Conscience

by Alice Mattison

  “I shot—someone.”

  “A cop,” I said. “I know.” Then I said, “How did you get out of jail?”

  “I’m out on bail. My father came to that town and prayed with everyone,” he said. “The cop’s parents . . .”

  “I have limited sympathy for the cop,” I said.

  “No. No,” he said. He stirred his coffee. “Look, I need to ask you something. Can I see you again?”

  I said, “You asked me out for coffee to ask me if it’s okay to ask me out for coffee?” He had an innocent smell—he smelled of schools and libraries and churches, I decided later.

  “See you more privately. May I visit you in your house?”

  “Sure,” I said. I was amused by this formality but liked it. He looked in both directions to make sure our conversation was private, then didn’t talk about the shooting but expressed a fear that I would be offended by what he called “my interest in you” because of what he’d done.

  I was startled, not so much that he was expressing sexual interest—I knew when he touched me that he found me attractive—as that his interest required this kind of acknowledgment. In our circle, sex was so easy and un-momentous that nobody was surprised when someone suggested it.

  “I want to make love to you,” Griff said.

  I hesitated—but it was what I wanted, too. My roommate was home that night, but he came the next evening. When I opened the door, he stepped into my apartment and pressed me into a long, trembling hug. He kissed me as if he’d been wanting to do it for a long time, not aggressively but with a series of questioning, exploratory, tasting nibbles and thrusts of his tongue. I led him to my bed. I wanted each moment to last, because what if we never did it again? Surely Griff would go to prison.

  He was a vigorous lover. I felt beautiful. When we lay sated, he began to talk. “Your friend Mallon. Did you know her real name is Beverly?”

  “She’s not my friend,” I said, but I wanted to hear everything, so after that, I didn’t speak. He too was sure he’d go to prison.

  “I’m on a bus,” he said, “Little town out in the country, no black people except at the university. A demonstration—and when we got there, four of us, it was mostly girls. This sweet little girl I talked to, Kimmy. I had a stomachache, and she smuggled me into her dorm so I could go to the bathroom. We’re going to keep it peaceful, for their sakes—and really, there was no reason not to have a peaceful demonstration. We’ve done some complicated stuff, but this was nothing. Nothing that would make those girls do what they promised their mothers they would not do.”

  I nodded. I wondered if Kimmy was black or white.

  “But I had a gun. I had one.” He paused. I was startled but didn’t say anything. He said, “I don’t know why I brought it—I guess because I usually carry it, and I was so sure we wouldn’t be arrested that I didn’t bother not to.” He paused again. “The fact is, I always had it. I owned it that night we ate those hamburgers, but I’d left it home because I figured we’d be arrested.”

  I was still silent.

  “I am sorry, my darling,” he said then. “I must use your restroom.” I told him where the toilet was. I lay still. “My darling” was a surprise.

  When he came back, he drew a blanket over us, tucked it in around me, and I drew up my knees to lean into him. His skin was warm. We faced each other in the bed, and I thought we might begin touching again, but he kept talking.

  “The cops started. They were swinging batons, so we threw what we could pick up—broke some windows. Then six or eight cops started bashing heads. They put twelve kids in the hospital. This one cop—well, I found out later his name was Lambeth, Carlin Lambeth. So when Carlin Lambeth aims for Kimmy, I—”

  He stopped. Then he said, “They knocked the gun out of my hand. They beat me up—I was in the hospital. They could have shot me, but they didn’t.”

  “Did you aim carefully, so as not to hurt Kimmy?”

  “When he hit her, she rolled away. There were steps, and she rolled down the steps. I thought she was dead. So sweet—and not too bright, so I felt responsible. She was in the hospital. One of the girls—she’s brain damaged. Honor student. I thought it would be in the paper, but nothing.”

  He paused. “He was alone up there,” he continued, “looking for the next girl to hit. So I shot his arm. It was easy. I destroyed his hand.”

  He held me close, and I realized he was crying.

