Fall from Grace (16 page)

Hunched on his stool, Teddy had turned pale. “How did you learn all this?”

“That’s my concern. I’ve got the name of a lawyer, and you damn well need to hire him.”

“With whose money?”

“Mine, for now. No matter how this mess turns out, one of us will have some.” Adam lowered his voice. “You’re my brother, Ted. I don’t know what our mother knows, but she won’t hear this from me. For everyone’s sake, don’t tell her anything more than she knows already. If it helps, you can pretend she’s me.”

Teddy stared at him. “What’s happened to you, Adam?”

“Life.”

Teddy shook his head. “‘Life’ is what you used to be full of—our father’s energy, our mother’s core of optimism. Now you’re watchful, and cold as ice. So you tell me something for a change. What the fuck is it that you do when you’re not with us?”

Even while fearing for himself, Adam saw, Teddy also feared for him—why he seemed so different, and what might happen to him now. Expelling a breath, he said, “All right, Ted—the truth, between brothers. It’s true I work for Agracon. It’s also true that I ask farmers who grow poppies for the Taliban to grow something else. What I’ve lied about is that my work isn’t dangerous. It could get me killed or kidnapped in a heartbeat. Knowing that will change you quick enough.

“‘Watchful’? You bet. The Afghans suspect any American—no matter how well intended—of being a spy. That means the friendly tribesman you meet may be setting you up for decapitation. I like my head right where it is. So I take nothing on faith, and believe nothing and no one completely. In that sense, our father trained me well. As for ‘cold,’” Adam finished evenly, “in my work that’s a synonym for ‘nerveless.’ To survive, you have to divorce your brain from your emotions. So if you don’t like who I’ve become, too bad.”

To Adam’s surprise, tears sprung to Teddy’s eyes. “That’s not what I’m saying, you fucking moron. I’m afraid for you.”

Adam touched the bridge of his nose. “That makes two of us, Teddy.”

“So don’t go back there, for chrissakes.”

“I have to,” Adam responded. “Survive for six more months, and I’m out. I plan on leaving upright. Good enough?”

Slowly, Teddy nodded.

Adam looked him in the face. “There’s also something about an insurance policy. Whatever it is, tell your lawyer.”

Teddy’s eyes went blank, and then he nodded. “I promise I’ll call him, Adam. All you have to promise in return is to get out of Afghanistan alive.”

“Don’t ask for much, do you?”

“Seems like a lot to me,” Teddy replied. “Six months from now, I want to be sitting in Mom’s house, looking at you across the dinner table. That’ll mean that we’ve all survived him.”

There was nothing more for Adam to say.

That night he awakened from his nightmare, sweating, still seeing his father’s face on his shattered body. He could not escape this, Adam realized, nor did he believe that he could keep his promise to Teddy. All that mattered to him now was that Teddy keep his.

Seven

At dawn, Adam took the first Cape Air flight to Boston, and met Dr. Lee Zell for coffee at the bar of the Taj hotel.

The two men sat at a table by the window. Across Arlington Street, students and tourists and nannies with strollers wandered through the Public Garden or sat beneath willow trees enjoying the flowers, the lush green grass, the swan boats on the pond. But the specialist Ben’s doctor had referred him to seemed edgy. Though esteemed as a neurosurgeon, Zell looked younger than Adam expected, with thinning brown hair and dark liquid eyes that conveyed a nameless discomfort with the man across the table—perhaps, in part, because he so deeply resembled the doctor’s now-dead patient. Abruptly, Zell said, “I know you’re entitled to ask about your dad’s treatment. But I’m not anxious to be sued.”

“I’m not here for that,” Adam said flatly.

“Still, let’s be direct. Given that he’s disinherited your mother, her quickest route to financial recovery is a wrongful death suit against his doctors—”

“Wasn’t he a dead man?” Adam interrupted. “No matter what you did?”

“I believe so, yes.”

“Then you can relax, Doctor—dead men lack earning potential. My father’s demise didn’t prevent him from writing another ten novels, or even one. Just how long did he have?”

Zell bit his lip. “With the most sophisticated treatment,” he said slowly, “thirteen months or so. But that’s not the path your father chose.”

This surprised Adam. He sipped his coffee, then said, “I’m chiefly interested in how the disease affected his cognition and mental acuity—”

“Can I ask why?”

