The Double Bind (2 page)

Afterward, Laurel went home to Long Island to recover, and she didn’t return to college in Vermont until January. The spring semester. She took courses the following summer to catch up—she was in Burlington that July anyway for her assailants’ trials—and by the autumn she was back on the same schedule with the rest of her classmates and would graduate with them in a couple of Junes. Still, the trials had been difficult for her. They had been brief, but there had been two to endure. It was the first time she had been back in the presence of either of her assailants since the attack, and the first time she had studied their faces in the flesh. The drifter, who would dramatically reduce his sentence by testifying against the bodybuilder, had pale skin the color of cooked fish and a nut-brown goatee that elongated a face already tending toward horsey. His hair was completely gone on top and what remained was gray mixed in with the brown of his small beard. Even though it was the summer, he wore a shirt with a high collar to hide his tattoo. A part of his defense was the contention that he had dropped acid before the attack and wasn’t in his right mind.

The bodybuilder was a lumberjack of a man who, while awaiting his trial, had continued to work out in the exterior pen where the weights were stacked at the prison in northwest Vermont—lifting, someone said, even on those frigid days when he would have to brush snow off the Nautilus machines—but it was once more those gray eyes that had struck Laurel. His head was shaved that summer, but she gathered that the autumn before he had merely kept his hair cropped to a tight bristle cut. After his sentencing in Vermont, he was extradited to Montana, where he was tried and convicted of the schoolteacher’s murder. He was serving a life sentence in a prison forty-five minutes from Butte. The drifter, following his conviction, was incarcerated in the correctional facility just outside of Saint Albans, relegated to the lowest, most demeaning rung of the prison in the eyes of the inmates: the pod with the sex offenders.

Certainly the assault changed Laurel’s life in myriad ways, but the most obvious manifestation was that she stopped biking. The cleats had saved her life, but the sensation of being clipped in—of pedaling—brought her back to that dirt road in Underhill, and she never wanted to go back to that place again. She had always been a swimmer growing up, however, and so after a few years away from the water she returned to the pool, taking comfort both in the miles she would mark and the way the smell of chlorine in her hair instantly would remind her of the safe haven of her childhood in West Egg.

The other changes were more subtle: a penchant for older men that her therapist suggested might stem from a need to feel protected—cosseted—by father figures who would shield her from harm. An avoidance of the gym and the weight room. A diary. An even greater immersion in her photography. A distancing from the social world at the college, particularly the fraternities where she had spent most weekend nights her first year. And then, her senior year, the decision to move from the dormitories to an apartment at the edge of the campus. Laurel didn’t want to live by herself—though she was no longer an especially social person, she could still have moments of Zoloft-resistant anxiety, especially when she was alone in the dark—and Talia Rice, her roommate since they had both arrived in Vermont at eighteen, volunteered to come with her. They found a couple of bedrooms, a living room, and a kitchen they could share in a rambling Victorian that offered Laurel quiet and detachment, but was still close enough to the campus for her decidedly more extroverted roommate. It was also very sunny, which Talia insisted any place they chose had to be—for her friend’s sake.

Still, some people thought Laurel had grown aloof. She could tell. But she shrugged this off and further curtailed her more casual friendships.

Of course, the change that mattered most is this: If Laurel had not been fiercely attacked, she would not have resumed swimming laps. That sounds prosaic, anticlimactic. But life is filled with small moments that seem prosaic until one has the distance to look back and see the chain of large moments they unleashed. Pure and simple, if Laurel had not started venturing most mornings to the school’s natatorium, she would never have met the University of Vermont alumna who ran the homeless shelter in Burlington and continued to stay fit years later in the UVM pool. And then she would never have wound up working at the shelter, first as a volunteer while she was still in school and later, after she graduated, as a bona fide employee. And if she hadn’t wound up at the homeless shelter, she would never have met a patient from the state mental hospital, a gentleman (and he was indeed gentle) fifty-six years her senior who went by the name of Bobbie Crocker.

L
AUREL’S FATHER
gave her some advice, too, when she was growing up: Smart is boring. Effort matters. And, yes, she should never forget that while she was being raised in a nice home in an impressive neighborhood with a mother willing to drive her to soccer games and swim team practice, most of the world lived in serious, dispiriting poverty and thus someday she would be expected to give something back. He did not mean to suggest in ominous tones that a karmic payback loomed before her because she always had enough to eat and never came home from the mall lacking in clothes or CDs or boys with whom she might want to hook up.

