Loss of Innocence by Richard North Patterson Page B

education in the home.’”
    “On who? Your kids? Isn’t that what grade school is for?”
    Whitney had often asked herself the same question. “It means I can read a recipe without moving my lips. What else could a woman want?”
    “Beats me,” Ben said, and then regarded her with what seemed to be genuine curiosity. “What did you study in college?”
    “I majored in English,” Whitney said tersely, then decided to give a better account of herself. “I also tutored, and tried to write a little.”
    “Is that what the journal’s about—writing something?”
    Whitney wondered how to answer, or whether to answer at all. “Maybe,” she allowed. “I took a lot of psychology courses, so perhaps I just like writing about why people are the way they are. Perhaps it’s self-flattering, but I like to think that I’m not overly messed up.”
    “Too bad, then. Some think that’s a prerequisite to a literary career—after all, Fitzgerald drank himself into oblivion, and Hemingway and Virginia Woolf killed themselves. So with all your obvious disadvantages, how did you come to writing?”
    Whitney found that she enjoyed remembering. “I took a creative writing class, and my professor encouraged me to keep on. I’d always thought of writers as a wholly different species, but the diary has sort of kept the idea alive. Still, that’s different from knowing how to become a writer.”
    “No one knows,” Ben insisted. “The only way to do it is to write. But if you need someone to share the madness, go back to school in creative writing.”
    Surprised, Whitney said, “Sounds like you’ve really thought about it.”
    For a moment, Ben’s expression became more open, hinting at both ambition and embarrassment. “True confessions, then. Journalism is a temporary cover. My real ambition is to write the Great American Novel, which probably makes me crazier than F. Scott, Ernest, and Virginia combined. That’s part of why I bothered you on the beach that morning. I saw your diary, and thought that maybe—in your words—you were a member of my species.”
    “I don’t have a plan,” Whitney demurred. “It sounds like you do.”
    Ben gazed out at the water. “Yup. The first part’s J-school, assuming I can scare up another scholarship.”
    “I guess you did well at Yale.”
    “Well enough. But I deviated from the plan by dropping out, so now I’m a player in life’s lottery. Big ambitions alone won’t buy you a slot in the reserves.”
    Despite this jibe, Whitney sympathized with his plight. “Maybe you won’t end up in Vietnam,” she ventured.
    With curled fingers, Ben wiped the perspiration from his dark eyelashes, staring ever more intently at the water. “Oh,” he answered softly, “I think I will.”
    “But why?”
    “Karma. I’m more afraid of being afraid than of what I’d have to face there.”
    For whatever reason, Whitney imagined him remembering Robert Kennedy. Pondering his fatalism in the face of the unknown, Whitney wondered what would happen to him without anyone to intervene.
    Ben still scrutinized the skyline. Following his gaze, she saw a distant line of gray above the water. “We’d better get going,” he told her. “I don’t like the looks of that.”

Four
    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