Conscience

by Alice Mattison

  And then the term ended, and in the spring term of senior year, I didn’t see her often; plenty was going on elsewhere. We continued to have a meal together now and then, but time with her made me restless, as if I were in the wrong place, as if there was something I should have been doing elsewhere.

  My roommate and I didn’t have a television set, and I didn’t subscribe to a newspaper. In November, the news had broken of the American massacre, more than a year earlier, of hundreds of defenseless Vietnamese civilians—including children—in the hamlet of My Lai. But it broke slowly. Seymour Hersh, an independent journalist, discovered that the Pentagon was investigating a case involving a Lieutenant William Calley, and he gradually learned what Calley and his soldiers had done. Calley eventually served three years for ordering and participating in the massacre of more than five hundred people. When Hersh broke the story, newspapers resisted it. It was published obscurely in mid-November, but a week or so later it became well-known, and Mike Wallace of CBS interviewed a soldier who talked about being ordered to kill men, women, and children, and who did so. “And babies?” Wallace asked—again and again—and the soldier, each time, said, “And babies.”

  I heard about My Lai from my parents, who saw the interview. “Babies!” my mother all but screamed when she phoned me, close to tears. After that, if she continued to think my participation in antiwar protests was foolish, she didn’t say so.

  That weekend, I once again rode the IRT uptown and found Mallon, Raz, and some people I didn’t know in the living room. Helen—they pointed when they saw me—was in the bedroom. I knocked, heard nothing, and went inside. She was in bed and sat up. She wore a loose T-shirt—blurry printing of a date, a raised black fist. “What is it?”

  “I’m sorry—did I wake you?”

  She shrugged in the direction of the living room. “What are they doing?”

  “Smoking pot, planning something—I don’t know.”

  “Olivia, I want to die,” she said.

  “Because of—”

  “I knew, we all knew,” she said. “It’s not that. It’s not, Olivia. This is just the My Lai that somebody found out about. There are hundreds. Every town in Vietnam is My Lai. We killed those babies, Olivia. And the army’s protecting the guy. This happened months and months ago. Do you understand that?”

  “I understand.”

  My parents had blamed the soldiers. Helen didn’t. “The soldiers didn’t do this—the people ordering them to go there did this. The system that brutalized them. You and I did this.”

  The window shade was pulled low, and the room was smelly. “When did you eat?” I asked.

  “You’re always talking about food,” Helen said, but she smiled a little. “Did you come to save me again?”

  “Maybe I did,” I said. I had come to find out what I should be thinking, to catch up, but also to save her—maybe even to save her by joining her. For once, I didn’t think that if I could only forget about the war and lead my life, I’d be better off. Now—like Helen—I knew it would be reprehensible to forget, and of all my acquaintances, Helen was the one I trusted to know what we should do about it, even though she scared me. I didn’t think she meant what she said about violence. Helen was kind. What My Lai proved was simple: the system—the organization of people and power and money; the military industrial complex, if you will—was not fixable.

  Again, I began spending time in the apartment, not living there but making myself heard at meetings, visiting when I could. Helen didn’t encourage me, but she didn’t stop me either. She was sleeping with Raz, and often as not they’d disappear into the bedroom. I’d watch her walk through a room, mostly wearing clothes you couldn’t go outside in, looking bereft, even confused. It was hard not to seize her by the shoulders and wrestle her out of there.

  One night, I saw no one but Raz. He was leaving but said, “Stay. Helen knows you’re here.” I sat there reading. There was silence when I knocked at her door, so I returned to my book. The evening passed. In more than one way, it was too late—too late for me to be where I didn’t belong, too late to become whatever Helen was or to persuade her to change.

  As I was finally packing up, Helen came out of the bedroom, pulling something around herself to keep warm. When she saw me, she leaned on a chair back. “You’re still here. I fell asleep.”

  “I’m just going.”

  “I’m weak,” she said. I thought she meant weak from hunger, but when I said, “Oh, for heaven’s sake, let’s find you some food,” she said, “Not weak like that.”

