Loss of Innocence (20 page)

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?”

Peter wore the same unyielding expression. “I’m not sure I should even try. Not when we’re talking about my fiancée and this conceited prick who set out to humiliate me in front of her.”

“Not until you swung at him . . .”

“He
wanted
me to,” Peter insisted. “I know when someone hates me. That sonofobitch does.”

He was right about this, Whitney knew. “I understand,” she assured him. “If I were you, maybe I’d have swung at him, too.”

Mollified, Peter touched his nose. “He sure picked the right guy, didn’t he? I hated you seeing that, Whitney.”

Feeling his shame and vulnerability, Whitney took his hand. “Believe me, so did I. But only for your sake.”

Peter grimaced. “I don’t want your parents to know, okay?”

“They don’t have to—we can tell them you bumped into something. And I don’t think any less of you for losing a fistfight. I’m not marrying Muhammad Ali.”

“That’s for sure,” Peter replied with a rueful smile. “He damn near knocked me into tomorrow.”

Relieved at this glimmer of good nature, Whitney kissed him gently on the mouth. “So does that hurt?”

“Not at all.”

Kissing him more deeply, she felt him respond. “I am marrying you for your body, though. Any interest in reminding me why? Or do you need rest and rehabilitation, supervised by Florence Nightingale?”

Peter managed a genuine smile. “Depends on what she’s wearing. A nurse’s outfit, or something less.”

“Sounds like I’ve got choices. Why don’t you lie down on the bed, and see what happens.”

Peter complied, his head propped on the pillow. “Okay, Whitney. So what now?”

Standing at the end of the bed, Whitney pulled the sweater over her head. She saw his eyes move to her breasts, swelling from the thin black bra he always liked to see her in. “Keep watching,” she instructed.

Slowly, Whitney slid out of her blue jeans, letting them drop to the floor. Suddenly, bashful at what she was about to do, she wondered if some deep the sensual impulse that had seized her, or whether she needed to salve his pride, put this night behind them before they faced her parents. She had never stripped for him before.

Closing her eyes, she slipped one strap of her bra from his shoulder, then the other, bending forward to expose the tops of her breasts. Then she reached behind her back, unsnapping her bra, letting them free.

“Yes,” she heard him say from deep in his throat.

She turned from him, slowly sliding her black silk panties down to show him more, and then turned again, facing him, exposing the dark triangle of hair between her legs.

“Jesus, Whit.”

Her skin tingled now, feeling his arousal. She dropped her panties to the floor. “Take off your clothes,” she ordered in a husky voice.

He stripped in haste, his gaze rapt. Sliding onto the bed, she took his penis into her mouth. He gasped with pleasure while her mouth and hand worked on his hard shaft. As Peter tensed, she withdrew her mouth, sliding her breasts across his chest as she whispered into his ear. “I want you to fuck me, Peter.”

“I will,” he whispered back, even as she wondered at the woman who had said this.

“Then stand at the end of the bed. I’ll show you where to go.”

Hurriedly, he did, staring down at her with his shaft in his hand, his face contorted with desire. Looking into his eyes, Whitney slowly opened her legs to show him everything, then slid one finger inside her. “There,” she told him. “Right there.”

As he gazed down at her, she touched herself with the tip of her finger, moving it gently until she felt the blood rush of stimulation and desire. For an instant she imagined herself as Clarice. “Do you want to fuck me?” she asked. “Or just watch me?”

“I want to fuck you,” he answered in a thick voice.

He knelt on the bed, hastily kissing her mouth before he slid inside her, tentative at first, then thrusting harder, Whitney pushing her hips against him, filled with a desperate need to drive away any thought but this, the muscles inside her tightening with a primal urgency she had never felt before, crying out, “Please, fuck me harder,” dazed and lightheaded now, her world going black, as though all the life in her had moved to the place of release until she tightened irrevocably, her body shuddering in an agony of pleasure, and her mind suddenly filled with the shocking image of Benjamin Blaine on top of her, feeling the warmth of his release inside her as his face replaced Peter’s and Ben’s name caught in her throat.

Peter slumped on top of her. “My God . . .”

Whitney’s eyes filled with tears. “That was beautiful,” she whispered.

For the next three days they kept busy as Whitney, contented on the surface, struggled to isolate one startling discordant moment. Each night, alone, she wished she could describe it to Clarice, so that her friend could put this in some safe category of the human and expected. During the day, she and Peter did the things that young people do. They went to the Agricultural Fair in West Tisbury, where livestock vied with the attractions of a traveling carnival, riding the Ferris wheel and eating pink cotton candy. Peter threw a baseball through a hole in the middle of a target, winning Whitney
a stuffed bear. “My hero,” she told him. Giving her a crooked smile, Peter touched his tender nose. “Oh, yeah . . .”

Later they went out to see Franco Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet. Despite the liberties it took with Shakespeare, Whitney found herself caught up in the hunger of two young people, rebels against family and a social order that had no room for them. “A sexy movie,” Peter judged afterward. “But we have a better ending, don’t we?”

