That Spring in Paris

by Ciji Ware

  Her mind flew to a million scenarios. “What are you saying, Dad? Is Brad not your child, too?”

  “Oh, he’s my son, all right. My second son. Our first child was born while I was in the Army Corps of Engineers during the Vietnam War.”

  “And what happened to him?” Juliet asked, shocked to learn she had yet another brother.

  Her father pointed to a photo of the entire family in a silver frame on a corner of his desk. “Before you three kids were born, Mildred and I had a son, but the thing of it was, Millie and I weren’t married when he was conceived.”

  Juliet reared back on her chair, but all she managed to utter on a long breath was, “Wow.”

  “Your mother learned she was pregnant after I’d shipped out, which was a huge crisis for both families. Remember, now, it was in the late sixties, and Millie’s family, the Churches, was just as prominent a clan in San Francisco as the Thayers.”

  “Mother has reminded me of that often enough.”

  As her father’s revelations began to sink in, Juliet couldn’t get over the fact that her snobbish mother had actually gotten knocked up, despite the introduction of the birth control pill at that time.

  “Well, Mildred wrote to me right away, of course,” continued her father, “but there I was... in the jungle in Southeast Asia. Not much I could do about it.”

  “Were you engaged at least?” Her father shook his head, and she pressed on, “Would you have married her if she hadn’t gotten pregnant?”

  She was shaken to her core by her father’s lack of an immediate answer. She watched him closely while he struggled to summon a response.

  “Since we’re being honest here, today,” he replied, finally, “I think I would have to say ‘no.’ I wouldn’t have chosen her for my wife. At the time, I didn’t think we were well suited, despite the fact we were both interested in architecture and our families were delirious about our supposed courtship before I joined the service.” He heaved a sigh. “I don’t want to in any way disparage your mother, but I knew in my gut she wasn’t the right one for me when I took her out the first few times at the urging of my parents.” He gave a small shrug. “This was why I enlisted in the service so I wouldn’t have to stick around and get pressured into marriage. I shipped out and figured it was all behind me.”

  “Except for one little problem,” Juliet said, her voice hard. “You’d slept with her without using birth control. So, obviously, it wasn’t ‘all behind you’ because here you are, married to her with three more children. What happened to the baby? Did Mother put it up for adoption?”

  A look of deep sadness invaded her father’s still handsome features. “To save face, Millie went to stay with an aunt in Arizona until the baby was due. Her dad pulled some strings with the then Governor and got me an emergency leave to be flown back to San Francisco for a long weekend. We met at the downtown Civic Center, got married by a judge my father knew, and I was on the first plane back to Asia.”

  “You just gave in? And let them fly you across an ocean to get married to someone you weren’t in love with?”

  “Well, the pressure from all sides was pretty intense.” A familiar, defensive tone laced his words. “But yes, I gave in, as you call it. It became the pattern for my life. I was back in the jungle twenty-four hours later.”

  “And Mother and the baby?” Juliet asked, stunned by everything he’d revealed.

  “After the ceremony at City Hall, she immediately returned to Scottsdale with a nice notice in the San Francisco Chronicle that we’d been married in a “‘small, romantic ceremony’, and that the bride had returned to Arizona to continue her studies in engineering while her husband finished his obligation to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Turns out, two months earlier, she’d contracted the measles from a kid in her aunt’s neighborhood. She carried the baby to nearly full term, but he was born dead. A blessing, I suppose, as I was told he had major birth defects.”

  “Oh, God... how awful.”

  “I never saw him, of course. He’s buried in a desert cemetery somewhere. After another year in Vietnam, I came back.”

  “That must have been some homecoming,” murmured Juliet.

  “For a time, your mother and I were joined by the sorrow of losing that child. Mildred had, by then, earned her engineering degree, which was quite an accomplishment back then. We moved in here,” he said, making a vague gesture to the hotel that rose above their heads, “and we both pretended that it would somehow all work out between us. A year later, we had Bradshaw, and Millie named him after me—again.”

