Carolyn’?”
“Or ‘Ben and Clarice,’” Adam responded. “‘Tom and Rita’ are a ten. Whereas, I’m sorry to say, Mom and you are more like a seven-”
“I’m heartbroken.”
“You should be. Anyhow, the season starts tonight, so you absolutely have to be there. I’ll be thinking about you.”
With a faint smile, Ben regarded his youngest son. “Your friend Jenny has some insight. I don’t know whether you’ll ever be a famous trial lawyer, Adam. But if you become one, let me give you some advice. I like fame, quite a lot. But you have to know how to use it.” His eyes became serious, his voice penetrant. “I use it to gain things of value-access to people I respect, or whose lives or achievements interest me. I use it to gain experiences I haven’t had, and learn things I didn’t know. Fame is hard to win, all too easy to lose, and way too precious to squander on tonight’s group of nattering hangers-on.”
“So why don’t you just let Mom go without you?”
“If only I could. But I’m the draw-in a marriage, sacrifices must be made.” Ben paused. “This Jenny of yours sounds smart enough. Is this a serious thing?”
Adam weighed his answer. “She’s still pretty young, only twenty. But it’s serious enough that we’re only seeing each other.”
Ben gave him a speculative look. “Then I hope she’s good, my boy.”
Abruptly, Adam felt a flash of anger-this was a line his father could not cross. “Good at what, Dad? You make her sound like an athlete.”
Watching Adam’s face, Ben shrugged, his way of backing off. Adam would never give him an answer, let alone the truth: Sometimes Jenny just goes away. Like she doesn’t know where she is, or that I’m the man inside her.
And now Jenny Leigh had become his father’s heir.
Adam looked at his uncle, ashamed of his own judgment of Jack’s life. This man was everything his father was not-loving, humane, and protective of Adam’s mother and brother. “At the end,” Adam asked, “did you think my father was crazy?”
In the failing light of dusk, he saw Jack frown. “Crazy? I don’t know. I just know that he was different.”
“In what way?”
“The ones your mother saw. Especially this thing with Carla Pacelli.” Jack shifted his weight, seemingly uncomfortable. “I mean, you know what he was like. When it came to women, as with a lot of things, Ben had a complete indifference to other people’s pain and a fierce desire to compete. Nothing was better than sticking his penis where some other man’s had been-”
“I know that,” Adam cut in. “But for whatever reason he always stayed with my mother. He didn’t start putting girlfriends in his will, for godsakes.”
“So maybe he was crazy,” Jack said in measured tones. “Or maybe, in his way, he fell in love with Carla Pacelli.”
“That’s a complete oxymoron. Ben Blaine wasn’t capable of love.”
Jack met his gaze. “I think he loved your mother once. At least as much as he was capable of love.”
“When?” Adam asked with real scorn. “Before I was born?”
“Yes,” Jack answered. “Before you were born.”
Adam folded his arms. At last, he said, “I may have left here, and he may be dead. But it’s not over between us, after all. It won’t be until I undo everything that bastard has done.”
Jack’s expression was tinged with melancholy. “How, exactly?”
Adam felt the same steel enter his soul he had felt ten years before. “I haven’t worked that out yet. But trust me, Jack, I will.”
Five
Adam found his mother in the den, his father’s sanctuary. It was filled with photographs of Benjamin Blaine with world leaders, politicians, missionaries, mercenaries, and soldiers in half-forgotten wars. There was nothing of his family in it. Yet Clarice had gravitated there, sitting on the leather couch in the dim light of Ben’s desk lamp, as if to search for meaning in her life with this man. Adam sensed the desperation beneath her composure-she had lost not only her inheritance but her identity as a woman. In the end, Ben had taken everything.
“What are you doing, Mom?”
“Remembering.” Her voice was quiet and bitter. “Taking stock of my accomplishments. Except for this last manuscript, I took part in every one he wrote-proofreading, researching, or just telling him what I thought. And no one knew but me.”
Adam sat beside her, absorbing the weight of her loss. For as long as he could remember, he had felt for her, all the more so when, still young, he had learned to decode the meaning of his father’s nocturnal disappearances, the jaunty look he took on in the wake of some new conquest. The boy Adam had loved her, worried for her, and wished that he could protect her from hurt. But he did not want to be like her-despite everything, the person he admired was his father.
Now, filled with anger and pity, he did not know what to say. Instead, Clarice told him, “I’m sorry, Adam. For everything.”
Adam took her hand. “He made this mess, not you. As always.”
Turning, she looked him in the eyes. “I don’t mean the will. The way you look at me now is all too familiar. I can see how worried you are.”
“Shouldn’t I be?”
“I suppose so. But that’s the point-you always were.” Her voice was new to him, clear and filled with reckoning. “I loved you both even more than you know. But instead of standing up for you and Teddy, what I gave you was an inconstant mother who drank too much. So you became my parent, helping me as best you could, while I went on pretending for others that my marriage was better than you knew it to be. And when you grew old enough to understand it all, you left in disgust.”
“Only with him.”
Clarice shook her head. “Not just him. I think you were smart enough to realize that on a more elevated plane, we had replicated Ben’s family of origin-the acquiescent mother, the demeaning father, the sons who suffered at his hands. And, as Ben did, our youngest son broke away. The worst part for me was knowing that only he gave you the strength to do that. Because you were so much like him.”
Adam felt a stab of fear, the need to protest that, like Jack, he had the ability to reflect, a concern for how his desires might impact those around him. But what he said was, “There’s a biblical quote that goes something like ‘When I was a child, I acted as a child. But when I became a man, I put aside childish things.’ To the day he died, my father was a cruel and destructive child, with a child’s self-absorption. No one else was real to him.”
“There was more to Ben than that,” Clarice responded. “For whatever it’s worth, your rupture hit him hard. He seemed to flinch at the slightest mention of your name, like the hurt he felt was too deep to admit-”
Adam’s harsh bark of laughter was involuntary. Abruptly, Clarice demanded, “Tell me what he did to you, Adam. After all this time, I have the right to know.”
Adam met her gaze. “All he had to do was be himself. One day I’d had enough. It’s a wonder you never got there-”
“You dropped out of law school, dammit.”
“I dropped out of my life, Mom. And made another that belongs to me alone.”
“Really? Is that why you’re working in a hellhole like Afghanistan? It’s exactly what Ben would have done.”
“Not exactly,” Adam responded. “Anyhow, he’s dead. At the moment I’m more concerned with how he got that way.”
Clarice looked at him steadily. “He was drunk, and he fell.”
“That drunk? A man who could drink a half bottle of scotch and still sail his boat in a storm?”
