Fall from Grace (7 page)

The quiet bitterness in Teddy echoed their mother’s. “How did you get along with him?” Adam wondered aloud.

“Mostly by avoidance. Though it seemed to amuse him to keep me here on life support, and our mother dangling on yet another string.”

The psychology of Teddy’s return, with its cycle of debasement for both son and mother, was painful for Adam to contemplate. But whatever the cost, he knew what Teddy had salvaged. Since boyhood, his brother had burned with the love of painting, the one thing—beyond the sexuality their father had scorned—that defined him. His partner had died; to lose the freedom to paint would have felt like another death, his own.

Turning, Adam studied Teddy’s canvas. The landscape was both unsettling and unsurprising, reflecting Teddy’s originality and the seeds of his defeat. Though it portrayed Martha’s Vineyard, it lacked the soothing elements prized by the purchasers of popular art: the beaches of summer, bordered by sea grass; a sailboat breaching whitecapped waves; verdant farmland and trees at the height of their foliage. Instead, Teddy’s landscape captured winter—not the snowy landscape of a greeting card, but the bleak, pitiless gray of February, when short days and long nights led to drunkenness and domestic violence, families turning on one another. This was the Vineyard seen through a glass darkly, harsh and barren, its shadows distorted, its trees so stripped of life that they seemed the remnant of some terrible disaster, a nightmare terrain that would haunt anyone who saw it. Adam found it startling and unforgettable, evoking hidden truths perceived by a unique vision—and likely unsalable.

As if reading Adam’s thoughts, Teddy remarked dryly, “Seems like I’ve got this corner of the market to myself.”

Adam kept staring at the painting. “It’s astonishing, Ted—surreal yet all too real. When I was a kid, I wondered how you could do this. I still do.”

Teddy smiled a little. “So do I, sometimes. It can be hard to live with.”

Adam looked up at him. “And the Vineyard? Other than the obvious, how has living here been for you?”

“Solitary.” His brother paused, stressing the word. “For a while I had a boyfriend—or thought I did. But then he got strange, in ways I won’t bother to describe. Except to say that I didn’t absorb enough of our mother’s masochism.” Teddy flashed a smile, interrupting himself. “Enough of that. Tell me when you’re escaping Afghanistan, so I’ll know when to quit worrying you’ll get yourself beheaded.”

The jaunty air Adam tried to conjure sat on him uncomfortably, both because it was false and because he was certain that, for Teddy, it evoked Benjamin Blaine. “There’s nothing much to worry about,” he said easily. “I’m doing a tiny bit of nation-building in a nation that will never get built. Given that the place is crawling with our soldiers, the Taliban couldn’t care less about me.”

Teddy gave him a penetrant look. “Cut the bullshit, Adam. Maybe this agrarian project you’re on is as pointless as you suggest. But they still deliver the New York Times here. Helmand Province is the most dangerous place on earth, filled with Taliban and laden with IEDs. You could get yourself killed by accident.”

Adam shook his head. “Long ago, I stopped emulating Benjamin Blaine. Assuming that his death was, in fact, an accident.”

Something flickered in Teddy’s eyes. “Meaning?”

“I want to know what happened the night he died.”

A veil seemed to fall across Teddy’s features, leaving him expressionless. “Damned if I can tell you. The bastard took his curtain call without inviting me to share the moment. Typical.”

“Did you see him at all that night?”

From behind the mask Teddy watched his brother’s face. “I barely saw him, period. It seemed to suit us both.”

“Did you talk to anyone? In the family or outside it?”

Teddy sighed. “The police asked me all this, Adam. Truth to tell, I really can’t remember. If I’d known it was his final sunset, I’d have taken better notes.”

“Do you agree that he was acting strangely?”

Teddy shifted on the stool so that one side of his face was in shadow. For the first time his voice, though level, was faintly accusatory. “As I keep reminding you, we didn’t hang out together. Maybe I lived a hundred feet away, but you were the one he wanted here. For him, looking at you was like gazing in the mirror. How could he not love you? But I grew up without a father. Why do you think that changed?”

Adam became pensive. “It’s just odd,” he finally said. “The way he died.”

“Falling off his favorite cliff? Actually, the image gives me a certain pleasure.” Abruptly, Teddy turned away, speaking in a different voice, rough and low. “Listen to me. Our father dies, and all that’s left to me is hollow jokes. God knows how much I wanted to love him, and him to love me. Even though I knew it was impossible.”

