Fall from Grace (32 page)

Thomson considered this with a frown. “An odd thought,” he replied. “Considering that she probably wasn’t born yet.” His frown deepened. “I remember thinking this was a time bomb I devoutly hoped would never go off. Thirty-four years later, it has.”

Troubled, Adam drove home for dinner with the mother and brother who had lied to him, pursued by thoughts of Jenny.

The dinner hour was subdued. Adam had little to say, less he could tell them, and too many questions it was not yet time to ask. The unspoken knowledge he shared with Teddy, withheld from their mother, burdened them both.

At length, she looked from Teddy to Adam. In a sharp tone that hinted at her tension, she said, “What is it with you two?”

Teddy’s belated smile was more a tic. “It’s just hard, Mom. Both of us miss Dad such a lot.”

And maybe you killed him, Adam thought. Then Teddy caught his eye, and Adam understood that there was something his brother wished to say to him alone.

“I wish his death were that amusing,” Clarice rebuked her sons. “You can’t imagine how it feels to begin a family with such hope, then see it deteriorate so horribly, with Ben delivering his final judgment on us all.”

But why? Adam wanted to ask, and could not.

Afterward, the two brothers sat on the porch gazing at the woods and grass, a soft green in twilight. It reminded Adam of their youth, the many days and hours when, chary of their parents, they had taken refuge in each other’s company. But by this time next year the house might be Carla Pacelli’s, and Teddy might be in prison.

“Do you have something to say?” Adam asked.

Teddy eyed him. “I was thinking you look like hell.”

“So I’m told. It’s been a bad day.”

“Seems like an understatement,” Teddy said pointedly. “The light in your eyes is gone.”

He could have been describing himself, Adam thought—he looked haggard, as though sleep had eluded him for nights on end. “My problems are yours,” he countered. “I sense that something more happened since our last frank and candid exchange.”

Teddy glanced over his shoulder, ensuring that their mother could not hear. Under his breath, he said, “George Hanley told my lawyer he’s impaneling a grand jury. I could be indicted within days.”

Gazing at the lawn, Adam absorbed what this could mean: the machinery of justice switching into gear, slowly but inexorably grinding forward until it delivered his brother to a life of torment and confinement for a crime that, to Adam, was less a crime than an act of cosmic justice. “What’s your strategy?” he asked.

“I’ve got two choices,” his brother replied in the same near whisper. “Take the information you gave us and try to give George Hanley a story that creates enough doubt to slow him down. Or accept that indictment for Dad’s murder may be inevitable, and save my version of events until Hanley puts me on the stand. If there were a third choice, I’d take it.”

Adam felt leaden. Once Teddy’s fate was in the hands of a jury, it might be sealed by his lies to the police. And all that Adam could offer him was Jenny.

That day was like another message from my father, she had told him. “You’ll never be important enough to care about, just to use.”

Watching his expression, Teddy regarded Adam with tender gravity. “Don’t take it so hard. You’ve done all you can. As only I know.”

But Adam had not. As only he knew.

Touching Teddy’s shoulder, he stood, went to the kitchen for a bottle of Ben’s scotch, and then locked himself in his room.

For an hour, Adam sat drinking scotch, the window a dark square, the chirring of crickets evoking nights spent with his father on the porch.

Who had killed him, he kept asking, and why?

Most likely Teddy; least likely Carla—with Jenny in the balance. Someone for Adam to sacrifice in the hope of saving another of Ben’s victims, his brother.

At midnight, the bottle half-finished, Adam fell into a broken sleep.

The nightmare came swiftly. Hellfire missiles rained down on a village controlled by the Taliban. Adam watched the carnage from the edge of a cliff, surrounded by other Taliban with rifles. Their leader spoke in the tones of a judge passing sentence. “You are responsible for the death of our brothers.” As his followers aimed their rifles at his head, Adam leaped off the cliff, a vertiginous fall toward the beach where his father died and Jenny had tried to kill herself—

He snapped awake, sweat dampening his face.

There was no point in asking what this meant. The meaning of Afghanistan was simple enough. He had six months left to serve, and an excellent chance of dying. It would be easier to accept his fate, whatever it was, if he left his brother and mother better off for his return.

Stumbling to the bathroom, he splashed cold water on his face, then resumed sitting at the end of his bed.