  “What is it?” I said, but he shook his head with its shortened curly hair and was silent, holding me as a child might.

  Then he said, “Do you have anything to eat?”

  I fed him, and we kept talking. A volunteer lawyer was oddly optimistic even then about what would happen to Griff, and in the end—months later—the charges against him were dropped, apparently because the cops feared a trial on account of the injured students. That night, he so regretted what he had done that he almost wanted to go to prison.

  I had kept away from discussions at Helen’s apartment involving bombs and guns, but not because I was certain—as I am now—that nonviolent protest is the only reasonable option. At that time, the willingness to risk getting hurt and hurting others had come to seem essential (“putting your body on the line”), and an undeviating pacifism seemed naïve. I wasn’t violent, but I wasn’t proud of that.

  I understood what Griff was telling me: maiming a boy’s hand for life—Carlin Lambeth, we learned, was twenty-one—was too harsh, and not the province of one citizen but of the society; the proper outcome might have been the loss of his job, prison. But if instead of shooting, Griff had rushed to the nearest police station and filed a complaint about an officer bashing in students’ heads, nothing would have happened—and even if something had happened, the bashing would have continued. When he shot Lambeth, the other cops turned from the girls to him. So I assumed that Griff’s regret—which he asserted again and again—was temporary: nerves. I thought he’d performed a heroic act. Carlin Lambeth might have killed the next young girl.

  I received my BA soon after that evening. I was going to graduate school, even though part of me believed that artificial arrangements like degrees and universities were about to disappear. I had gotten into Columbia with a fellowship.

  Helen, when I told her what Griff had done and how he felt about it, said, “We can’t let ourselves think that way.” She was suspicious of him because of his regret, and thought I shouldn’t sleep with him.

  One evening that summer, while waiting for her, I noticed that some papers on the kitchen table were instructions for making pipe bombs. Not that this was unusual. Several years earlier, The New York Review of Books had included an exact diagram for making a Molotov cocktail on its cover. I knew Helen and Mallon had handguns, though I hadn’t seen them. Raz had bought them on the street.

  Others besides Raz and Mallon began turning up at the apartment or living there. When I visited, I was met with unpleasant stares from strangers. Helen would come out of the bedroom, put her hand gently on the arm of the person rigidly holding open the door, and step past him or her to embrace me. She would silently lead me back to her bedroom, or quickly get what she needed, and come with me.

  Her hair in those days was bedraggled, and she wore loose men’s clothes that made her thin wrists and ankles more noticeable. I knew she and her friends were planning something, but she shrugged. “We’re just doing what we always do.” She didn’t want to take walks and would eat only occasionally. We’d stand talking somewhere, then separate. She and her roommates had had the phone removed because they were certain it was being tapped. I couldn’t call her, so I turned up often—stupidly, pointlessly. I still had fantasies of getting her out of there permanently, but I couldn’t get her out even for an hour.

  Whenever I didn’t hear from Griff for a few days, I began to be afraid he’d been called back to court, maybe sent to prison. He was brave and cautious at the same time; I admired the caution and envied the courage. I wondered whether he’d continue to
regret what he’d done. Maybe not. Maybe he’d take up violent protest as a way of life. I considered whether I might live that life with him, shoot a gun beside him. It would be unbearable to be given the choice—do this with me, or forget me.

  When he appeared on my doorstep or met me in the city—more and more often—I had to adjust my expectations to what he actually was. He never changed his mind about what he’d done. He insisted he shouldn’t have done it. Each time, I reassured him: he had done the right thing. He had no choice. He’d shake his head sternly. I’d go back to worrying about prison, worrying that I’d lose him that way. He was sexy and a little scary—which made me fall in love fast—but he was also something else. He had a studio apartment near Columbia, where I was touched to see a neat row of clean socks drying on the shower rod. He had a coffee percolator and made me a cup of coffee: not instant. Once he had a tin of cookies his mother had baked. His parents were upset about his arrest and what might come of that, of course. “They are beside themselves, to put it plainly,” he said. He was finishing up a master’s degree and hoping that the arrest would not keep him from teaching.

