“Do you know how many civilians have been killed by American soldiers?” she said. “The day before he died, there were forty-eight. Maybe that’s why he did it.”
Helen thought Mr. Morrison was saying that we in the United States lived such protected lives that a baby left on a city street would come to no harm—and indeed, someone rescued his baby—while our country wantonly killed babies elsewhere.
We had not talked before about the war in Vietnam, and my parents had done so only peripherally, but I knew I was opposed. A teacher had pointed out that the invented word “escalation” was a way of avoiding saying in plain terms what President Johnson was bringing about, after advocating peace before he was elected: more bombing, more fighting, more dead Vietnamese and dead Americans. I glanced at news programs my parents were watching. There were the sharp cracks of explosions, footage of people running, sometimes with naked children dangling from their arms, legs trailing. Helen knew more than I, but until the day we talked about the man who immolated himself, the war—and current events in general—were not among our topics. For me, private life—the inner life, the emotional life—was so compelling that I had little strength left for the questions of the day, and I loved Helen because she too cared about the inner life. But for Helen, the man who immolated himself was recognizable because he couldn’t subsume the questions of the day to the questions raised by his own life, even “Who’s watching the baby?”
The next time an antiwar activist, Roger Allen LaPorte, immolated himself—a week after Norman Morrison’s death—Helen was able to talk about it, and we discussed it at my house, eating apples and raisins in my room. I’d learned that Helen was likeliest to eat wholesome snacks.
LaPorte was a young ex-seminarian who set himself on fire in front of the UN and lived long enough to say that he’d done it because he didn’t believe in war.
“But how could anybody do it?” I said.
“I know,” Helen said, to my relief. It scared me that she was so willing to think about the act itself.
“I don’t know enough about this war,” she said. “I’ve been wasting time. I went shopping for clothes. My mother says she can’t make my clothes now that I’m going to college.” She plucked at the sleeve of her drab sweater. I felt guilty because I liked buying clothes.
“I don’t think I want to be—” She paused. “A woo-man.”
“I do,” I said. I wished I could go to Barnard, where Helen was applying. Her parents had more money than mine. I applied only to Brooklyn College, because it was free. Val, to my surprise, was also going to Brooklyn. She seemed like the kind of girl whose parents would have sent her away with puffy dresses in a big trunk.
“She’ll be your new best friend,” Helen said when I mentioned Val. “You’ll listen to the Beatles.”
“Don’t be silly.” But it was true that Val might be a compensation. She made me feel that more was possible than I had known. For Helen, life could lead to the unexpected, but only after you’d squeezed yourself through a narrow tube of self-scrutiny and considered everything up to and including burning yourself to death. Val’s idea of the possible was only slightly freer than mine, but in a significant way, as if she saw a few inches around corners.
Just recently, a parent had complained about a sex scene in a story of Val’s that we’d published in Sidewalks. I didn’t like the story. Upon hearing that someone had phoned the principal, I expected the magazine to be shut down, and, to my shame, I’d have accepted that. But Val wrote a letter to the editor of the school paper about the importance of free speech. Then she asked the principal, her old acquaintance by then, if she could put together a discussion at a school assembly on the subject of freedom of the press. She would invite a constitutional lawyer, the editor of The Nation, and our congressman. The principal—a kind, foolish man—was dazzled.
The school paper ran an article on the coming discussion, including an interview with Val. The assembly never took place. Val told us the luminaries had all said no. I wondered if she’d invited them. It didn’t matter. Her purpose had been served, and among the faculty and the more intellectual students, censoring anything had become not just unthinkable but notoriously unthinkable, the first example anyone would have thought of if asked for an instance of the unthinkable. Social studies teachers held units on the Bill of Rights. English teachers discussed the censorship of Ulysses.
“It was like a commercial on television,” I said to Helen. We were still eating apples and raisins, now arguing about whether Val was someone we respected.
“Exactly,” she said, running her fingers through her tight curls. “It was cheap.”
“I just mean it got everyone’s attention!” I said. “Like a jingle you can’t stop singing. Honestly, Helen.”
“But that’s what I mean,” Helen said. “It was in a good cause, but it was a gimmick.” She was accusing me of being taken in by a worthless trick.
I was hurt—I did admire what Val had done—but Helen had returned to the subject of Roger Allen LaPorte. “What can it be like to be that sure?” she said. She still nibbled at her apple. I’d thrown my core in the wastebasket a half hour earlier. “I want him to be my boyfriend,” she said, “now that he’s dead.”
Joshua Griffin
God, you watch me as if you were real. I put butter in the frying pan—my mother used margarine—salting and peppering the slices of cod, pouring flour in a bowl and turning the fish over in the bowl. I’ve known this bowl for a long time. Ollie kept it, at the end that was not the end, when I lived upstairs and she downstairs, because she was the one who wanted to be apart—and then when I lived in a different house, because she wanted that, too. The bowl was still here when I came back, to this house where she can pretend she lives somewhere else. She rarely uses this heavy tan bowl with a blue stripe, but I like it.
