Loss of Innocence (8 page)

Three

“You’re sailing with whom?” Whitney’s mother asked her.

“A guy named Benjamin Blaine. I met him at the beach, and it turns out he’s caretaking the place next door.”

“But what do you know about him?”

Stirring her coffee, Whitney tried to preempt further inquiry. “That he goes to Yale, and campaigned for Bobby Kennedy. I also assume he can sail a boat.”

Her mother gave her a brief sharp look. “Have you told Peter?”

“This isn’t a date,” Whitney answered briskly. “Or the Dark Ages. I’m sure it’s fine with Peter if I go sailing.”

“Still, I wonder that you have time. The wedding gifts are piling up, and so are the thank-you notes. Best to write them now, while you can, rather than dash off hasty scribbles that sound like a form letter. Once you’re married, you’ll be busier than you know.”

“It’s three months yet, Mom. I’ll catch up.”

“We should also consider a wedding tent,” her mother persisted, “in case of rain. A light blue canvass might not look quite so sodden.”

“You really do think of everything,” Whitney responded, glancing at her watch. “I’d better run. I’m supposed to be in Edgartown at nine.”

Whitney felt Anne’s dubious gaze follow her out the door.

Clasping her hand, Ben helped pull Whitney from the dinghy onto the deck of the sailboat, trim and perfectly maintained. “It’s beautiful,” Whitney said.

“It’s a Cal 48, forty feet long, and built for speed. Usually, the Shipleys race it in the July regatta—I crewed for them in high school. But they’re gone this summer, and I’ve got no heart for racing.”

As if to underscore the last remark, Ben grew silent, focused on rigging the sails. In minutes they were heading across the water toward Tarpaulin Cove with Ben at the helm. The day was bright and clear, and a headwind stirred his curly hair; absorbed in sailing, he barely seemed aware of Whitney sitting near the stern. While she did not mind the quiet, it felt as though he was playing the role of her indifferent crew. Then he finally spoke. “I wonder how many more times I’ll get to do this.”

“Because of the draft?”

Ben kept scanning the water. “Because of the
war
,” he said harshly. “What a pointless death
that
would be.”

Uneasy, Whitney thought of Peter’s safe haven in the National Guard. “You don’t believe we’re the firewall against Communism?”

His derisive smile came and went. “If you were some Vietnamese peasant, would you want to be ruled by a bunch of crooks and toadies? To win this war, we’d have to pave the entire country, then stay there for fifty years. And if we lose, what does that mean to us? That the Vietnamese are going to paddle thousand of miles across the Pacific to occupy San Francisco?”

Whitney had wondered, too. She chose to say nothing more.

The day grew muggy. Running before the wind, Ben headed toward Tarpaulin Cove, the shelter on an island little more than a sand spit. Hand on the tiller, he seemed more relaxed, his brain and sinews attuned to each shift in the breeze. It was not until they
eased into the cove that Ben spoke to her again. “I brought an igloo filled with sandwiches and drinks. Think the two of us can swim it to the beach?”

“Sure.”

Stripping down to her swimsuit, Whitney climbed down the rope ladder and began dogpaddling in the cool, invigorating water. Ben peeled off his T-shirt and dove in with the cooler, his sinewy torso glistening in the sun and water. Together, they floated it toward the shore, each paddling with one arm. At length, somewhat winded, they sat on the beach as the surf lapped at their feet. The Vineyard was barely visible; they had come a fair distance, Whitney realized, and yet the trip seemed to have swallowed time. This must be what sailing did for him.

For a time Whitney contented herself, as he did, with eating sandwiches and sipping a cool beer. Curious, she asked, “Is the war why you worked for Bobby?”

“There were several reasons, some balled up in the war. The Americans dying in Vietnam are mostly black or poor. And the Vietnamese are funny little brown people, easier to kill without thinking about them much. Do you really think we’d be napalming the French?”

“I couldn’t say,” Whitney responded mildly. “We did a pretty good job of firebombing Dresden.”

