Fall from Grace (10 page)

He got off, then walked to the stairway. As he looked up, the promontory was shrouded in darkness. All he could see was the moon and stars.

That night Adam could not sleep. He tried to purge his mind and imagine himself as Benjamin Blaine in the last months of his life.

Brain cancer.

Did he know? If so, this could account for much of his behavior—in his son’s estimate, Ben’s deepest fear was of his own mortality. The spectre of death could explain his writing schedule—frenzied, drunken, and nocturnal—as he felt his powers flagging and his gifts slipping from his grasp. A desperate race against the last, eternal night.

The manuscript was locked in his desk.

Adam reached into the drawer for the Luger he had concealed, then attached the silencer to its barrel. Leaving his room, he crept past the bedroom where, he suspected, his mother slept as fitfully as he. Then he took the stairway to the first floor and entered his father’s study, gun in hand.

Turning on the desk lamp, he found the drawer where his father kept his final work in progress. Then he aimed the gun at its lock and fired. With a pneumatic hiss, the lock vanished.

Opening the drawer, Adam put the manuscript on the desk, and sat in his father’s chair. The title page read “Fall from Grace” and, beneath that, “A Novel by Benjamin Blaine.” Then he turned to the dedication page, and his hand froze.

“For Adam,” it said, “the missing son.”

Fingertips steepled, Adam stared at the words. Then he turned the page and forced himself to read.

Between the ages of sixteen and twenty-three, Adam had read Body Count and the rest of his father’s novels to that date. He had admired their force, their craftsmanship, the sturdy architecture of the narrative and the strength and vigor of Ben’s prose. And so this work began. But as Adam turned the pages the writing became flatter, the scenes less fully realized. But this did not obscure the arc of the story, or lessen Adam’s disquiet.

He stopped, recalling another night from their last summer as father and son.

The evening after the Fourth of July, Ben had picked up on Adam’s suggestion that they go fly-fishing at Dogfish Bar.

Striped bass were nocturnal, and so Ben and Adam arrived at nightfall. The moon rose behind them, its silver light glistening on the surf at their feet. Together, they cast as Ben had taught him since the night on which, when Adam was six, his father had first awakened him to fish in darkness. Adam had not complained; he cherished this initiation into what he imagined as his father’s secret world. “It’s wonderful and mysterious,” his father had told him, “to cast a line into dark waters, hoping to connect with something you can’t see.” And so Adam discovered. For years, he worked to emulate the skill and grace his father brought to the art of casting a weightless line, his stiff arm tracing and retracing the same perfect arc. Now they cast together; in the darkness, Adam knew, no one could tell the father from the son.

Behind them, he heard voices in the night. On the rise that descended to the water, four more fishermen appeared, wearing boots and carrying fly rods, their outlines backlit like some shadowy militia come to occupy the beach. When Adam tried this simile on his father, Ben replied, “I may steal that from you, son. Did you ever consider writing yourself?”

“Compete with you? No thanks.”

Ben looked at him sharply. “If you’re afraid of that, all the more reason to try: fear exists to be mastered, not bowed to. Still, maybe you’re right—where is it written that you can do what I’ve done? And I can hardly blame you for choosing your own path. Thank God I didn’t follow my old man like he followed his.”

Though he could not see Ben’s face, Adam heard a note of satisfaction mixed with dread, as though Nathaniel Blaine might still pull Ben by the collar into the life he had fought to escape. “What was he like?” Adam asked. “I can’t remember much.”

“Limited,” Ben said flatly. “They all were. Granted, they had a certain mulish persistence that might have passed for character—through a century of lobstering, they stuck with it, no matter how hard the life. Their problem was tunnel vision. Each took those same traits of character and did the exact same thing, generation upon generation. From the age of five, I set out to be different.”

Something in Ben’s claim of uniqueness nettled Adam. “So did Jack,” he said.

Ben laughed under his breath. “Jack? All he managed was getting out of the water.”

It was always like this, Adam thought—his father determined to have him perceive his uncle as smaller than Ben himself. “He did more than that, Dad. Jack’s woodworking is special. He’s an artist, like Teddy.”

