Two who didn’t have a connection to any college were a woman named Mallon, who came to the apartment several times and whom we saw at some meetings, and a man they spoke of as Raz, whom I didn’t meet for a long time. Mallon had a long, reddish braid down her back and a wide face with freckles. The first time I saw her, I thought she looked atypically easy to approach, but when I tried to make friends, she didn’t look at me or speak. She and Helen were smoking weed and drinking tea, and I—coming into the apartment late in the afternoon, a bag of books over my shoulder—was an intruder. Mallon’s and Raz’s names confused me, and I asked Helen the next day if they were first or last names, if they were made-up names.
“What difference does it make?” she said, though we’d always been fascinated by names.
“I can’t get them straight,” I continued, almost trying to make her mad. “This famous Raz is a man? Have you actually laid eyes on him? Why does he matter?”
“He matters because he really knows,” Helen said. “And yes, I’ve met him. He was in the Marines—he saw it all himself. Last month his group broke into a draft board and poured blood on the records. Some kid won’t get killed in ’Nam because there’s blood on his name. Or that’s the theory.”
“Mallon wants you to join that group?”
We were in the part of the living room where I slept. I had been putting on my socks and shoes when Helen came in and asked me for money, and I gave her five dollars. I sat on the mattress I slept on, my foot extended, looking up as we spoke about her friends. She stood above me, the window behind her, with its broken venetian blind. From below, her face looked puffy.
“They’re trying something a bit harder next,” she said. Then, “They think I’m not ready.”
I saw Mallon again, in the street with Helen, a week or two later, as I walked from the subway station, again with my student’s sack of books. “I’ll be late,” Helen said, waving, and I went to the apartment alone and read Thomas Hardy.
On Election Day, I cut classes, or maybe school was closed. There were protests all over the city, and Eli told Helen and me to come to Union Square for a rally urging people not to vote. It interested me to realize that Eli’s presence at the rally wasn’t my primary reason for going, that I wouldn’t spend my time looking for him. I had at last succeeded—I thought—in attaining some of Helen’s detachment about men. Being preoccupied by the war was something like having such a bad cold that you didn’t care what happened in your life. Intense rage about the war and the government wasn’t enough to make me indifferent to whether the man I was sleeping with dumped me, it had turned out more than once. But too little sleep and food, and too much coffee and marijuana, could do it. I had no wish except to do what came next: to storm the police without having my head bashed in, to bring more people, louder people, to the next protest and the next, until the roar of our voices would be so loud that what we wanted would occur.
We never found Eli at the rally on Election Day, where someone in a pig mask teased and amused the crowd, waving a Vietcong flag. Miming horror, the pig man clasped a Nazi flag to himself, while people around him screamed, “Oink! Oink!”
Of all my parents’ objections to the movement, calling the police “pigs” bothered them most. “They’re ruining their own cause,” my mother would have wailed. “Those cops are just doing their jobs.”
By then, I’d seen policemen who were not just doing their jobs. But that wasn’t what made me yell along with the others: the idea of police was our enemy, whether particular cops deserved my hatred or not. That day, the place was massed with them.
Before the rally broke up, Helen seized my arm: “Let’s go.” We made our way to the edge of the crowd. “This is stupid,” she said. “And my ankle hurts.”
The protesters were supposed to go on to Rockefeller Center for a demonstration there, and even then, hundreds were heading for the subway stations. We walked slowly up Broadway and rested on a bench in Madison Square. I knew by then that I should have made Helen see a doctor in August and felt this had been my failed responsibility, as if she were my child. Now I wanted only to take her someplace quiet. The subway would be crowded, with too many steps, and I didn’t have money for a cab. People who’d left the rally were walking up Fifth Avenue toward Rockefeller Center, so I led her the other way, onto Madison Avenue. We walked slowly for many blocks. I offered to let Helen lean on me, but she said she was fine.
At Thirty-Sixth Street, we came to the Pierpont Morgan Library, a building I knew. I’d gone to one or two exhibits there, taking as much pleasure in being allowed to wander around a nineteenth-century mansion as in the art. “Let’s go in,” I said.
“Pierpont Morgan? Not without a bomb!” She looked up at the grand old building. There was still something childlike about Helen, an unself-consciousness in the way she stood, not arranging her body like a young woman of twenty.
“It’s a library,” I said. “We don’t have anything against libraries.” It was small in those days. You could almost imagine living in it.
“It’s all one system, Olivia,” she said, but I knew she wanted to see the inside of the place.
“We must inform ourselves about the moneyed classes,” I said. “Come on. We’ll wear out the floor with our shoes and contribute to the fall of the military industrial complex.”
“Are you making fun of me?” Helen said.
Her tone was teasing, warm. “Never, my darling,” I said, and led her inside.
In the abrupt quiet, we stood before a row of drawings in a long glass case—drawings of people, created centuries earlier in Europe, some by artists we knew, like Rembrandt and Dürer. I was too tired to note who had made each one, but looking at them slowed my metabolism. Tears came. I thought of the man with his Nazi flag and his pig mask, while looking at these pictures in which a few strokes seemed to have created life and mood: a woman with a child, or a man who looked up, awestruck.
