The landing was smooth, but the inactivity of the long cross-country flight had gotten to Jared, and he couldn’t wait to be out in the city and moving. All he’d done for the past seven hours was think about Mai, about Saigon and the man from Saigon and the Winstons—and about the Blackburns. Why did Rebecca have to be in Boston? He’d considered staying away because of her. But he couldn’t. He had to see Thomas Blackburn; he had to get answers to the questions he’d left hanging for fourteen years.
He couldn’t take any chances. The white-haired man had come to San Francisco. Obviously he had seen Mai’s picture in The Score. Now he had seen her.
Jared took a cab to the Massachusetts State House and walked the rest of the way to West Cedar Street. Whatever else might have changed in Boston in the past fourteen years, he supposed Beacon Hill would be pretty much the same.
And he knew Thomas Blackburn would be.
After the long flight, the exercise and the cool night air felt good. Jared took the familiar shortcuts to West Cedar Street, not even tempted to go by the house on Chestnut where he had lived with his mother after her brief marriage to his father. The place belonged to someone else and had for a long time.
The Eliza Blackburn house was in hellish shape. Jared discovered the doorbell didn’t work and tried the brass knocker, in need of polishing.
Thomas Blackburn opened the door, the strong smell of curry emanating from inside the house. He squinted at Jared, then nodded with satisfaction, as if he’d been expecting him.
“Jared,” he said.
“Hello, Thomas.” Jared put out his hand, but that wasn’t enough and they embraced briefly. Standing back, Jared added, “You haven’t changed.”
Thomas gave him a small laugh, shaking his head because, of course, he had changed. He was almost eighty now. He didn’t stand so tall and straight, and there were more lines in his face, more weariness. Yet his eyes were still that intense blue, his gaze incisive and uncompromising as he studied Jared for a moment.
“It’s good to see you, Jared.”
“And you.” Jared choked back his emotion. “It’s been a long time, Thomas. Too long—but you don’t seem surprised I’m here.”
Thomas shrugged, but his expression was serious. “I suppose not. Come inside.”
They went into the faded elegance of the front parlor. Neither man sat down. Jared was restless, anxious to move after his long, frustrating day. The odor of curry was even stronger inside, and he recalled that Thomas had always liked spicy food.
“You saw The Score?” he asked.
Thomas nodded. “Rebecca showed me.”
R.J. Jared had devoured every word on her in the short tabloid article, but there’d been no mention of where she was living. One of Boston’s pricey new condominiums? She was the first Blackburn in two hundred years to have money to blow, and he hoped she was enjoying every minute of it. But he couldn’t think about her now.
“Jared—” Thomas broke off, sighing. “Jared, what’s happened? The pictures have stirred up trouble, I assume.”
“Yeah. One of the assassins from Saigon—the one who shot me—saw them and must have realized Mai made it out alive.”
Leaving out nothing, Jared told Thomas about the scar-faced man from Saigon and his visit to Russian Hill, and even after fourteen years, it seemed right to unburden his soul to this aged, experienced, tortured man. The friendship they’d forged when Jared was in college and Rebecca still a kid in Florida remained intact, although in 1975, when Jared had come to Thomas shattered after his own experience in Indochina, still suffering the effects of two bullets in his shoulder, they had realized the decisions they’d arrived at that night might mean they’d never see each other again. Jared had already acknowledged, if not accepted, that he and R.J. were finished. But he’d understood then—as he did now—that whoever had shot him in Saigon had also meant to kill Mai, and could try again.
As he had fourteen years ago, Thomas listened without interruption or any apparent reaction. Finally, when Jared had finished, he asked, “Where is Mai now?”
“My father’s place, outside San Francisco.”
“Good.” Thomas clamped one hand on Jared’s upper arm, his eyes glittering even in the dim light of the parlor. “Go back to her. Stay with her. Let me find out what I can about this man and deal with him. My guess is he’s not after Mai directly.”
