Guilt by Association (14 page)

“Let’s promise that we’ll always be open and honest with each other. Completely honest. Let’s not have any secrets between us. What do you say?”

But Karen couldn’t say a word—there was something squeezing her throat.

“I want to know everything about you,” he went on. “The bad as well as the good. Just as I want you to know everything about me. I mean, what kind of marriage would we have if we were afraid to talk to each other? Besides,” he added with a chuckle,
“secrets always have a nasty way of popping out when you least expect them to, so it’s much better not to have any in the first place.”

She wanted to run then, but she could barely walk, and even were she able, there was no place for her to hide.

“What if—well, what if there was something that would maybe hurt the other person?” she asked in a small voice.

“Then you try to find a kind way of saying it,” he replied with a gentle smile.

Karen frowned, wondering if there were a kind way of telling him that she had let another man steal her most precious gift.

“Sweetheart,” he said earnestly, leaning forward, seeing her uncertainty. “Surely you must know, after all this time, that there isn’t anything you can’t tell me.”

Her mother’s voice went off in her head like an alarm bell.
Do you want to ruin your life?
it screeched. But Karen didn’t know how she was going to be able to make the promise Peter was asking of her, when the very promise itself would be the biggest lie of all.

“Sometimes,” she suggested, gazing out across the water, “there are things that may be better left unsaid.”

“Between others, maybe,” he allowed, “but not between us.”

Her blue-gray eyes turned toward him just long enough for Peter to see the anguish in them. “There’s so much you don’t know.”
She sighed. “I wouldn’t know where to begin.”

Her words were so unexpected, they left him speechless. He sat there staring at her, and despite the warm afternoon sun, he felt cold. This delightful, sincere young woman, who had always hung on his every word—this innocent, guileless girl he had thought he knew almost as well as he knew himself—was now someone he wasn’t sure he knew at all.

He didn’t know how to respond, or whether he should take her in his arms or turn away. What he did know was that something had suddenly gone very wrong with his master plan.

“So what is it I don’t know about you?” he asked at last, when the silence had become excruciating.

She shook her head. “It doesn’t matter,” she replied, toying with a chocolate-chip cookie.

“Are you trying to say you don’t want to marry me?” he asked, holding his breath.

Karen dropped the cookie. “Of course I want to marry you,” she cried. Enough to think I could cheat you and lie to you and steal your life from you, her heart cried.

He let out an enormous sigh of relief. “Then, whatever it is, whatever’s troubling you, we can work it out, I know we can.
You just have to trust me.”

She wondered if her mother could possibly be wrong about Peter. She wondered if he loved her and believed in her enough to understand. Karen wanted so desperately to tell him the truth. She couldn’t bear the thought of living with this horrible lie for the rest of her life.

Would you go into a store and pay top price for used merchandise?
her mother’s voice sounded in her ear.

Karen groaned inwardly, knowing she wouldn’t, and knowing she had no right to expect that Peter would, either. But, by
accident or design, she had already gone too far—as good as admitting she had secrets—and it was too late to retract her words and go on with the lie. She had no choice now but to trust him, and pray. She took a deep breath.

“I know what you want is for us to be the way we were,” she began cautiously. “But that Karen is gone, Peter. She isn’t coming back. Not ever. Whatever our future together might be, it’s going to be different than we thought.”

“It doesn’t have to be,” he argued, unable even to contemplate life without the sweet, innocent girl he loved so much.

“You don’t understand.”

“I understand,” he said. “I just don’t accept it. I realize that not being able to have children of our own is a setback—
maybe you could even consider it a serious one. But, what the hell, we’ll have each other, and that’s what counts. Besides,
we can still be parents. There’s always adoption, you know.”

Karen frowned, remembering that it was those very same thoughts that had carried her off to sleep last night. But she wasn’t tucked up safely in her bed now.

“This isn’t just about children,” she told him.

“I know—it’s about the accident, too,” he conceded. “You’ve had a ghastly experience and I can see that you’ve lost some of your confidence. But other people have been hit by cars and they get over it and go on with their lives. In time, so will you. I really believe that, and you just have to believe it, too.”

