Loss of Innocence Read Online Free PDF Page A

feel a watchful coolness beneath Clarice’s easy manner, as though this clever girl felt the need to start looking out for herself.
    “If real families were what Rockwell paints,” Whitney contented herself with remarking, “there’d be no work left for psychiatrists or novelists.”
    Her expression still abstracted, Clarice did not respond before glancing at her watch. “We’d better change,” she said abruptly, “before your dad and Peter show up. We’re celebrating your engagement, remember?”

Four
    That evening, the Dane family gathered at their summer home to mark the engagement of their younger daughter.
    A sprawling white-frame structure from the late nineteenth century, topped by an atelier, it had been purchased in the twenties by Whitney’s grandfather and renovated by her parents, who had modernized the kitchen and added a spacious sunroom and screened porch. Some of the original furnishings still remained, and the pieces Whitney’s parents had added—wing chairs, couches, paintings of pastoral scenes, and carefully chosen antiques—made little concession to the more casual Vineyard style. Her father’s distinctive improvements were high windows that offered a sweeping view of the grounds and ocean, and a guesthouse for the grandchildren that Charles and Anne so fervently anticipated, to the point of promoting a jocular competition between Janine and Whitney for the honor of starting the next generation. Looking at the familiar faces as they gathered around the polished mahogany table—her family expanded by Clarice and Peter—Whitney felt the glow of knowing that she, not her sister, was the reason for thisnight. Then Janine—late as usual—burst into the room, seizing the attention of all.
    Unlike Whitney, she had perfect posture that accented her willowy figure, an incandescent smile she could switch on and off, and a way of tossing her head back, as now, to display her perfect cheekbones and tawny mane of hair. Perhaps only Whitney and Clarice knew that Anne had purchased her daughter’s perfect nose from a Park Avenue plastic surgeon, sparing Janine the curse of her father’s more prominent one. After giving Peter a quick but warm kiss on the lips, which she proclaimed “sisterly,” she air-kissed Clarice. With a certain lack of enthusiasm, Clarice responded, “If it isn’t the ‘late Miss Dane,’” before adding, “dazzling, as always.”
    “Oh,
you
are,” Janine replied airily, “I’m so skinny I could shower in the barrel of Daddy’s hunting rifle.” She followed this persiflage with a glance at Whitney. “Of course the dresses I model aren’t made for normal girls.”
    “Only for goddesses,” Whitney agreed.
    With a trilling laugh to acknowledge the truth of this, Janine glanced around the table. “Shouldn’t we be drinking champagne?” she asked her father. “You’re finally marrying one of us off, and it’s my little sister. I need something to take the edge off my insecurity.”
    Even Whitney smiled at Janine’s self-deprecation, so clearly crafted to suggest that it was nonsense. Glancing at Clarice, Whitney caught her friend coolly appraising Janine above the perfunctory play of lips. “You missed cocktail hour,” Charles observed good-humoredly. “Doesn’t that Tiffany watch also tell time?”
    “Oh it does, Dad. Central Time.”
    Her father chuckled indulgently. “You’re in luck, dear. As you’ll note from the crystal, Mattie will be serving champagne. Now that you’re here, we can all sit down.”
    Clarice sat across from Whitney, tan and trim in her sleeveless dress, the picture of a well-bred New Englander. Wearing a navy-blue blazer identical to her father’s, Peter evoked an acolyte, taking in everything around them but, especially, Charles. To Whitney, this was a touching reminder of how young she and her fiancé were, andthe role her father had come to play in Peter’s life. His own father had died of a heart attack when Peter was