It first dawned on Bobbie in the sixth grade that he had been conceived in the summer of 1922: the summer of his mother’s alleged dalliance with that dead criminal who had once lived across the cove. He wrote this off as coincidence on a conscious level, and for a time even viewed it as corroboration that his mother could not possibly have been involved with Jay Gatsby. Back then, he presumed, his parents had still loved each other.
It was, perhaps not surprisingly, a photograph that had set in motion the final fight with Tom that would cause him to leave home. When he was sixteen he found a greeting-card-sized image of a young soldier in one of his mother’s ragged old books. The lieutenant was a little older than Bobbie at the time, but the teen couldn’t help but notice an uncanny resemblance between himself and the officer. He could see it in the hard, solemn cast of the man’s face, the high cheekbones, the firm jaw: the restlessness and ambition in the fellow’s dark eyes. There was a note on the back of the photograph in a handwriting Bobbie didn’t recognize:
For my golden girl,
Love, Jay
Camp Taylor, 1917
For years now, Bobbie had known the specific allegations about his mother and Jay Gatsby. Sometimes he had given the tawdry claims more credence than at others. But he had still been too young to accept with certainty the notion that his mother could be so deceitful and, ironically, that his father could be so magnanimous—at least when it came to raising Jay Gatsby’s bastard son. He just couldn’t quite believe the lurid stories could be true, though he had felt his relationship with his mother begin to change. He had found himself looking upon her differently. Less the victim in a turbulent marriage. Less the frivolous Louisville belle, still years short of serious middle-age. Less unreservedly innocent. But he had nonetheless remained confident that his father—or, to be precise, the man who was raising him—was far too arrogant and cruel to raise his wife’s lover’s baby. It wasn’t possible.
But this picture he had discovered in the old book suggested that it was. No, this picture proved to him that it was. He was an aspiring photographer, he knew that pictures didn’t lie. At least in those days they didn’t. And Tom Buchanan had to know. If he hadn’t known for sure in 1923, he had to have figured it out by now. The resemblance was unambiguous. Why then did this conceited, brutish man abide having him under his roof, within a stone’s throw of his precious polo ponies and his half acre of roses? And the answer, Bobbie realized, was clear. Pride. Precisely because Tom Buchanan was so arrogant, he was never going to acknowledge aloud that his wife had slept with Jay Gatsby—and thus the rest of the story, including the awful ways George and Myrtle Wilson had died, might be true, too. Tom might allude to the affair, he might allow the subterranean truth a glimmer of sun in a catty remark when he and Daisy were fighting—odd comments Bobbie had witnessed or overheard suddenly made sense—but he would never give public credence to the notion that he had been cuckolded by the low-rent criminal across the way.
In hindsight, Bobbie told Shem, he wished that he had waited until his mother had returned from her card game before demanding to hear what had really occurred in 1922. It wasn’t as if he didn’t already know. But he was filled with such adolescent rage that when he saw Tom in the kitchen—the very room in which this man and his mother had reconciled mere hours after Myrtle Wilson had died on the street near the ash heaps—he exploded. Here was the man who, in essence, had had his father killed. He took a swing at Tom, but the punch was well telegraphed and Tom decked the boy. Asked him if he wanted to climb up off the tile and take another. His sister made an attempt to calm both men down, but her efforts were doomed to fail because Bobbie knew where her loyalties lay. He understood now why his father always treated her so differently from him. Besides, she had always tried to defend her parents, and their behavior was indefensible. He wanted as little to do with her as he did with Daisy and Tom.
“And after he left?” Laurel asked Shem. “What then?”
“Then the story grows sketchy.”
“How so?”
“Sometimes I couldn’t tell what were the things Bobbie had actually done and what were the memories he was making up. But Reese knew some details, and between what Bobbie had told Reese years ago and what Reese recalled from the days they worked together at the magazine, you could get glimmers.”
“Such as?”
