Approaching the guesthouse, Whitney saw a light inside and, through a window, the silver glow of a television. Relieved yet unnerved, she hesitated, then knocked on the door.
In the silence that followed, Whitney sensed him deciding whether to answer. Then his rough voice came through another window cracked open to admit the cool night air. “Let yourself in.”
He was sitting in the dark, a bottle of whiskey beside him, staring at clips of Robert Kennedy moving inexorably toward his death. “I came to watch with you,” she said.
He shrugged, still fixated on the screen. Whitney sat on the couch, as far from him as she could, until the film was over.
Instead of placating the dissidents, it unleashed a wave of mass emotion—delegates standing on chairs and holding signs proclaiming BOBBY, WE MISS YOU. When the chairman of the convention tried to gavel them down, they responded with repeated stanzas of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” voices rising in a mutiny that showed no sign of stopping. Ten minutes passed, then ten more, fueling a pulsating outcry of defiance against Humphrey, Daley, the police, and all the forces determined to control the city and send them home with nothing. The hall seemed like a tinderbox.
Quietly, Whitney said, “I’m glad you didn’t go.”
“I couldn’t. I didn’t have the heart for it.”
On the screen the Kennedy delegates were singing, chanting, stomping on the floor, their caged energy building. Trying to drown them out, the mayor’s forces began shouting from the gallery, “We love Daley, we love Daley, we love Daley . . .”
As if on signal, their shouting stopped. A black man appeared on the podium, asking for a moment of silence in memory of Martin Luther King. There was a murmur of confusion until, from respect for another murdered leader, the demonstration of love for Robert Kennedy dwindled like the slow leak of a tire.
“I guess King still has his uses,” Ben said bitterly, then continued in a softer voice, “From the day he was shot, I started watching the crowds, wondering who’d come for Bobby. A few days later we entered a one-story town in Indiana, and saw police snipers on the rooftops overlooking the square where Bobby spoke. When I asked a cop if there’d been some kind of threat, all he said was, ‘We just want to make sure he leaves here the same way he came in.’ Bobby felt it, too—you could see it in his eyes. But he kept on riding in open convertibles, letting people see him.
“That last week in California was like a fever dream—the crowds, the screaming, the desperation of whites and blacks and Hispanics reaching out for him. In Los Angeles, someone put a kid in his arms as we passed, this pretty black girl of maybe five. There’s this craziness all around us and she’s just sitting in Bobby’s lap, holding a stuffed rabbit while he whispers in her ear, like nothing matters to him except what’s going on with this kid. Finally, he gets her to remember her phone number and address, tells the driver to stop, and asks me to find a cop to make sure she gets home safely. When the car started moving, he was still looking back at her. It was the last time I ever rode with him.”
“Were you there?” Whitney asked hesitantly. “When it happened, I mean.”
Still staring at the screen, Ben nodded mutely. “After his victory speech,” he said at last, “I expected him to wade through the crowd, like he always did. Instead someone told him to take a rear passageway out of the hotel. So Bobby and his bodyguards go down a hallway past a serving kitchen, with me trailing behind him.” In profile, Ben’s eyes moistened almost imperceptibly. “I see him stop to shake hands with a dishwasher, then hear a sound like dry wood snapping. Suddenly I can’t find him, and there’s chaos and screaming all around where Bobby was standing. When I get there, Ethel’s kneeling over him. For an instant I can see the look in his eyes, aware but unsurprised, like he was thinking, ‘so this is it.’ Then his bodyguards closed around, and they took him away. It was the last time I prayed for anyone, or ever will.”
Her throat constricted, Whitney found nothing to say.
Reaching for the bottle, Ben resumed staring at the convention’s heartless pageantry, the cameras trained on Daley as he scanned the floor with the satisfaction of an oligarch certain of his power. At last, Hubert Humphrey came to the podium, looking as happy as anyone could manage amidst the violence in the streets, the thwarted longing for Robert Kennedy inside the hall.
“Are you sure you want to watch this?” Whitney asked.
“It’s the new reality,” he answered.
“Rioting, burning, sniping, muggings, traffic in narcotics, and disregard for the law,” Humphrey was declaiming in his pipe organ voice, “are the advance guard of anarchy, and they must and will be stopped . . .”
Daley’s galleries released a full-throated roar, drawing from their nominee an incongruous look of delight. Then he launched into what sounded, at least to Whitney, like some nightmare amalgam of hackneyed Fourth of July speeches.
