Guilt by Association

by Susan R. Sloan

  The Rankin really did look wonderful there, against the dark-red brick, above the rough stone fireplace. Ted had it fixed in place in no time.

  “What do you think?” he asked with a mischievous wink. “A little more on the right?”

  Karen hooted.

  “What’s so funny?” Nancy inquired, looking from one to the other.

  Ted winked at Karen. “You had to be there,” he said.

  The week before Christmas, Karen mailed her presents home to Great Neck—a brocade-covered photograph album for Beverly, a cashmere scarf for Leo.

  “I’m going to stay in town on Tuesday,” she told her mother.

  “Why?” Beverly wanted to know.

  “Because we’re open until nine on Monday, and we open again at nine on Wednesday, and to try to do Great Neck in between would be too much of a hassle. But I won’t be alone. I’ve been invited over to Nancy’s.”

  “It seems to me you’re spending a great deal of time with that family,” Beverly observed. “Just like you used to with those Village people.”

  Even after the enormous success of Demion Five, there was still a note of disdain in her mother’s voice when she spoke of the Sullivan Street set.

  “They’re nice people,” Karen said mildly, “and I like them.”

  “Who are they, exactly?”

  Karen sighed. “You know perfectly well who they are. Nancy is a friend I met at the gallery.” She had not yet told her parents about the book. “And Nancy’s husband, Joe, and their two children, and also her brother and his three children, who share the same house.”

  “What about the brother’s wife?”

  “She died a few years ago.”

  “Oh?” There was a note of sudden interest in Beverly’s voice. “What does he do?”

  Karen sighed in exasperation. She wanted desperately to tell her mother that Ted was a garbage collector, just for the effect she knew it would have.

  “He’s an architect,” she said flatly. “And a friend.”

  “An architect?” Beverly echoed. “Is he starving, that he has to live with his sister?”

  “Hardly.”

  “What has he built?”

  “I haven’t the faintest idea.”

  Her mother sighed. “Well, I suppose it could be worse. Anyway, we’ll miss you. Everyone will be here. I’ll tell them that an indigent architect was more important.”

  Architects, Karen was well aware, ranked even lower than engineers in that outmoded pecking order Beverly Kern still clung to, despite the fact that her daughter was in her late thirties and still unmarried.

  “We’re friends, Mother,” Karen repeated.

  “Yes, dear.”

  It was the best Christmas Karen could remember, from the moment she arrived, barely past dawn, to participate in the official present-opening, to the moment she departed, near midnight, with Ted insisting on seeing her safely to her front door.

  Gwen had asked her aunt to take a photograph of herself and her two sisters, and her father had helped her frame it. “So you won’t forget what we look like when you’re not here,” she said when she gave it to Karen.

  “I’m going to put it on my desk at work,” Karen told her. “Since that’s where I spend most of my time.”

  Jessica had made a small ceramic box in school. “For your most precious things,” she whispered.

  “I’ll keep it right next to my bed,” Karen promised, “so it’ll be the last thing I see at night, and the first thing I see in the morning.”

  Amy had drawn a picture of a little blond girl with a big shaggy dog.

  “Who’s that?” Karen asked her.

  “Me, of course,” she said.

  “No—that person next to you?” Karen said, pointing to the dog.

  Amy giggled. “That’s not a person. That’s Duster.”

  “Who’s Duster?”

  “He’s the dog I’m going to have one day.”

  “I think I’ll put this on the door of my refrigerator,” Karen decided. “That way, every time I go into the kitchen I can wave to the two of you.”

  Ted laid a package gently in her lap.

  “Let’s see,” she said, weighing it. “This feels heavier than a feather, but lighter than a bread box.”

  The girls giggled. “Open it! Open it!” they cried.

  It was a book on modern interior design, with hundreds of color photographs of the most exquisite rooms, done by some of the foremost decorators in the world.

  Karen’s mouth hung open as she turned the pages. “It’s fantastic,” she said. “One room’s more magnificent than the next. I intend to spend months going through this.” Her eyes shone up at Ted. “You couldn’t have picked anything better.”

  He smiled. “I’m glad you like it.”

  “I love it,” she assured him. “I really do.” Then she jumped up. “Now it’s my turn.”

  Karen had worked with Jenna for weeks. Together, they had created a sweat suit for each of the girls, as well as one for Ted. Gwen’s was red with patchwork appliques of plaids and prints, Jessica’s was pale blue with diagonal paisley insets, and Amy’s was bright pink and decorated with pastel circles, squares and triangles. Their father’s was done in navy and featured bold stripes in red and green and yellow.

  Ted laughed until there were real tears in his eyes, and the four of them had to go and try on their new outfits before they would touch another present.

  “You look fabulous,” Nancy said, searching for the camera when they paraded back in.

  “They did turn out rather well, didn’t they?” Karen was immensely pleased with herself.

  “You couldn’t have picked anything better,” Ted said, the gold flecks twinkling in his eyes.

  After the presents, it was time for a hearty breakfast.

  “Opening all those presents really works up the appetite,” Joe insisted as he helped himself to a third stack of pancakes.

