Guilt by Association

by Susan R. Sloan

Amy nodded again.

  “So far, so good,” Karen declared. She glanced around the generous L-shaped space that they had hung with pink-and-white festooned wallpaper. “Now let’s see—is that your very own toy chest against the wall?”

  A third nod came in reply as the child eyed the gaily decorated trunk that housed her favorite things.

  “Is Snoopy sound asleep inside?”

  “Yes,” Amy admitted. “Unless I woke him up.”

  Karen listened. “I don’t hear a single peep, do you?”

  The little girl shook her head.

  “Well, I guess that means he’s just as snug as that old bug in a rug,” Karen declared. “But I think we should whisper anyway, just in case.” She lowered her voice. “Is that your very own dresser and desk and chair over there?”

  Amy looked at the pink-painted furniture that had been brought from her room in New York. “Uh-huh.”

  “Now peek inside that closet—are those your very own clothes hanging up?”

  “And that’s my bathrobe on the bedpost, and my slippers on the floor, and my Raggedy Ann and my panda and my picture of all of us at the wedding.”

  By this time, Karen was leaning against the headboard and Amy was nestled in her arms.

  “Well then, you’d better tell me: What are all these things doing here if this isn’t your very own new room?”

  The little girl shrugged. “It’s bigger than my old room, and it’s shaped funny, but I guess it isn’t so scary after all.”

  “In that case,” her stepmother suggested, “suppose you snuggle down under the covers and close your eyes and think about how special this room is going to be, just because it’s yours, and about all the new friends you’re going to make who’ll want to come here to play.”

  “Are there any little girls my age nearby?”

  “I have it on good authority that there’s one right next door.”

  “Maybe I can meet her tomorrow,” Amy ventured, stifling a yawn. “I can’t wait till tomorrow.”

  “In that case, the sooner you go to sleep, the sooner tomorrow will come.”

  “Don’t go yet.”

  “Don’t worry. I’m right here.”

  “Are you going to turn off the light right away?”

  Karen smiled. “Not until you’re in dreamland.”

  “Promise?”

  “Promise.”

  Ted found them both there the next morning.

  As she had once held her daughter, so now Karen held her husband on the night of Amy’s accident and the unexpected honesty held them both. He thought he had married a woman, but she knew he had married a shell. She thought she had married a shell, only to discover that she had married a man. With a silent splinter, the first crack appeared in the invisible wall.

  “It’s going to be all right,” she murmured. “You’ll see, everything’s going to be all right. Amy will be fine. We’ll all be fine.”

  Somehow, she thought.

  Amy recovered. She missed the last month of school but had no trouble making up the work. She spent the summer in a wheelchair, but by the fall she was back in class, first on crutches, then with a cane, and finally on her own two feet again. The skull fractures healed, having done no serious damage. Her hair grew a little funny around the scars, and she fretted until it was long enough to cover them, but that was the worst of it.

  The best of it was that Karen and Ted began to talk to each other, first during the long nights of Amy’s stay in the hospital, then during the months of her convalescence.

  “I married you for the wrong reasons,” he acknowledged. “I didn’t realize it then, but I do now. You see, you were like Barbara in so many ways, and I missed her so much, and I thought I could make her come alive again through you. But of course I couldn’t, and I blamed you when I shouldn’t have.”

  “I married you for the wrong reasons, too,” she conceded. “I thought I could get back some of the things I felt I’d been cheated out of, without having to pay the price. But I ended up cheating you instead.”

  “What sort of things?” he asked.

  “The chance to know what being married was like,” she replied. “The chance to have children to raise. The chance to have the kind of life I was brought up to believe I was supposed to have.”

  “The accident you had—it prevented all that?”

  “Yes,” she said truthfully. But she didn’t elaborate.

  Of course, he had seen the scars and wondered about them. But he would never ask.

  “I didn’t realize it was that bad,” he mused.

  “The doctors had to remove my uterus,” she explained. “My college sweetheart couldn’t handle it. I guess he wanted children more than he wanted me. After that, I guess I just withdrew. I was afraid of being hurt again.”

  “I can understand that,” he said. “I suppose men can be very selfish and insensitive sometimes.”

  “Well, it might not have been all his fault,” she heard herself say.

  “Marrying me wasn’t what you expected, was it?” he observed. “I turned out to be selfish and insensitive, too.”

  “No,” she said quickly. “Don’t blame yourself.”

  “Well, where do we go from here?” he asked, holding his breath. “Do you want a divorce?”

  “Do you?” she countered, not daring to breathe.

  His response was rapid and sincere. “No, I don’t.”

  Karen sighed with relief. “Neither do I.”

  “All right then,” he declared, “as far as I’m concerned, we start our marriage over again—from right this minute—and not only do I promise to love and honor you and keep you in sickness and in health, but I promise to keep you safe from harm for as long as we both shall live.”

  Less than a year later, they moved to San Francisco.

  Karen took her mid-morning cup of tea into the living room. The three Rankin oils she and Ted owned between them were stacked against one wall, waiting to be uncrated. The clown would go in the office, they had already decided on that, but it was up to Karen to choose where to hang the other two. She was about to begin ripping the first crate apart when the front doorbell rang.

