Fall from Grace (18 page)

“‘Fear,’” Adam repeated. “Of what?”

“The black hole at his core.” Glazer gathered his thoughts. “At the risk of sounding portentous, I’d say that Ben suffered from a poverty of spirit. Only the admiration of others could slake his hunger. But there was never enough. So he kept reaching for the next achievement—a woman, a race, the accolades of fans or critics—and whoever stood in his way got hurt. Beginning with your uncle Jack.”

The summary was so concise, yet so devastating, that it left Adam speechless with surprise. At length, he said, “Sounds like you gave him a great deal of thought.”

“Oh, I did. Your father was an extremely interesting study, as well as a man to be wary of.” Glazer sat back in his rocking chair. “How much do you know about his childhood?”

“Only what he told me, plus a few scraps from Mom. The father he described was barely human—coarse, brutal, and drunk—and his mother seemed like a shadow.”

Glazer nodded. “That may be more accurate than you know. My understanding is that Nathaniel Blaine was a limited man who seethed with resentments, and was given to violent rages that reduced his wife to a timorous cipher. Both were alcoholics, so there was no safe place for either boy. Since then, I think, everyone else has paid for the damage they did Ben in childhood.”

Adam shook his head, less in demurral than confusion. “I was too close to him, Charlie. How did that boy become the father I knew?”

Glazer nodded. “A good question. No one on earth is Adam or Eve—our parents had parents, too. So here’s how Ben lays out for a psychiatrist. As a child, he had no love from either parent: his father beat him, and his mother couldn’t protect him. That led to a terrible narcissistic injury—Ben’s lifetime quest to heal the wounds to his own sense of manhood.” Smiling, Glazer stopped himself abruptly. “Am I making sense, or does this sound like total bullshit?”

Adam stared at the deck, not answering. “Hardly,” he said at length. “In fact, you just surfaced a memory. My father and me, just the two of us, standing on the promontory after his own dad’s funeral.”

Glazer eyed him curiously. “How old were you then, Adam?”

“Not yet ten, I think. But suddenly I remember it all too well.”

His father stared moodily at the water, falling into a silence that Adam feared to break.

“It’s so strange,” Ben said at last. “The death of a father is a profound thing, I’m finding, no matter how great a sonofabitch he was. I don’t know why I should feel like this. It’s pathetic to be the slave of archetypes.”

His father’s voice was low and soft, as though he were speaking to himself. Curious, Adam asked, “How come we never saw him?”

“Because I could never forget who he was.” For a moment, Ben studied him. “Be grateful I’m your father, Adam. Mine used to get drunk and slap us around, then beat up my mother for sport. The only way I survived was to make myself tougher than he was.”

“What did you do?”

“Read book after book on boxing. Then I hung up a heavy bag in a neighbor’s barn and tore into it every day after school. Not to let the anger out, but to train it.” Ben turned to his son again. “I punished that bag until the stuffing bled through the canvas. A sign from God, I thought.” Adam heard Ben’s reflective tone transmute to something harder. “That night, at dinner, my father slaps my mother—there’s something about the stew he doesn’t like. She is cowering in a corner with that same look of incomprehension, a small animal petrified of a big one.

“I get up from the table and grab him by the wrist. ‘You’re a pussy,’ I tell him. ‘Good only for drinking and beating up women and small boys. You’re just smart enough to know I’ve gotten way too big for that. But too stupid to know what that means.’”

Listening, Adam felt his heart race. “The bastard’s eyes get big,” his father continued. “Suddenly, he takes a swing at me. I duck, like I’ve taught myself, and Jack tries to step between us. ‘Get out of my way,’ I bark at him, ‘or you’ll come next.’” Ben’s speech quickened. “Jack backs up a step. Before my father can move I pivot sideways and hit him in the gut with everything I’ve got. He doubles over, groaning. As he struggles to look up at me, I break his nose with a right cross.” Ben’s voice was shaking now. “His blood spurts on the floor. I’m breathing hard, years of hatred welling up. ‘Remember hitting me?’ I manage to say, and send a left to his mouth that knocks out most of his front teeth.

“My father starts blubbering, and he looks like Halloween. I pull him up by the throat and press my thumbs on his larynx till his eyes bulge. ‘I run this house now,’ I tell him. ‘You just live here. Hit her again, and I’ll cut your balls off with a butter knife.’”