Jared stiffened with disappointment and increasing frustration. “I’d hoped you’d talk to me, Thomas. I need advice—answers. Look, after Saigon I was so crazed and in such a state of shock, I’d have gone to Peru and opened a butcher shop if you’d told me it was the smartest thing to do. I trusted you then, and I trust you now. But Thomas…You haven’t been straight with me. I can’t let it lie anymore, not with this bastard showing up on my doorstep. Talk to me.” Stemming his anger, Jared softened his voice and asked, “You know this guy, don’t you?”
“From a long, long time ago.” The old man’s voice was distant, sadder than Jared would have ever thought possible. He had always seemed so impervious to anguish, but perhaps he was merely clever at hiding it from those who would take pleasure in his pain. Staring at the marble mantel where photographs of his lost wife and son were on display, he went on, “I’d assumed he never made it out of Saigon.”
Jared resisted the urge to press and press hard for information. “Who is he?”
Thomas shook his head, as if cutting off his own rampant thoughts, not Jared. “You came here because you trust me, didn’t you?”
Jared nodded.
Turning back to his young friend, Thomas clapped him on the arm, his grip stronger than Jared would have expected from a man near eighty. “Then believe me,” the older man said, “when I tell you the best thing you can do for yourself and for your daughter is to go home and let me see what I can root out on my own. You did what you had to do fourteen years ago. You knew then that you had to go on without answers—for Mai’s sake. Well, nothing’s changed.”
“Mai’s safe,” Jared said stonily. “I’m going to find this guy. I want to know what he’s up to. If it doesn’t involve my daughter, then fine. If it does—”
“Jared, go home.”
“I can’t. I’m not running away this time.”
“You didn’t before,” Thomas said with certainty. “You did what was right.”
Jared started to argue, but stopped at the sound of footsteps in the hall.
“Grandfather, how the hell much curry did you put in that stuff? It’s enough to kill a horse! My mouth’s on fire and—” Rebecca went silent as she came into the parlor.
The sight of her took Jared’s breath away. In her tangerine shirt and slim black skirt, she looked pulled together, gorgeous and very rich. She was older and even more beautiful, her eyes just as blue, her hair shorter, but still that unusual, very memorable shade of chestnut. And Jared realized, with a certainty that hurt, that although his life had gone on, he’d never really gotten over having loved and lost Rebecca Blackburn.
“Hello, R.J.,” he managed to say.
“Jared.”
Her voice was a whisper, and at that moment Jared knew that Thomas was right about one thing: nothing had changed.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
On a sweltering Labor Day weekend in 1973, Rebecca returned to Boston for the first time since moving off Beacon Hill ten years earlier. She came alone on an Amtrak train. Her mother didn’t approve of her choice of Boston University. “Why Boston?” she’d demanded. “You’ve been accepted at Vanderbilt, Northwestern, Stanford. Why Boston University?”
Because it was in Boston, and Rebecca had dreamed about going back since she was eight. She’d restore the Blackburn name to its lofty pre–Thomas Blackburn position of respectability. And she’d do it in Boston.
But she didn’t tell her mother that. She claimed she’d decided on B.U. because they had offered her the best financial aid package, which was true. Smart, fatherless and the eldest of six, Rebecca had had no trou
ble getting scholarships.
“You don’t have to take me,” she’d told her mother, and Jenny Blackburn made no pretense of her relief. She couldn’t go back to Boston. And Rebecca wasn’t going to make her feel she had to.
So, her stuffed duffel bag slung over one shoulder, Rebecca made her way from the train station to her dormitory, the only person on the subway not grumbling about the heat. She could have called her grandfather, she supposed, and prevailed upon him to meet her, but why bother? She hadn’t heard from him since she and her mother and brothers had left Boston; he hadn’t answered any of the flurry of letters she’d written to him in those first lonely months in Florida. The only reason she knew he was still alive was because her mother still got tense and nervous whenever his name was mentioned.
