Betrayals

by Carla Neggers

  “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.

  “Stephen and Mark and Jacob don’t remember you at all,” she’d told him, “and Taylor and Nate just barely. They’d love to see you. And the warm air would do you good. We could all go to Disney World.”

  Thomas was adamant. “Your mother would slam the door in my face.”

  Likely enough, she would have. Or done worse. Jenny Blackburn was still holding out hope that her daughter would transfer to another school. If nothing else, she figured the cold weather would lure Rebecca back to the south. Papa O’Keefe, a plump, red-faced, incredibly hardworking man, wasn’t so sanguine. “Not with that Yankee blood” was all he would say.

  Winter didn’t drive Rebecca south. Continuing to maintain her high average and work at the library, she used snowstorms and subfreezing temperatures as an excuse to indulge her passion for art. It wasn’t painting and sculpture that seized her spirit, but graphic design. With design, she had a greater chance of having her work seen by and communicated to a large number of people. She found the process of design both challenging and enjoyable, as she took fine art’s conceptual way of thinking and applied it in practical uses. The blending of artistic elements, technical expertise, inspiration and business demands appealed to her.

  It was her interest in graphic design that took her to the waterfront on a brisk April afternoon. Or so she insisted. A new building was going up and one of the top design studios in the country had been commissioned to do its graphic identity—enough reason for Rebecca to justify showing up at the press conference on site.

  But the architect was Wesley Sloan and the builder was Winston & Reed, and when she cut her microeconomics class and headed out to the waterfront, Rebecca had a feeling she was walking into trouble.

  She just didn’t know how much.

  Fourteen

  Jared Sloan was twenty-four that spring as he hunched his shoulders against the stiff wind gusting off Boston Harbor. He’d forgotten how cold Boston could be, even in April. Just a year in San Francisco had eliminated his tolerance for extremes in temperature. His father, however, seemed oblivious to the biting wind. Jared joined him over at the Bobcats waiting to demolish the condemned building occupying the site of Wesley Sloan and Annette Winston Reed’s latest project.

  “Lovely place to hold a press conference,” Jared said.

  Wesley, a solid man of fifty and utterly consumed by his work, laughed as his iron-gray hair stood straight up in the churning wind. “Your Aunt Annette does have a flair for the dramatic, but this one could backfire on her if a reporter gets blown into the harbor and has to have his stomach pumped. She insists the wind’ll die down by three o’clock.”

  “Or pay the price of her wrath?”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised. It’s good of you to come, you know.”

  As if he’d had a choice. Jared was an apprentice architect with his father’s San Francisco firm and had contributed to the design of Winston & Reed’s new headquarters in only the most minor of ways. Wesley Sloan wasn’t a man who easily delegated authority, even to his son. But Jared had no illusions about why he was in Boston: his Aunt Annette was portraying her new project as a family affair, and he was family. She’d gone so far as to summon Quentin from Saigon, where he’d gone in October to work with the branch that had launched Winston & Reed at the beginning of American military involvement in Vietnam more than a decade ago. Naturally Quentin had come. He wasn’t one to defy his mother’s wishes and going to Saigon in the first place had about exhausted his courage. With the Paris Peace Accords, Winston & Reed was scaling back its Southeast Asian operation, and Annette had only just barely tolerated having her twenty-two-year-old son volunteer to help. Jared thought he understood. She’d lost her husband in Vietnam; she didn’t intend to lose her only child.

  Jared wouldn’t have thought twice about defying his aunt, but he had his own reasons for wanting to accompany his father to Boston. His parents were seldom in the same city—his mother still lived on Beacon Hill—and he planned to take advantage. They’d agreed to have dinner with him while they were all in town. And then he’d hit them with his own plans to head off to the Far East. Starting June first, he would spend a year working as an architect in Saigon, under a foundation grant. He wasn’t ready to be tied down to a firm, nor did he consider his architectural education complete. Southeast Asia would provide him opportunities for learning that he couldn’t get in San Francisco or Boston. Wesley Sloan would see his only son’s departure from his firm as a betrayal. Maybe in a way it was. But it was something Jared had to do. His student deferments had kept him out of the war, and now he felt he needed to see the country where the lives of so many of his friends had been changed—and lost. Whenever he thought of the young men his own age, of his sensitive Uncle Benjamin, who always seemed to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, and of Stephen Blackburn, good-humored and keenly intelligent, Jared knew he had to go.

  “What the devil’s going on over there?” Wesley Sloan grumbled. “Who’s that lunatic?”

  Jared followed his father’s gaze down the chain-link fence securing the demolition area, where the wind had kicked up dust and debris. A woman in a bright red sweatshirt and Red Sox cap on backward was perched rooster-like atop a fence post. She had a camera strapped around her neck and was snapping pictures.

  “I’ll go see,” Jared volunteered.

