‘The kids have got themselves into a fix,’ the former legendary corporate litigator who had retired to oversee his old partnership in Quincy before the October War, had explained glumly. ‘Entirely innocently,’ he had added hastily. Claude and her husband had been on friendly terms for many years, for they were hardly competitors and Claude Betancourt was the sort of man who sometimes enjoyed the company of a man who was neither afraid of him or in hock to him. And besides, Walter was the most discreet of men, a thing a man like Claude Betancourt valued above all else. ‘Somebody has set a hare running with the Washington press, probably to keep the jackals at the Post from scenting a real scandal somewhere else in DC. Anyway, might I prevail upon your good offices for a small favour?’
Joanne had been a peripatetic member of Gretchen’s stepmother’s ‘occasional’ circle in the late fifties; in those days Gretchen had always seemed to be an uneasily spoiled brat desperately trying to be less ‘precious’ than she had any right to be, which was brave considering whose daughter she was and all the inflated hopes her family had, presumably, invested in her from her earliest days.
‘Gretchen will be very welcome in our house, Claude,’ she had assured the old man, ‘for as long as she needs to keep out of the limelight.’
Gretchen had arrived just after dark on Saturday night.
Meanwhile poor Dan remained besieged in his hotel in Washington, against all expectations somewhat relishing his role in the drama. He had sounded positively ‘chirpy’ on the phone that morning. That was just like Dan. Walter junior might have been the one to follow his father into the Navy but Dan was the son who most took after Walter senior in temperament and reminded Joanne most of her husband. Whereas, Sam was a throwback…
Joanne shuddered inwardly remembering how they had first learned Sam had been somewhere in the North-West on the night of the October War. Then there had been those horrible months before the news came through — a terse cable from California — that Sam was alive and well. A few days later in a clicking, whooping and hissing long distance telephone call in early April there had been mention of ‘Judy’. In a later call — long distance calls were still problematic because of something called ‘EMP damage’ to the telephone network on the night of the war — Joanne had discovered that Sam and Judy had escaped from Bellingham together and were still ‘a couple’. She had resisted the urge to interrogate her youngest son about Judy or about anything in particular, because Sam was only ever going to tell her what he wanted to tell her anyway.
Then eventually the letter had arrived. The terse words had clarified everything and completely allayed all his parents’ fears about the fate of their prodigal third son. Judy, it seemed, was a fixture and well-advanced towards producing Joanne’s first grandchild.
She and Walter had been foolish to worry about Sam!
But as parents are wont, they worried constantly about all their children.
Walter junior said his submarine had been in port the night of the October War but Joanne had taken this information with a large pinch of salt. His father had long ago confided to her that trying to get a submariner to tell one what he got up to was a waste of time. Notwithstanding, if Walt junior claimed the USS Scorpion was in dock the night of the war who was she to say nay. She was content and grateful that her eldest son dutifully stayed in contact and religiously spent a couple of days back in Cambridge between cruises.
“Who was it at the door?” Gretchen asked, having not dared to sneak a look through the curtains at the most recent callers to the house.
“An uncouth young man and a rather down at heel photographer from the Boston Globe. They wanted to know if I had any comment on my ‘son’s notoriety in Washington DC?’ “I said ‘no’. In the way of these things I knew that wouldn’t get rid of them so I explained that I was extremely proud of all my children. They also wanted to know if I knew where you were, my dear. I looked very blank and informed them that parents are the last people to know where their children are!”
Gretchen smiled involuntarily.
“The worst thing is the feeling that everybody is watching one all the time,” she confessed.
Even though Joanne did not know the younger woman very well she had decided that Gretchen was going to have to get used to being in the public eye. She recognised the ambitious, driven type from afar. Hopefully, sooner or later she would open her eyes to what was staring her in the face and admit that Dan was exactly the sort of man she needed by her side; a man happy to bask in her reflected glory and who always be there to catch her when she fell; and who would quietly, uncomplainingly fight her corner against all comers. As a mother Joanne hoped Gretchen would open her eyes sooner rather than later because Dan might not wait forever. Of her three sons, Dan was the marrying kind and most women with any sense saw it instantly. Gretchen Betancourt, it seemed, was self-evidently not most women.
Both women heard the car draw up outside the house, and the doors thumping shut. Both women’s spirits took a disappointed dip as they waited for the door bell to ring.
“Stay!” Joanne Brenckmann ordered paternally to her young guest. “It seems I will need to be more assertive with our callers this time.”
Inside the lobby behind the front door she girded her loins, set her face and prepared to ‘repel boarders’. With a husband who had commanded a destroyer in the Korean War and a son who was a hot shot submariner, nautical terminology had been invaluable to her down the years.
She opened the door.
And dissolved into gushing matriarchal delight.
The boys — well, Walt junior and Dan — were horribly embarrassed when she hugged them in public. Sam was made differently, an altogether more tactile man. She would hug him and he used to hug her back, literally lifting her off her feet for a moment.
Walter junior grinned lopsidedly at his mother.
The spic and span, somewhat weary young man in the uniform of a Lieutenant in the United States Navy submitted to his mother’s embrace with good grace, even briefly returning it.
“Junior!” Joanne laughed with relief. “I, we, weren’t expecting you!”
“I thought I’d be tied up on the boat for another week or so,” her eldest son explained in that unfussy, polite way of his. Walter junior could never have followed his father into the law; he was incapable of dissembling.
The boat, the proud mother assumed, was still the USS Scorpion, a deadly nuclear powered hunter killer submarine packed with Buck Rogers’s type ultra modern and secret devices. Junior — even though he was their first born, she and his father had always called him ‘Junior’ — talked very little about his Navy career, his duties, where he had been, anything much at all. His father said ‘that’s the Submarine Service for you’, whereas Joanne hankered to know more. Frustratingly, her son was discretion personified.
“When do you have to report back to the Scorpion?” She asked.
“Not for a while, Ma.” The son had resolved to pick his moment to vouchsafe the news that he had been posted to Groton and this was not it.
Joanne looked up and down the autumnal street.
A big canvas kit bag and a metal trunk lay on the ground behind her eldest son.
Parts of Cambridge were deserted these days, although not so much this close to the MIT campus. Few houses this far from the Quincy air burst had suffered major structural damage, just windows blown in, tiles lifted off roofs, and trees and fences blown down. There had been no power or water for several days after the war, a rash of break-ins, car thefts; and gangs of kids had roamed the streets while the Boston PD and the other emergency services were overwhelmed. The arrival of National Guard troopers and squads of Navy Military Policemen on street corners and patrolling the battered, otherwise intact suburbs had driven off the gangs of threatening young men on motorcycles, and put an abrupt end to the crime spree. There were stories about looters having been shot but Joanne had never met anybody who had actually witnessed that happen.