“No harm in it. In fact, the Surgeon General has certified that pot is good for you. Told me so himself, the last time I smoked some.” Reaching into his windbreaker, Ben took out a perfectly rolled joint. “Up to you, Whitney. But I’m driving, and I know my limits. If you want to experiment, you’ll be safe with me.”
Though he did not seem to be pushing her, Whitney felt embarrassed by her lack of sophistication. “Maybe a puff.”
Ben lit the joint, taking a deep drag before exhaling. “That’s how you do it,” he told her, and passed the joint.
Taking it between her fingers, Whitney tried to remember smoking a surreptitious cigarette with Clarice when they were both sixteen. Then she took a hasty puff. “A little deeper,” Ben advised. “Just not too much.”
With the second puff, the hot, acrid smoke made Whitney cough. Determinedly, she took another, holding it in as Ben had. Taking the joint from her hand, Ben said, “I admire your commitment to research.”
For awhile, they passed it back and forth, quiet. Whitney’s sensations began merging—the bonfire, the strumming of a guitar, the lapping of surf, the riot of stars in a black sky, the cool, gentle breeze on her face. Everything else—her family, Peter, the wedding—felt very far away.
She was floating, Whitney thought. Mute, she took Ben’s hand. He did not seem to notice. Hours passed, or maybe minutes. Ben appeared lost in his own thoughts.
Then someone was touching her shoulder. “Time to go,” he told her gently. “Before you turn back into a pumpkin.”
Whitney wished she could stay.
As Ben drove, Whitney laid her head back against the seat. “Still stoned?” he asked.
“I’m just wondering where I was. No one seemed connected to what’s going on.”
Ben glanced at her with a look of interest. “That’s the point. To escape what’s really happening and achieve a state of Nirvana at odds with human nature. Then their lives will all be different, and they’ll create a whole new world where everything is heartfelt and lovely. Why did Bobby bother to run, I wonder, when there’s Huck to liberate ‘all people of color.’”
Whitney angled her head to look at him. “You don’t like them much, do you?”
“Let’s just say I don’t respect them. Because they don’t really care about anything but their own lives. It will be interesting to see them at our parents’ age.”
“What do you think they’ll be like?”
Scanning the road, Ben flicked on his brights. “Some will hang on at the margins. Others will become their parents, only with a liberal gloss. Others won’t even bother to pretend. And a very few will dedicate their lives to making the world a better place, in the face of a lot of selfishness and inertia.”
Whitney thought of Robert Kennedy’s assassination, a dead weight on his soul. “You’re becoming a cynic.”
Ben shook his head. “Scratch a cynic, someone said, and you’ll find a bruised idealist. So I’m trying to be a realist. Still, I mean to live life like it matters.” Driving carefully, he braked to negotiate a curve. “Including my career. A lot of these people have bought a ticket to nowhere. The notion that creativity comes from being drunk or stoned or moonstruck is infantile. Art comes from engagement and hard work.”
“You’re sounding strangely like my dad,” Whitney observed.
Ben’s eyes narrowed. “Only in the sense that he didn’t succeed by medicating himself into oblivion. I mean to be a writer, and the romantic myth of the drunken writer is nonsense. Fitzgerald proved that by burning out without ever growing up.”
But he did sound like her father, Whitney thought—older than his age, fixed in his identity. There was a core to him, a wall against extremes, that kept him from believing that any other person or way of being could take him where he wanted. For the rest of the drive, she pondered that, while preparing to lie to her mother.
Ben stopped at the foot of the driveway. Briefly, Whitney thought of the stranger who had parked there, having sex with Janine as she lay over the hood of his truck. “You all right?” Ben asked.
“I think so.”
“Then let me see you walk.”
He got out, watching her slide from the passenger seat, turning in a pirouette to imitate a ballerina. “I’m pretty sure I can make it.”
Looking into her face, Ben smiled a little. “I hope so, Whitney.”
She gazed back at him. He was her friend, after all; he had wanted nothing more than her company after an event which, were he unlucky, might spell the end of his life before it truly began. A friend who she could trust, who knew that she was bound to Peter. “Thank you,” she said, almost bashfully, and headed for the house.
