Guilt by Association

by Susan R. Sloan

  “I love you,” he said in an unsteady voice. “I’ve always loved you. I guess I haven’t said it anywhere near as often as I should, but that doesn’t mean I don’t feel it.”

  “I know,” she murmured.

  “I’ve never loved anyone but you—not anyone. Not from the moment I first saw you in that ridiculous pom-pom skirt.”

  “No sillier,” she breathed, “than you in your Bermuda shorts.”

  “We made quite a pair, didn’t we?” he said with a painful chuckle.

  Her eyes flickered closed for a moment and he thought she might-be slipping away, but then they opened again.

  “The children …” she sighed, her voice weaker, her effort stronger.

  “What?” he asked. “What about them?”

  “Love them …”

  “Always,” he told her.

  “Find someone …” she managed, and he had to bend close now to hear her. “Make a family … build … build that house…”

  “No!” he cried.

  “Promise…”

  “No,” he sobbed, burying his head against her. “You can’t ask me to do that. I could never love anyone but you. Never! I’ll take good care of the girls. I’ll be the best father to them that I know how to be, but I don’t want anyone else. Please, don’t make me promise.”

  But Barbara could no longer hear him.

  Ted took her home to Reading to be buried. Nancy stayed behind with the girls. For two days he allowed himself to be surrounded by people who knew and loved him and who had known and loved Barbara.

  “I’m sorry,” he kept saying to her parents. “I’m so sorry.”

  “It wasn’t your fault, son,” they told him. “It was nobody’s fault. Don’t blame yourself.”

  But he did. He blamed himself for all those years he had made her wait, all those lost years they could have had together.

  When he returned to New York, he and Nancy and the girls had a quiet ceremony of their own. It was a godsend having Nancy there to take care of everything, but eventually she had to go back to Reading. Joe needed her and she did have two little ones of her own.

  “Why don’t you take a couple of weeks off?” she urged her brother. “Go away somewhere, get some rest.”

  “It’s better if I work,” he told her.

  “Well then, why don’t I take the girls home with me? Mom’s already said that she and Dad would love to have them for a while.”

  “Gwen and Jessica have school,” Ted said. “I don’t want to disrupt their routine any more than necessary.”

  “Will you be all right?”

  “Sure.”

  “How will you manage, I mean, with everything?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I suppose I’ll have to hire a housekeeper. Someone to cook and be here with the girls when I’m not home. I think that would be the best solution.”

  Nancy hired Mrs. Peagram before she left. The plump little widow, with the knot of gray hair on top of her head, had lost her husband in the Korean War, before there were any children, and had never remarried. She was fair, if strict, and believed in rewarding success more than punishing failure. The girls never entirely warmed up to her, but she had the household running smoothly in no time.

  Ted went ahead and purchased the property in Hastings-on-Hudson but he never built the house. The idea of living there without Barbara was much too painful. Occasionally, he would drive up on a Sunday and walk the boundaries of the site or sit on the slope and look out over the steady river while the children played catch or tag or munched on a lunch that Mrs. Peagram had prepared.

  He bought the house on West Seventy-eighth Street instead, and not only did he design the new interior, he did much of the actual renovation work himself. It was hard, mindless labor and exactly what he needed. While he and Barbara had dreamed of getting out of the city as soon as possible, his decision to stay was based on practicality. The fifteen-minute commute to and from his office, even at the height of the rush hour, gave him more time to spend with the girls.

  When the Yanows moved to New York a year later, Ted offered them the upstairs apartment. The arrangement suited everyone. Nancy slipped into the role of surrogate mother that Mrs. Peagram had never quite filled and Ted soon settled into a comfortable routine—with his work to sustain him, his children to fulfill him, and his sister to support him.

  He had no interest in meeting women. The very idea of dating seemed a betrayal. For the most part, he was quite content with his neat, safe life. If he sometimes missed the kind of intimacy that could be found only with a woman, it was a momentary distraction. For him, the act of love was as emotional as it was physical. On the few occasions when he even bothered to look at the women who continually circled around him, there wasn’t one among them with whom he felt the slightest desire to share anything intimate.

