CHAPTER 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 Rebecca, 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.”
They had her raise her arms and slipped the dress on. Lenny was bigger in the bust when he played a woman than Rebecca was, but otherwise the dress was a remarkably good fit. The lace hem came to midcalf. Ignoring Lenny’s pained expression, Rebecca added her only pair of pantyhose.
“You don’t have makeup, I presume?” he asked.
“I use a little Vaseline on my lips…”
“Horrors. Luckily I brought along my own palette. Sit.”
She sat. He draped a towel over her shoulders and, with Alex assisting, began on her face, explaining he used only natural cosmetics and would go for a light, unpainted look. He remarked on her creamy skin, but suggested genetics and youth were responsible since he assumed she didn’t bother with a proper skin-care regime.
“You know,” Rebecca said, “I don’t care about makeup. My ride will be here any minute—”
“We’re practically home free now. And your ride will be delighted to wait. I’m assuming it’s a man? Another woman might not let you out the door.”
Rebecca suddenly felt self-conscious. “I could just forget all this and go in my denim skirt.”
Lenny shook his head. “Relax, sweetheart. Although a little nervousness adds color to your cheeks and spark to your eyes. What do you think, Alex?”
“I think I’m going to toss her date down the elevator shaft and take her to dinner myself.” He grinned. “You like dorm food, Rebecca?”
She couldn’t stop herself from laughing. “You guys are impossible, but thanks. I look okay?”
“You look smashing,” Lenny said. “Where are your shoes?” He whisked off the towel and took Rebecca by the hand, guiding her to the mirror. “Your hair’s still a near-disaster, but rather innocent-looking—and the color’s magnificent.”
She had to admit that in a few quick minutes, Lenny had transformed her from looking like an impoverished student to a woman who could hold her own at any party the Sloans and Winstons decided to throw. On her own, though, she still wouldn’t have picked white lace.
Sofi slipped into the room, breathless, and handed Rebecca a pair of low white sandals with very skinny straps. “This was the best I could do. It’s reasonably warm tonight—”
Lenny grabbed them. “But these are perfection!”
He insisted on slipping them onto Rebecca’s feet himself. Sofi was highly entertained. “My, my, Cinderella in the flesh.”
“Sofi…”
“Hey, just kidding. You look great. I mean it. If this were an Aztec party you were going to, they’d sacrifice you on the altar.”
“You’re a big help.”
There was a knock at the door. Lenny picked up Rebecca’s hand and gave it a gentle squeeze. “Have a wonderful time.”
“Thanks.” Rebecca gave him a hug. “I’m not used to fussing over my appearance. I appreciate what you’ve done, and I’ll try not to ruin the dress.”
“I hope your man tears it off you.”
“Lenny,” Alex said, “you’re making her blush.”
“Of course I am. I want her to have fresh color in her cheeks when she walks out the door.”
Thanking them again, Rebecca shot out into the hall before one or another of the three could make one last remark. She quickly shut her door behind her so Jared wouldn’t see her entourage and room filled with cast-off clothes and think she’d put any effort into the evening.
He was breathtaking in a black evening suit. “Sorry I’m late. I forgot your room number.”
“You’ve been here awhile?”
“A few minutes.” He tried to hold back a smile, but failed.
“Um…You met my roommate Sofi?”
“Was she the one running up and down the hall looking for virgin shoes in size eight?”
So much, Rebecca thought, for illusions of sophistication, but by the time she and Jared reached the elevator they were both laughing.
* * *
“I won’t have her here.”
Jared stiffened in anger at his aunt’s words and looked to Quentin for support, but his cousin remained silent. Annette seemed hardly aware of her son’s presence in the small sitting room off the elegant drawing room where dozens of guests had gathered. Jared could see Rebecca smiling as she took a glass of champagne. She was so damned beautiful. His aunt, elegant in diamonds and black silk, had pulled him aside moments after they’d arrived at her Mt. Vernon Street house.
It was her party, she was his aunt, and Jared, despite his irritation, tried to be patient. “Aunt Annette, I don’t see why you’re carrying a grudge against her.”
“I’m not. She’s a Blackburn, Jared, and while that may be no fault of hers, it’s certainly none of mine.” Annette sighed, her expression softening as she touched her nephew’s hand. “I know this must be frustrating and embarrassing for you, but please try and understand. There are reporters here tonight. If they find out that’s Rebecca Blackburn over there, they’ll be all over me—and her. And I’d rather not have the past dredged up right now. I’m sure she wouldn’t, either. If not for my sake, then for hers, take her home.”
“Mother’s right,” Quentin, who’d been standing mutely beside her, added.
Jared shot his cousin an annoyed look. “You don’t believe that rationalization, do you? I doubt a single reporter here would care if Thomas Blackburn himself had come tonight. They just want free drinks and a chance to rub elbows with the Winstons and Sloans, although I don’t think I’ll really ever understand why.”
With a pained look on his handsome face, Quentin started to backtrack, but Annette put up a hand and he broke off. Jared sighed, not surprised. In Quentin’s place, he’d move as far from Boston as he could. Saigon was far, but Quentin was still working for his mother there—and he hadn’t said a word about not coming home. Annette had given him a year, and Jared was sure that’d be all Quentin took. Before her husband’s death, Annette’s parenting had been nonchalant, allowing her son a generous amount of freedom. All that was sharply curtailed when Benjamin Reed didn’t make it home from Vietnam. Jared didn’t think Annette loved her son any more than she had when Benjamin was alive. She was just more determined to control him, although, perversely, whenever she succeeded she was disappointed in him, more convinced he was a weakling. Jared had quit trying to figure the two of them out years ago, but he did feel sorry for his cousin. No matter what he did, Quentin would never please his mother.
