Loss of Innocence (3 page)

Three

As Whitney and Clarice waded through the surf, the air became damper, the sunlight hazy. Over the water a stray shower fell from a windblown smudge of darkness amidst the filtered rays. Clarice gazed out at this with a mild distaste.

“To think,” she remarked, “that this could have been the Mediterranean.”

Whitney felt a wave of disappointment at their aborted plans. Turning from the water, she sat on a rock with room enough for her friend, feet resting on sand dampened by a receding tide. “What could I do? I didn’t want to risk losing him before our life had even started. Starting a family, if that’s what it takes, seems better than having no family at all.”

Perching beside her, Clarice inquired, “Isn’t that a tad melodramatic? He hasn’t even got his draft notice yet. He’s a long way from Vietnam.”

“We can think that now. But once he’s classified 1-A, the odds get a whole lot shorter.” Whitney hesitated before giving voice to her fears. “I know he’d be brave and capable. But that’s just it—I can see him doing something reckless to save somebody else.”

“So maybe they’ll stop the war?”

“Who’s ‘they’?” Whitney asked more sharply than she intended. “Nixon and Humphrey support it, more or less. McCarthy can’t beat Humphrey, so that leaves Bobby Kennedy. The dirty secret I’m keeping from Dad is that I’m hoping Bobby wins today in California.”

“My dad hates the Kennedys,” Clarice said flatly. “He says their father was a bootlegger and a crook.” She shrugged. “It’s a class thing, I’m sure—Irish Catholics and all that. You know how they are in Boston.”

“Blacks love Kennedy,” Whitney replied firmly. “Chicanos, too. You can see them on TV mobbing his car, like he’s all they’ve got left.” She turned to Clarice. “Remember when they assassinated Martin Luther King?”

“I remember how upset people were at Wellesley. Most of them, anyhow.”

The remark was not unkind, just dispassionate, as though Clarice were an anthropologist. But for Whitney the memory was piercing—girls crowded around the TV in Meadows South; black faces shouting or sobbing; newsmen barking updates that changed nothing. Whitney imagined the young black boy she was tutoring in Roxbury, and feared she would never see him again. “Who could black people believe in, I kept thinking. But there weren’t many black girls at Wheaton, and I didn’t know them well enough to talk about it.”

Clarice glanced at her curiously. “So what got you into tutoring?”

“A suitemate talked me into going to an elementary school in Roxbury, so they assigned me a kid once a week.” Remembering him, Whitney grew pensive. “James was nine years old and little, with this coiled hair and bright eyes. He loved to learn, and I didn’t want to see those eyes go blank. So I kept showing up.”

“But weren’t you scared to go there?”

Whitney shook her head. “More startled. So many people were overweight, like their diets were terrible, and some were sick or missing teeth or crippled in some way. It was like I’d discovered a different species. Then I started grasping how little we see.”

Clarice’s brow knit. “What does Peter think about all this?”

“He’s really not that political, even with the draft.” Whitney smiled indulgently. “How many radical lacrosse players do you know? Anyhow, I don’t think the antiwar movement has infiltrated Wall Street.”

Clarice clapped her forehead in mock dismay. “How could I forget that my best friend’s fiancé is now a pillar of finance?”

The jocular remark aroused Whitney’s misgivings. Charles’s initial comments about Peter had been provisionally approving. “He listens,” Charles had said, “and asks good questions. Older men like that.” But the judgment that truly mattered to Charles Dane—his own—had yet to be rendered. She dreaded the idea of Peter, found wanting, hanging on at her father’s sufferance as his own confidence shriveled and died. “I don’t know if this is Peter’s life’s work,” Whitney objected. “He’s barely started.”

“He’ll be fine,” Clarice assured her. “How could he not with your dad there to guide him? Peter’s lucky to have him, and so are you.”

For a moment, Whitney was quiet. Not for the first time, she found herself wondering if Clarice envied Whitney her father. “I always thought our dads were a lot alike.”

“In some ways,” her friend replied in a clinical tone. “My dad is one of the nicest men you’d ever meet. But why wouldn’t he be, when he inherited everything he has? Yours may have started at his father-in-law’s firm, but he made it way more successful than it ever was, and more respected, too. Pretty admirable, I think.”

Clarice was no reader of the
Wall Street Journal
, Whitney knew. This was a story told within her family—by her mother, never her father—and Clarice had heard it more than once. “I don’t expect Peter to be like Dad,” Whitney said. “I just hope our marriage is as happy as his and Mom’s.”

Perhaps she only imagined a cloud crossing Clarice’s face. But what this disquiet might involve, Whitney could not tell. “I want it all, Whitney. I never wanted to get married just for the sake of being married.”

