Conscience

by Alice Mattison

  “I know she shouldn’t have,” I say. “I told her. I’ll tell her again. But I’m not firing her.”

  “Maybe one of the other two is still available,” he says.

  “I’m keeping Paulette,” I say.

  That afternoon, I tell Paulette she’s not fired, but every day she has to tell me what she’s done and what she’s going to do next. I should have made her do that in the first place. We follow this plan for a few weeks, until we both forget about it.

  Olive Grossman

  Active, take-charge people are enraged—not merely upset—by confinement. If I hadn’t been hurt the night of the dinner party, I might have been pleasanter to Griff in the following weeks. The party had been a success up to then. I liked Jean, liked watching the guests admire Martha, and it’s always good to see Lorna Anderson. Zak’s arrival was disturbing, but I was more interested than shocked. If I hadn’t been injured that night, I might have admitted the next day that I’d overdone rage and hurt feelings in advance of the party. But the cast kept my mood as well as my leg immobilized. Before the party, Griff and I had all but agreed to separate—or pretend to be separate in the same house—and when I was lying on the floor in pain, I sent him upstairs. He wouldn’t forgive that without an apology, but I had no impulse to apologize to someone whose movements were unimpaired, while I hobbled and crawled and needed to be waited on instead of managing others. Griff asked about my needs and comfort as if he were a polite neighbor. And he continued being elsewhere—to the point at which I no longer expected to see much of him in the evenings. We slept in the same bed most nights. A few times, I just didn’t bother and remained on the sofa where I spent my days.

  Jean Argos visited me often that spring and summer, sometimes just dropping in after work, sometimes bringing wine or cheese or both, settling in for a visit. I was grateful, but didn’t like feeling grateful. I preferred doing things for others. When she brought wine, I’d send her for a plate and glasses, then follow, thumping along on my crutches.

  “Talk to me about people doing things,” I said, on one of those occasions, when we were back in the living room. “Not just sitting around getting fat.” My clothes were tight.

  She sipped her wine and began to talk about Barker Street. A volunteer, a street guy, had begun working for the program a few hours a week, and Jean had just come from a conversation about him with the assistant director. “Either I should fire her, or she’s the best person there,” she said. “Joshua wants me to fire her.”

  “Don’t let him push you around,” I said.

  She looked at me with an odd smile. “He’s probably right,” she said, “but she makes me think.”

  “Griff preaches caution, but he takes chances at school.”

  Jean began walking around, as if somebody had to. She looked out the windows. “You need to leave?” I asked.

  She turned red and sat down on the arm of a chair. “It’s hard to keep still.”

  “You’re telling me,” I said. Then I heard Griff’s key in the front door. I hadn’t expected him until late and preferred to keep Jean to myself. He came in carrying two green cloth grocery bags. He had decided to surprise me with a decent meal, walking out of a meeting to do it. That’s how we were: not getting along, but with friendly exceptions.

  “Hi, Jean,” he said.

  “Hi, Joshua.”

  Not that I appreciated the exception. I wanted to be alone—to eat inadequately, nurse grudges, feel sorry for myself, watch an old French movie that Griff would hate. My leg itched under the cast.

  After bringing his groceries into the kitchen, Griff slid into a chair. Jean had moved from the arm of her chair to the seat. Propriety increases around my husband.

  “Wine?” Jean said, rising, prepared to go for an additional glass.

  He shook his head, raised his hand, disappeared into the kitchen yet again.

  “Why does she make you think?” I asked Jean. I wanted something to happen in this dead room, where I had accomplished nothing for many days—I wanted anything to happen.

  “Paulette?” Jean said. “She’s certainly not perfect.”

  “So she—”

  “Okay. For example—she held a prayer meeting. Didn’t tell me. Man gets up at the prayer meeting, says Jesus ruined his life.” She gestured dramatically.

  “You were there?”

  “I didn’t even know about it until the next day. Jesus ruined his life, and he gets into a screaming argument, and there’s a fistfight, but nobody is hauled off to the hospital, and they decide to have a meeting to talk about religion once a week.”

