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?”