  Until now.

  Now, as he puttered in his little patch of garden under a thin April sun and watched Gwen pulling weeds and Jessica teaching Amy to do a cartwheel, it occurred to him that, as usual, Barbara had been much wiser than he. She had tried to tell him not to bury himself beside her and shut his heart to the idea of being whole again. He had never dreamed that someone would come along to fill even a portion of that aching void inside him. But someone had—when he wasn’t looking, when his guard was down, when he least expected it.

  It was Nancy’s fault, of course, for bringing her into the house, first as a business associate, then as a friend, and finally blending her into the very fabric of the family.

  “She’s nothing to do with you,” his sister had insisted the day before his fortieth birthday party. “She’s my friend. We’re working on a book together, Joe and the kids adore her, and I thought it would be nice to include her. But if the idea really bothers you that much, I’ll just tell her not to come.”

  “You can’t very well do that once you’ve invited her,” Ted grumbled.

  “Then grin and bear it.”

  From Nancy’s careless account of her career-oriented friend, he expected something of a barracuda to show up— insecure, power-hungry, and typically overdressed, overconfident, and overanxious. He was totally unprepared for the gentle, amiable, utterly delightful woman who had captivated his daughters in less than thirty seconds.

  “You’ve very good with children,” he told her on that first evening. “The girls are usually quite shy with strangers.”

  “I love kids,” she said simply.

  He couldn’t understand why she wasn’t married, with a houseful of her own to nurture, but as winter slipped and skidded its way into spring, he realized how very glad he was that she wasn’t.

  It began on his birthday with just a vague recognition of someone new entering his space. By Christmas, he had become comfortable with her. By Easter, he thought of her as a good friend. By Labor Day, he found himself inventing opportunities to see her. And by the time 1981 rolled around, he was ready to put aside his guilt and acknowledge that he wanted her to be a lot more than a friend.

  She was bright and amusing and self-reliant, and still there was something terribly vulnerable about her—a way she had of holding back sometimes, to observe rather than to participate, or an expression in her eyes when she didn’t know he was watching.

  On New Year’s Day, he invited her up to Hastings-on-Hud-son. A foot of snow lay on the ground and chunks of ice floated slowly down the river. The girls immediately set to building a snowman and Ted and Karen began to walk.

  “It’s magnificent up here,” she breathed when they had tramped the length of the property. “I’m so sorry you and Barbara didn’t get to build your dream house.”

  “I think you would have liked her,” he heard himself say. “I know she would have liked you.”

  “Knowing you, knowing the girls,” Karen replied, “it’s obvious she must have been very special.”

  He was well aware that she saw him as a sort of surrogate brother, and was quite comfortable with him on that basis. He
had no inkling of how she would view a change in that status. In the eighteen months they had known each other, she had not once indicated, by a single word or deed, that she desired anything else. All by itself, that set her apart from almost every other woman he had met in the five years since Barbara’s death.

  It occurred to him that he really knew very little about her. She rarely spoke of herself, except to provide brief answers to direct questions. Their conversations were mostly about him or the girls or the Yanows or Demion Five. She had walked into the middle of his life, but as of yet, he had not been invited into hers.

  “I suppose you’re one of those feminists,” he suggested once when she teased him about his tendency to cling to traditional gender roles. “An emancipated woman who chose career over family.”

  “Sometimes,” she replied enigmatically, “life has very little to do with choice.”

  “What does it have to do with, then?” he probed.

  For a moment, Karen’s face clouded over and a haunted expression filled her eyes.

  “Survival,” she said. Then her face cleared and she was smiling and teasing him once again.

