Standing near the casket, a young Episcopal priest recited the Burial of the Dead:
I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord; he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live; and whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die…
Adam believed none of it. In his recent experience, death was random, ugly, and very final, all too often the work of men whose God commanded these acts. That world, like this service, offered no transcendence. His only comfort was that the survivors loved one another, and now might find some peace.
Adam glanced at his mother, then his brother, trying to read their faces. Clarice wore her public expression, a mask of dignity she used to conceal more complicated feelings. But Teddy’s dark eyes, cast now at the polished wooden floor, seemed to hold some anguished memory. At whatever age, Adam knew, some part of us is always a child, feeling pleasure at a parent’s love or the wounds of a parent’s disdain. The man inside the coffin had wounded Teddy long ago, too deeply to forget. From beneath the drone of the service, a memory of their father surfaced unbidden, as much about Teddy as Adam.
It was from that final summer, meant to be a bridge between Adam’s first and second years at law school, after which life would become too serious to savor the days of sun and sea and wind so evocative of his youth. The summer that instead transformed Adam’s life completely.
At the helm of his sailboat, Ben grinned with sheer love of the Vineyard waters, looking younger than his fifty-five years, his thick silver-flecked black hair swept back by a stiff headwind. To Adam, he resembled a pirate: a nose like a prow, bright black eyes that could exude anger, joy, alertness, or desire. He had a fluid grace of movement, a physicality suited to rough seas; in profile there was a hatchetlike quality to his face, an aggression in his posture, as though he were forever thrusting forward, ready to take the next bite out of life. “When Benjamin Blaine walks into a room,” Vanity Fair had gushed, “he seems to be in Technicolor, and everyone else in black and white.” As a boy, Adam had wanted nothing more than to be like him.
On this day, Adam enjoyed his father’s enthusiasm for his classic wooden sailboat. “Well into this century,” Ben had explained when he taught the eight-year-old Adam to sail, “the Herreshoff brothers designed eight consecutive defenders of the America’s Cup. They built boats like this for the richest, most sophisticated families of their time-the Vanderbilts, the Whitneys. I bought this one from your grandfather Barkley.” His voice lowered, to impress on Adam the import of his next words. “To own one is a privilege, but to race one-as you someday will-is a joy. I mean for you to learn the primal joy of winning.”
On this sail with Adam, fifteen years later, Ben was preparing for racing season yet again, his lust for competition unstanched. “This is the best thing in the world,” he exclaimed. “Even better than hunting deer. Are you ever going to try that with me?”
Adam adjusted the mainsail, catching the wind as it shifted. “I doubt it.”
Ben shot him a look of displeasure. “You’re too much like your mother, Adam. But in this family you’re the only game in town.”
At once, Adam caught the reference. However demanding their father could sometimes be with Adam, for years Ben had treated Teddy less like a son than an uninvited guest who, to Ben’s surprise and displeasure, kept showing up for dinner. But the role of favorite by default no longer gave Adam pleasure. “So Teddy’s not like us,” he rejoined. “So what? I can’t paint, and neither can you. Only Teddy got that gene.”
“Among others,” Ben said flatly.
As Ben steered them starboard, gaining speed, Adam felt his own tension, years of too many retorts stifled. “Welcome to the twenty-first century,” he replied. “Has it ever occurred to you that Teddy being gay is no different from you and I being left-handed? No wonder he never comes home.” He paused, then ventured more evenly, “Someday people won’t read you anymore. You’ll be left with whoever is left to love you. It’s not too late for Teddy to be one of them.”
Unaccustomed to being challenged, Ben stared at him. “I know it’s supposed to be genetic. So call me antediluvian, if you like. But genetics gave me a firstborn who feels like a foundling.” His voice slowed, admitting a regretful note. “You like the things I like. Teddy never did. He didn’t want to fish or sail or hunt or enjoy a day like this, God’s gift to man. When I wanted someone to toss around a baseball with, you were like a puppy, eager to play. Not Teddy. He just gave me one of his looks.”
