Guilt by Association (20 page)

Demelza shrugged casually. “So what?” she said. “You were among friends.”

Karen blanched. “I took my clothes off?” she gasped. “In front of everyone?”

“I don’t think anybody was paying much attention,” Demelza reassured her. “The candles were low, and besides, most of them had other things on their minds.”

Karen looked down at her crumpled blue skirt and high-
collared blouse. “If I took them off,” she questioned, “who put them back on again?”

“I did,” Demelza replied calmly.

“Then, you saw…?” Karen whispered.

“If you mean the scars, yes,” her hostess, her employer, her friend said gently. “Whatever caused them, you must have had a rough time of it.”

Karen felt the prickle of tears behind her eyes, tears of embarrassment and anger that she was never going to live down her past, and tears of frustration that it could still hurt so much.

“It was a long time ago.” She sighed. “I don’t like to talk about it.”

“I didn’t mean to pry.”

“You weren’t—you never do,” Karen murmured. Demelza listened, Demelza sympathized, Demelza encouraged, but never probed, never criticized and never judged. In the six months that Karen had known her, she had learned to trust the older woman’s advice,
value her opinions and admire her discretion. In many ways, Demelza behaved the way Karen sometimes wished Beverly would behave.

“I had… an accident,” she said.

“I’m sorry,” Demelza replied with genuine concern.

“I was careless and I ended up in the wrong place at the wrong time. It wasn’t exactly the high point of my life.”

Karen felt an unfamiliar flutter in the pit of her stomach. This was the most she had said about the night in Central Park in six years.

“But you’re all right now.”

It was a statement, not a question, but it seemed to warrant some kind of answer.

“You probably noticed my left leg is a bit stiff,” Karen said. “The kneecap was smashed, but it’s getting better.”

“I’m glad to hear it,” Demelza replied, her smile warm and real.

“I guess I’m self-conscious about the scars.”

“I can understand that,” Demelza told her. “After all, they’re a reminder of something you’d rather forget.”

“I can’t ever have children,” Karen heard herself say. “I always wanted to have children.”

“Because of the accident?”

Karen nodded. “I expected to marry a wonderful man and raise a houseful of children. Now, I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with my life.”

Sooner or later, Demelza thought, every riddle had an explanation, and every question had an answer.

“I generally think of life as a great big map,” she said. “When I reach a dead end on one road, I simply look for another to follow.”

K
aren crossed Washington Square South and hurried up Sullivan Street. The late-January wind whipped and roared around her,
burning her eyes and ears, and pushing its icy way down her throat. She burrowed deep inside her coat, and bent her body into the swirling gale.

The coat was a Christmas gift from her parents. It was made of thick gray wool, and came down to her ankles, and weighed almost as much as Karen did. Her shoulders ached for hours after each wearing, but it kept her warm.

It had arrived in the nick of time. The winter had turned unbearably cold. Piles of dirty snow lined the streets, reducing traffic to single lanes. Sidewalks were salted, but it was too cold for the ice to melt. Vehicles crawled down the middle of roads, honking and skidding. Pedestrians sank into slush over their ankles, cursing.

Reaching the run-down building she sought, Karen scurried up icy steps and pushed through the door. It had once had a lock on it, but that was long before the present tenants.

The structure had four stories. The upper floors were subdivided into studios for artists who sought cheap living in a congenial environment, while the first floor contained four flats of three rooms each. It was toward one of these that
Karen headed as she hastened down the narrow brown hall in the light of a single sixty-watt bulb. She stopped at a door on the left and rapped briskly. When her knock was answered, she crossed the threshold and the drab outside world disappeared.
She stood in the middle of Paradise. Or, to be more precise, in the middle of the Garden of Eden as it was being painstakingly reproduced, in a Gauguin sort of style, on the walls and ceilings of the once dreary flat.

“Hey, girl, you’re late,” cried a bear of a man in a paint-spattered shirt. “We started without you.”