  “She named both baby boys Bradshaw Thayer?” Juliet exclaimed, astonished.

  “That’s what she put on the grave marker, she said. Only this time, naming a son Bradshaw Thayer the Fourth served as a constant reminder to me of what a bad guy I’d been skipping out to fight a war I didn’t believe in, just to escape getting engaged.”

  “So the Brad I know was her Golden Boy,” Juliet mused. “Her redemption... and her revenge.”

  Her father arched an eyebrow, and then nodded in agreement. “And he was the Bradshaw Thayer that she far preferred over me. She was determined to mold him into a man of action... a man who never gave in and was successful in everything he attempted. She coached him and coddled him and told him every second how wonderful and perfect and brilliant he was, and that he was entitled—in a way I certainly wasn’t—to every ounce of her love.”

  It was Juliet’s turn to be silent, a million thoughts colliding in her brain. At length, she noted glumly, “So it seems that what happened with the two baby Brads guaranteed that there wouldn’t be enough affection left over for Jamie or me.”

  “That’s not completely true,” her father countered. “Your mother wanted more children. Demanded them, in fact. She said I owed her at least that.”

  “She needed a shrink, not more kids,” Juliet shot back, hearing the anger in her own voice as she remembered the seminal incident when Brad vandalized her bike when they were kids. “She never once sided with either Jamie or me whenever Brad did something mean or even cruel to us, and she never reprimanded him.”

  “I know that, pet,” her father said. “It pains me enormously to say this, but she turned your older brother into a kind of monster... and I let her do it.”

  “You were part of it, for sure. But then, why didn’t you ever stick up for us?”

  “I hated the constant bickering and conflict and before long, I became one of those ‘peace at any price’ guys... a complete coward in the face of the force of nature your mother became once she was a partner in our business and the hotel. Brad replaced the little boy she lost, and she never got past blaming me for everything that had happened to us when I rejected her, joined the Army, and lit out from San Francisco—in that order.”

  “Well, she’d wanted to marry you!” Juliet protested. “She must have loved you. Didn’t she worry about your safety? You were fighting for your country ten thousand miles away and could have been killed!”

  “None of that seemed to matter to her much. As I said, we weren’t well suited. She and her family supported the Vietnam War... and I sure didn’t, especially after I got over there and saw what it was like. She liked the social scene in the city. I didn’t. All those things. Looking back, we were two young kids driven by forces neither of us understood.”

  “Jeez, Dad!” It was one thing to wonder if your parents were ever truly in love, but it was quite another to hear from a reliable source that they weren’t, ever.

  Just then she flashed on Finn’s description of his wandering into a marriage with Kim right after he’d graduated from the Air Force Academy, a marriage that he knew, from the outset, had little chance of success, given how unalike they were.

  “You were in your twenties,” she mused aloud. “You were probably just ‘in lust,’ not in love.”

  “We weren’t even that, really,” he admitted. “We knew each other. Our families knew each other. Everyone but me thought that it was a �
��suitable match.’ The night she got pregnant was the result of too many tequila shooters at Trader Vic’s after a deb party—drinks that she paid for, as I recall.”

  “Well, hell, Dad,” Juliet protested, “then Mother was just as responsible as you were for getting pregnant!”

  “Ha! People didn’t think that way back then.” His short laugh was bitter and laced with palpable regret. “The next morning she said, rather gaily, that she didn’t really care if she got pregnant... that we could ‘always just get married—which is what everyone expects us to do,’ is I think how she put it. I could tell she was getting panicky that, at her age, so many young men were going to war, or to Canada to avoid the Vietnam draft. I got the distinct feeling that she considered me a good enough catch, given that I was wearing trousers, heterosexual, close to her age and education, and from a prominent San Francisco family. And if she was panicky, I was scared out of my skull by what she’d said. That same day she offhandedly mentioned marriage, I went straight down to the recruiting office and signed up, thinking I might be sent somewhere stateside to shore up levees in Louisiana or something.”

