Richard Patterson - Fall from Grace

Adam recalled one of the minor mysteries of his mother’s past-her aborted friendship with Whitney Dane. Among the affluent WASPs who summered on the Vineyard, the Barkleys and the Danes were unique among their class for living in Chilmark, which came to feature a significant Jewish population, rather than Edgartown, the traditional redoubt of their class. Through college, Adam knew, Whitney and Clarice had been intimate friends; as an adult, Whitney had become an eminent novelist, and would have been a natural peer for Ben save that Clarice, for reasons unclear to Adam, assiduously avoided her. That Carla Pacelli had landed in her estranged friend’s guesthouse could only have deepened his mother’s wounds. But of more immediate interest was the location of the guesthouse-from several directions, anyone could approach the promontory and not be observed. He was framing another question when, without warning, Clarice bent over, hands covering her face, shoulders trembling with soundless sobs. In that painful moment, Adam felt the pride, shame, and repression that had come to define her life. Helpless, he put his arm around her, and then his mother broke down entirely, cries of anguish issuing from deep inside her.

“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.

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.”