybe they told their children something, but contacting them would be a lot of work for little gain.”
“So you don’t believe this homeless person, Bobbie Crocker, was your brother.”
“Why would you believe that he was? My Lord, even if Robert hadn’t died, why would he have disappeared? Why would he have changed his name?”
Laurel had to restrain herself from answering simply: mental illness. Suddenly, she was nervous that if she didn’t scoop up the pictures that very moment Pamela Marshfield would, and so she slid the images toward her and then dropped them into her envelope. She saw the woman was watching her.
“You have more pictures with you, don’t you?”
“No,” she said simply. Technically, she knew, she couldn’t give the pictures to Pamela anyway because they weren’t hers to dispose of. But would anyone really have cared? Unlikely. Nevertheless, Laurel couldn’t bring herself to part with them—neither the snapshots she had with her, nor the material back in Vermont—and there was one critical reason why. She had the sense that Pamela was lying. The woman was denying that Bobbie Crocker was her brother and dismissing a BEDS client as a person. Laurel considered this unforgivable. Here she was living in an estate on the ocean while her brother had died in the stairwell to his small, single room in what had once been a run-down hotel. Withholding the photos was a way of penalizing her.
Besides, if she was going to unravel the mystery of how the man had gone from the mansion across from her childhood swim club to a dirt road and a homeless shelter in northern Vermont—and Laurel wanted to know now more than ever—she might need those pictures in her research.
Did she think there might be consequences? It crossed her mind. But she understood as well as anyone that often the trajectories in one’s life were built entirely upon unintended results. Obviously, none of her clients ever planned to wind up at BEDS.
“What else then is in that envelope?” Pamela was asking her.
“Oh—”
“If they’re pictures of my brother, don’t you believe I have a right to see them?”
“They’re not, they’re—”
“Child, please, hand them to me now. I insist,” the old woman said, and then she reached across the small table with the speed of a snake and simply pulled the envelope from Laurel’s fingers as if the twenty-six-year-old were a toddler who had hold of a piece of precious crystal. Laurel was too surprised to stop her.
“Well,” Pamela said, drawing the single syllable out into a short sentence as she began to flip through them, lingering on the one of Jay Gatsby. “I shouldn’t have doubted you. They’re not of Robert now, are they?”
“No.”
“My brother, of course, never knew this awful man. Apparently, I met him once or twice, but I was too young to remember anything.”
“Where did you meet him?”
The woman glanced up at her, offered a small practiced frown, and then proceeded to ignore the question completely: “People only know his side of what happened, you know. Gatz’s, that is. That, of course, was his real name. James Gatz. He
changed
it to Gatsby. That’s the sort of man he was. And yet everyone was always completely under his spell. See? Just look at the people at this party. Or this one. Gatz hypnotized people with his money.”
“And your parents didn’t?”
“No.”
She seemed to be contemplating the image of the old pool, the one in which Gatsby was murdered, before returning the pictures to the envelope. Then she leaned it up against her cup and saucer. Reflexively, Laurel reached across the table to retrieve it, inadvertently toppling her hostess’s teacup as she did. It fell into the woman’s lap, but it didn’t break and it was, fortunately, empty. Still, it was an awkward moment, and Laurel rose to apologize.
“I am so sorry,” she said, fumbling. “Please tell me it didn’t spot your skirt.”
“You might simply have asked for the pictures, Laurel,” she said, her voice a low rumble of condescension. “Trust me: I had no intention of stealing them. Merely touching that one of Mr. Gatz has left me with an almost overwhelming desire to wash my hands.”
“Your skirt?”
“My skirt is fine.”
“I’m really sorry,” Laurel repeated, aware even as she spoke that she had allowed whatever power she had to be eroded completely by one paranoid rush. Nevertheless, she still had the sense that had she not grabbed the prints back, Pamela Marshfield would indeed have held on to them.
Now the woman shook her head and folded her arms across her chest. “So, tell me,” she said. “What do you plan to do next?”
Laurel wasn’t precisely sure what she meant, and so she told Pamela of her intention to try to restore Crocker’s work and see what images existed in the negatives. She admitted that she hoped someday BEDS would give the man the solo show that his photographs deserved. When she was finished, Pamela rose and she knew they were done—or almost done.
“I presume you understand now that this photographer was not my brother?” she asked, and they started through the French doors and into the living room, the heels of their shoes echoing along the strip of gleaming white hardwood floor that separated two great, thick Oriental carpets. The ceiling was vaulted, and from it hung a massive art deco chandelier, the hundreds of bulbs encased in globes the shape of delicate angel wings.
Laurel thought for a moment about the woman’s question. She believed just the opposite was true. “Where is he buried?” she asked, instead of answering her directly.
Pamela stopped. “You want proof? You want the body, is that it? Would it put your mind at ease if we exhumed my dead brother’s corpse and had strands of his hair DNA-ed?”
“I’d just like to see the plot…if I may.”
“No,” said Pamela. “You may not.”
“Because…”
“Fine, go see the plot. I can’t stop you. It’s in the family mausoleum in Rosehill.”
“Rosehill?”
“Chicago, young lady. It’s a cemetery in Chicago—where my father’s people are from. You can go there and see it for yourself. It’s not far from the crypts for the Sears family and Montgomery Ward. My advice, however, is that you leave this alone. Just let go of this bone—and, yes, I am aware that was a rather grisly pun—and leave it alone. Surely you have better things to do with your life. And I would hate to see you compromise your years with a dangerous obsession.”
“Dangerous?”
She smirked. “Unhealthy, perhaps, might have been a better choice of word. Nevertheless: my brother and your homeless people. It doesn’t sound like a promising combination.”