Loss of Innocence (6 page)

Nine

When dawn broke, the mist and fog had vanished. Numb, Whitney remained in the library, listening to fragments of news and speculation as she prayed for Bobby to live.

Her mother appeared. Glancing toward the screen with a pained expression, she asked her daughter gently, “Have you slept?”

“No.” Looking up, Whitney said, “I was up when Janine came in.”

“I haven’t seen her yet this morning. Did she have fun?”

“I guess so.” Whitney paused, then added, “Does it seem like she’s drinking more?”

“Why do you ask?”

“She was tipsy, I thought, even at dinner. I guess it worried me a little.”

Anne arched her eyebrows. “She was celebrating, as were we all. No point in worrying about a girl so spirited and so sought after.”

Her unwelcoming tone was a signal for Whitney to back off. But she could not shake the image of her sister being taken against a pickup truck, or bent over her own vomit, begging Whitney not
to tell their mother. “If Janine’s so irresistible to men,” she inquired bluntly, “why don’t they seem to stick around?”

Anne stood straighter. “If anything, Whitney, your sister suffers from an excess of choices. But it will take a man with considerable presence—someone like your father—not to be overshadowed by Janine. She’s much too vibrant for just anyone.”

Whitney wondered about the truth of this. While Janine and their mother spent a great deal of time on the telephone, an intimacy Anne treasured, it occurred to her that Janine might alter reality to fulfill her mother’s needs, or her own. “Even in adolescence,” Anne continued, “Janine had a verve that created more admirers than she could cope with. It’s only a matter of finding a man worthy of her. Which is why I’m so pleased for you.”

“Pleased?” Whitney could not help but ask. “Or surprised?”

Anne gave her youngest daughter a look that mingled reproof and concern. “When I praise your sister, Whitney, that doesn’t mean I prefer her. It’s simply that you have different qualities, as any siblings do. You should concentrate on your own life—your wedding, your marriage, the family you’ll soon be starting. Let your father and me worry about Janine.”

Whitney understood that the intent of this veiled rebuke was to keep her at bay. For the first time, she wondered if Anne were protecting her sister, or herself. But it was not the morning to pursue this, or say anything at all.

As if unnerved by Whitney’s silence, Anne turned toward the television. Listening to a surgeon describe Robert Kennedy’s wounds, she said, “It’s dreadful, isn’t it. The world is becoming such a frightening place. In times like these, family is all the more important.”

“I know, Mom. That’s why I asked about Janine.”

“Then just love her, Whitney. Your aunt, the college professor, and I could never manage that. She didn’t care about me, or anyone in the family. Now we barely speak. I don’t want that for my own two daughters.”

The unspoken subtext to this, Whitney knew, was that her aunt might be a lesbian. But Anne could never acknowledge this, leaving
Whitney to guess at who had rejected whom. Her mother’s defenses might be more artful than Anne herself knew.

“I do love Janine,” Whitney affirmed, silently asking if her mother truly did.

In the next hour, there were no definitive reports on Robert Kennedy. Whitney watched helplessly, her fears punctuated by disquiet about Janine. Then Clarice entered the room.

Surprised, Whitney said, “You’ve heard about Bobby Kennedy.”

Clarice nodded. “Why do they let people like that have guns? It’s as if we’ve become a shooting gallery.” She looked around, then asked quietly, “I guess Janine made it home.”

“Almost intact. I guess she’d been drinking a little.”

“You can skip the ‘a little.’ I wondered what became of her, and thought you might wonder about me.”

“I did,” Whitney assured her. “Maybe we could go for a walk. I didn’t sleep at all.”

Clarice seemed to grasp Whitney’s need to talk. “Fresh air beats sitting here, doesn’t it? Especially on a day like this.”

Stifling the childish thought that she was abandoning Robert Kennedy, Whitney changed into a light sweater and blue jeans and drove with Clarice to Lucy Vincent Beach.

A dazzling blue sky cast light on sparkling water, and there was a fresh greenness in the new grass, a harbinger of summer. To Whitney the morning was so brilliant that it mocked reality, reflecting the vast indifference of a God she could never quite believe in. Taking the catwalk through the grass, the two friends kicked off their shoes and began walking at the water’s edge. “So tell me about last night,” Whitney asked.

“A waste of time,” Clarice answered briskly. “You know the scene—a dark, smoky room jammed with islanders and college kids here for the summer. I couldn’t hear a thing, and sipping Budweiser while mouthing words at strangers is my idea of misery. But Janine was drinking whiskey and swaying along with the
music, sex in a low-cut dress. Pretty soon guys we’d never seen were paying for our drinks while Janine preened like a slumming princess.”

Whitney put on sunglasses, cutting the brightness that hurt her eyes. “Did she pair off with anyone?”

“When I was there she wasn’t playing favorites, except maybe the two guys on each side of her, each looking down her dress. The three of them drank a lot, and seemed to amuse each other in a way I couldn’t fathom. When I told her I was ready to leave, Janine said one of the guys would drive her home. That was okay with me—and with them, it seemed quite clear.”

