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?”
Clarice shook her head. “The man you knew also wrote between seven and five. This may sound odd, but what frightened me most was to see him struggling to write at midnight, as if he were racing to finish. I no longer knew him at all.”
“Did you read his manuscript?”
“He wouldn’t show it to me.” Clarice nodded toward Ben’s desk. “When he finished working for that day, he’d lock it in that drawer. I can’t find the key.”
Adam gazed at the drawer. “Before he left that night, did he say anything?”
“Very little.” Clarice stared fixedly past him, as though trying to recall the moment precisely. “He sat in this room with a bottle of scotch, brooding and silent. Then he announced in a slurry voice that he was walking to the promontory, to watch the sunset at summer solstice. Those were the last words he ever spoke to me.”
“What did you say to him?”
“Nothing. I didn’t know whether to believe him.”
Adam took this as a tacit reference to Ben’s affair with Carla Pacelli. “And that’s what you told the police?”
“Yes.”
“What else did they ask you?”
Clarice folded her arms, then answered in a brittle voice. “Among other things, whether that button on his denim shirt was missing. I said I didn’t notice-that I wasn’t in the habit of mending his shirts and sewing on his buttons.”
As much as anything she had said before, this belated assertion of autonomy struck Adam as profoundly sad. Gently, he inquired, “I assume they also asked if you knew about Carla Pacelli.”
“Of course. That was why I didn’t necessarily believe Ben was going to the promontory.” Her voice lowered. “For once, he was telling the truth.”
His mother, Adam realized, seemed determined to never speak Pacelli’s name. “Did they ask about your relationship with Dad?”
Clarice sat straighter. “Why is that of such interest to you?”
“Because I’m interested in whatever interests the police. Please, humor me.”
Clarice’s lips compressed. “This is painful-particularly from a mother to a son. But yes, they asked about Ben and me in considerable detail. Such as the last time Ben and I had sex. I told them it was months ago.” There was something new in her tone, Adam thought, an angry, widowed sexuality. But when she turned to him, tears glistened in her eyes. “How I wish you had at least some illusions.”
Adam shook his head. “It wasn’t you who took them from me. Can I ask how you found out about Ms. Pacelli?”
His mother hesitated. “Jenny told me. She saw them together on the beach.”
“Nice of her.”
Clarice studied his expression. In a tone of reproach, she said, “After you left, Jenny and I became good friends. She only told me when I worried aloud that Ben was going out at night, without excuses or explanation, becoming more blatant by the day. At that point she’d have had to conceal what she knew.” Her voice flattened out. “In the end, Jenny did me a favor. She spared me the surprise when I followed Ben on one of his nightly jaunts, and saw him standing with a woman on the promontory.”
“A woman, or Carla Pacelli?”
“It was too dark to see. But I’m sure it was her-they appeared to be having the kind of intense conversation that men and women only have when they’re involved. And she’d taken the guesthouse at the Dane place, as Teddy told you. So it would have been an easy walk for her.”
Adam recalled one of the minor mysteries of his mother’s past-her aborted friendship with Whitney Dane. Among the affluent WASPs who summered on the Vineyard, the Barkleys and the Danes were unique among their class for living in Chilmark, which came to feature a significant Jewish population, rather than Edgartown, the traditional redoubt of their class. Through college, Adam knew, Whitney and Clarice had been intimate friends; as an adult, Whitney had become an eminent novelist, and would have been a natural peer for Ben save that Clarice, for reasons unclear to Adam, assiduously avoided her. That Carla Pacelli had landed in her estranged friend’s guesthouse could only have deepened his mother’s wounds. But of more immediate interest was the location of the guesthouse-from several directions, anyone could approach the promontory and not be observed. He was framing another question when, without warning, Clarice bent over, hands covering her face, shoulders trembling with soundless sobs. In that painful moment, Adam felt the pride, shame, and repression that had come to define her life. Helpless, he put his arm around her, and then his mother broke down entirely, cries of anguish issuing from deep inside her.
“Talk to me, Mom. Please.”
At length, she sat up, her voice tremulous. “It’s everything. Any day now, I’ll wake up and she’ll own our family’s home, and the guesthouse where Teddy lives and paints. Neither of us will have anything.” She paused, her throat working. “But it’s so much more than that. Where do I put my memories of Ben when he turned them all to ashes? What can I say my life meant? What can I believe I accomplished, with one son estranged, the other struggling? Nothing. By the end, all I hoped for was to live my life with some semblance of dignity. And now my husband of forty years has taken that from me as well, in the cruelest and most public way.”