Later that week, Charles returned and, as he often did, sipped scotch while he watched Huntley and Brinkley on the evening news. Sitting with him, Whitney riffled the latest Time until a film clip of Resurrection City caught her attention.
A makeshift encampment on the Washington Mall, it was an attempt by the poor to dramatize their plight. “How will this change their lives,” Charles inquired aloud, “and what are they teaching their children? That government has all the answers?”
But the scruffy campsite spoke to Whitney’s sympathies. “If they didn’t do this, maybe we wouldn’t think of them at all.”
Her father shook his head. “Maybe not. But if they don’t want to improve themselves, what can anyone else do to help? This is just a sideshow, an excuse for the radical young to pursue their own destructive purposes.”
Instinctively, Whitney thought again of Bobby Kennedy and the wounded young man she had encountered on the beach. Had her father always been this conservative? she wondered. Or had he acquired his beliefs from the moneyed classes he had joined upon marrying Anne, applying his keen intelligence until he could articulate them more clearly than his mentors? Whatever the case, it seemed that her father was passing his own views on to Peter. She wouldn’t have minded if, now and then, her fiancé gently disagreed with Charles. But it was not in his nature, and she was lucky they were as fond of each other as she was of seeing them together.
“I don’t think we can ignore them,” she told Charles, and let the subject die.
After dinner, Whitney retreated to her bedroom, her sanctuary since childhood, listening to a rock station from the Cape, the earthy growl of Janis Joplin followed by Aretha Franklin’s bluesy urgency:
I’m about to give you all my money
And all I’m askin’ in return, honey
Is you give me my propers when you get home . . .
Whitney found the lyrics both stimulating and unsettling—was that all the black woman of the song had to look forward to? But the propulsive drive Aretha gave the lyrics pulled her in. Then her mother peeked through the door.
“What is all this gutter yowling?” she inquired dryly. “Does someone have appendicitis?”
Whitney summoned her best deadpan look. “Aretha just wants her propers when she gets home. Didn’t you ever sing that to Dad?”
Her mother looked faintly amused. “I really didn’t have to,” she said with a certain maternal reserve. “On a tangent of that, and somewhat more pressing, I’ve been thinking about your wedding.”
“Really, Mom? When did you start?”
Anne’s perfunctory smile, a signal that she got the joke, also suggested her inability to change. “I was merely wondering if all the bridesmaids have been fitted for their dresses. As I recall, Julie hadn’t.”
“She has now, I’m pretty sure. That leaves only Janine.”
Anne’s expression became slightly more remote. “I do hope Julie doesn’t gain more weight,” she went on. “Sometimes I think she needs someone to take a greater interest in such things.”
The remark touched a psychic nerve, causing Whitney to wonder if this were her mother’s intent. “I don’t think Julie’s up for adoption, Mom, and she and her mother seem to be just fine. So you’ll have to make do with Janine and me. Do you happen to know if she’s been fitted yet?”
“You know how busy she is,” her mother said dismissively. “I’m sure she’ll get to it soon. I just hope she’s not too hurt about not being your Maid of Honor.”
It was a reflex of her mother’s, Whitney thought, to deflect unwelcome subjects with a witch’s shaft of guilt. “Clarice is my closest friend, and Janine’s had eighteen years to get used to it. What with the vibrancy of her own life, I’m sure this is merely a leaf scar.”
The veiled sarcasm was delivered so blandly that Anne hesitated before saying, “As your mother, I thought it would be nice, that’s all.”
“Well,” Whitney rejoined philosophically, “at least Clarice isn’t fat. I just worry she’ll look so stunning that I’ll be overshadowed.”
“Clarice is lovely,” her mother said stiffly. “But she’s hardly Janine.”
Lost in their sparring was any assurance from Anne that Whitney would not be overshadowed. It was as though her mother saw Clarice as her oldest daughter’s competition and, by extension, her own. But it was childish for Whitney to fault her, she chided herself: Anne had appeared at every school event, and was unfailing in her praise of Whitney’s attributes and achievements. It was not her mother’s fault she took such pride in Janine that her attention to Whitney felt, by comparison, like an expression of her unstinting sense of duty.
Perhaps reading her misstep in Whitney’s eyes, Anne sat on the edge of her bed. “It means so much to me that you chose to marry here. It’s where I spent the happiest years of my life—at least before I met your father, and had you girls. I was an innocent, of course, but life seemed perfect.” Her voice filled with nostalgia and regret. “My mother was alive then. I remember getting up with her each morning, just the two of us. It was her favorite time—dew still on the grass, the greenness around us fresh with newborn sun. It was a time, she often told me, when anything was possible.” Perhaps, Whitney thought, this was where she had gotten her own love of morning. With genuine feeling, she said, “I wish I could have known her.”
For a moment her mother’s eyes welled. “Oh, so do I. It was terrible watching her simply melt away.” Her eyes briefly shut. “No, ‘melt’ is too benign a word. She shriveled into herself, until I had the horrifying image of her as a mummy in a museum. I can usually manage not to think of things that are so unpleasant. But not my mother’s death.”
Whitney wondered why this subject, so seldom touched on, had arisen once again. As she took her mother’s hand, Anne told her, “You have a good heart, Whitney. Fortunately, whenever I feel like this, I can always look at her photograph—the one in the bedroom. It reminds me of how lucky I was to have her.”
The photograph was so formal that Whitney could not see the warmth so vivid in Anne’s memory, or have any real vision of her grandmother other than a faint resemblance to Janine. With a stab of resentment, Whitney thought again once more that she was last in her mother’s affection—behind Charles, Janine, and Anne’s own mother—then recoiled from her own pettiness. “I suppose,” Anne continued musing, “that’s why I feel such kinship with Peter. Some grief never ends, no matter how much you wish that. All I ever wanted was for you girls to feel secure. The way I felt before I knew that my mother was going to leave me, and there was nothing I could do.”