Her mother was up late, reading in the living room. Putting down her book, she gave Whitney a long, quiet gaze. She must still be a little stoned, Whitney thought—it felt like she was looking at someone in a mask through the wrong end of the telescope. “How is Clarice?” her mother asked politely.
“Fine,” Whitney said. “But I’m really tired.”
She went to bed, falling asleep on top of her covers. When morning came, the night before felt like a dream, its fragments half-remembered. Her clearest image was of Ben, standing close to her in the driveway yet not touching her at all, the war a shadow behind him.
Twelve
The next days passed uneventfully, with Whitney and her mother putting the final touches on her wedding—floral arrangements, tablecloths, reviewing the guest list to arrange the seating for dinner. With the major questions resolved, there was less friction with Anne—neither mentioned Ben, and sharing these last details created a companionship that, Whitney knew, both pleased and calmed her mother. Clarice was off-island, and difficult to find. But Whitney spoke with the other bridesmaids frequently, grateful for their anticipation of her day, and Payton Clarke gave her a bridal shower in Boston, a lively reunion with classmates who, in a matter of weeks, had come to view their years in college as a precious, irretrievable time. Some were getting married; others had their first purchase on a tentative career; still others would be teaching in the fall. But they pledged to spend a weekend together every summer, no matter where they were. Caught up in the forward pull of life, Whitney thought less about Janine or Ben—save for her fears about his draft physical, and his seeming inability to avoid whatever fate awaited him. Despite the tug of conscience, this made her all the more grateful that her father had secured Peter’s safety, and with it, the future life that would begin in four weeks’ time.
On another lazy morning, awakening to shafts of sunlight at the edge of her curtained window, Whitney turned on her bedside radio. Expecting rock music, she was surprised by a newsman’s solemn voice, reading a report from Radio Prague:
Yesterday, on August 20, at about eleven p.m., troops of the Soviet Union, the Polish People’s Republic, the Hungarian People’s Republic, the German Democratic People’s Republic, and the Bulgarian People’s Republic crossed the frontiers of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic . . .
Whitney sat up. In a distant way, she had followed the stirrings of hope that, despite its dominance by the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia could grope its way toward freedom. But the Russians had moved to snuff this out with overwhelming force. Listening, she was moved by the reports of young people marching into the center of Prague, surrounding Russian tanks to protest the gray subservience enveloping them once more. Picking up her phone, she called Peter at work.
He, too, had heard the reports. “There’s nothing for it,” he opined soberly. “Like your dad says, it’s the nature of that system. All we can do is resist them where we can, like in Vietnam, or else they’ll take advantage somewhere else.”
He was partly right, Whitney knew—the Czechs were on their own. “All our talk about freedom,” she said, “and yet we’re completely helpless. Whatever we do in Vietnam doesn’t help these people at all.”
“I know.” Peter hesitated. “Why don’t I ask your dad if I can fly over tomorrow evening. I c
an’t change the world, but maybe I can brighten yours a little.”
“I’d like that,” Whitney told him, and resumed following the news.
Throughout the day, her mood darkened—the tragedy in Eastern Europe had ripped her cocoon. For whatever reason, Anne suddenly seemed distracted, disinterested in the fate of Czechoslovakia or Whitney’s wedding. Intermittently, she retreated to her bedroom, the usual locus of calls to Janine or Charles, suggesting to Whitney that she was trying and failing to reach her older daughter. At dinner, Anne drank more wine than usual, remarking not on the Soviet invasion but on feminists protesting the Miss America Pageant. “You’d think that being attractive and well-spoken was a sin,” she observed. “Sometimes I think those women don’t like being women.”
“Maybe they just don’t like women parading in swimsuits and high heels,” Whitney responded mildly. “I’m more concerned about the Czechs.”
“You’re right, of course,” Anne said with ironic weariness. “The world can be a depressing place. Some days I’m very grateful not to live in it.”
The sense of isolation stealing over Whitney surprised her with its force. It was then she thought to wonder about Ben. “I’m going for a walk,” she told her mother. “The days are getting shorter now.”