Her roommate was a tiny, cheerful eighteen-year-old from Westchester County named Sophia Loretta Mencini—Sofi. She owned twenty-eight belts and twelve pocketbooks. Rebecca, who had one of each, counted them. Sofi grimaced at Rebecca’s meager wardrobe and the tattered, unabridged dictionary she had lugged all the way from Florida and promptly labeled her new roommate an egghead. They became instant friends.
“But why all the crayons?” Sofi asked.
“They’re oil pastels. I hope to audit a few art courses, too.” She’d had a flair for art since she could remember, but didn’t consider it a practical choice for a career—or for erasing her grandfather’s damage to the Blackburn name.
“Major egghead,” Sofi said.
Rebecca laughed. “Just determined.”
* * *
On a drizzly afternoon in October Thomas Blackburn gave up on the notion that Rebecca would come to him and instead went to her. He tracked her down at the B.U. library, roomy and nicely laid out, a better facility than he’d expected. He considered the large windows with tempting views of the Charles River an unnecessary distraction, however, and he loathed having to argue his way past the security desk. Did he look like someone who’d try to sneak books out tucked in his pants?
He found his granddaughter reshelving an enormous cart of books in the stacks and knew her at once, this little girl of his now grown-up. Thomas ached at the sight of her. At eighteen, she displayed the same unfortunate taste in fashion as her fellow students. She’d tied a red bandanna over her hair and knotted it at the nape of her neck; it was the sort of thing his wife used to wear when she cleaned the attic. Her jeans and bright gold sweater had so many holes they weren’t worth mending. At least, mercifully, she was clean, the strands of hair flowing down her back from under the bandanna shining, that fetching chestnut that marked her as a Blackburn. Although she wore no cosmetics, her skin, even smudged with library dust, was radiant, and her eyes sparkled. There was an arrogant straightness to her nose—a Blackburn touch—and an altogether stubborn set to her jaw that was pure O’Keefe. Even dressed in rags, Rebecca, in her grandfather’s opinion, would have looked regal, but he suspected telling her so would only have made her angry.
“A fine way to spend a Saturday afternoon,” he muttered. “Does this job of yours leave enough time for you to study?”
She turned, and in the flash of her eyes, he could tell she’d recognized him immediately, but she quickly hid her surprise and, he thought, her pleasure at seeing him. “We all have twenty-four hours in a day.”
“How true.” Thomas lifted a discarded volume from her cart. Aristotle. He hadn’t read the Greek philosophers in years. “I suppose this job of yours is a federally funded position for impoverished students?”
“Not necessarily impoverished. Work study helps students from middle-class families get by, as well. The less your family can afford, the larger your work-study grant.”
“Are you at the maximum?”
She gave him a tight smile. “Not quite.”
“Make work,” he said.
“It feels like real work to me. I’ve been at it since noon. Of course, if I had a rich and generous grandfather paying my bills…”
He laughed, a faint feeling of pride rising up in him. She was a tough, outspoken young woman. If she were going to stay in Boston, she’d have to be. He found himself resisting the urge to hug her, asking instead, “When do you finish?”
“Another forty minutes.”
“Good. I’ll meet you downstairs at the front desk.”
“For what?”
“We’ll go to dinner.” He winked at her, wishing it could be the same between them as it had before Stephen’s death, when they’d done everything together during his home leaves and had understood each other so well. But those days were over. He’d ended them himself. “I’ll take you to the Ritz.”
Rebecca laughed, and Thomas had to look away so she wouldn’t see his reaction. He could hear Emily in her laugh, could suddenly remember his wife as clearly as if he’d last seen her just that morning, instead of nearly forty years ago.
“You can’t afford the Ritz,” his granddaughter told him. “Even if you could, you wouldn’t spend the money. Besides, I can’t take the time to go into town.”
“Marshaling your twenty-four hours?”
“You bet.”
“Then we’ll go to one of the disreputable student establishments on Commonwealth Avenue. You choose.”