He gave her a brief keen look. “A fair point,” he said. “Except that I get letters from a high school friend who had to leave college and got stuck in Vietnam. Johnny and his buddies are scared out of their minds, some screwed up on drugs, and ended up doing some bad stuff no one talks about. Hard to blame them. But what’s left is a body count of ‘enemies’ on the evening news.”

Whitney recalled wondering how our troops could kill so many and make so little progress. “You really think you’ll have to go?”

“You mean like there’s a choice? Or are you talking about Canada?”

Once more, she felt discomfort at Peter’s privileged status. “Canada, I guess.”

“I’m an American,” Ben answered with the edge of scorn. “I worked for Bobby because he cared about a lot of things—like race
and poverty. That was worth the risk of dropping out. Canada is for the kids who hope McCarthy can save their lily-white asses.”

Silent, Whitney watched the seagull skittering on the sand nearby, hoping for a bite of discarded sandwich. On reflection, Ben’s caustic words echoed with the half-serious joke of her college friends: “If they kill all the guys we know, who’ll be left to marry?” Some went to rallies; others to candlelight vigils. But their chief concerns were personal. Perhaps Charles’s advice to Richard Nixon had been right. “My dad thinks that if the draft went away, the protests would, too.”

Ben glanced at her with sharpened interest. “Why not? Then our ruling class can fight their wars with other people’s kids. Not that I don’t grasp the virtues of survival—you’re a long time dead, and as near as I can tell there’s no future in it. I just decided that avoiding death is not the point of living.”

Whitney had no response to this. Sitting back, Ben rested on flattened palms as he squinted at the water. Covertly, Whitney studied his clean jawline and strong nose, the profile of a warrior on a coin. Unlike Peter, there seemed to be little gentleness in him. “So,” Ben said abruptly, “is your fiancé going to work? Or is he sweating out the war?”

Reluctant, Whitney answered, “He’s found a job on Wall Street.”

“Impressive. Which firm?”

“Padgett Dane.”

“As in ‘Whitney Dane’?” Ben queried with a smile. “Wonder how he survived the application process. Still, isn’t he worried about the draft?”

Whitney wondered how to stop this conversation. At length, she said, “He’s going into the National Guard.”

Ben laughed out loud. “Who arranged that, I wonder?”

“Wonder all you like,” Whitney snapped. “Just tell me when it’s over.”

“It’s over,” he said amiably. “I just don’t think your fiancé will be writing a supplement to
Profiles in Courage
.”

Angry, Whitney stared at him. “On Dogfish Bar I could simply walk away. But on this boat you’ve got a captive audience. So I hope you’re enjoying this conversation—if that’s what this is. I’m not.”

Ben raised his hands in mock surrender. “I apologize for offending you,” he said in a tone so penitent it was nothing of the kind. “Far be it from me to disparage the man of your dreams.”

“You really are obnoxious,” she retorted coldly. “I’m sorry about your life but more than happy with mine.”

“Did I say you weren’t?” he said, then skipped a beat. “What kind of life, by the way? Will you be working?”

“Thanks for your interest,” Whitney said, and then decided to annoy him further. “Perhaps, as my mother says, I can ‘use my education in the home.’”

“On who? Your kids? Isn’t that what grade school is for?”

Whitney had often asked herself the same question. “It means I can read a recipe without moving my lips. What else could a woman want?”

“Beats me,” Ben said, and then regarded her with what seemed to be genuine curiosity. “What did you study in college?”

“I majored in English,” Whitney said tersely, then decided to give a better account of herself. “I also tutored, and tried to write a little.”

“Is that what the journal’s about—writing something?”

Whitney wondered how to answer, or whether to answer at all. “Maybe,” she allowed. “I took a lot of psychology courses, so perhaps I just like writing about why people are the way they are. Perhaps it’s self-flattering, but I like to think that I’m not overly messed up.”

“Too bad, then. Some think that’s a prerequisite to a literary career—after all, Fitzgerald drank himself into oblivion, and Hemingway and Virginia Woolf killed themselves. So with all your obvious disadvantages, how did you come to writing?”

