Guilt by Association (8 page)

B
y Saturday afternoon, Karen had forgiven the policemen. She reasoned they probably didn’t realize they were being offensive.
More likely, it was their way of being polite, deliberately trying not to show any emotion as she plodded through her grim recitation.

Still, there was the feeling that they hadn’t believed her that kept nagging at her, that they thought her in some way responsible for what Bob had done. But of course that was absurd—she had tried everything she could to stop him. Karen decided that it was only because the policemen were strangers and knew nothing about her values or her upbringing that they had cross-examined her in such a harsh way.

She sipped the last of her afternoon shake as she waited for her parents to arrive, knowing that, even though she would have to tell her grim story again, this time she would be talking to the people who knew her best and loved her and would, above all, understand.

“Hi, sweetheart,” Beverly cooed shortly before four o’clock.

The black was gone. Her mother was wearing a bright-red suit with a cropped jacket and a flattering A-line skirt that Karen had never seen before, and she had been to the beauty
parlor. Her hair was perfectly coiffed and her nails gleamed with red polish.

“How’s my girl?” Leo asked, looking rather drab beside his flamboyant wife as he took the seat farthest from his daughter.

“Better,” Karen told him. It wouldn’t matter if it were true or not; she knew it was what he needed to hear.

“That’s good.” He nodded, satisfied.

Leo Kern was the kind of man who found it easier not to see ugliness in the world around him. He spent his days in a sterile stainless-steel cocoon, where defects could be fixed, as if by magic, decay could be drilled out of existence, and discoloration could be polished to gleaming purity. He left his wife to deal with the harsh realities of raising a family, and Karen sometimes felt he was more involved with the lives of his patients than with the lives of his daughters.

“What is that you’re doing with your fingers?” her mother asked.

“Closing the hole,” Karen told her. “So I can talk.”

“And is that what you’ve been doing since Thursday—talking up a storm?”

“I guess,” Karen answered. “The police came to see me.”

“The police?” Beverly echoed sharply. “What for?”

“They’re investigating what happened.”

Her parents exchanged a glance that was too quick for Karen to catch.

“What did you tell them?” Beverly asked.

“I told them everything I could remember.”

Beverly settled herself in her chair. “Well then, I guess maybe you’d better tell us, too.”

Karen took a moment to search for the right words, the right phrases that would convey the facts of that night to her parents without the horror. The last thing she wanted was to upset them unnecessarily.

“You went to Jill’s party,” Beverly prompted.

“Yes,” Karen said. “I went to Jill’s party. And right after I got there, I met a friend of a friend of Andy’s former roommate,
named Bob, from Harvard Law School. I don’t know
what his last name is—he never told me, but he seemed very nice and he was attentive, and we sort of spent the evening together.”

“Well, that doesn’t sound so bad,” Beverly commented.

“That part wasn’t,” Karen agreed with an uncustomary hint of bitterness in her voice. “When the party was over, Bob offered to help me get a cab to Aunt Edna’s. It was pretty late, after two o’clock, and I thought that would be all right. We waited and waited but we couldn’t find a cab, so then he suggested that we walk across the park.”

“A nice young man from Harvard Law School offered to escort you across Central Park at two o’clock in the morning?” Beverly summarized.

“That’s right.”

“Well, I guess that explains how you got there, although God knows why you would go into such a dangerous place in the middle of the night, even if you were with a friend of a friend of Andy’s former roommate.”

“It was cold,” Karen told her. “Walking seemed like a better idea than standing around.”

“So, you were in the park. Then what happened?”

Karen took a deep breath. “He attacked me.”

“Who attacked you?” Beverly asked, looking blank.

“Bob did. He made a pass. I tried to stop him, but he wouldn’t let me go.”

Beverly stared at her daughter with a combination of dismay and disbelief. “You were, you were… damaged”—she couldn’t even bring herself to say the right word—”by a Harvard Law student?”

“Yes.”

“It was someone you knew?”

“Yes.”

“Why?” Beverly cried.

“Why what?”

“Why would the young man behave like that? What did you do?”

“What do you mean, what did I do?” Karen replied. “I didn’t do anything.”

