Loss of Innocence (4 page)

Five

The dinner flowed easily, as did the cabernet, the conversation festive and light. Over the dessert wine, Charles turned to Peter, “It just occurred to me. If I can arrange it, would you enjoy meeting Richard Nixon?”

“How?”

“I’ve been raising a little money for him,” Charles responded comfortably. “One of the venues is a private dinner in Manhattan. I’m sure there’ll be room for you.”

This understated her father’s efforts, Whitney knew from her mother, as well as his aspirations—Charles had solicited a small fortune from friends and, though he dared not admit it, hoped for a prominent position at Treasury, perhaps even a cabinet post. “I’d like that,” Peter said appreciatively, then glanced at Whitney with a droll expression. “Do you think he can win? I know at least one person who doesn’t.”

Charles gave his daughter a quizzical look. “Why not, Whitney?”

Whitney struggled to express her sense of a man she didn’t know. “He just seems like a prisoner in his own skin, as though he has
something to hide. And when he smiles, it’s like someone is sending a signal to his brain, telling him to move his lips.”

“That’s a lot of similes for one politician,” Charles responded amiably. “In that spirit, let me try one I just heard: that watching his former opponent—that dunderhead George Romney—run for president was like watching a duck try to make love to a football.”

Whitney had to laugh. “All I remember is Romney saying he’d been brainwashed into supporting the Vietnam War.”

“Deadly,” Charles concurred. “Though in Romney’s case, a light rinsing would have sufficed.”

“Really,” Anne told her husband. “You’re being unkind. And that analogy about the sexual talents of ducks creates a rather unwelcome visual.”

“Agreed,” Janine said, refilling her wine glass. “Can that even be done?”

Clarice smiled at Charles. “Not easily, I imagine, and not well. But your dad is a man of wide experience.”

“With ducks?” Janine inquired innocently. “Or footballs?”

“Only with ducks,” Charles said reprovingly. “At feeding time in Central Park, when you were too little to speak. I’m growing more nostalgic by the minute.”

“You precipitated all this,” Anne pointed out.

“So I did,” Charles allowed. “But my real point that the country needs a man of judgment and experience. The last four years have unleashed a terrible restiveness: antiwar demonstrations, blacks burning their own neighborhoods after that lunatic shot King, a general erosion of the standards governing our behavior. Thank God these trends don’t include the young people at this table.”

Whitney shot a wry look toward Clarice, who ignored it. “How do you know?” she inquired of her father. “And how is electing Richard Nixon going to stop college kids from having sex or smoking pot while they watch Ronald Reagan and a chimpanzee in Bedtime for Bonzo?”

“That’s a frivolous remark,” Charles responded mildly, “if an amusing one. Reagan is governor of California, after all. As for
Nixon, he stands for traditional values—like respect for law—while the Democrats are hostage to forces that care about nothing but their own grievances, real or imagined.” His voice gained force and authority. “Have you watched those scenes in California, mobs of Mexicans and blacks nearly tearing Kennedy’s clothes off as he reaches for their hands from on open convertible? Does that seem like a president to you?”

Furtively, Whitney tried to gauge Peter’s reaction. But her fiancé regarded Charles with his usual respect. Turning to Whitney, he said, “I’m with your dad on this, Whit. Stirring people up like that is the opposite of what we need. Does that really seem like a president to you?”

“Maybe he seems like one to those ‘mobs of blacks and Mexicans,’” Whitney responded to both men. “Have either of you looked at their faces?”

“Yes, and it scares me,” Charles rejoined, then spoke more deliberately. “I know this view isn’t popular with the radical young. But blacks will get what they want, in time. Disorder only stirs up hatred.”

Glancing around the table, Whitney saw the others watching her with a look of reserve. More tentative, she asked, “How long were they supposed to wait, Dad? I mean, would you want to be black?”

“I don’t know, Whitney,” her mother interjected. “I think of Billie, our housekeeper, for whom her work is a matter of pride. What is so wrong with being a credit to one’s race, and why should that term excite derision, rather than aspiration?”

For Whitney, the mention of Billie stirred feelings she could not discuss. In her youth this practical woman had treated Whitney with watchful affection, an understanding that sometimes surpassed that of Whitney’s mother. She had a wicked sense of humor leavened with empathy—during Whitney’s touchy adolescence, Billie had taught her to dance, causing Whitney to imagine Billie’s very different world in Harlem, from which she commuted to the cosseted white enclave of Greenwich. Billie, she came to understand, was trying to compensate for her mother’s concentration on Janine.
“We just don’t know black people,” she told Anne. “We can’t sit here at this table and pretend we do.”