Whitney chose not to hear this as a slight. “Some do,” she replied good humoredly. “One girl at Wheaton got engaged her
junior year, hoping to beat the rush. By that spring she’d set the wedding date for the June after graduation and planned everything out—an Episcopal Church in Vermont, caterers from New York, bride and bridesmaids’ dresses from Paris, and the honeymoon in Fiji. By summer her intended groom had recoiled in horror and dumped her. And by November she’d found another guy to take his place—same date, church, caterer, bridesmaids, dresses, and tropical island. I thought her determination pretty impressive. Though I wonder if her substitute fiancé will take their wedding personally.”

Clarice laughed. “There are better ways to get to Fiji. I hope
your
friends weren’t so desperate.”

“None ‘desperate,’ some marrying, others not.” Whitney found she did not wish to mention the girls off on adventures—one in the Peace Corps, another moving to Australia, a third taking off for Morocco—free to do what they wanted, with not one of them looking over her shoulder. At Rosemary Hall, she had studied the literature and geography of France, imagining living there on her own or perhaps with Clarice. Instead, she was doubling down on her parents’ life, trading a transient dream for a lasting one. “My friends run the gamut,” she concluded. “What
I
want most, I guess, is to be a good wife and mother, more aware than Mom is. I don’t think she always sees me . . .”

“Actually,” Clarice put in, “she’s a little obtuse about you both. She’s got Janine confused with Jackie Kennedy, and you with Betty Crocker.”

Whitney stood, ready to walk again. “Which makes Janine her favorite,” she responded mildly. “But Dad’s a pretty great consolation prize. More important, Mom’s a good and supportive wife. I want to be one, too—helping Peter socially, offering advice and encouragement and love, making a life for him and our kids.”

The two friends resumed walking in a hazy mist. “And that’s really
all
you want?” Clarice asked dubiously.

“Why not? I don’t need to be remarkable outside our family. It is Janine who always needs attention—not just from my mother, but
the world. Maybe I’m content to be the center of a family because I never felt like the center of my own.”

Having said this, Whitney realized how true it was. But the troubled look in Clarice’s eyes did not seem aimed at Whitney. “I’m sure families look different from the outside,” she said at last. “But you’ve got your father, and you always knew that he’d make sure nothing ever went wrong, no matter what he had to do. Compared to that, your vain and flighty sister doesn’t matter.”

There was something nagging at Clarice, Whitney was suddenly sure—not envy over Peter, or regret over their lost trip—but maybe something within her own family, perhaps concerning her own father. Whatever it was, Whitney had begun to feel a watchful coolness beneath Clarice’s easy manner, as though this clever girl felt the need to start looking out for herself.

“If real families were what Rockwell paints,” Whitney contented herself with remarking, “there’d be no work left for psychiatrists or novelists.”

Her expression still abstracted, Clarice did not respond before glancing at her watch. “We’d better change,” she said abruptly, “before your dad and Peter show up. We’re celebrating your engagement, remember?”

Four

That evening, the Dane family gathered at their summer home to mark the engagement of their younger daughter.

A sprawling white-frame structure from the late nineteenth century, topped by an atelier, it had been purchased in the twenties by Whitney’s grandfather and renovated by her parents, who had modernized the kitchen and added a spacious sunroom and screened porch. Some of the original furnishings still remained, and the pieces Whitney’s parents had added—wing chairs, couches, paintings of pastoral scenes, and carefully chosen antiques—made little concession to the more casual Vineyard style. Her father’s distinctive improvements were high windows that offered a sweeping view of the grounds and ocean, and a guesthouse for the grandchildren that Charles and Anne so fervently anticipated, to the point of promoting a jocular competition between Janine and Whitney for the honor of starting the next generation. Looking at the familiar faces as they gathered around the polished mahogany table—her family expanded by Clarice and Peter—Whitney felt the glow of knowing that she, not her sister, was the reason for this
night. Then Janine—late as usual—burst into the room, seizing the attention of all.

Unlike Whitney, she had perfect posture that accented her willowy figure, an incandescent smile she could switch on and off, and a way of tossing her head back, as now, to display her perfect cheekbones and tawny mane of hair. Perhaps only Whitney and Clarice knew that Anne had purchased her daughter’s perfect nose from a Park Avenue plastic surgeon, sparing Janine the curse of her father’s more prominent one. After giving Peter a quick but warm kiss on the lips, which she proclaimed “sisterly,” she air-kissed Clarice. With a certain lack of enthusiasm, Clarice responded, “If it isn’t the ‘late Miss Dane,’” before adding, “dazzling, as always.”

