Loss of Innocence

by Davi Patterson, Richard North Patterson

Genres: General Fiction

Synopsis

June, 1968. America is in a state of turbulence, engulfed in civil unrest and uncertainty. Yet for Whitney Dane - spending the summer of her twenty-second year on Martha's Vineyard - life could not be safer, nor the future more certain. Educated at Wheaton, soon to be married, and the youngest daughter of the patrician Dane family, Whitney has everything she has ever wanted, and is everything her all-powerful and doting father, Charles Dane, wants her to be. But the Vineyard's still waters are disturbed by the appearance of Benjamin Blaine. An underprivileged, yet fiercely ambitious and charismatic young man, Blaine is a force of nature neither Whitney nor her family could have prepared for. As Ben's presence begins to awaken independence within Whitney, it also brings deep-rooted Dane tensions to a dangerous head. And soon Whitney's set-in-stone future becomes far from satisfactory, and her picture-perfect family far from pretty. A sweeping family drama of dark secrets and individual awakenings, set during the most consequential summer of recent American history.

Release date: August 1, 2013

Publisher: Quercus Publishing

Print pages: 370

Sample

Martha’s Vineyard September, 2011

Carla Pacelli and Whitney Dane had once loved the same man, one in his youth, the other in his final year, and had found their lives transformed. Now, forty-three years after Whitney’s fateful summer, they sat behind the guesthouse of the summer home she had inherited from her parents, gazing out at the Atlantic, Whitney pensive, Carla pregnant with her lover’s child.

Though the two women shared a quiet pleasure in the pristine August morning – a cloudless sky, light fitful breezes stirring the boughs of nearby oak trees, a thin sheen of silver-grey mist dissipating over white-capped aqua waters – Carla thought them an unlikely pair to share this history, or even this hour. A mere two years ago, Carla had been a striking presence on the screen, a lissome Italian-American brunette with a carriage that radiated grace and vitality, dark intense eyes that seemed to look through whomever they turned on. Now she had the tempered beauty of a survivor, and the directness of her gaze was leavened by self-knowledge and a trace of sadness. Her parents were working class, and, though she had trained her smoky voice to be more polished, it retained trace elements of their Mediterranean intensity. She was not lightly educated – despite her immersion in drama, she had been an exceptional student in high school, and at UCLA had a minor in psychology at which she had excelled. But because of her appearance, the impact of which obscured all else, beauty rather than intellect was what struck others at first glance, whether in person or on the screen.

Carla had been a serious actress and her skills – which she still felt under-appreciated – had focused her inherent ability to, as one network executive had put it, ‘pop through the lens into people’s living rooms’. But Carla now judged that woman an empty shell: the pressures of carrying a television series, and making movies during breaks, had led her to reach for the crutches of drugs and alcohol. The rabbit hole through which she had fallen – increasingly erratic behaviour culminating in a sojourn at Betty Ford – had dimmed her intensity and poisoned her career. The Carla who emerged from rehab discovered that her manager, a thief himself, had parked her money with another thief who made it disappear. With little but the determination to summon a stronger and more reflective woman capable of forging a new life, she had sought refuge on Martha’s Vineyard, settling in Whitney’s guesthouse through the good offices of friends.

When Carla arrived, Whitney was concluding a year in Paris, indulging her passion for French history and culture. At sixty-five, she was twice Carla’s age, and, while the deep brown eyes that were her most attractive feature lent her round face an air of perception and good humour, she had never turned heads simply by entering a room. Nor was age and appearance their only difference. Whitney was a WASP, the daughter of privilege, and spoke with the flawless, slightly arid enunciation of the East Coast patrician. An accomplished novelist, she had managed at once to be well respected and widely read, not least for her grasp of the hidden recesses of human nature, which cut so close to the bone that readers might squirm in recognition, yet lacked the cruelty that might drive them away. Though Carla had not yet mentioned this, for fear of fawning, she deeply admired Whitney’s writing – especially for its unflinching depiction of the challenges still facing women, some of which Carla knew all too well. And she could not help but envy the older woman’s air of settledness. Unlike Carla, Whitney had been disinclined to call attention to herself, preferring to let her novels speak for her. When interviewed – which she generally avoided – Whitney was tart, clear and concise. But, again unlike Carla, her personal life remained her own.

