cipher. Both were alcoholics, so there was no safe place for either boy. Since then, I think, everyone else has paid for the damage they did Ben in childhood.”
Adam shook his head, less in demurral than confusion. “I was too close to him, Charlie. How did that boy become the father I knew?”
Glazer nodded. “A good question. No one on earth is Adam or Eve-our parents had parents, too. So here’s how Ben lays out for a psychiatrist. As a child, he had no love from either parent: his father beat him, and his mother couldn’t protect him. That led to a terrible narcissistic injury-Ben’s lifetime quest to heal the wounds to his own sense of manhood.” Smiling, Glazer stopped himself abruptly. “Am I making sense, or does this sound like total bullshit?”
Adam stared at the deck, not answering. “Hardly,” he said at length. “In fact, you just surfaced a memory. My father and me, just the two of us, standing on the promontory after his own dad’s funeral.”
Glazer eyed him curiously. “How old were you then, Adam?”
“Not yet ten, I think. But suddenly I remember it all too well.”
His father stared moodily at the water, falling into a silence that Adam feared to break.
“It’s so strange,” Ben said at last. “The death of a father is a profound thing, I’m finding, no matter how great a sonofabitch he was. I don’t know why I should feel like this. It’s pathetic to be the slave of archetypes.”
His father’s voice was low and soft, as though he were speaking to himself. Curious, Adam asked, “How come we never saw him?”
“Because I could never forget who he was.” For a moment, Ben studied him. “Be grateful I’m your father, Adam. Mine used to get drunk and slap us around, then beat up my mother for sport. The only way I survived was to make myself tougher than he was.”
“What did you do?”
“Read book after book on boxing. Then I hung up a heavy bag in a neighbor’s barn and tore into it every day after school. Not to let the anger out, but to train it.” Ben turned to his son again. “I punished that bag until the stuffing bled through the canvas. A sign from God, I thought.” Adam heard Ben’s reflective tone transmute to something harder. “That night, at dinner, my father slaps my mother-there’s something about the stew he doesn’t like. She is cowering in a corner with that same look of incomprehension, a small animal petrified of a big one.
“I get up from the table and grab him by the wrist. ‘You’re a pussy,’ I tell him. ‘Good only for drinking and beating up women and small boys. You’re just smart enough to know I’ve gotten way too big for that. But too stupid to know what that means.’”
Listening, Adam felt his heart race. “The bastard’s eyes get big,” his father continued. “Suddenly, he takes a swing at me. I duck, like I’ve taught myself, and Jack tries to step between us. ‘Get out of my way,’ I bark at him, ‘or you’ll come next.’” Ben’s speech quickened. “Jack backs up a step. Before my father can move I pivot sideways and hit him in the gut with everything I’ve got. He doubles over, groaning. As he struggles to look up at me, I break his nose with a right cross.” Ben’s voice was shaking now. “His blood spurts on the floor. I’m breathing hard, years of hatred welling up. ‘Remember hitting me?’ I manage to say, and send a left to his mouth that knocks out most of his front teeth.
“My father starts blubbering, and he looks like Halloween. I pull him up by the throat and press my thumbs on his larynx till his eyes bulge. ‘I run this house now,’ I tell him. ‘You just live here. Hit her again, and I’ll cut your balls off with a butter knife.’”
As Adam watched him, frightened, Ben’s barrel chest shuddered like a bellows. Tears began running down his face. “He’s dead now,” he said in a choked voice. “Thank God it won’t be like that for us.”
Not knowing what to do, Adam took his father’s hand and felt Ben squeeze his in return.
Finishing, Adam felt the dampness in his eyes, a grief too deep and complex to express. For a time, Glazer let him be, scanning the horizon. “Do you remember what you felt, Adam?”
“Terrified,” Adam murmured. “Of both men in the story, the father and the son. And of being like either one.”
Glazer nodded. “That makes sense, and not just because they fought. The forgotten person in that scene is the mother-whose passivity helped make Ben who he became. Among other things, a serial pursuer of women, scarred by neglect from the first woman in his life.”
“Too many parallels,” Adam told Glazer. “My father never beat us-or, to my knowledge, her. But all of us lived in his shadow. My mother deferred to him, and couldn’t protect us from the psychic damage he inflicted. Like Jack, my brother stood aside. And, like Ben, I broke with my own father.”
The look in Glazer’s eyes combined compassion and deep interest. “You think you’re too much like him, is that it?”
“That’s all I ever heard,” Adam said in a low voice. “Not just to look at, but to be with.”
“Then bear with me for another moment. Because the father you knew was his own singular invention. No doubt you’ve heard of narcissistic personality disorder.”
Adam searched his memory. “As I recall, it involves an insatiable need for attention and admiration. Plus a tendency to see others in terms of those needs.”
Richard North Patterson
Fall from Grace
Glazer nodded. “At the positive end, you find someone like John F. Kennedy, a high-functioning leader who’s rewarded for his gifts. Or you get someone more malignant, seeking dominance by subjugating or destroying others-taking their jobs, stealing their women. Does that sound much like you to you?”
“Not as I imagine myself. Though I’d be the last to know, wouldn’t I?”
“You’re very much like him, it’s true. But the person you’re most likely to damage is yourself. Your father’s efforts were far more comprehensive. Regrettably for Clarice, however, narcissistic personality disorder does not disqualify someone from executing a valid will.” Glazer paused, reflecting. “What I can’t know is how the course of his disease, and the fear of imminent death, affected your father’s mental state. Or how Carla Pacelli fits into the puzzle.”
“Really?” Adam said tartly. “Everyone else tells me it’s obvious. My mother is sixty-five. Carla Pacelli is half that age, and known for her remarkable face and figure. Seems like enough for Dad, they tell me.”
Glazer’s face was skeptical. “But why leave her all his money? Ben was far too conscious of how the world saw him to play the besotted old fool.” Glazer looked at Adam intently. “Granted, sleeping with Carla Pacelli fit Ben’s need to prove his own superiority. But psychologically, his hunger for transcendence involved concealing his ‘true self’-the wounded son-behind a ‘fake self’ who was omnipotent, omniscient, and invulnerable. He needed to risk death because he feared it so much. But the last thing he’d do is risk appearing to be controlled by a younger woman-even this one. That’s why I find Ben’s relationship with Carla so completely enigmatic. As, I sense, do you.”
“True enough,” Adam conceded.
“I don’t know this woman at all,” Glazer cautioned. “But you don’t either. So don’t respond to stereotypes, no matter how tempting. She may be more complicated than you think.”
Adam gave him a dubious look. “I’ll hold the thought.”
Glazer read his expression. “Sorry I can’t be more help. But while I’ve got you here-for the first time in a decade, at that-there’s one more subject worth discussing further.”
“Which is?”
“Your own family, Adam. Starting with you and Ben.”
Ten
The two men leaned on the railing, the blue panorama of Menemsha Pond before them, the images of a long-ago racing season ghosts in Adam’s mind. “To escape his inner self,” Glazer observed, “Ben needed to write bestsellers, face down danger, and eviscerate anyone he saw as a rival. That came to include you, didn’t it?”
Adam did not answer. “And women?” he asked. “What were they to him?”
“Mirrors in which he saw himself-or the man he wished to see. Until Pacelli, and with the partial exception of your mother, I read him as the classic sexual narcissist: insatiable, emotionally cool, and incapable of love.” He
