Legacy of Secrets (9 page)

She read the rest of the letter, which said,
“We are holding the deed to your Nantucket property in our vaults for safekeeping.”

She read it again.
Your Nantucket property.
She knew about the cottage but she had never even seen it. Her father always promised they would visit it one day, but somehow he had always been too busy to take her, and she had never thought about going there alone. Yet it was the only true “family” possession her father owned.

He had told her the story of how, when he was fourteen, the head of the orphanage where he had been brought up since the age of five had summoned him into his office. He was a testy, impatient man, ill-suited to his life’s work with children and they were all mortally afraid of him. Everything came from his hands: punishment and beatings, rewards and Christmas largess. He was God in their small, confined world and Bob had been shaking in his boots at having been summoned into “the presence.” Shannon could hear his exact words as though it were a record playing in her head, he had told her the story so often—and it was
all
he had told her about his childhood. “O’Keeffe,” he said, looking solemnly over the tops of the thick-lensed glasses that made his eyes look as bulgy as a toad’s, “you are now considered a ‘young man,’ and therefore it is my duty to tell you that you are also a man of property. You were not left destitute, as most of the unfortunate children here were. There is the sum of five hundred dollars and a small parcel of land with a cottage in Nantucket. The property is almost valueless, because that part of the world enjoys little prosperity. Nevertheless it is yours, and one day you may wish to sell it for what little you can recoup.

“Meanwhile, I suggest you apply the goodly sum of five hundred dollars toward your education. You are a clever lad, and if you could only control your fiery Irish temperament, you could go far.”

Of course her father had been excited, but it had been
many years before he could afford to go and see his “property.” When he finally moved to Boston, where he studied and worked as a laborer on construction sites, he took some of his hard-earned money and caught the ferry to Nantucket.

“Ah, Shannon, it’s a special, magical place,” he had told her, smiling reminiscently. “All sky and sea and the sound of gulls. Sometimes it’s gray with no colors at all, then suddenly it’s all blue and gold, the sea and the sand. You’ll surely love it there, daughter, just as your mother and I did. It has a touch of magic about it. Since she died I’ve not been able to bring myself to go back, but one day we shall go. One day, little darlin’.”

But of course they never had and now that day would never come. Or would it?

Shannon sat bolt upright in bed. The Nantucket cottage had been the place her mother and father visited together —“just as often as we could,” her father had said. And it had “a touch of magic.” Well, she could surely use a little magic right now! She had a place of her own, a roof over her head; somewhere to hide and be alone while she worked out what to do with the rest of her life. She would leave for Nantucket before the auction. Before they took away all her memories. She would look to the future, just the way her father would have wanted her to. A great feeling of relief swept over her, and she lay, exhausted, back against the pillows and was asleep within minutes.

When she awoke the next morning, there was a note from J.K. pushed under the door.
Let’s have lunch?
it said simply. Shannon felt better; she would tell J.K. her decision and see what he had to say.

He took her to a little country inn a half hour’s drive away. There were blue checked tablecloths and a bunch of white daisies in a yellow jug on their table. The place was crowded and there was a pleasant bustling air about it.

“It feels normal here,” Shannon said, surprised.

“And that’s just the way it should,” he said. “I know it’s going to be hard, Shannon, but that’s what you have to do.
Try and get things ‘back to normal.’ I asked you out to lunch because I was worried about you. You’ve had one blow after another: your father, your stepmother, Wil. Everybody seems to be deserting you, and I wanted you to know that I am not. Whatever you want to do, I’ll help you.”

She looked at him solemnly. He was wearing a blue polo shirt and a linen jacket and she knew he meant to look relaxed, but somehow it still seemed as if he were wearing a formal suit and tie. His brown eyes looked worriedly at her from behind his gold-rimmed glasses and she reached across the table and took his hand and squeezed it gratefully. “I never knew you were so
nice,
J.K.,” she said. “Now I know why my dad didn’t turn you down when you came for the job.”