It was haunting, Whitney thought, how swiftly this memory could transform Anne into the heartsick girl she had been. “But you feel secure now,” Whitney said.
“Yes,” Anne responded quietly. “Thanks to your father.”
A new thought struck Whitney, a connection she had not made before. “Sometimes I worry about Peter,” she confessed. “He depends on Dad, as well.”
“Don’t worry,” Anne said firmly. “Your father will look out for Peter. And if anything ever happened to him or Peter, he’ll make sure you’re more than comfortable.”
She sounded like Clarice, Whitney thought—certain of Charles’s capacities and foresight. “I know,” she answered. But what she chose not to say was how vulnerable Peter seemed, and how uneasy this sense made her. For a strange moment, she envied her mother’s confidence in her husband’s strength of will.
They had known each other several months before Whitney fully divined the core of Peter’s doubts. It was a fresh June day of the summer before; they were walking in Central Park, carefree and at ease. Then Peter stopped abruptly, gazing at the outline of a hockey rink drained since early spring, and his face took on an unwonted cast of sadness and reflection. “What is it?” Whitney asked.
Peter shoved his hands in the pockets of his jeans. “I was thinking about my dad.”
“What was he like? You’ve never said that much.”
“That hockey rink reminded me of him. He never cared for sports—like your dad, his childhood was hard, and he worked pretty much all the time. But I loved all the New York teams, especially the Rangers. Anyhow, I was maybe ten, and dying to see the Rangers play the Blackhawks. Dad was in the middle of a trial, and wouldn’t have been interested even if he weren’t. I got so desperate I finally said, ‘But Dad—the Blackhawks have Stan Mikita.’
“‘Don’t worry, son,’ he answered. ‘If the Blackhawks take penicillin I bet it’ll go away.’ Even I knew it was funny, and I could see the humor in his eyes. I also knew that was it—no hockey game.
“He won the trial, I recall. And the night before the Rangers next game with the Blackhawks he came home with two tickets—first-row seats, right behind the Rangers bench. I don’t know where he got them, or how he even remembered. But he did.” Peter smiled at the memory. “He watched the game intently, asking questions about all the players, and who I thought was good. Mikita scored a goal, and the Rangers won in overtime. It was the best night I’d ever had.”
It struck Whitney that, however painful, these memories would make Peter a devoted father. “He sounds like a really nice dad.”
“He was a really good man,” Peter affirmed. “I remember being fourteen and coming back from Taft at Christmas with mediocre grades. He was sitting in the library reading the Sunday Times, and I slunk in with this kind of half apology—that I knew he’d had to work while he was in school, and still nearly got straight A’s, and here I was at this expensive place not doing half as well.
“My dad put down the Times and looked at me in this level way he had. ‘It’s true,’ he said, ‘I worked all the way through college until I got the scholarship to Columbia Law. People told me I’d developed character—I heard that quite a lot, actually. But I never had time to go to a single football game, and a lot fewer movies than I’d have liked. I came to think I’d developed more character than I could stand, and maybe more than I needed.’
“‘I don’t want to spoil you, Peter, and it’s true I’d like to see a little more effort. But I had too much care, too soon. It does me good to see you enjoying sports and having fun. You’ll do better next time.’ So I did. He died of a heart attack four months later.”
The story touched Whitney, all the more because it explained Peter’s affinity for Charles. Even now, she wondered if Peter should have decided to work with kids. But this was not the course he had chosen, the one taken by his surrogate father.
The next morning, Whitney took her diary to Dogfish Bar. Instead of swimming, she mused for awhile, then began to write.
It seems that my mom has tried to recreate, as best she can, the family she lost when her own mother died. But I wonder if she’s almost as vulnerable as she was then. I can’t imagine how devastated she would be to think that she had failed with any of us, most of all Janine.
Lately, I find myself asking if she worried less about me because she didn’t need to—that she sensed something in my sister as brittle as Janine felt to me when I was hugging her that night. If so, perhaps Mom’s obsession with Janine masks fears she can’t admit, especially to herself.
Maybe that’s jealousy couched as wishful thinking. But ever since that night I’ve wondered if Janine is more deserving of pity than envy and, perhaps, knows it.
She paused, watching a mist hanging over the sandbar. It was some moments before she began to write again.
It also seems clear that Janine wishes this were her wedding, not mine. But my parents worry for me, as well. Maybe by giving Peter a job and protecting him from the draft—and more than that, by serving as a second father—Dad is also assuring a solution to what Mom sees as the one area in my life, as she understands it, where I might need help. Finding the right husband.
This new thought, commingling warmth and humiliation, caused Whitney to put down her pen. Only then did she sense someone standing behind her.
With seeming nonchalance, Benjamin Blaine said, “Hope I’m not interrupting.”
Startled, she answered, “Didn’t you kind of expect to?”
His eyes glinted at this. “Which means ‘yes, you are, and it’s annoying.’”
She put down her journal. “I’ve had my great thoughts for the day. So it’s really not that annoying.”
“Good to know. I just wanted to ask if you feel like sailing, and then I’ll be on my way.”
Whitney felt torn. She wouldn’t mind sailing, and could not find a graceful reason to refuse. “When?” she asked, buying another moment to calculate how to avoid this stranger who kept throwing her off balance.
Perhaps he looked amused because he understood this. “Anytime,” he said easily. “Ever sail to Tarpaulin Cove?”