  “You didn’t enlist soon enough though, right? Your fate was already sealed.”

  “What happened afterward was a deep, dark secret, except to our four parents. Not one of them ever spoke another word about it. To stay sane, I tried to forget the sequence of events and just get on with my life—until now, when I’ve told you the story.”

  “And why have you told me?” demanded Juliet. “And why in the world did you stick with each other all these years?”

  He gestured in the direction of the floors that soared above their heads.

  “Thayers don’t divorce. The stakes are too high, especially in the age of big corporations trying to take over small luxury hotels like ours. But be that as it may, I told you all this today because I knew how hurt you were by Brad’s firing you and I wanted you to realize that your mother’s and Brad’s attitude toward you and Jamie has absolutely nothing to do with either of you. You are both wonderful people and I’m proud to be your father. And just for the record, I, too, wanted more children.”

  “As a buffer between you two?” Juliet was startled by how totally incensed she was by everything she’d heard. “As a handy distraction from how unhappy you were?”

  “Well, you were the best distraction a father could ask for,” he gently teased her.

  For some reason, his answer made Juliet even more furious. “You both used us!” she accused. “You used Jamie and me for your own purposes and that feels pretty rotten, come to think of it.”

  Her father’s stricken look made her instantly regret her brutal honesty. He had never hurt her. Her hand flew to the jade dolphin necklace she was wearing. All her growing up years, he had somehow let her know he loved her.

  “Perhaps we did use you kids, in part, but I had enjoyed being one of four siblings, myself, and I wanted more children, period. I was so happy when you and Jamie were born.” His voice broke. “You two were my salvation, just as Brad was Mildred’s.”

  “Well, at least it’s good to hear Jamie and I were wanted children and not just two more accidents after another few nights of tequila shooters.”

  “Believe me,” her father replied with his first show of anger, “I saw the look in your eyes the other day when your mother didn’t show an ounce of sympathy when you told us that your own brother had fired you after the stellar job you’d done, taking over when Avery left. I wanted to soothe, if I could, some of the wounds I saw each time she sided with Brad when she should have stood up for you.”

  “So, why didn’t you speak up long before this?” Juliet asked, unable to let him off the hook from her deep sense of hurt. “I came downstairs to see you, today, not the other way around. Why didn’t you stand up for me when you heard what Brad had done? Why don’t you ever stand up for James... or for yourself? And for God’s sake, why haven’t you put some pressure on Brad to pay back the money you and Mother loaned him against this hotel, because, frankly, I’m tired of championing your cause.”

  “I know you are, sweetie, and I’m here to tell you, you don’t have to anymore.”

  “But you have to!” she insisted. “Or you and mother could be in a world of financial hurt if something goes sideways with GatherGames—as it could, given the constant takeover rumors and this stuff with the FBI and the encryption controversy.”

  “I don’t really think this FBI thing will amount to much.”

  “That’s not the point!”

  Her father’s ensuing silence was as frustrating as the browbeaten demeanor he seemed habitually to wear like a second skin.

  “The hotel’s part of Jamie’s and my life, too, you know,” she pleaded. “If you won’t fight for it for yourself and all the Bradshaw Thayers that came before—and might come after—don’t lose it for us!”

  Her father’s tormented expression told her he was, in fact, very worried about the equity loan on the hotel used as an investment in GatherGames. “I hear you,” he said with a heavy sigh. “I’ve spent a lifetime of accommodating everyone else, but I-I... just don’t know if I can—”

  Just then, the door flew open with no knock preceding the person who suddenly filled the threshold. Mildred Thayer, dressed like a social doyenne on the cover of the Nob Hill Gazette, was her usual chic self in a pale pink St. John woolen suit and matching leather pumps. Her shoulder-length dyed brown hair had been coiffed and sprayed, per usual, in the hotel’s hair salon. She strode into her husband’s private office and stood beside the desk, her arms akimbo, her hands plastered on her hips as if she were ready to do battle.

