Fall from Grace (3 page)

“Less hard than what came before.”

She nodded, briefly looking down. Then she stood beside Clarice.

The small group gathered around the grave. Looking again at his uncle and brother, Adam pondered the patterns within their family. In the last two generations, the birth order seemed to have repeated itself; Teddy, the firstborn, resembled Jack; Adam was the image of Jack’s younger brother. Now they were burying Ben beside the father he had despised, Nathaniel Blaine, just as Teddy and Adam loathed the man they were burying. Both older brothers, Jack and Teddy, had been overshadowed by the younger. But there was this difference, for which Adam was profoundly grateful—whereas Ben’s transcendence over Jack came with a streak of cruelty, Adam, observing that, had striven to be easier for Teddy to love. A generous spirit, Teddy had perceived this. As a brother, he was all that Adam could have asked.

Standing together with folded hands, Adam and Teddy listened as Father Merritt recited the commitment to the grave. “Almighty God, Father of mercies and giver of comfort, deal graciously, we pray, with all those who mourn: that, casting all their care on you, they may know the consolation of your love—”

When this was done, they lowered Ben into the earth. Clarice shoveled dirt on the casket, then Jack, Teddy, and Adam. He had wondered how this would feel. Now he felt nothing but the desire to be done with it.

As Adam put down the shovel, Clarice turned toward Jenny. “We’re going home,” she said. “Would you like to come?”

Jenny glanced at Adam, then replied with equal softness. “Adam is here now. This should be a time for family.”

Looking from Jenny to Adam, Clarice nodded. Without another word, Jenny hugged her and left.

From the road, Adam saw, the photographer from the Enquirer was shooting pictures of his father’s grave. As Adam turned to watch Jenny departing, Teddy placed a hand on his shoulder. “Just as well,” he murmured. “We’ve got some things to tell you, and Jenny’s the least of it.”

Three

For all of Adam’s life, the Blaines had lived in a sprawling white frame house, set in a grassy clearing amid ten wooded acres. Built in the 1850s, it was sheltered by trees from the winds off the Atlantic, though clear-cutting had created an opening through which one could view the cliff overlooking the water. In the 1940s, a wealthy couple from Boston, Clarice’s parents, had bought this as their summer home; long before Adam and Teddy had played hide-and-seek in the woods and swum off the rocky beach below, Clarice had spent the best months of her childhood in this house. As with many homes of this vintage, the porch that looked out at woods and ocean had been more generous than the rooms, a reminder that what was most compelling about the Vineyard was outdoors. Adam could still remember the summer evenings when his mother and father, like Clarice’s, would sit on the porch until nightfall, talking or just listening to the crickets.

But like everything he touched, Ben had left his mark on the house of Clarice’s youth. Discontented with cramped space, he had knocked down walls and added a study that his wife and sons entered by invitation only. Now the living room was large and open, filled with comfortable furniture, sumptuous Asian rugs, and mementos of Ben’s travels—Asian vases, African masks, scrolls in Arabic and Hebrew, and Middle Eastern antiques acquired by dubious means. On the rough-hewn dining room table was the silver Herreshoff Cup, possessed for a season by the winner of the summer sailing competition, which Ben had claimed again in his sixty-fourth year. The home was so redolent of his father’s life that Adam, entering for the first time in years, half-expected to see the man they had just buried drinking whisky in his brown leather chair.

Instead, his family sat in a room that, despite its many appointments, felt empty. Shaking off this moment of strangeness, Adam poured himself a scotch and took deeper stock of the survivors. Whenever he could, he had met them off-island, so he did not gauge them by the ten-year span of his self-imposed exile. But all three had changed since Adam had seen them last.

His mother looked smaller and more worn, her beauty now the faded handsomeness of a woman in her sixties. Though she still carried herself with an air of serenity and self-possession, a second persona seemed to peer out from behind her cornflower-blue eyes, more tentative and wounded. In Adam’s mind, she had always been the master of appearances—her parents had taught her well, and she had polished her skills in the larger world as Ben Blaine’s lovely and forbearing wife, hiding the pain of her marriage and, with that, its loneliness. Clarice Blaine, her son thought sadly, was perhaps the nicest person no one really knew.