  “Then what?”

  “It’s hard to be tough,” she said. “We weren’t raised that way. It’s not—natural. Raz thinks I’m not making progress.”

  “What kind of progress?”

  “Something’s coming up. He wants me to be part of it, and I’m trying. It’s harder than I thought, Olivia.”

  “You mean—”

  She stood. “Never mind. Wait a minute—I’ll be right back.” She went back to the bedroom. I waited ten minutes, then left. I was not mugged on the subway. The night was cold, and I got home late. In the morning, it was a relief—a guilty relief, despite my resolution—to turn my attention to a paper I was writing about Jane Austen, who knew about friendship and loyalty. I knew Helen eventually came out of that room, expecting to see me.

  Griff used to say he saw me for the first time at a march, but I don’t remember that. I noticed him at a peaceful sit-in at a draft board. I noticed him watching Helen. We were all arrested. By then, this was routine. Helen was out in front, screaming. Griff talked to her and then to both of us: a black guy, not very tall but tough-looking, with lots of hair and a brisk, purposeful way of moving. We were released late that evening. He was with a woman, and the four of us ate hamburgers in the middle of the night. The food was pretty good, and I watched Helen eat—greedily, that time. I also watched Griff eat: his neat, precise fingers on the hamburger bun, his lips taking civilized sips of coffee. I didn’t think the woman was his girlfriend because of the way he looked at Helen. As if I were her mother, I wished I’d washed and combed her.

  The woman with Griff had a beautiful, big Afro—even bigger than his, which was big—and glasses. She looked sleepy. I thought she disapproved of Griff for eyeing a white woman. Griff—it was how he introduced himself; I didn’t know his actual name for weeks—told us about the school where they were both student teachers, a high school in Staten Island. “All the kids are white,” he said.

  “Do you hate them?” Helen said. I was startled.

  “Hate them? God, no.”

  “The Black Panthers—”

  “Do not all hate white people, no,” he said. He told us he had friends in the Panthers but had not joined. He was thinking about it, he said. His parents would be distressed. “Maybe I’ve already distressed them enough,” he said, “but maybe I have to do it.”

  “But the kids in your school,” Helen said. “Do you like them too much?”

  He looked puzzled. I was sitting next to Helen.

  “I love people too much,” Helen said. “This is a problem I have. I start with love. I have to learn to start with caution—to be cautious, to leave room for hatred.”

  It was very late, and I knew Helen would say anything if it were late enough, but this seemed remarkable. I didn’t change the subject but tried to shift it slightly. “You don’t love everyone,” I said. I remembered how she used to see things from every viewpoint, when we took those windy walks through Brooklyn.

  “I’m not mushy, no,” she said.

  “But eventually, you forgive everyone,” I suggested.

  “It’s not good,” she said.

  “Why not?” I said. Then I said, “Not Adeline. Remember?”

  “No,” Helen said, “not Adeline.”

  “Who’s Adeline?” the other woman asked. She probably thought Adeline was a rival for love, but Helen would have forgiven a rival. Adeline was the woman who had wanted a color TV and stopped letting
Helen tutor her child. When I explained this, Griff smiled and said, “Oh. You can’t forgive ideological impurity.”

  Helen stared at him. “But that’s what Raz says is wrong with me—I do forgive.”

  “Apparently not,” he said.

  “That’s why I asked you about hating white people,” she said. “I think if we’re going to make any progress, we have to do some hating. Black people have so much reason—I thought it might be easier.”

  “I was raised to look forward to Brotherhood Week,” Griff said. He’d grown up in New Haven.

  “Church?” Helen said.

  “Indeed.” He wiped his long fingers, one by one, on the paper napkin. “I do not hate children, no,” he said. “But I don’t find it hard to hate General Westmoreland. Or whoever is in charge.”

  “Could you kill him?” Helen asked quickly. She pushed her food aside and crossed her arms on the sticky table. How many times had I seen that gesture, on a table similarly sticky? I wanted to go home—somewhere—and sleep. Griff had a car and had offered to drive us to Morningside Heights once we’d retrieved it from wherever he’d left it that morning.

