Guilt by Association (31 page)

“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 play 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.

“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.