  Coming closer, he saw the messy chestnut braid trailing halfway down her back and her holey jeans and sneakers. Had to be one of Boston’s countless students. The woman jumped down from the fence post, landing lightly just inside the demolition area. She had a nice shape under her ratty clothes.

  “I wouldn’t stand in there without a hard hat on if I were you,” he said.

  She looked around at him, her eyes a lively shade of blue, her face angular and attractive and oddly familiar. “Of all people,” she said under her breath, then climbed as fast as a monkey back up the fence, paused on the post and hopped down beside him. Her Red Sox cap came off, and loose hairs blew in her face. “What’re you doing here?”

  “I’m with the press conference,” he said formally, bothered by her face. Did he recognize her? “My name’s Jared Sloan. Look, this area’s posted and—”

  “I know who you are.”

  “Your face is familiar—”

  She swept her cap up off the ground and grinned at him. “I would hope so.”

  And suddenly Jared recognized her.
He’d probably known, on a gut level, when he’d first spotted her. The face, the eyes, the brazenness—he had never forgotten them. But if there was anyone he didn’t expect to find in Boston, it was Rebecca Blackburn.

  “R.J.,” he said.

  She was already heading back out across Atlantic Avenue and failed to hear him.

  The Winstons had arrived, and the press conference was about to begin. Jared was supposed to line up for the obligatory family photo; he could see his father looking around for him. Quentin, suntanned and wearing a conservative suit that made him look forty, caught his cousin’s eye and waved. Jared pretended not to see him. His Aunt Annette glanced at her watch. She was forty-five and, Jared suspected, relished being chairman of a thriving corporation, but she’d be the last to say so. Jared remembered her as more of a free spirit, not the unapproachable, gray-suited grande dame she was playing these days. He wondered if power did that to people. Or just widowhood and its responsibilities. For certain, she wouldn’t appreciate his cutting out on her.

  He didn’t care. They could go on without him.

  He ran after Rebecca.

  She’d cut down a side street and was at a corner when he caught up with her, impatiently waiting to cross a narrow street clogged with traffic. “I remember,” Jared said, sidling up next to her, “when you couldn’t wait to be old enough to cross a street by yourself.”

  She fastened her bright eyes on him. “Hello, Jared.”

  He grinned. “Hello, R.J.”

  “What jogged your memory?” she asked. “You haven’t seen me since I was eight.”

  She was all of nineteen now. “You haven’t changed. Can I buy you a cup of coffee?”

  She didn’t even hesitate. “Sure. And I’ll buy an order of French fries. We’ll share.”

  They found a Brigham’s and sat opposite each other in a booth with their coffee and fries, and the decade since Jared had held back his tears and watched the Blackburn moving truck trundle down West Cedar Street melted away. They talked about San Francisco and Florida and her five brothers and his two half-sisters. Jared said something that amused Rebecca, and in her laugh he heard the echo of the little kid he’d played with, bugged, tolerated and rescued so long ago, not in terms of years, but in how much their lives had changed since. Especially hers.

  “How’s your Blackburn grandfather these days?” he asked.

  She didn’t avert her eyes, but he could see she was tempted. “Fine.”

  “It took courage for him to stay on Beacon Hill. What your mother did took a different kind of courage. Everyone thought Thomas would sell the house and retire to Maine or someplace. It can’t have been easy for him living around the corner from my aunt.”

  Rebecca was squinting her so-blue eyes at him. “Thomas?”

  Jared grinned. “He insisted on my calling him by his first name.”

  “When?”

  “A few years ago. I went to college here, and he had me over every now and then for dinner with him and his boarders. Usually served some dish of the flaming-esophagus variety.”

  “Sunday nights?”

  “Generally, yeah. R.J., what’s wrong?”

  She shrugged. “I guess I’m just jealous. I missed so many years with him—by his choice and my mother’s, maybe even a little of mine. You had him when I didn’t.”

  “He’s only in his midsixties. He’ll probably outlive us all.” Jared winced at his insensitivity, considering her father’s untimely death. “I’m sorry….”

  “No, don’t be. Wounds heal, Jared. I’m not angry with my grandfather for what happened to my father and your uncle. I wish I understood more about it, but—”

  “But Thomas won’t tell you.”

  “That’s right. And I can’t force him. It must be horrible, having to live with that guilt. No matter what happened, I don’t think Dad would’ve wanted that. Look, you’re missing your press conference.”

  “No problem,” Jared said quickly, not wanting to leave. “By the way, what were you doing there? I won’t flatter myself you came because you knew I’d be around.”

  She laughed. “No, I was taking pictures for a noncredit photography class I’m taking, but I really came because of the design studio your father hired. I was hoping to scarf up a press kit.”

  “That can be arranged. You’re an art major?”

  “Political science and history.”

  “A true Blackburn.”

  She shook her head. “I’m on the ‘wrong’ side of the Charles River.”

