Betrayals

Eight

Rebecca decided not to return to her studio after her conversation with her grandfather, and retreated to her room on the third floor, overlooking pretty tree-lined West Cedar Street. She had thought she’d never see the day she became one of Thomas Blackburn’s boarders. He’d started taking them in years ago, foreign students mostly. He charged them modest rents in exchange for a furnished room, a shared bath, and parlor and kitchen privileges, and he encouraged them to invite him to dinner when they were cooking something interesting and to discuss politics whenever they pleased. His current crop of boarders included a Nigerian doctoral candidate in economics, a Greek medical student, two Chinese physics students and Rebecca, who could have afforded to renovate the Beacon Hill house with its ancient plumbing and tattered drapes and upholstery and put them all up in decent apartments. But her grandfather and the boarders had their pride, and she didn’t see any need to spend money renting a proper apartment in the city with among the nation’s highest rents when she could stay with family, until she figured out if Boston was where she wanted to be.

The silver light of late afternoon angled through the paned window, and Rebecca pulled up an antique Windsor chair, in need of repair, and stared down at the street. Her grandfather had put her in her old bedroom, with the twin bed she’d had as a child, the marble-topped dresser with its puppy-chewed leg, the worn Persian carpet Eliza Blackburn supposedly had had shipped from Canton in 1798. Thomas had insisted upon the valuable carpet remaining in the upstairs bedroom, where it always had been; Eliza, he’d said, had been a practical woman and had intended her furnishings be used. Rebecca had quoted his words back to him when she’d spilled tempera paint on the carpet. She could still see the faded red and yellow stains. Her own furniture and things were either in storage or up at the old lighthouse she’d bought on an island off the coast of Maine. When the rest of the small, uninhabited island had gone up for sale, she’d bought it, too. She liked owning land, knowing she had places she could go pitch a tent.

She felt unsettled and raw. Looking at the quiet street, she could see herself at seven leaning out the window and nailing twelve-year-old Jared with her squirt gun for harassing her. “You’ll fall, you idiot,” he’d yelled, and she’d laughed and got him again.

She heard the telephone ringing downstairs. Then there was a quiet knock on the door. “Rebecca?” It was Athena, the Greek medical student; she and her landlord would blithely discuss the gruesome details of her anatomy class over the dinner table. “The telephone’s for you.”

Rebecca thanked her and headed down to the kitchen, where Athena was preparing a huge dish of spanikopita and studying pictures of carved corpses. She seemed quite happy with the outdated stove, the unstylish double-width white porcelain sink, the decades-old refrigerator, the shortage of cabinet space. The round oak table that had always been too big for the small kitchen still occupied its spot in front of the window overlooking the garden. As a little boy, Rebecca’s father had carved his name in the table, in the careful, awkward letters of a preschooler. Rebecca had watched her grandfather brush his fingertips across his only child’s efforts, just minutes before they were to bury Stephen Blackburn.

She grabbed the telephone.

“Rebecca,” Jenny Blackburn said, somewhat breathlessly, “why didn’t you warn me? I was buying groceries when I saw your picture. Are you all right?”

“I’m fine, Mother,” Rebecca replied, thinking about central Florida in late May, the smells, the flowers; it would be getting hot. But her mother wouldn’t notice. A handsome woman in her midfifties, with pale blue eyes and white-streaked dark hair, she had always loved the heat. Sinking into a chair, Rebecca added, “And I had no idea The Score was reprinting that picture or I’d have warned you. Have any reporters been bugging you?”

“A couple of local ones—young. I let them come over and look around the groves, and I answered their questions about what I’ve been doing for the past twenty-six years, which is raising children and citrus. I’ve found it’s easier to bore them than to tell them to go to hell.” She inhaled, then said, “Rebecca, I wish you’d just come home.”

She almost told her mother she had, but thought better of it. Maybe Florida, not Boston, was her home. Jennifer O’Keefe Blackburn made no secret of her disapproval of her only daughter and oldest child’s work and living habits, but she took a laissez-faire approach. “You’re an adult, Rebecca,” she would say, “and capable of making your own decisions.”

Ian O’Keefe—Rebecca’s maternal grandfather—had no such inhibitions. He’d kept his mouth shut thirty-six years ago when his one daughter had married a Boston Yankee, but no more. He didn’t approve of the way Rebecca just didn’t do things the way they were supposed to be done. In February when she’d visited him and her mother, he showed her his address book and pointed out how she’d messed up his B section with all her moving. True to his own convictions, he’d neatly printed each of her new addresses in ink. They were all there, from her first dormitory at Boston University to West Cedar Street. His ink was born of a stubborn adherence to his own ideas about what was right, but he never gave up on her. He’d run out of space under B two moves ago and had had to move into the C section. Rebecca’s five younger brothers had more or less given up trying to keep track of her; when they wanted to reach her, they just called Papa.

