how you should be.”
In this story, Adam knew, lay a key to his father’s psyche, part of which was his deep admiration—even love—for Robert Kennedy. But he could as easily have recounted his night on Chappaquiddick, fly-fishing in a bitter wind that drove his competitors off the beach. Ben held out until dawn, lips blue with cold, at last catching a forty-three-pound bass that set a world record. But the best example was his writing. No doubt Ben was ruthless there—Adam firmly believed he could bury his wife and sons in the morning, and write a chapter in the afternoon. No writer could steal the march on Benjamin Blaine.
Now, ten years later, Adam stared at his father’s final work.
Where is it written that you can do what I’ve done?
Reading on, Adam felt anew the full weight of those words. Ben could not stand the thought of anyone besting him—especially Adam, the one most like him, the one he had always feared. And now this.
On the page, the language revealed Ben’s deterioration. Now and again a lucid, vigorous passage evoked Benjamin Blaine as readers knew him. But the last pages were so poorly written that they resembled Cliffs Notes of the novel that might have satisfied his father. The man Adam had known would have ripped them up in disgust. Unless he had been so rushed or drunken or impaired that he had not paused to read the story of his own decline.
Adam forced himself to finish.
The story was set in the nineteenth century, its principal characters a family of lobstermen. Though incomplete, the narrative focused on the father’s fraught and ultimately tortured relationship with his younger son, the subject of its most piercing passages. At times, the son resembled Adam; at other times, Ben himself. There was similar confusion between Ben’s father as Adam understood him and the father Adam himself had known. Though the pages ended abruptly, marking his father’s death, Adam could grasp the tragedy ahead. By the end of this novel, he understood, one of these men, father or son, was meant to kill the other.
Part Two
The Provocateur
One
The next afternoon, Adam met Matthew Thomson at the trailhead of the Menemsha Hills nature preserve.
His father’s personal lawyer was much as he remembered him—a lean, puckish figure with wire-rimmed glasses, curly iron-gray hair, and a humorous play around the mouth and eyes that hinted at intelligence, irreverence, and an unvarnished view of humanity. The meeting place suggested Thomson’s love of outdoor exertions: in his youth, he had been a distance runner, and he retained the sinewy, stringy look of someone wedded to diet and exercise. As they shook hands, Thomson said, “Jesus, you look like him. I guess everyone tells you that.”
“Everyone does.”
Thomson looked at him more closely. “Left you a mess, didn’t he? Let’s walk a little and review the wreckage.”
There was something bracing, Adam found, about the lawyer’s disinclination toward expressions of sentiment. He recalled his father’s appraisal of Thomson: “a first-rate brain unfettered by illusions.” Together, they headed into the woods, the older man setting a brisk pace.
The trail was as Adam recalled it, a winding path through oaks and maples that admitted patches of sunlight, enveloping them in a hush punctuated by the cries of birds. “I’m not a religious man,” Thomson observed, “so this is the nearest I come to church, a place to reflect and appreciate what we’ve been given on this island.” He glanced sideways. “But you’re wanting to talk about what Ben took from your mother. I suppose Clarice mentioned that I was as shocked as she was.”
“She did. Which makes me wonder when you last met with him.”
“Concerning his estate? Not quite a year ago. We reviewed his will and decided that nothing needed to change. At that point, the estate—including the house—was worth about twelve million. Ample to provide for Clarice and preserve a chunk
In this story, Adam knew, lay a key to his father’s psyche, part of which was his deep admiration—even love—for Robert Kennedy. But he could as easily have recounted his night on Chappaquiddick, fly-fishing in a bitter wind that drove his competitors off the beach. Ben held out until dawn, lips blue with cold, at last catching a forty-three-pound bass that set a world record. But the best example was his writing. No doubt Ben was ruthless there—Adam firmly believed he could bury his wife and sons in the morning, and write a chapter in the afternoon. No writer could steal the march on Benjamin Blaine.
Now, ten years later, Adam stared at his father’s final work.
Where is it written that you can do what I’ve done?
Reading on, Adam felt anew the full weight of those words. Ben could not stand the thought of anyone besting him—especially Adam, the one most like him, the one he had always feared. And now this.
On the page, the language revealed Ben’s deterioration. Now and again a lucid, vigorous passage evoked Benjamin Blaine as readers knew him. But the last pages were so poorly written that they resembled Cliffs Notes of the novel that might have satisfied his father. The man Adam had known would have ripped them up in disgust. Unless he had been so rushed or drunken or impaired that he had not paused to read the story of his own decline.
Adam forced himself to finish.
The story was set in the nineteenth century, its principal characters a family of lobstermen. Though incomplete, the narrative focused on the father’s fraught and ultimately tortured relationship with his younger son, the subject of its most piercing passages. At times, the son resembled Adam; at other times, Ben himself. There was similar confusion between Ben’s father as Adam understood him and the father Adam himself had known. Though the pages ended abruptly, marking his father’s death, Adam could grasp the tragedy ahead. By the end of this novel, he understood, one of these men, father or son, was meant to kill the other.
Part Two
The Provocateur
One
The next afternoon, Adam met Matthew Thomson at the trailhead of the Menemsha Hills nature preserve.
His father’s personal lawyer was much as he remembered him—a lean, puckish figure with wire-rimmed glasses, curly iron-gray hair, and a humorous play around the mouth and eyes that hinted at intelligence, irreverence, and an unvarnished view of humanity. The meeting place suggested Thomson’s love of outdoor exertions: in his youth, he had been a distance runner, and he retained the sinewy, stringy look of someone wedded to diet and exercise. As they shook hands, Thomson said, “Jesus, you look like him. I guess everyone tells you that.”
“Everyone does.”
Thomson looked at him more closely. “Left you a mess, didn’t he? Let’s walk a little and review the wreckage.”
There was something bracing, Adam found, about the lawyer’s disinclination toward expressions of sentiment. He recalled his father’s appraisal of Thomson: “a first-rate brain unfettered by illusions.” Together, they headed into the woods, the older man setting a brisk pace.
The trail was as Adam recalled it, a winding path through oaks and maples that admitted patches of sunlight, enveloping them in a hush punctuated by the cries of birds. “I’m not a religious man,” Thomson observed, “so this is the nearest I come to church, a place to reflect and appreciate what we’ve been given on this island.” He glanced sideways. “But you’re wanting to talk about what Ben took from your mother. I suppose Clarice mentioned that I was as shocked as she was.”
“She did. Which makes me wonder when you last met with him.”
“Concerning his estate? Not quite a year ago. We reviewed his will and decided that nothing needed to change. At that point, the estate—including the house—was worth about twelve million. Ample to provide for Clarice and preserve a chunk
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