Richard Patterson - Fall from Grace

Her face softened in appreciation. “We’re all glad,” Jack affirmed.

Adam nodded. “How are you, Jack? Holding up okay?”

With his thoughtful air, so typical of Jack, he pondered the question. “For as long as I can remember,” he said at length, “Ben was part of my life.” He let the words stand for themselves, the enormity of their meaning left unspoken.

The limousine started toward the cemetery at Abel’s Hill. “What’s after this?” Adam inquired.

“A family meeting,” Teddy said. “We took care of the mourners last night-a wake of sorts without the body, another ritual to get through. Be happy that you missed it.”

In profile, his mother seemed to wince.

Silent, Adam looked out the window as memories of his youth flashed by-the dirt road to Long Point Beach, the turnoff for the Tisbury Great Pond. A life spent outdoors, cherished once, his memories curdled by his final summer. On the porch of Alley’s General Store, where Adam had worked summers, islanders had gathered to watch the funeral procession. “A last obeisance,” Teddy murmured. “How he would have loved it.” For a moment, Adam wanted to ask about the eulogy, then considered his mother’s feelings. He would talk with Teddy alone.

“A decade,” Jack said to him. “Does it feel that long to you?”

“Longer.”

His uncle nodded. “It’s great to see you on the island. Whatever the reason.” As if to say, Adam sensed, Now you can come back.

Teddy gave him the crooked smile Adam had loved since boyhood. “It is good, actually. Hope one of us doesn’t have to follow Dad’s lead to get you here again.”

Adam took his mother’s hand. Softly, he said, “I won’t require that now.”

The limousine reached Abel’s Hill, the hearse ahead of it. In the gentler sun of late afternoon, the green sloping hills of the cemetery looked inviting, a good place to rest. Set among the pines were tombstones dating back to the early eighteenth century. Five generations of Blaines were buried here, some who died as children, as well as Lillian Hellman, until today its most famous occupant, whom Ben had memorably described as “an unspeakable harridan, as ugly as she was dishonest.” When moved to scorn, which was often, his father had minced no words.

They parked near a grave site shaded by trees and bordered by freshly dug earth, where the priest awaited them. This time Adam, Jack, and Teddy carried the casket with two cemetery workers, placing it on the platform the men would use to lower it into the ground. As Adam introduced himself to the priest, Robin Merritt, another car appeared. To his utter confusion, Jenny Leigh emerged.

He glanced at Teddy. But his brother’s face registered no surprise. When Clarice saw Jenny, her expression warmed as it had for Adam. Tall and graceful, Jenny seemed to carry a separateness, as though creating her own space. But then she reached his mother and took Clarice in her arms.

Clarice hugged her fiercely. Ten years ago, Adam’s mother had barely known her. And yet, by some alchemy of time, Jenny Leigh was here.

She kissed Jack on the cheek, then Teddy. Approaching Adam, her blue-gray eyes were grave and searching. She hesitated and then, as though conscious of the others watching, brushed his cheek with her lips. Drawing back, she said, “You look different. But then it’s been quite a while.”

Adam’s mouth felt dry. “So it has. How are you, Jenny?”

“Fine.” She glanced toward the grave. “Is this hard for you?”

“Less hard than what came before.”

She nodded, briefly looking down. Then she stood beside Clarice.

The small group gathered around the grave. Looking again at his uncle and brother, Adam pondered the patterns within their family. In the last two generations, the birth order seemed to have repeated itself; Teddy, the firstborn, resembled Jack; Adam was the image of Jack’s younger brother. Now they were burying Ben beside the father he had despised, Nathaniel Blaine, just as Teddy and Adam loathed the man they were burying. Both older brothers, Jack and Teddy, had been overshadowed by the younger. But there was this difference, for which Adam was profoundly grateful-whereas Ben’s transcendence over Jack came with a streak of cruelty, Adam, observing that, had striven to be easier for Teddy to love. A generous spirit, Teddy had perceived this. As a brother, he was all that Adam could have asked.

Standing together with folded hands, Adam and Teddy listened as Father Merritt recited the commitment to the grave. “Almighty God, Father of mercies and giver of comfort, deal graciously, we pray, with all those who mourn: that, casting all their care on you, they may know the consolation of your love-”

When this was done, they lowered Ben into the earth. Clarice shoveled dirt on the casket, then Jack, Teddy, and Adam. He had wondered how this would feel. Now he felt nothing but the desire to be done with it.

As Adam put down the shovel, Clarice turned toward Jenny. “We’re going home,” she said. “Would you like to come?”

Jenny glanced at Adam, then replied with equal softness. “Adam is here now. This should be a time for family.”

Looking from Jenny to Adam, Clarice nodded. Without another word, Jenny hugged her and left.

From the road, Adam saw, the photographer from the Enquirer was shooting pictures of his father’s grave. As Adam turned to watch Jenny departing, Teddy placed a hand on his shoulder. “Just as well,” he murmured. “We’ve got some things to tell you, and Jenny’s the least of it.”

For all of Adam’s life, the Blaines had lived in a sprawling white frame house, set in a grassy clearing amid ten wooded acres. Built in the 1850s, it was sheltered by trees from the winds off the Atlantic, though clear-cutting had created an opening through which one could view the cliff overlooking the water. In the 1940s, a wealthy couple from Boston, Clarice’s parents, had bought this as their summer home; long before Adam and Teddy had played hide-and-seek in the woods and swum off the rocky beach below, Clarice had spent the best months of her childhood in this house. As with many homes of this vintage, the porch that looked out at woods and ocean had been more generous than the rooms, a reminder that what was most compelling about the Vineyard was outdoors. Adam could still remember the summer evenings when his mother and father, like Clarice’s, would sit on the porch until nightfall, talking or just listening to the crickets.

But like everything he touched, Ben had left his mark on the house of Clarice’s youth. Discontented with cramped space, he had knocked down walls and added a study that his wife and sons entered by invitation only. Now the living room was large and open, filled with comfortable furniture, sumptuous Asian rugs, and mementos of Ben’s travels-Asian vases, African masks, scrolls in Arabic and Hebrew, and Middle Eastern antiques acquired by dubious means. On the rough-hewn dining room table was the silver Herreshoff Cup, possessed for a season by the winner of the summer sailing competition, which Ben had claimed again in his sixty-fourth year. The home was so redolent of his father’s life that Adam, entering for the first time in years, half-expected to see the man they had just buried drinking whisky in his brown leather chair.

Instead, his family sat in a room that, despite its many appointments, felt empty. Shaking off this moment of strangeness, Adam poured himself a scotch and took deeper stock of the survivors. Whenever he could, he had met them off-island, so he did not gauge them by the ten-year span of his self-imposed exile. But all three had changed since Adam had seen them last.

His mother looked smaller and more worn, her beauty now the faded handsomeness of a woman in her sixties. Though she still carried herself with an air of serenity and self-possession, a second persona seemed to peer out from behind her cornflower-blue eyes, more tentative and wounded. In Adam’s mind, she had always been the master of appearances-her parents had taught her well, and she had polished her skills in the larger world as Ben Blaine’s lovely and forbearing wife, hiding the pain of her marriage and, with that, its loneliness. Clarice Blaine, her son thought sadly, was perhaps the nicest person no one really knew.