Twenty-Seven
Gisela’s funeral had depressed Thomas, and he welcomed his four-year-old granddaughter’s company back at the Winston mas. Rebecca showed him her collection of worms and committed him to taking her for a walk. He avoided Annette. He continued to have misgivings about their talk that morning. There was something more between her and Jean-Paul Gerard than an exciting, handsome jewel thief and one of his coincidental victims. That it all might be none of his business occurred to him only fleetingly, for he had known Annette since the day she was born, and Jean-Paul was Gisela’s son, a secret she had shared only with her old friend Thomas. He was distressed that he and Rebecca would be returning to Paris in the morning and this was how their visit to the Riviera was ending, with Gisela flinging herself off a cliff, Annette retreating into uncharacteristic silence and Jean-Paul on the run as a fugitive.
At least Quang Tai had agreed to return to Vietnam. A soft-spoken, well-educated man, Tai thought the Diem government was paranoid and wrongheaded, and he did not approve of the communists’ plans for forced collectivization of the Vietnamese peasantry or their puritanical conviction that only their way was right. Tai understood, however, that his people possessed a deep, abiding resentment of foreign domination; they would no more tolerate the Americans calling the shots for them than they had the French, the Japanese or the Chinese. Thomas didn’t need convincing, but there were those in the U.S. government who couldn’t see beyond the global communist threat to the legitimate nationalistic aspirations of the Vietnamese people. He hoped Tai, although just one person, could get the right people on all sides to listen to him.
Thomas suddenly was anxious to get back to Saigon himself. He would return to Boston with Rebecca and see his other grandchildren, and perhaps try to convince his daughter-in-law he was perfectly sincere when he’d told her she was at liberty to do as she pleased with the house on West Cedar Street, including put a swing-set up in the garden and Porky Pig curtains in the children’s bedrooms. Why on earth should he or anyone else care? And so what if they did?
“Grandfather, I want to go to Saigon to visit Tam,” Rebecca announced.
Thomas had hold of her grubby, sturdy hand as they negotiated a steep incline, to the spot under a lemon tree where the view of the Mediterranean was heart-stopping.
“I hope you can one day,” he told his granddaughter.
“Tam’s sad about going.”
“I understand. She’s lived in France most of her life, but Saigon ’s her home.”
“Maybe she can come visit me in Boston, Massachusetts, and we can ride our bikes.”
Thomas smiled at the way his irrepressible granddaughter always said “ Boston, Massachusetts ” as if she were the only one who knew where it was. Jenny’s doing. “Not everyone knows or gives a damn where Boston is, you know,” she always told Thomas.
“Tam was crying,” Rebecca said, chattering as they picked a spot from which they could sit and watch the sailboats. “She wouldn’t come worm-digging. She just wanted to stay up in Aunt Annette’s room and cry.”
Quite an offense to a nonsulker like Rebecca. She went on, “But she felt better after I showed her Aunt Annette’s pretty marbles.”
Thomas stared at the little girl. “And what were they?”
“Her pretty marbles,” Rebecca repeated impatiently. “I found them.”
“How big?”
She made a highly unreliable boulder-size circle with her thumb and forefinger. “That big. Some were bigger.”
“They were different colors?”
“Uh-huh.” Pleased with her grandfather’s interest, she wrinkled up her face and began reciting: “Blue, red, purple, white, yellow, green-ummm, black…umm, I can’t remember.”
“And what did you do with them?”
“Oh,” she said solemnly, “we put them back.” She jumped up suddenly, squealing and pointing. “Look, Grandfather, a big boat!”
Thomas nodded, distracted. His granddaughter had just described Gisela’s Jupiter Stones. Real or fake, that they were in Annette’s possession proved what he had begun to suspect in the past twenty-four hours: she and the dashing Jean-Paul Gerard had had an affair. Jean-Paul must have swiped the stones from his own mother to give to his lover. No wonder poor Gisela had had enough. Her son was a thief willing to steal his mother’s most cherished possessions so he could give them to a wealthy, self-indulgent woman like Annette Winston Reed.
For her part, upon discovering her young French lover was the notorious Le Chat, Annette had turned him in-without mentioning their relationship to the authorities. Thomas supposed he couldn’t blame her for that.
He did, however, blame her for not getting Gisela’s stones back to her. What did Annette intend to do with them now that Gisela had committed suicide and Jean-Paul was dead?
Thomas watched boats with Rebecca for nearly an hour before they made their way back to the mas.
The next morning, they left for Paris. Two days later they were back in Boston, and within the week, Thomas was on his way back to his quiet apartment in Saigon.
It was another two years before he saw Annette again.
And another three years before he fell into bed with her.
It happened because he was tired of being alone; because his young company was doing moderately well helping American businesses understand the South Vietnamese system enough to start making money, and poorly in helping them, or anyone else in Washington or Saigon, understand the seriousness of the mistakes they were making. His hopes and dreams for this haunting, troubled country to find its place in the world as a free and independent nation were fading with the increasing corruption and isolation of the Diem government, with the quiet arrival of thousands more American military advisors, war materials, helicopters, planes and promises too easily made. Even as he dashed off persuasive letters to the Kennedy administration, the rumors had begun to circulate that President Kennedy was going to shut up Thomas Blackburn by naming him his new ambassador to Saigon.
Meanwhile, strategic hamlets went up, President Diem continued to resist needed political and economic reforms and antagonized the people he was supposed to serve, and the pot, as Thomas liked to say, began to stink. Then on January 2, 1963, there was the debacle at Ap Bac, where a small group of Vietcong routed a far superior-on paper, at least-American-advised ARVN division. Not only was the government suspect and corrupt, but so was much of the South Vietnamese military. Thomas could see the whole thing falling apart, and through it all, the Vietcong went about their business under the cover of the steamy Vietnam night.
Into this depressing mess came, in mid-January, Annette Winston Reed to see for herself, she said with a broad smile, what her husband was doing with Winston & Reed, the company he’d founded on her money. Thomas had long since stopped expecting Annette and Benjamin to talk in terms of what was theirs, together. It wasn’t her first trip to Indochina. She’d visited in the fall for two weeks, but Thomas had been too busy to see her.
This time, he made a point of seeing her.
They had dinner together one night on the colonial-style terrace of the Continental Palace Hotel. Annette was impressed with the beauty of Saigon, especially its tree-lined streets and washed pastel provincial buildings that reminded her of her beloved southern France. Thomas encouraged her to see Hue, the old imperial city on the Song Huong-the Perfume River -that was the religious and intellectual seat of the country. And he wanted her to see the rice paddies of the Mekong Delta, the extraordinary beauty of the beaches of the South China Sea. He had come to love this picturesque, dangerous, divided country since his own first visit not long after losing Emily.