Guilt by Association (2 page)

“She’s still alive, Brandy,” Margaret cried. “She’s not dead—she’s still alive. We have to do something.” She tried to think.
“Keep her warm, that’s it. We have to keep her warm.”

She pulled off her pea jacket and laid it over the part of the girl’s body that the dog wasn’t already covering. She didn’t have any idea how long the girl had been lying there, or how close she was to freezing to death, but she knew the temperature was low enough to numb her own body in just the few seconds since she had shed her coat.

“Brandy,
stay,”
Margaret ordered the retriever. “I’m going to find help.”

With the bitter cold urging her on, Margaret ran as fast as she could back up the twisting path, past the boathouse, across the deserted East Drive, and out to Fifth Avenue. She knew it was still too early for much traffic, but she prayed that there would be someone about at this hour. She ran into the middle of the road and stopped the first vehicle that came along.

“What’s the matter with you, lady?” the irate taxi driver yelled, slamming down hard on his brakes and skidding to a stop.
“You wanna get us both killed?”

“Help,” Margaret cried. “Oh, help me, please. There’s a girl back there. I think she’s been beaten up and she may be almost frozen to death. Please, get a doctor, get a policeman— get somebody.”

“Okay, lady, okay,” the cabby said in a more reasonable voice. “Calm down. There’s a police station right up the road. Just tell me where to bring ‘em.”

“It’s back there,” Margaret told him, quickly pointing out the direction.

“Yeah, yeah, okay, they’ll be able to figure out where that is.” He reached into the back of his cab and pulled up a car blanket.
“Here,” he said. “It’s not much, but maybe it’ll help till I can get someone to you.”

Margaret took the blanket and quickly retraced her steps to the clearing and the clump of bushes where her retriever was right where she had left him.

“We have to keep her warm awhile longer, Brandy,” she said. “Until help comes.”

She picked up her coat and put it back on, jumping up and down a few times until she grew warm inside of it. The last tiling in the world Margaret wanted to do was get near the girl. Even the thought of blood was enough to make her queasy, but she suppressed the surge of nausea and forced herself to crawl into the bushes, lie down on the ground as close beside the broken body as she could get, and drape the blanket carefully over all of them. Brandy stirred a little beneath the unfamiliar cover but stayed where he was.

The stench of waste was awful. Margaret shut her eyes and swallowed hard and, searching her mind for anything that might distract her, began to think about the Christmas tree that her family would be trimming tonight.

Unlike any other in the neighborhood, the Westfield tree would be hung with garlands and ornaments that her mother and sisters spent weeks creating, each one hand-fashioned and unique. It was a tradition that had been passed down through generations of Westfields, but Margaret had never really cared that much about it, until now. Now it seemed like the most important thing in the world, and for the first time since she had moved from Providence to New York, she couldn’t wait to get home.

She didn’t know if the girl she held in her arms could hear her, but she began to talk aloud, about that tree and about her family, and about all the silly, crazy, happy moments they had shared down through the years, one thought leading to another,
in a soft, soothing voice.

They stayed there like that for almost half an hour—the girl, the woman and the dog, until the cabby appeared, bursting into the clearing with a burly policeman and two white-uniformed medics in his wake.

1962

We believe no evil till the evil’s done.

—
Jean de La Fontaine

K
aren Kern left the subway at Columbus Circle, deciding on impulse to walk the rest of the way to the Hartmans’ West Side apartment.

Office Christmas parties, held on Friday by companies that would be closed on Monday, were ending. Cabbies, cold and irritable,
leaned on their horns as they inched around the clogged intersection. Salvation Army Santas in stuffed red suits clanged their bells from every corner, and the tantalizing odor of roasting chestnuts hung in the air.

Karen didn’t mind that there was no snow. She had just come down from Ithaca, where almost three feet of it had fallen in forty-eight hours, disrupting traffic, causing accidents, and canceling classes at Cornell University, where she was a junior.
She didn’t mind the cold, either, although the black cashmere coat wrapped tightly around her slender figure gave little real protection.