The two women had never met. This morning, on returning from Paris, Whitney had called on Carla out of courtesy and, Carla assumed, a curiosity which was exceedingly well informed – even in Europe, Carla’s life on Martha’s Vineyard had reached the tabloid media. All this because of Carla’s involvement with a married novelist who was Whitney’s age but twice as famous, whose life had ended in a fall under circumstances so murky that they had raised suspicions of suicide or murder. And so, once again, Carla found herself notorious, a fact that coloured this encounter with considerable tension. Whitney Dane would know almost everything save the reasons for her actions, and Carla could only await her judgment and, perhaps, her expulsion from her guesthouse.

At first, the subject did not arise. Instead, the two of them drank tea on the deck, the sun warming their faces. Politely enough, Whitney asked about her pregnancy, and how the guesthouse had suited her. Edgy, Carla kept waiting for the questions that never came.

Finally, she said bluntly, ‘I’m sorry I’ve become an embarrassment to you. And to say that I didn’t mean to do that sounds pathetic.’

Whitney’s smile, though ambiguous, was not unkind. ‘I understand more than you may think,’ she answered. ‘I knew him, you see.’

The Delphic remark puzzled Carla. ‘Who did not?’ she responded. ‘Even if you hadn’t been neighbours.’

Whitney’s smile diminished, and her tone flattened out. ‘Actually, we rarely spoke. At least, not for years.’

Caught up short, Carla wondered what outrage of his had provoked this. That there had been one seemed certain, but given his proclivities she was reluctant to inquire. The keen look in Whitney’s eyes revealed that she saw this. ‘No,’ she added, ‘he didn’t proposition me at a cocktail party. As one look at you confirms, his esthetic standards became more rarified. The truth is that his wife and I became allergic to each other.’ She hesitated, then finished more softly, ‘A complicated story.’

The change in Whitney’s tone – at once bitter and rueful and valedictory – pricked Carla’s curiosity. There was something this seemingly composed woman wanted to say, however reluctantly, and something else that made Carla – a stranger until now – a potential listener. ‘No surprise,’ Carla ventured. ‘He was a complex person.’

For a moment, Whitney gazed into the distance, as if at her own past. ‘So were we all,’ she said, then turned to Carla. ‘Were you in love with him?’

‘Yes.’ Intending to leave it there, Carla felt the need to explain. ‘Age softened him, and the cancer – facing death, really – sobered him. He could feel the window closing, that he’d leave nothing good behind him but the books he feared that people would forget.’ She touched her rounded stomach. ‘We were his last hope, he told me.’

‘Not his wife? What an irony for them both.’

This was said with what Carla took to be an unusual asperity, marbled with some deeper emotion she could not identify. Instinct told her to say nothing.

‘And how sad,’ Whitney added quietly. ‘The worst thing for him, I came to think, would be to face the void at the centre of his all-too-eventful life. Though he concealed that awfully well.’

With a sadness of her own, Carla remembered the man as she first knew him: his frame still robust; a full head of jet black hair streaked with grey; the aggressive prow of a nose; dark, probing eyes; the sardonic, challenging smile of a movie pirate; a baritone voice; all combined with his brusque and flavourful speech to create a persona which, as he no doubt wanted, could fill a room – perhaps, as Whitney suggested, to camouflage the scars within that Carla had slowly discerned.

Reading her face, Whitney shook her head in self-rebuke. ‘You’re the party in interest here, not me. But his death seems to have shaken me more than it should. The other day, I found myself re-reading my own ancient diary, written by a young woman who seems a stranger to me now. Page upon page was filled with him.’

‘I understand,’ Carla answered, unsure of what she was understanding save that it was important to Whitney. ‘I’ve come to know Adam, you see. We talked about his father quite a lot. Including the damage he caused within his own family.’

Whitney’s eyebrows raised. ‘Then Adam doesn’t despise you? Despite his apparent loathing for Dad.’

‘No. Adam doesn’t despise me.’

‘Nor you him, it seems.’

At this, Carla looked directly into Whitney’s face. ‘Far from it.’

Whitney tilted her head, as though considering Carla anew. ‘So where is Adam roaming now?’

