Betrayals

by Carla Neggers

  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 th
ink 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.

  When Rebecca got up to pepper her hummus, about twenty preschoolers gathered around her bench for a carefully supervised picnic. She remembered taking her youngest brothers on picnics down by the pond at home in central Florida, teaching them about snakes and showing them how to catch frogs and lizards. In her room at night, she would describe all their activities in detailed letters to her grandfather in Boston.

  She had hated Florida at first. The oppressive summer heat, the big, strange rooms of Papa O’Keefe’s twenties-style house, the pond in the backyard, the endless citrus groves, the lack of neighbors, the spiders and snakes. It was all so different from Beacon Hill. But her mother had promised her she would come to love the place, and she had, in her own way. That didn’t stop her from wondering what her life might have been like if they’d been able to stay in Boston. Would she have turned out to be another in a long series of impoverished, holier-than-thou Boston Blackburns? At least, she thought, their “wilderness exile,” as Thomas Blackburn called it, had spared her that.

  After she took a few more bites of her salad, Rebecca tossed the leftovers and started back toward Congress Street. She’d return to her studio and take on all the assignments she could, maybe think about the advertising job in New York. She needed to work.

  A man’s face came at her from the throng crossing the Congress Street Bridge, past the replica of the Boston Tea Party ship, and she stopped cold.

  “My God,” she heard herself whisper.

  The face was even more battered now and older—so old—but there was still the slight limp, and the tough, sinewy body.

  Together, they became the Frenchman from Saigon.

  Or his ghost. Hanging back on Museum Wharf, Rebecca waited to see if she wasn’t hallucinating from the pressures of being back in Boston and having her picture in The Score force her to relive the hell of April 1975.

  She wasn’t hallucinating.

  Rebecca’s heart pounded; this was no coincidence. He had to be on Congress Street because of her. He had spotted her picture in The Score, looked up her studio’s address in the Boston Yellow Pages and here he was.

  The crowd thinned out once she’d passed Museum Wharf. Rebecca could easily make out the limping figure in worn, loose-fitting jeans and a faded, short-sleeved black shirt. With his scarred face and snowy hair, he’d never be able to melt into a crowd.

  Concentrating on keeping her breathing normal so she wouldn’t do something stupid like faint, Rebecca walked down Congress Street after him. Seeing him was a shock; there was no question of that. Her heart deserved to pound. But she didn’t have any idea whether she should be afraid of him or not.

  I suppose you’ll find out if you keep following him….

  There were enough people in her building and around outside that she wasn’t too worried he’d try anything. And she wasn’t fool enough to follow him all the way up to her isolated studio. If he went up there, he could ransack the place to his heart’s content.

  He wasn’t going to kill her, she told herself. He’d had the chance fourteen years ago and hadn’t.

  Of course, by now he might have realized his mistake.

  With a quick glance up to check the number, the Frenchman entered her building. Rebecca clenched both her hands into tight, nervous fists and made herself tiptoe up behind him in what passed for a lobby. He had already pressed the up button on the old service elevator.

  Before she could say a word, he turned expectantly to her. “I thought that must be you following me.”

  His accent was only vaguely French, his voice—its timbre, its intensity—exactly as Rebecca remembered from Saigon, his eyes exactly as soft and brown and strangely vulnerable. He took her in with a sweeping glance, and Rebecca knew he wasn’t seeing a terrified twenty-year-old kid who
expected to have her head blown off in the next few seconds. If she hadn’t put the past behind her, she had at least gone on with her life.

  She tried not to stare at his ravaged face as she searched for a response. But what was there to say? In 1975, he and his Vietnamese cohort, a tough, brutal man, had murdered Tam and left Jared Sloan dying. Rebecca hadn’t forgotten that night and, she was quite certain, neither had the Frenchman.

  He seemed to sense her discomfort and smiled, a surprisingly gentle, tortured smile. “I saw your picture in the paper,” he told her quietly. “I didn’t know until then you’d gotten out of Saigon safely.”

  “‘Safely’ might be exaggerating,” she said, the words not coming easily from her dry mouth and tension-choked throat. “But we got out. I’d like to know who you are.”

  “I could tell you a name.” He shrugged, and she saw that he was very tanned, his muscles stringy and tough, reminding her of one of Papa O’Keefe’s invincible old roosters. “Would a name change anything?”

  “If you just made one up, no. But you could tell me where you came from, why you were there that night in Saigon, why you’re here now.”

  “It’s better you ask no questions, Rebecca Blackburn.” Her name rolled off his tongue, as if he’d spoken it many times. Rebecca had to stop herself from shuddering. But he noticed, and said, “Perhaps I shouldn’t have come.”

  “Why did you?”

  The elevator creaked and groaned as it started its descent. She would run back out into the street before she got in there with him.

  If he let her.

  She shook off the thought.

  “The past,” he said, “sometimes must collide with the present.”