“But when did you become so liberal?” Janine asked.

Nettled, Whitney answered, “I’ve just been watching, that’s all. In between reading fashion magazines.”

Across the table, Clarice’s lips twitched before she glanced at Charles. “I don’t mean to irritate you,” Janine retorted. “But Dad has been watching much longer than either of us.”

“A painful truth,” Anne interposed. “Which also implicates me. But I agree with your father, Whitney. It’s deeply unsettling to watch your generation take to the streets.”

Charles nodded. “I don’t mean to sound as ancient as everyone suggests. But enduring a depression and a world war taught the value of discipline and perseverance, and of ending what aggressors start. All too often I don’t see these values in the young people who protest the war while our soldiers are fighting and dying.”

In the guttering candlelight, Whitney looked toward Clarice. “Just this afternoon, Clarice asked if I knew someone who’d actually fought in Vietnam. Does anyone here?”

“Leave me out of this,” Clarice said, raising her hands in mock surrender. “I’m a pacifist.”

A shadow crossed Peter’s face—guilt, Whitney felt certain, about the exit from danger that Charles had secured for him. Perhaps noting this, Charles told Whitney, “If it helps, I’ve told Nixon he should abolish the draft. Then all these ‘idealists’ who protest the war would return to their normal lives, leaving the fighting to volunteers.”

To the least fortunate
, Whitney wanted to retort,
and for what?
The photo of the Vietnamese president’s brother-in-law shooting a Viet Cong prisoner in the temple had jarred her deeply, and the weekly body count of enemy dead on the evening news suggested to Whitney that in only a year we had dispatched an entire country. “I don’t understand all this,” Janine was telling her. “We’re a business family, after all—we owe our existence to our grandfather’s firm, that Dad made even better. I don’t think any of us want that taken away.”

By whom?
Whitney wondered. Janine was glib, but her intellect brittle—she knew just enough about current events to slide through at a cocktail party. But she avoided serious discussion, often through strenuous, if supposedly charming, efforts to divert the conversation to herself. At bottom her political and social views were what she imagined Charles’s to be. What else could a girl do, Whitney thought acidly, when her father’s sizeable donation had slipped her into Vassar, commencing an education to which she had remained largely inured.

By contrast, Whitney deeply valued her four years at Wheaton. Granted, applying had been a last stab at pleasing her mother, a devoted alumna, who adored her time there and relived it through frequent reunions with classmates. But Whitney was also drawn by its pristinely New England campus, the oaks and evergreens amidst rolling lawns and red brick buildings with white pillars, the deeper sense that this was a place dedicated to educating bright young women barred from attending the all-male bastions of Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Dartmouth. Her first day had been somewhat disheartening: she and the other new girls wore white dresses to a convocation where Wheaton’s president, a bow-tied patrician named William Courtney Hamilton Prentice IV, told them that Wheaton’s purpose was to educate prospective mothers, the better to raise the next generation of children. No feminist, during the holidays President Prentice sat atop a platform in the gym as he read “A Child’s Christmas in Wales,” to girls in robes and pajamas. But the professors were there to encourage these women to grow. Free from the scrutiny of males, Whitney had begun to think for herself. Out in the world women faced barriers, everyone knew, but the boldest believed they could, in the words of her friend Payton Clarke, be “more than the charm on the arm,” a decorative helpmate. Whitney too had glimmers of a different life, encouraged by a creative writing professor who suggested that she should keep on writing short stories. Though Whitney could not quite believe it, she cherished the compliment.

“A business family?” she inquired of her sister. “What does that mean, exactly? I don’t remember Mom and Dad issuing me a briefcase with my diapers.”

Janine waved a hand. “You know very well what I mean.”

But do you?
Whitney wanted to ask. Janine’s fix on the world changed from moment to moment, her account of the same people and situations oscillating wildly, depending on what she wished reality to be, or how she wished others—especially Anne—to see her. It was tiresome, Whitney thought, before catching herself. It was bad enough to disagree with her father, worse to spoil this dinner by exposing her sister’s shallowness of thought. Already, Peter was fidgeting with his dessert fork.

“Janine’s right,” she told her father equably. “There ought to be some good in being older, including the graceful silence of a grateful daughter.”

