Legacy of Secrets (4 page)

E
VERY MAGAZINE AND
newspaper in the U.S. had covered the story of how Robert O’Keeffe had started out a poor boy, an orphan who had labored on Boston construction sites for years to pay for his studies at M.I.T. And how, with an engineering degree finally in his pocket, he had married Mella, an Irish girl from Limerick. They said she was slight and red-haired, a gentle beauty; the love of his life and as alone in the world as he was himself.

He had found a steady job as a construction engineer
and they had bought a little house in the Boston suburbs. A year later, when Shannon was born, he felt life could offer him nothing more. They were happy and content, a perfect little unit.

Then it all fell apart: Mella took sick with cancer that had gone undetected until it was too late. She died when Shannon was two years old, and Bob stayed home, drinking himself into a stupor every night, alone with his grief, while worried neighbors looked after the baby.

After a month, he later said, his grief turned to anger at the world for keeping on turning without his beloved Mella and then his anger turned to rage at himself for not being able to help her. He stopped drinking and he buried his frustration and rage in work. He left the baby in the care of a friendly neighbor while he worked all hours that God sent, filling his head with nothing else but blind ambition.

He said he was lucky: he was always the right man in the right place at the right time. Success came quickly, in a minor way, but he wasn’t content with just that. He borrowed huge sums from bankers who were charmed by his silver tongue and impressed with his dedication as well as his knowledge of his business and his foresight. And within four years he took his small company into the big time. They said he was a man who knew what he was doing and what he wanted and that he was determined to have it. The banks were quick to spot the qualities of a winner. They gave him what he asked and they never lived to regret it, because Big Bob O’Keeffe never let them down.

When Shannon was six he bought an apartment on New York’s Park Avenue and employed a fancy decorator to do it up. He installed her there with a housekeeper and a nanny and enrolled her at the Ursuline Convent School. They said that in return for his good fortune, Bob offered his services and a portion of his money to various charities and then he began to be seen around the smartest parties in town.

He met Barbara van Huyton—Buffy—at the very first party the very first week. She was tall and slender in a
black velvet dress, with perfectly cut shoulder-length blond hair, a chiseled nose, and confident hyacinth eyes. Her family had an important name but no money; she was his image of the perfect upper-class girl and he married her six months later.

Buffy’s friends said that when she married him she had traded her social advantages for his money. And they were right. He gave her a million-dollar marriage settlement with an additional one million dollars for every year they were married, to be paid into her account on their wedding anniversary. She was as cool as her husband was volatile, as clinical as he was passionate, and the gossips said that within a year of their marriage he had taken a lover. And they later said she was only the first of many.

S
HANNON SAID,
“I
KNEW
about my father’s latest mistress, Joanna Belmont, though I guess not many other people did, except Buffy. And that was only out of self-interest.” She added bitterly, “She just wanted to protect her investment. Obviously she couldn’t have considered Joanna much of a threat. She probably thought she was just some actress.

“At least she used to be an actress, because I know for a fact that Joanna hasn’t worked since she met my father. She’s beautiful, you know. Thirty-five years old, six foot two in her heels, blond, and I guess you could say she’s flamboyant. Her theater bios said she had the smile of Doris Day, the body of a young Ginger Rogers, and the legs of Shirley MacLaine, and I guess my dad found that an unbeatable combination. And maybe Joanna really cared about him, too, because with her flashy temperament it couldn’t have been easy for her to keep a secret.”

She shrugged wearily. “Anyhow, that was the way things stood the night of the party.”

T
HE NIGHT WAS HOT
and humid. A lavish dinner of caviar with scrambled eggs, Maine lobster, raspberry chocolate marquise, and vintage champagne had already been devoured by the four hundred guests under the lantern-lit trees, and on the long terrace with its distant view of the lake. Now they were dancing in the sumptuous swagged green-and-white silk marquee. Its billowing curtains were looped back to catch any breath of breeze, and elegantly gowned women strolled the lawns, fanning themselves with the long-handled Chinese paper fans Buffy had provided in anticipation of the heat. She had also provided umbrellas and tented walkways in the event of rain: Buffy was a woman who left nothing to chance, and Shannon thought her stepmother would have made a good corporate attorney. Buffy hadn’t approved of the cabaret that was about to start, though. Her father had insisted on it against all her protests. “It’s so Irish,” she had complained.

“Well, for God’s sakes, I am Irish,” he’d bellowed. “And so is Shannon, despite all your efforts to tame her.” And he had gone ahead and booked a traditional Irish band and a troupe of Irish dancers and singers to teach his guests to jig.

Pushing his way through the happy crowd of dancers, Bob Keeffe grabbed his daughter’s hand and led her onto the stage. Silencing the band with a wave of his hand, his big voice boomed across the lawns without the aid of the
microphone. “Ladies and gentlemen, my friends,” he called, and the young people gazed obediently up at him and the strollers outside the marquee turned to listen.

“As you know, this party is a celebration of Shannon’s birthday,” he said. “But
these people
are a celebration of her Irish red hair and her smiling Irish eyes.” Amid laughter he took the mike and announced, “Ladies and gentlemen, the fiddles and flutes and the squeeze-box will play for you, and these lovely young people”—he waved to the dancers standing behind him—“will show you how to
really
dance.”

The music started up, and Bob put his arm around Shannon and whirled her away. Within minutes the floor was bouncing and the guests outside on the lawns drifted back to the marquee, drawn by the magnet of the different music.

Later, as she danced with her fiancé, Shannon saw her father make his way alone to the edge of the marquee. Leaning against the struts, one hand in the pocket of his immaculately cut white dinner jacket, he watched the dancers, and she thought how strangely lonely he looked for a man with so many friends.

