‘Without knowing, he created a monster, desperate to appease him. My performance as the baker whose wedding cake collapsed was my absolute apotheosis, a masterpiece of overacting that moved Mrs LoBionco to tell my dad, “with that talent, Carla should be an actress – God knows she’s pretty enough”. The word “actress” sounded so magical that pretty soon I was in every play at school, always in the lead. Acting was better than riding my bicycle – a transcendence so complete that I forgot myself and everything that troubled me.’ Briefly, Carla experienced a residue of guilt and sadness. ‘My other reward was that Dad stopped hitting me. Unlike Mom, I’d became special in the eyes of others and, therefore, to him.
‘The irony is that my mother saw this. She implored my father to enroll me in acting lessons at A.C.T. – the theatre company in San Francisco where Annette Bening got her start. I became addicted in the true meaning of that word – only acting gave me the approval I craved and, on stage, it was immediate. My mother was giving me an escape she could never have.
‘She began sitting up with me at night, listening to my ambitions and my dreams. When my drama teacher said I should consider acting as a career, I knew that everything in my life had destined me for this. And when my mother heard the news, tears of joy ran down her face, and she told me she had prayed for this.’
Remembering her mother’s arms around her, Carla felt herself swallow. ‘The Church,’ she went on, ‘remained the centre of her life. Every night, to please her, I recited the Hail Mary, the Our Father, and an act of contrition. I never let on that they were white noise to me now, like the rules that came with them – that birth control violated God’s will, or that sex outside marriage was a mortal sin. My high school, the Convent of the Sacred Heart, had begun accepting non-Catholics, girls who believed in nothing at all. I was moving outside my parents’ world.’
She was making a confession, Carla reflected, offered to Adam Blaine. ‘For the first time I was special – an actress, and pretty, a girl other girls envied and admired. And I’d begun hearing rumours about my father and other women. One night, cruising with friends in another neighbourhood, I saw my father coming from a bar with his arm draped around a much younger woman – wearing too much makeup, but nice-looking enough, with a body that made the obvious even more so. The kids I was hanging out with didn’t recognize him. But I was devastated and then furious: this was the ultimate insult to my mother, still more punishment for all that she’d endured, and a complete denial of all the rules they’d pressed on me. The next night, I slept with my first boy, a guy I barely knew and cared about even less.
‘That Sunday morning I took a certain savage pleasure in my confession. I’d been taught that if you sincerely repent your sins, God would forgive them, and if you went outside and got hit by a bus, you’d immediately go to heaven. So I confessed my sins with a vengeance – drinking, smoking pot, the guy I’d just slept with. When dried-up old Father Riley admonished me from behind the screen to avoid boys – the “near occasion of sin”, he called them – then gave me a penance of six Our Fathers and ten Hail Marys, I could barely keep from laughing. All this incense and mirrors had ever gotten my mother was another beating from her adulterous husband, my father.
‘To me, she was more than my father’s victim. She was the victim of her Church and all the rules enforced by men: no divorce; mute acceptance; redemption in an afterlife I no longer believed existed. But still I’d go with her to church – to refuse would have shattered her, and she’d already endured too much. So I was relieved when a new young priest, Father Vasquez, took Father Riley’s place. He seemed friendly, and more approachable, not pickled in the stifling Catholicism I’d grown up with. Through him, I decided to give the Church a final chance.
‘The opening I chose was confession. Instead of the usual sins, I began telling Father Vasquez about my childhood, what went on within our four walls – my father’s brutality, my mother’s silent suffering. As I spoke, I imagined his silence as compassion, and the words began escaping in a rush: my mother needed help, someone to protect her. “Please, Father,” I implored, “tell me how to help her. Please, help us.”
‘Behind the screen he was still quiet. Then he said, “You must come here to seek forgiveness for your own sins, not your parents’. I will pray for your mother and father, as you should. But it is not your place to confess your father’s sins.”
