Marthaas.Vineyard.01.Fall.From.Grace.2012, page 5
“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.
“Talk to me, Mom. Please.”
At length, she sat up, her voice tremulous. “It’s everything. Any day now, I’ll wake up and she’ll own our family’s home, and the guesthouse where Teddy lives and paints. Neither of us will have anything.” She paused, her throat working. “But it’s so much more than that. Where do I put my memories of Ben when he turned them all to ashes? What can I say my life meant? What can I believe I accomplished, with one son estranged, the other struggling? Nothing. By the end, all I hoped for was to live my life with some semblance of dignity. And now my husband of forty years has taken that from me as well, in the cruelest and most public way.”
With your collaboration, Adam thought. For a long minute, he gave her the gift of silence. Then, gently, he said, “When you signed that postnup, he must have promised something in return.”
Mute, Clarice shook her head.
“Why, then?”
“As I said, I thought I was going to inherit all I needed from my father. Another rude surprise.”
Adam searched his inventory of family lore. “I thought Grandfather went bankrupt before I was born.”
“No,” she said tersely. “After.”
Perhaps, Adam thought, she had been too insulated by her family’s cosseted life to believe that it would ever vanish. “And you knew nothing about this new will?”
Clarice sat straighter, retrieving a semblance of her usual composure. “No. Once Father lost everything, I thought Ben would do the decent thing. As to affairs, he’d had them before.”
“You didn’t think this woman was different.”
“No.” Clarice exhaled. “It was your father who was different.”
Adam watched her face in profile. It had been some time, he realized, since she had looked him in the face. “Did Dad ever threaten to leave you?”
She gave a vehement shake of her head. “Never. Nor could I leave him. Not just for my own security, but Teddy’s. Once he got sick, he depended on us, both for a place to recover and for money to get back on his feet.” Her voice became parched. “As for me, I had the consolation of being Mrs. Benjamin Blaine. The one he always stayed with.”
And now, Adam thought, she faced the reckoning that she had never allowed herself to imagine. “I’m back,” he told her. “If this will holds up, I’ll give the money he left me to you and Teddy. But I mean to see that it won’t.”
His mother mustered a smile. Then, to his surprise, she said, “You haven’t asked about Jenny.”
Adam shrugged. “She’s not a member of this family. Right now I’m concerned with the people who are.” He stood, placing a hand on her shoulder. “I should spend some time with Teddy.”
Clarice studied his face, her eyes questioning. Adam kissed her on the cheek and left.
Crossing the lawn, he saw a light in the guesthouse. Instinctively, he stopped, for a moment unable to move.
You haven’t asked about Jenny.
Six
With almost cinematic specificity, Adam could still remember the crucial moments of that final summer, most of them centered on Jenny Leigh.
In early June, a week after he finished his first year of law school, Adam and Jenny had pushed off from Sepiessa Point in a double kayak, a picnic cooler between them, headed across the Tisbury Great Pond. A brisk spring wind skidded cirrus clouds across a vivid blue sky, and the whitecapped water was still cool from winter. Determinedly, they paddled toward the green shoreline ahead.
Though three years older than Jenny, Adam had known her for half his life. As a senior at Martha’s Vineyard High School when Jenny had been a freshman, he had admired her poetry in the school newspaper. But it was during the previous summer that Adam had encountered Jenny at a beach party and rediscovered her as a woman he was drawn to.
Both were home from school. But where Adam was set on being a trial lawyer, Jenny had focused on the far more elusive goal of becoming a fiction writer. In Adam’s mind, she seemed to have a poetic temperament—at one moment vibrant and amusing, at others inward and almost elusive, given to long silences that often ended in remarks that were both original and oblique. He had never known anyone quite like her.
For one thing, Jenny had grit. A Vineyard kid whose father had taken off and whose mother seemed barely able to cope, she had taken her future in her own hands, compiling a record of achievement that had gained her a full scholarship to UMass Amherst. But she lived in an aura of mystery that Adam found intriguing—she seldom mentioned her family and said little about her past. When Adam had asked how she imagined her future, she answered simply, “I feel like one of my stories. I’m still creating myself.”
Her willingness to make such delphic remarks was an expression of trust, Adam sensed, the hope that he might understand her and help her better understand herself. When she became moody or aloof, Adam learned to ride it out, knowing that this was not directed at him. But on that sparkling afternoon, as they forged across the choppy waters, the “social Jenny,” talkative and appealing, explained Celebrity Pac-Man and the point system by which the competing stalkers could calculate their ranking. “I’m not sure the famous ones even know they’re playing,” she observed. “They’re way too secure. They’re even nice to people who wait on them, like me—they’ll ask you questions, honestly trying to find out who you are. The rude ones are the wannabes and name-droppers, too busy trying to puff themselves up to notice the help.” She paused and then, as so often, her tenor softened. “Maybe I shouldn’t be so judgmental. Being like that must be painful—needing other people’s approval just to convince yourself that you matter.”
Paddling briskly, Adam inquired, “Don’t writers need approval? Not just from readers, but from critics.”
From behind him he heard the silence of thought. “It’s different. You’re not with them while they’re reading your story, or deciding whether or not to buy your book. You never see their faces. So it feels safer to me.”
“That has a certain Jenny-logic,” Adam responded with a smile. “But rejection is still rejection. Every book out, my dad is scared that it won’t sell.”