  When the last biscuit, the last egg, the last drop of maple syrup had disappeared, the two men bundled the children into their snowsuits and took off for a romp in the park. Karen and Nancy tackled the kitchen, but no sooner had they gotten the breakfast things cleared away than it was time to start on dinner.

  “Now I know what they mean when they say a woman’s work is never done,” Karen groaned with a grin.

  Nancy chuckled. “I can’t tell you how much it’s meant to have you with us,” she said as they began to soak bread crumbs and chop up the celery and onions. “I don’t just mean today, I mean the whole past ten months.”

  “Well, you make me feel like one of the family,” Karen told her.

  “You make it easy,” Nancy said. “You might not see it, of course, because you didn’t know them before, but your being around has really made a big difference in Ted and the girls. It’s put the light back in their eyes.”

  “You give me too much credit,” Karen murmured. “I think it’s probably more a case of grief just running its course.”

  Nancy gave her a sidelong look. “Well, whatever,” she murmured.

  It was much later, after the trip to the park, after dinner, when everyone was stuffed to the limit and sprawled in front of a crackling fire, listening to the last of the Christmas music on the stereo, that Gwen and Jessica crept up on either side of Karen.

  “Will you come spend New Year’s Eve with us?” Jessica asked, her solemn brown eyes now full of trust. “Daddy says if you come we can have real champagne at midnight instead of apple cider.”

  “Daddy says the sad times are over,” Gwen added. “And he says if you come it means that 1980 will be an extra special happy year.”

  Karen looked over at Ted. He was sitting on the floor, with his back up against Nancy’s chair, cradling a sleeping Amy in his arms. Karen couldn’t remember ever seeing Laura’s husband do anything like that with her niece and nephew, and she couldn’t help but envy Nancy enormously.

  If God had told her to go out into the world and pick herself a
brother, she knew she wouldn’t be able to find a better choice than Ted Doniger.

  “I guess we’ve been monopolizing quite a lot of your time,” Ted said afterward as he left the car motor running and walked Karen up the steps of her town house. “We really would love to have you join us on New Year’s, but of course we’ll understand if you have other plans.”

  “Well, as a matter of fact, I am expected somewhere else,” Karen admitted, handing him her cache of gifts as she fished for her keys.

  The Sullivan Street set’s New Year’s party had long since gained the status of an annual event, and this year’s celebration was doubly special. The Rankins had finished their renovation, having divided the old tenement building into four truly elegant duplex suites, each five times the size of the flat they once rented.

  “I see,” Ted said.

  “It’s an annual thing, with a group of friends. It all started when we were very young and very poor and needed one good meal a year to keep us going.”

  He smiled. “It goes that far back, does it?”

  “Little did we realize what success would do to us,” Karen said, only half in jest. “But I’m pleased to say that I’m not totally spoiled. I would be willing to share the evening.”

  “You would?” he said, brightening.

  “What if I went off to my party for a while and then came around to your place?” she offered. “In time for the champagne, of course.”

  “That would work,” he replied with a nod. “Is the party nearby?”

  “It’s in the Village.”

  Ted frowned. “You’re not going down there by yourself, are you?”

  Karen chuckled. “If you’re asking whether I have a date, the answer is no. But I always take a taxi, so it’s quite safe.”

  “Still, it’s no night for you to be chasing all over the city on your own.” He scraped his toe against the top step. “Look, maybe this is out of line, and you can tell me if it is, but I’d feel a whole lot better if you’d let me take you down there and then bring you back.”

  Karen couldn’t help staring at him. It had been a very long time since anyone had been that concerned about her welfare. She decided he really was the big brother she had never had.

  “I love it that you’re so concerned about me,” she said, “but I wouldn’t dream of letting you do that. However, I am willing to negotiate.”

  “Oh?”

  “How about you coming along to my party with me? I’m sure the Rankins would be delighted to have you, at the very least because you’re the proud owner of two of Mitch’s best paintings. Besides, they’ve just finished renovating their building and they kept a very special room in it that you might get a kick out of seeing.”

  A broad grin spread quickly across Ted’s face. “You’ve got a deal,” he declared.

  With that, he handed her back her packages, brushed his lips against her cheek and was gone, bounding down the steps two at a time.

  To anyone observing from a distance, he looked far more like a carefree teenager than the middle-aged, widowed father of three.

  six

  Ted Doniger married his high school sweetheart two weeks I after he received his license to practice architecture, and expected to spend the rest of his life with her.

  They met when Ted was a junior and Barbara a freshman. What began as an intense adolescent infatuation eventually evolved into committed adult love.s

  “You’re too young to tie yourself down to one girl,” his mother argued when Ted was saving up for a ring. “You haven’t experienced anything of life yet.”

  “Your mother’s right, son,” his father felt compelled to agree. “What happens when you go off to college and meet somebody else?”

  “I’ll probably meet hundreds of girls,” Ted replied, thinking only of the young woman with the straight brown hair and solemn brown eyes. “But none of them will be Barbara.”