  “I’m not sure that killing a general makes tactical sense,” he said. “But I could kill, of course. I could kill some of these soldiers who rape and kill civilians.”

  “Really?” Helen said. His friend got up and went to the ladies’. I didn’t know if she was disgusted or just bored and sleepy.

  “Really. No question.”

  “How?”

  “I think if I had the chance,” he said seriously, “and I was sure who they were, I could do it any way you like.”

  It didn’t make me think ill of him. It’s hard, decades later, to remember how things felt at that time: how weary and angry we were and yet how excited about the possibility of big change—of revolution. I too thought revolution was the only way to change, and I kept returning to protests, or just to Helen’s apartment, because I didn’t want to be one of those who failed to see the revolution coming. It was an exhilarating thought, and there was little else to be exhilarated about. The people who opposed us—who approved of the war—hated us and were excited about nothing. We hated them and also were excited. We were sure that they too—that everybody—would benefit from change.

  Things would become chaotic, we thought, and committees of ordinary people would start to organize life—without killing, without racial prejudice, with help for those who were poor. What we envisioned—what I think I remember—wasn’t like the Russian Revolution. It was a coming together of people of goodwill, of sense. Unique to this period in my life was the feeling that soon things might actually be new. Schools would change; what we read and thought and how we worked would change. It sounds naïve, but it wasn’t, not entirely, and some of what changed in my life then has never reverted.

  When Griff’s friend came back, she put on her coat, and I stood, too. I took our check, went to the counter, and paid it. When I came back, Griff stuffed some money into my hand. He sat down again—Helen had not moved—and continued talking earnestly to her, while his friend and I leaned on a wall in the harsh light.

  “This does have to do with being a black man,” he said.

  “Yes?” Helen leaned toward him.

  “I can’t participate in powerlessness,” he said, “even if I’m squeamish. I must exert power if I have to.”

  “Would you shoot a gun?” Helen said.

  “I have shot a gun,” Griff said quietly.

  “At somebody?”

  “No. Practice.” He didn’t gesture much, I noticed. When he wasn’t talking, he was motionless. There was silence, and then he spoke again. “It would be different if the war didn’t involve our country—if we weren’t directly involved. We could make nuanced observations. But we don’t have that luxury. We oppose it—or we don’t oppose it.”

  Helen stood up then and leaned against me. I put my arms around her. “I oppose it,” she said.

  I thought Griff might try to walk next to Helen as we left, but he stepped back and put his arm around his fellow teacher, and she leaned her head on his shoulder. His car was a long walk away.

  As we drove, Griff tossed a small notebook into the back seat. “Olive, your phone number, okay?” he said. “I need to talk to you.” He’d heard me say that my name was Olive, though Helen still called me Olivia.

  “Sure,” I said, and scribbled it.

  Griff had a good lottery number—that topic came up the night we met—so this was after December 1969, when student deferments ended and a lottery determined the order in which young men would be drafted in the new year. Numbers from one to three hundred sixty-five were pulled at random from a box—I believe it was a shoe box—and the following year, men were drafted in the order in which their birthdays came out of the box. The day after the lottery, some men were absent from class—on their way to Canada or home in bed, sick with dread. Some enlisted, to get it over with.

  The morning of the lottery, I talked to a quiet young man named Greg in my Victorian literature class, and he told me his birthday: October 18. He was one of those absent the following day. He was right near the top, was quickly drafted, and died in Vietnam. I didn’t know him well, but well enough that I could imagine the life he might have led—one of the lives we’d been trying to save, with our marches and protests. And indeed, those activities seemed more and more foolish. How could we have imagined they’d prevent what happened to Greg or to anyone?

  When the Weathermen—later called the Weather Underground—mistakenly blew up a building in Greenwich Village with bombs intended for protests, Helen said on the phone, “I envy their certainty.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake!” I said. “Two people died!” These were activists we’d heard of; Helen had met one. I hadn’t quite believed until then that educated young people like us were constructing bombs.