Mitchell Rankin wrapped her in a hug. He stood over six feet tall and weighed over two hundred pounds. Karen had no clear idea of his face, buried as it was beneath a woolly beard. He never asked to hug her, he just did it, and she had learned to accept it. In the four months she had been coming to Sullivan Street, there had never been anything in his embrace but the simple regard for one person by another.

“Hey, Karen,” a tomboy of a woman called from atop a crudely fashioned scaffold on the far side of the room. “What do you think of my clouds?”

Karen glanced up at the globs of white pigment that were beginning to scud across one part of the ceiling. “I think they look very … cloudlike,” she said.

There was a splash of white freckles across the woman’s nose and cheeks. “I could use an assistant Michelangelo,” she said with a deep stretch.

“lone, be careful,” scolded Mitch. “You’re doing that balancing act for two, you know.”

“Never mind about us, you big gorilla,” retorted the woman called lone, as tiny as he was big, as pale as he was dark. “Just take the girl’s coat so I can put her to work.”

Mitch helped Karen out of the gray maxicoat. Beneath it, she wore a long black skirt over black boots and a coarse muslin shirt, loosely bound at the waist with a rope belt. Her dark hair was tied off her face by a beaded headband and she had taken to outlining her eyes in heavy black pencil.

“You can’t paint in that outfit,” lone declared.

Karen shrugged. “I didn’t want to take time to change.”

“Mitch, get the girl my smock,” the tomboy instructed. “It’s hanging on the back of the closet door.”

As Mitch disappeared into the bedroom, a gaunt young man with thick glasses and a wispy reddish beard came out.

“Hey, Karen.” he said with a distracted smile.

“Hey, Kevin.”

“Ione, where’s the dictionary?” he asked.

“On the back of the toilet.”

Kevin looked at her quizzically.

“I was doing a crossword puzzle,” she said with a toss of her short blond hair.

With a grunt, he turned back into the bedroom.

“He’s got exams,” whispered Ione.

Kevin Munker was in his third or fourth year at NYU, Karen wasn’t quite sure. He wasn’t a student in the traditional sense,
enrolling for four years to earn a degree. Instead, Kevin took the minimum three courses per semester and kept changing his major so that, each term, he would have a whole new list of requirements to complete. As long as he maintained a B average,
he could keep his draft exemption.

Mitch reappeared with Ione’s smock just as the front door blew open and two women came in. Jenna, barely out of her teens,
with carrot-colored hair, deep blue eyes and traces of baby fat still clinging to her, studied fashion design at Cooper Union.
Felicity, a stick of a woman at thirty, with high cheekbones and brown hair and eyes, was a dancer who made incredible pieces of jewelry whenever the spirit moved her, and sold them whenever hunger moved her.

“If you’re not going to paint,” Mitch ordered, “stay out until ten.”

Jenna and Felicity weighed the advantages of going back out into the cold. “We’ll paint,” they said together.

Karen couldn’t imagine how all five of these people survived in one small apartment together, but they did. They called it communal living, the way of the future, and although unrelated, they considered themselves a family.

Ione Meecham came from the coal mines of Alliance, Ohio, arriving in New York with a fine-arts degree in her hand
and stars in her eyes, hoping for a spot at the Metropolitan Museum. Two years later, funds depleted, she took a job teaching art history at NYU, which always amused Karen, since she looked far more like a student than a teacher.

Over the next dozen years, Ione earned a small measure of respect, rose from the rank of instructor to assistant professor,
discovered that she really loved teaching, and met Mitchell Rankin, a starving artist with unbridled optimism.

Mitch was a farm boy from Montana who’d spent his young years surrounding himself with paints and canvas instead of comic books and baseball cards, translating the raw splendor of Big Sky country into impressionistic brilliance.

“Something’s wrong with the boy,” his father had declared. “He’s not interested in things kids his age are interested in.
And he doesn’t give a damn about sugar beets.”

“There’s nothing wrong with him,” his mother had protested. “He’s just different, sensitive. He sees beauty in the world where everybody else sees brutality.”

Mitch went from high school to Korea, where a mortar burst resulted in a patchwork of scars across his right cheek. He grew a beard to cover them. When he met Ione, he was painting buildings, not pictures, but he still had his dream. She said at least he hadn’t been reduced to doing those awful portraits for the tourists who invaded Washington Square. She invited him into her home and her heart.