Annette maintained her regal calm. “Be angry if you want,” she told her nephew. “Just get that girl out of my house.”
Which was what he did.
To her credit, Rebecca knew exactly what was going on. “I’m being booted, huh?”
She was trying to sound as if she didn’t give a damn, but Jared could see the flash of anger—and humiliation—in her eyes and red-stained cheeks. “I’m sorry,” he said tightly.
She polished off the last of her champagne. “Don’t be.”
But he was. He’d been a fool to think his aunt would have tolerated a Blackburn in her house, and if Rebecca was going to be polite and not tell him so, her grandfather had no such compunction. They took their frustrations down to West Cedar Street, but after Thomas Blackburn politely told Jared it was good to see him, he waved off their complaints without sympathy.
“What on earth did you expect?” he asked them.
Rebecca kicked off her thin-strapped shoes and paced on the worn carpet in her stocking feet. “Am I going to be damned forever for something I didn’t even do?”
It was a rhetorical question not meant to be answered, but Thomas said, “Probably,” and disappeared into the kitchen.
Jared stood awkwardly in the middle of the dimly lit parlor, a fire going to take the chill off the raw spring night. He didn’t know if he ought to leave or stick around. He was half-Winston and had to be an annoying physical reminder of the Blackburns’ loss of prestige. For centuries, their moral and intellectual rectitude had kept them within the circles of power, even to the point of having presidents consult them on any number of topics. They had been the conscience of Beacon Hill, a shining example of “doing the right thing.” They hadn’t needed money to maintain their particular kind of authority. Jared could remember when Thomas Blackburn’s name had evoked respect and his opinions had made people think, listen, change their minds.
An ambush in the rice paddies of the Mekong Delta had changed all that, and even if it was something the Blackburns could get used to, it wasn’t anything Annette Winston Reed was likely to let them—or anyone else—forget. She wasn’t a forgiving woman on the best of days, and her husband was dead because of Thomas Blackburn. If she hadn’t stolen their moral authority from them, she was content not to let them earn it back.
But Jared hoped Rebecca would take his friendship with her grandfather as a cue that he didn’t share his aunt’s relentless hatred, nor her vindictiveness. Because Jared didn’t want to leave the shabby West Cedar Street house.
He wanted, he admitted to himself, to get to know Rebecca again. When they were kids, she was the big sister to a passel of brothers and had sought Jared out just because he was five years older. She had never idolized him; that wasn’t R. J. Blackburn’s style. Sometimes she’d fight and kick and yell and act like a little sister asserting her independence, and then sometimes she’d find a common ground with him that was more mature than the bond she’d share with her younger brothers—something Jared could see now. At the time, more often than not, he’d viewed her as bossy as hell and a royal pest.
“I’m choking in this dress,” she said, unclasping the hook-and-eye at the nape of her neck. She fastened her gaze on Jared. “You can go on back to the party, you know. I’ll be fine here.”
“That’d be the height of rudeness, wouldn’t it? Going back to a party my date’s been kicked out of. What do you take me for, R.J.?”
“Those are your people—”
“I won’t damn my aunt for being what she is,” he said carefully, “but I won’t defend her, either. I don’t agree with what she just did to you. If I did, I’d never have taken you there tonight in the first place.”
Turning her back to him, Rebecca fingered a small brass Buddha atop the marble mantel of the cold fireplace. “I believe you.”
Jared said nothing. It hadn’t occurred to him that she wouldn’t believe him.
“Did Quentin want me out, as well?”
“I don’t think so—”
“I know, it’s hard to tell.” She faced him again, hinted a smile. “I hadn’t seen him since we left for Florida. I didn’t have a chance to say hello to him tonight, but that’s probably just as well.” Her almost-smile broadened into a real one that was filled with energy and irreverence. “He’s a handsome devil, isn’t he?”
Jared laughed. “Yeah, you want his phone number? Maybe he could take you out and give his mother heart failure.”
“That’d do it, wouldn’t it?” Rebecca laughed, as well.
Thomas returned with a big bowl of crisp tortilla chips and a batch of his homemade salsa, hot enough to make Jared’s and Rebecca’s eyes tear. The old man seemed unaffected. He told them he didn’t want to hear another word about the goings-on at the Winston house on Mt. Vernon and suggested they play “that game of yours, Rebecca.”
She grinned, totally recovered from her humiliation at the hands of Annette Winston Reed. “That’s because he always wins. My grandfather,” she told Jared, “has the most incredible junk mind.”
So, as it turned out, did Jared.
A handful of Thomas’s foreign students joined them, and they played until midnight, when he finally threw them out. Jared drove Rebecca back to campus in his rented car and dropped her off at her dormitory, offering to walk her to the door.
“I’ll be fine. It’s pretty late. Sofi, Alex, Lenny and half the floor’re probably waiting up for me.”
“Tell them,” Jared said, leaning toward her and kissing her lightly, “your virgin shoes worked.”