“I mean it,” her mother went on, and Rebecca could hear the rising tension in her voice. “You know I hate to interfere in my kids’ lives, but you’ve got no business being in Boston.”

Oh, so that was it, Rebecca thought. The pictures in The Score were her mother’s excuse for letting her daughter know how she felt about her being back on West Cedar Street. As if Rebecca couldn’t have guessed. She said patiently, “My being in Boston didn’t cause this thing in The Score. It was just a fluke—Jared being a hothead. It had nothing to do with me.”

“I hate Boston,” Jenny said.

“I realize that, Mom.”

“It’s that Blackburn pride of yours, isn’t it? You just had to go back. You can’t leave well enough alone. You always have to keep pushing and pushing.”

Rebecca resisted the urge to defend herself, knowing it would only fuel her mother’s frustration—and her worry. Boston hadn’t been an altogether lucky place for Jennifer Blackburn or her daughter.

“What do you hope to accomplish?” her mother asked wearily.

“Maybe,” Rebecca said, “I just think Grandfather shouldn’t have to die a lonely old man.”

It was a moment before Jennifer O’Keefe Blackburn said, “He deserves to,” and slammed down the phone.

Nine

Rebecca Blackburn received the news of her father’s death on a gray winter afternoon in early 1963. She was eight years old. It was Jared Sloan who came to her third-grade class at the private elementary school in Boston’s Back Bay to walk her and two of her younger brothers home. A car had already come for Quentin Reed, in the fifth grade.

“There’s a family emergency,” was all Jared would say.

Just thirteen himself, he took hold of Nate, seven, and five-year-old Taylor and let Rebecca trot along beside him. He had volunteered to collect them and, too distraught to think clearly, his mother, his Aunt Annette and Jennifer Blackburn had let him. Jared was familiar; he wouldn’t scare the Blackburns’ school-aged children.

Rebecca felt her face freezing in the stiff sea breeze. “Where’s Mother?”

“She had to stay with the little ones.”

There were three more brothers at home: Stephen, four, and Mark and Jacob, the two-year-old twins. Once, Rebecca had heard her paternal grandfather fussing to her father about having so many children. “People will think we’re running an orphanage here,” Grandfather had said. Her father, who, like Rebecca, never took Thomas’s grumblings seriously, had asked him since when did a Blackburn care what people thought? Thomas had strong opinions about everything, but Rebecca knew he loved her and her brothers. She remembered when he’d told them the best things came in sixes. When he was home, he liked to take her and her brothers to museums and old Boston cemeteries and let them throw rocks in the Charles River.

Not satisfied, Rebecca asked Jared, “Did something happen to Fred?” Fred was one of their cats. They had four. Grandfather complained about them, too; he said West Cedar Street wasn’t a barnyard.

Jared paled. “No, R.J., Fred’s fine.”

“Good.”

Her mother met them at the door of the Eliza Blackburn house on Beacon Hill. Away in Indochina so much, Thomas had insisted his son and daughter-in-law and grandchildren live there. Right away Rebecca knew something terrible had happened. Her mother’s face was very white and tear-streaked, and she jumped off the steps and gathered her and Nate and Taylor into her arms, choking back sobs. Rebecca tried to cling to Jared. She wished he’d take her down to Charles Street for hot cocoa or ice-skating on the Common, anywhere so long as she didn’t have to hear what her mother had to tell her.

But Jenny Blackburn, trying vainly to smile, thanked Jared and told him his mother was waiting for him at his aunt’s house on Mt. Vernon Street.

“Will you be all right going alone?” she asked him. After all, he had lost an uncle, and, in Stephen Blackburn, a man who had been like an uncle to him.

“You don’t have to worry about me, Mrs. Blackburn.”

Alone with her six children, Jenny told them their father had been killed in the war in South Vietnam, where he and their grandfather had gone to help bring peace. She got out Thomas’s musty globe and pointed to the country so far from Boston. Their father, she explained carefully, had gone with Benjamin Reed to a place called the Mekong Delta, and a group called Vietcong guerrillas had attacked them. Rebecca thought she meant gorillas.

“No,” her mother said, “they’re just people.”

But why would people kill her father? Rebecca kept the image of gorillas. “What about Grandfather?” she asked, still numb with shock. “Was he killed, too?”

Jenny shook her head, and her voice cracked when she replied, “Your Grandfather Blackburn always manages to survive.”