Why did my mother lie to me? he silently asked his father. And what secret did you entrust to Carla Pacelli?

The answer, if Adam could find it, must lie in the will Benjamin Blaine had left them.

By now he could divine, however imperfectly, the workings of Ben’s mind. He had left money to Carla because of their son; to Jenny less out of guilt than shame, the hope of burying his seduction of a young woman and the betrayal of his son. But his motive for making Adam executor was more obscure. Though this ploy seemed likely to keep Adam on the island, he rejected the notion that Ben had done this for Jenny’s sake, or that his father imagined that Adam’s hundred-thousand-dollar inheritance would keep him from undermining the will. Father and son had known each other too well; Ben could not have doubted that Adam would act to protect his mother. So Ben’s treatment of Clarice remained the heart of the unknown, revealing a depth of malice unexplained by anything Adam knew. And the gift of an old photo album, one among so many, made no sense at all.

Once again, Adam picked up the album.

It contained photographs of Ben in Cambodia, meticulously dated, covering a two-and-a-half-month period in that country’s terrible history, including atrocities committed by the Khmer Rouge in the spring and early summer of 1976. His father had dared much to go there, and documented it all. There was page upon page of photographs of Ben with soldiers, guerrillas, doctors, and guides, or on a sampan or in some temple destroyed by war. Were another man featured in these photographs, he would have drawn Adam’s admiration—he knew very well how it felt to put his life at risk. As it was, given that this bequest accompanied the ruin of his mother, Adam wondered at the vast reserves of narcissism that had caused Ben to think his son would give a damn.

Suddenly, he stopped, staring at a date on one page. Then another.

I think he loved your mother once, Jack had told him. At least as much as he was capable of love.

When? Adam had asked. Before I was born?

Ben had hidden their secret in plain sight, knowing he would come to it in time.

Adam began shaking.

“You bastard,” he said aloud. Said this in grief and hatred and wonder. Said this with a crushing sense of solitude that was too much to endure.

His entire life had been premised on a lie.

Nine

Still and silent, Adam rethought the past, willing himself to feel nothing.

But dispassion was beyond him. A single fact had transformed the meaning of his life, and his relationship to its central figures—from the first moments of his existence, he had been the catalyst for a web of hatred and deception that had enveloped them all. He would not come to terms with this in an hour, or a year. But there was too much at stake not to start.

With deliberate calm, he dressed, walked down the hallway, and knocked on his mother’s bedroom door. She answered too quickly to have been sleeping.

Cracking open the door, she stared at him. “What’s wrong?”

“Please come downstairs,” Adam said. “There’s something we need to discuss.”

For the first time, Clarice looked haggard, almost old. “Can’t it wait until morning?”

“No. It can’t.”

The look of alarm in her eyes was replaced by a fear that seemed years deep. In a weary voice, she said, “Give me time to dress.”

He went to the living room, turning on a single lamp before sitting in Ben’s chair. For what seemed endless minutes, he waited there, the room quiet, the cool night air coming through an open window. He had never felt more alone.

His mother’s footfalls sounded on the wooden stairs. Then she appeared, dressed in jeans and a sweater, a semblance of her usual calm slipping into place. But her posture when she sat across from him was taut, her hands folded tightly in front of her. The pale light made her face look waxen, accenting the apprehension in her eyes. “What’s so urgent?” she inquired.

Adam composed himself. “Tell me about you and Jack. Everything, from the beginning.”

She was quiet, her eyelids lowering. He watched her contemplate evasion, the habit of years. Then she said simply, “It started before you were born.”

“That much I’ve worked out. The question is why all of you perpetuated such misery.”

His mother searched his face, as though trying to gauge what he knew. “More than I’d understood, Ben was a selfish man. His early success made him hungry for more—more adventure, more accolades, and, I suspected even then, more women. For weeks on end, he left me here alone with Teddy.”

“And Jack?”

Reluctantly, she nodded. “It happened over time, without us fully realizing how we’d come to feel. But he was everything Ben couldn’t be—gentle and reflective, more inclined to listen than talk about himself.” Emotion made her voice more throaty. “He valued me. With Jack I was never an accessory.”

“Isn’t that the life you signed on for?”

Clarice flushed. “I suppose so. But it seems I needed more. Jack provided it.”