“Once again, we give our testimonial to America. Each and every one of us in our own way should reaffirm for ourselves and our posterity that we love this nation, we love America.” Invoking Democratic presidents like a litany of saints, he concluded with Lyndon Johnson. “And tonight, Mr. President, I say thank you. Thank you, Mr. President . . .”
“For making me a eunuch,” Ben muttered with bottomless disdain.
But Humphrey’s pieties continued unabated. “We are, and we must be, one nation, united by liberty and justice for all, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all . . .”
“And Wonder Bread,” Ben added, “which builds strong bodies twelve ways.”
“With the help of that vast, unfrightened, dedicated, faithful majority of Americans,” Humphrey effused, “I say to this great convention tonight, to this great nation of ours, I am ready to lead America . . .”
He was in a bubble, Whitney thought, more otherworldly and horrific for the violence outside. She could not easily imagine how Ben felt.
The telephone rang. Abruptly, he got up to answer, listening intently before murmuring, “Jesus Christ . . .”
For the next few moments, Ben said little. Hanging up, he stood there, arms folded tightly, staring at the floor.
“What is it?”
At first, he did not answer. “That was a friend, a Kennedy guy who went to Chicago. While Humphrey was bloviating there was another riot at the Hilton, worse than last night. Seth got caught between the cops and the hotel.”
“Is he all right?”
“Except for a split lip and two missing teeth. Some guy from the McCarthy campaign pulled him into the lobby, still puking from the tear gas, then took him up to a hotel room fifteen floors up. From there he could see everything. A man carrying a woman with her skull cracked open until the cops pummeled them to the ground; people begging for mercy as police beat them to a pulp; more cops clubbing anyone with a camera; waves of cops in blue helmets trampling helpless kids. Even that far up Seth could hear clubs cracking skulls and smell the mace and tear gas. He says the floor of the hotel room was like a MASH unit, people lying there bleeding onto the carpet.” He stopped, then finished with acidic quotation of Hubert Humphrey’s speech, “‘Once again, we give our testament to America . . .’”
Whitney stood, walking toward him. “I’m sorry.”
For the first time Ben looked into her eyes. “For what?”
“That it ended this way for you.” She hesitated. “For all of us.”
Wordless, he stared at her. “Oh, well,” he responded tonelessly. “Life will go on for you.”
Rebuffed, Whitney turned away. “I’d better go . . .”
“Damn you,” he said under his breath. “Damn you, Whitney Dane.”
Startled, she looked up at him, shaken by the intensity in his eyes. Placing his hand behind her neck, Ben pulled her face to his.
In her confusion, Whitney did not pull away. She felt the warmth of his lips, her blood rushing, the world closing down. Instinctively, she shut her eyes.
She was kissing him back now, she realized, their tongues touching, bodies pressed against each other’s. A last protest from deep in her core caused Whitney to pull back.
“My God, Ben—what am I doing?”
He gazed at her, breathing hard, hands clasping her waist. “What you want to do.”
“I can’t . . .”
Tearing herself away, Whitney hurried through the door.
Blindly, she rushed toward home, the air chilling the flush on her skin, tears of shock stinging her eyes. She felt as though the earth had opened up beneath her.
Her mother had left the porch light on. She headed toward it, legs still weak from panic and desire. She forced herself to slow, fighting to compose herself, then entered the house.
Her mother was in the living room, dressed in a chiffon robe. “Where have you been?” she asked in a tight voice. “When I knocked on your bedroom door, you weren’t there.”
Whitney had no answer to give. “Sorry if I worried you.”
Anne gazed up at her. More quietly, she said, “You look a mess, Whitney. Is there anything we should discuss?”
“No. Nothing.”
Without awaiting an answer, Whitney went to her room.
Undressing, she lay in the dark, a stranger to herself, bereft in her solitude, yet grateful for it.
Who am I? she wondered. But all that came to her was the warmth of Ben’s lips, the press of his body.
Instinctively, Whitney touched herself.
Ben came to her, as he had with Peter inside her. She felt her body tighten, seeking him again. The climax came in waves, leaving her limbs slack, the warmth of her release commingling with shame.
Please, she told herself, don’t do this to yourself. Don’t do this to Peter.
She had to see him. She did not know what she would say or do. But she could not stay here, or something irrevocable would happen. Perhaps it already had, for Whitney no longer knew herself.