Buffy was watching him too. She gave him that cool “Buffy” look and Shannon knew just what she was thinking. She could read her stepmother like a book. There always were only two things on her mind. Money and position.

Buffy had always hated being poor. At twenty she had pictured herself growing older, struggling to maintain her social position and beauty on a pittance, just the way she had throughout her girlhood, and she had decided to marry money. She knew what she needed was an “entrepreneur,” a New Age man who made money as though he had just invented it. She had found him in Bob O’Keeffe.

She had been twenty-six and Bob was in his forties. The wedding was a lavish one, with all her family and her many friends as guests, and his daughter, eight-year-old Shannon, as flower girl. The O was discreetly shaved from
O’Keeffe and she became Buffy Keeffe and Shannon became her stepdaughter. She was the perfect hostess; she knew everybody who counted on first-name terms and she was beautiful. And yet she knew that within a year of their marriage her husband had taken a lover and that there had been others since. Yet Buffy and Big Bob Keeffe remained a social legend, the smartest couple in New York and Palm Beach.

Shannon stepped back from Wil Davenport’s arms. She said, laughing, “Give me a break, Wil. I’m all out of breath. I need water and fresh air.”

“I’ll get you both,” he said gallantly, escorting her out onto the lawn and going in search of a glass of water.

Shannon smiled as she watched him go. She had known him exactly three months and she couldn’t wait to spend the rest of her life with him. He was tall and dark and as handsome as any young man had the right to be. He was romantic—he sent flowers
all
the time. He wooed her with words and small presents. He wasn’t very rich, he’d told her, impressed by her father’s wealth, but she knew that didn’t matter, her father had not started out rich either.

She didn’t remember her own mother but she did remember when her father had married Buffy, and herself as a bridesmaid in lemon silk taffeta so stiff it crackled when she walked down the aisle. She had stood still as a statue, afraid to move in case her noisy skirts drowned out the holy words. And after that Buffy had simply taken over their lives.

By the time she was eleven years old Shannon was too tall for her age, skinny as a jackrabbit with a mop of fiery red hair. She had freckles she despised and teeth that protruded so much she just knew they’d need years of braces. And her knobbly knees stuck out of the hateful short, pretty frocks Buffy liked to dress her up in, which made her look exactly like Raggedy Ann. She had huge dark-lashed sweatshirt-gray eyes and an offhand manner that was a cover for her insecurities. Her face was wide-boned and symmetrical and her nose slightly dented from the
time she’d fallen off her pony at the age of eight, a defect her stepmother insisted must be corrected later.

Buffy saw that she attended the right schools and had the proper friends, and that she went to parties with children “of her own sort,” but the truth was the two had little in common except her father.

Still, her childhood had been happy enough, because she was the apple of her father’s eye. But even though Bob Keeffe adored her, he was not an attentive father; he was far too busy making money for that. Yet he always made sure to show up for the main events, and he was proud of his only daughter.

“You’ve got it all, baby,” he would say admiringly. “You can be anything you want, just like your dad. But remember this, little darlin’, you’ve got to go after what you want and you’ve got to want it real hard. That’s the difference between us Irish and these old-line rich folk. They came over on the
Mayflower
and we came over on the coffin ships. And just look at us now.” And he had roared with laughter at the idea of exactly where he was now, so high and mighty and richer than the men next to him, with a wife as snobbish as theirs and a daughter on whom he could lavish his love and his money.

Yet, oddly, whenever she asked, “But who are our Irish ancestors, Daddy? Why don’t we have any aunts and uncles?” he always closed up tight as a clam and told her not to be bothering her head about that, and that maybe he’d tell her when she was older. And then he would hurry her off to tea at some smart hotel.

Shannon grew up sheltered from the “real world” by their money and smart private schools. Her summers were spent in the company of boring grown-ups on Mediterranean yachts and her winter vacations were spent being bored with more grown-ups at villas in Barbados. The best time of the year was summer camp with the other kids, where for a few weeks they all ran wild and talked about boys.

As the years passed, her teeth were straightened, her
knees unknobbled themselves, her limbs grew long and sleek and her body supple, but she kept her pony-battered nose, ignoring Buffy’s instructions to have it fixed. She grew curves in the right places and was properly slender where it counted. But her hair was still a flaming red and her freckles were still the bane of her life, and to her embarrassment, her eyes were truly the windows on her soul, gray as a deep lake and reflecting every passing emotion. She knew it was impossible for her to keep her feelings to herself; they were right up there in her eyes for everyone to see.

She had been fourteen when she first saw her father with his mistress. She had sneaked out of her Boston school with two other girls and they had gone shopping and for tea at the Ritz-Carlton. He was with a pretty, youngish woman. She had dark hair and pale skin and he was holding her hand under the table. Shannon had felt the blush sting her cheeks with heat. They were unaware of her, wrapped up in each other. As she watched, her father had run his finger gently across the curve of the girl’s cheek. He touched her full lips and she kissed his hand, clutching it for a brief moment. Shannon had turned and fled, followed by her friends. “It’s okay,” they told her comfortingly, “all men do that!”

Her father later realized something was wrong when she couldn’t look him in the eye, and finally she told him what she had seen. He paced angrily back and forth on the Aubusson rug in the library of the Fifth Avenue penthouse.

He looked pleadingly at her. “I was going to say you are too young to understand these things. But obviously you are not. You understood what you saw.” He shrugged. “I won’t ask your forgiveness, because you are my daughter, not my wife. And I can’t tell you it’s all right, because it’s not. All I can do is ask you to try to forget it, and hope that someday, when you are older and know better, you will forgive me.
And remember this, daughter. Never trust a man.”