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.
O
RIGINALLY, 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.
Occasionally, she would bring one of her cameras and take their pictures. The children all knew just enough about computers and photography to be disappointed when she wouldn’t arrive with her digital camera, because they presumed when she started snapping away that they would get to see instantly what the pictures would look like. Consequently, sometimes Laurel would bring her digital for no other purpose than to entertain them. They would have casual modeling sessions, and then she would hook the Sony Cyber-shot up to the computer in the shelter manager’s closet of an office and print out the pictures.
The next week the family might be gone, but the images would still be taped to the windows and the walls.
Nevertheless, Laurel always preferred her film cameras, because—unlike most of the aspiring female photographers she had met in high school or in college—she actually enjoyed her work in the darkroom. Printing and toning. Moreover, she preferred black and white because she thought it offered both greater clarity and deeper insight into her subjects. In her opinion, you understood a person better in black and white, whether it was an abruptly homeless little girl in Burlington, Vermont, in the early years of the twenty-first century or a pair of drunken revelers at one of Jay Gatsby’s Long Island parties eighty years earlier.
On a certain level she felt voyeuristic, a bit like Diane Arbus, especially when she would photograph the children with their mothers. The mothers all looked dazed and drugged (which, sometimes, they were) and more than a little sociopathic (which, again, sometimes they were). But Laurel also had a thick notebook filled with nothing but contact sheets of her cousin Martin, who had Down syndrome, and she wondered if she would always feel slightly Arbus-like whenever she took anyone’s picture because so much of her training since junior high school had involved shooting him. Martin was a year older than she was, and he loved musical theater. His mother, Laurel’s aunt, had sewn enough costumes for him over the years to fill a walk-in closet, and Martin would model these for Laurel for hours. The results were pages and pages of contact sheets of a teenage boy with Down syndrome, imitating in his own way everyone from Yul Brynner in
The King and I
to Harvey Fierstein in
Hairspray.
Laurel actually spent much of her recovery after she was attacked with Martin. Her friends from high school were all off at their colleges, and so she was very glad she had her cousin in her life. Her mother still referred to that period as that “awful autumn,” but in Laurel’s opinion it really hadn’t been all that awful once she had returned to Long Island. She slept. She journaled. She healed. She and Martin must have seen a half-dozen Broadway shows together in those months of darkening days, always a matinee, which meant that when they entered the theater it was daytime and when they emerged it was evening and Times Square was an invigorating, phantasmagoric display of light. Then, the next day, careful not to jostle her slowly mending collarbone, they would reenact again and again their favorite scenes. Laurel was content in her own very specialized cocoon. And once she could use both of her arms again, she took even more pictures of a young man decked out in capes and bowlers and
Scarlet Pimpernel
wigs.
Every so often when Laurel was still in college, a single woman would wind up at the family shelter who was only a year or two older than she was. These women were at an age in which they were too old for the emergency shelter for teens run by another group in another section of the city, a small world where they might actually have felt the safest, but they were still too young to be comfortable in the wing of the shelter cordoned off for adults. Consequently, if there was room and they were clean—free of drugs, though not necessarily of grime and lice—they would be allowed to stay in the section for families.
Laurel would photograph them, too, even though more times than not they would try to sexualize the experience. Sex was their only currency and they used it determinedly if inappropriately. They would begin to peel off their tops, unsnap and unzip their jeans, or touch themselves and pout at the lens as if they were modeling for an adult magazine. They would, as the song said, try to show her their tattoos. It was almost a reflex for them because instinctively they ached even for Laurel’s approval, and they knew cold and hunger intimately.
Only when she had been at the shelter close to a year and grown more comfortable with the world of the homeless did she begin to photograph the men, too. Initially, she had avoided that wing because of her experience in Underhill. And, of course, she had seen homeless men on the streets of New York when she’d been a little girl: bedraggled and grimy, malodorous, insane. Screaming or muttering obscenities either at strangers or—and this could be even more unnerving—at no one. But, clearly, she was worrying for naught. The homeless men who wandered through BEDS were frequently among the most gentle people on the planet. Sometimes it was bad luck and (yes) bad choices that had driven them down, not mental illness. And even when they were bipolar or schizophrenic—like Bobbie Crocker—when they were properly medicated often the madness would become manageable. And less frightening. Whenever Laurel looked at the contact sheets that she had made of these men, she was struck either by how broadly they were smiling or how wistful and unthreatening their eyes really were.
In the fall of her senior year, a twenty-two-year-old woman named Serena came to the family shelter. Serena told Laurel that things in her life had begun to unravel when she was fifteen. The final straw? Her father, who had been raising her alone and smacking her around since her mother had disappeared when she was five, pounded a sixteen-ounce glass jar of mayonnaise into the side of her face, blackening her eye and giving her a deep purple bruise the size of a softball along her cheek. For the first time in her life, she didn’t try to hide the marks with makeup, partly because she couldn’t—she would have needed an ice hockey goaltender’s mask, not a little powder and blush—and partly because she just couldn’t stand being beaten up anymore by her dad and wanted to see what would happen if people knew. She figured that things couldn’t possibly get any worse.