Adam and Jack stood at the promontory where, countless times before, the younger Adam had watched the sunset with his father.
Like the bow of a ship, the point jutted out from land over the rocky beach below, affording a sweeping view of the Atlantic on both sides. The massive rock on which they stood, embedded in hard red clay, had been polished as smooth as a table by wind and rain. When Adam was a boy, his father had organized evening picnics for his wife and sons, exulting in the elemental beauty of the sun descending toward the vast cobalt sea. One memory from Adam’s last summer on the Vineyard was especially vivid-Ben at his most appealing, the nature sensualist enthralled by the gift of life. The evening was hazy, the setting sun a red ball, turning a backdrop of nimbus clouds into a panorama of brilliant orange. Grinning, Ben had told him, “This is my favorite place on earth-that rarest of things in these parts, a water view of the ocean with a western exposure. I never tire of it; every sunset is different. When I die, I hope to God someone will have the grace to scatter my ashes here.”
But his mother had not done so-she had buried him in the earth, next to the father he despised, perhaps the only revenge she had left. His father had died in this place, his skull shattering on the rocks below. Another memory came to Adam-as a small child, bold even then, he had stood at the edge of the promontory, gazing down the sheer cliffside with no thought to his safety. Taking his hand in a strong grip, his father had pulled him back. In gentle rebuke, Ben said, “Don’t stand so close, son. You could fall to your death. Follow my example and stay back from it.” Perhaps Ben, sure-footed as he was, had said this for a child’s benefit. But even on that last night, their final sunset together, his father had stood well short of the cliff.
Amid this skein of memory, another thought came to Adam-that, however subconsciously, his childish resolve to stand at its edge had been a way of showing up Teddy, who suffered from vertigo and endured these family picnics like a conscript. Odd, too, that in these memories his mother, though surely present, had left no image of herself behind.
Pensive, Adam walked to the edge. Ninety feet below, the coarse sand was covered with rocks and boulders; no one could survive such a fall. “Where exactly did you find him?” Adam asked.
Jack pointed at a group of jagged rocks. “Beside those. The last thing you’d imagine, I know.”
“The very last.”
“Ten years makes a difference, Adam. In me, in you-even in Ben. The man you remember wasn’t the man I found there.”
Adam shoved his hands in his pockets, feeling the wind on his face as he watched the sun, a red-orange disk, slice into the water. At length, he said, “Funny he died on the summer solstice, the longest day of the year. His favorite time to come here.”
Jack gave him a curious look. “You sound almost sentimental.”
“I’m just trying to envision what happened that night.” He turned to Jack. “The state police taped off this area, I assume.”
Jack inclined his head toward the hiking trail that ran along the cliff. “Only for a few hours. There’s too much foot traffic here.”
Adam looked around them, gauging how the police would evaluate their surroundings. Bordered by woods, the promontory would be visible only to hikers or from the waters below. The trail itself, running in both directions, headed past other homes until it meandered to the main road. The pathway from the Blaine house, trod by his mother’s family and then his own, ran to the cut in the trees perhaps fifty feet to Adam’s left. Peering over the rock again, Adam saw the wooden stairway to the beach, built by Ben for his sons when they were young. That night anyone could have approached this promontory from any of four directions, and likely remained unseen by anyone but Ben himself.
“They took your shoes,” Adam said. “That suggests there were footprints here. What was the weather like that day?”
Jack stared at the clay, his shaggy white-tipped eyebrows raised in thought. “It had rained that morning. Anyone coming by might have left some prints.”
Adam scoured the area around the rock. “Even wet, that clay is pretty hard.”
“True. Anyhow, no point looking now. A few hours after I found him it started raining buckets.”
Adam faced his uncle. “Tell me what you think, Jack. Did someone give him a shove?”
Jack shook his head, less in demurral than distress. “Why would they?”
“Take your pick. Fear. Greed. Reprisal. Not to mention the sheer pleasure of it.” Adam’s voice hardened. “Personally speaking, I don’t much care if someone helped him, or who it was. But Sergeant Mallory does.”
