The Double Bind (20 page)

Now, was Bobbie’s childhood one long no-win proposition? It certainly seemed possible. Laurel began to imagine a scenario in which the son of Tom and Daisy Buchanan learns in high school what his parents had done the summer before he was born, and then all the bad behavior he has witnessed for a decade and a half—the snobbish arrogance, the marital duplicity, and, yes, the petty carelessness—becomes small change when compared with this nightmare. And so he confronts them. He asks them how much of the story is true and how much is conjecture. His father denies it all, he argues that Jay Gatsby was driving that twilight afternoon in 1922. But Bobbie sees through him, can tell he is lying.

And his mother, that woman whose voice was full of money: What of her? What does she do? Does she confess to her son? Or, like her husband, does she continue to insist that Gatsby was behind the wheel of the car? Or does she simply remain silent?

Either way, Bobbie knows the truth. And that part of his gray matter that had kept his behavior in check—that, to some degree, had kept the schizophrenia at bay—was no longer able to stem the onset of the symptoms.

It was possible, she guessed, that by then even Daisy herself had begun to believe the lie that she and Tom had been telling the world. Who could say? Perhaps Daisy Buchanan had gone to her grave in complete denial, in the end viewing the rumors that swirled about her as a mean-spirited fiction concocted by distant cousins and jealous neighbors.

Memory, after all, can be kind: If you’re not schizophrenic, she knew, sometimes a forgiving memory was the only way to get by.

T
HE REFERENCE DESK
at the library was open all day Saturday, and so Laurel worked steadily in the darkroom through the morning and the early afternoon, subsisting on bottled water and a muffin she bought at the UVM snack bar. She was feeling weak, but she couldn’t bring herself to stop working. There was always one more picture to print. The images from the World’s Fair Bobbie shot that she recognized with certainty were of the New York State Pavilion—the 250-foot tall towers designed by Philip Johnson—and the symbol of the celebration itself, the U.S. Steel Unisphere. She had seen the towers and the Unisphere probably a thousand times from the highway in Queens, and she had had an American history teacher in ninth grade who remembered the fair well from his own childhood and once brought the whole class to Corona Park as part of a unit on the 1960s.

She didn’t emerge from the darkroom until almost two-thirty, and she left then only because there was work for her to do at the library.

Quickly, the reference librarian found for her the microfilm spool of
Life
magazines from 1964, and she began to move forward from January. She saw a story about Pope Paul VI becoming the first pontiff to ride in an airplane, and a profile of Secretary of Defense John McNamara. There was an article about the conviction of Jack Ruby, and another about the way some woman named Kitty Genovese was savagely murdered outside her Queens apartment one night, and how her screams for help were heard by over thirty neighbors—none of whom came to her aid.

Finally, in an issue in April, she saw the first photos from the World’s Fair in Flushing. The fair was formally opened on April 22 by President Johnson, and there were photographs of actual-sized models of rockets—surrounded by visitors clad either in jackets and ties or dresses and skirts, many of the women wearing white gloves—as well as the exhibit buildings constructed by General Motors and Chrysler and IBM. There was a half-page image of the New York State Pavilion (though not the one she had just printed herself in the UVM darkroom), as well as a picture of the monorail with a photo credit—though the photographer was neither Robert Buchanan nor Bobbie Crocker.

She was disappointed but moved on, and within moments she found herself leaning forward in the seat and squinting at a black-and-white image on the microfilm screen. There in the following week’s issue was a photograph on the second-to-last page of the magazine, the page opposite the inside back cover, of the Unisphere. The view of the orbital rings from the pedestal and the prominence of Australia reminded her of the one Bobbie had taken. She read the caption, and there he was—waiting patiently for her at the very end.

The U.S. Steel Unisphere surrounded by the Fountain of Continents, the World’s Fair, Flushing, New York. The globe stands 12 proud stories high and weighs an Atlas-straining 470 tons. At night the capitals of the world’s leading nations are lit, while high above the planet three satellites whiz by. Total cost? $2,000,000, but worth every penny given the glorious way it reminds visitors that for all our political and ethnic differences, we are truly one Earth. The Unisphere is both the symbol of the newly opened World’s Fair, and one of its most popular attractions! Photo: Robert Crocker.