‘Afghanistan. Working in agricultural assistance, he says. Not that I really believe that – there’s this sense of alertness about him, like in a given circumstance he could be quite dangerous …’

‘How like his father.’

‘I know. But with Adam, I think it’s because he has to be, for reasons he can’t reveal. Not because he wants to be.’

Whitney regarded her with deep seriousness before a smile played across her lips. ‘I haven’t seen Adam for a decade. In his twenties he seemed so like his father, ready to match himself against the world. But without the fatal product defects. Adam’s the one who might be safe to care about.’

Carla studied the deck. Softly, she answered, ‘I don’t know that yet.’

‘But you want the chance. Even though you’re carrying his brother.’

The bald statement caused Carla to flinch with embarrassment. ‘Even so.’ Hoping to move past this answer, she ventured, ‘You said that you and Adam’s father rarely spoke. But it seems you once knew him very well.’

Whitney’s eyes narrowed in reflection, and then she brushed away a tendril of steel grey hair. ‘Knew him?’ she repeated. ‘Looking back, I barely knew myself. But there came a time when I learned a great deal about us both.’

Carla watched her face. ‘If you don’t mind, I’d like to hear about it. He changed my life, after all. But there are still so many holes and unanswered questions.’

Whitney gave her a probing look. After a time, she said, ‘Yes, I suppose I do need to talk about him. And wouldn’t he be pleased at that.’ She paused, adding dryly, ‘Under your current circumstances, I don’t suppose you keep any wine around the place.’

Carla smiled faintly. ‘No. Not a good idea for me.’

Whitney sat back in her deck chair, as though trying to relax herself. ‘Then I suppose I can try without that.’

Carla waited.

Haltingly at first, then with the skill for narrative that underpinned her craft, Whitney Dane described the summer of her twenty-first year.

In June 1968, hours before the events which pierced her soul and scarred her generation, Whitney Dane would have said that her youth had been as blessed as her future promised to be. So, as she walked the beach beneath her parents’ summer home with her closest friend, Clarice Barkley – the first warming breath of spring in the air, the water of the Vineyard Sound a light, sparkling blue – this birthright informed her answer when Clarice asked curiously, ‘How are you feeling at this great crossroads of your life? Like the ingénue on the cover of American Bride? Or like you’ve been catapulted toward marriage, still clutching your diploma, wondering how you got to be a grown-up?’

The tart phrasing, displaying an ironic turn of mind that Clarice tended to conceal, made Whitney smile as she considered her answer. ‘It’s moment to moment,’ she confessed, ‘depending on how good I am at suspending disbelief. A wife and mother is what Mom is, not me. But how can I not feel lucky? And now I’ve got four months with nothing to do but plan a perfect wedding on this perfect island. Unless it rains, of course.’

‘Even then,’ Clarice answered blithely, ‘I imagine Peter will show up. He seems suitably besotted.’

Whitney paused for a moment, a swift tug of honesty surfacing from the self-doubt at her core – she had always been the smart daughter, not the pretty one, with a pleasing but unremarkable face, and a sturdy figure which had made her wonder at her genetic mismatch with her striking and willowy sister, their mother’s ideal. ‘I still can’t believe that someone like Peter is attracted to me,’ she confessed. ‘And now I’ll have a life with him.’ She glanced at Clarice, adding dryly, ‘For one shining day in late September, hopefully sunny, Janine won’t be the centre of attention.’

Clarice’s smile at this was slightly sour. ‘Not that the Crown Princess won’t try. I can imagine her using the rehearsal dinner to announce her engagement to Mick Jagger.’

Her friend’s jaundiced view of Janine warmed Whitney with its loyalty. ‘Mick Jagger?’ she responded. ‘Dad wouldn’t hear of it – you know how he is. And David Eisenhower is already taken.’

Clarice shot her a wicked grin. ‘Thank God. Imagine an entire life spent in the missionary position. Not that our princess doesn’t deserve it.’

Startled by her friend’s irreverence, Whitney laughed aloud, thinking that her luck included meeting Clarice in childhood. Among the Danes, Clarice had become the unofficial third daughter, joining them on vacations and sharing their celebrations. On the Vineyard, the Barkleys owned the property next door, and Clarice had a standing entrée to appear at dinner unannounced. At twenty-two, she retained the careless insouciance of her class, a girl for whom the laws of gravity and commerce seemed suspended – in no rush to find a job, Clarice was spending the summer after her graduation from Wellesley on the Vineyard, sailing and swimming and playing tennis, with trips off-island to shop or see friends. At its end, she would be Whitney’s maid of honour.

