CHAPTER NINE
Rebecca Blackburn received the news of her father’s death on a gray winter afternoon in early 1963. She was eight years old. It was Jared Sloan who came to her third-grade class at the private elementary school in Boston’s Back Bay to walk her and two of her younger brothers home. A car had already come for Quentin Reed, in the fifth grade.
“There’s a family emergency,” was all Jared would say.
Just thirteen himself, he took hold of Nate, seven, and five-year-old Taylor and let Rebecca trot along beside him. He had volunteered to collect them and, too distraught to think clearly, his mother, his Aunt Annette and Jennifer Blackburn had let him. Jared was familiar; he wouldn’t scare the Blackburns’ school-aged children.
Rebecca felt her face freezing in the stiff sea breeze. “Where’s Mother?”
“She had to stay with the little ones.”
There were three more brothers at home: Stephen, four, and Mark and Jacob, the two-year-old twins. Once, Rebecca had heard her paternal grandfather fussing to her father about having so many children. “People will think we’re running an orphanage here,” Grandfather had said. Her father, who, like Rebecca, never took Thomas’s grumblings seriously, had asked him since when did a Blackburn care what people thought? Thomas had strong opinions about everything, but Rebecca knew he loved her and her brothers. She remembered when he’d told them the best things came in sixes. When he was home, he liked to take her and her brothers to museums and old Boston cemeteries and let them throw rocks in the Charles River.
Not satisfied, Rebecca asked Jared, “Did something happen to Fred?” Fred was one of their cats. They had four. Grandfather complained about them, too; he said West Cedar Street wasn’t a barnyard.
Jared paled. “No, R.J., Fred’s fine.”
“Good.”
Her mother met them at the door of the Eliza Blackburn house on Beacon Hill. Away in Indochina so much, Thomas had insisted his son and daughter-in-law and grandchildren live there. Right away Rebecca knew something terrible had happened. Her mother’s face was very white and tear-streaked, and she jumped off the steps and gathered her and Nate and Taylor into her arms, choking back sobs. Rebecca tried to cling to Jared. She wished he’d take her down to Charles Street for hot cocoa or ice-skating on the Common, anywhere so long as she didn’t have to hear what her mother had to tell her.
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 think 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.