Whitney found that she enjoyed remembering. “I took a creative writing class, and my professor encouraged me to keep on. I’d always thought of writers as a wholly different species, but the diary has sort of kept the idea alive. Still, that’s different from knowing how to become a writer.”

“No one knows,” Ben insisted. “The only way to do it is to write. But if you need someone to share the madness, go back to school in creative writing.”

Surprised, Whitney said, “Sounds like you’ve really thought about it.”

For a moment, Ben’s expression became more open, hinting at both ambition and embarrassment. “True confessions, then. Journalism is a temporary cover. My real ambition is to write the Great American Novel, which probably makes me crazier than F. Scott, Ernest, and Virginia combined. That’s part of why I bothered you on the beach that morning. I saw your diary, and thought that maybe—in your words—you were a member of my species.”

“I don’t have a plan,” Whitney demurred. “It sounds like you do.”

Ben gazed out at the water. “Yup. The first part’s J-school, assuming I can scare up another scholarship.”

“I guess you did well at Yale.”

“Well enough. But I deviated from the plan by dropping out, so now I’m a player in life’s lottery. Big ambitions alone won’t buy you a slot in the reserves.”

Despite this jibe, Whitney sympathized with his plight. “Maybe you won’t end up in Vietnam,” she ventured.

With curled fingers, Ben wiped the perspiration from his dark eyelashes, staring ever more intently at the water. “Oh,” he answered softly, “I think I will.”

“But why?”

“Karma. I’m more afraid of being afraid than of what I’d have to face there.”

For whatever reason, Whitney imagined him remembering Robert Kennedy. Pondering his fatalism in the face of the unknown, Whitney wondered what would happen to him without anyone to intervene.

Ben still scrutinized the skyline. Following his gaze, she saw a distant line of gray above the water. “We’d better get going,” he told her. “I don’t like the looks of that.”

Four

As they sailed toward the Vineyard, Ben kept scanning the horizon. At length, Whitney asked, “What was he like? Bobby, I mean.”

He let out some sail, catching the wind, seemingly intent on his task. Then he spoke without looking at her. “From the first time I met him, he surprised me. Before I knew it, he’d changed my life.”

To Whitney, the phrase had a valedictory sound. “Was that when you left school?”

In the silence that followed, Whitney felt that she had probed too deeply into a wound still far too fresh. Then, slowly at first, Ben described Bobby Kennedy.

For weeks, he spent long stretches passing out leaflets or going door-to-door, still keeping a toe in college. The last days of this were in Indiana, a primary bitterly contested by Eugene McCarthy and his young volunteers. Waiting for his flight back East, Ben found himself in an argument with a clutch of McCarthy kids. Kennedy was an opportunist, they complained, jumping into the race only after
McCarthy had humbled Johnson in New Hampshire. Ben responded that McCarthy was lazy, arrogant, and indifferent to minorities and the poor. Then Ben looked up, astonished to see Robert Kennedy standing between two aides, watching their exchange.

He was slighter than Ben expected, with crow’s-feet of weariness that belied his youthful thatch of hair. Gazing at the McCarthy kids sitting nearest to Ben, a dark-haired boy and a pretty blond girl, Kennedy told them, “I just want to say that I admire you. You’re working hard for what you believe.”

The blond girl gave her head a shake. “You’ve got such cruddy canvassers, and you’re still ahead.”

In fascinated silence, Ben watched Robert Kennedy step from his imagining into life. “Well,” Kennedy said mildly, “you can’t blame all that on me . . .”

“I don’t know what’s happening,” the boy interrupted. “I canvassed black neighborhoods, and no one listens.”

“That’s not your fault,” Kennedy responded. “Why isn’t Senator McCarthy more persuasive there?”

“You’re a Kennedy,” the girl protested. “You have the name.”

Though this reference to his lineage seemed to make Kennedy even wearier, he answered without rancor. “That’s a tremendous advantage, it’s true. But why can’t your man go into a ghetto? Why don’t you see him in the poor neighborhoods? Can you tell the people there anything he’s done to help them?”