“Does your ankle hurt?” I said, after we’d looked silently at five or six drawings.
“Yes,” she said, but she moved on down the row. On one page, studies were grouped: three sketches of a man’s head and torso in a hat, one above the next. Two sketches, to the side, of the hat alone. Above them, a woman’s face, suggesting compassion, grief, sorrow.
Helen kept looking longer than I did, standing motionless before each drawing, her head sometimes tilted to the side. At last, we sat down on a bench. No one else was there. Helen searched in the denim bag she carried over her shoulder and removed a small spiral notebook with a dark reddish cover, bent and wrinkled from the months or years she’d been carrying it. The pencil she had stuck through the metal coils was too large, so it had loosened the spiral. She poked the pencil free and began drawing on an unused page near the back of the notebook.
After a while, she said—casually, as if what she said was obvious—“When something happens. That’s it. That’s everything.”
“I don’t understand,” I said. She was copying, I saw, a depiction of a woman in a billowing dress with a bucket at her side and a small child, also in a billowing dress.
“It makes my heart hurt,” she said.
“The drawing?”
“Not this one particularly—the idea that they might not have . . .” She put the notebook away. “They were made quickly.”
“Yes.” I had thought about that too—a few sure, swift strokes.
“His wife calls him to lunch ten minutes earlier—no woman at all.”
I thought. “You mean the drawing might not have been made.”
“I mean,” she said. She tapped the elegant hardwood bench on which we sat. “This building. Everybody building it could have dropped dead, but Mr. Pierpont Morgan would have said, ‘Oh, too bad, haul away those stinky bodies—but here are the plans, get someone else.’”
“But a drawing . . .,” I said.
“Right.”
“Right, what?” I said. I thought we agreed, but I didn’t quite know what it was we
agreed.
“The woman. She’s there, or not. If she’s there, that’s enough. I know how the artist felt when he drew her. I know what she’s feeling. If he doesn’t draw her, nothing can change that.”
We stood and looked at some more drawings, speculating on which stroke was the very first.
“Making is destroying,” Helen said then. “Making is everything—but making is destroying, so it doesn’t count.”
“Destroying? How?”
“The drawing destroys the blank surface,” she said. “If you value the drawing, drawing is making. If I drew on the wall over there, the guard would call it destroying.”
“So what?”
“If making is destroying,” she said, “sometimes destroying is making. Doing something. That’s what counts.”
When we left, the library was closing and it was dark. We took a bus, finding seats in the back for our long, bumpy ride uptown. Helen sat silently next to the window. Then she said, “I forgot it’s Election Day.”
“We went to the rally,” I said. “We made our point.”
“What did we make?” Helen asked.
The bus struggled noisily up the avenue, letting people on and off. I was glad we had seats, and I wasn’t giving mine up, no matter who got on. I hoped Helen would keep looking out the window. She could be difficult on the subject of ethical behavior, sore ankle or no.
“We didn’t make anything,” she continued. “Those drawings are something somebody made. We just talked. We just said. There’s no value in that.” She shook her head vigorously. Her hair was very curly that day.
“Wait a second,” I said. “How can you claim that saying something isn’t worth anything? What about poems? What about novels?”
She was silent, looking out the window, and I thought she wouldn’t answer. The bus continued northward. Then she said, “Poems and novels don’t seem to be ending the war.”
“So they have no value?”
“They have value,” she said. “They have value—for pleasure, for leisure. But, no, Olivia, they’re not what we need. Not now.”
“They teach us,” I said quickly. “They tell us how to live. How to think.” She was silent. “Like the drawings. They’re no different from the drawings!”
“I guess you’re right,” she said. “No different.”
I’d have thought she was trying to shock me, but Helen never said what she didn’t mean. “You don’t believe in literature,” I said. “In art.”
Helen turned and looked straight at me. “Oh, honey, I wish I did!” The bus stopped, and she was silent while the doors creaked open. People stomped off and others got on; the doors creaked again. “That was so nice, what we used to think! When we wrote poems. When we took those walks.”
I pulled her into a sideways hug.
Then she said, “I love you, but you’re a liberal. You want to talk. You want to convince them. That’s over.”
“If we can’t talk, we have wars,” I said. “I thought we were trying to stop a war.”
“We are,” Helen said. Now there were so many people around us that talking was awkward. We were silent until we reached our stop. The apartment was still a few blocks away, and our usual coffee shop was on the way.
“Let’s get some eggs,” I said. I was starving.
“The way to end war,” Helen said in a low voice, as we waited for our food—as if she’d been waiting all this time to say this sentence—“is not commentary, but action.”
“Destroying something?”
“Maybe. Sometimes. A draft board—wow,” she said. “I’d like to blow one up.”
Our plates of egg and toast and potatoes arrived. “Aren’t they in buildings people use—in city halls, stuff like that?” I asked.
“Maybe.”
I was too hungry to let the food get cold while we argued. I ate half a slice of toast, slathered with salty butter. It tasted wonderful. I was the only antiwar activist who hadn’t gotten thin—maybe that was how you could tell I was a liberal. “Helen,” I said then, with my mouth full, “you’d do that? You’d blow up a building? What if somebody got hurt? Or killed?”