“Yes,” Ben answered tartly. “On a rock off the coast of Massachusetts, fifty square miles. This is a place to come back to, not to define the boundaries of a life. The world has too much to offer.”

Adam felt the familiar stab of ambivalence mixed with admiration. His father was ever on the lookout for places that bared the nature of man at its noblest and most terrible—in Vietnam, Cambodia, Kosovo, Nigeria, the West Bank, Lebanon, the Sudan. He had embedded himself with American troops during the Gulf War, followed the Afghan rebellion against the Soviets, forging lifelong bonds with a legendary operative for the CIA. It was as though he were engaged in a worldwide game of dare—danger, tragedy, and war had always drawn Benjamin Blaine.

But equal to Ben’s hunger for experience was his iron will to record it with merciless clarity. “Whatever you do,” his father continued, “dream big, take risks, and work harder than whoever else is doing the same thing. Do you know why I’ve succeeded? Not because of talent—I’ve known writers more gifted than I am. But I was driven to wring every molecule out of whatever talent I possessed. Success is not something you aspire to—you have to grab it by the throat.

“There’s a story about Bobby Kennedy I’ve always loved. When Bobby was attorney general, he set out to jail the crook who ran the Teamsters, Jimmy Hoffa. One night Bobby worked on the Hoffa case until two a.m. Driving home, he passed the Teamsters Building, and saw the light on in Hoffa’s office. So he turned around and drove back to work.” Chuckling with fondness for the image, Ben concluded firmly, “There’ll be people better and smarter than you, Adam. There always are. Your strength must be to want it more, and let nothing get in the way. They called Robert Kennedy ruthless. But for a few months before he died, when I joined his campaign, I knew Bobby very well, and I can tell you he was most ruthless with himself. That’s how you should be.”

In this story, Adam knew, lay a key to his father’s psyche, part of which was his deep admiration—even love—for Robert Kennedy. But he could as easily have recounted his night on Chappaquiddick, fly-fishing in a bitter wind that drove his competitors off the beach. Ben held out until dawn, lips blue with cold, at last catching a forty-three-pound bass that set a world record. But the best example was his writing. No doubt Ben was ruthless there—Adam firmly believed he could bury his wife and sons in the morning, and write a chapter in the afternoon. No writer could steal the march on Benjamin Blaine.

Now, ten years later, Adam stared at his father’s final work.

Where is it written that you can do what I’ve done?

Reading on, Adam felt anew the full weight of those words. Ben could not stand the thought of anyone besting him—especially Adam, the one most like him, the one he had always feared. And now this.

On the page, the language revealed Ben’s deterioration. Now and again a lucid, vigorous passage evoked Benjamin Blaine as readers knew him. But the last pages were so poorly written that they resembled Cliffs Notes of the novel that might have satisfied his father. The man Adam had known would have ripped them up in disgust. Unless he had been so rushed or drunken or impaired that he had not paused to read the story of his own decline.

Adam forced himself to finish.

The story was set in the nineteenth century, its principal characters a family of lobstermen. Though incomplete, the narrative focused on the father’s fraught and ultimately tortured relationship with his younger son, the subject of its most piercing passages. At times, the son resembled Adam; at other times, Ben himself. There was similar confusion between Ben’s father as Adam understood him and the father Adam himself had known. Though the pages ended abruptly, marking his father’s death, Adam could grasp the tragedy ahead. By the end of this novel, he understood, one of these men, father or son, was meant to kill the other.

Part Two

The Provocateur

One

The next afternoon, Adam met Matthew Thomson at the trailhead of the Menemsha Hills nature preserve.

His father’s personal lawyer was much as he remembered him—a lean, puckish figure with wire-rimmed glasses, curly iron-gray hair, and a humorous play around the mouth and eyes that hinted at intelligence, irreverence, and an unvarnished view of humanity. The meeting place suggested Thomson’s love of outdoor exertions: in his youth, he had been a distance runner, and he retained the sinewy, stringy look of someone wedded to diet and exercise. As they shook hands, Thomson said, “Jesus, you look like him. I guess everyone tells you that.”