He walked off with the Aristotle tucked under one arm to read while waiting.
Rebecca chose the student union because she could use her dining card and they wouldn’t have to go out in the rain. The rain wouldn’t have bothered Thomas, but he understood about the meal card. His own dinner proved relatively inexpensive, and they found an unoccupied table in a corner. He was surprised by how comfortable he felt among the scores of young students and would have enjoyed striking up a dialogue at the crowded table behind them on the Vietnam conflict.
“How did you find out I was in Boston?” Rebecca asked.
“Your mother. Don’t look so surprised. As much as she despises me, she believes it her duty to write me intensely formal letters once or twice a year with pictures of you all and one or two lines on your current activities.”
“Do you ever write back?”
“It would only annoy her if I did.”
Rebecca pulled in her lips, but he knew what she was thinking. He said, “I still have every letter you wrote to me. And I answered them all. I just never mailed them.”
“Because of Mother?”
“Because of you. You were a child, Rebecca. You needed to make the adjustment to your new life, and I didn’t believe you could do it with me indulging your homesickness for Boston. Then when you stopped writing, I felt I didn’t want to intrude.”
She gave him a long, clear-eyed look. “Sounds like a rationalization to me.”
He shrugged. “Maybe it is. Tell me about school. How are your classes?”
She told him briefly, but he wasn’t satisfied with superficial answers. He wanted to know if her professors were idiots, if her courses were rigorous enough, what texts were on her reading lists, whether she was required to write term papers and if there would be final exams. He had heard somewhere that young people were ignorant of geography and interrogated her on the whereabouts of Borneo, Calcutta, Rumania and Des Moines, Iowa.
“I hope,” he said ominously, “that none of your professors has given you the choice between doing a paper or a collage.”
Rebecca assured him none had. “You’re just worried because I’m not at Harvard.”
“Nonsense.”
She didn’t believe him. “Well, I think the quality of one’s education depends to a great degree on the individual. A dope going to Harvard will still come out a dope.”
Thomas sniffed. “That sounds like something someone who didn’t go to Harvard would say.”
“You’re such a snob, Grandfather.”
She tilted her paper cup of soda up to her mouth and got out the last of the ice, her eyes focusing on the man across from her. His tweed jacket was frayed and rumpled and his whitening hair needed a trim. Even if he’d had a million
dollars in the bank, he’d probably have looked much the same. Thomas Blackburn had always hated to spend money. But there was something in his expression—just the hint of a shit-eating grin—that made her wonder if he wasn’t pulling her leg just a bit and not quite the snob he was making himself out to be.
“Why did you come to see me?”
“You’re my granddaughter,” he said. “Just because we haven’t seen or spoken to each other in ten years doesn’t mean I haven’t thought of you. I have, you know. Every day.”
She choked up. “Grandfather…”
“Come to supper on Sunday at the house. We’ll have sandwiches—bring your roommate if you wish. I’m correct in assuming you have no current gentleman friend of importance?”
Smiling through the tears in her eyes, she said, “You’re correct.”
“No room for romance in your twenty-four hours?”
“Not,” she shot back, “if I intend to maintain my four-oh average.”
* * *
By winter, Rebecca felt more comfortable in Boston and had gotten used to the idea that her grandfather had said all he was going to say on the subject of 1963—the deaths of Benjamin Reed, her father and Quang Tai, and his own retreat from public life. And what he’d said was nothing. She didn’t blame him for the tragedy; she just wanted to hear his side of what had happened. What did he mean when he’d accepted full responsibility for the incident? Was there any truth to the rumors he had associated with the Vietcong? She’d started to ask him a hundred times, but stopped herself every time. He’d only call her impertinent or presumptuous for asking. He knew it was on her mind and would tell her if he wanted to.
Even after a decade, her mother’s bitterness toward him was still palpable, and Rebecca wisely chose not to bring him up during her visit home during winter break. She didn’t mention she’d invited him to join her in Florida.
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