For Whitney, the hours and days that followed were a blur.
Returning to the house, she checked the television and learned that Robert Kennedy still lived. Headed to her bathroom to splash water on her face, she encountered Janine coming down the stairs.
Without makeup, her sister looked wan and tired. Giving Whitney a brief guarded look, she began chattering as though nothing had happened. Before Whitney could break in, the private phone line in Janine’s bedroom started ringing. Flustered, she ran to pick it up, closing the door behind her.
Whitney paused, considering whether to confront Janine. In moments, she burst out of her room, jangling with anxious energy. “Do you know where Mom is?”
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” Janine said with a smile that resembled a nervous tic. “They need me in Manhattan for a photo shoot, that’s all.”
Something in her manner evoked a lie told by a child. But Whitney had no basis for probing this, and lacked the heart to try.
“Good luck,” she began, but Janine was already hurrying down the stairs.
Following, Whitney found Peter at their door. Enveloping her in a wordless hug, he held her until, in her sadness and confusion, Whitney began to cry. “It’s okay,” he murmured. “Everything will be okay.”
For hours he watched the news with her, quiet and uncomplaining. Though not himself drawn to Bobby, he was appalled by the shooting and solicitous of the grief Whitney herself could not explain. At dinnertime he brought them trays of food, staying into the night until she encouraged him to get some sleep.
Whitney was alone when, in the early morning hours, Bobby’s press secretary reappeared before the cameras, his shoulders slumped in terrible weariness. He briefly bowed his head before speaking.
Senator Robert Francis Kennedy died at 1:44 a.m. today, June 6, 1968. He was forty-two years old.
Whitney covered her face. Instinctively she recalled hearing about the death of President Kennedy, then that of Martin Luther King. She had a shamed, mordant thought—the next time someone murdered a leader she cared about, it was better to be with a crowd of friends. Then she began to cry.
In the morning Peter found her there, eyes bleary from a fitful sleep. When they returned to the guesthouse, Whitney tried to make love. But the act felt mechanical and detached, and she could find no solace in it.
She was just tired, she told him. But it was Peter who fell asleep.
Awakening to sunshine, Whitney tried to remember her own good fortune. She was surrounded by people she loved and who loved her, the touchstones of the life still awaiting. To Peter and her family, she realized, she must surely seem deranged. It was not as though she had given Bobby this much thought when he was alive.
“I understand,” he reassured her. “His wife’s a widow now, and all those kids don’t have a father. I remember losing my dad, and wondering why. But no one had an answer.”
Ashamed, Whitney realized that she had not—at least consciously—thought of this at all. Instead, she had felt that Bobby’s death was something that had happened to her, which, in some indefinable way, would change the world in which they, and their own children, would live. Whatever the cause, she could not turn away from the rituals of death—images in black and white, the stoic grace that carried his surviving brother through the eulogy. Only at the end, quoting the lines Bobby had used to conclude so many speeches, did Edward Kennedy’s voice crack.
Some men see things as they are, and say “why?” I dream things that never were and say “why not?”
Transfixed, Whitney watched the funeral train from New York to Arlington Cemetery, the crowds along the right-of-way paying witness to hope lost. At length Charles ventured in a kind, paternal tone, “This is a terrible thing, I grant you. But for the last few days, you’ve been sleepwalking through life, and all but ignoring Peter. All of us search for some meaning in the senseless, some larger force at work. But here, there isn’t anything to point at.” He hesitated before continuing more quietly. “Except, perhaps, that the equally senseless murder of Jack Kennedy, and the emotions Bobby evoked, made killing him the holy grail for the angry or unstable. Were I as malevolent as some acquaintances I don’t particularly admire, I’d say that the hubris of Joseph Kennedy spawned an ongoing Greek tragedy that he’s still watching from his wheelchair. What I do believe is that there’s been enough—for this country and for his family.”
To Whitney, this remark seemed subtly wrong, as though her father were blaming the victim for evoking passions of which he disapproved. But she had no heart to respond.