Jennifer O’Keefe and Stephen Blackburn had met in Cambridge, when she was a scholarship student at Radcliffe and he, at his father’s insistence, was pouring more of Eliza Blackburn’s dwindling fortune into another Harvard education for one of her descendants. Stephen was the Boston Brahmin with the impeccable pedigree. Jenny was the lively, straight-talking Southerner who planned to get her education and go home to teach college. When Stephen had shown her Eliza’s headstone in the Old Granary Burying Ground off Boston Common, she’d remarked that her ancestors had been horse thieves and scoundrels.

She hadn’t expected to fall in love with a New England Yankee, but she did, anyway.

And that was all right. Stephen was a kind, funny man—gentle, intelligent, sensual. He possessed none of his father’s sometimes irritating natural incisiveness about people. In true Blackburn fashion, they were both historians, but Thomas had an uncanny knack for zeroing in on a person’s weaknesses and less-than-generous motivations. It could make him difficult to be around.

“He’s a sharp judge of character,” Stephen would say.

Jenny believed him.

She and Stephen were married in historic Old South Church at Copley Square on a warm spring day in 1954, not long after the Vietminh routing of the French at Dien Bien Phu. Stephen had laughingly warned his bride that her new father-in-law would mark events that way. Nothing occurs in a vacuum, Thomas Blackburn was fond of saying. Jenny considered him a harmless eccentric, one of those brainy East Coast types in tweeds and holey boxer shorts. Since his wife’s death in 1933, Thomas had spent as much time in Southeast Asia as he could, and more and more as his son grew up. Stephen worried about his father meddling in that dangerous part of the world. Jenny did not. She had grown up among the lakes and citrus groves of central Florida and knew a survivor when she saw one.

In late 1959, with his fourth grandchild on the way, Thomas had surprised virtually everyone who knew him when he started his own consulting firm, specializing in providing government agencies and private businesses with analysis on the political, social and economic systems of Indochina. If not amiable, Thomas Blackburn did possess intimate knowledge of the region and envisioned his company as a means of working with the people of Southeast Asia and understanding their aspirations.

Within two years, he was able to invite his son to join his firm. With Jenny’s mixed blessings, Stephen accepted.

Two years later, her husband was dead.

Thomas Blackburn escorted his son’s body and that of Benjamin Reed back home to Boston. Three months before, Benjamin had hired Blackburn Associates for advice and information on establishing his new construction firm in South Vietnam. He’d started Winston & Reed with his wife’s money and meant to make a success of it, and he thought the Blackburns could help. Halfway between Thomas and Stephen in age, he had been friends with both men.

The inquiry into the ambush cleared Thomas of specific wrongdoing. He’d planned the excursion into the Mekong Delta and had rushed Stephen and Benjamin into executing it, but he couldn’t have known the Vietcong would attack.

Or could he have?

There was rampant speculation that Thomas, in his zeal for information, had originally arranged a meeting with a group of Vietcong the day of the ambush. He canceled out—chickened out, some said—at the last minute and allowed the excursion to go on without him, apparently hoping nothing would happen if he didn’t show up. Instead the Vietcong attacked, and three people were killed. Thomas had believed his position would compel the Vietcong guerrillas to leave him and his people alone.

Everyone from his daughter-in-law to a host of American military advisors and President Kennedy himself expected Thomas to defend himself against charges that he’d been arrogant or just plain naive.

He didn’t.

“I accept,” he told Jenny, Annette, colleagues, clients, politicians, military men and reporters, “full responsibility for what happened.”

They let him.

He went back to Indochina only briefly after burying his son. His company quickly went bankrupt, and President Kennedy decided against what would have been the bold move of naming Thomas Blackburn his new ambassador to Saigon. Showing no outward sign that any of this was more than he expected or felt he deserved, Thomas continued to refuse to answer the speculative charges against him, but simply retired to his house on Beacon Hill, taking up gardening and indulging his passion for rare books.

By summer, Jenny had recovered enough from the shock of losing her husband to realize she couldn’t continue to live in her father-in-law’s house. She would bump into Annette Winston Reed, also made a widow that terrible day, on the streets and have nothing to say. She could see her own children becoming ostracized, confused because the Blackburn name no longer had the same resonance it once had had. And there was no money. She had six small children and a father-in-law who’d become a pariah, and Eliza’s late-eighteenth-century fortune would stretch only so far.

But more than anything else, there was Thomas himself. Jenny could no longer face him every morning over coffee, listen to him scratch in his garden instead of doing something. Looking for a job. Fighting back. Starting over. Anything.

Finally, she knew she had to make a life for herself and her children away from Boston. She called her father. Of course, he told her, she could come home; he had always hoped she would.