“I want you to look at me, Peter,” she said. “Just for a moment, I want you to see me, not as you remember me from two years ago, or even six months ago, but as I am right now—as I was last night. Think about it. I cringe whenever anyone reaches for me. I hyperventilate at harmless shadows. I break into a cold sweat at the thought of leaving the house. Do you see me?”

“Yes,” he answered reluctantly.

“All right then, deep down inside, where all your good instincts live, do you honestly believe any of this is about an automobile accident?”

“I guess I don’t understand,” he admitted.

“There was no car, Peter,” she said bitterly, “no hit-and-run, no drunk driver. There was no accident at all.”

“But your mother said—”

“My mother lied. To you, to everyone.”

His eyebrows met over a puzzled frown. “But then, what happened to you?”

Karen opened her mouth to speak, closed it, then opened it again. The end of the past and the shape of the future lay in her next words.

“I was … assaulted in Central Park,” she said.

“Assaulted?” Peter echoed.

“Yes,” she confirmed. “The injuries my mother described to you … they weren’t caused by a car. They were the result of a beating,
a very vicious beating.”

It took him a moment to digest this. “I don’t get it,” he said. “If you were assaulted by someone, then you were assaulted.
Why lie about it?”

“Because that isn’t all.” She took a tremulous breath. “I wasn’t just beaten up, you see. He, uh—well, he—he also … raped me.”

Peter stared at her in disbelief. “Raped?” he finally managed to croak. “What do you—? Are you saying that someone—someone actually—?”

“Yes,” she said.

He sat there, struggling to get his mind around her words. The whole thing was preposterous, way beyond the scope of his comprehension,
and yet, with a sharp thrust of pain in his heart, he knew it made perfect sense. It explained Beverly’s peculiar evasiveness and her efforts to keep him away from the hospital. It explained that craziness at the dinner table, too. And, of course,
now he understood Karen’s behavior since his arrival.

“I don’t know what to say,” he said.

“I’m sorry,” she replied. “I wanted to be … to be perfect for you.”

Perfect, he thought. There was that word again, and he almost groaned aloud. He wanted to put his arms around her and assure her it didn’t matter, hold her close and promise to
protect her for the rest of his life, beg her to believe that not all men treated women as she had been treated. He reached out and patted her hand.

“I never expected perfection,” he forced himself to say, because, of course, he had never expected anything else.

“I did,” she murmured.

“But why hush it up?” he exclaimed. “It’s a crime, for God’s sake, and the person who committed it should be put in jail.
What’s the matter with the police down here? Didn’t they investigate?”

Karen shrugged. “They were looking into it, but my parents didn’t want any publicity.”

Despite his turmoil of emotions, he could understand the practicality of that. After all, the world was not entitled to know everything—the right to privacy still existed. But the thought of someone else putting his hands all over her, putting his—and getting away with it! Peter felt as though he were about to throw up.

“Do they know who he is?” he gulped.

The easy part was over, Karen thought. Now came the hard part.

“They know,” she said.

“You mean, they showed you mug shots? You were able to identify him?”

“No … I told them who he was.”

“You
knew
him?”

“I met him at Jill’s party. Remember, that’s where I was that night. He was polite and attentive. When he offered to take me home, it never occurred to me that he had something else in mind.”

On a bright, sunny afternoon in Steppingstone Park, overlooking Long Island Sound, the bottom fell out of Peter Bauer’s world.
Of all the things he imagined happening to him in his life, he had never once considered that the woman he would choose to marry would go off with some other man and get herself violated.

He knew she was waiting for him to say something to her,
something sympathetic and reassuring, as he always had, but no loving words formed behind his tongue. He felt betrayed.

“I don’t understand,” he cried. “I thought you loved me?”

“I do,” she assured him.

“We were practically engaged.”

“Yes.”

“Then how could you do such a thing to us? To me?”

Karen groaned. “And you wanted me to trust you.”