Helen was eating, but now she put down her fork. “We’re careful,” she said, and I noted the “we.” “I don’t want anyone to be killed. I don’t want to be killed. But you know, Olivia,” she said, “this is not a new idea. Sometimes people have to die to bring about something that matters. You know that.”
“No, I don’t know that!” I said. “I thought we were fighting to save kids in Vietnam from napalm, not to kill somebody else.”
“We have to do what it takes to save those kids,” she said, “and if Americans die—well, they’re probably helping to bring about the war. We’re all helping, even I’m helping. There I am”—she smiled sadly and shook her curly head—“adding to the luster of Pierpont Morgan.”
I put down my fork again. I had not yet eaten any potatoes and was looking forward to them. “How can you love the drawing of a human being, and not the human being herself?”
“The drawing is nothing,” Helen said. “When this civilization is gone and someone finds one scrap, it won’t be one of those drawings. It will be this napkin or a cigarette ad.” She pointed to the cash register near us, with a display of cigarettes next to it.
“So?”
“So—everything disappears. No one person matters that much.”
But the drawings spoke to me, indeed, of the value of one person, at one moment. Nearly all the figures were busy being ordinary. “No,” I said. “No, no, no.”
Helen said, “Think of the woman with the big wide dress that I copied. If she died fifteen minutes after this drawing was made, it wouldn’t change the drawing.”
“That has nothing to do with it!” I stopped eating. Our conversation made no sense. I couldn’t even follow it. “So, you’d kill?” I said.
There was a long pause. “No,” Helen said. “Well. I hope I don’t have to. But if it is the only way, and I have to—then yes. To say the government has to change.”
“But you said ‘say,’” I said. “That’s talking—how is that not just talking? Like literature? Like poems? Like those drawings, damn it! The death of one person wouldn’t stop the war—it would just make a point, badly. Isn’t it better to make it in words?”
“Action brings more action,” Helen said. “Action against me, maybe. What brings action is action, not just commentary.”
She arranged her knife and fork at the side of the plate. “As long as action follows action, there’s a chance for change. That’s what we have to do, start chains of action.”
There was nothing more to say. I knew Helen had no money. I paid the check and we walked slowly back to the apartment to hear that Nixon would be president.
Jean Argos
By the end of the long evening of the dinner party, I’m thinking—nervously—that Olive and I may become friends. She makes everyone do what she wants when she gets hurt. I admire that—except for what she does to Joshua. But who knows anything about somebody else’s marriage? Later, though, I decide she would disapprove of me for sleeping with Zak. He calls me right away. We’re both busy, but we see each other a few times a week. I wonder how Olive is doing with a bad ankle and a shaken brain, but I don’t call. I also keep making up my mind to talk to Zak about Yvonne, but somehow I never think of it when I’m with him.
He tells me that he and Martha were together for most of high school. “She had the best parents,” he says, leaning back to look out a window in my kitchen. “They were my friends. I lost them in the breakup. I was a dope.”
“Kids are dopes,” I say.
“Not always,” Zak says. He says Olive will be laid up for weeks. Casts like that are hot and uncomfortable.
“Have you called her?” I ask.
“I don’t think she wants me to,” he says. “But you should.”
So I call. Olive sounds glad to be talking to someone. “All I can do is work,” she says. “I
can read, I can write—I just can’t live.” She needs crutches to walk, so she can’t carry anything or use her hands while standing.
But she says she’d like a visit, and I go over after work, bringing a cold bottle of pinot grigio with some sheep’s cheese and good crackers. Olive calls, “It’s open,” when I ring the bell. The dog, who I have learned is called Barnaby, pushes his nose through the door, and I’m wary for a moment, but he licks my bare leg and leads me to where Olive is stretched out on the red sofa. The crutches are propped nearby. She reaches to squeeze my hand and motions me to a chair. The room is bare without a party. On the low table near Olive’s sofa is a laptop. The long table we ate at is covered with books and papers, a radio, a television, old mail.
“How are you managing?” I say. “Are you alone?”
“Mostly. Griff works most of the summer. Martha’s in New York, my other daughter’s in Philadelphia. She came for a week right after I got hurt.”
“Joshua isn’t taking time off?”
“Thank God. He drives me crazy.”
This has quickly become none of my business. I show her what I’ve brought, and she waves me into the kitchen for glasses and a knife to cut the cheese. I look into cupboards and find a plate and paper napkins.
“How civilized!” Olive says sarcastically, but I think she’s pleased. She sips. She has a slightly rigid way of moving, made worse by the awkward cast, which seems to make any gesture harder, even if it doesn’t involve the leg. But she isn’t prim. Her gray hair is messy, and her glasses are smudged.
I offer to clean them and she accepts. “Anything else, while I’m up?” I ask, but she shakes her head. She’s like a big wooden marionette. I wonder how much older she is—five or ten years.
On second thought, she asks for a box of tissues and a glass of water and sends me upstairs to her bedroom for a sweatshirt. “I don’t need it now,” she says, “but it will get cool before Griff turns up.”
Conscience Page 15