  A large woman in her late fifties, with full lips, a broad nose, narrow brown eyes, and frizzy salt-and-pepper hair pulled back into an unfashionable bun, stood across the threshold with a casserole in her hands. There was something about her that reminded Karen of Demelza.

  “Hi,” she said, when the door was opened. “I wanted to bring this to you yesterday, because I know how horrific mov-ing-in day can be, but I had an emergency at the office and just didn’t get home in time to get it done. So I took this morning off, and here it is. I hope you can use it.”

  “Thank you,” Karen replied. “That’s very kind.”

  “I’m Natalie Shaffer and I live across the street,” the woman continued, nodding in the direction of a stately Tudor two houses down. “Welcome to The Wood and to San Francisco and even to California, come to that.”

  Karen introduced herself. “I guess I have to admit to all three,” she said with a chuckle. “We came from Tucson.”

  “Never been there,” Natalie announced. “But if you have time to come over for a cup of coffee, you can tell me all about it.”

  “I’ve just made a pot of tea,” Karen ventured. “Why don’t you come in and join me?”

  “Tea?” Natalie echoed, stepping into the foyer. “My goodness, you’re civilized. I thought Arizona was still one of those wild and woolly places.”

  Karen laughed. “In many ways it is, but I’m originally from New York.”

  “Are you?” pounced Natalie. “How delightful—we’re twice neighbors. I’m from Pennsylvania.”

  “My husband comes from Pennsylvania,” Karen exclaimed. “From Reading.”

  “Well then, we’re practically family,” Natalie assured her. “I’m from Scranton.”

  Karen poured another cup of tea and found a box of cookies in the cupboard, and the two women s
at down at the breakfast-room table.

  “I’m amazed you can find anything, a day after moving in,” Natalie marveled, biting into a cookie.

  Karen shrugged. “I used to be the manager of a shop that depended on my being able to unpack and organize in record time. My employer used to call me the Unbearable Neatnik. I guess some habits are hard to break.”

  “I wanted to be a flower child,” Natalie said with a chuckle. “My husband used to call me the Unbearable Beatnik.”

  Karen sipped her tea with a soft smile. After ten years and four moves, she knew she was about to make a real friend.

  “What do you do that you have emergencies and you get to take mornings off?” she asked.

  “I’m a psychiatrist,” replied Natalie and immediately burst out laughing. “I’ll wager no one’s ever accused you of having a poker face,” she cried. “It froze like a sphinx the minute that word came out of my mouth.”

  “Did it?” Karen managed to say. “I can’t imagine why.”

  The neighbor grinned. “It gets worse, I’m afraid—my husband’s one also.”

  “Really? Both of you?” Karen blurted in her discomfort. “I guess psychiatry must be … profitable.”

  Natalie chuckled. “Shrinks are in, shame is out. With ninety-eight percent of the population among the walking dsyfunctional these days, there’s no longer anything wrong with an otherwise perfectly sane person seeking help.”

  “I didn’t mean to offend you,” Karen said hastily.

  “I’m not offended,” Natalie replied. “On the contrary, I think this is the beginning of a great friendship.”

  By the end of three weeks, Karen no longer thought about Natalie in terms of her profession. They were having too much fun together. Soon, the Shaffers were coming to dinner every other Friday night, and the Donigers were going across the street for brunch on alternate Sundays.

  The Shaffer home was a collector’s bad dream, crammed with antiques representing every period from Elizabethan to Bauhaus. Threadbare Orientals that rightfully belonged in a museum covered the floors, original Tiffany lamps lit the rooms, a real Fabergé egg kept the papers on a side table from scattering, and Karen found a cabinet of first editions tucked into a corner that would have had Demelza drooling. Mostly, however, there was clutter—papers, books, magazines and dust.

  “Neither of us is particularly good at housekeeping.” Natalie shrugged without guilt.

  Herbert Shaffer was a jolly man of sixty, with bushy eyebrows and a funny little mustache. It seemed to be a race whether he would go bald before he went gray. He had a surprising interest in architecture, and he and Ted hit it off immediately.

  The first Friday the Shaffers came to dinner, they sat in the green-and-cream living room afterward, drinking brandy from crystal snifters and carrying on an animated discussion about everything from movies to music to food to California wines, and eventually to the five-year-old drought.

  “Isn’t that the most beautiful book?” Natalie exclaimed during a break in the conversation, nodding toward a copy of Tapestry that Ted insisted be kept on the coffee table. “I saw it down at B. Dalton’s and—I don’t know—there was just something about it. I had to have it. I guess that’s where I got my wild and woolly notions about Arizona.”

  “Yes,” Karen murmured noncommittally.

  “I understand the authors travel around the country in a jeep. A couple of free spirits, I guess.”

  Amy giggled.

  “What’s so funny?” Natalie inquired.

  “That you call my mother and my aunt free spirits,” she replied.

  “Your… what?”

  “Nancy Yanow is my aunt,” Amy explained. “She takes the pictures. And Mom writes the words. But she uses her maiden name so no one will know it’s her.”