She found him at the end of the dock, sipping from a whisky bottle and gazing up at the stars as they appeared in the darkening sky. “Are you okay?” she asked.
He did not look up at her. “More than okay, I’m peachy. In fact, you could say I’m 1-A. I passed the physical, of course. Thanks to the fates or whatever, I’ll be protecting you and your husband when the Vietnamese invade Greenwich, Connecticut.”
She sat beside him, gripped by sadness and foreboding. “I’m so sorry, Ben.”
“I suppose you have that luxury. Courtesy of Dad, you won’t be getting Peter back in a body bag . . .”
“That’s not fair.”
Ben took a deep swallow of whisky. “Fair?” he repeated. “What’s ‘fair’ about me getting on the conveyor belt to Vietnam while Peter comes home to your very safe bed?”
He was drunk, Whitney realized, or at least well on his way. In a tentative voice, she said, “I wish I could help you.”
“But you can’t, can you?” Suddenly, Ben turned, gesturing at the Dunmores’ spacious grounds. “Can you get me this, Whitney? God knows I want it. All of it. The money, the space, the freedom—whatever it takes to erase these feelings . . .”
“What feelings?”
“Not being able to stand even thinking about my life—all the months and years I spent in that house, believing I was powerless, that I’d never escape.” He looked at her fixedly, his face so close that Whitney smelled the liquor on his breath. “For all I despise your family’s smugness, you have no idea how much I envy you—the entitlement, the lack of that sharp-toothed rat gnawing at your insides like the ones who gnawed the food in our pantry.” His voice lowered. “I thought I’d escaped. But now they’ve got me again. And there’s nothing I can do.”
There was a part of him she could not reach, Whitney sensed, a hunger no thing or person could ever slake. “But why complain,” he went on. “Here I am, singing sad songs for myself, and these poor bastards in Prague can’t get out either. I’m sick of seeing shit like this, and feeling so fucking helpless. They’re having this joke of a convention in Chicago next week, Humphrey’s coronation, and Daley’s cops are planning to pen up protesters in camps just like they’re the fucking Russians. So what does McCarthy say? That antiwar protesters should stay away to avoid a ‘tragedy.’ A tragedy is Bobby getting shot. A tragedy is what’s happening in Czechoslovakia or Vietnam—or here. And now McCarthy tells us to be quiet so that pig Daley can put on his sham convention. Fuck them all.”
He stopped abruptly, staring at the dark sky above the darker ocean. Apprehensive, Whitney said, “You’re not thinking of going, are you?”
“Why not? What the hell do I have to lose?”
“I’ve been reading up on this, Ben. There’s going to be trouble in Chicago. Some of the radicals want that, and maybe Daley does, too—you could get thrown in jail, or get your head bashed in. For what? You’re not a radical Weatherman, or someone who campaigned for McCarthy. Like it or not, Bobby’s dead. Why get beaten up for someone else’s benefit?”
Ben shrugged. “Who the fuck cares?”
Whitney hesitated. “I do,” she said quietly.
He turned, looking into her face, his smile somewhere between puzzled and derisive. “So what are you offering, Whitney?”
“Free advice,” she snapped. “I’m sorry you’re getting drafted, all right? But that’s no excuse for being reckless.”
Ben’s face darkened. “I’m not a coward,” he said stubbornly.
Frustrated, Whitney grasped his shoulders. “You don’t have to prove that anymore—to me, or to yourself. All that’s left is to prove you’re not a fool.”
Ben looked into her eyes. Wordless, they stared at each other, their faces inches apart. “Whitney?” someone called from the darkness.
She recognized his voice just before she caught the unfamiliar tone, angry and proprietary. Pulling back from Ben, she stood.
Peter strode quickly toward them, footsteps thudding on the dock. Stunned, Whitney realized that he had come a day early, no doubt with her father’s blessing. Ben sat there, remaining quite still, regarding Peter intently.
Stopping two feet from them, Peter looked from Ben to Whitney. “What’s going on here?” he demanded.
Slowly, Ben stood. “We’re talking about world affairs. If you have any thoughts, feel free to join in.”
