Free Loss of Innocence by Richard North Patterson Page A

up, closing the door behind her.
    Whitney paused, considering whether to confront Janine. In moments, she burst out of her room, jangling with anxious energy. “Do you know where Mom is?”
    “What’s wrong?”
    “Nothing,” Janine said with a smile that resembled a nervous tic. “They need me in Manhattan for a photo shoot, that’s all.”
    Something in her manner evoked a lie told by a child. But Whitney had no basis for probing this, and lacked the heart to try.
    “Good luck,” she began, but Janine was already hurrying down the stairs.
    Following, Whitney found Peter at their door. Enveloping her in a wordless hug, he held her until, in her sadness and confusion, Whitney began to cry. “It’s okay,” he murmured. “Everything will be okay.”
    For hours he watched the news with her, quiet and uncomplaining. Though not himself drawn to Bobby, he was appalled by the shooting and solicitous of the grief Whitney herself could not explain. At dinnertime he brought them trays of food, staying into the night until she encouraged him to get some sleep.
    Whitney was alone when, in the early morning hours, Bobby’s press secretary reappeared before the cameras, his shoulders slumped in terrible weariness. He briefly bowed his head before speaking.
    Senator Robert Francis Kennedy died at 1:44 a.m. today, June 6, 1968. He was forty-two years old.
    Whitney covered her face. Instinctively she recalled hearing about the death of President Kennedy, then that of Martin Luther King. She had a shamed, mordant thought—the next time someone murdered a leader she cared about, it was better to be with a crowd of friends. Then she began to cry.
    In the morning Peter found her there, eyes bleary from a fitful sleep. When they returned to the guesthouse, Whitney tried to make love. But the act felt mechanical and detached, and she could find no solace in it.
    She was just tired, she told him. But it was Peter who fell asleep.
    Awakening to sunshine, Whitney tried to remember her own good fortune. She was surrounded by people she loved and who loved her, the touchstones of the life still awaiting. To Peter and her family, she realized, she must surely seem deranged. It wasnot as though she had given Bobby this much thought when he was alive.
    “I understand,” he reassured her. “His wife’s a widow now, and all those kids don’t have a father. I remember losing my dad, and wondering why. But no one had an answer.”
    Ashamed, Whitney realized that she had not—at least consciously—thought of this at all. Instead, she had felt that Bobby’s death was something that had happened to her, which, in some indefinable way, would change the world in which they, and their own children, would live. Whatever the cause, she could not turn away from the rituals of death—images in black and white, the stoic grace that carried his surviving brother through the eulogy. Only at the end, quoting the lines Bobby had used to conclude so many speeches, did Edward Kennedy’s voice crack.
    Some men see things as they are, and say “why?” I dream things that never were and say “why not?”
    Transfixed, Whitney watched the funeral train from New York to Arlington Cemetery, the crowds along the right-of-way paying witness to hope lost. At length Charles ventured in a kind, paternal tone, “This is a terrible thing, I grant you. But for the last few days, you’ve been sleepwalking through life, and all but ignoring Peter. All of us search for some meaning in the senseless, some larger force at work. But here, there isn’t anything to point at.” He hesitated before continuing more quietly. “Except, perhaps, that the equally senseless murder of Jack Kennedy, and the emotions Bobby evoked, made killing him the holy grail for the angry or unstable. Were I as malevolent as some acquaintances I don’t particularly admire, I’d say that the hubris of Joseph Kennedy spawned an ongoing Greek tragedy that he’s still watching from his