Clarice was a popular choice. Everyone seemed to like her – except, perhaps, Janine. Like Peter, Clarice was energetic, with a sense of fun, and, on the surface, disinclined to brooding or introspection. She had a pretty, sunny appearance – Grace Kelly with a touch of Doris Day – and people always invited her to their parties; her demeanour was cheerful, her manners impeccable, and she could be as good a listener as Whitney’s own mother, a master of the art. Clarice drew boys while hardly trying; one whom Whitney had secretly liked had called Clarice ‘classy without being scary’. Perhaps only Whitney saw the elusiveness that lay beneath. Others thought they knew her, but few really did; good grades and a well-crafted exterior concealed a subterranean wild streak and a keen sense of her social surroundings. Even for Whitney, at times it was impossible to decipher what Clarice Barkley was thinking or feeling. Her best friend, she had come to realize, was far more complicated than she seemed.

‘What about you?’ Whitney asked. ‘Is there anyone special? Or are you still searing the souls of the unwary?’

Stopping to look out at the water, Clarice dug her toes into the sand. ‘Why decide?’ she responded Delphically, then turned to her friend. ‘No offence, Whitney, but I’m glad that when I get married I’ll have had sex with more than one man. I mean, don’t you ever wonder what that would be like with someone different?’

‘No offence, Clarice,’ Whitney replied mildly, ‘but I don’t want to be promiscuous. I can only sleep with someone I really love.’

By unspoken consent they turned to walk into the surf, feeling the cool ocean water on their ankles and calves. ‘Love,’ Clarice informed her friend archly, ‘is an elastic concept. There’ve been times when I was willing to love who I slept with, if that’s what was required. I wasn’t thinking about marriage.

‘But after marriage, sex becomes routine, and sleeping with other guys problematic. So I might as well enjoy it now, because that’s not all I’m after in a husband. I’m not marrying some boy just because I like him inside me. I want a husband who’s also a man.’ Glancing at Whitney, Clarice’s eyes glinted with humour. ‘And please don’t be shocked. These days shock is unbecoming unless you’re our mothers.’

‘I’m not shocked,’ Whitney rejoined crisply. ‘I just don’t want to be shocking.’

Clarice gave a twitch of her tan, graceful shoulders. ‘In your position, I’d feel the same. I just hope you don’t get restless, that’s all. Imagining things isn’t the same as doing them.’

Whitney waded in up to her knees. ‘So maybe I’m just unimaginative,’ she said over her shoulder.

‘You? I doubt it. So maybe having sex with Peter and imagining Paul Newman will work just fine.’ Clarice stopped beside her. ‘So how is it with Peter? You never really say.’

Whitney smiled a little. ‘Would you settle for “sweet”?’

‘“Sweet”? That’s lovely. But does the earth move? Or is it more like a mudslide?’

Folding her arms, Whitney replied with mock dignity, ‘I have nothing more to say, Miss Barkley. You’ll have to rely on your own lurid fantasies.’

To her surprise, Clarice did not respond in kind. Instead, she turned toward the sound, watching a sailboat in the distance. More seriously, she said, ‘I’m being kind of a pill, aren’t I? Maybe I envy you a little.’

‘Why should you?’

Still watching the water, Clarice spoke more softly. ‘Your life is settled, all laid out in front of you. You have someone you love, who loves you. You don’t have to wonder who he’ll be, or if that man will want you, or how the two of you will live.’

In faint surprise, Whitney studied Clarice’s flawless profile. It was she who had always admired her friend’s serene blonde looks, her self-containment, her matchless ability to charm and engage others – especially men. ‘You can have your pick of guys,’ Whitney assured her. ‘All you have to do is choose.’

‘I suppose,’ Clarice replied in a distant tone. ‘But how will I know that he’s the right one?’

Once again, Whitney felt her own good fortune. She, and not Clarice, was the one Peter Brooks had chosen.

For the rest of her life, Whitney felt certain, she would recall the moment perfectly, and everything that followed.