As Adam watched him, frightened, Ben’s barrel chest shuddered like a bellows. Tears began running down his face. “He’s dead now,” he said in a choked voice. “Thank God it won’t be like that for us.”

Not knowing what to do, Adam took his father’s hand and felt Ben squeeze his in return.

Finishing, Adam felt the dampness in his eyes, a grief too deep and complex to express. For a time, Glazer let him be, scanning the horizon. “Do you remember what you felt, Adam?”

“Terrified,” Adam murmured. “Of both men in the story, the father and the son. And of being like either one.”

Glazer nodded. “That makes sense, and not just because they fought. The forgotten person in that scene is the mother—whose passivity helped make Ben who he became. Among other things, a serial pursuer of women, scarred by neglect from the first woman in his life.”

“Too many parallels,” Adam told Glazer. “My father never beat us—or, to my knowledge, her. But all of us lived in his shadow. My mother deferred to him, and couldn’t protect us from the psychic damage he inflicted. Like Jack, my brother stood aside. And, like Ben, I broke with my own father.”

The look in Glazer’s eyes combined compassion and deep interest. “You think you’re too much like him, is that it?”

“That’s all I ever heard,” Adam said in a low voice. “Not just to look at, but to be with.”

“Then bear with me for another moment. Because the father you knew was his own singular invention. No doubt you’ve heard of narcissistic personality disorder.”

Adam searched his memory. “As I recall, it involves an insatiable need for attention and admiration. Plus a tendency to see others in terms of those needs.”

Glazer nodded. “At the positive end, you find someone like John F. Kennedy, a high-functioning leader who’s rewarded for his gifts. Or you get someone more malignant, seeking dominance by subjugating or destroying others—taking their jobs, stealing their women. Does that sound much like you to you?”

“Not as I imagine myself. Though I’d be the last to know, wouldn’t I?”

“You’re very much like him, it’s true. But the person you’re most likely to damage is yourself. Your father’s efforts were far more comprehensive. Regrettably for Clarice, however, narcissistic personality disorder does not disqualify someone from executing a valid will.” Glazer paused, reflecting. “What I can’t know is how the course of his disease, and the fear of imminent death, affected your father’s mental state. Or how Carla Pacelli fits into the puzzle.”

“Really?” Adam said tartly. “Everyone else tells me it’s obvious. My mother is sixty-five. Carla Pacelli is half that age, and known for her remarkable face and figure. Seems like enough for Dad, they tell me.”

Glazer’s face was skeptical. “But why leave her all his money? Ben was far too conscious of how the world saw him to play the besotted old fool.” Glazer looked at Adam intently. “Granted, sleeping with Carla Pacelli fit Ben’s need to prove his own superiority. But psychologically, his hunger for transcendence involved concealing his ‘true self’—the wounded son—behind a ‘fake self’ who was omnipotent, omniscient, and invulnerable. He needed to risk death because he feared it so much. But the last thing he’d do is risk appearing to be controlled by a younger woman—even this one. That’s why I find Ben’s relationship with Carla so completely enigmatic. As, I sense, do you.”

“True enough,” Adam conceded.

“I don’t know this woman at all,” Glazer cautioned. “But you don’t either. So don’t respond to stereotypes, no matter how tempting. She may be more complicated than you think.”

Adam gave him a dubious look. “I’ll hold the thought.”

Glazer read his expression. “Sorry I can’t be more help. But while I’ve got you here—for the first time in a decade, at that—there’s one more subject worth discussing further.”

“Which is?”

“Your own family, Adam. Starting with you and Ben.”

Ten

The two men leaned on the railing, the blue panorama of Menemsha Pond before them, the images of a long-ago racing season ghosts in Adam’s mind. “To escape his inner self,” Glazer observed, “Ben needed to write bestsellers, face down danger, and eviscerate anyone he saw as a rival. That came to include you, didn’t it?”

Adam did not answer. “And women?” he asked. “What were they to him?”

“Mirrors in which he saw himself—or the man he wished to see. Until Pacelli, and with the partial exception of your mother, I read him as the classic sexual narcissist: insatiable, emotionally cool, and incapable of love.” He glanced at Adam. “I remember a cocktail party one summer, watching him charm my college-age daughter—hopefully just for sport. I wasn’t amused: it was one thing to enjoy Ben as the compelling and often generous figure I’d known well since we were young, and another to want him near the daughter I loved dearly. So I took her aside, told her Ben was the most dangerous man on the island, and spelled out why. I don’t think she ever spoke to him again.”