  It was the first time he had seen beneath her sunny, serene surface, the first glimpse he had of a darker side. He wondered what misfortune shrouded her past, but he didn’t press her. He didn’t want to appear to be prying and run the risk of pushing her away. Besides, it didn’t really matter. In the silence of the night, and the emptiness of his bed, he couldn’t stop thinking about her.

  Two or three evenings a week, when he knew she was upstairs working on the book with Nancy, Ted would invent a reason to come knocking on the door. After a while, the frequency of his visits prompted Nancy to observe, privately, that she had seen more of him in the past several months than in the past several years.

  “Is that a complaint?” he asked.

  “Nope,” she said with an impish grin. “In fact, let me know when you run out of excuses. I’m sure there are a few I can suggest.”

  At Ted’s instigation, Sunday evenings became” family occasions. Either upstairs or downstairs, the Yanows and the Donigers would gather together for dinner, a few games, a little conversation and a lot of fun. Karen was always included.

  Late one summer Sunday, when the children were asleep and the adults were lingering in the garden, Amy woke up screaming from a nightmare and neither Ted nor Mrs. Pea-gram could manage to calm her.

  “Let me try,” Karen offered.

  She sat down on Amy’s pink-and-white canopy bed in the little girl’s candy-cane room, and calmly took the child into her arms. Her voice was too low for Ted to catch the words, but it didn’t matter. In less than ten minutes, his youngest daughter was sound asleep again.

  “What did you say to her?” he whispered.

  “I told her that her mother had sent me to chase away the hobgoblins and keep her safe while she slept.” He caught a sudden mischievous glint in her blue-gray eyes. “Then I bribed her.”

  “With what?”

  “I promised that, whenever I’m here, I’ll come and tell her a story before she goes to sleep so that her dreams will be filled with beautiful things—and there won’t be any room left for scary monsters.”

  It became a ritual. Three, sometimes four nights a week, Karen would sit on the edge of Amy’s bed and spin magical tales of little girls and little boys in a faraway world where the sun always shone and birds always sang and flowers always bloomed, and there was no such thing as sadness.

  “Is there such a place?” Amy asked her.

  “Oh yes,” Karen told her. “If you believe.”

  Before long, Jessica and Gwen, too, were sidling into Amy’s room, climbing up on the end of the bed to listen, and from the doorway, Ted watched and realized how much his daughters needed a mother. Mrs. Peagram kept the house spotlessly clean and the girls properly fed and clothed and supervised their homework, but she wasn’t very good at nurturing. She just didn’t have the knack.

  Karen had the knack. She wasn’t Barbara, of course—no one would ever be Barbara. Yet, in some ways, she was a lot like Barbara. She seemed to know many of the same things Barbara had known and she did many of the same things Barbara had done, and more and more, he couldn’t seem to keep himself from smiling whenever she was around.

  She was interested in his work, genuinely fond of the children, and perfectly at ease in his environment. Without even being aware of it, he began to picture her running the house, raising the girls, and growing old beside him.

  “Is Karen coming tonight?” Jessica asked, interrupting his thoughts, and yet not really interrupting them at all.

  “Is today Sunday?”

  “Sure.”

  “Then Karen’s coming.”

  “I want to show her my science project before I turn it in.”

  “Good,” Ted replied. “As I recall, she was the one who gave you the idea.”

  “Yeah.” Jessica grinned. “She did, didn’t she?”

  “Watch me, Daddy!” Amy cried suddenly. “I’m going to do a cartwheel!”

  “I’m watching, sweetheart,” he called.

  The effort was a bit lopsided but the chubby youngster managed to pull it around.

  “Did you see?” she chortled, jumping up and down. “Did you see?”

  “I saw, and it was wonderful.”

  “Will Karen be here before it gets dark? I want to show her, too.”

  “I think so.”

  “Make sure, Daddy, will you? I want her to see me.”

  “You know, Dad,” Gwen observed idly, “if you married Karen, we wouldn’t have to keep asking when she’s coming all the time. She’d already be here.”

  “You mean every night?” Amy asked, overhearing.

