Fall from Grace (6 page)

“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.”

That much was true. When Teddy, like Jack, had returned to the island, Clarice had pled with Ben to make the guesthouse Teddy’s home. The front room had become his place of work, with painting supplies, an easel, and several half-finished canvases awaiting the artist’s touch. Teddy had turned from the easel, his normally grave features displaying the engaging smile he reserved for those he cared for. Sitting on the sofa, Adam said simply, “I’m sorry about all this.”

Teddy gave him a look that mingled affection and directness. “Not your fault. I know you always felt like it was, somehow. But the only one to blame is him.”

Adam felt himself relax. Within their family, he realized, his relationship with Teddy was a respite, unalloyed by his own complex feelings for his mother and his loathing for the father he too closely resembled. “Did you have any idea he’d do this, Ted?”

Teddy’s face hardened. “Why would I? He’d written me off when he was still alive. He just decided to save the coup de grâce for after he was gone.”

“That could have been years from now,” Adam objected. “Dad was the last man who could imagine his own death. Why change his will so soon?”

In the light from above, focused on Teddy’s easel, Adam saw a grim smile play on his brother’s lips. “Don’t ask me to explain the workings of his mind. Whatever they were, he timed his departure quite badly. I’m destitute.”

“Literally?”

Teddy considered him, his left elbow propped on his knee, his face resting in his palm. “Why do you think I came back? Nostalgia? Once I got lymphoma, I hit the financial wall—I was too sick to work, my old paintings stopped selling, and I was all but uninsured. Then Brian died. In a few months, my life had become the train wreck Dad had always predicted. Mom wheedled the money from him for my treatment, then this ‘safe haven’ in which to recuperate—”

“But you’re all right now, true?”

Teddy twitched his shoulders. “As far as I know. Except for discovering that living with him wasn’t the worst part.”