“When I came for that job he would have been perfectly justified in turning me down. I was brash, uncouth, and rude.” J.K. laughed. “Thank God he didn’t, I was down to my last ten bucks and no prospects. I’d banked everything on getting a job with Bob Keeffe. He had been my idol all through my teenage years: a man with nothing who had made a fortune. Your father had the American dream and I wanted it, too, or at least a part of it. I figured where better to learn how to get it than from the man himself. So there you are. Now you know the truth about me.”

“I don’t really know anything about you, J.K.,” she said, surprised.

“Probably because you’ve never given me a second thought,” he retorted, and they both laughed.

“Well, now I am, so why don’t you tell me about yourself,” she said coaxingly. “Where you were born, your family, your girlfriends, everything. After all, you know everything there is to know about me.”

He thought for a minute and then said, “My father was a bastard.” She stared at him, shocked, and he said, “He was a drunken bully who left his family more often than he stayed with it. Thank God, I barely knew him. I guess I didn’t know my mother too well either. I was mostly
brought up by my grandmother. She was a lovely woman, a doctor’s daughter. I adored her. I would have done anything for her.

“But I’m sure you don’t want to hear my sorry tale,” he said with an apologetic smile, and she eagerly told him she did, so he thought for a minute and then said, “My grandmother married a charming rogue. She was a small-town girl who had never been more than forty miles from her Carolina home in her life. He was an older man, in his forties, and very good-looking in a different, rugged sort of way. She said he could charm the birds from the trees if he wanted something and he soon convinced her he had fallen in love with her. He admitted to being a hell-raiser with a fondness for the bottle. ‘But that’s all in the past,’ he told her. And the poor girl believed him.

“She was twenty-three and plain and she was in love for the first time in her life. Her father, the doctor, threw her out of his house when she said she would marry, with or without his consent. They ran off together and she told me it was then that all her troubles began. They trekked from town to town, from state to state, always short of money. Sometimes he would pick up a temporary job and she would hope maybe they could settle down, but it never lasted.

“My grandmother told me that when she gave birth to her son, her husband took a long, hard look at them as though he were seeing them for the first time. He figured out loud how much it was going to cost him to take care of both of them, then he took whatever money he had in his pocket, every last cent of it, and laid it on the table. He said he was going out west, alone. He had heard there was money to be made there in oil. He would be in touch.

“For five years she brought up her boy alone, working in the local drugstore and making just enough to get by, though she told me she never had a new dress or a pair of shoes in all that time.

“She never expected to see him again and she was amazed when he returned five years later. He had money
in his pocket and he swept them both off to the ranch he said he had bought in South Carolina. The ranch turned out to be a poor little farm and he didn’t even own it. He was a sharecropper, a tenant farmer who paid his rent in a share of the crops. He put her to work in the fields and even the child was sent out, in his little sunbonnet, to help pick the poor crops.”

J.K. sighed. “Of course, the inevitable happened: he left her again and this time he didn’t come back. She had no money and no choice but to stay on and run the farm with the help of Noah, a young black boy she had befriended and helped.

“ ‘You ain’t no better’n a slave yourself, ma’am,’ Noah told her, watching her working alongside him in the fields. And he was right.”

J.K. smiled grimly at Shannon. “They were a scandal, the white doctor’s daughter and the young black living together in the four-room farmhouse, even though he slept in the wooden lean-to. She told me they were ostracized by all the God-fearing, right-minded folks around and that she barely spoke to anyone for ten years, except her son and young Noah. Her son,
my father,
grew up a barefoot poor boy, skipping school just as often as he could. He was finished with formal education by the age of fifteen and by seventeen he was raisin’ hell in three counties.

“When he was eighteen, in about 1949, I guess, he was drafted into the army, and that boy hated it. He was already a heavy drinker and he ran away from the army just as he used to run away from school. After a few months he was discharged under a cloud. Grandma never did hear exactly why, but when he came home he refused to work on the farm. He roamed the country just like his father had, leaving her with only Noah for company. Every now and then he would return and hand her a wad of money, but after a couple of nights he would be off again, restless for company and drink. Arthritis was crippling her and she managed as best she could, but soon Noah was doing all the work.”

The waitress came with their food and J.K. said to Shannon, “Are you sure you want to hear all this? It’s hardly good lunch conversation.”