‘Suddenly I imagined my father confessing to brutalizing my mother, and this priest sending him back home to beat her up again with six Our Fathers on his lips. “All right,” I answered. “You want to hear my sins. My father is a policeman – you know him well. Every night I pray that someone will kill him and set my mother free. When I’m not praying for that, I wish it with all my heart. Because there’s no other hope for my mother – trapped in this marriage and this Church, by men who care nothing for her.” Shaking with rage, I placed my lips close to the screen, and whispered, “Fuck you, Father Vasquez. What’s the penance for that?”
‘I left before he could tell me.’
It was a moment before Carla realized that the tightening in her stomach was not a delayed reaction to the past.
Rushing to the bathroom, she stripped off her clothing, and saw the spotting of blood – the first sign of miscarriage, she knew from her own mother. Filled with apprehension, she dressed again, and went back to the computer.
‘I’m sure this is more than enough,’ she typed for Adam Blaine. ‘Please keep safe, and know that I think of you often.’
She hit the Send button, then walked gingerly to her car, driving to her doctor’s office without calling ahead.
THREE
Alone in his quarters, Adam stared out at the starkly beautiful mountain ranges, waiting for the call from his case officer.
He had been blunt about his own misgivings. ‘This Afghan could be a plant,’ he had told Brett Hollis, ‘and his P.O.W. tip completely bogus. They may be thinking we’ll respond like Pavlov’s dog, salivating at the chance to retrieve one of our own – the kind of showy operation that got bin Laden. That would confirm me as C.I.A. Way more important, they could lure us into Pakistan and expose our assault teams operating against Al Qaeda and the Taliban inside the border. All on the word of an agent we don’t know and have never tested.’
‘All true,’ Hollis said tersely. ‘But I need to report this now. If the information is solid, they may be moving Bergdahl soon.’
‘That’s another thing that bothers me,’ Adam replied. ‘Maybe everything he says is true – or, at least, he believes that it is. But why hide our guy in a populated village instead of in some cave? This story is perfectly designed to make us rush into a trap, get a bunch of guys killed or captured because we just couldn’t stand to wait. Instead of one P.O.W., they could have a whole fucking platoon.’
‘I’ll pass on your reservations,’ his superior responded glumly. ‘But this one’s not our call.’
So Adam waited.
Restless, he read Carla’s email for the second time that morning. He was thinking about her too much. For the last decade he had lived without a past or future, functioning in the moment. Now, against all of his instincts, he had begun to imagine a life beyond Afghanistan. Another reason, perhaps, why he was so wary of the Afghan’s story – he wanted to leave here alive, and sensed some new danger at hand. In the curious logic of his job, the fear of death could make him more hesitant and edgy, dulling the reflexes he needed to survive. He should never have risked himself with her.
And yet, in her own way, Carla was also taking chances. Her email made light of this, mocking its supposed self-absorption. But she was giving him a part of herself, so that he might understand her better, and perhaps respond in kind. It was no accident, he suspected, that she had chosen to reveal truths about her family; as Carla surely knew, what haunted Adam resided there, unresolved.
Still, she had written, and he should answer.
Sitting at the computer, he began by describing things he could talk about
– the terrain, the people, the semi-fortress in which he lived. ‘In a way,’ he told her, ‘the walls around us symbolize the pointlessness of our mission. We don’t want Afghanistan to be the base for another 9/11. But we won’t leave a positive imprint here, any more than foreigners did before us. This isn’t a country at all, as we understand that – it’s a bunch of tribes. Outside of Kabul, Karzai is a joke – he’s the mayor of a city, not the president of anything. Each tribe runs their self-allotted territory, and mountain ranges divide them from each other. So the locals depend on mullahs and religious leaders, a lot of whom hate the government for taxing them, or for helping us cut down opium production and kill their friends with drones. When we go, we’ll leave nothing behind but corpses. Including our own.’
This was what he would tell anyone in a moment of honesty, Adam knew. But all it would mean to Carla was that his death, should it happen, would be as meaningless as the rest – a pointless sacrifice to his own personal code. He owed her better, if he could find the words, and Charlie Glazer would say that he owed this to himself.