The students fell silent. Finally, the boy said stubbornly, “We’re sticking with him, Senator.”

“You’re committed,” Kennedy replied with rueful admiration, “and I think that’s terrific.” He inclined his head toward Ben. “At least I’ve got one friend here.”

When Kennedy faced him, Ben was struck by his eyes, gentle but intense. “You look as tired as I am. Let me buy you dinner before my plane arrives.”

Stunned, Ben went with Kennedy and his aides to find a restaurant. “What’s your name?” the senator asked.

“Ben Blaine.”

“Wasn’t very welcoming back there, was it? Sort of like being Custer at the Battle of the Little Bighorn.”

“I thought you sympathized with the Indians, sir.”

Kennedy waved a hand. “Oh, I do.” He stopped abruptly, facing Ben. “At any rate, you argued well. What are you doing for the next few weeks?”

“Whatever I can,” Ben promised. “I want to help change the country, and you’re the only one who still can.”

Ben felt Kennedy go somewhere else, his gaze remote and unspeakably sad, as though he had forgotten the three men with him. Just as Ben was feeling awkward, Kennedy suddenly asked, “Think you’d like to travel with me? If you’re not too busy, that is.”

As he spoke, Ben’s face had changed entirely. To Whitney he seemed so deeply drawn back into memory that she knew how it must feel to be twenty-two, and have a mythic figure invite you on a twisting, chaotic, and wholly uncertain ride into the unknown. Even Ben’s voice was unfamiliar, melancholy commingled with pride. “After that,” he told her. “I became what they call his ‘bodyman’—the guy who travels with him looking after things. I did anything he needed—make phone calls, track suitcases, organize his papers—from the time he got up until he went to sleep.

“We were always rushing somewhere, surrounded by people—staffers, reporters, local politicians. But every now and then he’d ask me what I thought. One day when I brought him back a sandwich, he said, ‘My brain trust tells me to cut down on campuses and ghettos—that news clips of blacks and long-haired kids will distress the middle class. What’s your wisdom on the subject?’

“Somehow I knew he
needed
to see these people. ‘You have to keep doing it,’ I answered. ‘That’s who you are.’

“He was quiet for a moment, and then he shrugged. ‘That’s that, I guess. I’ll let them know of your decision. But if I lose, I’ll remember whose fault it was.’” Ben paused a moment, smiling to himself as though Whitney were not there. “Afterward, I realized I’d said what
he expected me to say. Not that he ever acknowledged it. Especially after the next disaster.”

You could see right away they weren’t Bobby’s people, Ben told Whitney—a crew-cut, unsmiling group of medical students, silent throughout his speech. When Kennedy invited questions, they were uniformly hostile. Finally, a cocky would-be doctor demanded, “So who’s paying for all these programs for the poor?”

Kennedy tensed, and Ben saw that he had heard enough. “You are,” he snapped, and his speech quickened with anger. “Let me say something about the tone of these questions. I look around this room and I don’t see many black faces. I don’t see many people coming from slums, or off Indian reservations. You’re the privileged ones here. It’s easy for you to sit back and say that all our problems are the fault of the federal government. But it’s our society, not just our government, that spends twice as much money on pets as on fighting poverty. You sit here as white medical students, while blacks and the poor carry the burden of fighting in Vietnam . . .”

Listening to Ben describe this, Whitney felt his anger as her own. But Bobby had made a joke of it. “Now look what you’ve made me do,” he had told Ben as they left. Then his eyes grew distant, and he added quietly, “I’ve had worse days, I suppose.”

The clouds were closer now, Whitney saw, but she was caught up in Ben’s description of a man she had never known and, equally, the way remembering Robert Kenney transformed Ben’s persona. “He sounds complicated.”

