David Bramhall was my friend for a very long time. The first time I ever saw him was in Menemsha. He had a pack of Luckies rolled up in his T-shirt, was drop-dead gorgeous and had just come back from swordfishing with Danny Bryant. He always had this aura of mystery about him, being a shy, almost aloof person. That was in the late 1950s. I introduced him to my parents and he became a part of the family. My mother, Rita Benton, adored him, mothered him and fed him. He brought fish and she would cook it for him and David loved to have a few bourbons and long conversations with Daddy about art and literature.

David majored in English at Princeton. I went to Radcliffe and we saw each other every summer for years. I went off to Italy, and David continued to see my parents on a regular basis. He really was a part of my family and always felt like another brother to me in the sense of his caring loyalty to us all.

I think David was the original Indiana Jones. He lived all over Mexico and Guatemala, and was a collector and a broker of pre-Columbian art. His reputation in the art world in this country was pristine, as a dealer in original and genuine (being the key word) and unique pieces of art that he had managed to glean in the jungles and mountains of Latin America. He was not only an art historian but an anthropologist as well, extremely knowledgeable about the Mayan and Inca civilizations.

And at the same time he spent his summers on the Vineyard, becoming a legendary fisherman along with his brother, Kib. Everyone on the Island looked up to the Bramhalls. They were handsome, talented, charming and really great fishermen. They could cast farther with conventional gear than anyone from shore! By this time, David was living in his hero Danny Bryant’s barn: a wild and wonderful and dangerous place to visit.

Through the eighties we fished together and cried together. Through the ninteies we spent time together in Mexico. David was relaxed and enjoyed my extended family. We moved through one another’s lives easily, through some very hard times for us both and some beautiful, rewarding ones too. We shared. I was always honored, in a way, if David would trust me with his feelings. He was a beautiful man who somehow was always connected to my soul.

And in these last years, we grew closer.

I will always remember him serious, handsome, loving, vulnerable, leaning against a wall of one of the places I live, smoking a cigarette, eyes alive, asking . . .

I loved him so much!

Jessie Benton is the daughter of the artist Thomas Hart Benton. David Bramhall died on Feb. 28.