Laurel was, perhaps, as satisfied as she had ever been in her life, and she considered calling David on his cell phone that very moment. But she was afraid after the way they had parted that morning that it would sound like she was gloating. Moreover, she was suddenly tired, very tired. Almost light-headed. Probably too tired to talk.

She wasn’t due to meet Leckbruge for another forty-five minutes, and so she printed out the page and then returned the spool to the reference librarian and sat down for a long moment on a reading room couch to rest. Finally, she rose, and with the little energy she had left she went to the bakery down the street from the library for a bottle of juice and a scone. She knew that she had to be on top of her game when she met with Pamela Marshfield’s attorney.

C
HAPTER
E
IGHTEEN

P
AMELA WALKED SLOWLY
along the beach behind her house late Saturday afternoon in her bare feet and a pair of khaki slacks she had rolled up into capris. The autumn light fell upon her like a wave, and for a split second she was indeed unsure of her footing, as if the sand below her were shifting. She paused for a moment to watch seagulls surround a small crab in the sand, circling it. One finally grabbed it and soared into the sky over the surf. The other bird squawked angrily and then noticed her, tilting its head quizzically, robotically in her direction, before lifting off after the seagull with the crab. In the distance, perhaps a half mile down the shore, she could see the colorful dots of the much younger people in their blue jeans and windbreakers who rented shares in the more modest homes on that stretch of beach.

She had not been completely surprised when T.J. had called with the news that the social worker had agreed to meet with him. It wasn’t that she thought her attorney was especially charming—though, in her opinion, he was—but because she knew this girl from West Egg was curious. Meddlesome. Nosy. Unwilling to leave her homeless client’s legacy alone. And, thus, unwilling to pass up an opportunity to meet with this lawyer from Manhattan.

In this regard, the girl certainly reminded her of Robert. Asked too many questions. Didn’t know when to quit.

That was, after all, precisely why Robert had finally had to leave. Or, at least, why he had decided to leave. Either way, it was hard for Pamela to imagine her father and Robert enduring another night together under the same roof after their final brawl. Of course, Robert had gotten the worst of it: Her father had been a football player. A polo player. An all-purpose brute. Had their mother been home, she would have intervened and wound up in the emergency room at the hospital in Roslyn. Fortunately, Tom and Robert Buchanan had saved their last and worst confrontation for a night when Daisy was off playing bridge. Consciously or unconsciously, Robert had probably chosen that moment because their mother was gone—though his anger at her was as deep and dogged and undiminished as the fury he had felt toward Tom. Even at the end, Daisy loved him—he would always be her mercurial little boy—but he simply could not find it in either his heart or his sadly muddled head to forgive her.

Pamela really didn’t know much about either mental illness or teenage boys. How much of Robert’s behavior those days was attributable to the insanity that eventually would envelop him completely and how much was the result of being a testosterone-fueled male adolescent was never quite clear to her. She knew he didn’t just wake up one day as a madman. It had been a slow and steady deterioration that may have escalated in speed when he was fifteen and sixteen years old. She was no longer sure. Who in their circle even thought about such things in the 1930s? Clearly, Daisy and Tom Buchanan weren’t about to. They had plenty of growling demons of their own. But there had been talk of hospital stays (and it was only talk), and at some point they’d made the decision that Robert would be the first Buchanan who could not be trusted at a boarding school. His mood swings were far too intense, and he was completely incapable of focusing on traditional schoolwork. And—far worse, in Tom’s opinion—he had no enthusiasm for sports. Only his photography interested him. When he was in one of his periods of absolutely frenetic activity, he would stay up all night in the darkroom their mother had built for him when it was clear he was never going to attend an Exeter or a Hotchkiss or a Wales. Instead, he would go to a private day school in Great Neck.

Then Pamela left for college, which meant that she no longer saw Robert daily. Consequently, she may have noticed the changes even more clearly than her parents. One holiday when she returned from school, he told her he was relieved: He said he had been quite sure she had been kidnapped—and he was serious. Another Christmas, he said he saw things in his pictures that no one else did. Initially, Pamela had hoped that he was merely evidencing a newfound hubris as an artist or critic; when he showed her his photos the next day, however, she realized that he meant it literally. On some level, he was aware of this inconsistency, and her heart sank for him.