Like Carla, he had memories of a father – first poisoned by betrayal, then by the searing discovery that Benjamin Blaine was not his father at all. For years, Adam had sealed them in a psychic box he never opened. Now he allowed himself to recall Ben teaching him how to sail the Herreshoff on Menemsha Pond – how patient he was; how different than on land. As if recalling someone else, Adam felt a distant, odd affection for the boy he had been, so trusting of his father, so innocent of all that lay ahead. He could not reach back and protect himself – he had learned to be a fatalist, dealing only with whatever he had to face. But he wished better for Carla’s son.
That was the festering core of things – the man who had been the foundation of Adam’s life, then changed it irrevocably, had been Carla’s lover and the father of this boy. Yet there were good memories, as painful as they were to resurrect, and perhaps it would help her to know this much. After gazing at the screen, lost in time, he wrote, ‘I know you wonder what happened between Ben and me. That’s for another day, if ever, and certainly not for an email. But the way in which your father planted the seeds of acting, without meaning to, reminded me of the things Ben did as a father that were for the better.
‘One memory stands out. Baseball was the spectator sport he most loved, and he grew up worshipping Ted Williams, the left fielder for the Red Sox who he insisted was the greatest hitter who ever lived. He told me everything about Williams – how he sacrificed five years of baseball to be a fighter pilot in two wars; how he played to his own exacting standards, and not for the adoration of the fans; above all, the molten, uncompromising integrity with which he drove himself to get the most out of his talent.
‘This statistic may not mean anything to you, but seventy years ago Williams became the last man to hit .400 – an average of four hits in every ten at bats. That’s a stunning athletic feat. I still recall Ben telling me, “To accomplish that by swinging a wooden bat at fastballs coming at ninety miles an hour from sixty feet away, or curveballs that dip just when you’re swinging, is incalculably difficult. But on the last day of the season, that’s exactly where Williams stood.
‘“His manager offered to take him out of the line-up for the final two games, a double-header, so that Williams could preserve this record.” At this point in the story Ben would begin speaking in a gruff Ted Williams voice. “If I don’t earn this record on the field,” he’d say, “it isn’t worth a damn, and neither am I.” Then Ben would smile, and deliver the punch line: “That day, Ted Williams got five hits and raised his batting average to .406. No man has done it since.”
‘It was a message about integrity and risk, the idea that a man should have of himself. It was how Ben strove to live, and drove me to live.’
Adam paused, caught in images he once had cherished. Then he decided to give them to her.
‘My own training started early,’ he went on. ‘When I was six, Ben began taking me to a baseball diamond in West Tisbury. At first, the bat felt almost too heavy to lift. But Ben pitched slowly, underarm, until I learned to time the contact of bat with ball. Every session got harder; each time, I got better, a little more confident. Finally, he deemed me fit for the ultimate challenge – facing his alter ego, Ace Blaine, the fearsome pitcher for the hated New York Yankees, the Red Sox’s bitter rival, the pin-striped scourge of Boston’s hope of winning a pennant after forty years of heartache.
‘In these imaginary – but, to a seven-year-old, very real – contests, it was always the last game of the season, and the Red Sox and Yankees were playing for the pennant Boston fans had craved for decades. Their hopes were all on me. I was the Red Sox’s entire line-up, all nine batters, faced with batting against the fearsome Ace, whose swagger and towering ego were a parody of Ben’s own. The game was always played at Fenway Park, in front of a rabid crowd; it was always the last of the ninth inning, with the Sox one run down, and the gloating Ace smelling another humiliation for the entire city. And the Sox – meaning me – had to get three hits to load the bases, then drive in two runs to win.
‘The fans were going crazy, the broadcaster – also Ben – building tension with each pitch. As for me, I was carrying the burdens of an entire team, and my heart was in my throat.’
He could feel it still, Adam realized – heart beating, muscles taut, nerves jangling with apprehension and yet this strange adrenalized exhilaration, the nascent belief that he lived to face down challenges. In high school and college, his apparent nervelessness had awed his teammates. Now it kept him alive.
