Sins of Innocence (15 page)

“Gonna need one of these for your important letter,” he said, with what looked to Jess like a leer. Yes. He was just a little too friendly.

Her pulse raced. Let me out of here, she thought. She pulled her hand from under his. He snapped off one stamp.

“Allow me to do the honors,” he said hoarsely.

Jess looked up at his face in time to see his rough wet tongue lick the stamp. He smiled. His teeth were crooked. She grabbed the rest of the stamps and quickly stuffed them into her pocket, then turned toward the door.

“Oh, little lady?” he asked.

She stopped.

“Hey, you ain’t one of those girls who’s moved into the old Larchwood place are you?”

Jess fled out the door, her heart thumping like the bass of a Rolling Stones song. She gripped her jacket more tightly and ran onto the sidewalk, head down, eyes glued to the bricks. She felt the flush in her cheeks. Why did they make her feel so dirty? First Father, then the cook, and now
this man. Soon everyone in this town would know who she was.
What
she was. No one seemed to care that she and Richard loved each other.
Really
loved each other. Jess raced down the walk, wanting to run back to her room and stay there, locked up, until Richard could come for her. Tears clouded her vision. She ran smack into a man coming up the walk.

He grabbed her shoulders. “Here you are! Miss Jess, I’ve been looking for you!”

Jess looked up into the dark, familiar face of Pop Hines.

“The missus saw you go off with an envelope in your hand. I thought you might come here.”

She started to cry. Pop put a comforting arm around her shoulder. “There, there, it’s okay. I’ll take you back. The station wagon’s parked right here by the curb.”

Jess, rattled at having been caught, tried to stop crying.

“No need to cry. No one’s angry with you,” he said as he walked her toward the car. “It’s just that you shouldn’t have gone off without telling someone. You’re just a little girl. What if something bad happened?”

Jess got into the car, her eyes still wet with tears. Not, as Pop was likely to think, because she’d been chastised. No. It was more that because now when Richard came for her, sneaking out of Larchwood wouldn’t be as easy as she’d hoped.

Susan

It was Monday, June 3, 1968. Susan Levin sat in the red vinyl booth of the coffee shop and slowly stirred sugar into a thick porcelain mug. Across from her sat David. The man she had loved for nearly a year, the man she’d convinced herself she no longer loved.

“I don’t care if graduation
is
next week,” she said slowly. “I think now’s as good a time as any to discuss it.”

Through his wire-framed glasses she saw David’s eyes close.

“I love you, Susan,” he said quietly. “I thought we were going to do great things together. What about Kennedy’s campaign? I thought you wanted that as much as me. I thought we’d be working on it together this summer.”

She felt a lump in her throat. “It isn’t working anymore. I loved you, but we’re graduating now. It’s time we both grew up. Besides, Bobby Kennedy doesn’t need me to help get him elected. He’ll win in California tomorrow and will go on to become president.”

“He just lost Oregon! McCarthy is hot on his heels, and Kennedy needs all the help he can get! Jesus, what’s happening to you?”

Susan lit another cigarette and pushed her glasses up on the bridge of her large, curved nose. If only David could just let her go, let this thing die. But he was an impassioned man. He felt things so deeply. And it was that sensitivity that had attracted her to him in the first place.

“So what are you going to do?” David raved. “Burn your SDS card and slither back to your parents’ cushy home in Westchester?” His tone was anxious, his words rapid. Susan winced at his hurt. “Or maybe you’re going to grab your flowers and your beads and your Barnard bachelor’s in English and take off for Haight-Ashbury to write poetry. What’s it going to be, Susan? What the hell are you going to do with your life? What the hell are you going to do to help this country get out of this pit? What the hell are you going to do? Let Vietnam continue?”

“I’m as much against the war as you are, you know that. Just because I’ve said I don’t want to see you anymore doesn’t mean I’ve changed my values. That’s not fair.”

He shook his head and scratched his reddish-brown beard. His voice lowered. Pain seeped through his words. “What about the sit-in?”

He was talking about last April. The same queasiness Susan had first felt then now fluttered in her stomach again. In April she’d thought it was caused by sleepless
nights on the damp concrete floors of Columbia’s administration building. Too much pizza, too many cold-cut heroes, too many hot, burn-to-the-fingertips joints. It was a few days later she’d realized she was pregnant.