  “Which is good,” I said.

  “Of course.”

  “What’s good?” Griff asked, coming with his usual ice water. She told him.

  “But she didn’t tell you in advance? It’s the same thing, Jean—”

  “She’s worth it.”

  “People like that are not fixable,” Griff said. “What if it had been a knife? Or a gun?”

  “Same as what?” I asked. It turned out that the woman, Paulette, had talked prematurely to a reporter about something they were doing, something Griff opposed. He sat straight up in his chair, and his skin took on a certain dull color it gets when he’s upset. Jean was smiling, relaxed.

  “We’ll discuss this,” Griff said.

  Jean poured herself another half glass and held out the bottle to me. I shook my head. Now I didn’t want another half glass’s worth of conversation. She drew her feet out of her shoes and tucked them under her.

  “So, Joshua,” she said, “did you finish Bright Morning of Pain?”

  “Not yet,” he said.

  I wondered if he even had a copy. I had mine, and Jean had hers—had he bought two used ones? I wasn’t planning to lend him mine again.

  “The end is exciting,” she said. She tapped her knees, which were thick, in snug leggings. She wore leggings and a loose gray shirt. “I won’t give it away. But—the character of Harry . . .” She sat forward. “Did you get to that part? I’m not sure we’re supposed to like Harry, but I did.”

  I was silent. It’s never smart to want something to happen without deciding what kind of something. Asking about the character of Harry in Bright Morning of Pain was not a good idea.

  “I mean—is this just coincidence?” she said. “I know Olive knew the author, but—”

  Griff and I didn’t help her. He brought his glass to his lips and took it away without drinking. He stood.

  “I bought chicken,” he said. “I’ll go cook it.”

  “I don’t feel like chicken,” I said.

  Jean looked at me. “Don’t be cranky,” she said. “It’s not our fault you’re hurt.”

  Secretly, I liked this. “‘Our’?” I said, as if I were accusing them of sexual malfeasance, which I was not.

  “I mean, the way Harry advocates violence—and then what happens. In a way it’s all his doing, and yet—”

  Griff set down his glass on the table. He looked at Jean. “I have not finished reading the book,” he said. There was tension in his cheeks. “But I am aware of the passages you refer to.” It was thirty years now that Joshua Griffin had been aware of those passages without reading the book. Maybe we’d never have separated for those long years if he hadn’t been aware of those passages.

  “Yes,” he said, “Olive knew the author. The character of Harry, I believe, is an African American man from Hartford, Connecticut, who, from what I understand, turns up late in the book. He influences the main character. He is the son and grandson of clergymen, but he has refused to go to divinity school and has become a peace activist, going so far as to . . .” He picked up his glass again, brought it once more to his lips, and again set it down without—as far as I could see—swallowing. “He participates in a violent episode and is found not guilty on a technicality, but it is his act that leads to the final events of the book.” This time he picked up his glass and drank. “Because he influences the main character, who becomes vio
lent in imitation of him.”

  He drank again. “I have never lived in Hartford,” he said. “The rest is true, Jean. Make of it what you will.”

  “But I liked him,” she said. “I respected him. The times they lived in . . .”

  “No,” I said, and sounded not just cranky to my own ears but angry. “No, it’s not true. Griff, you’ve never actually read those scenes and you don’t know if they’re true or not—maybe the summaries you’ve heard sound true, but it isn’t true!” I gasped like a crying child.

  “Perhaps,” Griff said. He stood, turned toward the door, as if Jean had announced her imminent departure. Indeed, she stood—I was furious with her for complying, though I wanted her to go—and she came forward to hug me where I sat. Her bare arms and hands, touching my arm as she crouched, felt cool and regretful, as if her arms were wiser than the rest of her, and I stretched to embrace her.

  “I’ll see you soon,” she said, and left.

