Fall from Grace (27 page)

Teddy flushed. “So you think I killed him?”

“I don’t give a damn. You’ve paid too big a price for him already.”

A brief, reflexive tremor ran through Teddy’s frame. “And if I tell you what happened?”

“It never leaves this room.”

“It can’t,” Teddy said with sudden force. “This involves more than me. You’ll have to be every bit the actor I’ve come to think you are.”

Adam felt a stab of dread, a sense of coming closer to a reckoning with the truth. “Go ahead.”

Teddy bent forward on the stool, hands folded in his lap, then said in a husky voice, “We didn’t tell the truth—not all of it. Mom called me that night, close to frantic. Dad was drunk and rambling, she said, not really making sense. But the essence was that he was leaving her for Carla Pacelli.”

Adam felt the jolt of revelation run through him: first that his mother and brother had lied to him and to the police, then that—at least on this point—Carla Pacelli had told the truth. “Why didn’t you tell that to the police?”

“Because I knew that Mother hadn’t. She told me she was afraid that could make his death look different from what it was—an accident.”

Adam tried to envision Clarice suggesting this, further complicating his sense of who she was. Quietly, he asked, “Because she believed that? Or because that’s what she needed other people to believe?”

Teddy rubbed his temples. “I can’t be sure. See, I concealed the truth from her as well. She still doesn’t know that I went to the promontory.”

“This family certainly has a gift for candor, doesn’t it? Tell me when you went there.”

“After she called me.” Teddy’s voice became harder. “That sonofabitch had tormented me for years, and now he was humiliating our mother. So I decided to confront him.” His words came in a rush now. “He was standing there like he had a thousand nights before, staring at the fucking sunset like it was the last one in human history and he was there to bear witness.”

I can’t imagine not looking at this, Ben had said to Nathan Wright. Can you? “Maybe he was,” Adam said. “After all, the man was dying.”

“I didn’t know that. All I knew was that he treated her like dirt.” Teddy shook his head, voice thickening with emotion. “God help me, I wanted to push him off that cliff, just like I’d imagined ever since I was a kid. Instead, I just stood there waiting for him to notice me.

“When he finally did, he gave me this look—not disdainful like normal, but more puzzled. ‘What are you doing here?’ he asked. ‘You hate this place.’ It threw me off guard—suddenly he had the tone and manner of an old man, and his face looked ravaged. My idea of him was so strong I hadn’t seen that he’d become his own ghost.

“‘I’m here for my mother,’ I told him. ‘For years I’ve watched you degrade her in private, humiliate her in public, and exploit her fear of being abandoned. She’s the only parent I ever had. You were only a sperm donor, and even that makes me want to vomit.’ He tried to muster that supercilious smile, but even that was a ghost. ‘Then go ahead,’ he told me. ‘Just keep it off my boots. They’re new.’”

Adam tried to imagine the ferocity of will that made his father, dying, still prefer hatred to pity. But Teddy seemed transported back in time. “‘Maybe I’ll push you off this cliff,’ I told him. He just kept looking at me, almost like he was curious what I’d do. Then he spoke in a strange new voice, tired but completely calm, ‘If you hate me that much, do it for your mother. Or better yet, yourself.’

“He sounded like he didn’t care, that he’d be willing to die if that would make me feel better. All at once I saw him as he was, this aging husk of a man. I couldn’t move, or fight back the tears.” Briefly, Teddy closed his eyes. “Looking back at me, he seemed to slump. “‘Jesus,’ he said in this heavy way I’d never heard before. ‘What have I done to you, Teddy? Did I make you like this?’

“I don’t know whether he meant gay or too weak to act in my own behalf. Then he finished, ‘To come to the end, and face this. It’s not your fault you could never be like Adam. It was foolish of me to want that.’”

For a moment, Adam could say nothing. Then he said softly, “He certainly had a gift, didn’t he? Only he could issue an apology meant to cut you to the quick.”

Teddy continued as if he had not heard. “I started toward him. He just watched me, not moving, when suddenly his eyes rolled back in his head. Then he kind of collapsed, like he was too tired to stand, and sat there in the mud near the side of the cliff, his eyes as blank as marbles.” Pausing, Teddy looked into Adam’s face, as though recalling he was there. “He was utterly defenseless. But killing a helpless man is what he would expect from me. So I grabbed him by the wrists and dragged him to the rocky area, where at least it wasn’t muddy. Then I sat there, studying his face as though he’d gone to sleep, trying to remember when I’d loved him.