Lean and angular, Teddy was an amalgam, with his mother’s air of refinement, Jack’s sensitive brown eyes, and a forelock of Ben’s unruly black hair falling over his pale forehead. But his essence was uniquely Teddy—the artistic talent, the ironic smile with humor to match, a cover for his own hurt. The disease that had driven him back to the island, non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, had left him frailer and, it seemed to Adam, out of place. It was hard to grow up gay on Martha’s Vineyard; even for adults, there was not much cushion for that among the natives. But it was worse to return to Ben’s scorn and indifference. Nothing Teddy accomplished could change his father’s verdict: where Adam saw a gifted painter, Ben had seen a feckless dreamer. In a just world, Adam thought, Jack would have been Teddy’s father.

Jack, too, had been an artist—a sculptor. Faltering in his chosen path, he had become a woodworker, sublimating whatever frustrations he might feel in an embrace of the island’s natural world. But the fraternal pattern persisted—when Jack chose to compete with Ben, as he had for years of summer sailing, far more often than not Ben won. Now Ben was dead, and Jack looked hollowed out and weary. Perhaps the saddest part of this moment for Adam was that, for all of their resentments, Ben Blaine had been the dominant figure in the lives of these three people, and in his own.

Following Adam’s lead, Teddy poured a tumbler of scotch for his mother, another for himself, but none for Jack. In response to Adam’s querying look, his uncle said simply, “I’ve stopped. It was getting me through too many winter nights.”

The note of regret in Jack’s voice underscored the reticence in the room. Adam looked at the three of them, Clarice sitting beside Jack on the couch, Teddy in an antique chair. Each seemed grim and subdued, as if they had much to say and no easy place to begin. Remembering Teddy’s words at the grave site, Adam said to his brother, “The eulogy got my attention. What ‘difficult year’ are we talking about? Every year with our father was difficult.”

Teddy glanced at their mother. “This one was harder,” she said in a brittle voice. “Especially the last four months.”

“How so?”

The trace of melancholy in her eyes did not match the asperity of her tone. “He was drinking heavily—much more than when you knew him. His behavior became very erratic, with frequent mood changes and outbursts of temper, lapses where he couldn’t find the word he wanted.” She shook her head. “Some of this isn’t easy to describe. But there were moments when I remembered my father in the first stages of dementia.”

“That seems odd for a healthy man in his midsixties.” Adam pointed at the silver trophy. “Last August, he was fit enough to snare that cup after a two-month racing season. The drunken or demented couldn’t do that.”

A note of reproof entered Clarice’s voice. “You weren’t here, Adam. By December, your father was a different man. For me, perhaps the oddest thing was that his writing habits completely changed. You remember how disciplined he was.”

“Sure. At his desk by seven—even hungover or sick as a dog—writing and rewriting until the cocktail hour. ‘Writers should have workdays,’ he used to say, ‘like bureaucrats or bankers.’”

“He lost that,” his mother said wearily. “His writing became frenzied, even nocturnal. I’d find him at his computer past midnight, a drink on his desk. He’d never written at night, or used alcohol as a spur.”

Another remark of his father’s sprung to Adam’s mind: “This myth of drunken writers is romantic bullshit—all drinking ever got them was vomit on the page.” It was disconcerting how much about his father came back to him now.

“None of this makes sense to me,” Adam said at length. “Including his death. He must have walked a thousand times to that promontory, but never that close to the edge. He could have gone there blindfolded and not fallen off the cliff.”

“Well, he did,” Jack said flatly. “The next morning I found him on the rocks below in a pool of dried blood, his skull crushed.”

Adam tried to envision this. “Has there been an autopsy?”

“In Boston. But we don’t know the results yet. The certificate of death we needed to bury him listed the cause of death as ‘Pending.’” Jack’s tone became sarcastic. “If it were me, I’d have written ‘Fell ninety feet before he hit a rock headfirst.’ One look at him resolved all doubt.”

Something was very wrong, Adam knew. Facing Teddy, he asked, “Have the police paid you a visit?”

His brother frowned. “Yup.”

“About what?”

“It was pretty much the same questions for all of us. When we last saw him. What he was wearing. What we were doing when Dad must have taken his swan dive. If anyone was with us.” Briefly Teddy looked at the others—Clarice with her brow knit, Jack watching Adam’s face. “One thing they asked me is if I noticed a button missing on his shirt.”