“I appreciate your passion,” Charles said, his face brightening, “as well as your forbearance.” He smiled at Peter. “Whitney’s notions of equity developed early. When Janine was seven and Whitney was five, Anne and I paid Janine to watch her little sister while we went to a cocktail party next door. When Whitney found out we’d given Jeanine a quarter for babysitting her, she demanded a dime for having to be the baby.”

Whitney was never sure whether this tale was meant to indicate her jealousy, compliment her precocity, or intimate that she retained a five-year-old’s sense of justice. But everyone laughed. Squeezing her hand, Peter asked, “Is that true?”

“So I’m told,” Whitney said. “In my version, I demanded a dollar for putting up with Janine.”

At once, Whitney felt the others relax. “I almost forgot,” Charles said, absently fishing into his coat pocket to retrieve a key chain with two keys, brass and silver. He stood, placing the keys in Peter’s hand.

As the others watched, Whitney’s fiancé stared at the keys with a pleased but puzzled smile. “What are they for, sir?”

Charles shook his head. “I suggest you take Whitney to the northeast corner of Madison Avenue and Sixty-fourth. If you need a clue, look for the engraved gold plate beside the door of an apartment building. The one that reads,
MR. AND MRS. PETER BROOKS
.”

Whitney was speechless. She had imagined looking with Peter for a place in the West Village, closer to the offices of Padgett Brothers. Gazing up at Charles, Peter flushed. “I can’t think of anything adequate to say.”

Anne, Whitney realized, was studying her face. Following his wife’s gaze, Charles said in a mollifying tone, “Perhaps I shouldn’t deprive you two of the fun of house-hunting. But that’s the building where Anne and I lived until Janine was two years old. We have so many happy memories.”

“As well you should,” Janine told her father. “But the plaque should read
BIRTHPLACE OF JANINE DANE
.”

Clarice grinned at her across the table “Really, Janine, envy is so unbecoming.”

To Whitney, this seemingly flippant barb at Janine concealed an effort to dispel the awkwardness of Whitney’s silence. Catching the spirit, Janine rolled her eyes, tossing her hair in a parody of her own vanity. “Yes,” she sighed, “I suppose my matchless beauty should be enough.”

With this Whitney stifled her ambivalence, speaking the words she knew her father needed to hear. “It’s the gift of a lifetime,” she assured him. “Knowing that you and Mom started there makes it all the more special.”

With obvious pleasure, Charles raised his glass. “To the marriage of a lifetime,” he toasted.

Six

After dinner, Charles invited Peter to indulge in a snifter of Armagnac on the open-air porch—a 1923 Laberdolive from Gascony, which he and Anne had discovered while celebrating their twentieth anniversary in France, and so reserved for the most special occasions. Snifters in hand, he found Whitney gazing out the window of the dining room, and paused. “I don’t want to stifle you,” he said apologetically. “But the comfort we enjoy at our dinner table will not always be available in the social world of Peter’s business. Like it or not, he won’t be making his career among avatars of Bobby Kennedy.”

Despite his gentle delivery, Whitney felt patronized. “I know that,” she said stiffly.

“I’m sure you do,” her father responded with the same paternal calm. “Nonetheless it’s awkward to disagree with your husband in front of others, especially when it’s a matter of first impressions. Most often you’ll be the youngest woman at the table. As you and Clarice were tonight.”

Still touchy, Whitney heard—or imagined—a tacit comparison. “Clarice barely said a word.”

Charles smiled faintly. “A sign of her social intelligence. Including, I thought, one helpful intervention. She didn’t want to attenuate any discord . . .”

“Especially when she has no opinion.”

The remark was sharper than Whitney had intended. Charles regarded her closely. “As Clarice remarked to your sister, Whitney, jealousy is unbecoming—especially of your closest friend. It shouldn’t threaten you to acknowledge that Clarice has considerable tact and acuity, and deserves an enviable place in the world. Even at the price of elevating some benighted male.” He signed with resignation. “A somewhat thankless job, many say these days. But helping a husband’s career is no small thing. I’ve seen unhappy women—alcoholic, neurotic, or just plain shrill—derail a spouse at crucial moments. And others whose touch with people eases the way with such grace and subtlety that no one discerns the art in it.”

Suddenly, Whitney imagined herself in finishing school, learning to ease the way of men. “Like Mom.”

Charles gave a slight but emphatic nod. “As I made clear, I never forget what I owe her. Nor will Peter.”

Unsure of what to say, Whitney lowered her eyes. Gently, Charles kissed her forehead. “I’m very happy for you, and sorry if I upset you.” He paused again, perhaps waiting for her to speak, then went off to join Peter.

