Richard Patterson - Fall from Grace

Killing the motor, Adam let them bob in a cone of silence. At length, he said, “I take it you got her help.”

“A great deal of help. For two months she was hospitalized at Mass General. Your father paid for everything.” Clarice paused, then spoke in a different register. “Despite what he’s done to me, Ben saved her life. I expect that explains his bequest.”

Carla had proposed one theory, Adam thought, his mother another. And neither of them knew. “Other than my departure,” he inquired, “did you divine any reason why a twenty-year-old girl would decide to end her life?”

Reproach resurfaced in Clarice’s eyes. “Not to a certainty. Medically, her doctors at Mass General proposed bipolar disorder, or schizoaffective disorder-which is far more dangerous. Or even post-traumatic stress disorder-”

“The trauma being?”

“Nobody knows. And Jenny couldn’t-or wouldn’t-help.” Clarice’s tone became less harsh. “Bipolar disorder tends to surface between sixteen and twenty-two. Did you see any signs of it?”

Remembering Jenny as she was, Adam felt a deepening sadness. “Looking back, her moods would shift abruptly. The swings could be pretty wide.”

“That’s what the doctors said. At first they kept her in lockdown, then heavily medicated. Her mother was working, and not much help. So I stayed there for days at a time.”

Adam felt obscurely shamed-not just about Jenny, but that he had known nothing about such a central piece of his mother’s life. “Now I understand why Jenny is so important to you.”

“Do you?” A film of tears appeared in his mother’s eyes. “Ben dominated our lives. First he’d driven Teddy away, and then you simply vanished. But now I had Jenny. Every day I watched her coming back to life. Sometimes we’d talk, and sometimes she’d let me brush her hair.” Clarice’s voice thickened. “When at last she was better, Jenny’s mother drove her home. But by then we were bonded in a way more profound than blood. My husband was unfaithful, my sons missing. But Jenny helped fill my life.

“She still does. Sometimes we fly to New York, shopping or going to galleries or the theater. Every few days we’ll meet for lunch or dinner, or just go for a walk. The thing she rarely does is come to the house. She says it reminds her too much of you.”

Once more, Adam felt a wave of guilt and anger. “After all these years, why should I still matter?”

“My theory? To Jenny, you represent an ideal. When you left, she lost the one man she’d ever loved.” Clarice leaned forward, as if to reach him. “You’re not a woman, so you may not understand this. But I think that Jenny is capable of loving you, and hoping you’d return, for the entire decade you were gone. Some women are like that, no matter how little encouragement they get.”

In the crosscurrent of his emotions, Adam felt sadness prevail. “Tell me what her life is like.”

“She’s had some success getting her stories published. Day to day, she works mornings in an art gallery and spends time with women friends like me. Romantically, she’s had a series of unsatisfying relationships, often with older men.” Clarice paused. “Jenny has come to believe she’s been trying to replace her father, who abandoned them when she was eleven. She’s ready for something deeper.”

Adam gazed out at the water. For a while the boat drifted, rudderless, mother and son sharing long moments of silence. Then Adam started the motor again, remaining quiet until the boat rounded West Chop, the estates of WASP families as privileged as Clarice’s once had been. “I have an awkward subject of my own,” he said. “Last night I saw Carla Pacelli.”

His mother’s eyes widened in hurt and dismay, as though Adam, like Ben, had betrayed her. “For what earthly reason did you do that?”

“My duties as executor, an excuse for helping you sub rosa. But something strange came up.”

“Which was?”

“Apparently, my father suggested to her that your marriage was a ‘sham’-quote unquote. I took it to mean that you were no longer intimate. Or perhaps that you were unfaithful, too.”

Clarice’s jaw clenched in anger. “How pathetic,” she said scornfully. “That Carla believed it, or that you believed Carla. Even men like Ben make excuses for infidelity. It only surprises me that he bothered.”

“So it’s not true.”

“Hardly. Though at times I wished it were. Feeling alone in a marriage is worse than being alone.” She shook her head, as if at her wasted years. “On the subject of solitude, let’s get back to Jenny. No matter what you feel now, there’s no harm in being kind to her.”

Silent, Adam tried to imagine how it felt to prefer oblivion. Then another memory came to him, more telling now than then.

They had taken North Road to the entrance of a hiking trail, Alicia Keys on his CD player, then climbed through woods and fields until they reached Waskosims Rock.

They sat at the crest of the hill, looking out. Even at this elevation, they could not see the water; the scene before them, miles of woods and farmland and stone walls, was rolling and pastoral, a portrait of New England. “At moments like this,” Adam said, “I want to live here all my life.”

Jenny kept watching the horizon. “How long will that be? I wonder.”

Adam smiled. “I’m planning on forever. I’m too afraid of dying. Like Dad, I guess.”

Jenny considered him. “Not me,” she answered softly. “From what I’ve read, it’s just as well. Often people like me don’t live past thirty.”

Troubled, Adam grasped her hand. “What ‘people like you’?”

Jenny gazed down and then, quite suddenly, conjured her brightest smile. “Brilliant, of course. It’s such a burden being me. So much talent, so little understood.”

But Adam was not mollified. He kissed her gently, then looked into her face. Impulsively, he said, “I won’t let anything happen to you, Jen. I promise.”

Closing her eyes, Jenny rested her head on his shoulder.

Ten years later, Adam remembered the catch in his throat. “I’ll go see her,” he told his mother. “I promise.”

Late that afternoon, Adam climbed into his father’s truck and took South Road to the intersection crossing over to Menemsha. The lawn of one of several great houses overlooking the pond was covered with tables beneath umbrellas, the scene of a wedding or fund-raiser or dinner party, reminding Adam that he was moving through this summer season without taking any note of it. His family’s past and present had consumed him; the summer most vivid to him had happened years ago.

Reaching Menemsha, Adam walked along the dock. Charlie Glazer was tending to his Herreshoff, Folie a Un, the boat he had raced against Ben for many seasons. The psychiatrist waved Adam on board, fixing him with a bright, inquisitive expression as his visitor sat across from him. “Sorry to trouble you,” Adam said, “and so soon at that. But things have started crashing down on me.”

Glazer’s eyes became graver. “Concerning Ben’s death? Or your relationship when he was still alive?”

“Both.”

Glazer nodded slowly. “Yesterday I felt this coming. It seems we have a lot to cover, much of it painful. So you can start this any way you like.”

Adam bent forward. Closing his eyes, he was barely conscious of the cries of gulls, the great pond flecked with boats, the gentle rocking of the Herreshoff in its slip. “Let’s begin with that summer,” he said.

For over an hour, Adam talked, gazing at the shoreline he barely saw. He felt Glazer watch him fixedly. But except to clarify a point, the psychiatrist said nothing. Only at the end did he permit himself an audible intake of breath. “That’s a lot to carry around, Adam. And to conceal. I suppose your work helps you compartmentalize.”