“We got what we demanded,” David continued. “Well, partly, anyway. And we shared it together.”

He was right. The administration had stopped building the new gym. The land had gone back to the kids of Harlem—to become a playground for the underprivileged, rather than another status symbol for the establishment.

David reached across the table and took her hand. “We shared something together then,” he said. “Don’t you remember how it felt?”

Susan remembered it only too well. Together with other card-carrying members of the Students for a Democratic Society, they held the dean hostage in his office for twenty-four hours. She remembered the way David had hugged her and held her when that demand was finally met; she remembered the defeat that washed across his face when it was announced that the school would not, however, sever its ties with the Institute for Defense Analysis—an institute that clearly had ties to the situation in Vietnam. Changes at home were possible; attempts at altering the “War” seemed futile. But later that night, warm and naked on the mattress on the floor in David’s room, Susan and David made a pact, a commitment to each other: They would not stop protesting, they would not stop working; not until there were equal rights for all, not until our troops were out of Vietnam.

“I remember,” Susan whispered now.

“Didn’t that show you how right we are together?” he asked.

“Right for what?” Susan didn’t believe in marriage. Neither, she knew, did David. Marriage was the cornerstone of their parents’ generation. Freedom was theirs. Freedom to fall in love, freedom to fall out of love. Susan only wished she had fallen out of love with David before she’d become pregnant.

He pulled his hand off hers and ran his fingers through his long hair. “Right! Right together!”

She took a long sip of coffee. It was cold. Like the stone she felt where her heart had once been. She saw the anguish on his face. Why had she stopped loving him? When? But Susan knew the answer. She had stopped loving David when she discovered she was pregnant. For it had been then that she realized that no amount of freedom could erase her inbred Westchester values that said that when boy plus girl equals baby, the only solution is marriage. It had been easier to stop loving David than to think of something as stupid and as stifling as marriage. And Susan feared that despite his antimarriage feelings, if David learned about the baby, he would … well, she didn’t know what he would do, exactly, but she knew it would be something she’d ultimately come to regret. Yes, it had been easier to just stop loving him.

“Jesus,” he said now. “I thought you loved me.”

Susan let her gaze drop back to the half-empty coffee mug.

David got up from the booth and pulled a wrinkled dollar from his bleached bell-bottom jeans. He tossed it on the table and brushed his long hair from his forehead. “Have a nice life, Susan.” Then he held up two fingers in sign. “Peace.” He left the coffee shop, and Susan, behind.

Two days later, on an early morning, three thousand miles away, Robert Kennedy was shot. Susan had just stepped out of the shower when she heard the news come over the radio. Her body went cold. She fell against the wall, trying to catch her breath.
This isn’t happening. This isn’t happening
, she repeated to herself over and over.

“The senator is in critical condition.…” the announced continued.

No. Not Bobby Kennedy. Not Bobby Kennedy
.

“He had just delivered a statement claiming victory in the California primary.…”

Susan ripped off her bathrobe. She stood naked, shuddering. Sickness crawled around her, over her, into her. She
could think of only one person, one thing: David. She had to get to David.

She started to move, then stopped.

But you don’t love him anymore
.

The sickness within her swelled. Tears spilled from her eyes.

You are carrying his baby, but you don’t love him anymore. It’s better this way, remember?

But in her mind Susan saw David’s face. She saw his eyes spark at the mention of the name “Kennedy.” Bobby Kennedy. Savior of humanity.

She wrapped her arms around herself and sobbed. She did love David. She had never stopped loving him. And now she needed him. Their baby needed him. And he, she knew, needed her.

She moved quickly, throwing on cutoff jeans and a frayed sweatshirt. She ran from the dorm.

David’s room was across campus. Maybe she could make it before he woke up.

Her wet hair clung to her face; her sandals slapped the ground. All around her, students mingled in small groups.
They know
, she thought. In a little while the whole world will know.