“Suddenly his eyes snapped open. He looked at me, surprised, then said, ‘I passed out, didn’t I? It’s happening more often.’ Then he asked in this quiet voice, ‘Why didn’t you kill me, Teddy?’ I gave him the only answer I could think of: ‘Too easy.’”

Someday people won’t read you anymore, Adam remembered telling his father. You’ll be left with whoever is left to love you. It’s not too late for Teddy to be one of them. Finally, he asked, “How did he react?”

Teddy swallowed. “His eyes seemed to focus, like he’d never seen me before. Then he sort of croaked, ‘I’ll change things, Teddy. At least those things I still can help.’”

“The will?”

“Maybe,” Teddy answered. “But I didn’t know about that, and I’m sure Mom didn’t either. So what I imagined him saying was that maybe he wouldn’t leave her.

“Suddenly, I felt exhausted—not only by what happened between us, but by being in that place. Without saying another word, I left him there. I never saw my father again.” Teddy looked at Adam intently, finishing with lacerating bitterness, “For all I know, he jumped or fell. Whatever happened, the sonofabitch fucked me one more time. Instead of fixing the will, he made me the prime suspect in a murder I could only fantasize about.”

For a moment, Adam struggled to distance himself from Teddy’s story, and his desire to believe it. Finally, he asked, “Why did you call your ex-friend?”

“Jesus, Adam—wouldn’t you call someone after an experience like that? Or would you just pour yourself a drink and switch on the Red Sox game?”

“I really don’t know. But I might have told Sean Mallory what you just told me, instead of framing myself for murder. Assuming, of course, that anything you’ve told me is true.”

A moment’s anger flickered through Teddy’s eyes, and then he looked away. “You’ve met Mallory,” he said in a dispirited tone. “I took one look at him and knew he wouldn’t believe me. All I’d do is get myself and Mom in trouble.”

“Instead of just yourself,” Adam rejoined. “But now you’re right to protect her, I suppose, given what you say she doesn’t know. A sudden recollection of her phone call might not help either one of you.”

Looking up, Teddy met his brother’s gaze. “Do you believe me, Adam?”

Adam weighed his answer. Too much of Teddy’s story was implausible. But it had the virtue, at least, of accounting for the evidence Adam had siphoned to his lawyer—suggesting its essential truth, or, more likely, his brother’s considerable ingenuity. A jury might not—probably would not—believe him. But Adam could not bring himself to reject the story outright. Then it struck him that if Teddy’s account was true, and Ben had resolved to revise his will yet again, Carla Pacelli might have had reason to kill him. But this assumed that Carla had come to the promontory, and that Ben had told her. An assumption that, as of now, was as unprovable as the other indispensable assumption: that Carla had known about her inheritance.

“It doesn’t matter what I believe,” Adam said at length. “Your story covers the evidence as I know it—except for the button. Tell me how that came off his shirt.”

“I have no idea,” Teddy insisted. “I never touched his shirt. For all I know the button was already missing.”

Adam considered this. The button had not been missing; Adam had found it at the scene, and the hair on Ben’s shirt suggested closer contact than Teddy admitted. But if his brother were telling the truth, then someone else—perhaps Nathan Wright’s elusive figure—had ripped the button off. And only Adam knew that.

Watching his face, Teddy said, “You don’t believe me, do you? I’m pretty sure my lawyer doesn’t either. I guess that’s what happens when he gives you a lie detector test and it comes out inconclusive. All I could tell him is that my fantasy was so strong that sometimes I feel like I killed him. Doesn’t inspire much confidence, does it?”

Adam did not answer. “Just keep our mother out of this,” he instructed. “Including what I know about her not-so-small lapse of memory. At least until I figure out what else to do.”

Teddy stared at him. “You sent my lawyer those documents, didn’t you?”

Adam stood. Then he smiled a little, placing a hand on Teddy’s shoulder. “What documents?” he replied, then returned to their mother’s house, his expression as he said good night to her placid and untroubled.

Three

On the way upstairs, Adam paused in the dining room, placing a hand on the Herreshoff Cup. The name Blaine was now engraved on it ten times, with the year of triumph beside it, the last victory occurring the summer before his father’s death. Now, perhaps like the house itself, someone else would claim it. But on the long-ago night Jenny Leigh had come to dinner, the cup was on this table, Ben’s prize from the previous year, the only question which Blaine—father or son—would claim it at summer’s end.