I tell you this because I have always mumbled and you have always been the recipient of my mumbles, though for decades I haven’t believed that you are real in the sense that my daughters, my parents, the woman I love, or I am real. My students. Can a man who has believed in a deity cease to believe? Is it possible? Can he do more than make a claim not to believe? I am still demanding that you cure my doubt.
I need to take my wife to bed.
It’s true that I read most of Val’s book, true that I loved it, not true that I was too sleepy to read the end. I know that at the end, the character of Harry appears. I’ll read those pages, but not yet. Surely I can be forgiven for wanting to postpone that. I didn’t mean to lose the book. I have no idea where it is.
I always ask the same questions: Is it possible to cease to believe? Is it only a claim? And I ask them while doing something that doesn’t require attention—chopping at a block of frozen green beans with the sharp knife, chipping at it until it fits into a saucepan. I add salt as we speak. I am real enough to add salt, and I can’t say the same about you. I imagine myself saying, Ollie, let me tell you about my student who’s in trouble. I lost the book because I was thinking of him.
We talk for a long time. Then I stand up and she stands up and I put my hand on the small of her back.
All day at school I didn’t miss it, but when I saw it was gone, what I wanted again was the pleasure of forgetting my life, reading not to learn but to be someone else. All that evening, the evening I read, I thought about nobody but those made-up people, not my marriage that isn’t exactly a marriage, my school that can’t save its pupils, my family that will never believe that I have been worthy of my inheritance.
No, that’s not true. I thought also of the past, the difficult past, gunshots and blood. But apparently even that was preferable.
I want a drink. And won’t have one. Will eat this plain food without even a beer, though I want a beer. We don’t keep beer because I would drink it, even after all these years. What will make her sit and watch me cook and talk to me? Make me know that, God, and I’ll believe.
Jean Argos
I’m avoiding pa
tches of old snow, hurrying through the parking lot from my Toyota to the midsize, semi-lovable agency I am in charge of, not knowing what I’m about to find. We just hired a new assistant director. This morning, as I rushed out to a meeting downtown for which I was already late, I heard her shout at my community service worker. Shouting is not how we do things. Useful community service workers are hard to come by, and the kid we have now is useful but easily upset.
The meeting was fine but long, and I’m eating lunch at last, ham and cheese on rye. I made the sandwich at home, with Dijon mustard and red-leaf lettuce, and all I ask is to eat the second half sitting. It’s in my other hand. So I’d like ten minutes in my office before I have to confront Paulette Strong, the new hire.
Barker Street Social Services is in an old factory building. This is New Haven, so the factory once made guns or parts of guns. The parking lot looks like a factory parking lot from the days when nobody put trees and bushes around a factory. Three clients, young guys, come out of the front door as I climb the steps. If the building was still a factory, they’d be workers, but they don’t look tired enough to be getting off work, and yet, in a different way, they look too tired. No place to go. I’d like to put them to work, though making guns would not be my first choice. I know two of them, not by name. The third, whom I don’t know, is tall, walking a little behind the others, stretching his hands wide like the daddy, urging them along. As they pass me, he says in a deep voice, “May I have a bite?”
“No way!” I say. The other two laugh, so everybody knows everybody’s kidding. We already knew. People with nowhere to go have time for subtleties.
“Miss Jean,” I hear one of the shorter men say—not talking to me but about me. I’m responsible for the lunch they just ate, he means. “Miss” makes that clear.
The tall man turns and calls, “I’m Dunbar.”
“Pleased to meet you!” I yell without turning. I hold both halves of the sandwich in the same hand to open our heavy old metal door. I brace it with my shoulder. Our building is the last one left on a one-block street. I like our high windows, with lots of panes, but I don’t like how wind moves across the open space or how the sun cooks it.
Barker is a drop-in center, a place that isn’t the public library where people with nowhere to go can get out of the rain. An outreach team of three finds homeless people hanging out and talks to those who are most afraid of the shelters, most wary of people with social work degrees. We get them to take something—food, a doctor’s appointment, a referral. We’re open during the day, when the shelters are closed. We serve a light breakfast and lunch. An APRN comes in twice a week. We have two washing machines and a dryer, much used and often broken. Yale students who must change from year to year but who look alike—always a blond girl, an Indian girl, a black boy with glasses—show up and help people write résumés, which rarely lead to jobs, but it has happened. Groups hold discussions in which they sound more in charge of their lives than they are. Some people come in for a half hour, get warm, and leave without sitting down.
The front door of Barker is between our two main rooms. To my right as I enter is a room with donated computers, sofas, chairs, books, magazines, a TV that doesn’t get cable but on which we sometimes show movies. To the left is a larger, drafty room with tables at one end. Lunch is ending as I pass. The last eaters—five guys—are at the other end of the big room. As I move toward the stairs, I hear a few words of their conversation: joking, bragging. Nothing troubling. We have echoing halls and iron handrails on metal stairs, so every walk is a big deal, with clanging and thumping. When I’m in my office, I hear people coming up and people coming down. There’s a mental health clinic on the third floor, but they’re moving out at the end of the winter. I’m drooling over the space. I have big, high rooms, but not enough of them.
But before I can get into my office and close the door, Darlene, my office manager—who knows the sound of my footsteps—pops out of her office and plunks her tough little self between me and my door.