“By sleeping with his brother’s wife,” Adam rejoined. “A landmark in their rivalry. Imagine my surprise at discovering where I fit in.”

Her eyes froze. “I’m not sure what you mean.”

“That since I was young, I always felt that something wasn’t right. I’d like to have known when it still mattered who Jack really was to me.”

For a telling moment, Clarice looked startled. “Your uncle,” she parried. “A man who cared for you.”

“Give it up, Mother. From the May through July before I was born, Benjamin Blaine was in Cambodia. But I look too much like him for that to be coincidence.” Pent-up emotions propelled Adam from his chair. “Once I grasped that, it explained so much. Jack’s kindness toward me, and Ben’s ambivalence. Their lifelong breach. The warped psychology of that last racing season, Jack pitting me against his brother.” And, Adam thought but did not say, Ben’s desire to sleep with Jenny Leigh. “Most important,” he finished in a lower voice, “the truth behind Ben’s will and, I believe, his murder. That when he presented you with the postnuptial agreement, you were pregnant with Jack’s child. I’m the reason you agreed to it, aren’t I?”

Clarice sat straighter, marshaling her reserves of dignity. “Yes,” she said evenly. “In legal terms, you were the ‘consideration’ for everything I signed away.”

Hearing this said aloud made Adam flinch inside. “But why agree to all that?”

A plea for understanding surfaced in her eyes. “Is it really that hard to grasp? I did it for Teddy, and for you—”

“For me?” Adam said in astonishment. “Do you really think making Benjamin Blaine my father was a favor? Then let me assure you that I’d pay any price to go back in time and stop you from making this devil’s bargain. For Teddy’s sake even more than mine.”

Clarice turned white. “Do you think I have no regrets? What you’ve just discovered has haunted me for years. But I had no choice—”

“Would it have been so terrible to be the wife of a woodworker?”

“Please,” his mother said urgently, “consider where I was then. I had no money or skills of my own, and was pregnant with another man’s child. The price of being with Jack would have been penury, a bitter divorce, and scandal—with me exposed in public as the slut who slept with two brothers, and you stigmatized as the product of an affair. My choice was wrenching for me, and humiliating to Jack. But with Ben as your father, both of my sons would have the security you deserved—”

“And you’d go on being Mrs. Benjamin Blaine.”

To his surprise, Clarice nodded. “Whatever you may think, I’m not a mystery to myself. My upbringing was a tutorial in dependence—on men, money, and the security of affluence and status. Whatever his weaknesses, I loved my father dearly. But what I understood too late was that to him a person was who he or she appeared to be. And when that was taken from him, Dad withered and died—figuratively at first, then literally.” Her tone grew bitter. “But not a man like Benjamin Blaine. I came to wish my father had one-tenth of his strength. Ben started with nothing, took what he wanted, and made sure he kept it. I might have been afraid of him, but not once did I fear that he would fail. I’d never be poor or desperate like my mother became. And, yes, I enjoyed the reflected glory of being his wife, and all the privilege that came with it. That was part of the bargain, too.”

“What was in it for Ben?”

His mother seemed to fortify herself, then spoke in a reluctant voice. “Beneath the surface, Benjamin Blaine was a very frightened man. One night early in our marriage, he got terribly drunk. He came to bed and suddenly started rambling about Vietnam, this man in his platoon. He’d been exhausted and afraid, he said—that was why it happened. I realized without him saying so that ‘it’ involved another man. What tortured Ben was that it might be fundamental to his nature.” Pausing, Clarice inhaled. “The next day he carried on with false bravado, like he hadn’t told me anything. He never mentioned it again. But on a very few occasions, when he was drunk, Ben’s tastes in sexual intercourse didn’t require me to be a woman. A brutal instance of in vino veritas.”

When he rolled me on my stomach, Jenny had said, I flashed on us in the lighthouse. But it wasn’t like that at all. Not what he did or the way he hurt me.

Sickened, Adam said, “And the others?”

“Weren’t enough to banish his fears.” Turning from him, his mother continued her painful narrative. “That I was pregnant by Jack made him all the more insecure. But I couldn’t bear the thought of aborting Jack’s child, and Ben was afraid of anyone knowing he’d been cuckolded by his brother. By exacting the postnuptial agreement as the price for keeping you, he kept Jack and me apart. His ultimate victory.”