“Everyone does.”

Thomson looked at him more closely. “Left you a mess, didn’t he? Let’s walk a little and review the wreckage.”

There was something bracing, Adam found, about the lawyer’s disinclination toward expressions of sentiment. He recalled his father’s appraisal of Thomson: “a first-rate brain unfettered by illusions.” Together, they headed into the woods, the older man setting a brisk pace.

The trail was as Adam recalled it, a winding path through oaks and maples that admitted patches of sunlight, enveloping them in a hush punctuated by the cries of birds. “I’m not a religious man,” Thomson observed, “so this is the nearest I come to church, a place to reflect and appreciate what we’ve been given on this island.” He glanced sideways. “But you’re wanting to talk about what Ben took from your mother. I suppose Clarice mentioned that I was as shocked as she was.”

“She did. Which makes me wonder when you last met with him.”

“Concerning his estate? Not quite a year ago. We reviewed his will and decided that nothing needed to change. At that point, the estate—including the house—was worth about twelve million. Ample to provide for Clarice and preserve a chunk for Teddy when she goes.”

Hearing this made Adam wish anew that he could reach back in time, changing his father’s last year. “Did he say anything about another estate plan?”

“Zero. Nothing at all about Jenny Leigh—or this actress.”

“If the tabloids are right, she wasn’t here. Ms. Pacelli seems to work fast.”

A quizzical smile surfaced in Thomson’s eyes. “You’re in an odd position, it seems. Your father’s executor; your mother’s son.”

Adam breathed deeply, inhaling the crisp, tree-scented air. “‘Odd’ doesn’t cover it. That’s why I need your best legal advice. In confidence, of course.”

“All right. Your familial position may be perverse. But your legal position is simple. As executor, you’re obligated to carry out your father’s will, ensuring that your mother and brother get nothing at all. Which, psychologically, must be excruciating.”

“Only if I let it be.”

“So you may be resigning?”

“I’m considering my choices. As executor, what power do I have to investigate why he left everything to those two women?”

Thomson’s keen expression deepened. “You stand in his shoes as a matter of law. So you, and you alone, can waive the privilege that prevents Ben’s doctors or lawyers from revealing their dealings with him. Including on matters pertinent to this will—”

“In other words, my legal status is unique. Neither his lawyer nor his doctor can tell my mother anything. But I can make them talk to me.”

Thomson nodded. “As I expect you’ve grasped, should Clarice challenge the will, her attorney would very much want to know what Ben said to his new lawyer, and how his doctors think the brain cancer might have affected his powers of reason. But these professionals can only reveal that to you. And, as executor, your duties are in direct conflict with your mother’s interests. Your obligation is to work with Ben’s lawyer, not Clarice’s.”

Adam had the strange sensation of conducting a two-track conversation—the first track what Thomson could say, the second its unspoken implications. “But it’s also true, is it not, that I can gather information to determine whether and how my mother can break the will?”

“For what purpose?”

“To anticipate her strategy. So as to defend and enforce the will, of course.”

“Oh, of course,” Thomson said with quiet irony. “You’re simply being cautious. I suppose there’s nothing to stop you, as long as you’re not passing information to Clarice. But, of course, you know that. Just as you know that Ben’s doctor and lawyer, like me, can’t reveal to your mother what they told you.”

Adam smiled a little. “Just in case I visit him, what do you make of your successor?”

“Young Mr. Seeley?” Thomson said with real scorn. “Hungry, shrewd, prone to legal shortcuts, and fundamentally stupid.” He paused, taking in the trees and foliage that surrounded them. “When I’m in this sacred forest, I should try to be more charitable. Let’s just say that Ted Seeley underrated the difficulty of building a practice on this small island, and that your father showed his usual keen eye for human weakness. Unless hiring Seeley was Carla Pacelli’s idea. I’d be curious to know if she was in the room when Ben and Seeley came up with this abortion.”