Adam felt a wrenching sadness—not for his father, but for those whom he had harmed and would continue to harm. “We’re taught to believe in archetypes,” he replied. “Families are warm, parents love their children, fathers cherish their sons. But that’s not how it was. Believe me, he did real damage to us both. I just resemble him too much for you to see that.”

Teddy regarded him with open curiosity. “Strange, isn’t it? The son he wanted was the one who cut him off.”

The unspoken question lingered between them. “It was instinctive,” Adam said. “Like the reflex that tells an animal when to run.”

Ted gave him a look of silent appraisal. “There’s something else that’s odd,” Adam ventured. “Carla Pacelli.”

“That’s odd?” An incredulous smile spread across Teddy’s face. “It’s classic Benjamin Blaine—a beautiful actress, thirty years younger. It would have been odd if he hadn’t gone for it.”

“Maybe so. But this attachment somehow feels deeper than his norm.”

“I couldn’t really say,” Teddy responded in his driest tone. “Our father didn’t confide in me about male–female relations.”

Nodding, Adam looked around the room. He saw now that it made a perfect studio for Teddy, containing the elements his brother had explained to him long ago. There was wall space for his finished work, ample room for a table on rollers, its surface covered with multicolored oils and cups filled with paintbrushes. The main window faced north, admitting a steady light, and during the day the skylight would illuminate Teddy’s easel. It was possible, Adam reflected, that the work Teddy could do here allowed him, at least for a time, to forget the man who owned it. And then a painting on the wall caught him up short. As stark as the others, it portrayed an image Adam had seen a hundred times before, the sun setting over the promontory from which their father had fallen to his death.

Teddy followed his brother’s gaze. “A memory painting,” he said evenly. “As I told the police, I haven’t gone there in years.”

Adam met his eyes. “Even though it’s literally in your own backyard.”

“Even so. Then and now, I hated that place.”

Remembering the truth of this, Adam fell silent. At length, he said, “It’s been a long day, hasn’t it?”

Teddy still stared at the painting. “With many more to come. Maybe we can rent our family home from the newly affluent Ms. Pacelli. Though I doubt we’ll have the money for even that.”

The cruelty of what his father had done struck Adam anew. Then Teddy said in a somber tone, “But it has been a long day. You look depleted, bro.”

He was exhausted by how far he had come, Adam realized, and not just in miles. When he stood, so did Teddy. As the brothers embraced, Teddy murmured, “I love you, Adam. Always did, always will.”

Adam hugged him for an extra moment. “Me too.”

Releasing his brother, Adam left. As he crossed the lawn, he saw that their mother had left the light on in his old room, a rectangle of yellow in the darkness.

Lugging his suitcase, Adam climbed the stairs, floorboards creaking under his weight.

His room was intact, a museum of the past, as though he had never left. High school trophies, a certificate acknowledging him as valedictorian of his class. A Yale coffee mug filled with pens. A family photo, four people smiling into the camera, Ben with his canine grin, Teddy standing a little separate from the others. A photograph of Ben and a marlin that the college-age Adam had labeled “Hemingway Lite.” A picture of Jenny Leigh.

The remnants of another life, Adam thought, everything but Miss Havisham’s wedding cake. Then he remembered that it was his father who, when Adam was not yet ten, had patiently read Great Expectations aloud to him from start to finish. There was something magical, he had discovered, about hearing Dickens’s words in his father’s rich baritone voice.

You broke my heart, you bastard.

For a moment Adam sat on his bed caught in the vortex of memory. Then he began to unpack, filling the old chest of drawers with the clothes of a much older man. When he took out the last shirt, all that remained in the suitcase was his handgun.

He did not know why he had packed the Luger. Habit, he supposed; the last six months had made him jumpy, no matter where he was, even more watchful and untrusting than before. One week ago, this gun had saved his life, or he would have died on the same day as his father. Now he concealed it under two pairs of slacks.

Turning out the light, he crawled between fresh-smelling sheets that his mother must have laundered for him. But his surroundings, at once familiar and strange, did not allow for sleep. Reviewing what his mother, uncle, and brother had told him, he wondered how much to believe.

At last, his mind weary, he drifted into the restless sleep that had become all that he could manage.