A look of reticence entered Jack’s eyes, perhaps the superstitious fear of speaking ill of the dead, or worry about the police. “Whatever Ben did, he’s gone now.”
Adam felt a resurgence of the anger he could never escape, stirred by the revelations of the last hours. “Gone? In a year, maybe I’ll believe it. But he’s as much trouble dead as he was alive, and not just because of how he died. He shafted my mother-even now Benjamin Blaine is pulling our strings. We didn’t bury him at all.”
Jack stared at his feet. “I wish we could,” he said. “Death should put an end to hatred.”
Adam shook his head. “Not for me. Not with what he’s done.”
After a moment, Jack met his eyes. “I know,” he said in a tone of resignation. “How do you suppose I feel, Adam? Long before you were born, Ben was my brother.”
For Adam, Jack’s statement had its own complex resonance. His uncle’s nature was inherently kind; despising Ben must carry its own pain. Through the prism of hindsight, Adam could see that Jack treated those who suffered as he had-Ben’s wife and sons-with deep compassion, understanding all too well how they must feel. Where Ben was indifferent to Teddy’s talent, Jack-who knew what it was to make things with his hands, using his eye for form and shape-encouraged him. And when Teddy wrestled with being gay, it was only Jack who listened.
This led Adam to the question of why Jack had never married. Perhaps, like Teddy, Jack was gay-for an islander of Jack’s years, secrecy might have felt safer. Or perhaps sexual intimacy was not important to him. But whatever Jack’s nature, Adam, too, had benefited from his uncle’s care.
When Ben was away-as was frequent-Jack took him fishing or sailing or hiking, teaching him to observe the small wonders of nature. With Jack, Adam never felt that clutch in the stomach, the need to please his harshly judgmental father. In Ben’s absence, Jack came to Adam’s games, cheering as he played quarterback, or point guard, or center field. It was from Jack, not Ben, that Adam learned the value of positive encouragement-to cherish his achievements, to learn from his mistakes. It was Jack who taught Adam compassion for himself, and then for others. Without Jack, Adam might have become his father.
Perhaps that had been his uncle’s plan. For as long as Adam could remember, the two brothers had a quietly corrosive relationship. Ben spoke of Jack with dismissive scorn; Jack did not mention him at all. It was as if Ben’s family was their only bridge. When, as a teenager, Adam had wondered aloud why they seemed estranged, Jack had answered wryly, “We have temperamental differences.” But gradually, through his mother and a populace that, in winter, shrunk to fourteen thousand souls, Adam had come to understand far more.
Their family of origin had been impoverished in every way. Nathaniel Blaine had been frustrated by the harshness of his way of life, all that he knew, and a deep sense of his own limitations. He was a man of volcanic anger, subjecting his wife, Amy, to a stunted and fearful existence. Both drank to excess; neither had much love to give Jack, and less after Ben was born. But Jack was gentle from birth, while Ben burned with the desire to transcend his family. The first test for Ben was Jack-quite explicitly, Ben set out not just to outstrip Jack as a student, athlete, and sailor, but to sear Jack’s soul with the knowledge of his own inferiority. It was Ben who left for Yale; Ben who became the Vineyard’s most famous son. Jack was known as his older, lesser brother.
Parsing these reflections, Adam glanced sideways at his uncle, Jack’s gentle mien illuminated by the sun in its descent. Jack should not have been on this island-then or now. In his twenties Jack, like Teddy, had struggled for survival in New York City. Then the widowed Nathaniel Blaine, stumbling while drunk, had struck his head on the kitchen counter and bled to death on the floor. No one had found him for days; no one cared much. But he had left the home he died in, a small house near Menemsha Harbor. In a seemingly benign gesture, Ben had waived his rights of inheritance, giving Jack a home he could not replace anywhere else by selling it. And so Jack had returned to live in Ben’s shadow-which, Adam thought now, was likely Ben’s intention. Ben had held out a poisoned chalice, and his older brother had taken it. Even in that last fateful summer, when Adam had tipped the balance of their rivalry, he knew that the fault line in his life had cracked open before his birth. And now he had come back.
Adam became aware of his long silence. “You’re right,” he told his uncle. “I’ve been away a long time now. I remember him as he was.”