Shem rested his head in his hands, his mind a wardrobe of Bobbie’s reminiscences—some real, some imagined. He told Laurel how Bobbie had claimed to have traveled, but the picaresque paralleled his father’s in so many ways that at least some of it, Shem believed, had been fabricated. Ostensibly, Bobbie was looking for Jay’s family. He insisted he had been to wintry upper-plains cities in Minnesota in search of his grandfather, and eventually to Saint Olaf, a Lutheran college in the southern part of the state where Bobbie had heard Jay had spent two weeks as a student and janitor. Like his father roughly three decades earlier, Bobbie said he had worked as a clam digger and salmon fisherman on Lake Superior. He’d tracked down the remnants of Camp Taylor, scrupulously avoiding his cousins and his grandparents who still lived in that corner of Kentucky. (He said that years later he had returned to Louisville to see what remained of the Fays, and there he had participated in—and chronicled—a freedom march an hour to the east in Frankfort.) As a young man, Bobbie had briefly considered taking his real father’s name, but he wanted anonymity as he visited the states and towns that had even the smallest cameos in the story.
When the United States entered the Second World War, he enlisted. This was, after all, what his father had done. His real father, the one who was a captain, fought in the Argonne, and eventually would be given command of the divisional machine guns. The man who had raised him, on the other hand, had spent most of 1917 playing polo and most of 1918 romancing Daisy.
This entered Bobbie’s mind when he signed up to join the Army. He felt he couldn’t be a Gatsby given the preconceived notions people had of his father, but he no longer wanted to be a Buchanan. He no longer wanted to be the son of a patrician and bully. He no longer wanted to be Robert. On his way to the recruiting station on a main street in Fairmont, Minnesota, he passed a grocery store which had a window display with a poster of a fictional housewife named Betty Crocker and decided, almost on a lark, to commandeer the name. Why couldn’t he be Bobbie Crocker instead of Robert Buchanan? Hadn’t his own father changed his name, too?
Moreover, he realized that if he changed his name, it would be that much more difficult for them to follow him—though who, precisely,
they
were Shem couldn’t say. Still, it wasn’t merely nascent schizophrenia and paranoia that caused him to shed the skin of a Buchanan: It was also a desire to distance himself from the whole hollow, sullen, and morally insolvent little clan.
If the Army had any doubts about the mental health of a recruit whose moniker must have reminded them of a cake mix, they weren’t sufficient to prevent them from allowing him to wade ashore at Omaha Beach in one of the very first waves behind the demolition teams. Bobbie would fight that year and into the next in France and Belgium and Germany, somehow escaping the war unscathed. Physically, anyway. He had an affair with a French woman who was in many ways even more scarred than he was, given how much of her family had died in the first German offensive in May 1940 and then fighting in North Africa in 1943. She lost two brothers, a cousin, and her father. He wanted to bring her back with him to the United States, but she wouldn’t leave her family—the living and the dead.
And so he returned alone to America with his unit, and after his discharge got work in a photography store in lower Manhattan. He sold cameras and film, and in the evenings he took pictures himself. Sometimes he’d visit nightclubs, largely because he was living alone in a squalid apartment in Brooklyn and wanted to spend as little time there as possible. He didn’t have a lot of money, but he spent what he had to keep his seat warm at places like the Blue Light, the Art Barn, and the Hatch. He drank heavily—which only intensified his isolation and exacerbated his mental illness—and found that he could drink on the house if he took the performers’ pictures. He didn’t have a studio, and so these were all shots of the musicians and singers while they were on stage or relaxing in their dressing rooms. They loved the photographs and (more important) their managers loved them, especially the candids, and in 1953 he took his first assigned photograph of Muddy Waters, a profile of the musician for Chess Records that showed the master with the head and tuning pegs of his bottleneck slide guitar resting against the tip of his elegant, aquiline nose.
Eventually, Bobbie’s work came to the attention of editors at
Backbeat
and
Life,
and soon he had become friends with a young photo editor who called himself Reese.
From there, Laurel realized, she could almost tell the story herself. She didn’t need Shem’s help. He was merely corroborating her suspicions and the details she’d already gleaned: Bobbie’s mental equilibrium had never been one of his cardinal strengths, and his instability and schizophrenia were amplified by the alcohol. He grew less dependable. Over the next decade, he would make some deadlines and miss others. He was immensely talented, which only made working with him that much more frustrating. There were seasons in the 1960s when Bobbie actually would vanish off the radar screen so completely and for so long that Reese would finally conclude that this time Bobbie had died. Usually when he reappeared, Reese would insist that Bobbie find a place where he could dry out once and for all. Shem guessed that Bobbie probably had been hospitalized during some of those disappearances. During others, he was in all likelihood trying to find his family. That meant scavenger hunts in odd little towns throughout the Midwest and Chicago, and brief conversations with the sons and daughters of people who may (or may not) have met the strange men his father knew and who passed, specterlike, through Jay Gatsby’s life: Meyer Wolfsheim. Dan Cody. A boarder named Klipspringer.
