As they sailed toward the Vineyard, Ben kept scanning the horizon. At length, Whitney asked, “What was he like? Bobby, I mean.”
He let out some sail, catching the wind, seemingly intent on his task. Then he spoke without looking at her. “From the first time I met him, he surprised me. Before I knew it, he’d changed my life.”
To Whitney, the phrase had a valedictory sound. “Was that when you left school?”
In the silence that followed, Whitney felt that she had probed too deeply into a wound still far too fresh. Then, slowly at first, Ben described Bobby Kennedy.
For weeks, he spent long stretches passing out leaflets or going door-to-door, still keeping a toe in college. The last days of this were in Indiana, a primary bitterly contested by Eugene McCarthy and his young volunteers. Waiting for his flight back East, Ben found himself in an argument with a clutch of McCarthy kids. Kennedy was an opportunist, they complained, jumping into the race only after McCarthy had humbled Johnson in New Hampshire. Ben responded that McCarthy was lazy, arrogant, and indifferent to minorities and the poor. Then Ben looked up, astonished to see Robert Kennedy standing between two aides, watching their exchange.
He was slighter than Ben expected, with crow’s-feet of weariness that belied his youthful thatch of hair. Gazing at the McCarthy kids sitting nearest to Ben, a dark-haired boy and a pretty blond girl, Kennedy told them, “I just want to say that I admire you. You’re working hard for what you believe.”
The blond girl gave her head a shake. “You’ve got such cruddy canvassers, and you’re still ahead.”
In fascinated silence, Ben watched Robert Kennedy step from his imagining into life. “Well,” Kennedy said mildly, “you can’t blame all that on me . . .”
“I don’t know what’s happening,” the boy interrupted. “I canvassed black neighborhoods, and no one listens.”
“That’s not your fault,” Kennedy responded. “Why isn’t Senator McCarthy more persuasive there?”
“You’re a Kennedy,” the girl protested. “You have the name.”
Though this reference to his lineage seemed to make Kennedy even wearier, he answered without rancor. “That’s a tremendous advantage, it’s true. But why can’t your man go into a ghetto? Why don’t you see him in the poor neighborhoods? Can you tell the people there anything he’s done to help them?”
The students fell silent. Finally, the boy said stubbornly, “We’re sticking with him, Senator.”
“You’re committed,” Kennedy replied with rueful admiration, “and I think that’s terrific.” He inclined his head toward Ben. “At least I’ve got one friend here.”
When Kennedy faced him, Ben was struck by his eyes, gentle but intense. “You look as tired as I am. Let me buy you dinner before my plane arrives.”
Stunned, Ben went with Kennedy and his aides to find a restaurant. “What’s your name?” the senator asked.
“Ben Blaine.”
“Wasn’t very welcoming back there, was it? Sort of like being Custer at the Battle of the Little Bighorn.”
“I thought you sympathized with the Indians, sir.”
Kennedy waved a hand. “Oh, I do.” He stopped abruptly, facing Ben. “At any rate, you argued well. What are you doing for the next few weeks?”
“Whatever I can,” Ben promised. “I want to help change the country, and you’re the only one who still can.”
Ben felt Kennedy go somewhere else, his gaze remote and unspeakably sad, as though he had forgotten the three men with him. Just as Ben was feeling awkward, Kennedy suddenly asked, “Think you’d like to travel with me? If you’re not too busy, that is.”
As he spoke, Ben’s face had changed entirely. To Whitney he seemed so deeply drawn back into memory that she knew how it must feel to be twenty-two, and have a mythic figure invite you on a twisting, chaotic, and wholly uncertain ride into the unknown. Even Ben’s voice was unfamiliar, melancholy commingled with pride. “After that,” he told her. “I became what they call his ‘bodyman’—the guy who travels with him looking after things. I did anything he needed—make phone calls, track suitcases, organize his papers—from the time he got up until he went to sleep.
“We were always rushing somewhere, surrounded by people—staffers, reporters, local politicians. But every now and then he’d ask me what I thought. One day when I brought him back a sandwich, he said, ‘My brain trust tells me to cut down on campuses and ghettos—that news clips of blacks and long-haired kids will distress the middle class. What’s your wisdom on the subject?’
“Somehow I knew he needed to see these people. ‘You have to keep doing it,’ I answered. ‘That’s who you are.’
“He was quiet for a moment, and then he shrugged. ‘That’s that, I guess. I’ll let them know of your decision. But if I lose, I’ll remember whose fault it was.’” Ben paused a moment, smiling to himself as though Whitney were not there. “Afterward, I realized I’d said what he expected me to say. Not that he ever acknowledged it. Especially after the next disaster.”
You could see right away they weren’t Bobby’s people, Ben told Whitney—a crew-cut, unsmiling group of medical students, silent throughout his speech. When Kennedy invited questions, they were uniformly hostile. Finally, a cocky would-be doctor demanded, “So who’s paying for all these programs for the poor?”