Dodging taxis, donating a quarter to the nearest Santa, and skirting knots of tipsy secretaries with a smile, Karen threaded her way through the intersection and headed north along Central Park West. It was December 21, 1962. She was young and healthy,
and she had never been happier.

Even in the murky glow of the streetlights, it was clear that
her face was too long for classic beauty, her nose too small, her cheekbones too prominent. But her dark Jackie-Kennedy-styled hair gleamed, her blue-gray eyes sparkled, and a pair of impish dimples framed her full lips. Her slim feet in black satin pumps barely touched the pavement.

Her mother might have been devastated when Karen was rejected by Radcliffe, where she would have mingled freely with Harvard men, and refused even to apply to Smith or Mount Holyoke, which were well within striking distance of Yale, but Karen was delighted with her choice. She loved Cornell, with its picture-postcard setting, grand Gothic campus, and amiable atmosphere.
Besides, her father was a graduate of the university’s dental school, which didn’t exactly leave her mother in much of a position to protest.

“Don’t waste time with undergraduates,” Beverly Kern had advised. “Concentrate on the men in the professional schools.”

For a month or so, Karen made a halfhearted effort to comply, ever conscious of her mother’s social set, in which success was measured by the number of doctors or dentists or, at the very least, lawyers brought into the fold. It was the direction in which sons were pushed and the end to which every parent of a marriageable daughter openly aspired. But then Karen met Peter Bauer, and her mother’s exhortations flew right out of her head.

The very thought of the senior engineering student was enough to deepen her dimples and warm her heart on this frigid night,
and she had thought of little else for weeks. After two years of dating, she and Peter had gotten pinned, in one of those incredibly romantic ceremonies, and were already talking about getting officially engaged come summer.

She could still remember how special she felt, standing on the porch of her sorority house, surrounded by all her sisters,
grinning from ear to ear, while the men from Peter’s fraternity serenaded her. And at the moment when he actually fastened his fraternity pin to her pink angora sweater, she was profoundly sorry for every other girl in the world.

Karen sighed in the chill Manhattan night, watching her
breath frost in front of her, and wishing Peter were here beside her instead of in Bangor, Maine, spending Christmas with his family. Despite her mother’s importunings, Peter was everything Karen had ever wanted, ever hoped to find in a man, from his quick mind and generous nature to his short crop of sandy hair, warm brown eyes and soft lips that hardly needed an excuse to curl into a grin.

“At least we’ll spend New Year’s together,” he’d told her when they hugged good-bye at the Ithaca train station. “I’ll see you on the thirtieth.”

Nine days and counting, Karen thought with anticipation. Still, she couldn’t suppress a small stab of disappointment because she would have so enjoyed the chance to show him off at the party Jill and Andy Hartman were throwing tonight.

At Seventy-seventh Street, she turned west.

Although Great Neck, the upper-income suburb jutting out into Long Island Sound where Karen had been born and raised, was no more than half an hour’s train ride from Manhattan, the very last thing the Cornell coed had planned to do on the Friday before Christmas was come into the city. But here she was, dressed in her finest and on her way to her best friend’s party.
Her best friend who had returned from her sophomore year at Northwestern ten pounds overweight and two months pregnant.

What a mess that had been—Jill disgraced, Andy dragged back from his summer abroad, Jill’s parents trying in vain to put a good face on everything. No one bothered to mention the option of a back-alley butcher. Instead, there was a hushed, rushed little civil ceremony that was promptly predated six months. Jill’s father, a prominent New York attorney, pulled some strings to get Andy transferred from Northwestern to the law school at Columbia. Of course, Jill had to quit college.

Karen could just imagine what her own parents would do were she to get herself into such a predicament. The very thought of her mother’s wails and screeches brought her stomach to the edge of revolt She said a silent prayer of thanks for Peter, who had made a few attempts to get her to
go all the way with him, in the back seat of his green Pontiac after they had drunk too much sour-tasting beer, but had never pressed her past a certain point.

Perhaps it was going out of style nowadays, but Karen still believed in the value of virginity and the importance of saving herself for her wedding night. Besides, her mother had certainly warned her often enough about the perils of promiscuity.