  “That’s not why at all,” Karen objected. “It’s just the way we started.”

  Natalie gaped at Karen with a mixture of astonishment and admiration.

  “You never said,” she complained.

  Karen shrugged. “It never came up.”

  “I asked you what you did,” the psychiatrist insisted. “You said you were a housewife.”

  “I am.”

  “And a mom,” Amy put in.

  “That’s right,” Karen said, giving her stepdaughter a hug. “The other is just a hobby.”

  “You’ve done a first-rate job with your Amy,” Natalie remarked one day during a shopping excursion. “I’m looking forward to meeting Gwen and Jessica.”

  “I’m afraid I can’t take much of the credit.” Karen sighed.

  “The girls aren’t mine. I only wish they were. Their real mother died when they were young.”

  “You look pretty real to me,” Natalie observed.

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  “I know what you meant, but you don’t know what you’re talking about,” the psychiatrist said bluntly. “Amy is the way she is as much because of you as anyone else.”

  “Well, perhaps.”

  “How come you never had any of your own?”

  “I had … an accident some years ago,” Karen confided reluctantly. “I wasn’t able, after that.”

  “Not something you care to discuss,” the psychiatrist suggested. “Me and my big mouth.”

  “It doesn’t matter anymore,” Karen replied with a shrug.

  “One of the by-products of being a shrink,” Natalie said casually, appraising her friend through the professional corner of her eye, “is that you get in the habit of asking too many questions. Of course you also get to be one hell of a listener. So, if you ever feel like talking, you know, about anything at all, I’m just across the street.”

  Karen smiled politely, a bit of the old plastic smile, but said nothing. Years ago, she had told Nancy all she intended to tell anyone about the assault in Central Park. Since then, she had managed to put the past behind her and now she wanted only to leave it there. Despite their new understanding, she had not even told Ted. Several times, she thought she might, but the fear stopped her—the same fear that the truth would disgust him and he would turn away from her as Peter had.

  She sometimes wished there had been someone to tell who might have listened without condemning, who might have understood, who might have been able to help her deal with the anger and frustration. But there hadn’t been anyone there for her.

  Now it was a different world. Rape was a topic that was being discussed openly, and rape-counseling centers were springing up all across the country. Along with date rape, acquaintance rape was beginning to gain acceptance. More and more, women were coming forward to say: “Yes, I went with him, but I did not want to have sex with him. I said no.”

  How desperately Karen had longed to say those very words to the New York police, to her mother, to Peter, to the whole world, and have someone stand up beside her and agree. But no one had, and after almost thirty years, she had pretty much convinced herself that she had been the villain of the piece instead of the victim.

  The balmy days of September stretched into October and the Bay Area held its collective breath, hoping for rain. The drought had brought severe water rationing.

  “We had enough water when we were in the middle of the desert,” Karen observed wryly. “Now here we are, surrounded by water, and the reservoirs are dry.”

  “It’s not the weather, it’s the politicians,” Natalie told her. “Down in southern California, they’re swimming in their pools and watering their lawns just like they always did, while up here we’re recycling every possible drop and taking communal showers.”

  Karen had never had much interest in the workings of government, at any level. Although she dutifully voted in every election, she paid scant attention to the players. She had the general impression that politics had degenerated to a fairly dismal level, that corruption was everywhere, and behavior once considered abhorrent was now being condoned.

  Over the last decade, a growing distrust and disgust with the business of polit
ics had culminated in total disinterest. Karen stopped reading newsmagazines altogether, began to skip the front sections of the paper, and paid no attention to the evening news. She made an effort to watch some of the Thomas-Hill hearings, but the entire spectacle appalled her.

  “It’s progress,” the psychiatrist told her. “A generation ago, a woman would never have been allowed to confront such a man about his behavior. Anita Hill may not have stopped the Thomas confirmation, but she accomplished something just as important. She opened a door that won’t be easily shut again.”

  Karen pondered that for a while. “I suppose you have a point,” she conceded, “but I’m suffering from an incurable case of apathy. I don’t even know—or care—who’s going to run for President next year.”

  Natalie nodded. “I understand how you feel. But it happens that we have someone right here in California that I wish would take a stab at it.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I think he’s a good man. It’s clear he really cares about the state and I think he cares just as much about the country, too. I heard him speak at an AMA luncheon last month, and he was honest enough to tell us what a mess we’re in, and smart enough to show us exactly how he’d fix it.”

  “What’s his name?” Karen asked. “If he runs, maybe I’ll vote for him.”

  “Willmont,” Natalie replied. “Robert Drayton Willmont.”

  two

  On Thursday, October 24, Randy Neuburg squeezed his way past a throng of media representatives into Robert Willmont’s private office in the Old Senate Office Building, shutting it firmly behind him.

  “It’s a zoo out there,” he exclaimed. “I’ve never seen so many reporters stuffed into one place before. How do you think they all knew it was today?”

  Robert leaned back in his chair and grinned. “Mary Catherine told them.”

  It was still the same boyish grin, but now it spread across a face that showed the erosion of middle age and the pressures of responsibility. “Handsome” had described him in his youth. At fifty-three, the more appropriate word was “distinguished.”