“She left something out,” she says, and hands me a form. She has a wide, pale face and a short brown ponytail with a plain, tight rubber band. Paulette had paperwork to fill out. Darlene doesn’t like her and is in a hurry, so I postpone the second half of the sandwich, leave it on my desk, and go back down to find Paulette, carrying the form.
The dining room serves thirty. We want people to go to the big soup kitchens, where they get a hot lunch, so we hand out nothing but cold sandwiches, apples, granola bars, and coffee. No cookies except on Christmas. The big dining room windows give us peace. Barker is a nicer place to be than you’d think, because of those windows. Now the clients ending their meal are standing up, throwing away trash. Beyond the dining room is the kitchen, which is small and old, and at the time I’m talking about, there’s an ancient, unreliable gas stove, since replaced. The walls are covered with small six-sided chipped white tiles.
As I cross the dining room, I hear arguing from the kitchen. Not shouting, not like this morning, but arguing. Through the open door, I catch sight of a stranger, a large man in a sweatshirt. Light-skinned, maybe white.
It’s Paulette’s third day. I don’t trust her because I let myself be talked into hiring her by my board. The decision was mine, but the board takes an interest. I couldn’t say why I didn’t like Paulette. Her credentials were good. The only board member who agreed with me was the president—the outgoing president, whom I don’t like—so since he was against her, I decided in her favor. Paulette is a tall, light-skinned black woman with skinny arms. I don’t trust her skinny arms. They’re too long. What will she do with them that she should back away from?
Now she’s having an argument with the community service worker, whose name is Grant, and the stranger. Nobody except staff is allowed in the kitchen, but there he is. The kitchen window is cloudy glass, with wire woven through it slantwise. The light is softer, and it falls on Grant’s face. He looks scared. Community service workers have something to be scared of—if we complain about them, they could go to jail. Paulette is facing him, her back to me. He’s filling a bucket with hot water to mop the dining room. It’s half full, at his feet, but he’s facing Paulette, not the sink. The other man is off to the side.
I say, “The utility sink for the pail, remember?”
Grant stays where he is. The stranger stands next to him. Heavy arms and shoulders, wild dark hair.
“It’s under control, Jean,” Paulette says. She glances over her shoulder. “I told him to do it here.”
“No, we’re not supposed to,” I say. “These are for cooking and dishes. Health department.”
“Jean,” Paulette says. She faces me. “This is something you can delegate. I promise.”
“But wait a second,” I say. “Is there a problem here?”
“It’s okay,” Grant says. “It’s okay, it’s okay.” He’s scared to fill the bucket at the sink and scared not to. Not liking Paulette makes me extra careful. Maybe she has a reason, I’m thinking. Maybe a boa constrictor in the utility sink is going to strangle our community service worker.
“Paulette, let’s go talk about this,” I say. “I’ve got this form, too—you left something out. And this morning, I thought I heard—” But I will never get a chance to mention this morning.
“Just leave it,” Paulette says. “I really can handle it, Jean.” Then to Grant, “Okay, use the other sink.”
“It’s okay, it’s okay,” he says again. He dumps his bucket out in the kitchen sink (“Sweetie, you didn’t need to do that!” I say) and carries it into the laundry room, and I hear the faucet run. The other man follows him. I put myself where I can see them both. They fill the bucket.
“Who’s that?” I say in a low voice, shrugging one shoulder toward the man.
“I get it,” Paulette says. “It’s hard to delegate. I’ve had the same problem.”
I feel like hitting her. “Who is that man?” I say in a low voice. “Nobody’s allowed in the kitchen ex
cept staff. And what was the argument?”
“He offered to help when he finished his lunch,” she says. “His name is Arturo. Volunteering is something we ought to encourage.”
“I suppose,” I say, working hard at staying calm, “but it’s not a great idea with somebody we don’t know. And not in the kitchen.” It takes a while for new hires to learn our way of being both lax and strict. We have to be loose, friendly, and kind, or nobody will come near us—and we have to admit that some clients are dangerous, and be careful. I glance toward the utility sink. Arturo and Grant have gone out to the dining room.
“You can trust my judgment,” Paulette says. “And the reason I shouted? Well, you saw for yourself. He was filling the bucket at the wrong sink.”
“But you told him to,” I say. “You didn’t know it was wrong until I told you.”
“No, he was filling it in there. I didn’t want the volunteer in there where I couldn’t keep an eye on him.”
“That doesn’t sound like a reason for an argument.”
“You’re saying I’m lying?” Paulette says.
I will certainly not mention this morning. “Of course not,” I say. “Could you fill that out now, please? Darlene needs it.”
“I don’t have a pen,” she says. “I’ll bring it soon, I promise.”
I don’t have a pen either. I turn, ending the conversation. Almost over my shoulder, I say, “Just try to stay professional.”
The dining room, as I pass through, is almost empty, with the calm look it takes on some afternoons, when traffic slows and the sun makes patterns on the floor. Arturo is mopping, and Grant is watching him. The rest of the group I saw are on their way to the door, stopping to talk. There’s an AA meeting in the computer room pretty soon.
Conscience Page 3