  I moved in with him. My lease was up, and I had been on the point of looking for something in Morningside Heights, now that I was going to Columbia in the fall. Griff and I couldn’t be apart anyway—the move seemed like the obvious choice. The apartment was too small for both of us, but we managed somehow. I worried even more about the threat of prison now that we lived together. He had become a three-dimensional person who could suffer, not just someone to daydream about.

  One evening we ate at a little Italian restaurant on Broadway, and when we stepped outside, I heard a laugh that I recognized. Val Benevento was walking past, talking intently, head bent, to a man who looked older than we were, in a jacket and tie. We dressed to express our politics in those days: my hair was loose, and I was in jeans and an embroidered peasant blouse I’d bought at a store that also sold drug paraphernalia. Dress codes were loosening; Griff wore a tie to teach in but managed to look like a revolutionary anyway, and he too was in jeans that evening. Val, in heels, spotted me. She hugged me, and we laughed as if meeting this way was miraculous. We introduced the men. She and her date had been to a foreign film—Val made sure to let us know—and were on their way to dinner. “Come with us!” she said, and named their destination, an expensive place. I knew she didn’t expect us to say yes; she’d probably even seen us coming out of the restaurant. I wanted her to behave differently, to behave like someone I’d be friends with. Moments of ease and comfort with Val were touched with anxiety (Did she really like me? Was she someone I wanted to like?), and moments of anxiety were touched with love. I could almost discern the friend I cared about. I could see she was nervous, and I liked her more because she cared what we thought of her. Maybe she thought that having a black friend—being friendly to her friend’s black boyfriend—would make her a worthier person. But I felt Griff dislike her; he was putting polite pressure on my arm, moving me away. Val wasn’t serious. It was what Helen thought: Val was not worthwhile. For once I could see the whole woman, see through the show, and I wanted my lover to like my friend, to discern what I liked about her. Later I could remember nothing about the man except his tie and a thicket of neatly cut straw-colored hair over pale eyebrows. Hair too neatly cut for the era we were living through.

  From Griff’s I could get to Helen’s easily, and twice she came to our place. The first time, she walked in while we were eating, late at night. She accepted a glass of water, then a chair and a little spaghetti before she fled. The second time, it was also night, but I was alone. Griff had gone to New Haven to see his parents. I recognized her knock—tentative and defiant at the same time, as if to say she didn’t care whether I let her in or not. It was a pleasant, late-summer night after a hot stretch, and the windows were open to the fresh air. I had been reading. Griff had a television set, but I avoided the news.

  “Olivia,” she said, “I need to tell you something.”

  “Okay . . .”

  “I may have to leave New York. Don’t worry about me if you can’t find me, okay? And—don’t go to the apartment anymore.” Helen’s hair was longer now, and she looked older, pushing it off her face with a weary, harried gesture. “That’s all.”

  “Your roommates don’t want me?”

  “Some things are delicate at the moment,” she said.

  “Tell me what’s going on!” I said.

  She looked at me, silent—embarrassed for me.

  Griff’s place—our place, now—had kitchen equipment in an alcove, and after a long silence I went over to the refrigerator for a glass of ice water to give her. Even back then, Griff kept a bottle of water in the fridge. “I have cookies,” I said, and put the package on the table between us—chocolate chip cookies. She took one, and then another.

  I watched her. “You don’t like this life,” I said. “Why don’t you quit?”

  “Oh, stop it.”

  “You could.”

  “What would I do? Move in with my parents?”

  She was sitting at the edge of the bed, and she shifted to lean on the wall, drawing up her legs, kicking off her shoes. She wore ballet slippers.

  “That’s not impossible,” I said. “But no. Come here. We’ll help you figure out what to do next.” Even then, I knew Griff was too high-minded to object to this offer, whether he wanted to or not, whether it was even possible or not.