Whitney faced the living room. Clarice and Janine were there, her sister sipping port and conducting what appeared to be a somewhat one-sided conversation. Feeling Anne at her side, Whitney sensed that she was the object of a parental pas de deux. Preempting this, she inquired softly, “Have you ever felt stifled, Mom?”

Anne’s puzzled look contained a hint of asperity. “‘Stifled’?” she repeated. “Lord no. Your father has given me a wonderful life—love, children, and more privilege than even
I
could imagine. Never once have we disagreed about anything fundamental. Instead I was free to fill the role most natural to women.” Her voice eased. “To these so-called feminists, I know, that sounds like a gilded cage. But I’ve had a life any generation of women in the history of the world
would have envied—freedom from drudgery and enslavement, the dangers of childbirth, or the ravages of disease. Within my area of responsibility, I was autonomous, a full and equal partner. You and Janine, I devoutly hope, got the best of us both.”

Beneath this statement, Whitney sensed, lay an inquiry she was not inclined to acknowledge. Instead, she asked, “But when you were supervising Billie, or seeing to our activities, didn’t you ever want to be doing something else?”

“No,” Anne replied firmly. “I was doing what I wished my own mother had been able to do for me. Watching over you was all I wanted, and more than I’d had.”

Though Anne seldom spoke of it, Whitney understood that Elaine Padgett’s death from the ravages of cancer, as the fourteen-year-old girl watched with helpless dread, was central to forming the mother she knew. Curious, Whitney asked, “Was that why you and Dad had Janine so soon?”

Perhaps because of Whitney’s quiet tone, or the privacy created by candlelight and shadow, Anne seemed to relax. “This may sound odd to you, but I’d wanted children for as long as I can remember. For a woman not to, I think, betrays a terrible selfishness. And once you girls were born, I had the luxury of caring more about you and your father than myself. It felt quite liberating, really.”

The remark surfaced a memory that Whitney had not parsed for years. Well short of adolescence, Janine was pushing a toy baby carriage and baby down the driveway. Watching through the kitchen window, Anne had mused to her husband, “The maternal instinct comes early, doesn’t it?” Hearing this, the child Whitney had wondered when those feelings would bloom inside her, and then wondered at Janine’s. Given that Janine often ridiculed or picked on her, Whitney hoped that she would be nicer to her kids.

“I had a professor,” Whitney told Anne, “who questioned all that. She argued that women aren’t discontent because of some personal or psychological problem, but because of societal assumptions that put them in a straightjacket.”

Her mother turned to her with eyebrows arched. “I don’t know your professor, Whitney. But I once saw Betty Friedan on television. A hideous-looking woman, obviously compensating for her unhappiness through a sharp and aggressive manner. I would have felt sad for her but for all the women she’d confused in order to justify herself. I wonder if she likes men at all.”

Though Anne was trying to be good-humored, Whitney heard an undercurrent of anger. “Professor Claymore wasn’t like that, Mom. She has a husband, but she also has a career.”

“And so do I, Whitney. But mine acknowledges that men and women are different.” She paused, her manner becoming patient and tutorial. “Early on, I set out to establish my own relationship with your father’s business associates. One way was to ferret out their interests, then ask questions that allowed them to reveal themselves.

“The men were often quite different, and sometimes difficult, which required me to be a bit of a chameleon. So it was better if whoever the man was never asked a single question about me, but left knowing that he’d had a fascinating conversation with an intelligent and sympathetic woman.” Anne smiled reflectively. “If you know men at all, you’ll be wholly unsurprised by how well that works.”

“But didn’t you ever want to tell them what you thought?”

“Why would I?” Anne’s voice softened. “However I appear, I’m a very private person. I never really wanted people to know that much about me. If you’re a woman that’s easier to get by with.”

“And men are different.”

“Oh, yes. Your dad needed to be known, and to make a name in business. Not just because he wanted to build the firm, but because that was his essential nature. He arranges his surroundings as he wants them to be.” Anne’s eyes crinkled with amusement. “In his benign way, my father said that Charles was heaven-sent to keep our family’s blood from thinning out. Looking at our family tonight, he’s certainly done that. You girls were all the credentials I ever needed.”

For an instant, Whitney chafed at the word “credentials.” But what followed was an intuitive sense of her mother’s loneliness, even her need for Janine as a surrogate. Without quite knowing why, she drew Anne to her, feeling her mother’s instinctive resistance to closeness, perhaps fear of vulnerability, before she yielded to her daughter’s embrace.

“I love you, Mom,” Whitney told her.