They were in his dorm room, at Dartmouth. It was a chill winter evening; snowflakes on the window melted into dots that blurred the darkness outside. Naked, she pulled the wool blanket up to her chin, watching Peter undress.

The weekend had followed their usual pattern. Like other women’s colleges, Wheaton was a suitcase school: girls left for the weekend, or endured the consolation prize – a steak dinner on Saturday night – which exposed their datelessness. Boys seldom came to Wheaton: they were not allowed in the dorm rooms, and were less adaptable than women when it came to making conversation and fitting in with friends. Besides, alcohol was forbidden – this was a school for women, after all. Better to go where the guys were.

Whitney’s suitemate, Payton Clarke, had their ticket to freedom – a car. So Whitney, Payton and two other friends wrote their destination in the sign-out book and headed for Dartmouth, hopeful that, if delayed by love or folly past the Sunday evening deadline, they could sneak back through the windows of co-conspirators. Leaving the snow-covered campus, the girls had felt the elation of escape; Payton turned on the radio, and they began singing along with Aretha, the Beatles, or even dumb stuff like ‘Kind of a Drag’ by the Buckinghams, which Jill’s terrible voice made even funnier. They shared a prized invitation – Dartmouth Winter Carnival.

Not that these weekends were always a bargain. Nor was this one: as Whitney had anticipated, the huge bonfire that marked the weekend was followed by binge drinking at Peter’s fraternity, during which several otherwise acceptable males devolved into buffoons with the wits of Neanderthals – an orgy of crudity which, for one guy, was capped by public retching. While Peter remained himself throughout, Whitney was happy to retreat to his room. Closing the door behind them, he left a tie on the doorknob to indicate the presence of a woman, assuring them an hour alone.

Though he undressed in front of her, a lingering modesty kept Peter from looking into her eyes; she could watch him unembarrassed, feeling a kind of wonder at their intimacy. His body was strong yet lean, as if there were barely enough skin to cover his muscled frame. His blond curls were charmingly unruly; his blue eyes a window to what she knew to be an open heart; his smooth features engagingly complicated by a nose broken playing lacrosse. He was a boy other girls stared at. And now – at least for this time – Peter belonged to her.

She had met him the year before on a blind date. Though assured that Peter was ‘a doll’, Whitney had approached the weekend with trepidation. He might not find her attractive; the ‘doll’ might become a nightmare. In her parents’ mind, attracting some Ivy League guy was a ticket to security. But in reality, you were stranded for the weekend, and guys at men’s schools often treated women horribly – turning callous and trying to push them into sex. Among Whitney’s friends it was known that a classmate had been raped at Princeton, triggering a nervous breakdown. This faceless Peter Brooks could become her enemy.

Whitney was nervous all the way to Dartmouth. When Peter called at the boarding house, she still felt queasy. But though he was as tall and handsome as described, instead of conceit there was a sweetness in his face. He did not seem disappointed that she was not prettier or slimmer. ‘I’m Peter Brooks,’ he said, and his easy manner and obvious sobriety filled Whitney with relief.

Throughout the weekend, he was attentive and thoughtful, always asking after her needs, what she might want to do. Though at first they struggled for conversation, his good nature made it easier, and gradually she felt comfortable with him. He took her to dinner and parties, including a smoke-filled bash where some of his fraternity brothers got stupefyingly drunk. But he kept his own drinking under control, and Whitney never felt abandoned. Though it was clear that Peter was a guy the other guys admired, he did not seem to notice. It was one of his friends, not Peter himself, who mentioned that he was a lacrosse star.

He was anyone’s dream date, she realized by Sunday. So when he kissed her on the cheek, then asked if she would come back next weekend, Whitney was more than flattered. ‘Yes,’ she said simply. ‘I’d like that.’

Now, head on his down pillow, Whitney smiled up at him. ‘You’re beautiful.’

Gently, he pulled down the comforter to look at her. ‘So are you.’

Before, she would have been embarrassed. Peter was the only boy she had allowed to see her like this, and she vividly recalled her shame when, at Wheaton, the freshmen were marched to the gym and photographed nude to diagnose defects in their posture. Whitney’s ‘defects’ were round hips and full breasts, but she was mortified by rumours that guys from Dartmouth had stolen her class’s pictures, imagining herself pinned to a corkboard while leering drunkards gave her a ‘D’. When she had confessed this, Peter had assured her that the story was a myth. ‘If I’d seen your picture,’ he said lightly, ‘I’d have cut my classes and taken the bus to Wheaton.’

