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.”
Fifteen
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.”
“More than that. I have an existence no one in my family can imagine. I’ve developed this distance-physical and emotional.” Adam paused, trying to explain a sensation foreign to almost everyone he encountered. “I’ve learned to split off from the past, or even what’s happening to me in the moment. In effect I’ve become a different person, who can stuff even the worst experience until it’s time to face it.”
Glazer regarded him closely. “And now your father’s dead, and you’re ten years harder. And coming back has forced you to confront the reasons that you left.”
“So it seems. I’d like to exhume the past, then bury it for good. At least to the extent I can.”
Glazer hunched in his chair, blue eyes fixed on Adam. “And that racing season was the catalyst, you believe.”
“For both of us. Without that, I’m certain, I’d have gone back to school and become a lawyer.”
“And married Jenny?”
Adam closed his eyes again, his voice lower and quieter. “I’ll never know, will I? All I’m sure of is that one summer on this pond changed everything.”
In Adam’s understanding now, the annual competition for the Herreshoff Cup caught the primal essence of his father: a ruthless competitive drive, an ineradicable class envy, the lust to subordinate other men. The novels, the accolades, the women-none of that was enough. There was also the battered silver trophy with a half century of victors engraved on its side. By 2001, Benjamin Blaine had stamped his name on it seven times; this summer, as before, the cup sat on their dining room table like a prize of war.
From his father’s earliest memory, Adam knew, he had been captivated by the sight of these gaff-rigged boats, so perfect in design, racing one another on the pond from which his drunken father had extracted lobster-at once a wondrous spectacle, a privilege of wealth, and a contest between competitors stripped of all excuses. As a youth, Ben had begged his way onto the boat of a wealthy man, Clarice’s father; as a man, he had bought her father’s house, then his Herreshoff-the boat he had always craved, a wooden-hulled classic from the early 1900s, as beautiful as it was balanced. With what seemed an act of fraternal generosity, but which Adam now perceived as malignant perversity, his father had purchased a companion boat for Jack. So that every summer, on these same waters, Ben could remind his older brother of which man had transcended Nathaniel Blaine.
The occasion was the summer races sponsored by the Menemsha Pond Racing Club, a preserve of skilled sailors who, quite often, were also celebrated as actors, writers, musicians, and lions of industry or Wall Street-or,
