Sins of Innocence

by Jean Stone

  The cook scowled and peeled excess dough from around the circles.

  “I’m—I’m sure it will be fine,” Jess stammered.

  “Pop will be in shortly,” Miss Taylor said. “Pop,” Jess figured, must be Mr. Hines. She wondered if he would be as unfriendly as his wife. “Will you set the table?” The housemother gestured toward a stack of thick china plates on an upper shelf by the pantry.

  Jess’s eyes moved to the plates. Set the table. Yes. That would give her something to do. “How many?” she squeaked.

  “Just the two of us. Pop and Mrs. Hines eat in their apartment over the carriage house.”

  “I’d best get the plates,” the cook growled, and wiped her hands on her apron. She reached up onto the shelf. “A woman with child shouldn’t stretch over her head. The cord can strangle the baby.”

  “Oh, Mrs. Hines,” Miss Taylor laughed. “That’s an old wives’ tale.”

  The negro woman snorted. “Think what you’d like. But I ain’t gonna be held responsible.” She plopped the plates on the counter and went back to work on the pastry.

  Miss Taylor winked at Jess. “The silverware and linens are in the sideboard in the dining room,” she said. “Through that door.” She motioned to a large swinging door beside the table.

  Jess took the plates off the counter. “Thank you, Mrs. Hines,” she said. And thank you, God, she thought, that I don’t have to eat dinner with her.

  She pushed through the door into the next room and automatically felt for a wall switch. The enormous room lit up amber. There before Jess was a long table, stretched to seat twelve. A sparkling crystal bowl sat in the center, filled with daffodils and white tulips. Against one wall was a massive sideboard; on it stood three pairs of silver candlestick holders in varying heights. The candles were pale yellow, their wicks white and stiff, not yet charred. Loosely woven off-white curtains hung from the high windows. As Jess carefully stepped across the worn yet freshly vacuumed Oriental rug, the kitchen door closed behind her. Once again she heard low voices from the other room. Mrs. Hines was no doubt talking about her. Jess had never felt so alone.

  After dinner that night Jess escaped to her room. She sat at the small oak desk, and took out the box of pale vellum screened with blue butterflies, the stationery she always used when writing to Richard.

  Dear Richard, she began.

  Well, I made it. It’s not so bad here. The housemother, Miss Taylor, is real nice, but I don’t think the cook likes me very much. It doesn’t matter, though, because every time I eat, I throw up.

  She leaned back in the chair and chewed the tip of her pen. It was hard to know what to say to Richard. She didn’t want him to worry about her. She crumpled the sheet and began again.

  Dear Richard,

  Well, I made it, and I miss you already. It isn’t so bad here, and at least I won’t have to face Father every day. And I know you’ll figure out a way for us to be together.

  Father won’t let me get any mail here—so there’s no point in you writing. He won’t say your name, but I know it’s you he’s afraid of me getting letters from. Don’t worry though, I’ll write every day so you’ll know how I’m doing. Even Father can’t stop that.

  She filled the page and went on to another, telling him over and over how much she loved him. When she got to the end of the letter, Jess quickly signed it and tucked it into the envelope, before her tears could spill onto the vellum.

  She got up from the chair and stretched out on the bed, then opened the drawer of her nightstand and pulled out her calendar. May 24. Jess crossed out the date with a thick black marker and reached to touch the hardly visible swell of her stomach. Not quite seven months to go. She closed her eyes and drifted into a fitful sleep, dreaming of her father in snapshot vignettes of anger and coldness.

  It was still early, but as Jess went down the huge, Gone With the Wind staircase, she could hear dishes rattling in the kitchen. Mrs. Hines must be making breakfast, she thought. The later she had to face the woman, the better. Jess slipped out the front door unnoticed. She smiled. This would be real easy when Richard came to take her away.

  She knew there must be a mailbox in town, and she headed down the long driveway, trying to remember the direction they’d come from when Father had brought her yesterday. Was that only yesterday? Jess reached the road. Left. Definitely left. She remembered the way the stone wall curved into the driveway, and she supposed all she needed to do was follow the stone wall into town.

  The morning air was chilly, and Jess pulled her loden coat tighter around her narrow hips. It was the coat her mother had bought her for those damp London mornings; by autumn, Jess knew, it would probably no longer fit.

  In less than half an hour Jess turned the corner onto Main Street. She spotted the small houselike building right away, with its American flag shining in the morning sun. U.S. POST OFFICE, the sign read. She went up to the front door. It was locked. A hand-printed sign was taped to the window: HOURS: 8 A.M. TO 4 P.M. MON.-FRI. Beneath the sign was a small slot. DROP MAIL HERE, another hand-scratched sign read, with an arrow pointing down toward the opening.

  Jess took Richard’s letter from her pocket. She hesitated. Should she drop it in the slot? Would it be safely mailed? She didn’t want to take any chances. She needed to be sure he’d get her letter.

  “Can I help you, miss?”

  Jess jumped. She turned to see a man in a gray-blue uniform standing behind her. He had longish black hair sprinkled with gray and a coarse-looking mustache. His face was pockmarked and laced with purple veins; his nose swollen. She recognized that look. The man was a drinker.

  “I need to mail a letter,” she said quietly. “I just didn’t know if I should drop it in the slot. It’s kind of important.”

  His tiny brown eyes looked her over. “You from around here? You don’t look familiar.”

  She felt a flush come into her cheeks. “No.” She didn’t know what else to say.

  He took a huge ring of keys from his jacket and jangled them until he found the one he wanted. “You can come in if you want. I’ll see that letter gets on its way through the U.S. mail.”

  The man reminded her of the cockney pub-goers she’d always crossed to the other side of the street to avoid, but Jess stepped behind him through the door. The post office, and this man, however frightening he seemed, were her only link to Richard now. Jess stepped into the office. There wasn’t much there: just some cubbyholes along the wall with letters hanging out and a couple of canvas sacks on the floor. She stood beside a picture of President Johnson while the man walked behind the counter. He belched and rubbed his huge stomach, which hung over his belt. Jess noticed the buttons on his shirt were stretched open from the strain of his bulk.

  “Coffee?” he asked.

  “What?”

  “Coffee. Want some coffee?”

  “Oh. No, thank you. I just want to mail my letter.”

  “Too bad.” He belched again. “I was hoping you’d make some. Can’t stand my own coffee.” He laughed crudely.

  Jess clutched the envelope more tightly. “No,” she said. “Just mail the letter, please.”

  The man sighed loudly. He took the envelope from Jess as though he were being interrupted from more interesting things, and he studied the address. “New York, huh? That where you from?”

  Jess fumbled in the pocket of her jacket for her change. “Yes. I’ll need some stamps too. Ten for now.” She put the coins on the counter.

  The man opened a wooden drawer and separated ten stamps from a large sheet. “New York,” he repeated. “Well, little lady, we don’t get many of you highfalutin’ types around here.”

  Jess reached for the stamps, and he slapped a weathered palm over her hand. His knuckles were gnarled; two of his fingertips were, like Miss Taylor’s, stained bronze with nicotine. Jess froze.

  “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.”