“Do you mean tonight?” Whitney asked. “Or later?”

They went home to make love, Peter pleased at her new ardor. But Whitney felt herself holding back, afraid to pierce the wall between her conscious thoughts and the outlaw image that threatened her peace of mind.

The next evening featured fireworks in Oak Bluffs. Peter and Whitney took blankets and a bottle of wine to Ocean Park, watching a glorious display that framed a moon glimmering through a thin layer of fog. “Remember the scene in To Catch a Thief? he asked.

Through the warm glow of wine, Whitney tried to recall this. “I’m not sure.”

“It’s where Cary Grant and Grace Kelly are lying on the couch, and the camera pans to fireworks in his hotel window. That’s when you know they’re making love.”

As though on cue, Whitney said, “Then let’s go make our own movie.”

Their days and nights together passed like that, Peter wanting her again and again, the elixir of male confidence refreshed, Whitney bent on pleasing him while being good company to her parents, who were disappointed that Janine had canceled yet another trip to see them. Though Clarice dropped by to visit, Whitney found no time with her alone. Instead, she was deeply attentive to Peter, still shadowed by the fear that the sudden release of her sexuality, the erotic jolt of a single night, came from a desire she must erase. At times she felt like a stranger to herself and those around her, her greatest solace the belief that, as with any strong but vagrant impulse, time would banish this as quickly as it had come.

When Peter had to leave, Whitney kissed him at the airport with a fervor that made him grin. “Sooner than you realize,” she told him, “I’ll be Mrs. Peter Brooks.”

He smiled at the sound of this. “All the unborn little Brookses are looking forward to that.”

“Let’s just practice for awhile,” Whitney replied. “Now that you’re in the reserves, you don’t have to be an instant dad.”

As he walked to the plane, blond curls glistening in the late afternoon sun, he turned to smile and wave, everything forgotten, it seemed, but Whitney herself. The swell of affection in her heart felt pleasurable and reassuring.

Less than four weeks, she told herself again.

Part Four

Betrayals

Martha’s Vineyard–New York City

August–September 1968

One

Returning from the airport, Whitney decided to watch the eve of the Chicago convention on NBC, worried that the confrontation of protestors and police would—as Eugene McCarthy had predicted—explode into violence.

The first film clip seemed peaceable enough, a crowd of McCarthy backers greeting their candidate as he arrived at Midway Airport. Though they looked subtly different from the Nixon delegates, they had this much in common—all were white. Watching their restrained enthusiasm, a reflection of McCarthy’s own, Whitney recalled Ben saying, “All someone has to do is abolish the draft, and they’ll go back to screwing and driving Volkswagens and watching films with subtitles. Their ‘crusade’ won’t have been about much of anything, and they’ll disappear like ether.” She was about to switch channels when the coverage changed to Grant Park.

Shaken, Whitney sat. The scenes unfolding on the screen were wholly unlike the America she knew—police beating a crowd of demonstrators with clubs to keep them from marching on the
convention center. From their midst someone thrust a sign aloft—
WELCOME TO PRAGUE!
Then, amoeba-like, the throng shrunk back from a wave of tear gas, police with gas masks and billy clubs flailing at long-haired youths. Transfixed, Whitney belatedly realized that Charles was standing beside her.

Silent, they watched fresh images of conflict filling the screen—kids burning draft cards in front of cops; radicals stoning police cars; protesters bloodied from beatings, or incapacitated by tear gas. Softly, Charles said, “So this is how it ends, where dissent becomes contempt for law, the prelude to social disintegration. It’s why we need Richard Nixon.”

“Nixon,” Whitney repeated with instinctive disdain.

He looked at her closely, then continued with weary certainty. “I know that, to some, all this upheaval seems terribly romantic—youth in rebellion, throwing off the shackles to remake the world in your own deeply admired self-image, convinced that no other generations’ experiences have any value. But eventually, these people will have to find jobs.

“After that they can begin the quiet but equally destructive work of the self-indulgent: changing partners at will, spending money without regard to their children’s futures, reading books that assure them that they—the sacred individual—is the person they should love first and best. They won’t build anything, because they don’t think they owe anything to anyone else. I pity their children and grandchildren.” He turned to Whitney. “I don’t mean you and Peter, or Janine. But I’m afraid your peer group will make mine look far better than it should. And God knows there’s a lot of you.”

In some ways, Whitney realized, he sounded like Ben commenting on the beach party. “And that’s reason enough for the cops to beat them? These people hate the war, but have no power to stop it. Protest is the only way that they can be seen or heard . . .”

“It’s
not
the only way,” her father objected. “They’re like blacks who ‘protest’ by destroying their own neighborhoods. Now the police are giving them what they want—a bloody shirt to wave.”

“And Nixon will step in to save us?”