  “It’s not simple, Olivia,” Helen said. “No, I don’t like this life. I’d rather have a pretty life.”

  I knew she was tempted because she’d begun not with the ideological argument but the practical question—where would she go? So I persisted.

  “You could go back to school. It doesn’t have to be Barnard. The city colleges are all right.”

  “I’m not a snob about the city colleges,” she said.

  “You could get a job. We could do this. Stay here. Don’t go back.”

  She stood up. “I’m disappointed in you,” she said. “I didn’t know how confused you were.”

  “Never mind, never mind,” I said, panicky. I started talking about something else, but she left quickly. At the door, she turned back, took me in her arms, and pressed her face into my shoulder. I clutched her thin back, stroked her hair.

  A week later, Griff came into the apartment, where I was putting a meal together, and snapped on the TV without speaking.

  I turned. “What?”

  “There’s something. . . .” He waved his hand impatiently while the newscaster went through stories that were obviously not the one he was interested in. “It was probably the lead story,” he said. At the end of the news broadcast, the lead headline was repeated. Armed radicals had held up a bank in Westchester. A security guard was dead, and a policeman was injured. One of the criminals had been identified in photographs as Beverly Mallon. Another woman and two men had fled with her.

  In the next days, I wandered the apartment, reading newspapers and exhausting myself with TV and radio reports. Helen’s name appeared in the New York Times two days after the holdup. There had been at least two guns. Apparently, Helen carried one but did not shoot. Raz, who was arrested the next day, had killed the bank employee. The fugitives were sighted here and there—or people claimed to have sighted them. It sounded as if they were upstate.

  Weeks passed. I would walk into a store and think I heard people say, “Helen Weinstein,” and maybe I had. I had constant fantasies: seeing Helen in the street; going to her apartment and finding her in bed, hungry; hearing her knock at my door. I didn’t go to the apartment. I did little of anything. Griff became withdrawn, maybe jealous. We were too new a couple for something like this. He had just gotten a teaching job, a miracle with all his arrests.

  I went to see my parents and Helen’s. If my parents were anxious about my black, non-Jewish boyfriend, they didn’t say so, and even Helen’s apolitical parents looked nervous but wished me luck. They wept and hugged me, longing fo
r news. Riding back to Manhattan on the subway, I noticed I no longer had trouble believing in nonviolence and regretted my impatience with Griff on that topic. A moment later, I decided I should have been at Helen’s side in that bank, shooting along with her, destroying the system that killed and oppressed.

  Those weeks, I was angry with Helen, and also with anyone who attempted to comment on or even mention her. Has a piece of your private life ever become public? Suddenly, you are no longer the expert on your own friend, your own family member. Everyone has an opinion, and yours is irrelevant. Nobody got Helen right, and at first I said so everywhere and was pulled into pointless arguments. Nobody deserved to judge her. But I judged her.

  My torn ligament, the summer after Griff’s dinner party, had nothing to do with old age, but because I was past sixty, I thought of it as a sample of what was to come, and that made my mood even worse. Everyone irked me. Jean, my new friend, was easiest to take. Others tried to help—my colleagues at work, writer friends, neighborhood friends—but each had irritated or disappointed or bored me at least once in the past, and I punished them now in my helplessness. My sister phoned often. She’s a clinical psychologist; she lives in San Francisco. My brother, a New York lawyer, emailed. But I didn’t feel like talking to them.

  Jean was present when I got hurt and thus seemed to understand. And she’d just read the book I had to write about—an assignment that became more urgent as the weeks passed. At first I wasn’t pleased that she’d read a book that was almost my private property (now that it had mostly been forgotten), but one Saturday, when I was finally walking around outdoors again and we met for coffee, she said, “In Bright Morning of Pain, the characters itch.”

  I laughed.

  “They’re always scratching mosquito bites or noticing a rash. Nothing else is like all that scratching. Did Valerie Benevento have skin trouble?”