“Benjamin Blaine scared?” she said with real surprise, and then pondered this. “I guess when you’re that big, people notice failure—including other writers who are jealous of your success. Schadenfreude kicks in.
“I just never thought of someone like your father as being vulnerable. And then you go and tell me that every age and status has its own terrors.” Suddenly, she laughed at herself. “Whatever do I live for now? Until you shattered my illusions, I thought that when I got famous I’d be a whole different Jenny. I was looking forward to getting up every morning feeling great about myself.”
“Speaking for me,” Adam assured her, “I think you’re pretty okay now.”
He expected that this compliment would please her. Instead, she answered seriously, “You’re the okay one, Adam. There’s something real at your core that no one will ever take from you.”
He caught something wistful in her tone, a kind of guileless envy. Then she asked, “So why do you want to spend your life defending criminals?”
Adam watched an osprey fly low across the water. “Who says they’re all criminals?” he parried. “Some might actually be innocent. Others may need someone to explain them. There are reasons why we become the way we are, which often aren’t apparent on the surface of our lives.” He paused, then added gently, “You’ve told me that your father drank too much, and that your mother worked too hard to be around. But I don’t know how that affected you, and it matters quite a lot to me. Because you matter to me.”
Jenny’s expression turned opaque. “It’s all I know. So I don’t think about it much.”
“Your father vanished, Jenny. Wasn’t that important to you?”
“No,” she answered coolly. “It’s only important that he’s gone.”
This was so unlike her that, too late, Adam sensed the wall between them. “My modest point,” he temporized, “is that most people have hidden stories. A defense lawyer has to tell them in a sympathetic way.”
“Even if they’re murderers or rapists?”
“Even then.”
Jenny fell quiet, deep within herself. They paddled in silence until they reached the shore.
They beached the kayak, and Adam led her through the trees into a grassy clearing dappled with sunlight. Spreading a blanket, he laid out the picnic he had prepared. “How did you find this place?” she asked.
“Teddy and I found it together. When we wanted to get away, we’d paddle over here with food or books to read. Sometimes we’d camp out for the night, looking up at the night sky, listening to the wind stir the leaves and branches.”
“It sounds peaceful.”
Especially for Teddy, Adam thought. For his brother, this glade was more than a refuge from Benjamin Blaine. Adam still remembered the day Teddy had discovered it. One of the joys of painting, his brother had enthused, is that you can be out in the world and suddenly find yourself looking at something, the image you might create growing in your mind’s eye—at those moments life becomes art, and nothing is wasted. Listening, Adam saw the world as Teddy did. When Teddy painted the glade, he gave the painting to Adam.
“It was,” he told Jenny. “We both loved it here.”
Jenny smiled. “So do I.”
At the bottom of the cooler was a bottle of chardonnay. “A little wine?” he asked.
“Just mineral water, thanks.” She hesitated, then gave him a tentative look. “I’ve started taking meds that wouldn’t mix too well with wine. A good thing, probably. Alcohol hits me too fast, and I like it too much.”
She was on antidepressants, he guessed, though perhaps her fear of alcohol came from her father. “Then I won’t drink either,” he told her.
They shared the picnic in companionable silence, Adam letting Jenny’s thoughts drift where they would. After a while she took his hand, her fingers interlaced with his. “You’re the only person who ever lets me do this.”
“What, exactly?”
She looked into his eyes. “Sometimes I need to be alone. You let me be alone with you.”
For Adam, there was a world of meaning concealed in those few words. Smiling a little, he said, “I just like being with you. Even when you’re alone.”
A new and palpable affection surfaced in her eyes. She leaned over to kiss him, her mouth soft and warm, then leaned her forehead against his. Quietly, she asked, “Would you like to make love with me?”
Taken by surprise, Adam felt a tightness in his throat. “Yes.”
Wordless, she stood in front of him, eyes locking his. She took off her sweater, then her bra, the nipples rising on her small, perfect breasts. Transfixed, Adam watched her step out of her jeans, then lower her panties, exposing the light brown tuft between her slender legs. Then she turned around to show him everything before facing him again.
“Do you like me, Adam?”
He could not seem to move. “Even more than I imagined.”
“Then why are you still dressed?”
He stood, peeling off his clothes, his desire for her written on every fiber of his body. She kissed him deeply, then knelt to take him into her mouth. “Not that,” he murmured. “It’s you I want.”
“Then lie down,” she said in a husky voice.
He lay on his back. With silent urgency, Jenny mounted him, eyes closing as she took him inside her body. As she began to move with him, her face went rigid, almost blank. Their rhythm quickened, drawing soft cries from inside her. When she cried out more fiercely, her body shuddering, Adam saw tears at the corners of her eyes. Then, all at once, he was beyond wondering why.
When they were spent, Jenny searched his face again, as though rediscovering its features. “Just hold me,” she whispered.
Filled with tenderness and questions, Adam did that.
Seven
Breaking off this memory, Adam knocked on the door of the guesthouse. “Come on in,” a mordant voice said. “Whoever you are, you can’t be my father.”
Adam stepped inside. Though his brother sat in front of a canvas, for a moment Adam saw neither Teddy nor his surroundings. “What’s wrong, bro?” Teddy asked. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
At once, Adam shook off the illusion of having stepped into the past. “It’s just that I haven’t been here for so long. The last time I saw this room it wasn’t an artist’s studio.”
