Guilt by Association (38 page)

“I know the timing isn’t very good,” Karen conceded with a sigh. “But we didn’t have much choice. It’s an important project and your father couldn’t turn it down.”

“It’s not fair!” the teenager exclaimed.

Karen had to agree it wasn’t.

There were more than enough hotels and shopping malls and office complexes being built on the East Coast to have kept Ted busy for two lifetimes. But his eyes had always been fixed on some distant horizon.

If Karen had thought that, by wrapping herself up in Ted’s ready-made family, she would automatically have the idyllic
life she had dreamed of having, she soon learned otherwise. Trying to meet her personal needs for privacy and orderliness and fulfillment in the midst of four other people who had long since resolved those issues among themselves required constant compromise and difficult periods of adjustment. With every assignment Ted was unable to resist in yet another new city, she was forced to abandon whatever nest she had painstakingly constructed and begin building again, compounding the problems.

She felt isolated by the southern hypocrisy of Georgia, awed by the sheer size of Texas, and haunted by the eerie desert winds of Arizona, but she eventually grew accustomed to each—just in time to leave. She made very few friends along the way, and those she did make were superficial.

Karen missed Demion Five more than she had ever expected she would, not to mention the Yanows, Demelza, and the Sullivan Street set. She saw her life now as quite dull compared to the excitement she had left behind. She turned inward to her family, only to find her family striking outward. Ted was absorbed in his work and the girls were involved with their schools and activities.
The more they blossomed, the less they seemed to need her. That left only her partnership with Nancy.

In ten years, the two women had collaborated on seven books. Their second effort,
Mirror Images,
completed just after the Donigers moved to Atlanta, sold well enough at Demion Five for a major New York publisher to approach them with a proposal for future endeavors.

“We’ll get a lot more exposure working with a publisher than we do printing our own books and selling them through Demion Five,” Nancy had told her. “Besides, we’ve just about exhausted the New York market anyway.”

What Spectrum Publishing had in mind was to take the same format they had used in their first two books and go national with it.

“You mean, take a good cow and milk it until it’s dry?” Karen had observed. But she had to admit the idea appealed
to her and would go a long way toward easing her loneliness. Within a few weeks, Nancy was on a plane to Atlanta.

“As long as you were already here,” she said, “Spectrum figured this was as good a market as any.”

The team of photographer and poet spent three weeks exploring the city as Karen never would have on her own. They titled the book
Phoenix Risen,
choosing to concentrate on the triumph over devastation that truly set the Georgia city apart from much of the Civil War South.

They did Washington, D.C., next, focusing on the two separate cities that shared the same space, and produced a black-and-white indictment they called
Dichotomy.
It soon became mandatory for anyone who aspired to be someone in the political sphere to claim it in his library.

Then came Houston. The two women called that effort
Southern Comfort.
They took a detour through the antebellum elegance of New Orleans to
do Amazing Grace.
And then, in Arizona, they broke tradition and did their first book in color.

“This can’t be done in black and white,” Nancy declared emphatically at the end of her first visit to the Southwest. “Look at all the colors—they’re just bursting to be told.”

They decided not to focus on any one city, either, as they had before. Instead, they wove the peoples and places of the whole state together, and named the result
Tapestry.

The endeavor brought Nancy out west six times and took almost two years to put together, a luxury they hadn’t enjoyed since their first book, but it was worth it. They were rewarded with a product that reviewers declared embodied a great deal more than a photographic journey through the Southwest, and an extraordinary initial printing of twenty thousand copies.

The cover featured a Hopi youth, standing on the boundary of his reservation, staring out toward the mountains. About him,
Karen had written:

The color of pain

is purple

for distant peaks

never to be reached,

and green

for the land

never to be roamed.

The color of pain

is brown

for the blood

of countless ancestors,

and red

for the pride

that still burns within.

The color of pain

is gold

for the hope

that rises with the sun

and sets with the moon.

The color of pain

is gray

for the apathy

of yesterday

and the indifference

of tomorrow.

As far as Karen was concerned, the best part of
Tapestry
was the four months that she and Nancy spent together, crisscrossing the state in a four-wheel drive, from the Grand Canyon to Chiricahua and from Yuma to Mexican Water. Each time they set out on one of their forays, she had the strange sensation that she was escaping.

The girls were growing up so fast. First it was Gwen, graduating from high school with honors, going back east to the University of Pennsylvania, and then on to business school and a nice young man from Wharton. Then Jessica, surviving her sister’s limelight and departing for the University of Colorado, with ideas about medical school after that. And before long, it would be Amy’s turn to find her niche in the world—
such a different world than it was when Karen was her age. The concept of home, which used to be a noisy, crowded place, in whatever city they happened to be, was too rapidly becoming a silent, empty place.

Over the years, Karen’s relationship with Ted had settled into one of uneasy intimacy. The nightmares grew less frequent,
until their occurence was rare, and the strangeness of blending two adult lives into one slowly dissipated; but the carefree camaraderie they had shared before their wedding night never fully returned.

The energy that Ted hoped to put into his marriage and family he put into his profession instead, working long hours, six and sometimes seven days a week. The drapery wall he had erected between them back in New York came down, but not the invisible one that neither seemed able to penetrate. The twin beds were pushed together to look like a king-sized one, but it was illusion rather than reality.