She raced toward the sidewalk, caught the edge of it with her sandal, and fell forward to the concrete. Pain seared through her toes. She struggled to sit up, then looked down at her foot. Blood gushed from her big toe. The nail had been ripped half off. Susan buried her face in her hands and sobbed.

“Susan?” The voice was familiar, but it wasn’t David’s. Susan looked up and saw Alan, David’s roommate. “Christ,” he said, “Are you okay?”

Susan quickly wiped her tears with trembling hands. “Where’s David? I’ve got to find David.”

Alan sat on the ground beside her. “He’s gone.”

“He heard?” Susan choked. “He knows about Kennedy?”

Alan shook his head. “Don’t know. After he met you
the other day, he came back to the room and cleared out his stuff.”

Susan went numb. “Where’d he go?”

“Who knows? His parents are dead. It’s not like he had a home to go to.” Alan took out a rumpled handkerchief and wrapped it around Susan’s bleeding toe. “Do you think he’ll die, Susan?”

“
Die
?” she screamed. “
Why would David die
?”

He tied a knot in the cloth. “Not David,” he said. “Kennedy. You don’t think he’ll die, do you?”

Twenty hours after he’d been shot, Robert Kennedy died. With his death the dream also died. The dream, and a little piece of Susan. With what remained of her strength, she turned to the only real security she’d ever known—her parents.

“We send her to one of the best schools our money can buy, and she gets pregnant by some hippie! Go figure!” Freida Levin twittered around her daughter, adjusting the
magna cum laude
sash at Susan’s neckline.

“Mother …”

“Freida …”

Susan and her father spoke at the same time.

Freida ignored them. “At least the gown hides your stomach.”

Susan sighed. “Mother, I’m only three months’ pregnant. I don’t exactly have a ‘stomach’ to hide.”

“Not yet, not yet. But you will. Of course, that wouldn’t be a problem if you’d listen to your mother.…”

“No abortion, Mother.” She turned from her mother and walked across her dorm room to the bureau. She picked up the mortarboard and adjusted it on her head. There was no reasoning with her mother. Susan could never explain to her that she loved David, that she loved their unborn child. She could never explain the impact of what she had seen in the biology lab last semester—a two-month-old embryo bottled in formaldehyde, left on a shelf to float forever in eternity. A tiny curled embryo frozen
with an innocent look that was unafraid, secure. Susan thought about the slits that would have become eyes, the spine that would have become straight and tall. And she thought about its heart that would have loved. No, Susan could not have an abortion. She could not do that to a child. She could not do that to David’s child. She would go to the place—the “home”—her father had found. And while she waited, she would try to find David.

“But there’s that nice young doctor who just joined the club. They say he’s one of the best at Mount Sinai … I just know he would do us the favor. I heard he took care of Lottie Cushman’s daughter.…”

“And no one would know, right, Mother?” Susan said.

“No one.”

“Just like you don’t know about Lottie Cushman’s daughter? Forget it.” Susan pulled off the mortarboard, picked up her brush, and began vigorously brushing her hair. Her mother had not stopped campaigning for an abortion ever since Susan had called them last week and told them she was pregnant. When her mother first mentioned it, Susan reminded her that abortions were illegal. “Legal, schmegal,” her mother had screeched. “There’s always a way. You think you’re the first good girl to get into trouble? Besides, you’re supposed to be one of those new liberals, aren’t you?”

Susan set down her hairbrush now. “We’d better get started if you want to get good seats,” she said.

Joseph Levin moved to the window in Susan’s room and looked out across the sunny, bustling campus. “It’s going to be a fine commencement,” he said.

“Don’t change the subject,” Freida snapped.

“But it’s too nice a day for bickering.”

“Bickering? I’m not bickering. Can I help it if I only want what’s best for my daughter? Look at her! Look at her hair!” Susan’s mother grabbed a handful of Susan’s long, straight hair and waved it at Joseph. “You think she’d let me put this up into a respectable French twist?”

“Mother,” Susan said. “French twists are out.”

“In. Out. So who says being pregnant with no husband is ‘in’?”

Susan reached behind her and rescued her hair from her mother’s grasp. She smoothed it down over her shoulder. Tomorrow, Thank God, she would leave for Larchwood Hall. Far away from her mother’s constant criticism.