“I didn’t realize,” he began. “I never expected—”

“The truth?” she asked softly. “Peter, I made a mistake, and what happened, happened.”

“Why did you have to tell me?” he exclaimed.

“Would you have preferred to live with the lie?”

“Yes,” he agonized. “No. I don’t know. I just don’t understand any of it. Why would you, how could you, let someone—?”

“I didn’t
let
him,” she whispered, tears flowing down her cheeks. “I tried to stop him. I tried as hard as I could. That’s why he beat me up. I never wanted anybody but you to be the first—the only—you have to believe that.”

Peter shut his eyes against her words. “We don’t have to discuss this anymore now,” he decided because his heart was hurting too much. “We have lots of time. We can talk again tomorrow, or the next day, after we’ve both had a chance to, well, sort things out.”

Some things, he thought, were better left unsaid.

“If that’s what you want,” she said dully.

“Yes,” he replied with a forced smile. “I think that would be best.” He peered into Winola’s basket. “We came here for a picnic, didn’t we? Well then, let’s have one.”

Peter heaped his plate with chicken and potato salad and blueberry muffins, although he didn’t know how he was going to get a single bite past the lump in his throat.

Karen stared into her lemonade as though it held some kind of answer.

The little velvet box lay forgotten on the blanket between them.

1964

It is said to begin with the father.

—
Maxine Kumin

A
manda Willmont took the decanter from the table beside her chaise longue and poured another glass of sherry, carelessly spilling several drops on the polished mahogany surface.

The late-afternoon sunlight filtered through the windows of the elegant Jackson Street Victorian that crowned San Francisco’s exclusive Pacific Heights, spreading a soft haze over the subtle grays and mauves of the large corner bedroom, just the way Amanda liked it. Life was easier when the edges were a bit blurred.

It was her favorite time of day, just before dusk, when her correspondence was finished, her charity work completed, and her household duties attended to, and she could slip into her favorite silk dressing gown and retire to the privacy of her room,
knowing she would not be bothered until Robert came home for dinner—if he came home for dinner.

For the past two weeks, her husband had been noticeably absent three nights out of five, which usually signaled the onset of a new liaison. As was typical in such situations, this was Thursday, and Amanda hadn’t seen him since Tuesday.

Not that she cared very much anymore. She had given up whatever romantic notions she might have had about her mar
riage shortly after the honeymoon, right after she had become pregnant with Bobby, as soon as her trust funds had legally been put into Robert’s care.

“You are no longer to be pitied,” he had told her two months after the wedding. “You now have a husband to parade around in public, a posh home in one of the best parts of town, and a secure place in San Francisco society. In exchange, you’re going to let me do exactly as I please.”

What pleased him was to be successful in his own right, to live well, and to sample half the female population of the state of California. Before the Willmonts had reached their fifth wedding anniversary, he had achieved the first two and made a significant dent in the third. What he didn’t have much interest in was a house filled with bothersome children. He moved out of his wife’s bedroom on the day she announced her pregnancy, and never returned.

Amanda Willmont, who had been Amanda Drayton of the San Francisco Draytons before her marriage at the age of twenty-nine,
was the only child of Horace Lowell Drayton, the financier and magnate, whose ancestors had been among the most influential in the city’s development since the gold rush days. Her mother, a homely but refined woman, came from one of the oldest families on Philadelphia’s Main Line.

Robert Willmont came from nowhere, but he had taken a modest law degree and, with the help of his wife’s name and her father’s backing, turned it into a partnership in one of the most prestigious law firms in San Francisco. Even Horace, who would never have considered the brash nobody as son-in-law material had his daughter not been descending rapidly into spinsterhood, was forced to concede that the man had made the most of his opportunities.

As public as his professional success was, Robert was careful to keep his personal successes private. It mattered little to him that his wife knew of his various escapades, but he didn’t want to run the risk of his father-in-law’s finding out and perhaps withdrawing his patronage. It didn’t take any great insight to understand that, with her close-set eyes, thin mouth,
beak nose and mousy hair, Robert hadn’t chosen his wife for her looks.