What passed for lovemaking between them began a few weeks after the wedding, with Ted admitting to himself that being able to look at Karen and talk to her was not going to be enough, after all. It started with casual gestures of affection—a kiss,
a hug, a touch, and slowly progressed to acts of consummation that mostly occurred when, for whatever reason, Karen had consumed more alcohol than usual.

The first time they attempted actual intercourse, she bit down so hard on her lip that it bled, and clutched the sheets so tightly that they tore. Neither of them ever mentioned it. Eventually, she learned how to separate Ted from her nightmare and was able to meet his needs with a modicum of liquor and a minimum of panic. There was no thought of her own satisfaction.
Too many layers of guilt and shame and humiliation were in the way.

To the rest of the world, however, theirs looked like the perfect marriage, the embodiment of the American Dream. The girls were bright and attractive. The parents were well-dressed and soft-spoken. They had a sheepdog named Duster and a tabby named Cat, and an unnamed station wagon. And there was enough money. But the things they once believed
they had in common were not strong enough to bind them together, so they grew apart.

They never discussed what was happening—or not happening—between them. They discussed the children, the house, their work,
but never the serious issues that, board by invisible board, were pushing the wall between them higher and higher. It was almost as though they were fearful of saying or doing anything that might spoil the illusion, so they surrounded themselves with the girls for as long as they could and, when they were obliged to be alone with each other, they were considerate but not close.

“I sometimes think we should never have married,” Karen said on one of those occasions.

“Probably not,” Ted agreed.

“I would understand if you wanted a divorce.”

“I don’t… Do you?”

“No.”

So they went on the way they were, because something was better than nothing and the illusion seemed more important than the reality. Until one hot Thursday in the spring of 1990, when Amy’s tenth-grade class took a field trip out into the Arizona desert and her horse, spooked by a rattlesnake, set off at a dead run.

Amy was a good rider but the bolt was so unexpected that she lost her balance and was thrown from the saddle almost immediately,
which would not have been so bad except that her right foot caught in the stirrup and she was dragged a hundred yards or more before two of her classmates were able to head her off and stop her horse.

At the hospital, the doctors found multiple contusions and abrasions, two broken legs, a dislocated right hip, and a skull fractured in three places.

Karen and Ted paced the hospital corridors until well after midnight, the scene in different ways all too familiar to both of them, but the doctors couldn’t say anything except that surgery had gone as well as expected and that the next forty-eight hours would tell.

They dragged themselves home in a daze, Karen helping an
exhausted Ted to undress and get into bed. Then she went into the kitchen and downed two stiff shots of brandy before returning with one for him.

“This will help you sleep,” she said, sitting down on the side of the bed and holding out the glass.

“I don’t want to sleep,” he cried, although he was shivering with fatigue. “I want to be awake in case she needs me. I should have stayed there with her.”

“The doctor said he would call if there was any change,” she reminded him. “The hospital is only ten minutes away.”

“It’s all my fault,” he sobbed suddenly.

“What is?” she asked.

“I’ve been so wrapped up in my work I haven’t had time for her. I know so little about what she’s doing, what she likes, what she thinks. We hardly see each other anymore. I can’t even remember the last weekend we spent together.”

“All the weekends in a lifetime wouldn’t have prevented this accident,” Karen said. “You’re a wonderful father, and if you could ask her, she’d tell you she couldn’t have wished for a better one.”

“It all goes so fast,” he mumbled. “One day, they’re babies, the next, they’re teenagers, and the day after that, they’re grown up and gone, having babies of their own.”

“That’s what it’s all about,” Karen observed.

“But are they ready?” he asked. “Are they strong enough? Are they wise enough? Did we do a good enough job? That’s what I don’t know.”

“We did the best we could.”

The platitude seemed to work for a moment. He swallowed some of his brandy and looked as though he would calm down, but then his tears broke out afresh.

“I’m so lonely,” he cried from the very center of his soul. “I don’t want to be lonely anymore.”

Before she quite realized what was happening, he had his arms around her and she was holding him, as she had so often held the girls when they were frightened or unhappy.

“I’m here,” she murmured. “Don’t worry. I’m here.”

The first night they spent in the house in Atlanta, Amy had
awakened screaming. When Karen reached her room, she found the eight-year-old cringing on the floor.

“This is a scary place,” the child sobbed over and over. “This isn’t my room—it’s a scary place. I’m all alone here. I want to go home.”

“It’s not your
old
room,” Karen told her, sitting down on the bed. “It’s your
new
room.”

“I want my old room,” Amy cried.

“Tell you what,” Karen said. “Why don’t you come up here with me so the two of us can take a good look at this room, and then maybe it won’t be so scary.”

Uncertain, Amy crawled up next to her stepmother.

“You know, a room just doesn’t get to be your very own room until you’ve looked at it from your very own bed,” Karen told her. “Wait a minute now—this
is
your very own bed, isn’t it?”

Amy nodded. It was her familiar pink-and-white canopy bed from home.

“Well, then, are these your very own sheets?”

The bedding was white with pink ribbons and brown teddy bears frolicking across it.

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.”