  I lay back, watching Griff—visible from where I lay—close the front door. His back—clean white shirt, dark brown neck, gray hair—disappeared into the kitchen. I thought we were going to fight.

  And it began as I expected. “What’s her game?” he said. “Likes the character of Harry! I’m supposed to admire that? Or be grateful?”

  “She doesn’t know us,” I said, now exhausted. “She doesn’t even know how far back we go.”

  “Of course she does. She met Martha. She knows we didn’t meet last week.”

  “People don’t understand about fictional characters,” I said.

  “Ollie,” he said.

  “I know,” I said. “All these years, you didn’t read it. That was probably better.”

  “But I knew. I knew what you told Val.” He sat down opposite me, his hands on his knees, his face wide-open. “I never expected to like the book,” he said.

  “Why don’t you finish it?”

  “Because I know what happens,” he said, and the wild, open expression I’d seen disappeared. “I know what I did.”

  “It’s fiction, Griff.”

  “Don’t give me that.”

  “But it is,” I said. “It’s a work of imagination.”

  “You told Val—” He leaned back, and his fingers played with the upholstered surface of the arm of the chair.

  “And she imagined. . . .”

  “It’s probably worse than I think.” His face held so much pain, I couldn’t have been angry with him, no matter what was going on.

  “Yes, it’s worse,” I said at length. “But it isn’t you.”

  “But it is.”

  I stood, laboriously, with the crutches. “It’s not. Harry tells Hannah Cohen that violence is the only way, and no one else says it so clearly to her. Black critics protested when the book came out—Harry is one of only two violent people in the book, and he’s never sorry. You know that’s not what happened in reality.”

  “Why are you getting up?”

  “I need to pee,” I said. Then something gave me the grace to say, “In fact, I do feel like chicken.”

  “I’ll go cook,” he said. What would people do if it weren’t for food? Food and dogs. Barnaby followed Griff into the kitchen. Without food and dogs, we would live in the past and the future. I thumped my way into the bathroom. We ate. But before the meal was over, we were quarreling yet again, this time about Annie, who had a boyfriend Griff considered worrisome. Then he interrupted himself to say, “The night you got hurt—the night of that damned dinner party—”

  “It was a good dinner party,” I said. “Until I fell.”

  “It was not,” he said. “Before it, you said you wanted me to move upstairs.”

  “You said that,” I said.

  “But you said it was what you wanted.” We were in the kitchen, still. The food had been only adequate, and we remained sitting at the table when it was done, maybe each hoping the other would imagine into being a dessert, an elegant cheese tray, something. “It wouldn’t be too expensive,” he said. “There was that door at the foot of the stairs. It’s still in the basement. I don’t need a whole kitchen upstairs. A microwave and a coffeepot will do.”

  “Is that what you want?” I asked.

  “I think it’s what you want,” he said.

  “Maybe you’re right,” I said. “Maybe we should just take a break. At least bring the TV up. I don’t like television much. I don’t like sports.” After I was injured Griff had brought it down, and on a few evenings we’d watched together. Now I wanted it back in Annie’s old room, where it had been for years. It was half true that I didn’t like sports. In some moods, I looked forward to watching with him.

  Helen’s mysterious Raz turned out to be a man in his late twenties with a thin, light brown beard, patches of skin showing through it, and a bald spot starting on the top of his head. In the spring of 1969 he could often be found in the apartment. He couldn’t learn my name, neither Olive nor Olivia. Helen was respectful in his company—maybe awestruck—and when I heard him argue politics, I saw why. He kept the history of the war in his head and could be specific and persuasive when even Helen could not. “The French did that,” he’d say. He remembered Vietnamese place names and knew how to pronounce them. If he’d looked at me, I’d have become his disciple too—maybe. Maybe he could tell I was not worth his time.

  Helen was bitter and defeated as the war continued and protests became less common. I knew she missed school. At rallies, radical groups interrupted the speeches, screaming destruction. Helen grew bonier, moving about the apartment with books or papers in her hands—never, in those days, with food or kitchen utensils or even sheets or clothes. Daily life had become pointless, along with reasoned discussion. Angie moved out, and Mallon moved in. Eli had found a lively young woman who took up much of his time, and I gradually stopped hearing from him.