“Were they good-looking?”

“They were islanders,” Clarice answered in a throwaway tone. “I suppose one of them had some appeal in a scruffy, sinewy way, though it seemed best not to probe his intellect. But he certainly admired Janine—if that’s what you call sniffing at her with the subtlety of a rottweiler.”

It was a pity, Whitney thought, that Clarice chose not to share her powers of observation with the larger world. “So did Janine seem all right to you? Emotionally, I mean.”

Clarice glanced at her curiously. “She was drunker than I’ve ever seen her, if that’s what you’re asking. Even looped she’s kind of a phenomenon, and at first impression she’s pretty electric. But I’d guess that she wears guys out.”

“That’s what Peter thinks.”

“Really,” Clarice said in a tone of muted surprise. “I guess it’s pretty obvious.”

“Not to my parents.”

“They don’t want to see it, Whitney.” Looking at her sideways, Clarice continued, “I don’t know what you’re contemplating, but whatever it is, your mom won’t hear of it. Questioning Janine is like attacking
her
.”

With this, Whitney grasped that—however flawed his perceptions of Janine—her father understood Clarice quite well. At the core she was a careful woman, who knew when to speak and what
to withhold, absorbing far more than she revealed. Though this was not a new thought, it seemed clearer now, illuminated by Charles’s praise of Clarice the night before.

“I’m sure you’re right,” Whitney responded, and chose to say nothing more.

For minutes, the two friends walked in silence beside the lulling surf, content with each other’s presence on such a terrible morning. At this hour the beach was almost empty—as if, for Whitney, the shooting of Robert Kennedy signaled the end of civilization. All she saw were three guys in faded shorts and T-shirts gazing out at the Vineyard Sound. They had brownish hair and beards in various stages of growth, and were passing around a joint with casual heedlessness. Looking vaguely up at Whitney and Clarice, the short one with glasses kept on talking.

“It’s a sick country,” he pronounced. But his voice was passionless, as though discussing a planet far away.

His squat friend nodded sagely. “They’ve taken over—the frat boys and beer drinkers and preppies with rich dads. Time to bail out, live in a world of our own invention. No point in caring about this shit.”

Angry at their self-absorption, Whitney stood in front of them. “Don’t you give a damn about Robert Kennedy?”

Unruffled, the boy said flatly, “Oh, he’s gone—that’s what those fascists do. I don’t want them to kill me, that’s all.”

The third boy laughed harshly. “That’s what Canada’s for. One guy I know told the witch doctors at the draft board he loved penises, and asked to see theirs. But he had the lisp down, and walked like a ballerina. I’m not that good an actor.”

“I thought you loved my penis,” the first guy trilled.

“Fuck you, Steve—and that’s a figure of speech, okay? Better Canada than you.”

Her mood rancid with disgust, Whitney told Clarice, “Let’s go back.”

Clarice turned the way they had come. Indifferent to being overheard, she said, “What losers. The world really
must
be ending.”

“Oh, no,” Whitney corrected. “They’re creating a world of their own.”

“So very tempting,” Clarice answered. “But maybe you should go find Peter. He’ll be rising any hour now, wanting to be with you. Especially when he learns what happened to Bobby.”

It was a measure of her gloom, Whitney realized, that she had not thought of her fiancé. “I should have woken him up this morning,” she confessed. “But when you appeared, I was just so glad to see you.”

Clarice gave her a faint but affectionate smile. “Me, too. After all, you’re the first person I ever slept with. Back when we were four.”

Ten

For Whitney, the hours and days that followed were a blur.

Returning to the house, she checked the television and learned that Robert Kennedy still lived. Headed to her bathroom to splash water on her face, she encountered Janine coming down the stairs.

Without makeup, her sister looked wan and tired. Giving Whitney a brief guarded look, she began chattering as though nothing had happened. Before Whitney could break in, the private phone line in Janine’s bedroom started ringing. Flustered, she ran to pick it up, closing the door behind her.

Whitney paused, considering whether to confront Janine. In moments, she burst out of her room, jangling with anxious energy. “Do you know where Mom is?”

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” Janine said with a smile that resembled a nervous tic. “They need me in Manhattan for a photo shoot, that’s all.”

Something in her manner evoked a lie told by a child. But Whitney had no basis for probing this, and lacked the heart to try.

“Good luck,” she began, but Janine was already hurrying down the stairs.

Following, Whitney found Peter at their door. Enveloping her in a wordless hug, he held her until, in her sadness and confusion, Whitney began to cry. “It’s okay,” he murmured. “Everything will be okay.”

For hours he watched the news with her, quiet and uncomplaining. Though not himself drawn to Bobby, he was appalled by the shooting and solicitous of the grief Whitney herself could not explain. At dinnertime he brought them trays of food, staying into the night until she encouraged him to get some sleep.

Whitney was alone when, in the early morning hours, Bobby’s press secretary reappeared before the cameras, his shoulders slumped in terrible weariness. He briefly bowed his head before speaking.