On Sunday, Charles and Peter left for Manhattan, both with a kiss from Whitney. “Thanks for understanding,” she told her fiancé. “When you come back next weekend, I’ll be a normal girl.”
But as he climbed in the taxi with her father, Whitney suddenly felt abandoned—even by Clarice, who had called to say she was off to visit friends on the East Coast. In the glow of a candlelit dinner, Whitney allowed her mother to lead her through the menu for her wedding, oddly grateful for a quotidian distraction that so obviously pleased Anne. “It’s so nice to see you becoming yourself,” Anne hopefully remarked, and Whitney assured her that she was fine.
But she wasn’t, quite. And so the next morning Whitney drove to Dogfish Bar.
The spot was down a mile of dirt road in an isolated section of Gay Head. A footpath through scrubby brush and sea grass led to a mile of sand and half-buried rocks, stretching toward the variegated clay promontory where the Gay Head lighthouse stood, a distant spike against the light blue sky. As often, and as she wished, Whitney was alone.
On some mornings she would swim the bracing waters of the sound, made more tranquil by a sandbar. But today she brought her journal.
This practice had started with the professor who, having discerned a talent Whitney doubted she possessed, had urged her to record her thoughts in order to discover them. Once written, he said, they were there—to be retrieved, rewritten, and polished for whatever use she chose.
But he had also given her some tools. Under his tutelage, she discovered women who had become exemplary writers—Carson McCullers, Eudora Welty, Katherine Anne Porter, Mary McCarthy, and before them, Edith Wharton—as well as John O’Hara, James Gould Cozzens, and Louis Auchincloss, all of whom she admired for their ability to convey human behavior so subtly yet so well. The discipline of regular writing, her professor insisted, would develop her own gifts of illumination. Though painfully aware of her deficit in wisdom and experience, she had started keeping a diary.
Sitting with it open in her lap, she gazed out at the sound and pondered the boundaries of her life. The world in which she had grown up was comfortable and happy, one that she had never questioned. The changing manners and mores she had encountered in college were, she understood, a small repudiation of that world, in which she had gingerly participated by dressing casually, sleeping with Peter, and, more substantively, tutoring in Roxbury. But even that did not put her at odds with Charles and Anne—while they worried for her safety, they could not quarrel with her desire to help a disadvantaged boy. Torn between the rebellious fervor of those classmates who protested Vietnam or segregation, and Charles’s greater knowledge and forbearance, she remained largely outside the ferment of her time in school.
This morning, however, she felt strangely transformed. No doubt this was foolish, even narcissistic. But she could not avoid sensing that the death of Robert Kennedy had caused some deeper change in her, though she did not know what it was. All that she could do was put words to whatever might emerge.
For a time she stared at the blank pages, pen in hand. At last, she began to write.
On the surface, everything is the same. I admire my father. I love my family. Clarice is still my closest friend. I’m planning my wedding, and the start of the wonderful marriage I know I can create with Peter. I have everything I could need or want, and the life ahead of me I’ve always imagined.
And yet.
What is happening to me? I wonder. Part of it may be Janine. She’s in trouble, I’m sensing, and not just because of what I saw the night Sirhan shot Bobby Kennedy. It’s more the instinct that she’s at the core of some imbalance within our family, which causes us to act out certain carefully-wrought illusions, comforted but circumscribed by our own desires to see each other as we wish. That’s common, I suppose, and rarely dangerous to anyone. But I’ve begun to worry that some difficulty may be awaiting us in the ambush of time.
Maybe that’s stupid and portentous. Maybe it’s just me—or Bobby’s death, disturbing the chemistry of my all-too-unformed brain. Perhaps that’s why I’ve begun to wonder why I don’t speak out more often. I’ve started feeling a tectonic plate inside me, slipping ever so slightly, and it scares me. It’s like being a child again, afraid of the dark because of whatever you may only be imagining. No doubt childish superstition is not confined to children. Still, it feels like something is about to happen to me, and I don’t know what it is.
Pensive, Whitney closed her diary.