Peter took two steps forward, standing close to Ben. “You want trouble, smartass? You just found it.”
“I wasn’t looking.”
“Bullshit. You’re after Whitney, and now it’s going to stop.”
“You’re right,” Ben replied, glancing at Whitney. “I’m leaving.” Angling sideways, he slid past Peter, then looked back over his shoulder. “Your problem isn’t with me or Whitney. It’s with yourself.”
With two quick steps. Peter grabbed Ben, turning him around.
“Watch it . . .” Ben warned, and then Peter swung wildly.
“No,” Whitney cried out.
The closed fist struck Ben’s mouth with a cracking sound, knocking him off balance. He stared up at Peter, blood trickling from his lip. Rushing to Peter, Whitney pressed against his back, enveloping him as tightly as she could. “Don’t,” she said. “Please.”
Ben stood, wiping the blood off his mouth. With surprising softness he said, “I don’t want to fight you, Lord Fauntleroy. And you damn well don’t want to fight me, you really don’t . . .”
Peter swung again.
This time, Ben ducked, backing up a step while circling to Peter’s right. “No more punches, Peter. Then I’ll let this go, for Whitney’s sake.”
To Whitney, Ben seemed suddenly, lethally sober. Confusion appeared in Peter’s eyes, followed by anger and humiliation. Crouching at the knees, he launched a right at Ben’s jaw.
With a slight movement of the head, Ben avoided his fist, pivoting so suddenly that Whitney barely saw his vicious but compact blow to Peter’s solar plexus. As Peter slumped, a sick, stunned look on his face, Ben hit him with a straight punch to the nose.
Blood spewing from his nostrils, Peter staggered backwards. He had no chance, Whitney knew: Ben’s ferocity, even hatred, was all the more frightening because of his controlled and brutally efficient application of force. “No,” she shouted as Ben hit Peter with a left hook to the jaw, lifting him up before he fell to the dock and crumpled on his side.
Desperate, Whitney stepped between them. “That’s enough,” she implored Ben shakily. “Please.”
Facing her, he took a deep ragged breath. In a tired voice, he said, “He’ll be all right, Whitney. The only lasting damage I did is to his self-image. And he has way better reasons to doubt himself than losing a fight he w
as too stupid to avoid.”
Abruptly, he turned and stalked off, as though in a hurry to leave them both behind.
Kneeling beside him, Whitney looked into Peter’s stunned eyes, as guileless as a child’s at something beyond his comprehension. Kissing his forehead, she murmured, “I’m so sorry. I love you, Peter, and I’m sorry.”
Thirteen
When Peter could stand, Whitney led him to the guesthouse.
Penitent, she sat beside him on the bed, holding a damp cloth to his nose until it stopped bleeding, then wiping the blood off his face. “I’m all right,” he said stiffly.
Whitney shook her head. “I know what you’re thinking, Peter. But he’s just someone I’ve gotten to know. He passed his physical today—he’s going to be drafted. He doesn’t want to go, but he has to. We both know what it’s like to worry about that.” She hesitated, then finished gently, “This was the wrong night to pick a fight with him, and you’re the wrong person. The one who’s safe.”
Peter’s lips compressed in a stubborn line. “This wouldn’t have happened if you’d stayed away from him. But you didn’t. Or maybe you didn’t want to.”
“I will now,” Whitney promised firmly. “I don’t want you to worry, or wonder. But I can’t say I’ll never speak to him again. He’s going away soon, and so will we—him to the Army, us to an apartment in New York City. I can’t just treat him like dirt on my shoe.”
“What about how I feel?” Peter demanded. “What’s more important to you—me, or this guy you say isn’t even a friend?”
“You are.” Whitney removed the cloth, looking him in the face. “If you didn’t know that before, tonight should make it clear.”
“Then why were you hanging out with him?”
“Because he’s in a bad place, and I’ve got some pride, too.” She paused, groping for words that could help him comprehend her. “I wasn’t there because I’m attracted to him. It’s more how I feel about myself, as a person. That’s different than how my parents feel about me, or even how you feel. Can you understand that?”
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