“Who was doing the asking—the locals or the state police?”

“The staties. The lead guy was a Sergeant Sean Mallory.”

“Did they take anything?”

Biting his lip, Teddy nodded. “The clothes and shoes we were wearing that night. Also samples of our DNA.”

“They like to do that in a homicide investigation,” Adam replied softly. “I remember it well from when I interned at the Manhattan DA’s office. Please tell me you have lawyers.”

The worry deepened in his mother’s eyes. In a voice both vulnerable and defensive she said, “Why would we? None of us knows what happened to him.”

“Come off it, Mom. These folks think someone gave Dad a shove—maybe one of you. At least they haven’t ruled it out. Were any of you with someone else that night?”

Jack spread his hands. “Turns out all of us were alone. I was at home, watching the Red Sox game.”

Adam looked at Teddy. “In my innocence,” his brother replied, “I was painting another unsalable landscape.”

“And I was reading,” Clarice said tautly.

Adam looked at her, obviously shaken now, her tenuous mask of calm stripped away by his questions. He had begun to understand the agonizing delicacy of the eulogy, her need to navigate the land mines of Ben’s death. A wave of sympathy overcame him—instead of a certain peace, Ben’s death had brought her fresh anguish. More gently, he asked, “Is George Hanley still the local DA?”

“Yes.” Clarice shook her head, as if she felt her world slipping away. “George has been polite, but very guarded. All he’ll say is that this is a police matter.”

Adam looked from one to the other. “Before my legal education was aborted, I picked up some rudiments here and there. I know this was a shock, and that you’ve had to deal with quite a lot in very little time. But each of you needs to see a lawyer before talking to Sergeant Mallory again.”

No one else spoke. Sitting back, Adam tried to read their expressions. Then he said, “I sense a very large elephant in the room, something else waiting to be said. At the church, I was hassled by a reporter from the Enquirer, of all places. Whatever else, my father wasn’t Michael Jackson. I can’t imagine that rag’s demographic gives a damn that he tumbled off a cliff.”

His mother turned away, face pinched. “The great man left a will,” Teddy said in a monotone. “A new one.”

Impassive, Adam waited. Teddy inhaled, then continued, “He disinherited Mom and me. The house, and most of Dad’s estate, goes to Carla Pacelli.”

Stunned, Adam tried to take this in. “The actress?”

“The very one. Catnip for people whose lips move when they read.”

Adam felt comprehension war with disbelief. “What on earth does a TV star have to do with Dad? The last I heard of her, she was coming out of rehab, her series canceled, her finances trashed, and her career in ashes.”

Clarice still looked down, a study in mute humiliation. “As you’ll remember,” Teddy responded, “every summer the Hollywood contingent graces us with their presence. Supposedly, this particular second-tier talent came to heal herself. Instead, she took refuge in the guesthouse at the Dane place, a convenient five-minute walk from here, then she found salvation in the arms of the Vineyard’s resident celebrity. Now she’s about to become the owner of this house, and everything that’s in it.”

Turning to Clarice, Adam said, “How can that be, Mom? I thought this house was yours.”

With effort, his mother looked up at him, a damp sheen in her eyes. “It would have been. But when my father went bankrupt, Ben bought it. As a favor to me, I thought.”

“Who knew?” Teddy remarked. “All these years, bro, we lived here at his sufferance.”

At once, Adam grasped the depth of his mother’s grief and betrayal. At the moment of her husband’s death, he had stripped her of everything—her past and her future. If nothing mattered to his father but his own desires, if years of loyalty and common enterprise were trifles to him, there was no way Clarice could compete with a woman barely older than Adam—an actress who, a mere two years ago, had been a stunning beauty, her aura so electric that she seemed to pop off the screen. The female embodiment of Ben Blaine’s self-concept, the ultimate mirror of his ego.

In a rough voice, Adam said, “Long ago I found out that my father was a monster of selfishness. But this suggests I thought too well of him.” Stopping himself, he finished quietly, “You don’t deserve this, Mom.”

Jack glanced at Clarice, his lined face graven with helplessness and frustration. Fighting back his anger, Adam realized that the will helped explain the interest of the state police in Ben’s wife and oldest son, his victims. If given a second chance, Adam would have killed his father without remorse. “Who knew about this will?” he asked.