For a moment her mother’s eyes welled. “Oh, so do I. It was terrible watching her simply melt away.” Her eyes briefly shut. “No, ‘melt’ is too benign a word. She shriveled into herself, until I had the horrifying image of her as a mummy in a museum. I can usually manage not to think of things that are so unpleasant. But not my mother’s death.”
Whitney wondered why this subject, so seldom touched on, had arisen once again. As she took her mother’s hand, Anne told her, “You have a good heart, Whitney. Fortunately, whenever I feel like this, I can always look at her photograph—the one in the bedroom. It reminds me of how lucky I was to have her.”
The photograph was so formal that Whitney could not see the warmth so vivid in Anne’s memory, or have any real vision of her grandmother other than a faint resemblance to Janine. With a stab of resentment, Whitney thought again once more that she was last in her mother’s affection—behind Charles, Janine, and Anne’s own mother—then recoiled from her own pettiness. “I suppose,” Anne continued musing, “that’s why I feel such kinship with Peter. Some grief never ends, no matter how much you wish that. All I ever wanted was for you girls to feel secure. The way I felt before I knew that my mother was going to leave me, and there was nothing I could do.”
It was haunting, Whitney thought, how swiftly this memory could transform Anne into the heartsick girl she had been. “But you feel secure now,” Whitney said.
“Yes,” Anne responded quietly. “Thanks to your father.”
A new thought struck Whitney, a connection she had not made before. “Sometimes I worry about Peter,” she confessed. “He depends on Dad, as well.”
“Don’t worry,” Anne said firmly. “Your father will look out for Peter. And if anything ever happened to him or Peter, he’ll make sure you’re more than comfortable.”
She sounded like Clarice, Whitney thought—certain of Charles’s capacities and foresight. “I know,” she answered. But what she chose not to say was how vulnerable Peter seemed, and how uneasy this sense made her. For a strange moment, she envied her mother’s confidence in her husband’s strength of will.
They had known each other several months before Whitney fully divined the core of Peter’s doubts. It was a fresh June day of the summer before; they were walking in Central Park, carefree and at ease. Then Peter stopped abruptly, gazing at the outline of a hockey rink drained since early spring, and his face took on an unwonted cast of sadness and reflection. “What is it?” Whitney asked.
Peter shoved his hands in the pockets of his jeans. “I was thinking about my dad.”
“What was he like? You’ve never said that much.”
“That hockey rink reminded me of him. He never cared for sports—like your dad, his childhood was hard, and he worked pretty much all the time. But I loved all the New York teams, especially the Rangers. Anyhow, I was maybe ten, and dying to see the Rangers play the Blackhawks. Dad was in the middle of a trial, and wouldn’t have been interested even if he weren’t. I got so desperate I finally said, ‘But Dad—the Blackhawks have Stan Mikita.’
“‘Don’t worry, son,’ he answered. ‘If the Blackhawks take penicillin I bet it’ll go away.’ Even I knew it was funny, and I could see the humor in his eyes. I also knew that was it—no hockey game.
“He won the trial, I recall. And the night before the Rangers next game with the Blackhawks he came home with two tickets—first-row seats, right behind the Rangers bench. I don’t know where he got them, or how he even remembered. But he did.” Peter smiled at the memory. “He watched the game intently, asking questions about all the players, and who I thought was good. Mikita scored a goal, and the Rangers won in overtime. It was the best night I’d ever had.”
It struck Whitney that, however painful, these memories would make Peter a devoted father. “He sounds like a really nice dad.”
“He was a really good man,” Peter affirmed. “I remember being fourteen and coming back from Taft at Christmas with mediocre grades. He was sitting in the library reading the Sunday Times, and I slunk in with this kind of half apology—that I knew he’d had to work while he was in school, and still nearly got straight A’s, and here I was at this expensive place not doing half as well.
“My dad put down the Times and looked at me in this level way he had. ‘It’s true,’ he said, ‘I worked all the way through college until I got the scholarship to Columbia Law. People told me I’d developed character—I heard that quite a lot, actually. But I never had time to go to a single football game, and a lot fewer movies than I’d have liked. I came to think I’d developed more character than I could stand, and maybe more than I needed.’
“‘I don’t want to spoil you, Peter, and it’s true I’d like to see a little more effort. But I had too much care, too soon. It does me good to see you enjoying sports and having fun. You’ll do better next time.’ So I did. He died of a heart attack four months later.”
The story touched Whitney, all the more because it explained Peter’s affinity for Charles. Even now, she wondered if Peter should have decided to work with kids. But this was not the course he had chosen, the one taken by his surrogate father.
The next morning, Whitney took her diary to Dogfish Bar. Instead of swimming, she mused for awhile, then began to write.
It seems that my mom has tried to recreate, as best she can, the family she lost when her own mother died. But I wonder if she’s almost as vulnerable as she was then. I can’t imagine how devastated she would be to think that she had failed with any of us, most of all Janine.
Lately, I find myself asking if she worried less about me because she didn’t need to—that she sensed something in my sister as brittle as Janine felt to me when I was hugging her that night. If so, perhaps Mom’s obsession with Janine masks fears she can’t admit, especially to herself.
Maybe that’s jealousy couched as wishful thinking. But ever since that night I’ve wondered if Janine is more deserving of pity than envy and, perhaps, knows it.
She paused, watching a mist hanging over the sandbar. It was some moments before she began to write again.
It also seems clear that Janine wishes this were her wedding, not mine. But my parents worry for me, as well. Maybe by giving Peter a job and protecting him from the draft—and more than that, by serving as a second father—Dad is also assuring a solution to what Mom sees as the one area in my life, as she understands it, where I might need help. Finding the right husband.
This new thought, commingling warmth and humiliation, caused Whitney to put down her pen. Only then did she sense someone standing behind her.
With seeming nonchalance, Benjamin Blaine said, “Hope I’m not interrupting.”
Startled, she answered, “Didn’t you kind of expect to?”
His eyes glinted at this. “Which means ‘yes, you are, and it’s annoying.’”
She put down her journal. “I’ve had my great thoughts for the day. So it’s really not that annoying.”
“Good to know. I just wanted to ask if you feel like sailing, and then I’ll be on my way.”
Whitney felt torn. She wouldn’t mind sailing, and could not find a graceful reason to refuse. “When?” she asked, buying another moment to calculate how to avoid this stranger who kept throwing her off balance.
Perhaps he looked amused because he understood this. “Anytime,” he said easily. “Ever sail to Tarpaulin Cove?”
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.”
Loss of Innocence Page 8