‘Remarkably, I later realized, at times both the broadcaster and the ferocious Ace lost track of the count, allowing four strikes before I hit the ball. For a great athlete, Ace was also an erratic fielder, who sometimes made inexplicable errors when I slapped a pitch right back at him. Every so often, with two outs, Ace would blow a third strike right by me – teaching me that I couldn’t always win, would sometimes have to bear up under defeat until the next time. But more often than not, I triumphed, and I learned to thrive on challenge and adversity. And I could see through the veneer of Ace’s disappointment and frustration how much that pleased the man I loved more than anyone in the world.
‘Later on, I understood that he was training me to be nerveless under pressure, the one who never folded. I still carry that, his gift to me.’
Gazing at these words on the screen, Adam felt a tightness in his throat. Before his breach with Ben, he had always cherished this memory; later, he had refused to remember it at all. Now it hurt.
Sitting back, he steepled his fingers. Ben, who was not his father, had nearly destroyed Adam’s life. His true father, Jack, had killed him. Now Adam concealed this from the world. From Carla.
Still, for her sake, he forced himself to go on.
‘There were other people in my family, of course. I knew my mother loved me, and she had a sense of fun then, the desire to do new things. She was at her best when Ben wasn’t around, and she could have life the way she wanted it. And Jack – my uncle, then – was a calming presence, much gentler than his brother. As for my own brother, I loved him; Teddy was always good to me, no matter what a nuisance I was, and I admired his talent even then. When it became apparent that he was gay, I was the one who confronted Ben on Ted’s behalf.
‘But that was later. It was Ben who taught me to love the outdoors, and gave me a model of success – determined, unsparing of himself, unwilling to accept anything less than the best. He showed me how to compete; when I was older, he gave no quarter, and expected none.’ Here Adam paused, caught by a brief, wrenching image of Jenny Leigh. ‘I’ve never forgotten what he told me about how to face the world. “Don’t make excuses for what you’ve already done, and don’t complain if people dislike you for it. Don’t whine, feel sorry for yourself, or hide from your mistakes. The past is dead; all you can change is the future. So learn, and move on.”
Easier to say, Adam thought, when you are the pr
otagonist – although, in the end, it seemed that Ben himself had not quite outrun the damage he had done to Jenny. But Ben had also passed on his test for friendship, developed when, as a young man with no money and no prospects, he had observed the underside of the Chilmark social scene, which he had scathingly labelled, ‘high school for the rich and vapid’.
‘“If you want a friend,” he admonished me, “don’t choose the insecure, the envious, or the needy. They’re the ones who will sell you out. Those you can trust are confident and secure, men and women who like their lives, and don’t have to meet their needs at your expense. So no gossips, back-stabbers, or celebrity fuckers. No one who has to tell you who they know, what they own, how important they are, or whose self-concept depends on the acceptance of others. The only people who can truly care about you are those who are sufficient unto themselves.”’
Here, Adam paused again. In his own experience, this last was largely true. But he wondered now whether Ben was also saying that he, himself, was too flawed to be trusted – or, perhaps, that his own resentments of Adam for existing were too great. Growing up, Adam had seen many of Ben’s flaws: too much drinking; Ben’s derisiveness and harshness; the whispers about women he never bothered to deny; his growing compulsion to compete with Adam – his own son, or so Adam had thought. But he had never expected Ben’s last brutal violation of his trust, because Adam had not known that he was at the heart of his family’s bitter secrets. Knowing this was no help now, except to explain what could not be helped. The past, as Ben had told him, was dead.
Except that it lived on in the woman he was reaching out for, if only through a letter.
The cell phone on his desk rang, the one he used for secure calls.
‘They agree with you,’ Hollis said without preface. ‘So far, your Afghan’s background checks out – what he told you about himself is true, at least as far as it goes. But they want you to test him, ask for more information. Who’s in charge of the village, a detailed description of the house he claims our boy is being held in – walls; windows; whether the doors swing in or out. Tell him you want pictures, if possible.’
Eden in Winter Page 13