“Did you ever care about what Teddy liked?” Adam paused, then came to the hard truth he too often felt. “Do you love me for me, Dad, or because I’m more like you than he is?”
Ben’s face closed, his pleasure in the day vanishing. “We’re not the same person, for sure. But we’re alike in ways that seem important. Think of me what you will, but I desire women. I’ve seen almost everything the world contains-wars, poverty, cruelty, heroism, grace, children starving to death, and women treated like cattle or sold into sexual slavery. There’s almost nothing I can’t imagine. But one thing I can’t imagine is you looking at a man the way you look at Jenny. Teddy sees a man and imagines him naked, lying on his stomach. Assuming,” Ben finished, “that Teddy is even the protagonist of that particular act.”
In his anger, Adam resolved to say the rest. “I’ve always loved Teddy,” he replied coldly, “and always will. But given how you feel about him, it’s a good thing that he’s in New York. And given how I feel about that, it might be good for you to remember that I’m the son you’ve got left.”
Ben gave him a level look, deflecting the challenge. “He’s in New York for now,” he said at length. “It’s where artists go to fail. Inside him, Teddy carries the seed of his own defeat. My guess is that he’ll slink back here, like Jack did. The larger world was a little too large for him.”
Listening, Adam marveled at the casual ease with which Ben had slipped in his disdain for his older brother. “Just who is it that you do respect, Dad?”
“Many people,” Ben answered. “But in this family?” He paused, regarding Adam intently. “You, Adam. At least to a point.”
Staring at his father’s coffin, Adam wished that he had never learned what that point was. In kinship, he placed his hand on Teddy’s shoulder.
Two
Amid the hush that follows prayer, the priest began to speak.
In the Episcopal Church, Adam knew, by tradition there was no eulogy. But it seemed that his father could not be buried without one. Even dead, he was not a man for observing rules.
Briefly, Adam glanced at his mother, hands folded in her lap, attentive and almost watchful. What piqued Adam’s curiosity was that she had assigned the eulogy to this cleric, a man far too young to have known Ben well. Clarice understood, of course, that neither his sons nor his brother cared to express public sentiments about the deceased. But that she had not enlisted one of the visiting celebrities suggested to Adam that she wished to maintain the public image of this family and this marriage. He settled in to endure a web of fictions and evasions.
A serious-looking young man with thinning hair, the priest began with the rise of Benjamin Blaine. The son of a Vineyard family whose males, for more than a century, had scraped by as lobstermen. The first Blaine to attend college, on a scholarship to Yale-an act of will, Adam knew, reflecting his father’s iron resolve to be nothing like his father. A draftee who became a decorated veteran of bitter fighting in Vietnam. Author of the first great memoir for that war, Body Count, a searing depiction of combat that became a bestseller. A foreign correspondent who went to the hardest places on the globe. Then, not yet thirty, the novelist who, in the clergyman’s words, “sought out the impoverished, the embattled, the victims of war or oppression, capturing their lives in indelible prose-”
And taking due credit for it, Adam thought. The travels not only fed his books but his legend-that there was nowhere Ben Blaine would not go, no danger he feared to face. He could have written the priest’s next words: “He was handsome and charismatic, a great adventurer who was friend to some of the world’s most famous people, and some of its most forgotten.” All of whom, Adam would have said, his father saw as bit players in the drama of his life. Glancing at Teddy as he suffered this account in silence, he mentally added Ben’s family to the list.
“He never blinked at the cruelty of the world,” the priest went on. “Instead, he recorded it with brutal honesty. That was the obligation he took on: to become our eyes and illuminate what he saw so that we could see.” Give Ben Blaine his due, Adam conceded-he had breathed humanity into forgotten lives, touching the conscience of millions. For Adam, one of the mysteries of writing was that it could ennoble the most selfish of men,
