Richard Patterson: Fall from Grace

Amid this skein of memory, another thought came to Adam-that, however subconsciously, his childish resolve to stand at its edge had been a way of showing up Teddy, who suffered from vertigo and endured these family picnics like a conscript. Odd, too, that in these memories his mother, though surely present, had left no image of herself behind.

Pensive, Adam walked to the edge. Ninety feet below, the coarse sand was covered with rocks and boulders; no one could survive such a fall. “Where exactly did you find him?” Adam asked.

Jack pointed at a group of jagged rocks. “Beside those. The last thing you’d imagine, I know.”

“The very last.”

“Ten years makes a difference, Adam. In me, in you-even in Ben. The man you remember wasn’t the man I found there.”

Adam shoved his hands in his pockets, feeling the wind on his face as he watched the sun, a red-orange disk, slice into the water. At length, he said, “Funny he died on the summer solstice, the longest day of the year. His favorite time to come here.”

Jack gave him a curious look. “You sound almost sentimental.”

“I’m just trying to envision what happened that night.” He turned to Jack. “The state police taped off this area, I assume.”

Jack inclined his head toward the hiking trail that ran along the cliff. “Only for a few hours. There’s too much foot traffic here.”

Adam looked around them, gauging how the police would evaluate their surroundings. Bordered by woods, the promontory would be visible only to hikers or from the waters below. The trail itself, running in both directions, headed past other homes until it meandered to the main road. The pathway from the Blaine house, trod by his mother’s family and then his own, ran to the cut in the trees perhaps fifty feet to Adam’s left. Peering over the rock again, Adam saw the wooden stairway to the beach, built by Ben for his sons when they were young. That night anyone could have approached this promontory from any of four directions, and likely remained unseen by anyone but Ben himself.

“They took your shoes,” Adam said. “That suggests there were footprints here. What was the weather like that day?”

Jack stared at the clay, his shaggy white-tipped eyebrows raised in thought. “It had rained that morning. Anyone coming by might have left some prints.”

Adam scoured the area around the rock. “Even wet, that clay is pretty hard.”

“True. Anyhow, no point looking now. A few hours after I found him it started raining buckets.”

Adam faced his uncle. “Tell me what you think, Jack. Did someone give him a shove?”

Jack shook his head, less in demurral than distress. “Why would they?”

“Take your pick. Fear. Greed. Reprisal. Not to mention the sheer pleasure of it.” Adam’s voice hardened. “Personally speaking, I don’t much care if someone helped him, or who it was. But Sergeant Mallory does.”

A look of reticence entered Jack’s eyes, perhaps the superstitious fear of speaking ill of the dead, or worry about the police. “Whatever Ben did, he’s gone now.”

Adam felt a resurgence of the anger he could never escape, stirred by the revelations of the last hours. “Gone? In a year, maybe I’ll believe it. But he’s as much trouble dead as he was alive, and not just because of how he died. He shafted my mother-even now Benjamin Blaine is pulling our strings. We didn’t bury him at all.”

Jack stared at his feet. “I wish we could,” he said. “Death should put an end to hatred.”

Adam shook his head. “Not for me. Not with what he’s done.”

After a moment, Jack met his eyes. “I know,” he said in a tone of resignation. “How do you suppose I feel, Adam? Long before you were born, Ben was my brother.”

For Adam, Jack’s statement had its own complex resonance. His uncle’s nature was inherently kind; despising Ben must carry its own pain. Through the prism of hindsight, Adam could see that Jack treated those who suffered as he had-Ben’s wife and sons-with deep compassion, understanding all too well how they must feel. Where Ben was indifferent to Teddy’s talent, Jack-who knew what it was to make things with his hands, using his eye for form and shape-encouraged him. And when Teddy wrestled with being gay, it was only Jack who listened.

This led Adam to the question of why Jack had never married. Perhaps, like Teddy, Jack was gay-for an islander of Jack’s years, secrecy might have felt safer. Or perhaps sexual intimacy was not important to him. But whatever Jack’s nature, Adam, too, had benefited from his uncle’s care.

When Ben was away-as was frequent-Jack took him fishing or sailing or hiking, teaching him to observe the small wonders of nature. With Jack, Adam never felt that clutch in the stomach, the need to please his harshly judgmental father. In Ben’s absence, Jack came to Adam’s games, cheering as he played quarterback, or point guard, or center field. It was from Jack, not Ben, that Adam learned the value of positive encouragement-to cherish his achievements, to learn from his mistakes. It was Jack who taught Adam compassion for himself, and then for others. Without Jack, Adam might have become his father.

Perhaps that had been his uncle’s plan. For as long as Adam could remember, the two brothers had a quietly corrosive relationship. Ben spoke of Jack with dismissive scorn; Jack did not mention him at all. It was as if Ben’s family was their only bridge. When, as a teenager, Adam had wondered aloud why they seemed estranged, Jack had answered wryly, “We have temperamental differences.” But gradually, through his mother and a populace that, in winter, shrunk to fourteen thousand souls, Adam had come to understand far more.

Their family of origin had been impoverished in every way. Nathaniel Blaine had been frustrated by the harshness of his way of life, all that he knew, and a deep sense of his own limitations. He was a man of volcanic anger, subjecting his wife, Amy, to a stunted and fearful existence. Both drank to excess; neither had much love to give Jack, and less after Ben was born. But Jack was gentle from birth, while Ben burned with the desire to transcend his family. The first test for Ben was Jack-quite explicitly, Ben set out not just to outstrip Jack as a student, athlete, and sailor, but to sear Jack’s soul with the knowledge of his own inferiority. It was Ben who left for Yale; Ben who became the Vineyard’s most famous son. Jack was known as his older, lesser brother.

Parsing these reflections, Adam glanced sideways at his uncle, Jack’s gentle mien illuminated by the sun in its descent. Jack should not have been on this island-then or now. In his twenties Jack, like Teddy, had struggled for survival in New York City. Then the widowed Nathaniel Blaine, stumbling while drunk, had struck his head on the kitchen counter and bled to death on the floor. No one had found him for days; no one cared much. But he had left the home he died in, a small house near Menemsha Harbor. In a seemingly benign gesture, Ben had waived his rights of inheritance, giving Jack a home he could not replace anywhere else by selling it. And so Jack had returned to live in Ben’s shadow-which, Adam thought now, was likely Ben’s intention. Ben had held out a poisoned chalice, and his older brother had taken it. Even in that last fateful summer, when Adam had tipped the balance of their rivalry, he knew that the fault line in his life had cracked open before his birth. And now he had come back.

Adam became aware of his long silence. “You’re right,” he told his uncle. “I’ve been away a long time now. I remember him as he was.”

Jack gave him a probing look. “Why did you leave?” he asked. “You changed the entire course of your life, cut off your father, and wouldn’t say why. It was like you were too proud to tell us.”