“Well, there must be something you’re not telling us,” Beverly said flatly. “Nice young men from Harvard don’t go around taking advantage of innocent girls for no reason.”

“Well, this one did,” Karen retorted.

“Oh my God,” her mother muttered, springing up, almost knocking over her chair.

“What’s the matter?” Karen asked.

Beverly looked to Leo for support, but Leo was looking at the crease in his trousers with a very pained expression on his face.

“I thought we were talking about some maniac. I thought some very sick stranger grabbed you off the street, and you couldn’t defend yourself.”

“I couldn’t defend myself,” Karen insisted. “He was too strong.”

“I just don’t understand you at all,” Beverly snapped. “You keep telling us you’re madly in love with Peter Bauer. So why on earth would you take up with someone else like that?”

“I didn’t take up with him,” Karen protested, tears filling her eyes, forgetting for the moment that Peter Bauer had never fit into her mother’s narrow category of acceptable suitors. “He said he was taking me to Aunt Edna’s. That’s all. I believed him.”

“And you’re sure you didn’t lead him on in some way, or give him any reason to expect that you might be receptive to his advances?”

“No.”

“You didn’t lean up against him, say, in a manner that he might have misconstrued?”

Karen remembered Bob pulling her inside his coat when she complained of the cold, but that had been his idea, not hers.

“It wasn’t like that,” she cried, the tears now flowing freely down her cheeks. “I didn’t do anything wrong.”

“Oh, darling,” Beverly said hastily, grabbing a tissue and dabbing at her daughter’s eyes. “Now don’t get yourself into a tizzy. Nobody said you meant to do anything wrong. It’s just that sometimes we don’t realize how our actions might appear
to another person. The way we smile, perhaps, or the way we stand or the way we say things. It’s so easy to be misinterpreted.”

“I was just having a good time,” Karen sobbed.

“Of course you were.” Her mother relented. “Just like anyone else at a party would. You had no way of knowing that this Bob person would take it so seriously.”

“No,” Karen mumbled. This wasn’t going at all the way she had thought it would. First the police, and now her parents. She was suddenly very confused.

“I don’t mean to distress you,” her mother added, “but your father and I just can’t understand how you could have gotten yourself into such a situation, how you could have been so, so … careless.”

Leo had yet to say a word.

“Neither do I,” Karen sobbed, letting go of the tube to cover her face with her hands.

After a moment, Beverly sat back down in her chair, crossed her legs at the ankles and clasped her hands together in her lap.

“Yes, well, I think we have a pretty clear idea of what took place and we’re not going to dwell on it any longer,” she said firmly. “You’ll soon be well again, and I think it’s time that we consider this … unfortunate incident over and done, and get on with the rest of our lives.”

Over and done, Karen thought wistfully. Could it really be over and done with a snap of her mother’s fingers?

“Do you think so?” she asked.

“Yes, I do,” her mother affirmed. “I can tell how terribly upset talking about the whole thing is making you, and I don’t see any reason to put you through the painful ordeal of repeating this story again. After all, it’s none of anyone’s business.”

“The police know,” Karen reminded her. “I told them everything. They’re going to find Bob and arrest him and make him pay for what he did.”

“Your father will take care of that,” Beverly said smoothly. “The last thing we’re going to do is let anyone drag you into
some sordid courtroom and smear your name all over the newspapers.”

“But I’ll have to testify,” said Karen. “I want to. I want to see him convicted and put in jail.”

“You’ll do nothing of the kind,” her mother declared. “You’re not going to have anything more to do with this whole unpleasant mess. From now on, we’ll simply tell anyone who asks that you were taken to the hospital because… because of an accident.”

“An accident?”

“Yes.” Beverly declared. She studied a speck of lint on her red jacket. “Actually, that’s pretty much what we’ve been telling people anyway.”

Karen looked from her mother to her father and back to her mother again. “You told people I had an accident?”

“We weren’t very specific about anything, of course. After all, we didn’t really know anything. We just sort of intimated that it was an accident. There wasn’t any reason to go into the gruesome details.”

“What kind of accident did I have?”

