Fall from Grace (5 page)

It was telling, Adam realized, that he did not ask why his mother had married Benjamin Blaine. As it was, the question made Jack frown. “The first part is easy enough to answer. At Ben’s core was this raging anger that he was born into this stunted family, with no money or accomplishment. He was deeply ashamed of that, and of our parents. The shame deepened when the summer people came, enjoying their affluence and success. To scrape together some money Ben and I started working as waiters at their parties, serving them cocktails and hors d’oeuvres, then cleaning up the careless mess they made.”

“That’s how they met, right?”

Jack nodded. “For years, he watched your mother, the beautiful daughter of a family who took their lives for granted. No one knew that later on her father’s investment firm, his inheritance, would collapse under claims of mismanagement.” Jack’s smile was brief and mirthless. “‘Inbreeding,’ Ben told me once. ‘The Barkleys’ blood got thin, until everything her father had he owed to ancestors with more brains and balls.’”

The echo of his father’s scorn re-ignited Adam’s anger. “It didn’t keep the sonofabitch from marrying the old man’s daughter.”

“Clarice was a prize to be won,” Jack replied, “a symbol of all he wanted and never had. For a passing moment, I thought he was after your mother’s best friend, Whitney Dane. But once Ben left Yale, it was his time to go after her. She never had a chance—the triumph of capturing her was too great for Ben to fail.” Jack’s tone grew hard. “So he pursued her, married her, and cheated on her. The ultimate proof of his superiority was that he made her parents’ home his own. And now he’s taken that piece of her life and given it to this actress.”

Feeling the chill of this story and its coda, Adam shut his eyes. Another moment with his father came to him, again from their final summer. Jenny was off-island, and Adam had asked Ben to go fly-fishing off Dogfish Bar. With a rueful smile, Ben shook his head. “Believe me, son, I’d vastly prefer your company to the living death I’ll experience tonight. But your mother insists on going to some idiot’s Fourth of July party. For reasons that are obscure to me, she actually cares about what these people think.” Ben sat back in his chair, his tone confiding. “I call it high school for the rich. They go from party to party, dying for acceptance, never wondering whether it’s worthwhile being accepted by whatever moron they encounter. The only amusement they hold for me is wondering who’ll flatter me in the most unctuous and transparent way. Knowing full well that none of them would give a damn except for who I am.

“Time is too fleeting for that. I could spend tonight fishing with my son, or making love, or talking with a man or woman who actually has something to say, or rereading War and Peace, the greatest novel ever written. By midnight, both of us will be six hours closer to being dead, and only you will have anything to show for it. Just thinking about it curdles me with envy.”

Adam laughed. “Have I told you Jenny’s theory on summer social life?”

“These minnows justify an entire theory?”

“A small one. Jen caters parties, like you used to do, honing her skills of observation. She says that the summer social circuit is actually a game called Celebrity Pac-Man, with a scoring system based on how many famous people you can hang out with between the Fourth of July and Labor Day—”

“Celebrity Pac-Man?” Ben repeated with a grin. “As in I got ‘Tom and Rita’ or ‘Ted and Mary’ or ‘Alan and Carolyn’?”

“Or ‘Ben and Clarice,’” Adam responded. “‘Tom and Rita’ are a ten. Whereas, I’m sorry to say, Mom and you are more like a seven—”

“I’m heartbroken.”

“You should be. Anyhow, the season starts tonight, so you absolutely have to be there. I’ll be thinking about you.”

With a faint smile, Ben regarded his youngest son. “Your friend Jenny has some insight. I don’t know whether you’ll ever be a famous trial lawyer, Adam. But if you become one, let me give you some advice. I like fame, quite a lot. But you have to know how to use it.” His eyes became serious, his voice penetrant. “I use it to gain things of value—access to people I respect, or whose lives or achievements interest me. I use it to gain experiences I haven’t had, and learn things I didn’t know. Fame is hard to win, all too easy to lose, and way too precious to squander on tonight’s group of nattering hangers-on.”

“So why don’t you just let Mom go without you?”

“If only I could. But I’m the draw—in a marriage, sacrifices must be made.” Ben paused. “This Jenny of yours sounds smart enough. Is this a serious thing?”

Adam weighed his answer. “She’s still pretty young, only twenty. But it’s serious enough that we’re only seeing each other.”

Ben gave him a speculative look. “Then I hope she’s good, my boy.”

Abruptly, Adam felt a flash of anger—this was a line his father could not cross. “Good at what, Dad? You make her sound like an athlete.”

