well as Lillian Hellman, until today its most famous occupant, whom Ben had memorably described as “an unspeakable harridan, as ugly as she was dishonest.” When moved to scorn, which was often, his father had minced no words.
They parked near a grave site shaded by trees and bordered by freshly dug earth, where the priest awaited them. This time Adam, Jack, and Teddy carried the casket with two cemetery workers, placing it on the platform the men would use to lower it into the ground. As Adam introduced himself to the priest, Robin Merritt, another car appeared. To his utter confusion, Jenny Leigh emerged.
He glanced at Teddy. But his brother’s face registered no surprise. When Clarice saw Jenny, her expression warmed as it had for Adam. Tall and graceful, Jenny seemed to carry a separateness, as though creating her own space. But then she reached his mother and took Clarice in her arms.
Clarice hugged her fiercely. Ten years ago, Adam’s mother had barely known her. And yet, by some alchemy of time, Jenny Leigh was here.
She kissed Jack on the cheek, then Teddy. Approaching Adam, her blue-gray eyes were grave and searching. She hesitated and then, as though conscious of the others watching, brushed his cheek with her lips. Drawing back, she said, “You look different. But then it’s been quite a while.”
Adam’s mouth felt dry. “So it has. How are you, Jenny?”
“Fine.” She glanced toward the grave. “Is this hard for you?”
“Less hard than what came before.”
She nodded, briefly looking down. Then she stood beside Clarice.
The small group gathered around the grave. Looking again at his uncle and brother, Adam pondered the patterns within their family. In the last two generations, the birth order seemed to have repeated itself; Teddy, the firstborn, resembled Jack; Adam was the image of Jack’s younger brother. Now they were burying Ben beside the father he had despised, Nathaniel Blaine, just as Teddy and Adam loathed the man they were burying. Both older brothers, Jack and Teddy, had been overshadowed by the younger. But there was this difference, for which Adam was profoundly grateful-whereas Ben’s transcendence over Jack came with a streak of cruelty, Adam, observing that, had striven to be easier for Teddy to love. A generous spirit, Teddy had perceived this. As a brother, he was all that Adam could have asked.
Standing together with folded hands, Adam and Teddy listened as Father Merritt recited the commitment to the grave. “Almighty God, Father of mercies and giver of comfort, deal graciously, we pray, with all those who mourn: that, casting all their care on you, they may know the consolation of your love-”
When this was done, they lowered Ben into the earth. Clarice shoveled dirt on the casket, then Jack, Teddy, and Adam. He had wondered how this would feel. Now he felt nothing but the desire to be done with it.
As Adam put down the shovel, Clarice turned toward Jenny. “We’re going home,” she said. “Would you like to come?”
Jenny glanced at Adam, then replied with equal softness. “Adam is here now. This should be a time for family.”
Looking from Jenny to Adam, Clarice nodded. Without another word, Jenny hugged her and left.
From the road, Adam saw, the photographer from the Enquirer was shooting pictures of his father’s grave. As Adam turned to watch Jenny departing, Teddy placed a hand on his shoulder. “Just as well,” he murmured. “We’ve got some things to tell you, and Jenny’s the least of it.”
Three
For all of Adam’s life, the Blaines had lived in a sprawling white frame house, set in a grassy clearing amid ten wooded acres. Built in the 1850s, it was sheltered by trees from the winds off the Atlantic, though clear-cutting had created an opening through which one could view the cliff overlooking the water. In the 1940s, a wealthy couple from Boston, Clarice’s parents, had bought this as their summer home; long before Adam and Teddy had played hide-and-seek in the woods and swum off the rocky beach below, Clarice had spent the best months of her childhood in this house. As with many homes of this vintage, the porch that looked out at woods and ocean had been more generous than the rooms, a reminder that what was most compelling about the Vineyard was outdoors. Adam could still remember the summer evenings when his mother and father, like Clarice’s, would sit on the porch until nightfall, talking or just listening to the crickets.
But like everything he touched, Ben had left his mark on the house of Clarice’s youth. Discontented with cramped space, he had knocked down walls and added a study that his wife and sons entered by invitation only. Now the living room was large and open, filled with comfortable furniture, sumptuous Asian rugs, and mementos of Ben’s travels-Asian vases, African masks, scrolls in Arabic and Hebrew, and Middle Eastern antiques acquired by dubious means. On the rough-hewn dining room table was the silver Herreshoff Cup, possessed for a season by the winner of the summer sailing competition, which Ben had claimed again in his sixty-fourth year. The home was so redolent of his father’s life that Adam, entering for the first time in years, half-expected to see the man they had just buried drinking whisky in his brown leather chair.
Instead, his family sat in a room that, despite its many appointments, felt empty. Shaking off this moment of strangeness, Adam poured himself a scotch and took deeper stock of the survivors. Whenever he could, he had met them off-island, so he did not gauge them by the ten-year span of his self-imposed exile. But all three had changed since Adam had seen them last.
His mother looked smaller and more worn, her beauty now the faded handsomeness of a woman in her sixties. Though she still carried herself with an air of serenity and self-possession, a second persona seemed to peer out from behind her cornflower-blue eyes, more tentative and wounded. In Adam’s mind, she had always been the master of appearances-her parents had taught her well, and she had polished her skills in the larger world as Ben Blaine’s lovely and forbearing wife, hiding the pain of her marriage and, with that, its loneliness. Clarice Blaine, her son thought sadly, was perhaps the nicest person no one really knew.
Lean and angular, Teddy was an amalgam, with his mother’s air of refinement, Jack’s sensitive brown eyes, and a forelock of Ben’s unruly black hair falling over his pale forehead. But his essence was uniquely Teddy-the artistic talent, the ironic smile with humor to match, a cover for his own hurt. The disease that had driven him back to the island, non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, had left him frailer and, it seemed to Adam, out of place. It was hard to grow up gay on Martha’s Vineyard; even for adults, there was not much cushion for that among the natives. But it was worse to return to Ben’s scorn and indifference. Nothing Teddy accomplished could change his father’s verdict: where Adam saw a gifted painter, Ben had seen a feckless dreamer. In a just world, Adam thought, Jack would have been Teddy’s father.
Jack, too, had been an artist-a sculptor. Faltering in his chosen path, he had become a woodworker, sublimating whatever frustrations he might feel in an embrace of the island’s natural world. But the fraternal pattern persisted-when Jack chose to compete with Ben, as he had for years of summer sailing, far more often than not Ben won. Now Ben was dead, and Jack looked hollowed out and weary. Perhaps the saddest part of this moment for Adam was that, for all of their resentments, Ben Blaine had been the dominant figure in the lives of these three people, and in his own.
Following Adam’s lead, Teddy poured a tumbler of scotch for his mother, another for himself, but none for Jack. In response to Adam’s querying look, his uncle said simply, “I’ve stopped. It was getting me through too many winter nights.”
The note of regret in Jack’s voice underscored the reticence in the room. Adam looked at the three of them, Clarice sitting beside Jack on the couch, Teddy in an antique chair. Each seemed grim and subdued, as if they had much to say and no easy place to begin. Remembering Teddy’s words at the grave site, Adam said to his brother, “The eulogy got my attention. What ‘difficult year’ are we talking about? Every year with our father was difficult.”
Teddy glanced at their mother. “This one was harder,” she said in a brittle voice. “Especially the last four months.”
“How so?”
The trace of melancholy in her eyes did not match the asperity of her tone. “He was drinking heavily-much more than when you knew him. His behavior became very erratic, with frequent mood changes and outbursts of
