Guilt by Association (16 page)

look to the future.

—
Anonymous

K
aren Kern hurried up Fifth Avenue, as quickly as the slight stiffness in her reconstructed left knee would allow, and turned left on Twelfth Street. Both the temperature and the humidity registered in the upper nineties, and Karen was perspiring freely beneath her bulky black coat.

She had regained her health and most of her weight. Her skin glowed a rich bronze from weekends in the sun, setting her blue-gray eyes off dramatically. Her dark hair, which grew well below her shoulders, was pulled back at the nape of her neck. A pale touch of lipstick was her only makeup.

Shifting the sack of groceries she carried, she began to fumble for her door keys when she was still half a block from the solid concrete building where she shared an apartment with Arlene Minniken, her former roommate from Cornell.

“Good evening, Miss Kern,” Martin, the doorman, said as she approached.

Her parents had insisted on her living in a building that provided round-the-clock doormen for extra security.

“Hello, Martin,” she replied with the plastic smile she had perfected for almost every man with whom she came in contact,
regardless of the circumstances.

The lobby of the ten-story apartment house was dim and

functional, in contrast to the splendid opulence of Jill Hart-man’s building on West End Avenue, but Karen hardly noticed.
She pulled an assortment of bills and advertising circulars from her mailbox and rode the tired, creaking elevator to the sixth floor.

Letting herself into her apartment, she dropped her coat on the floor, deposited the bag of groceries on the kitchen counter,
and hurried over to flip the switch on the air conditioner. The unit was old and rattled so much that she and Arlene almost had to shout to hear each other above the racket, but it provided a modicum of relief that was better than nothing. Then she kicked off her shoes, fixed herself a vodka collins and collapsed on the living room sofa.

For the past six months, Karen had been working as the assistant manager of the Washington Square Bookery, which wasn’t exactly on Washington Square, but close enough for the owner to get away with the namesake.

Housed in the dim, quiet, faintly musty basement of an old brownstone, the Bookery specialized in previously owned, rare,
and hard-to-find books and periodicals. Peace posters hung everywhere, along with a sign that read, “Make Love Not War,” and a cartoon of Lyndon Johnson riding the top of a bomb about to plunge into a crying baby, which said, “Bombs Hurt.” Burning incense spread a pungent odor over everything.

A number of regulars, mainly friends and neighbors from Greenwich Village, came in to browse and pass the time of day with Demelza, the rather eccentric proprietor, but the shop was not generally frequented by uptown customers. Karen kept track of inventory, placed orders, organized the woefully disorganized owner, and made sure there was always a pot of herbal tea brewing. The job was interesting and just a short walk from the apartment, and the money didn’t matter because her parents footed the bill for her major expenses.

When she wasn’t at home or at the Bookery, Karen could be found on a bench in Washington Square with her nose deep in one of Demelza’s treasures, or wandering around the nar
row streets of Greenwich Village peering into secondhand shop windows, or sitting by herself in one of the coffee houses that were an integral part of the area’s offbeat charm.

Nobody bothered her. Like marbles bouncing off one another, people of the Milage met, touched briefly and then veered away,
strumming their guitars, selling their wares, keeping their distance and protecting their own painful secrets behind hard,
glossy shells.

Had she had her own way, Karen would have chosen one of the run-down walk-ups that passed for quaint right in the heart of the unique little community, but her parents had been adamant.

“It’s bad enough you want to live in the city at all,” her mother had said. “But as long as you do, we’re going to make sure that it’s someplace safe and respectable, and not some bohemian enclave overrun by weirdos and freaks.”

There was no way Karen could explain to her parents what it was like when she crossed Washington Square South. More than merely entering another part of the city, it was like entering another life, a life she felt she belonged in—among the weirdos and the freaks.

They settled on the formerly deluxe apartment house on West Twelfth Street, a block off Fifth Avenue. It was quiet and well-maintained and offered enough security to satisfy the elder Kerns, and it suited Arlene, who split her time between Bellevue Hospital and NYU, where she was earning her master’s degree in psychology.