Watching Adam’s face, Ben shrugged, his way of backing off. Adam would never give him an answer, let alone the truth: Sometimes Jenny just goes away. Like she doesn’t know where she is, or that I’m the man inside her.

And now Jenny Leigh had become his father’s heir.

Adam looked at his uncle, ashamed of his own judgment of Jack’s life. This man was everything his father was not—loving, humane, and protective of Adam’s mother and brother. “At the end,” Adam asked, “did you think my father was crazy?”

In the failing light of dusk, he saw Jack frown. “Crazy? I don’t know. I just know that he was different.”

“In what way?”

“The ones your mother saw. Especially this thing with Carla Pacelli.” Jack shifted his weight, seemingly uncomfortable. “I mean, you know what he was like. When it came to women, as with a lot of things, Ben had a complete indifference to other people’s pain and a fierce desire to compete. Nothing was better than sticking his penis where some other man’s had been—”

“I know that,” Adam cut in. “But for whatever reason he always stayed with my mother. He didn’t start putting girlfriends in his will, for godsakes.”

“So maybe he was crazy,” Jack said in measured tones. “Or maybe, in his way, he fell in love with Carla Pacelli.”

“That’s a complete oxymoron. Ben Blaine wasn’t capable of love.”

Jack met his gaze. “I think he loved your mother once. At least as much as he was capable of love.”

“When?” Adam asked with real scorn. “Before I was born?”

“Yes,” Jack answered. “Before you were born.”

Adam folded his arms. At last, he said, “I may have left here, and he may be dead. But it’s not over between us, after all. It won’t be until I undo everything that bastard has done.”

Jack’s expression was tinged with melancholy. “How, exactly?”

Adam felt the same steel enter his soul he had felt ten years before. “I haven’t worked that out yet. But trust me, Jack, I will.”

Five

Adam found his mother in the den, his father’s sanctuary. It was filled with photographs of Benjamin Blaine with world leaders, politicians, missionaries, mercenaries, and soldiers in half-forgotten wars. There was nothing of his family in it. Yet Clarice had gravitated there, sitting on the leather couch in the dim light of Ben’s desk lamp, as if to search for meaning in her life with this man. Adam sensed the desperation beneath her composure—she had lost not only her inheritance but her identity as a woman. In the end, Ben had taken everything.

“What are you doing, Mom?”

“Remembering.” Her voice was quiet and bitter. “Taking stock of my accomplishments. Except for this last manuscript, I took part in every one he wrote—proofreading, researching, or just telling him what I thought. And no one knew but me.”

Adam sat beside her, absorbing the weight of her loss. For as long as he could remember, he had felt for her, all the more so when, still young, he had learned to decode the meaning of his father’s nocturnal disappearances, the jaunty look he took on in the wake of some new conquest. The boy Adam had loved her, worried for her, and wished that he could protect her from hurt. But he did not want to be like her—despite everything, the person he admired was his father.

Now, filled with anger and pity, he did not know what to say. Instead, Clarice told him, “I’m sorry, Adam. For everything.”

Adam took her hand. “He made this mess, not you. As always.”

Turning, she looked him in the eyes. “I don’t mean the will. The way you look at me now is all too familiar. I can see how worried you are.”

“Shouldn’t I be?”

“I suppose so. But that’s the point—you always were.” Her voice was new to him, clear and filled with reckoning. “I loved you both even more than you know. But instead of standing up for you and Teddy, what I gave you was an inconstant mother who drank too much. So you became my parent, helping me as best you could, while I went on pretending for others that my marriage was better than you knew it to be. And when you grew old enough to understand it all, you left in disgust.”

“Only with him.”

Clarice shook her head. “Not just him. I think you were smart enough to realize that on a more elevated plane, we had replicated Ben’s family of origin—the acquiescent mother, the demeaning father, the sons who suffered at his hands. And, as Ben did, our youngest son broke away. The worst part for me was knowing that only he gave you the strength to do that. Because you were so much like him.”

Adam felt a stab of fear, the need to protest that, like Jack, he had the ability to reflect, a concern for how his desires might impact those around him. But what he said was, “There’s a biblical quote that goes something like ‘When I was a child, I acted as a child. But when I became a man, I put aside childish things.’ To the day he died, my father was a cruel and destructive child, with a child’s self-absorption. No one else was real to him.”

“There was more to Ben than that,” Clarice responded. “For whatever it’s worth, your rupture hit him hard. He seemed to flinch at the slightest mention of your name, like the hurt he felt was too deep to admit—”

Adam’s harsh bark of laughter was involuntary. Abruptly, Clarice demanded, “Tell me what he did to you, Adam. After all this time, I have the right to know.”