That night, however, Adam had other worries, principally about his mother. The evening before, with his father out, he had found her on the porch. The bottle of Chassagne-Montrachet at her side was almost empty. Adam understood that, at times, his mother would dull some unspoken worry with an extra glass of wine, drifting into a space where she seemed untouchable. At these times, she spoke sparingly, careful to conceal whatever troubled thoughts were roiling beneath the genteel veneer. But tonight, she seemed almost stupefied, and her belated greeting to Adam was delivered in a slurry voice he had never heard before. This slippage, startling in a woman so self-controlled, had caused Adam to sit beside her, though tact kept him from asking questions.

Finally, she said in a low voice, “You’re a kind person, Adam. Not like Ben at all.”

To someone accustomed to hearing how much he resembled his father, this remark was troubling. Trying to delve its cause, Adam inquired, “Are you angry at him about something?”

Clarice inclined her head and propped her chin with one hand, the posture of inebriation or despair. “More angry at me,” she said haltingly. “So many compromises, so much hurt.”

Adam leaned close to her. “Maybe to you, Mom. You haven’t hurt anyone else.”

“Haven’t I?” She peered out, as though the answers existed somewhere in space. “I’ve certainly hurt myself. I only wish I could confine the damage.”

Adam waited for a moment. “Is this about Teddy?”

“Teddy?” Her laugh, though quiet, startled him. “You would think that. I wish it were so simple.”

Surely this was about his father, Adam thought, perhaps another woman. But he had not seen the restless, predatory look that suggested Ben was on the hunt, or the complacent air that went with some new conquest—this summer, Benjamin Blaine’s ego seemed preoccupied with besting his younger son in sailing. Watching Clarice in profile, Adam had the tantalizing, disturbing sense that he was closer to penetrating the inner life she tried so hard to mask. Gently, he said, “Talk to me, please. You’re the most loving mother on the planet, but I’m not always sure I know you.”

A mist appeared in her eyes. “Then I’ve succeeded, haven’t I? Who really wants to know their parents? And what ‘loving mother’ would inflict that on her children?” She faced him, her need to restore self-discipline showing in the tightness of her jawline. “I’m sorry to be so delphic. As you can see, I’m drunk, babbling about nothing. I’ll behave myself for Jenny.”

To Adam, the last phrase was freighted with meaning—not about dinner with Adam’s girlfriend, but as the credo for his mother’s life. In seconds the wall between Clarice and the world had reappeared. “Go on,” she said in a brittle voice. “I’m sure she’s waiting for you, as I once waited for him. I’m fine here by myself and fine tomorrow night.”

There was nothing he could do. Touching her hand, he left, trailed by the shattering sense of a long-ago psychic explosion, its damage concealed by a shell.

Ten years later, with his mother facing ruin, the memory seemed oddly prescient. But now, as then, its deeper meaning eluded him. And on the night Jenny had come for dinner, his father and mother were the parents he wished for.

Looking about her, Jenny had seemed in awe of the size of their house, the artifacts of privilege and travel. To his surprise, she accepted a glass of wine, a sign of nervousness that put Adam more on edge. But Clarice, an expert hostess, engaged Jenny with what seemed to be genuine interest, while Ben presided with avuncular good humor. “Is it true,” he asked, “that Adam is trying to make a sailor out of you?”

To Adam, the trill of Jenny’s laugh suggested a paradoxical emotion—the determination to relax. “Did he also say he was trying to drown me?”

Ben grinned at Adam. “Another failure on the high seas.”

“A small setback,” Adam interjected airily.

Jenny sipped her wine, glancing nervously at Ben. “Actually, I was terrified. You know how they say your whole life flashes before you? This is ridiculous, I thought. My life isn’t even a short story, let alone a novella. I’ve hardly left Massachusetts.” Glancing at Clarice, she said, “You’ve been everywhere, right?”

Clarice smiled at her. “Ben’s been everywhere,” she answered with wry self-deprecation. “He takes me to the nicer places, like Tuscany and the south of France. But I get to skip Kosovo and Darfur.” More seriously, she added, “It’s a terrible character defect, I know—one Ben as a writer can’t afford. But I’ve learned that human ugliness is hard for me to witness.”