Whitney covered her face. Instinctively she recalled hearing about the death of President Kennedy, then that of Martin Luther King. She had a shamed, mordant thought—the next time someone murdered a leader she cared about, it was better to be with a crowd of friends. Then she began to cry.

In the morning Peter found her there, eyes bleary from a fitful sleep. When they returned to the guesthouse, Whitney tried to make love. But the act felt mechanical and detached, and she could find no solace in it.

She was just tired, she told him. But it was Peter who fell asleep.

Awakening to sunshine, Whitney tried to remember her own good fortune. She was surrounded by people she loved and who loved her, the touchstones of the life still awaiting. To Peter and her family, she realized, she must surely seem deranged. It was
not as though she had given Bobby this much thought when he was alive.

“I understand,” he reassured her. “His wife’s a widow now, and all those kids don’t have a father. I remember losing my dad, and wondering why. But no one had an answer.”

Ashamed, Whitney realized that she had not—at least consciously—thought of this at all. Instead, she had felt that Bobby’s death was something that had happened to her, which, in some indefinable way, would change the world in which they, and their own children, would live. Whatever the cause, she could not turn away from the rituals of death—images in black and white, the stoic grace that carried his surviving brother through the eulogy. Only at the end, quoting the lines Bobby had used to conclude so many speeches, did Edward Kennedy’s voice crack.

Transfixed, Whitney watched the funeral train from New York to Arlington Cemetery, the crowds along the right-of-way paying witness to hope lost. At length Charles ventured in a kind, paternal tone, “This is a terrible thing, I grant you. But for the last few days, you’ve been sleepwalking through life, and all but ignoring Peter. All of us search for some meaning in the senseless, some larger force at work. But here, there isn’t anything to point at.” He hesitated before continuing more quietly. “Except, perhaps, that the equally senseless murder of Jack Kennedy, and the emotions Bobby evoked, made killing him the holy grail for the angry or unstable. Were I as malevolent as some acquaintances I don’t particularly admire, I’d say that the hubris of Joseph Kennedy spawned an ongoing Greek tragedy that he’s still watching from his wheelchair. What I
do
believe is that there’s been enough—for this country and for his family.”

To Whitney, this remark seemed subtly wrong, as though her father were blaming the victim for evoking passions of which he disapproved. But she had no heart to respond.

On Sunday, Charles and Peter left for Manhattan, both with a kiss from Whitney. “Thanks for understanding,” she told her fiancé. “When you come back next weekend, I’ll be a normal girl.”

But as he climbed in the taxi with her father, Whitney suddenly felt abandoned—even by Clarice, who had called to say she was off to visit friends on the East Coast. In the glow of a candlelit dinner, Whitney allowed her mother to lead her through the menu for her wedding, oddly grateful for a quotidian distraction that so obviously pleased Anne. “It’s so nice to see you becoming yourself,” Anne hopefully remarked, and Whitney assured her that she was fine.

But she wasn’t, quite. And so the next morning Whitney drove to Dogfish Bar.

The spot was down a mile of dirt road in an isolated section of Gay Head. A footpath through scrubby brush and sea grass led to a mile of sand and half-buried rocks, stretching toward the variegated clay promontory where the Gay Head lighthouse stood, a distant spike against the light blue sky. As often, and as she wished, Whitney was alone.

On some mornings she would swim the bracing waters of the sound, made more tranquil by a sandbar. But today she brought her journal.

This practice had started with the professor who, having discerned a talent Whitney doubted she possessed, had urged her to record her thoughts in order to discover them. Once written, he said, they were there—to be retrieved, rewritten, and polished for whatever use she chose.

But he had also given her some tools. Under his tutelage, she discovered women who had become exemplary writers—Carson McCullers, Eudora Welty, Katherine Anne Porter, Mary McCarthy, and before them, Edith Wharton—as well as John O’Hara, James Gould Cozzens, and Louis Auchincloss, all of whom she admired for their ability to convey human behavior so subtly yet so well. The discipline of regular writing, her professor insisted, would develop
her own gifts of illumination. Though painfully aware of her deficit in wisdom and experience, she had started keeping a diary.

Sitting with it open in her lap, she gazed out at the sound and pondered the boundaries of her life. The world in which she had grown up was comfortable and happy, one that she had never questioned. The changing manners and mores she had encountered in college were, she understood, a small repudiation of that world, in which she had gingerly participated by dressing casually, sleeping with Peter, and, more substantively, tutoring in Roxbury. But even that did not put her at odds with Charles and Anne—while they worried for her safety, they could not quarrel with her desire to help a disadvantaged boy. Torn between the rebellious fervor of those classmates who protested Vietnam or segregation, and Charles’s greater knowledge and forbearance, she remained largely outside the ferment of her time in school.

This morning, however, she felt strangely transformed. No doubt this was foolish, even narcissistic. But she could not avoid sensing that the death of Robert Kennedy had caused some deeper change in her, though she did not know what it was. All that she could do was put words to whatever might emerge.

For a time she stared at the blank pages, pen in hand. At last, she began to write.

Pensive, Whitney closed her diary.