She rented a truck and hired a couple of high school boys from South Boston to help her load it with the few things she and Stephen had accumulated during their nine years together. Her father would arrive later that morning and drive it to Florida, with Rebecca and Nate up front with him. Jenny would take the other children in the car.

Thomas watched stonily from the sidewalk. When Jenny had announced she was moving back “home,” he’d refused to take her seriously. Yet there was the truck blocking the narrow street and the children pouring out to holler and run about in its empty cargo space. He was forced to admit the inevitable.

“You’re running away,” he told his daughter-in-law.

“So what if I am?” She had decided not to let him put her on the defensive. “At least now the children will have air.”

“Air? There’s plenty of air in Boston. Take them up on the roof and let them breathe all the air they want. And what’s the matter with the Esplanade? The children can ride their bikes on the riverbank whenever they want. I’ll take them myself. And there are parks all over the city—too many, can’t afford the upkeep.”

Jenny knew he was baiting her, if relatively harmlessly. “You believe children should play in the streets?”

“Why not? I did.”

Pity you weren’t run over, she thought. But then she’d never have had Stephen, or their children. And she hated herself for hating him; it was perhaps the best reason for leaving.

“What do you think you’ll find in Florida besides alligators and poisonous snakes?”

“Alligators and poisonous snakes,” she snapped back, “are better than a lot of what you’d find on Beacon Hill.”

He smiled faintly. “Touché, my dear.”

She sighed. “It’s too late to argue, Thomas. I’m going.”

“I know.” He touched her arm. “I wish things could be different. I hope you know that.”

“I don’t, Thomas. I only know that my husband’s dead and you’re willing to take responsibility for his death when no one asked you to. Now people are saying you were a communist collaborator, you’re naive, you were duped, you were arrogant. If you’d considered me and the children, maybe you’d defend yourself.”

“To what end?”

She jerked her arm away, scoffing. “It was difficult enough being a Blackburn before this tragedy. Can you imagine what it’s going to be like now? Think of your grandchildren, Thomas. Think what it’s going to be like growing up knowing their grandfather’s accepted full responsibility for the deaths of three people, including their own father. Even leaving Boston isn’t going to make that any easier to deal with.”

Thomas pulled in his lips a moment, then sighed. “You’re right, of course.”

“But that doesn’t change anything, does it?”

“I’m afraid it doesn’t.”

“The Blackburn pride,” she said bitterly, and turned away so that he wouldn’t see her cry.

Without a word, Thomas went back inside. He didn’t come out when Ian O’Keefe arrived and helped Jenny finish packing, and finally she found him in his garden, pinching off wilted daylily blossoms.

“You’ll come visit, won’t you?” she asked.

He turned to her. “Not,” he said, “if what you want to do is forget.”

“It isn’t.”

“Then perhaps I’ll come. Invite me.”

But she never did.

Ten

By noon the day after her picture had appeared on newsstands all over the country, Rebecca gave up all hope of getting any work done. Not that she’d tried that hard. There wasn’t a whole lot to do if she wasn’t going to get out there and take on new assignments. She’d thrown out her red nail polish, used up a dozen cotton balls and ten minutes getting it off her nails, and had done a few bad sketches of the replica of the Boston Tea Party ship just up the road at the Congress Street Bridge.

And answered the telephone.

It was ringing when she’d unlocked her door at eight-thirty and continued to ring most of the morning. She turned down interviews with two Boston newspapers and a regional magazine, but agreed to answer a few questions by a journalism student at Boston University who wanted to know about one of her school’s famous almost-alumni. There were three calls from businesses in metropolitan Boston who offered her assignments; she took their names and numbers and said she’d get back to them. Maybe. The president of a New York advertising firm called to talk to her about becoming his art director. He said he knew her work and had thought about tracking her down for several years, but when he saw The Score at the train station on his way home last night, he decided he had to call. Rebecca listened to his pitch and realized why he had gone in to advertising. She was tempted, told him so, and took his name and number.

An old boyfriend from Chicago called and said he had to be in town on business next weekend, how ’bout dinner? She told him no, but thanks. After seeing Jared Sloan’s picture the last thing she wanted to think about was men.

Half a dozen nonprofit organizations called with very polite, understated requests for money. Two she recognized as reputable and promised them checks, two she hadn’t heard of and asked them to send her more information and two she thought sounded made up and told them to forget it.

And that was enough phone calls for one morning. She put on her message machine and headed over to Museum Wharf, where she stopped for lunch at the Milk Bottle, shaped like its name and located in the middle of the brick plaza in front of the Boston Children’s Museum. She took her hummus salad to a stone bench to watch the crowd, mostly kids, tourists and young, white-collar types looking for a quick meal they could eat outside. It was a gorgeous day.