When Robert left home, he took few clothes with him, reserving the limited space in his suitcase and their uncle’s large Army duffel for his cameras and negatives and stacks and stacks of his photographs. Among them, she knew, was a portrait he had taken of her, because he showed it to her when she tried to calm him down and stop him from packing. But she could only guess what other images—either family snapshots or his own work—he had with him when he departed. She tended to doubt he had any pictures that included either Daisy or Tom.

Would things have been different if, as their mother had begged when she’d returned from her card game, Tom had gone after Robert that evening? Pamela honestly didn’t think so. The two men, one still a teenager, would simply have found another night to continue their interminable, unresolvable conflict, and Robert would have chosen another night to storm out. Besides, they all expected he would return in the morning. And then, when he didn’t slink back in by breakfast, that he would be with them once more by dinner. Even her own effort to convince him to stay had been brief and halfhearted, both because she presumed he would not be gone long and because she would always be loyal to her parents. She knew who they were and what they did. But there was also less for her to forgive.

Still, someone probably should have gone after Robert in those first hours when, in all likelihood, he was still on Long Island. She was home from Smith for the summer, and she knew who Robert’s friends were and the places where he was likely to find refuge. She could have retrieved him—or, at least, she could have tried. She did wander down to the dock to see if she could detect a glowing shaft from a flashlight or a campfire near the empty house across the cove. The old Gatz estate had been bought and sold at least a half-dozen times since 1922, but once more it was on the market and empty. Nevertheless, she spent only a moment at the shore: The image in her mind of a solitary figure looking for a light across the water was far too reminiscent of James Gatz’s desperate behavior that spring he was stalking her mother. And so she returned to the house and her father’s now-silent rage.

A year later, her father announced that he no longer cared if Robert ever returned. The boy was all but dead to him. Soon after that, she heard him remarking gravely to an acquaintance from college whom he hadn’t seen in twenty-seven or twenty-eight years that Robert had died. In a car accident. In Grand Forks.

Apparently, their mother had hired a detective to find Robert, and he had been sighted there six months after he had left home. The rest, of course, was a spontaneous, arguably sociopathic fabrication: After Grand Forks, the trail had disappeared.

Eventually, Pamela would hear the story repeated at dinner parties in their elegant dining room in East Egg: The Buchanans’ wayward, runaway son had died when his car had overturned in a ditch. By the time she was married in 1946, friends of friends were actually claiming at the wedding reception to have been at her brother’s memorial service in Rosehill.

It would be decades before she would see him again, because he did not return for her father’s funeral. It was years later, about a month after Daisy was buried, that he reappeared. Pamela came outside one afternoon when she saw him photographing
—documenting
was the word he would use—their house. She hadn’t recognized him at first: It had been a long time and he hadn’t aged well. He smelled like the homeless she passed on the streets in Manhattan, vinegar-like and sour. He boasted proudly of an idea he was hatching, and she offered to get him help. She couldn’t even get him to stay. His disgust with her hadn’t diminished in the slightest over time.

Which was why she knew she had to retrieve those photos from the social worker. She could only speculate how far her deranged younger brother had taken his plan.

She watched a wave retreat and dug her toes into the sodden sand. She presumed the girl hated her.
Fine,
she thought.
Let her lionize Robert.
The fact was, it was she—not Robert—who had found it in her heart to pardon her parents.

And now she had to forgive herself. Even if she had gone after her brother that night, she couldn’t have saved him. He would still have gone mad, he would still have resisted every attempt the family made to help him. Nevertheless, as she looked back on their lives, she couldn’t help but wish that she had been able to reel him in—if only for the sake of their mother.

If only so he hadn’t wound up…homeless.

The idea stunned her when she contemplated it. Homeless. In the end, her unstable, unhinged, self-destructively self-righteous little brother had actually wound up on the street. It was almost incomprehensibly needless and sad.

Before her, a small flock of seagulls landed en masse in the hard, moist part of the beach where the sea had just been, and began to strut and peck. She sighed and tried to remember specifically what had triggered her father and Robert’s finishing quarrel. Then, almost ruefully, she shook her head. She didn’t have to think long at all.