  I kept to myself that summer, working at the camp during the day and at the restaurant in the evenings—a little place in Murray Hill where the owners cheated me but spoke to me kindly, as if I was a stupid but loved relative. Some old men came in every night, alone with a book or newspaper; ate a chop, meatloaf, or Friday fish; and left tips calculated to the penny. The place was never crowded but never quite empty.

  At the start of my senior year, I rented a small apartment in Brooklyn. Finally all my clothes were in one place: all at once, I moved out of both Helen’s apartment and my parents’. I decided to go to graduate school for English literature, irrelevant as that sounded, and felt almost as if I’d decided to enlist in the army: submitting to a second university’s rules and practices, getting an advanced degree, was acceptance of the prevailing system. But I wanted to read more books, and with a fellowship, I could do that. I took the GREs, applied to programs.

  I kept the job at the restaurant. I had a roommate, an art major I’d found through a notice on a bulletin board, but she worked two jobs and often slept in her studio. Patrick and I had stopped singing together, I’d left the chorus, and I had little to do with other students at Brooklyn—except that I suddenly saw more of Val Benevento.

  The interactions of people on a campus change when a new term starts and they walk different paths at different hours. Val and I had two classes together in the fall of our senior year—one a lively course in which we read most or all of James Joyce—and I found myself seeking her out for more conversation as we left the classroom; or she might propose coffee or a meal during a gap in both our schedules right after class. Val was taking a course that required going to plays around the city, and she talked me into attending a couple of obscure off-Broadway plays with her. She slipped into the role vacated by my mother when I moved out: she told me what was wrong with me, such as how long to wear my hair so it had the romantic sweep I wanted without looking uncivilized.

  “But I spend my time protesting the war. I should look uncivilized,” I said.

  “Nobody needs to look uncivilized,” Val said firmly. I laughed and felt looked after. I had my hair tri
mmed. In fact, we hardly ever discussed the war—which made me guilty but happy.

  Val also had opinions on my love life, though hers, I pointed out, was more of a mess than mine. She didn’t approve of Eli when she heard about him, but she too fell for older men, and they too weren’t serious about her. One afternoon over coffee, she put her hands on the table and said, “Do you think we could get together some time with Helen?”

  “Helen?” I didn’t think she ever gave Helen a thought.

  “Well, you know Helen and I were friends when we were little kids—best friends. I know she’s terribly, terribly pure and busy”—Val shook her curls, and they fluffed out and resettled—“but maybe we could—oh, I don’t know, have lunch? Go for a walk? Give me her phone number.”

  I most certainly didn’t know Helen and Val had ever been friends. I seriously doubted that it was true. But I gave Val Helen’s number.

  And I asked Helen about it, when I stopped at the apartment on my way to a meeting that weekend. She was asleep when I got there. She awoke and washed her face; she gulped coffee.

  “Friends?” she said. “Her sister was my babysitter.”

  I remembered then that she’d said that before. She was silent while she pulled on some clothes and took another swallow of coffee. “We were in kindergarten, maybe first grade. Her sister was in charge of us after school.” She disappeared into her bedroom for something, but when she came out, she stood still, as if reliving something she liked thinking about. Her voice softened. “Val was bigger than me, so I thought she was older. She was bossy. She didn’t get what I meant. I’d say something, and she’d look at me. But sometimes we played in the park. Her sister would talk to her teenage friends and we’d pretend to be lost, running into criminals, getting our lives saved. We were always getting killed by bears.”

  I don’t know if Val ever called Helen, if they got together. But I’d detected in Helen’s voice something I felt too: you couldn’t quite dismiss Val; you couldn’t quite do without her. I wanted her approval. I wanted her ideas—I wanted to hear the next surprising thing she’d say, about me or something else.