  Helen said, “They should have been more careful.”

  “Fooling around with that stuff?” I said. “You can’t be sure.”

  “You can be sure.” She was quiet. “You can do it right.”

  Griff called me a week after I gave him my number and invited me for coffee. He had questions about the movement in Brooklyn, he said. Later, he would say he liked me from the beginning—he claimed we’d met before—and had found Helen fascinating, but not that way.

  When we met on a street corner, he raised a hand to brush hair off my face. It scarcely touched my skin, but in response, I raised my own hand. I meant to touch his sleeve, but he moved his right arm and I touched his hip, the rough canvas of his pants. I felt a sexual charge and reached for his hand, as a child might, to acknowledge something we’d both experienced. Then I saw what I was doing and pretended to be shaking hands. He laughed and hugged me. We went for coffee, and he did have questions, though not about the movement but about my friendship with Helen—how we’d met, what she was like. We didn’t sleep together, though sleeping together in those days was almost automatic. I was confused, stunned by desire. I decided he worked for the FBI, investigating potentially violent activists, and that he’d befriended me to find out about Helen.

  That spring, in 1970, there were protests at campuses all over the country, especially after the announcement at the end of April that we had secretly been bombing Cambodia. Thousands protested in New Haven when nine Black Panthers were tried for murder. I wondered if Griff had gone home for that and fantasized about going there myself, maybe coming across him. Then he called me again. He had been to New Haven, where violent protests had been expected, though the Yale administration and the Panthers had kept things relatively calm. He said, “I want to know you—but I can’t now.”

  “What are you doing?”

  He paused. “I’ll call you,” he said, and hung up. I was irked, unimpressed. He seemed more self-important than dangerous. But I stopped thinking he was working for the FBI. He couldn’t lie, I sensed. That turned out to be true. Nonetheless, he was full of himself, and I didn’t both
er to think about him.

  One rainy night several weeks later, Mallon walked into Helen’s kitchen, where the two of us were drinking tea. “Isn’t Joshua Griffin a friend of yours?” Mallon asked.

  “I don’t think so,” I said.

  “That’s his name,” Helen said. “That’s his real name—you know.”

  “Griff?” I said.

  “Yes. From the draft board protest. What happened to him?”

  “Shot a pig,” Mallon said.

  I stood up, startled, and inadvertently knocked over my tea, then was down on the floor with napkins, mopping, as she told Helen what she’d heard. I was excited—I’m afraid it made me feel more legitimate to know someone who’d done this. Some of Mallon’s group had joined a protest at a college in upstate New York. A policeman had brought his club down on the head of a young girl, and Joshua Griffin, now in custody, had drawn a gun and shot the policeman in the arm.

  “Crazy,” Mallon said. “What if he hit the girl?”

  “He’s not crazy,” I said, scrambling to my feet with my sodden napkins. “It will turn out he had a clear shot.”

  In the next days, I could think of nothing else. Mallon knew only the bare fact, told to her by a friend: a policeman had been shot, not killed; Joshua Griffin had been arrested. I found nothing in the New York papers, and it seemed important to Helen not to make a fuss, positive or negative, about what Griff had done. “Yes,” she said, nodding vigorously. “This is what it’s going to be like now.”

  I had imaginary conversations with Griff, in which he regretted without regretting. “I’m sorry this was necessary.” I’d seen him only twice but knew what he looked like: the compact way his body moved; the worry lines on his face, made deeper by smoking.

  After a week, he phoned me. “I thought you were in jail,” I said.

  “You’ve heard something,” he said. He wanted to meet for coffee again. We met on a street corner, and for a second I didn’t recognize him. He’d shaved and cut his hair. He saw my momentary confusion, touched his head, and said, “Court.” We had coffee and doughnuts at a Chock full o’Nuts, sitting way at the end of the counter. He mumbled something I didn’t hear. “What?”