Charles shook his head. “Let’s not quarrel, Whitney. I’ve said my piece, and you’ve indulged me. It’s probably good I’m going back to New York tomorrow morning.”

Touching her gently on the shoulder, Charles left.

Suddenly Whitney felt alone. She went to her bedroom and called Clarice.

“She’s gone to Boston,” Jane Barkley reported dryly, “or so I understand. It seems she has important business—seeing friends from college, certainly. Perhaps even finding a job.”

“Wherever she is,” Whitney responded, “have her call me.”

“Of course,” Jane promised. “As soon as we reestablish contact.”

Returning to the living room, Whitney watched new images of violence, hoping that Ben was not in Chicago but safe, at least for the moment, a few hundred yards away.

For the next three nights, Whitney watched the convention. Her mother refused to join her, drinking a little more wine at dinner, then retreating to her bedroom to call Janine or Charles whenever she could find them. But she said nothing about Janine, and Whitney wondered again at her sister’s elusiveness. More often she thought of Ben, wishing that Ted Kennedy—the last hope to defeat Humphrey—would allow his name to be placed in nomination, yet fearing what could happen if he did.

Instead, each night brought its own repellent images and stunted hopes. After Mayor Daley proclaimed to the delegates on Monday that “as long as I’m mayor in this city, there’s going to be law and order in Chicago,” police moved on a throng of demonstrators in Lincoln Park, and a few rogue cops pulled black residents off their own porches to beat them with leather truncheons. On Tuesday, as more police in combat gear cleared out Lincoln Park, Edward Kennedy, still devastated by his brother’s assassination, asked his supporters to cease trying to draft him. Wednesday brought a police riot.

Bent on marching to the convention hall, the protestors regrouped in front of the Chicago Hilton and were confronted by another phalanx in uniform. Blindly, the cops flailed at the demonstrators closest to them, trapping some against the wall of the hotel. Sickened, Whitney watched the jumbled film clips—protestors crashing through first-floor windows amidst shards of glass; bloodied men and women desperately pushing into the lobby; blue-helmeted police beating others fallen to the concrete; demonstrators trampling their comrades as they retreated in terror to a cacophony of sounds—clubs striking bone, police shouting, victims crying out, the screech of police sirens. In the convention hall, Senator Abe Ribicoff decried “Gestapo tactics in the streets of Chicago”; Richard Daley’s supporters rose in derisive outrage, shaking their fists, and the screen filled with Daley’s face as he mouthed obscenities at the speaker. On the first ballot, the delegates nominated Hubert Humphrey. Whitney felt like the world had gone insane.

On Thursday morning, she took her journal to Dogfish Bar, struggling to find words for what she felt.

She could write little. Closing the leather volume, she lingered in the hope that Ben would appear, relieving her of the vow she had taken—for Peter and herself—to avoid him. She saw no one.

That night she turned on the television yet again. An ominous climax was building—the triumphant appearance of Humphrey as protestors marched on the convention. When the police confronted them with a shower of tear gas, Whitney went to call Peter. “Are you watching this?” she asked.

“The convention? No. It all seems so stupid and pointless—I don’t know what these people think that they’re accomplishing.”

“They’re getting maimed and teargassed, Peter.”

“It’s bad, okay? I know that. But this is what they wanted.” His voice softened. “So how are
you
, sweetheart? Is everything okay over there?”

Whitney thought of her mother: in the last few hours, she had repeatedly called Janine, clearly agitated that she could not find her.
“Fine,” Whitney said reflexively, and realized that this is what Anne would say. “So how is work?”

“Really good,” Peter said. “We’ve got a new underwriting, a public offering for a big chain of nursing homes. After we get back from the honeymoon, your dad’s putting me on the due diligence team.”

This was a plum assignment, Whitney knew. Facilitating sale of stock to the public was a lucrative part of Padgett Dane’s business, and an inquiry into a company’s prospects was an indispensable prerequisite. “That’s great,” she heard herself saying. “I’m proud of you.”

“Thanks, Whitney. So don’t worry too much, okay? The country will straighten itself out.”

Returning to the living room, Whitney felt lonelier than before.

It was not Peter’s fault, she reminded herself: he was striving to succeed in her father’s world, a few scant weeks from the only world they had ever known—where everyone was their age, and what absorbed them most was classes and activities and dating and late night conversations about the quandaries of life in this halfway house between adolescence and adulthood. She felt for him now, compelled to become a man on the great conveyor belt of life, which had a schedule all its own.

On the screen, Robert Kennedy appeared.

It was a convention film offered to pacify all those who loved him. But even on celluloid Bobby seemed more real than anyone else at the convention—alive again, passionate and wry and funny and melancholy. Whitney wondered if Ben, too, watched alone, painfully reliving his time with the man for whom he had sacrificed so much. Or whether he was among the demonstrators, choking on tear gas and despair.

Unable to stop herself, she stepped outside, pausing but briefly, then hurried to Ben’s place, dreading yet hoping to find him.