  “I just thought of something,” he said suddenly, half-lying. In truth, he’d been toying with this idea since he’d realized R.J. wasn’t going to tell him to go to hell and be done with him. “There’s a party of sorts tonight to celebrate today’s groundbreaking on the new building. I didn’t think to invite anyone. Would you care to go?”

  Sitting back, Rebecca eyed him with that vaunted Blackburn incisiveness. “As your date, you mean?”

  Jared coughed. “Well, yes.”

  “If you’d told me you’d be asking me on a date when I was eight years old, I’d have…I don’t know, kicked you in the shins or something.” She peeled a snarled rubber band off the end of her braid and shook loose her hair, and Jared shifted on his bench, properly dazzled. She added, “I’d love to go. Is this thing a hotsy-totsy party?”

  He laughed. “As hotsy-totsy as they come.”

  “Then I’d better start tracking down a dress.”

  She started out of the booth, but Jared put a hand on her wrist. “R.J.—I’m glad you don’t hate me.”

  The smile she gave him was surprisingly gentle and filled with memories. “How could I?”

  Rebecca didn’t own a party dress. A short denim skirt, yes. Jeans, sweatshirts, turtlenecks, sneakers and knee socks, yes. But no party dress. Sofi, however, had a solution, and it arrived an hour before Jared was to pick her up in the form of Alex, a theater arts major who, Sofi announced, would dress her. Before Rebecca could make a decent protest, Alex was at her closet.

  He didn’t stay there long. “Your farm-girl look’s a no-go. It’s a wonder there’s not a pitchfork in there.”

  “You didn’t dig back far enough,” Rebecca told him.

  “Funny, funny.”

  He tried Sofi’s closet. Rebecca warned him that nothing would fit her wildly different frame, but Alex was undeterred. He hauled out hangers dripping with skirts, blouses and dresses—and rejected everything.

  Sofi was insulted. “What’s wrong with my clothes? I bought half that stuff at Bloomingdale’s!”

  “Too New York. We want Boston. Something elegant and understated. Something that says old money.”

  Rebecca laughed. If it was one thing Blackburn money was, it was old. It was also scarce. She said, “Then all I need to do is head up to Beacon Hill and borrow some dumpy old dress stuffed up in my grandfather’s attic—”

  Alex suddenly clapped his hands together. “Of course!”

  “I will not—I was only kidding. Look, thanks, but I’ll figure something out.”

  “Rebecca, hush, will you please? I don’t care about the frumpy clothes in your grandfather’s attic. I have our answer.”

  Rebecca was dubious. “What?”

  “Not what—who. Lenny.”

  “Lenny?”

  Alex would say no more. He grabbed Sofi and disappeared. When they weren’t back in twenty minutes, Rebecca was contemplating her denim skirt and her roommate’s silver sequined top, but then they burst in, with Lenny, a senior theater major. Lenny wasn’t short for Eleanor or Leonora, as Rebecca had anticipated, but for Leonard. He was five-ten, had a wiry runner’s body and wore a short ponytail. He, Sofi and Alex all carried an assortment of evening clothes.

  “Lenny finds playing women’s roles both fun and instructive,” Sofi said, obviously quoting him. “He thinks his openness toward new experiences ultimately will help him become a better actor and director.”

  Lenny made a clinical examination of Reb
ecca, in her ratty chenille robe and bare feet, and immediately dismissed three of the dresses he’d brought along. Rebecca made a none-too-subtle remark about the time. Sighing, Lenny posted Alex outside the door. When Jared arrived, Alex would knock three times.

  Finally, Lenny said, “The white.”

  He withdrew his choice from the masses of dry cleaner bags, unwrapped it and held a white linen dress up to Rebecca. It had tiny white lace edging and a high collar. He said, “Perfect.”

  “I’ll look like a virgin!”

  “Of course you will.”

  “But…”

  “You are a virgin,” Sofi pointed out, quite unnecessarily, in Rebecca’s opinion.

  Lenny was all business. “You don’t have shoes, I suppose?”

  “Sneakers and L.L. Bean boots.”

  “My God. Sofi?”

  “I wear a size six. Rebecca wouldn’t fit in my shoes.”

  “I’m a size ten,” Lenny said.

  Rebecca couldn’t believe they were having this discussion, but surrendered. “Size eight.”

  “Must be somebody around here who wears an eight,” Sofi said. “I think Edie might.”

  “They must be white,” Lenny instructed, “and as delicate as possible.”

  “Virginal,” Sofi added, with a wicked grin at her roommate, and shot out the door.

  The decision made, Lenny called Alex in, and together they played valet for Rebecca as though she were the star in one of their student theater productions. By now she was getting too big a kick out of the whole thing to protest. They helped her off with her bathrobe, assuring her their interest in her slip-clad body was purely professional, although Alex did make a point of telling her that Lenny might be gay, but he wasn’t.

  “Don’t worry,” Lenny reassured her, amused, “if the cretin tries anything, I’ll punch him out.”

  “I have five brothers. If he tries anything, I’ll punch him out.”