  “Sure,” Gwen told her, “and mornings and afternoons, too.”

  “Would she be here to tie my shoes for school?” the first-grader pressed.

  “Of course,” Jessica put in. “She’d be here just like Mommy used to be.”

  Amy’s eyes widened. “Just like Mommy?” she gasped, although she was too young to have a very clear image of Barbara.

  “Well, not exactly like her,” modified Gwen, the only one of the three of them who could really remember. “But almost.”

  The little girl turned to her father. “Are we going to marry Karen, Daddy? Is she going to be almost like Mommy?”

  “Would you like that?” he asked, amazed at how simple the most complex things could become when seen through the eyes of a child.

  “Oh yes,” Amy breathed.

  “Sure,” Jessica said.

  “Why not?” Gwen shrugged and then lowered her voice to a whisper. “She’s a lot nicer than Mrs. Pea, anyway.”

  As if on cue, Mrs. Peagram came to the back door. “It’s time for lunch,” she announced in her high-pitched Boston twang. “Come on in now, girls, and let’s get those little hands washed.”

  Ted thrust his trowel into the soft dirt of the flower bed and stood up with purpose.

  “You go on in with Mrs. Peagram and have your lunch,” he directed his daughters.

  “What about you, Daddy?” Jessica wanted to know. “What are you going to do?”

  “I’m going to go clean myself up a little,” he told her, looking down at his soiled jeans, “and then I have an errand to run, across town.”

  seven

  Karen sat cross-legged in the middle of her living room floor, in a baggy red sweat suit, surrounded by black- and-white photographs. A yellow pad lay beside her, a ballpoint pen was clamped between her teeth. There was a smudge of ink on her chin.

  The book that she and Nancy had envisioned nearly two years ago was almost finished. They had made the final photo selections, from among the thousand images captured on film, just last week. All that was wanting now were the words.

  “No pressure,” Nancy had assured her, handing over a thick stack of prints. “Just take these home with you, live with them for a while, and see what comes.”

&nbs
p; At first, nothing had come. Karen spent hours staring at a blank pad, chewing on the end of her pen, trying to think like a poet. Finally, she tossed the pad and pen aside, stopped thinking, and began to stare instead at the images themselves, spreading the prints out around her, concentrating on their stories.

  Eventually, she found words to describe the children of Harlem as they stood in the path of a gushing fire hydrant on a suffocating summer day, and the cold breath of death that reached into a Bowery doorway in the middle of winter to claim a man beneath a blanket of newspapers, and the rebirth of the earth as the first spring crocus pushed its head through the hard crust of clay along Riverside Drive.

  But autumn had totally frustrated her. With a sigh, and time running out, Karen reached for the twelve visions of that enigmatic season for perhaps the hundredth time. This time, one of them caught her attention and she reached out and pulled it toward her. It was a bleak illustration, in which Nancy had caught the last leaf falling from the only tree in an otherwise treeless section of Morningside Park. She yanked the pen out of her mouth, grabbed her pad, and began to write.

  The last tear of autumn

  falls unnoticed.

  A silent cry,

  frozen on the cheek of winter.

  Now, at least, she had a beginning, a direction.

  An hour later, she had covered half a dozen pages. So engrossed was she that the unexpected sound of her door buzzer severed her concentration like a chain saw.

  “Hi,” Ted said when she opened the door.

  “Hi,” she replied, wondering why he was standing on her doorstep, looking so freshly scrubbed, in the middle of the day. “Don’t tell me I forgot something,” she gasped. “Did we have plans?”

  “No, no,” he assured her hastily. “I just happened to be in the neighborhood, so I thought I’d stop by. But if you’re busy, I can be on my way.”

  “Don’t be silly,” she told him, because the mood was broken now and the words were gone. “Come on in.”

  “I thought maybe you’d be out on a day like this.”

  Karen was quickly gathering up her papers, stacking them neatly on the desk. “I’ve been trying to work.”