“Men might date tramps, but they marry virgins,” Beverly Kern would state bluntly, hammering her message home at every opportunity.
“Would you go into a store and pay top price for used merchandise?”

Karen had to admit she wouldn’t.

“And God forbid you got pregnant,” her mother always continued. “How could we ever hold up our heads in this town again? The tongues would never stop wagging.”

Just the notion of humiliating her family in such a way was enough to make Karen break into a cold sweat. So each time she found herself getting high on beer in the back seat of the Pontiac, a prudent little voice, which always sounded remarkably like her mother’s, would begin to echo very clearly in her ear. It was more than enough to keep her resolve firm and her legs crossed.

Karen felt awful for Jill having to quit college, for having to marry so inopportunely, and for having a baby when she was still practically a baby herself. She knew Jill had dreamed of going to Paris after college, of living in a quaint little garret on the Left Bank, painting surrealistic versions of the Eiffel Tower, and hobnobbing with expatriate artists for a year or so, until her graduation money ran out.

For herself, Karen had no such lofty ambitions. While she intended to earn a degree in English at Cornell, a career did not really figure into her future. In fact, there wasn’t any fantasy in her head that didn’t ultimately end in getting married and having children—a whole houseful of children. Especially since she had met Peter. And while such a goal might have seemed dull or old-fashioned to some, she could hardly
wait for the day when, as she pictured it, she would walk down the aisle and begin her real life.

Karen knew a few girls at Cornell who planned to pursue careers after graduation, but her mother had always dismissed a vocation as something to fall back on only in the case of early widowhood, and dismissed Karen’s schoolmates as girls who, lacking enough marketable assets to make good marriages, were simply making the best of unfortunate circumstances.

Moreover, Beverly Kern was convinced that anyone with Andy Hartman’s good looks and other attributes, having been forced into marriage, would probably divorce Jill at the earliest possible moment, thus ruining her forever.

By the time Karen reached the corner of West End Avenue and Seventy-seventh Street, it was after eight o’clock. The brick building in front of her, which rose twelve stories and occupied almost half the block, was, like so many that lined the streets of Manhattan, a once-elegant structure that was past its prime. In the dreary December night, it appeared more gray than red.

A doorman in maroon livery ushered her in out of the cold and across a softly lit lobby so ornately appointed that Karen imagined it might have been lifted from a palace like Versailles.

“At last,” Jill Hartman exclaimed when the elevator deposited Karen on the eighth floor and she made her way to Apartment G. “I was beginning to think you’d changed your mind about coming.”

“And miss a good party?” Karen laughed. “You know me better than that.”

Jill was now eight months pregnant and she looked absolutely radiant. Her long, honey-colored hair glistened, her hazel eyes danced, and her face glowed. This party was her final fling, as she described it, before the baby burst onto the scene.

“Well, come on in,” she cried. “There are scads of great-looking guys here that ought to keep you from pining for Peter for at least one evening. I’d take you around and intro-
duce you, but the truth is, they’re mostly friends of Andy’s. I hardly know any of them.” She took her guest’s coat and purse and waddled off down the hallway. “Don’t be shy,” she tossed over her shoulder. “Just jump right in.”

Karen chuckled. Always bright and bubbly, she was anything but shy. So she fluffed out her hair and smoothed down her skirt and looked around. The apartment was truly fabulous, boasting large, airy, cream-colored rooms with high ceilings and intricately carved moldings. Crystal sconces graced the walls, velvet curtains framed windows that overlooked the Hudson River, and those floors that weren’t buried beneath thick carpeting were highly polished parquet.

With insolent indifference, the Hartmans had taken this glorious setting and filled it with Danish modern furniture. A makeshift bar sat at one end of the living room, while an assortment of spindly teak sofas and chairs upholstered in ugly brown tweed occupied the other. Across the foyer, a stick-legged dining table sagged under an extravagant buffet supper. The throaty voice of Nat King Cole drifted out of an elaborate hi-fi system that Andy had installed, completing the incongruity.