Karen never went back to Cornell. Nor did she marry Peter Bauer. The two of them had spoken on the telephone several times after his return to Maine that dreadful spring, but their conversations were short and superficial. Peter spoke of the weather and told her about his job and his family, but he carefully avoided any mention of the future. Karen listened politely and didn’t press him. There wasn’t really any point. After a while, the phone calls stopped.

“What could you possibly have been thinking of, to tell him that ugly story?” her mother demanded once she had pried the
circumstances of the picnic at Steppingstone Park out of her daughter.

“I couldn’t marry him under false pretenses,” Karen replied defensively. “I had to tell him the truth.”

“Truth, my dear girl, is what we want it to be,” Beverly retorted. “Were you
trying
to push him away?”

“I was trying to find out if he really loved me—or just some fantasy he had of me.”

“Why? What’s so wrong with fantasies?”

“Nothing,” Karen conceded. “I just didn’t want to build my marriage on one.”

“I daresay many a marriage has been,” Beverly declared. “You have to understand—it isn’t men who lead women down the garden path, but the other way around. It’s all part of the game we play to get what we want. And there’s no harm in it, because the men are getting what they want, too.”

“It just wouldn’t have been fair to him,” Karen insisted stubbornly.

“Fair?” Beverly exploded. “Has this whole awful thing been fair to any of us?”

“I don’t want to talk about it anymore,” Karen snapped, her head beginning to throb.

Beverly threw up her hands in exasperation. “Have it your way, then. Just remember that righteousness is a poor excuse for loneliness.”

Karen had hobbled away defiantly, but her mother’s words stayed with her. She learned to accept the sympathy she received as the innocent victim of a terrible automobile accident. She never again spoke of what had really happened to her, but pushed it all down into a dark place within her, where no light could shine.

She discarded the crutches. The stiffness in her left knee grew less and less noticeable. The doctors assured her that, in time, it would disappear altogether. She took to wearing long skirts and high collars to hide the scars on her body, and perfected an attitude of polite disinterest to hide the scars on her soul. It was two years before she could bring herself to leave Knightsbridge Road for something other than a brief ap-
pointment. But when she did, in the summer of 1965, she left for good.

“Arlene Minniken wants me to share an apartment in the city with her,” Karen announced one evening at dinner. “She thinks it would be fun for us to room together again.”

“You want to live in Manhattan?” Beverly asked, unsure she had heard correctly. It was her opinion that nice young ladies stayed at home until they married.

“Yes,” Karen replied. “Lots of girls are doing it these days. Take Arlene, for example.”

“Arlene’s home is in Tallahassee,” her mother declared. “She couldn’t very well commute to New York City. But you have a perfectly good home right here. If you want to get away so badly, you can always go back to college.”

“I don’t want to go back to college,” Karen responded. “I just want to live on my own for a while.”

“How will you support yourself?” her father asked.

“I’ll get a job.”

“A job?” Beverly questioned. “What kind of job?”

Karen shrugged. “I don’t know yet.”

“You know that isn’t necessary,” her mother exclaimed. “There
are
other options.”

“Mother, please, let’s not start that again. I’m not going back to college, and I have no plans to marry.”

“I suppose we can help out with expenses”—Leo thought aloud—”at least until you get on your feet.”

Karen beamed at him. With one sentence, he had not only resolved her financial qualms, he had silenced her mother in mid-argument,
and that was not a frequent occurrence.

“Thanks, Daddy,” she said. “That would be fantastic.”

“What with Laura starting at Mount Holyoke in the fall, and now you wanting to live in Manhattan,” Beverly pouted, “the house is going to be awfully empty.”

“I’ll come back to visit as often as you like,” Karen assured her.

It was the end of summer before she found work. There were not many jobs available to someone without a college degree, certainly not ones her mother considered appropriate,
which meant in the right part of town, in an acceptable industry, among respectable people. She took a position as a receptionist at Marilyn’s Beauty Salon, where she was allowed to wear full skirts and high-collared blouses and oversized sweaters, and the patrons, mostly older women, patted her hand a lot. In addition to greeting customers and scheduling appointments, it was Karen’s job to close the shop at night, making sure that curling irons and blow dryers were turned off. Hardly demanding work, but the pay was steady.