  “Ah, Millie... how was your bridge game?” her husband asked politely.

  “Oh, don’t be stupid, Brad,” she retorted. “Don’t try to pretend you and Juliet, here, are having an innocent little chat.” She turned toward her daughter. “Jamie just told me that you’re leaving for France tomorrow night for six months. You might have done the courtesy of letting your mother know!”

  CHAPTER 26

  Juliet rose from her chair and turned to face her mother, wondering what it would have been like to carry a child for nine months, only to bury it in the sand? Summoning a nonchalance she didn’t feel, she said, “You were deep into your bridge game, but you were next on my list to tell about my plans to go to Paris.”

  “How very kind of you,” Mildred said, sarcasm dripping from every syllable. “Second on your list, was I?”

  “Since Brad canned me so unceremoniously, I’ve had a lot of decisions to make, Mother, and not much time to make them.” Juliet struggled to keep any defensive tone out of her voice. “In a funny way, the lousy thing he’s done has given me an opportunity to do what I want, for a change, and I’m going to grab it.”

  “He said he had to let you go because you weren’t paying attention to your work, and now I can see why,” accused Mildred.

  “That’s absolute bullshit, but I’m not surprised you swallowed his lie, like always.”

  “Juliet Morgan Thayer, watch your language!”

  “As a matter of fact,” Juliet replied, a strange calm coming over her as it had when she’d finally told Brad what she thought of him two days earlier, “I paid very close attention to my work. I did everything he asked and more. Frankly, Mother, all I feel now is relief that I don’t have to be a part of that violent dreck he’s launching into the universe. I’ve got some money saved and I’m going to get serious about landscape painting. And yes, I’ll be gone at least six months.”

  As a peace offering in honor of the dead brother she never knew and the heartbreak her mother had endured at his loss, she made an impulsive proposal.

  “Maybe you and Dad will come over and visit me while I’m there? Both of you are pretty good sketch artists yourselves. Come take some classes with me, why don’t you?”

  She reached out and lightly touched the nubby wool sleeve of her mother’s fifteen-hundred-dollar suit. In the back of her mind, she wo
ndered why she still hoped that Mildred Thayer would—just once—see a situation from her daughter’s point of view.

  Her mother’s arms fell rigidly by her sides. “Paris will be a waste of your time and money,” she declared in a tone that cut Juliet to the quick. “It’s quite unlikely you’re talented enough ever to make a living as an artist. Brad said your work ‘lacked originality.’ He said—”

  “It doesn’t matter what he said,” Juliet broke in to put a stop to her mother’s insults. “Who knows if I can make a living? I’m taking off because I want to spend six months in France away from here. Good or rotten, I’m going to paint landscapes, which is what I always wanted to do since the moment I went to art school. We can both probably agree that my bowing out of things right now is a very good idea. At least I’m not on the list of employees the FBI wants to interview today.”

  Mildred took a deep breath and reached for the back of a chair to steady herself. For the first time in Juliet’s life, she saw a vulnerability there, a fear that perhaps her mother’s eldest son had put them all in jeopardy.

  “It’s probably for the best that Brad and I won’t be in such close proximity for a while,” Juliet offered wryly.

  Still gripping the chair back, her mother murmured, “It’s just it’s... it’s all so sudden, your going to Paris, and the FBI grilling Brad—”

  Mildred halted, mid-sentence, and touched her forehead as if she had a headache coming on. For the briefest moment, Juliet caught a glimpse of what her mother would look like as an old lady. As for Juliet, a tiny but utterly unexpected fizz of happiness began to fill her chest. She was bound for Paris! Far away from the toxic Thayer family stew.

  “Getting fired is definitely not the end of the world for me at all,” Juliet assured both her parents. “I can’t wait to launch into whatever is going to be next for me.”

  “I think studying in Paris is the perfect thing for you right now,” her father said with a pointed look toward his wife. He gestured in the direction of the drawing of three porpoises Juliet had done years before that still hung in its frame behind his desk. “I saw your talent even back then.”