Adam met her gaze. “All he had to do was be himself. One day I’d had enough. It’s a wonder you never got there—”

“You dropped out of law school, dammit.”

“I dropped out of my life, Mom. And made another that belongs to me alone.”

“Really? Is that why you’re working in a hellhole like Afghanistan? It’s exactly what Ben would have done.”

“Not exactly,” Adam responded. “Anyhow, he’s dead. At the moment I’m more concerned with how he got that way.”

Clarice looked at him steadily. “He was drunk, and he fell.”

“That drunk? A man who could drink a half bottle of scotch and still sail his boat in a storm?”

Clarice shook her head. “The man you knew also wrote between seven and five. This may sound odd, but what frightened me most was to see him struggling to write at midnight, as if he were racing to finish. I no longer knew him at all.”

“Did you read his manuscript?”

“He wouldn’t show it to me.” Clarice nodded toward Ben’s desk. “When he finished working for that day, he’d lock it in that drawer. I can’t find the key.”

Adam gazed at the drawer. “Before he left that night, did he say anything?”

“Very little.” Clarice stared fixedly past him, as though trying to recall the moment precisely. “He sat in this room with a bottle of scotch, brooding and silent. Then he announced in a slurry voice that he was walking to the promontory, to watch the sunset at summer solstice. Those were the last words he ever spoke to me.”

“What did you say to him?”

“Nothing. I didn’t know whether to believe him.”

Adam took this as a tacit reference to Ben’s affair with Carla Pacelli. “And that’s what you told the police?”

“Yes.”

“What else did they ask you?”

Clarice folded her arms, then answered in a brittle voice. “Among other things, whether that button on his denim shirt was missing. I said I didn’t notice—that I wasn’t in the habit of mending his shirts and sewing on his buttons.”

As much as anything she had said before, this belated assertion of autonomy struck Adam as profoundly sad. Gently, he inquired, “I assume they also asked if you knew about Carla Pacelli.”

“Of course. That was why I didn’t necessarily believe Ben was going to the promontory.” Her voice lowered. “For once, he was telling the truth.”

His mother, Adam realized, seemed determined to never speak Pacelli’s name. “Did they ask about your relationship with Dad?”

Clarice sat straighter. “Why is that of such interest to you?”

“Because I’m interested in whatever interests the police. Please, humor me.”

Clarice’s lips compressed. “This is painful—particularly from a mother to a son. But yes, they asked about Ben and me in considerable detail. Such as the last time Ben and I had sex. I told them it was months ago.” There was something new in her tone, Adam thought, an angry, widowed sexuality. But when she turned to him, tears glistened in her eyes. “How I wish you had at least some illusions.”

Adam shook his head. “It wasn’t you who took them from me. Can I ask how you found out about Ms. Pacelli?”

His mother hesitated. “Jenny told me. She saw them together on the beach.”

“Nice of her.”

Clarice studied his expression. In a tone of reproach, she said, “After you left, Jenny and I became good friends. She only told me when I worried aloud that Ben was going out at night, without excuses or explanation, becoming more blatant by the day. At that point she’d have had to conceal what she knew.” Her voice flattened out. “In the end, Jenny did me a favor. She spared me the surprise when I followed Ben on one of his nightly jaunts, and saw him standing with a woman on the promontory.”

“A woman, or Carla Pacelli?”

“It was too dark to see. But I’m sure it was her—they appeared to be having the kind of intense conversation that men and women only have when they’re involved. And she’d taken the guesthouse at the Dane place, as Teddy told you. So it would have been an easy walk for her.”

Adam recalled one of the minor mysteries of his mother’s past—her aborted friendship with Whitney Dane. Among the affluent WASPs who summered on the Vineyard, the Barkleys and the Danes were unique among their class for living in Chilmark, which came to feature a significant Jewish population, rather than Edgartown, the traditional redoubt of their class. Through college, Adam knew, Whitney and Clarice had been intimate friends; as an adult, Whitney had become an eminent novelist, and would have been a natural peer for Ben save that Clarice, for reasons unclear to Adam, assiduously avoided her. That Carla Pacelli had landed in her estranged friend’s guesthouse could only have deepened his mother’s wounds. But of more immediate interest was the location of the guesthouse—from several directions, anyone could approach the promontory and not be observed. He was framing another question when, without warning, Clarice bent over, hands covering her face, shoulders trembling with soundless sobs. In that painful moment, Adam felt the pride, shame, and repression that had come to define her life. Helpless, he put his arm around her, and then his mother broke down entirely, cries of anguish issuing from deep inside her.