  With his dream and her determination, his good humor and her good sense, his energy and her serenity, they were two sides of the same coin—opposite and inseparable. There was never anyone else for either of them. From the very beginning, they knew that one day they would be husband and wife. But that day would not come until Ted could properly afford to support her and the family they would have. He was adamant about that.

  “You’re not going to scrub, you’re not going to scrimp, you’re not going to do without,” he said the afternoon she saw him off to Yale. “We’re going to have a decent place to live and a car and enough extra money for movies and ice cream and vacations every summer.”

  It took eight years.

  His first job was with a small firm on the outskirts of Philadelphia, which was barely close enough to Reading for him to commute every day from the little cottage behind her parents’ house, but not close enough to allow him very much time with his new bride.

  “We can afford to live closer, if you like,” he told her. “But if your parents are really willing to let us have this place, just for the cost of fixing it up, maybe we should grab it.”

  Barbara Doniger was not only in love, she was very wise. If she could wait patiently for him to finish four years of college, two years in the army and two years of graduate school, she could wait for him to come home for dinner.

  “We’ll start a savings account,” she said. “And every month we’ll make a deposit, just as if we were paying rent, and before you know it, we’ll have enough to build our own dream house.”

  “A dream house, eh?” He smiled. “Is that the plan, Mrs. Doniger?”

  “That’s the plan,” she told him firmly. “And it isn’t going to cost so very much, either, because I happen to know an exceptional young architect who’ll design exactly what we want for free.”

  Five mornings a week, Ted got up before dawn, leaving the house at six to drive to Philadelphia, some sixty miles away. Barbara got up with him so they could share breakfast together, packed him a lunch so they could save money, and got into the habit of fixing a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich for herself around three in the afternoon so she could wait to have supper with him when he came home at night, which could be anywhere between eight and ten o’clock, depending on his workload.

  One day in April of 1967, he made the usual two-hour trip home in eighty-six minutes, reaching the hospital in Reading just seconds after his first daughter was born.

  “I guess I didn’t plan very well,” Barbara yawned as she drifted off to sleep. “I thought it would take much longer.”

  Jessica was born in Hartford, Connecticut, a year after Ted took a job with a medium-sized firm that specialized in the kind of steel-and-glass office buildings that had begun to pop up all over the northeast. Amy was born in New York, six months after Ted accepted a junior partnership in a large and prestigious firm known for its distinctive hotels and unique office complexes.

  Each time, in each place, he and Barbara resolved to build their dream house, and each time they were thwarted by a better offer in another city. But this time Barbara would not be denied. They rented an apartment on the west side of Manhattan for convenience, and spent their weekends driving from one suburb to another, from New Jersey to Long Island to Westchester County, hunting for just the right place. One crisp September afternoon they drove into Hastings-on-Hud-son and knew their search was over.

  “Here,” Barbara said.

  “Here,” Ted agreed.

  The very next week, they placed a deposit on a beautiful two-acre site that sloped down toward the river and began to design their house.

  “I want large rooms, high ceilings, and lots of windows,” Barbara declared. “And a big pantry in the kitchen. And closets—endless closets.”

  “Every room will have a river view,” Ted decided. “The house will have two arms that extend out, sort of like a V with a flat bottom, and the girls will have one wing and we’ll have another.”

  “Can we have a garden?” she asked.

  “Of course,” he told her. “And we’ll have a pla
y area for the girls, and a patio with a barbecue, and a front porch where we can sit in the evenings and watch the sun go down.”

  “I can’t wait,” she breathed.

  But Barbara was already sick. Every specialist Ted consulted told him the same thing—a year, perhaps two, no more than that.

  They kept the seriousness of it from the children and from each other and even from themselves as long as they could. Every night, Ted would snuggle close beside her, willing his strength into her body and praying for a miracle even as he watched her slowly fading away.

  “She’s always been there,” he told his sister wretchedly one drab day in May when the ambulance had been summoned to rush Barbara to the hospital for the last time. “She’s not just my wife, you know, not just my friend—she’s the best part of me. She’s my strength, my purpose. Whatever dreams have come true, whatever plans have worked out, whatever I’ve accomplished—all of it—it’s only because she was there, backing me up. What will I ever do without her?”

  “What you have to do,” Nancy told him, holding tight to his hand. “You’ll go on.”

  The doctor, a well-meaning but taciturn man, came out of Barbara’s room just then and tapped Ted on the shoulder.

  “She wants to see you,” he said.

  Ted started to stand up but his knees buckled under him.

  “Get hold of yourself,” Nancy hissed. “You have to be strong now, for her.”

  He nodded numbly and struggled to his feet. It was only a few steps across the corridor, but it took an eternity for him to reach her door and all his effort to push it open. She looked so small lying in the hospital bed, so helpless, her brown eyes too big in her pale face. What was left of her glossy brown hair barely grazed the pillow. The tubes were gone, the masks, the wires, the machines—symbols of modern medicine that had not been able to heal. Had they been there, he might have smashed them with his fists.

  She tried to smile at him as he came toward her and that pitiful attempt alone was enough to fill his eyes and pinch his throat.

  “Hi,” she whispered.

  He sat down on the bed beside her and held her shoulders and kissed her lightly.