There was no humor in Glazer’s eyes or voice. Quietly, Adam asked, “Was he capable of sexual violence?”

Glazer gave him a dubious look. “I never heard that he was, and it runs contrary to his self-image. But if some woman challenged his vanity? Wrong time, too much to drink, and who knows. Do you have something in mind?”

“No.” Adam paused. “I keep thinking of my mother. What kept that going? I wonder—at least until Carla Pacelli.”

Glazer’s gaze at him was ruminating. “Growing up, it must have seemed mysterious to you. But in certain ways they were a match—for reasons functional and dysfunctional. Your mother was lovely, aristocratic, socially skilled, and, beneath the surface, deeply dependent. From what I could grasp, her parents raised her to be an asset, rather than an independent being. Damaging to her; perfect for Ben. She became a badge of honor for a young man who started with nothing but ego.” Glazer paused, amending his remarks. “They did have things in common. Both were articulate, smart, and charming. Your mother was made for the outdoors, as was he. She could ride or swim or play tennis with the best of them.”

Adam nodded. “Sometimes they seemed most compatible in motion. When they were still, they had to face each other. Or, in my mother’s case, work overtime to avoid facing unpleasant truths: the latest woman, the indifference with which he sometimes treated her. I always wondered what she got from being with him.”

“That’s not hard,” Glazer said crisply. “In his own way Ben had need of her. In return she got Benjamin Blaine, the preeminent American writer—a high achiever, unlike her father, with all the access and cachet she’d been accustomed to since birth. I always sensed her comfort in that amused him.”

Adam smiled without humor. “It did. I remember her lobbying to attend an annual Fourth of July party given by some guy who’d call the Boston Globe to list the celebrities attending. It was part of the Vineyard social season, she told him—everyone they knew would be there. ‘Society,’ he retorted, ‘was invented by people with no actual talent. Without ornaments like us to get their names in the paper, and the lemmings who envy them for it, they’d shrivel up like salted slugs.’”

Glazer laughed aloud. “That’s so like Ben—I can even hear his tone of voice. How did your mother react?”

“Not well. All the more so because his penchant for publicly speaking unpleasant truths ran so contrary to her nature. She had opinions for sure—some caustic—but few outside the family ever heard them!”

“That’s one aspect of your mother, Adam. But she also survives by avoiding dark nights of the soul. If a fact was painful, she would do her damnedest to repress it. For the sake of others, I’m sure, but also her own.”

“But now she can’t,” Adam shot back with sudden anger. “In death, my father set out to crack her facade in the cruelest and most public way, turning forty years to ashes. It’s more than callous—it’s an act of hatred meant to ruin another human being, poisonous and inexplicable. It’s like he set out to destroy all of us, and she was the last one standing. I used to think there was nothing else he could do to me. But I was wrong. Watching her now is painful beyond words.”

“And so you mean to fix that for her.”

“Who else will?” Adam turned to him. “There’s also Teddy. He got the shaft from the beginning. Not only did my father prefer me, but I think my mother did, too. And now Teddy’s got nothing because my father left her nothing. I’m the only one who escaped.”

“If so,” Glazer replied, “it’s for reasons embedded in your family. In her way Clarice loved your father deeply; Ben loved his idea of himself. And there you were. The one who looked like him; the great athlete; the young man who attracted women easily. In short, the one who reflected the Benjamin Blaine he needed others to believe in. But a gay son? Never. So he spat out Teddy like a piece of bone. Cutting him off was Ben’s final rejection.”

Silent, Adam watched a trim sailboat skitter across the surface of the pond. At length, he said, “If the purpose of this will was to destroy his wife and son, maybe Pacelli was just a vehicle. Is that what you’re suggesting?”

A corner of Glazer’s mouth pinched in a dubious expression. “I’m not sure. The idea of Carla Pacelli as Ben’s weapon makes more sense to me than imagining Ben as hers. But as hard as this is to envision, suppose he saw Carla as his equal? If his intention was simply to ruin your mom and Teddy, he could have found a hundred other ways. Why this woman, and why now?”

“Maybe he was afraid of dying,” Adam rejoined sharply, “and she was smart enough to exploit that. Even ruthless enough to see the benefits of a long fall off a cliff.”