Occasionally, Shem said, Bobbie had girlfriends. The photographer was, when he was sober, eccentric and talented and interesting-looking—though not traditionally handsome because the alcoholism had reddened his skin and his mental illness caused him to care less and less about hygiene. Still, there was a backup singer who never quite made it and a dancer who never quite made it and a secretary at
Life
magazine who actually would make it, joining Helen Gurley Brown to help edit
Cosmopolitan,
and each time Reese had high hopes that this was the woman who would provide Bobbie with the grounding he needed to settle down. It never happened.
“And his son?” Laurel asked. “Which of these women was the mother of his son? Do you know?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know much. I know she wasn’t one of those more serious relationships he had. She did something in theater, I think—but not on the stage. A costumer, maybe. A seamstress. She died a long time ago.”
“Do you know anything about the boy?”
“Bobbie didn’t like to talk about him. It was one of those subjects—and Bobbie had a lot, of course—that were off-limits.”
“But he said something.”
“His son was homeless. I know that.”
“Like Bobbie?”
“Worse. Did drugs. Didn’t work much.”
“Might he have been a carny?”
“Like in a circus?”
“Like at a county fair. At a midway.”
“It’s possible.”
“And eventually he wound up in Vermont?”
“So it seems. Seven or eight years ago. But by the time Bobbie returned two years ago, he must have been long gone. Bobbie never mentioned going to see him.”
“There were two men who…”
“Go on.”
She shook her head; she couldn’t. She was surprised that she had even begun to reveal what had happened to her seven years earlier, and guessed that she had spoken only because Shem was such a wondrous and unexpected resource, and because his face was so unthreatening and kind. Even the deep lines around his lips were patterned like the ridges on a scallop seashell. Still, she had to know if Bobbie’s son was indeed one of the two men who had attacked her, and—if so—which one.
“Do you believe his son might be in jail?” she asked instead. “Jordie thought he might have been a criminal.”
“If he was, he was no petty thief. Bobbie spent serious time on the street, too, remember. He wouldn’t have cut his kid off for stealing a sandwich or because he had a substance-abuse problem. It woulda had to have been something much worse.”
She gathered herself. Then: “Rape? Murder?”
“Oh, yeah.”
“Is rape really a possibility? Or attempted rape?”
She felt him studying her intently, sympathetically, a grandfather’s anxious gaze. “I guess anything’s possible,” he said after a moment.
“Did Reese know?”
“About the son? Or the possibility that the boy may have grown into a very bad person?”
“Either.”
“He knew Bobbie had a son. But not much else. Don’t forget, it’s not as if Bobbie was a great father himself. He had his own devils, his own mental illness. He told Reese and me that the boy’s mom had kept him away from the child when he was growing up. Didn’t want Bobbie to have anything to do with him. Maybe this saddened Bobbie. Maybe he just wrote it off to one of the many conspiracies that surrounded him. Maybe he understood he couldn’t help the boy. Who can say? Reese probably thought this was a wise course of action on the part of the mother. He knew Bobbie’s limitations.”
“But he liked Bobbie…”
“Very much. Oh, very much. Years ago—before you were born—he made it clear to Bobbie that if he ever needed anything, he shouldn’t hesitate to ask. And so one day, decades later, Bobbie did. That would have been a little more than two years ago now,” Shem said, his voice growing rueful. He explained that Bobbie had come to the Green Mountains in search of Reese. He was old and out of options. But he didn’t find Reese right away. First, there was an incident of some sort in Burlington, and Bobbie was brought to the Vermont State Hospital. It was from there that he asked a member of the staff to track down his old editor; two months later, he was released into Reese’s care. Bobbie’s attention span had diminished to the point that he could barely sit through a half-hour sitcom on the TV Land channel, and Reese had the impression that Bobbie had been in and out of state hospitals in New York and Florida and North Dakota. But he no longer drank. And, properly medicated, he was the same good-natured, well-intentioned, not wholly presentable misfit he’d been thirty-five and forty years earlier.