Next came Felicity Gravois. Mitch found her sitting on a curb, crying, beside a box holding all her worldly goods. She was six months behind in her rent and had been evicted.

“I’m a dancer,” she explained. “A really good dancer. Only nobody seems to care about that.”

When she was eight years old, a society matron had taken her to see
The Red Shoes.
Felicity decided then and there that she would be a ballerina. She slept, ate, and breathed dancing, took any job to pay for lessons and, when all else failed, made up steps and danced them in her head.

“How long have you been in New York?”

“Three years,” she sniffled.

“Maybe you should think about going home,” he suggested gently. “This can be a lousy city to be alone in.”

“The Saint Louis Institute for Orphans?” the twenty-three-year-old asked through her tears. “I don’t think so.”

“Come with me,” Mitch said.

“I never knew my parents,” Felicity told Ione. “The orphanage called me Felicity for happiness and Gravois for the street where I was found. With that name, I figured I couldn’t help but become famous.”

Jenna Bell had been sent after high school from Alliance, Ohio, with a letter from tone’s mother.

“This is the daughter of our new minister,” Mrs. Meecham had written. “She wants to design clothes for a living, and has convinced her parents that she can only do this in New York. Everyone will feel so much better if you keep an eye on her, you being a teacher and all.”

“I’m free,” Jenna had cried her first night on Sullivan Street, whirling around, her carrot-colored curls sticking straight out. “You have no idea what it’s like to be a fourth-generation minister’s daughter—with red hair.”

Ione helped the teenager find a job as a seamstress on Seventh Avenue and arranged for her to enroll at Cooper Union.

Kevin was next, and after that, the pattern was set. Sometimes the number taking refuge in the three-room flat swelled from five to as many as ten, depending on who needed a bed at the time. Karen met them in September, through Ethan, who lived there until just before Thanksgiving. When his number came up, they all went down to a street corner near Battery Park to see him off on the first leg of his underground journey to Canada.

There was something very comfortable about these people, and Karen soon found herself spending every possible moment with them. Their secret was that they genuinely cared about one another in a way Karen had never experienced before. There was no rivalry here, no petty jealousies among them. No one had anything another wanted because they shared everything they had—their money, their clothes, their abilities, even their bodies.

Karen knew that Mitch slept with Ione and sometimes with Felicity, and that Kevin slept with Felicity and occasionally with Jenna, and that Jenna spent several evenings a week with John, a sculptor who lived in a studio apartment upstairs. Like Demelza’s loft, the bedroom floor was carpeted in wall-to-wall mattresses, and visitors were always welcome to join in.

Once, such an arrangement would have made Karen turn and run, but she had come a long way in a short time. Much of that, she realized, had to do with the matter-of-fact approach these people had to life and living, and the ease with which they accepted one another’s boundaries. There was never any pressure. Certainly, no one ever pressured Karen. They took her into the fold and never challenged the limits she set. She was one of the family, on whatever terms she chose, and that was all they cared about. No one ever crossed the line.

Arlene was dating an orthopedist from Bellevue and often did not come home, so Karen got into the habit of dropping by Sullivan Street several nights a week. The women cooked, the men rolled joints, and then they would meet to share the fruits of their labors. Sometimes, if it got late and Karen was feeling particularly mellow, she would grab a blanket and curl up, undisturbed,
on one of the mattresses.

The Garden of Eden had actually been her idea, born while they were toasting in the New Year, having emptied the contribution can and splurged on a rather decent bottle of champagne. The wine bubbled right down to Karen’s toes, and with the weed she had already smoked, heaven was a three-room apartment in the run-down heart of Greenwich Village.

“I love you all,” she said when the toast came around to her. “You took me in and treated me like one of you, right from the start, and you never asked for anything in return. You nurtured me and encouraged me and gave me space, and then you waited to see if I would bloom. I want to thank you for that, and wish all of you as much happiness in 1970 as you gave me in 1969.
If this place were a garden, you’d be the most magnificent flowers growing.”