“As executor, I’m charged with carrying out his wishes. That will is being contested—by my mother, as it happens. I’m obligated to find out why he concealed his cancer, behaved bizarrely, and left his estate to a woman he’d just met.”

Zell seemed to relax a little, and his expression changed from wariness to regret. “I saw him only twice—the first time six months ago, the second two weeks later. He’d complained to his doctor on Martha’s Vineyard about migraine headaches that impaired his ability to write. So I checked his reflexes, which were normal, and determined that his physical condition was that of a man twenty years younger.” Zell smiled a little. “Your father said he wasn’t interested in dying. So he’d worked like hell to keep himself vital.”

Adam could imagine this; even in his forties, his father could hear death’s footsteps. The thing about dying, he told Adam once, is that there’s no future in it. I mean to live a crowded hour until I drop. Softly, Adam said, “Death terrified him.”

Zell nodded. “I saw that after I reviewed the MRI on his brain and called him in again.” The doctor paused, recalling the moment. “I told him he had a brain tumor. Your father sat back, closing his eyes. Then he said, ‘This is the end for me, isn’t it?’

“I conceded that it might be, but that the next step was to drill a hole in his skull and remove a sample of brain tissue. That would tell us whether, as seemed likely, the tumor was malignant. Then we could decide what to do.”

Looking out at the brightness of a summer morning, Adam imagined his father in this doctor’s office, realizing that the world outside—his life of joys and conquests, adventures and adulation—could be taken from him by an enemy lodged within the brain that made him who he was. “How did he react?”

Zell paused again, searching for words. “The haunted look seemed to vanish. Then he said, ‘I can’t die.’ As though the thought of dying was foreign to him, and he refused to allow it.”

“You describe my father as I knew him,” Adam observed. “Some people assess the facts confronting them and adjust their behavior accordingly. My father focused on what he wanted and willed it to be so.”

Zell stirred more sugar in his coffee, his long, graceful fingers holding the stirrer as though it were a scalpel. “I know. I damn near had to challenge his manhood to make him sit and listen to his alternatives.”

“Which were?”

“One was radiation to shrink the tumor. That could at least relieve the symptoms.” Zell looked up at Adam. “But radiation would be palliative, not curative, and could also dull cognition. And no doctor would prescribe radiation until there was a biopsy.”

“He never had one, did he?”

“No,” Zell answered flatly. “He said there was no way anyone was drilling a hole in his head. He didn’t want to walk into a room, he said, and have people seeing a dead man—”

“Without treatment, they’d be seeing one quick enough.”

“Maybe so, but on your father’s terms. That’s why he ruled out the second alternative—surgery followed by radiation. One risk of surgery is that it might impair vision, impacting his ability to write. Worse, it could inflict serious damage on his cognition, comprehension, and speech. Worst of all, it could cause strokes or excessive bleeding, both potentially fatal. And the follow-up treatment—chemotherapy—could impair his mental and physical functioning. ‘In other words,’ your father interrupted, ‘you could gain me three months as a vegetable who can’t find his own limp dick. Unless you kill me outright.’”

Despite himself, Adam laughed briefly. “I feel for you, Doctor. I can see this all too well.”

Zell nodded. “The atmosphere between us was visceral. This man lived through his mind and body, and I was trying to steal them both. Then he said, ‘There’s a woman, Doctor. So tell me this—if you buy me a few more months by invading my brain with knives and chemistry, will I be the man I’ve been?’”

Adam tried to grasp what had terrified his father more: struggling to comprehend his world—or, fully cognizant, to look at Carla Pacelli knowing that he could never have her again. “Death may have no future,” he said, “but you forced him to imagine a living hell.”

“By his lights, yes. I told him that sexual function would likely be over. He looked me in the face and said, ‘It will be over when I’m dead.’ As though we were enemies, and I was bent on stripping him of every scrap of his being.”

“So he decided against treatment.”

Zell’s gaze at his coffee was thoughtful. “No. Instead we entered into a negotiation over the nature and extent of your father’s remaining time on earth. At length, we decided on oral chemotherapy. Prednisone and Temador.”

“Why that?”

“Because it might bring him a couple more months while being virtually undetectable—no hair loss, no hole in the skull, and, most important, no loss of sexual potency. In turn, I made him sign a letter stating that he was rejecting all other treatment options with full knowledge of the consequences.”