Kennedy tensed, and Ben saw that he had heard enough. “You are,” he snapped, and his speech quickened with anger. “Let me say something about the tone of these questions. I look around this room and I don’t see many black faces. I don’t see many people coming from slums, or off Indian reservations. You’re the privileged ones here. It’s easy for you to sit back and say that all our problems are the fault of the federal government. But it’s our society, not just our government, that spends twice as much money on pets as on fighting poverty. You sit here as white medical students, while blacks and the poor carry the burden of fighting in Vietnam . . .”
Listening to Ben describe this, Whitney felt his anger as her own. But Bobby had made a joke of it. “Now look what you’ve made me do,” he had told Ben as they left. Then his eyes grew distant, and he added quietly, “I’ve had worse days, I suppose.”
The clouds were closer now, Whitney saw, but she was caught up in Ben’s description of a man she had never known and, equally, the way remembering Robert Kenney transformed Ben’s persona. “He sounds complicated.”
Ben nodded, as if appreciating her comprehension of a man she did not know. “In the course of an hour,” he responded, “he could go from brooding to crisp to detached to funny. If he took a shine to you, you’d have these moments of connection. But he had no gift for small talk, and was never long on compliments. He just expected you’d do your job without a lot of bullshit or wasted time.” Caught again in memory, Ben’s face grew more relaxed. “Then he’d suddenly step outside the absurdities of politics in this ironic, self-mocking way. One time we landed at an airport, and there’s no one there at all. Bobby sticks his head out the door, then says to the reporters behind him, ‘There are fifty thousand people waiting,’ and peers out to take a second look. ‘Now they’ve seen me,’ he informed them, ‘and they’re screaming with anticipation and delight.’ Then he gets off the plane, waving to the empty tarmac, and flashes the victory sign.”
For a brief moment, another faint smile of reminiscence appeared at the corner of Ben’s lips. He had a writer’s gift, Whitney thought; caught in his own narrative, he could capture her as well. “At other times,” he went on, “you couldn’t reach him at all. Like whenever he went to an Indian reservation. He’d start talking about the rates of suicide among young Indians, and come out looking ravaged.
“Once we were driving away from this ghetto, and he said, ‘They should make a documentary about this place. Let some network capture the hopelessness, what it’s like to think you’ll never get out. Show a black teenager told to stay in school, looking at his older brother who can’t find a job, or a mother staying up at night to protect her children. Then ask the rest of us to watch what it means to have no hope.’”
These were the things Whitney had wondered about since going to Roxbury, but could never articulate at her parent’s dinner table. Now Robert Kennedy was dead, and she was planning her wedding. “I know this sounds stupid,” she told Ben. “But once he died, I realized there was no one like him.”
For a time, neither Ben nor Whitney spoke, as though briefly sharing a sort of kinship. Then he continued in a voice so muted that, to Whitney, it almost evoked a dream state. “We were headed to a black neighborhood in Indianapolis when we heard about Martin Luther King. Bobby went completely quiet—you knew he was thinking about King and his brother, maybe even what might happen to him. Then the police told him he shouldn’t speak, that there’d be a riot once the word was out. He got that look, and I knew he wasn’t backing off.
“The crowd hadn’t heard. When someone handed him a speech he’d scribbled down, Bobby waved it away. Then he got out of the car and climbed on the back of a flatbed truck. It was dark—only the floodlights turned on Bobby, surrounded by a crowd of black people who didn’t know what had happened.
“‘I have sad news for you,’ he started out. ‘Martin Luther King was shot and killed tonight . . . ’
For a moment, Ben half closed his eyes. “There were screams and wailing—this sound of raw pain. Then Bobby said, ‘Martin Luther King dedicated his life to love and justice between his fellow human beings, and he died in the cause of that effort.’
“The crowd went silent. ‘For those of you who are black,’ he went on, ‘you can be filled with bitterness, with hatred, and a desire for revenge. Or we can make an effort, as Martin Luther King did, to replace the stain of bloodshed that has spread across this land with love and understanding.’” Pausing, Ben shook his head in wonder. “Then he quoted Aeschylus, of all people. ‘Even in our sleep, pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart. Until in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.’
“The crowd was completely hushed. For a minute Bobby was quiet, too, then sort of willed himself to finish. ‘So I ask you to return home, to say a prayer for the family of Martin Luther King, but also for our country, a prayer for understanding and compassion. Let us dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man, and make gentle the life of this world.’”
What struck Whitney first was how well Ben remembered the words, as though he had read them many times since Kennedy’s death. To her astonishment, tears glistened in his eyes, and for a moment she thought of Peter telling her about his father. “There were riots all over America,” Ben finished. “But not in Indianapolis.” Then he added in a throwaway voice, “Anyhow, it’s all gone now.”
Any hint of tears had vanished. But to Whitney, the weight of his loss felt tangible, as if he had lost a part of himself. “Were you there?” she could not help but ask. “In Los Angeles?”
For an instant, she caught the anguish in his eyes. Then his face closed altogether. Pointing at the horizon, he said curtly, “Let’s talk about the weather. That’s what matters now.”