Her father knew everything about the consumption, but nothing about the boys. At least nothing of consequence. He died soon after she finished college with nary a notion of either the sexual appetites or the experimentation that occurred in the high school circles in which she had traveled, or the sexual carousel that had marked her first year at the University of Vermont.

He was a Rotarian, which meant that he was a sizable target for comic abuse. But he was firm in his belief that when his two daughters were grown they would have a moral obligation to reach out to others who lacked their advantages. His Rotary Club actually paid for and built an orphanage in Honduras, and he went there himself annually to inspect it and make sure the charges there were content and well cared for. And so Laurel always was careful to defend the Rotary when people around her made jokes about the organization, making it clear to the glib and sarcastic that in her opinion you didn’t make fun of people with full-time jobs who put roofs over the heads of children whose parents had died of AIDS or had lost their homes in a hurricane. Her sister, a stockbroker five years her senior, became an active member of that very same Rotary Club.

Laurel was twenty-three when her father died abruptly of a heart attack. She was confident that he knew how much she had loved him, but that didn’t necessarily make the hole his death had left in her life any easier to fill. He and her mother had arrived at the hospital in Burlington the night she was attacked in less than three hours. How? A fellow Rotarian was a pilot with a small plane, and he flew them north as soon as she called.

Laurel and her childhood friends were well aware that the country club on Long Island Sound where they all learned to swim and sail and play tennis had once been the home of Jay Gatsby. But, in truth, they didn’t much care. Even their parents didn’t much care. Their grandparents probably did. But as nine- and ten- and eleven-year-olds, Laurel and her friends didn’t care much at all about anything that mattered to their grandparents. The clubhouse and broad, sweeping dining room had been Jay Gatsby’s stone mansion, and there were dusty black-and-white photographs of his parties from the early 1920s decorating the foyer. In every image everyone was overdressed. Or pickled. Or both. Laurel sensed that her friends—the boys, anyway—might have been more intrigued by the club’s history if the swimming pool in which they spent whole summer days had been the marble one in which George Wilson had shot Gatsby, but it wasn’t; that pool was long gone, replaced by an L-shaped monster with eight twenty-five meter lanes along the letter’s vertical length, and a twelve-foot deep diving section along the shorter, horizontal span. There was a one-meter board and a three-meter board, and in the grass along the western and northern sides there were long rows of stately crab apple trees. In the high summer, the young mothers would sit among them in the shade with their toddlers. Laurel spent five years at the pool on the swim team and another three as a diver.

In addition, everyone knew that the northernmost of the three houses across the cove in which they capsized their canoes had once belonged to Tom and Daisy Buchanan. Daisy was the Louisville belle Gatsby had longed for and Tom was her husband. The Buchanans’ Georgian Colonial was the oldest of the three homes, the other two having been built when Pamela Buchanan Marshfield—Tom and Daisy’s daughter—subdivided the estate in the early 1970s. Where there had once been a half-acre of roses there was now a north-south tennis court that belonged to a family named Shephard; where there had once been a barn housing Tom Buchanan’s polo ponies there was a sprawling replica Tudor owned by a family named Winston. Pamela sold the remaining property—the house in which she grew up and where she lived as a married adult until she was almost sixty—in 1978, the year before Laurel was born.

Consequently, Laurel never knew Pamela when she was growing up. They wouldn’t meet until she was an adult herself.

But her father knew Pamela. He hadn’t known her well, but that wasn’t because she was an eccentric recluse. Pamela and her husband simply traveled with a much older (and, yes, even wealthier) crowd than Laurel’s parent’s, and for fairly obvious reasons were not members of the relatively casual country club across the cove. Instead, they belonged to a far tonier marina farther east on Long Island.

Nonetheless, when Laurel contemplated her childhood, more times than not the names Gatsby and Buchanan never even entered her mind. If she thought of them at all, she viewed them as insubstantial ghosts, wholly irrelevant to her life in Vermont.

But then she saw the dog-eared photographs that Bobbie Crocker—indigent, good-tempered (most days), and mentally ill—had left behind after he died at the age of eighty-two. The old man suffered a stroke in the stairwell on his way to his dormitory-like studio in what had once been the city’s Hotel New England, but was now twenty-four heavily subsidized apartments the formerly homeless could rent for about 30 percent of their disability benefits or Social Security, and as little as five dollars a month if they hadn’t any income at all. Bobbie had no family that anyone knew of, and so it was his caseworker who discovered the carton of old photographs in his one closet. They were badly preserved, the images stacked like paper plates or wedged upright into folders like old phone bills, but the faces were clearly recognizable. Chuck Berry. Robert Frost. Eartha Kitt. Beatniks. Jazz musicians. Sculptors. People playing chess in Washington Square. Young men tossing a football on a street in Manhattan, a Hebrew National billboard towering overhead. The Brooklyn Bridge. A few clearly more recent ones from Underhill, Vermont, including some of a dirt road—one with a girl on a bike—that Laurel knew all too well.