Jack gave him a probing look. “Why did you leave?” he asked. “You changed the entire course of your life, cut off your father, and wouldn’t say why. It was like you were too proud to tell us.”
The tacit accusation stung. But Adam had no desire to explain his reasons, and Jack no right to know them. “Maybe I just got sick of him.”
Jack raised his eyebrows. “Enough to shun him for a decade?”
“Yes. That much.”
The laconic rebuff, hard for Adam to deliver, had the unexpected result of softening Jack’s expression. “He got no better, Adam. Sometimes I found myself wishing that, like you, I’d stayed away.”
“Why didn’t you?”
Jack’s shoulders slumped, as if the weight of his reasons was too great to express. “This was home,” he said simply.
Adam felt a rush of affection, accompanied by the fervent wish that he could respect his uncle fully. Perhaps Ben had stamped Adam with his own harsh judgment, but he could not quell his verdict on Jack’s life: You should have left. Instead, Adam said, “Then there’s my mother. Why on earth did he marry her, and why did he stay?”
It was telling, Adam realized, that he did not ask why his mother had married Benjamin Blaine. As it was, the question made Jack frown. “The first part is easy enough to answer. At Ben’s core was this raging anger that he was born into this stunted family, with no money or accomplishment. He was deeply ashamed of that, and of our parents. The shame deepened when the summer people came, enjoying their affluence and success. To scrape together some money Ben and I started working as waiters at their parties, serving them cocktails and hors d’oeuvres, then cleaning up the careless mess they made.”
“That’s how they met, right?”
Jack nodded. “For years, he watched your mother, the beautiful daughter of a family who took their lives for granted. No one knew that later on her father’s investment firm, his inheritance, would collapse under claims of mismanagement.” Jack’s smile was brief and mirthless. “‘Inbreeding,’ Ben told me once. ‘The Barkleys’ blood got thin, until everything her father had he owed to ancestors with more brains and balls.’”
The echo of his father’s scorn re-ignited Adam’s anger. “It didn’t keep the sonofabitch from marrying the old man’s daughter.”
“Clarice was a prize to be won,” Jack replied, “a symbol of all he wanted and never had. For a passing moment, I thought he was after your mother’s best friend, Whitney Dane. But once Ben left Yale, it was his time to go after her. She never had a chance-the triumph of capturing her was too great for Ben to fail.” Jack’s tone grew hard. “So he pursued her, married her, and cheated on her. The ultimate proof of his superiority was that he made her parents’ home his own. And now he’s taken that piece of her life and given it to this actress.”
Feeling the chill of this story and its coda, Adam shut his eyes. Another moment with his father came to him, again from their final summer. Jenny was off-island, and Adam had asked Ben to go fly-fishing off Dogfish Bar. With a rueful smile, Ben shook his head. “Believe me, son, I’d vastly prefer your company to the living death I’ll experience tonight. But your mother insists on going to some idiot’s Fourth of July party. For reasons that are obscure to me, she actually cares about what these people think.” Ben sat back in his chair, his tone confiding. “I call it high school for the rich. They go from party to party, dying for acceptance, never wondering whether it’s worthwhile being accepted by whatever moron they encounter. The only amusement they hold for me is wondering who’ll flatter me in the most unctuous and transparent way. Knowing full well that none of them would give a damn except for who I am.
“Time is too fleeting for that. I could spend tonight fishing with my son, or making love, or talking with a man or woman who actually has something to say, or rereading War and Peace, the greatest novel ever written. By midnight, both of us will be six hours closer to being dead, and only you will have anything to show for it. Just thinking about it curdles me with envy.”
Adam laughed. “Have I told you Jenny’s theory on summer social life?”
“These minnows justify an entire theory?”
“A small one. Jen caters parties, like you used to do, honing her skills of observation. She says that the summer social circuit is actually a game called Celebrity Pac-Man, with a scoring system based on how many famous people you can hang out with between the Fourth of July and Labor Day-”
“Celebrity Pac-Man?” Ben repeated with a grin. “As in I got ‘Tom and Rita’ or ‘Ted and Mary’ or ‘Alan and 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.”