Beverly hesitated a moment. “I think we’ll make it an automobile accident,” she decided. “That’s the most logical choice,
isn’t it? I mean, considering how damaged you were, we can’t very well say you fell out of a tree, now can we?”

Karen’s head suddenly began to hurt. “But that’s a lie,” she said.

“Well, if it is, it’s only to save you, save us, from a lot of humiliating gossip.” Beverly’s full lower lip began to quiver.
“Isn’t it enough that we have to know what went on, does the rest of Great Neck have to know, too? We’re respected members of the community. There’s never been a hint of scandal in our family. Think what it would do to your father’s practice if this ever came out.”

“Now, Mother.” Leo spoke up for the first time.

“And think of your sister,” Beverly went on, as though he hadn’t. “If you go around broadcasting all the ugly facts, people might start asking what you had in mind when you went
strolling in Central Park in the middle of the night with a young man you hardly knew.”

“But the people here know there wasn’t any automobile accident,” Karen argued, wondering dimly what this had to do with sixteen-year-old Laura.

“Maybe they do and maybe they don’t,” Beverly declared. “Besides, hospital records can be sealed or something, and then we can do whatever’s necessary to prevent anyone else from finding out.”

“What about Peter?”

“The time for worrying about Peter was before you went walking in Central Park, I should think,” her mother replied tartly.
“But of course we’ll have to tell him the same thing as everyone else.”

“I can’t lie to him,” Karen objected.

“Of course you can,” Beverly snapped. “What chance do you think you’ll have to make a decent marriage, to him or to anyone else, if you repeat this dreadful story? Do you really want to ruin the rest of your life? Because that’s exactly what will happen if you ever tell anybody what you told us.”

Karen’s head was throbbing and she began to pray for the oblivion that had always come to ease her pain to come now and swallow her up forever.

“It’s not fair,” she said.

“Fair?” her mother pounced. “You think it would be fair to stand up and tell the whole world what you did?”

“What
I
did?” Karen echoed. “You mean, what
he
did, don’t you?”

“Whatever,” Beverly replied, picking the piece of lint off her jacket.

“You’re my parents,” Karen whispered. “You’re supposed to love me. I thought you’d be on
my
side.”

“Of course we love you,” said Beverly. “Of course we’re on your side. That’s why we’re willing to go to such lengths to protect you.”

“No,” Karen accused. “You think this was all my fault. You don’t think he ought to be punished—you think
I
should. You think I flirted with him and teased him and then enticed him
into the park. You think I asked him to do this to me, don’t you?”

“I don’t think anything of the kind,” Beverly retorted. “I think there was probably a terrible misunderstanding somewhere along the way and he took advantage of you. Maybe he should be punished for that, but not at the expense of this fam-ily’s reputation.”

Suddenly Karen couldn’t seem to catch her breath. Her right leg was in spasm, her face turned beet-red, her whole body began to heave, and she was clawing at the wires that fastened her jaw.

“Oh my God, what’s wrong?” Beverly shrieked.

Leo sprang up and grabbed for his daughter’s hand before she could do any serious damage to herself. “Get a nurse in here,”
he told his wife.

Beverly rushed for the door. “She can’t breathe,” she shouted into the corridor. “Do something.”

Rose Thackery came running. After one look she turned on her heel, returning seconds later with a hypodermic. She hurried to the bed, almost knocking Leo aside.

“Karen,” she said firmly, “calm down now. You’re having a little anxiety attack, that’s all. It’s nothing to worry about.”

She stuck the needle deep into Karen’s hip. Then she took hold of her patient’s hand. “Listen to me,” she said soothingly.
“You’re all right. You’re safe. Nothing bad is going to happen to you.”

Karen stared at the kind face through the flood of gasps and tears—a face that had always meant comfort and acceptance and good humor, and heard the soft words that had never been anything but supportive.

The panic began to subside.

“Just take a nice deep breath,” the nurse encouraged. “Come on, just one.”

Slowly, Karen began to draw air into her lungs, and when she could hold no more, she let it all out.

“Now another.”

Karen obeyed. By the third breath, the spasm in her leg had eased and her face was returning to its natural color.