And in a separate envelope designed for a greeting card, the snapshots: smaller, though equally as distressed. She recognized instantly the home of Pamela Buchanan Marshfield. Then the country club from her childhood, including the Norman-like tower, when it was owned by a bootlegger named Gatsby. The original swimming pool, with the tower behind it. Parties, such as those that were celebrated on the walls of that country club dining room. Pamela Buchanan Marshfield as a little girl, standing beside a boy a couple years younger, a tan coupé off to their side. Gatsby himself, beside his bright yellow roadster—the car that Tom Buchanan dismissed at least once as a mere circus wagon.

There were just about a dozen of these smaller photos, and hundreds of negatives and larger prints that she presumed Bobbie Crocker had taken himself.

Laurel did not know instantly who the little boy was beside Pamela. But she had a hunch. Why couldn’t Pamela have had a brother? Why couldn’t he have wound up homeless in Vermont? Stranger things happened every day. But she certainly did not suspect the whole truth when she first tried to make sense of the box of dingy pictures, or imagine that soon she would wind up alone, estranged from her lover and her friends, once more pursued and shaken and scared.

P
ATIENT 29873

…patient still obsessed with the old photographs. Talks of them constantly, wants to know where we’ve put them. Plans to have a show someday—a “spectacular show”…

Plan: Continue risperidone 3 mg PO BID

Continue valproate 1000 mg PO BID

Given security issues, no off-ward privileges at this time.

From the notes of Kenneth Pierce,
attending psychiatrist,
Vermont State Hospital, Waterbury, Vermont

C
HAPTER
O
NE

P
AMELA
B
UCHANAN
M
ARSHFIELD
saw the ad the homeless shelter in Vermont had placed in the newspaper before her attorney did. She realized right away it was about her brother and her brother’s work.

Memory, she knew—especially when you were her age—was nothing if not eccentric. Consequently, when she thought of Robert, she did not recall a grown man. Instead, she thought instantly of the infant she would take from the nurse’s arms and show off to her parents’ guests as if he were her own. And, in some ways, he was. She was helping to change his diapers, she was helping to feed him. She would carry him out to the garden and hold his face up to the roses so he could breathe in their perfume. She would let him sniff the polo ponies, and the polo ponies sniff him. Her parents’ marriage grew considerably less turbulent in the first years after he was born, and it was the only period from Pamela’s childhood when she did not recall them fighting. They may even have been drinking less. Her mother was perhaps never happier than when her brother was cuddly and small and smelled of talcum; the myriad disappointments that already had marked Daisy’s life—and Daisy herself was still very young then—must have seemed considerably easier to shoulder when she cradled her baby.

Unfortunately, it didn’t last. It couldn’t. The fissures that were the distinguishing feature of Tom and Daisy Buchanan’s marital landscape were far too wide for a baby to bridge. For any baby. Nevertheless, Pamela hoped and prayed and craved nothing less than a lightninglike miracle from that child. That toddler. That little boy.

Pamela had read somewhere that infants only saw black and white when they were first born. They didn’t yet distinguish colors. She thought this was interesting for a variety of reasons, but mostly because of one of her earliest memories of her brother. It was a day the summer after he was born. Her father wasn’t home, but her mother had returned from a lunch with some lady friends just about the time that she and her brother were awakened by their nurse from their naps. They didn’t usually nap in the same room, but they did that humid August afternoon: They had rested together in the parlor that looked out upon the terrace because the nurse could open the French doors and a breeze would come in off the water.

Daisy got out the album with the larger photographs and portraits, most from her adolescence in Louisville, and brought her two children with her to the couch. There she sat Robert upright in her lap as if he were one of his big sister’s teddy bears, while Pamela nuzzled beside her. She smelled of lemon and mint. Then she proceeded to tell her children—mostly Pamela, of course, since her brother was barely a season old—the stories of the people in each one. And while Pamela could no longer recall specifically what her mother had said that afternoon about her grandparents or cousins or aunts and uncles and suitors, she did remember this: Her brother would want to stare at the images long after she and her mother were ready to flip the page, and often he would reach out with his pudgy fingers and touch the black-and-white faces of the Fays from Louisville who had preceded them.

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.