She nodded. “It’s good for you to tell someone. Besides, I feel now I’m getting to know you.”

He nodded. “Okay. When my father was around thirty, I guess, he met a woman called Alma Brennan. Gran told me that back then she was a flashy hip-swinging kind of woman; she wore low-cut dresses and she could match him drink for drink. They quarreled violently all the time and he would disappear and leave her alone for months on end, without any money. Alma hated being stuck out on a farm in the middle of nowhere, but she was pregnant and she had no choice. As soon as I was born she got herself a job in a store in the local town, intending to save up to get the hell out, but every time she got her wages she would hit the high spots—if you could call the local saloon a high spot—and blow it all.

“By now my father was a serious drunk, and then one day, just like my grandfather, he left and never came back. My mother spent most of her time at the saloon, so they finally gave her a job. The customers liked her, she was jolly after a few drinks, big and blowsy, and she could give as good as she got. She prided herself on her smart mouth, my grandma told me, and she took her pleasures where she could find them.”

J.K.’s eyes met Shannon’s and he said bitterly, “I grew up in a small southern town, the grandson of a woman who they said lived with a black, and the son of the local whore. Can you wonder I was a loner? What kid’s parents would let him be friends with a person like that?”

She shook her head and said compassionately, “Poor J.K. I didn’t realize it was that bad.”

“However bad you think it was, I can tell you it was worse,” he said bleakly. “The only saving grace was my grandmother. She was an educated woman. She brought me up. She taught me to read and write, she told me stories and gave me dreams. And she told me to stay away
from drink.” He tapped his glass of water with his forefinger, and said, “I have never taken a drink in my life, not even a glass of wine. I’m afraid if I do, I’ll end up like my grandfather and my father.”

He laughed, lightening up a little. “I guess all of my dreams didn’t come true. I never did become the football hero and win the scholarship to Notre Dame. I never did get that Mustang convertible, or date the pretty blond cheerleader. But I did get an education, of a sort. I worked hard and got a place at the local college. I kept pictures of your father pinned to my wall, the way he kept pictures of the van Gogh on his, as a symbol of what dreaming can get you. And as soon as I graduated, I headed straight for New York.” He shrugged and smiled disarmingly at her. “You know the rest.”

“And your grandmother?”

“She died a month before I graduated. My mother died four years before that. Cirrhosis of the liver. It was in the local newspaper, so everyone knew how they had scooped her up from the sidewalk one night, hemorrhaging from the mouth. Her liver was shot to pieces. I just gave the keys of the farm to my grandmother’s old friend, Noah, and said that as far as I was concerned it was his. I was never going back.”

He looked at Shannon and said simply, “And I never have.”

“Poor J.K.,” she said softly. “Poor lonely little boy. I get the feeling there are things you haven’t told me. All the things that mattered so much.”

“Maybe you’re right,” he said coolly. “But we were here to talk about you and now I’ve done all the talking.”

His tone was suddenly distant and she thought maybe he regretted his sudden confession, and she quickly told him about the cottage and that she would be leaving for Nantucket.

He said, “Are you sure you’ll be all right alone?”

“I’m not sure I’ll ever be all right again,” she replied bitterly. “J.K., I’m certain my father did not kill himself.
He would never have done it on the day of my party. He wouldn’t have hurt me that way. And he would never have left me unprovided for. Dad loved life, he had made his money once and he would have made it again. You know he wasn’t a grandiose man, a man ‘with an ego as big as a skyscraper,’ the way the media is making him out to be.”

He said, “Look, your father was in a lot of trouble. He was a proud man. Sometimes the fall from grace can just be too hard for a person like that to take. Besides, who knows what goes on in another person’s mind? You think you know a man and then they do something you would call ‘out of character.’ Except maybe it’s just they never showed you that other, darker, side of themselves before. It’s happened to great men throughout history, Shannon. I don’t want to upset you, but I don’t think you should be thinking about how and why. You should be thinking about
you,
about picking up your own pieces and getting on with life again. And you know if there’s anything I can do to help you, I will.”