“Oh,
you
are,” Janine replied airily, “I’m so skinny I could shower in the barrel of Daddy’s hunting rifle.” She followed this persiflage with a glance at Whitney. “Of course the dresses I model aren’t made for normal girls.”

“Only for goddesses,” Whitney agreed.

With a trilling laugh to acknowledge the truth of this, Janine glanced around the table. “Shouldn’t we be drinking champagne?” she asked her father. “You’re finally marrying one of us off, and it’s my little sister. I need something to take the edge off my insecurity.”

Even Whitney smiled at Janine’s self-deprecation, so clearly crafted to suggest that it was nonsense. Glancing at Clarice, Whitney caught her friend coolly appraising Janine above the perfunctory play of lips. “You missed cocktail hour,” Charles observed good-humoredly. “Doesn’t that Tiffany watch also tell time?”

“Oh it does, Dad. Central Time.”

Her father chuckled indulgently. “You’re in luck, dear. As you’ll note from the crystal, Mattie will be serving champagne. Now that you’re here, we can all sit down.”

Clarice sat across from Whitney, tan and trim in her sleeveless dress, the picture of a well-bred New Englander. Wearing a navy-blue blazer identical to her father’s, Peter evoked an acolyte, taking in everything around them but, especially, Charles. To Whitney, this was a touching reminder of how young she and her fiancé were, and
the role her father had come to play in Peter’s life. His own father had died of a heart attack when Peter was fourteen, leaving his son well provided for, but without much guidance from a feckless mother stunned by her husband’s death. Whatever her misgivings about his new employment, that Peter gravitated toward Charles was a gift to them both.

Her mother sat at the opposite end of the table, seated nearest Janine in an unspoken affinity group, her blond hair a perfectly coiffed artifice, her fine features flawed only by the slight bump in her nose, a blemish she had not permitted Janine. Anne’s rationale had been that Janine was a photographer’s model, occasionally appearing in magazines and more often the society pages, having developed an uncanny talent for striking a pose. But Anne’s motives, Whitney perceived, went deeper than a career Janine would drop once she found a man who deserved her. Their entwinement seemed to have begun at her sister’s birth, spawning Anne’s current absorption in Janine’s life, beneath which Whitney sensed an anxious need for Janine to epitomize the feminine role Anne embraced so completely. Whitney had once hoped to feel closer to her mother. But once Janine turned sixteen, Anne had focused on her sister’s boyfriends, social life and sense of fashion, the vibrancy and allure she so often praised. Now she imagined Janine marrying someone prominent and powerful, a glamorous partner in a public life.

By contrast, Whitney had drawn her mother’s attention chiefly because of her intermittent problems with weight. Nor did Whitney, who enjoyed books and literature, share her sister’s and mother’s interest in clothes or interior design, or in the artful arrangement of atmosphere, seating and guests that comprised the perfect dinner party. Whitney had come to accept that she would never quite gain Anne’s approval, and thus might always feel a little outside the charmed circle of her parents and Janine.

At times Charles seemed to sense this. Though his tastes in books were those of a practical man—contemporary history or politics or business—he sometimes took her to readings by female writers which Whitney sensed he cared nothing about, asking her opinion
so gravely that she wanted to hug him. More recently, he had come to the father-daughter dance at Wheaton, where dads dressed in tuxedos and became their daughters’ dates for the weekend, a hoary tradition which excluded mothers and moved a suitemate to remark, “Paging Dr. Freud.” But Whitney was proud of how pleased Charles looked, how other men deferred to him, and most of all, how attentive he was—as if, for once, no one else mattered. Instead of an odd memory, this became one of her warmest.

As Charles stood to offer a toast, Whitney gazed at him in the flickering candlelight with unalloyed affection. Beneath thick, curly chestnut hair barely flecked with gray was the countenance she had always loved, round and ruddy, featuring large brown eyes which could move from commanding to attentive to humorous at will. The planes of his face were broad, his slightly cleft chin pleasantly plump, reminding Whitney that she had always resembled her father rather too closely, her mother not at all. Were there perfect justice, she sometimes thought, she would have been his son—perhaps a business partner to be—rather than the younger, plainer daughter he praised for her stability and common sense.

These traits radiated from Charles himself, along with his self-confidence, keen mind, and the relentless ability to forge his path. To Whitney he epitomized an investment banker as she imagined the breed—a man of wisdom without illusions, cool headed and decisive, with a sense of probity that served him for the long haul. Working his way through school he had learned that time was precious, and became foresighted and proactive, never surprised or out of control. When Whitney went off to Rosemary Hall, he had told her, “Organize your time, and husband your resources. If I had to stay up the night to before an exam, I’d already fallen short. It’s as big a sin to be surprised by your own life as it is to let other people define it.”