Reaching into his sport coat, Zell took out a copy of the letter and laid it on the table. Adam stared down at the signature that had graced countless books—“Benjamin Blaine.” The bold letters, slanting forward, bespoke vigor and aggression, as distinctive as his father’s face in profile. For an instant, Adam saw him piloting his sailboat, as clear as though it were yesterday. “Were there side effects?” he asked.

“A few. A potential drop in white blood cells, weakening the immune system. They also would have caused him to bruise more easily—not to the touch, but if he bumped into something or someone.”

At once, Adam thought of the pathology report George Hanley refused to give him. “So if someone struck him, or gripped him with any kind of force, bruises would reflect that?”

The look Zell gave him was curious. “I’d think so, yes.”

“How long did you expect him to live?”

“At a guess? About as long as he did live, deteriorating steadily toward the end. All of which I told him.”

“Then let me ask you a critical question. In discussing his refusal to seek more aggressive treatment, did my father seem rational to you?”

Zell folded his hands in front of him, gazing at a slice of morning sunlight that had appeared on the corner of the table. “It’s not the course I’d take, but I can’t say that it’s flat crazy. He wanted to be the man he was for as long as he could. ‘If I get to the point where I’m not,’ he told me, ‘I’ll know what to do.’”

Surprised again, Adam asked, “Suicide?”

“He wasn’t explicit. But that was implied, I thought.”

Adam tried to imagine his father, powers flagging, deciding to end his life in his favorite place and on his favorite day, the summer solstice. Then he gazed at the date of the letter, a little over five months before. “By the end, how would you expect this disease to affect him?”

“There are a variety of possibilities. Worsening headaches. Problems speaking or remembering words. Visual deficits. Impaired coordination—”

“Could it have caused him to fall off that cliff?”

“Might have. His balance could have been compromised. He might have had a seizure, or blacked out. He could even have had a stroke.”

“My mother says he’d stumble, or forget words. She thought it was drinking.”

“Maybe,” Zell allowed. “But just as likely it was the tumor spreading. Did your mother mention mood changes?”

“Yes. That he was much more volatile and erratic.”

“No surprise. As it grew, the tumor could affect areas of the brain that govern reasoning, self-control, and comprehension.”

Adam looked Zell in the face. “And the capacity to execute a will?”

“It could,” Zell said, with obvious reluctance. “But a medical opinion requires ‘a reasonable degree of medical certainty.’ Without having seen him further, all I’d have is the MRI and, eventually, the pathologist’s report. Only a charlatan would opine on his mental fitness to execute a valid will.”

Adam felt discouraged and angry at once. “There’s an irony here, Doctor. It seems likely that, by refusing treatment, my father increased the likelihood of mental impairment. Even as he made it impossible for you to ascertain that.”

Zell gave him a sympathetic look. “I understand. For my own part, having Benjamin Blaine as a patient was one of the most disheartening aspects of my career. I’m confronted with this vigorous, talented man, and all my training tells me I could extend his life, and its quality. But he focused on the possible effects of treatment, not the inevitable effects of the disease. And, of course, on secrecy.”

“How so?”

“One of his imperatives was that I tell his doctor nothing. Your father shared Dr. Gertz with your mother, he told me, and he didn’t want to burden Gertz with keeping secrets. He said he’d tell her when it was right.”

“He never did,” Adam said bluntly. “Instead, he stole her future.”

Zell tilted his head. “I have to wonder if he told Carla Pacelli. Of all people, she might be the last person he’d want to see him as a dying man.”

Adam considered this possibility, trying to fit it into the puzzle of Carla’s involvement in the will. “Then let me ask you something else,” he said. “Was my father as you perceived him capable of ending his own life?”

Zell gave an incredulous smile. “You tell me.”

“That would be difficult,” Adam replied. “I hadn’t seen or spoken to him in a decade. To borrow a phrase, having Benjamin Blaine as a father was one of the most disheartening aspects of my life.”

Zell stared at him. “As an amateur psychologist,” he said at length, “I think your father was capable of anything he set his mind to. If he thought living a day longer would diminish how people saw him, he might have thrown himself off a cliff.” He paused. “Your father had an elemental force, and palpable strength of will. One thing I’m pretty sure of is that I’d never want to be in his way.”