But the nightmare caught him, even here. He started awake, forehead damp, reaching for his gun before he realized where he was. Much of the dream was as before—though he could see himself, his body lay by the road, eviscerated by an IED. But this time his corpse had the graying hair of Benjamin Blaine the last time Adam had seen him.

Eight

The next morning, as was the family custom, Adam drove to Alley’s General Store to buy the New York Times. The headlines were grim—the Taliban had ambushed and killed seven American soldiers in Helmand Province, and the Afghan government had descended into factional squabbling that, to Adam’s jaundiced eye, reflected the corruption of all. It made the death of young Americans that much harder to accept.

Returning home, Adam passed the cemetery at Abel’s Hill. Inevitably, his gaze was drawn to his father’s grave, lit by shafts of morning sunlight, the grass around it a deepening green. Beside it, the solitary figure of a woman in a simple black dress bent to place flowers on his grave. Adam pulled over to the side of the road and got out, walking among the tombstones to reach the place where, only yesterday, his family had buried Benjamin Blaine.

The headstone was engraved BENJAMIN BLAINE, 1945–2011. HUSBAND OF CLARICE, FATHER OF EDWARD AND ADAM,. Beneath this were the words Ben once had spoken in an interview: “I WROTE THE TRUTH AS I SAW IT.” Kneeling, the woman quietly recited a prayer; though she must have heard Adam behind her, she gave no sign of this. Finally, she crossed herself and, rising, turned to face him.

Tall and slender, she looked a touch older than her age, which he put at thirty-two. On television she had been striking and exotic, an Italian-American brunette with dark, intense eyes and a vitality that made her all the more memorable. Now she had the tempered beauty of a survivor. In the last photograph Adam remembered of her, taken after her arrest, her eyes were clouded by drugs and filled with shame and confusion. But the eyes that regarded him now were clear and flecked with sadness. The faint smile at one corner of her mouth did not change them.

“You could only be Adam.” Her voice was as he recalled it, smoky, with a trace of Mediterranean intensity. “Now I know how your father must have looked at your age.”

She took it for granted that he knew who she was. The strangeness of the moment left him briefly silent. Then he said, “And you’re Carla Pacelli. Or used to be.”

The veiled insult did not change her expression. “I’m sorry if I’ve upset you. But the only service I could hold for him is private.”

Instinctively, Adam looked toward the road. Near his car he saw a Jeep, then a woman he took to be Amanda Ferris with a photographer whose telescopic lens glinted in the sun. Facing Pacelli, Adam said, “Not too private. I think you and I just made the National Enquirer.”

Briefly, Pacelli shut her eyes. “I’m used to this,” she said wearily, “and it’s way too late to care. But I didn’t mean to inflict them on you or your family.”

Adam dismissed this. Perhaps she had staged her touching graveyard visit to cast herself as a woman in mourning. She was, after all, a performer, no doubt conscious that an image, if artfully created, could conceal avarice and calculation. Adam’s reality was this—she had been his father’s lover and the chief beneficiary of his will, heedless of the damage she inflicted on Clarice Blaine. At length, Adam said, “You were far from his only woman—just the one in the girlfriend chair when the music stopped. All I care about is what you’ve taken from my mother.”

A moment’s anger flashed in Pacelli’s eyes, then died there. In the same even tone, she said, “Then there are a few things I should say to you, as clearly as I can. Whatever you choose to think, I loved your father. Except for consideration and respect, I didn’t expect much in return. Nor did I ask for anything. I didn’t know about the will, or request him to change the one he had. From time to time, he helped me with expenses, but that was all. I’d far prefer that Ben were still alive.”

This was the defense that Adam expected, stated with the quiet command of an actress. In his estimation, Carla Pacelli had been a good one—whether feigned or real, grief was written on her face. “Nonetheless,” Adam said, “his demise has worked out nicely for you.”

She gave him a long, cool look. “Then I should be happy, shouldn’t I. Do I seem it to you?”

Adam met her eyes. “No,” he answered. “But your business is appearance, not reality, and good taste requires the appearance of sadness. I am curious, though, about the last time you saw him alive.”

Pacelli looked at him with the same directness. “I’m not sure I’m ready for this conversation. You buried him yesterday; I buried him just now. That’s hard for me. But if we’re going to talk, would you mind sitting down? I haven’t slept much lately.”