Thinking of this, Whitney beckoned to him. ‘Come here,’ she said. ‘Before my nipples get cold.’

Kneeling at the end of the bed, Peter kissed her stomach and breasts as he lay across her, kissing her deeply, lingeringly, before he slipped his finger inside her.

‘Yes,’ she murmured.

He filled her, moving gently at first, and then she felt the urgency in the thrust of his thighs and hips. Shutting her eyes, she tried to focus on her own pleasure, urging the inside of her to tighten and find release. She was almost there when Peter cried out, and she knew that it was done.

Whitney let her body go slack. Sometimes it worked, sometimes not. Though she had heard stories about boys who used their tongues, she could not yet bring herself to mention this. Instead, she focused on the familiar softness in his face, the warmth of knowing that her body had the power to do this.

Suddenly, he looked at her with new intentness. ‘Close your eyes, Whit.’

Complying, Whitney felt him stir, thought she heard the whisper of a drawer opening. Then she felt his lips light and playful, brushing her stomach. Her skin tingled – perhaps, this time, he would please her as she imagined.

Then Peter flicked his bedside lamp on. ‘You can open your eyes now.’

Something small and light was resting on her stomach. She saw him smiling, then followed his gaze. A diamond ring circled her navel. To her startled eyes it looked perfect – not large or showy, but beautifully shaped, its facets sparkling.

‘It’s my grandmother’s,’ he said. ‘Mom wanted you to have it. But you have to say you’ll marry me.’

Stupefied, Whitney found herself grinning until she thought she could never stop. ‘Are you kidding me?’ she finally blurted. ‘I love you, and I’d love to marry you.’

Hurriedly, she put on the ring, stretching out her fingers for him to see. Suddenly they were hugging, rolling on the bed, laughing with the sheer joy of having each other.

‘Mrs Peter Brooks,’ he murmured.

‘Whitney Brooks,’ she amended. ‘I can’t wait to tell Mom and Dad.’

‘Actually, I have. Your dad, anyhow.’

For an instant, Whitney felt obscurely cheated; her father had participated in this moment before she had: a partnership of males. Just as quickly, she reproved herself. Peter’s father was dead; Charles Dane had lost any hope of a son after his wife’s struggles in bearing Whitney. Yet her father had never betrayed any disappointment that she was not the boy he’d wanted, and it was obvious that he had liked her new guy at once. She was glad to have brought him Peter Brooks.

‘How did you tell him?’ she asked.

Peter grinned. ‘I met him for lunch at the Athletic Club over Christmas break. Then I asked him for your hand – and the rest of you, of course – just like a proper suitor should. I’m afraid I was pretty nervous. But he was so happy we killed a bottle of champagne.‘

Whitney imagined her father and his almost-son, enveloped in celebratory warmth. ‘But did he say anything, or did you just start drinking?’

‘Actually, he told me that I was the son he’d never had. And that he’d done pretty well with who you’d dragged through the door.’ He hesitated, becoming serious. ‘He also said there was a job at the firm, if I wanted it.’

Struggling to imagine Peter on Wall Street, Whitney was surprised, then not. ‘What did you say?’

‘That I’d talk to you.’ He looked at her searchingly. ‘But really, it’s a great opportunity. Your dad wouldn’t ask if he didn’t think I could do it.’

Despite his confident tone, Whitney saw the uncertainty in his eyes, which she understood and shared. Though seldom harsh, Charles Dane judged younger men with a jeweller’s eye – his approval, once withdrawn, was difficult to regain. Peter had gone through school being good at things – sailing, lacrosse, making friends, leading his teams to victory – without a clear vision of life after college. Though he applied himself to school with diligent effort, Whitney, a far better writer, had edited his papers. And the life both had led, she understood, might not breed her father’s relentless drive.

‘I’m sure you could do it,’ she temporized. ‘If that’s what you want.’

Peter seemed to sense her ambivalence. ‘But if I worked with your dad, would you be happy?’

He needed her approval, Whitney understood. ‘Of course,’ she assured him, and curled back into h. . .