After that, she became a salesgirl at Lord & Taylor’s. The department store stood solidly on Fifth Avenue, at what her father called the edge of the high-rent district. Everything about it was elegant—the architecture, the dramatic display windows,
the merchandise, the personnel. After her training period, Karen was assigned to the lingerie department, where the senior saleswoman showed her how to recognize the buyers from the browsers and taught her how to clinch a sale to a wavering customer.

She soon discovered that it wasn’t only women who bought lingerie. Men, sometimes awkward and embarrassed, came looking for finery for their wives or their mothers or their sweethearts or their mistresses. It didn’t take Karen long to learn the difference.

One October afternoon, when she had been at Lord & Taylor’s for almost a year, a customer approached her, gray-haired, distinguished,
and obviously wealthy, carrying a black satin negligee in his hands. It was the most expensive that the store offered and one of Karen’s personal favorites.

“Excuse me, miss,” he said. “I wonder if you can help me. I want to buy a birthday gift for my daughter, and I’m not at all sure what would be appropriate.”

Karen concealed a smile. She knew that men did not buy slinky black satin negligees for their daughters, but she had learned how to play the game.

“How old is she?” she asked politely.

“Well, I’d say she’s about your age.” He held up his selection. “Tell me, do you like this?”

“I like it very much,” Karen conceded. “What size does she wear?”

He frowned at that. “I don’t know,” he admitted. “But I think she’s about your size. Maybe if you’d hold it up, I could get an idea of how it would look on her.”

Karen took the negligee from him and held it awkwardly against her body, fussing with the folds to get them just right. “How’s that?” she inquired.

He shook his head. “I can’t really tell for sure. I don’t suppose you’d be willing to try it on for me?”

The hair began to rise on the back of Karen’s neck. She had been trained to deal with difficult customers, but no one had told her what to do in this situation.

“I’m afraid not,” she murmured, thinking fast. “As you can see, I’m alone in the department, and I’m not allowed to leave the floor.”

“Well, that’s all right,” he said with an easy smile. “Why don’t I just take it anyway, and if my daughter doesn’t like it,
she can bring it back and pick out something else.”

Karen wrote up the sale as quickly as she could, the plastic smile fastened to her face, and breathed an enormous sigh of relief when he took his package and left.

The store closed at six. It was six-thirty when Karen slipped out the side door and hurried across Fifth Avenue to catch the downtown bus, joining a small knot of people who were already waiting.

“I think this was meant for you,” a voice directly behind her said. “Even though you wouldn’t try it on.”

Karen was so startled that she fell against an elderly woman standing in front of her.

“I beg your pardon,” she mumbled, as she bent down to retrieve the woman’s fallen handbag. Straightening up, she glanced over her shoulder at the gray-haired man.

“I wanted to give it to you right there at the store, but I realized that might not be very appropriate, under the circumstances,”
he said. “So I waited for you. I thought we’d go somewhere for a drink, perhaps have dinner. Get to know each other.”

“I think you’ve made a mistake,” Karen said, her heart pounding.

“Really?” he asked with a smile. “I thought you got my message very clearly. I certainly got yours.”

“What message?” she demanded. “I gave you no message.”

“You knew perfectly well I wasn’t buying a present for my daughter.” He chuckled. “I don’t even have a daughter.”

“I didn’t know
who
you were buying it for,” she replied truthfully, praying the bus would come.

“I was buying it for you, of course.”

“Thank you very much, but no, thank you,” she said as politely as she could because he might have been a good customer at Lord & Taylor’s and she couldn’t afford to offend him. “That particular item isn’t one I have any use for.”

“If you play your cards right,” he told her with a deep chuckle, “an opportunity might present itself.”

Up the street, Karen could see the bus inching its way toward them, and in anticipation the knot of people began to surge forward. The gray-haired man pressed against her.