Ben nodded, as if appreciating her comprehension of a man she did not know. “In the course of an hour,” he responded, “he could go from brooding to crisp to detached to funny. If he took a shine to you, you’d have these moments of connection. But he had no gift for small talk, and was never long on compliments. He just expected you’d do your job without a lot of bullshit or wasted time.”
Caught again in memory, Ben’s face grew more relaxed. “Then he’d suddenly step outside the absurdities of politics in this ironic, self-mocking way. One time we landed at an airport, and there’s no one there at all. Bobby sticks his head out the door, then says to the reporters behind him, ‘There are fifty thousand people waiting,’ and peers out to take a second look. ‘Now they’ve seen me,’ he informed them, ‘and they’re screaming with anticipation and delight.’ Then he gets off the plane, waving to the empty tarmac, and flashes the victory sign.”

For a brief moment, another faint smile of reminiscence appeared at the corner of Ben’s lips. He had a writer’s gift, Whitney thought; caught in his own narrative, he could capture her as well. “At other times,” he went on, “you couldn’t reach him at all. Like whenever he went to an Indian reservation. He’d start talking about the rates of suicide among young Indians, and come out looking ravaged.

“Once we were driving away from this ghetto, and he said, ‘They should make a documentary about this place. Let some network capture the hopelessness, what it’s like to think you’ll never get out. Show a black teenager told to stay in school, looking at his older brother who can’t find a job, or a mother staying up at night to protect her children. Then ask the rest of us to watch what it means to have no hope.’”

These were the things Whitney had wondered about since going to Roxbury, but could never articulate at her parent’s dinner table. Now Robert Kennedy was dead, and she was planning her wedding. “I know this sounds stupid,” she told Ben. “But once he died, I realized there was no one like him.”

For a time, neither Ben nor Whitney spoke, as though briefly sharing a sort of kinship. Then he continued in a voice so muted that, to Whitney, it almost evoked a dream state. “We were headed to a black neighborhood in Indianapolis when we heard about Martin Luther King. Bobby went completely quiet—you knew he was thinking about King and his brother, maybe even what might happen to him. Then the police told him he shouldn’t speak, that there’d
be a riot once the word was out. He got that look, and I knew he wasn’t backing off.

“The crowd hadn’t heard. When someone handed him a speech he’d scribbled down, Bobby waved it away. Then he got out of the car and climbed on the back of a flatbed truck. It was dark—only the floodlights turned on Bobby, surrounded by a crowd of black people who didn’t know what had happened.

“‘I have sad news for you,’ he started out. ‘Martin Luther King was shot and killed tonight . . . ’

For a moment, Ben half closed his eyes. “There were screams and wailing—this sound of raw pain. Then Bobby said, ‘Martin Luther King dedicated his life to love and justice between his fellow human beings, and he died in the cause of that effort.’

“The crowd went silent. ‘For those of you who are black,’ he went on, ‘you can be filled with bitterness, with hatred, and a desire for revenge. Or we can make an effort, as Martin Luther King did, to replace the stain of bloodshed that has spread across this land with love and understanding.’” Pausing, Ben shook his head in wonder. “Then he quoted Aeschylus, of all people. ‘Even in our sleep, pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart. Until in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.’

“The crowd was completely hushed. For a minute Bobby was quiet, too, then sort of willed himself to finish. ‘So I ask you to return home, to say a prayer for the family of Martin Luther King, but also for our country, a prayer for understanding and compassion. Let us dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man, and make gentle the life of this world.’”

What struck Whitney first was how well Ben remembered the words, as though he had read them many times since Kennedy’s death. To her astonishment, tears glistened in his eyes, and for a moment she thought of Peter telling her about his father. “There were riots all over America,” Ben finished. “But not in Indianapolis.” Then he added in a throwaway voice, “Anyhow, it’s all gone now.”

Any hint of tears had vanished. But to Whitney, the weight of his loss felt tangible, as if he had lost a part of himself. “Were you there?” she could not help but ask. “In Los Angeles?”

For an instant, she caught the anguish in his eyes. Then his face closed altogether. Pointing at the horizon, he said curtly, “Let’s talk about the weather. That’s what matters now.”