To Whitney’s knowledge, the adult Charles Dane had never failed to control his own destiny, never allowed any obstacle to deter him. Along the way he built Padgett Brothers, her maternal grandfather’s firm, into a power second to none. Charles had been born on the
outside, without resources, and he was single-mindedly determined that no one in his family would ever feel as he had.

Now, as she had seen him do many times before, he looked to his right and left, silent until the others turned to him. Then he told them, “I look at this family tonight—including Peter and Clarice—and feel more fortunate than I can ever say.”

His voice thickened with emotion as he gestured to indicate their surroundings. “All of this,” he continued, “and whatever success I’ve enjoyed, would be nothing without you. Family alone is the true measure of a life.” Meeting Anne’s eyes, he added softly, “And of a marriage.”

Across the table, Clarice watched him intently. “It all started,” he went on, “with my brilliance—or sheer luck—in persuading Anne Padgett to marry me.

“When I doubted myself, she was there.

“When I was at odds with a superior, or a partner, she would seat him beside her at a dinner party, always knowing the perfect thing to say, the right time to listen, easing my way without seeming to try.

“When I worked to build the life I wanted for Janine and Whitney, Anne made certain that they were safe, secure, and healthy in mind and body.” As tears misted her mother’s eyes, Whitney dismissed her own petty feelings of neglect. “By saying that life is nothing without family,” Charles said emphatically, “I’m also saying that I’d be a far lesser man without Anne. For that I will be forever thankful. And so,” he told Peter, “will you.”

As Peter smiled, her father faced Whitney. “You have a fine mind, a great heart, and a strong character. You will be the core of a new family, true north for your sons or daughters. And if my experience is any guide, you’ll work more than a few improvements on your husband.” Amidst appreciative chuckles, he added dryly, “Not that you aren’t perfectly adequate, Peter.”

“I will admit to a few misgivings,” Charles elaborated with mock sternness. “You’re too tall, more than a bit too good-looking, and far too adept at snagging a lacrosse ball. By comparison I’m shorter, stouter, and have what some tart-tongued girl once called the face
of an amiable peasant. Most embarrassing, you threaten to eclipse my lifetime quest to lay a golf club on a stationary ball. Whoever contrived evolution ignored the concept of simple fairness.”

Whitney glanced at her mother, who smiled back in complicity. That Charles did not mean a word of this self-depreciation did not detract from its charm—as Anne often said, her husband excelled at playing Cary Grant. Then Charles addressed Peter with renewed seriousness. “Truth to tell, I’m feeling especially lucky in you. Given the qualities of my daughters, I never regretted not having a son. But now I have one—a companion in arms, and someday a partner.” His tone lightened again. “Not to mention a much needed source of gender balance in a household where I’ve felt bound hand and foot like Gulliver among the Lilliputians. And Whitney’s mother and I can hardly wait to meet the children who will be the joyous culmination of a life well lived.” Extending his glass, he concluded, “On our behalf, I wish you, Peter, and you, Whitney, all the happiness we’ve enjoyed—and more.”

As the others raised their flutes of champagne, Whitney felt a lump in her throat. “I don’t know what to say,” she managed. “But if we can be like you and Mom, we’ll feel incredibly lucky.”

As her father’s eyes lowered, a sign of emotion, Clarice appraised him over the rim of her glass, reminding Whitney of the envy she sensed in her friend. Then Peter joked appreciatively, “Is it too late to ask you to be my best man?”

“
And
give away the bride?” Charles rejoined. “That would require a certain agility. Though I’ve always tried to make my own rules.”

“You don’t know how true that is,” Whitney told Peter. “Best to keep him in his place.”

“Don’t be hasty,” Charles admonished them. “I didn’t want to tell you until I was sure, Peter. But the head of the Connecticut National Guard is a neighbor in Greenwich. I’ve spoken to him, and there seems to be a place for you. The firm will give you whatever time you need to fulfill your obligation.”

Stunned, Whitney saw Peter’s shoulders sagging with relief. “Thank you, sir.”

“I didn’t want you to worry,” Charles told Whitney in a gentler voice. “Too many friends died in my own war, leaving widows and sometimes children. To see that happen to you would break my heart.”

A wave of gratitude overcame Whitney. Seeing Clarice’s ironic smile at her, she briefly wished she had known this before canceling their trip, then had the stray, superstitious fear that some less fortunate young man might die in Peter’s place. But such thoughts were unfair to Peter, and to the father who must love her as much as she loved him. Once again, Charles had arranged life for the benefit of those within his charge. “Thank you, Dad,” she echoed.

At the corner of her vision, she saw Janine pour herself a glass of wine.