Conscience

by Alice Mattison

  “How what happened?”

  “What’s in the book. It’s not true.”

  “You mean about you?” I say.

  “I don’t count,” Joshua says. “No. About someone else.”

  “I thought it was a novel,” Zak says.

  “It is a novel,” Olive says. “Of course it’s a novel.”

  “Yes and no,” Joshua says. “It’s a novel if you didn’t live through certain events. If you did, it’s not quite a novel.”

  “You mean,” Zak says, “it should be accurate about verifiable events?”

  “Of course, and despite its charm, it’s not,” Joshua says. “But that’s not what I mean.” He’s stirring his food with his fork. I’m eating away.

  “Charm?” Olive says.

  “I want it to be accurate about the people it’s based on.”

  “Is that fair?” I say, looking up from my plate.

  “Yes, it’s fair,” Joshua says. “I love this book. But it takes off from the life of someone who became well-known. It shouldn’t lie about her.”

  “It doesn’t use her name,” I say. “I don’t even know her name.”

  There was silence. “Her name,” Joshua says now, “was Helen Weinstein.”

  I’ve vaguely heard the name. “But the character of Harry?” I say, immediately regretting it.

  “This is more important. But that’s troubling, yes. The book glorifies violence.”

  “My entire life,” Olive says, “has consisted of you caring about the character of Harry, and that’s not much of an exaggeration.”

  “But I’d never read it,” he says. “The other is much more important. It lies about what Helen did.”

  Now I want to know more—about Helen Weinstein, about Griff and the character of Harry—but Olive pushes her plate away, folds her arms on the table, and says, “Fiction establishes its own truth.”

  “What?” I say. “What does that mean?”

  “It’s a work of the imagination,” Olive says. “You can’t argue with it—not about accuracy, at least.”

  “Wait a minute,” I say. I expected her to say what she said before—that the book is inaccurate about the character of Harry. “You’re not happy with this book. You’re mad at this book!”

  Olive ignores me. “In one novel, history is accurate, in another, it’s distorted but recognizable, in a third, space aliens assassinate the president. Each thing is true within each book.”

  “But how do you know which kind you’re reading?” Zak says. “If a book says Abraham Lincoln was president in 1980, how do I know if the author is doing something tricky or he just doesn’t know?”

  I laugh at that, and Zak, belatedly listening to himself, adds, “Could Lincoln have beat Ronald Reagan for the Republican nomination?” but Olive is serious. “The book tells you,” she says. “It tells you how to read it. Like a Hollywood movie with a secretary living in a fancy house—you know whether you’re supposed to wonder where she got the money. The fancy house could be part of the plot—or it could just be real estate porn.”

  “She stole it,” Zak whispers.

  “I’m serious, Zak,” Olive says.

  I don’t know why Olive cares so much—or why she’s defending the book—but Zak ought to know enough to shut up.

  “Yes, Mrs. Griffin,” he says. He’s almost sarcastic.

  “I’ve never been ‘Mrs. Griffin.’”

  “Sorry, I forgot. Ms. Grossman.”

  “My cousins wanted her to hyphenate,” Joshua says mildly. “They didn’t mind if she kept Grossman, but they wanted Griffin, too.”

  “Grossman-Griffin is a mouthful,” I say. Is it possible that we can get away from all these topics?

  “That wouldn’t stop my cousins,” Joshua says.

  The waiter asks if we want anything else, and Griff orders tea, which nobody else wants. We are silent as the man clears the plates and dishes. We watch Joshua drink tea. I think we’re okay. Then Zak says, “Why does the author owe Helen Weinstein anything? It would be different if she claimed it was true, but I gather she never did.”

  Now I sort of understand. “I do like novels to be true,” I say. Maybe we can turn this into a conversation about how everybody’s taste is different. Nobody glares at me, so I keep going. “I figure a novel might be true—I do! I shouldn’t admit this, but I don’t even want to know what’s not true in this book. Which I loved. To me, it’s all true.” Then I remember our previous conversation and add lamely, “Not the character of Harry—that never seemed true.”

  “So, once you know who it’s about, you think it’s true about her?” Zak says. “Maybe the problem is that the author said who she was writing about.”

  “You want her to keep it a secret?” Olive says. “That’s not a bad idea. But Val talked all the time about Helen, as if all she’d changed were the names. At the time, people would have guessed she meant Helen, anyway.”

  “Aren’t you contradicting yourself, Olive?” I say. “Whose side are you on?”

  Olive sighs and picks up her wineglass, which is empty, and glances around for the waiter, then seems to think better of it. “My personal preference,” she says, “has nothing to do with the ethics of writing a novel. Helen was my friend.”

  This is the first I know of that.

  “I thought Valerie Benevento was your friend,” I say.

  “Not really.”

  “Not really?”

  “No,” says Olive. “Helen.” She continues. “But novelists don’t owe anybody anything. That’s what it means to write a novel. That’s art. Nobody can complain that a novel lies.”

  “Are you kidding?” I say.

  “Well, of course people do complain,” Olive says, “but no, I am not kidding.”

  And then something at the table changes. Joshua, who does not raise his voice, says, “The end of the book—” He pauses. For the second time in our acquaintanceship, I think he may cry—and it interests me that the first time was when he found this very book. “The end of the book glorifies violence,” he says again. “It romanticizes violence. I love this book. It’s not always accurate, but I love it. Until the end. It doesn’t have to tell the truth about everything, maybe, but that’s one truth it should tell.”

  “What truth?” I ask.

  “What’s wrong,” he says, his voice shaking, “is wrong. What is destructive—” He pauses. “Destroys.” His tea is still in front of him, and he clutches the cup but does not drink. “Blowing people up. Shooting people. It’s wrong when it’s terrorists now, and it was wrong when we did it. There’s no difference.” He picks up the cup this time but still doesn’t drink. “It’s not like a play—you don’t wash off the red makeup. It’s blood. Helen knew that and did it anyway. Give her that!”

  Olive now turns to him, and when she speaks, she sounds as if she too may cry. “You say what bothers you most about Val’s book is the way she wrote about Helen? The fake Helen? That’s not what bothered you. That’s what bothered me.” She pauses. “I’m the one who cared about Helen. I suffered over Helen. You can’t have Helen.” She sniffs, and her voice wobbles. “Helen was an idea to you. You didn’t love her. You didn’t love her and lose her.”

  “You think I didn’t suffer over Helen?” he says. “You still think that?”

  I consider the end of Bright Morning of Pain. The two women—who loved the same man in college—again love the same man, a different man. Harry has urged the narrator’s friend, Hannah, to follow her convictions and carry a weapon. The narrator and her boyfriend cook up a plot: the boyfriend will pretend he loves not the narrator but Hannah, so he can then persuade Hannah not to use a gun. He will feign love to get her away from Harry’s influence. But the plan fails. Hannah talks the boyfriend into agreeing that violence may be necessary. The two of them participate in a raid on a draft board. When the police come, a policeman aims his gun at the boyfriend. Hannah, who loves him, shoots and injures the cop. Another policeman shoots her. The novel ends wi
thout telling us whether she or the cop lives, whether she goes to prison, but it’s clear that the narrator and her boyfriend will be together.

  Joshua’s intensity—and Olive’s—scares me. Maybe the novel does glorify violence—I’m not sure. At the end, I was sad for Hannah. I didn’t think she was a villain. I gather my thoughts. I have to disagree with Joshua—though of course I should keep quiet. I search for the right words.

  “That sounds . . . unforgiving,” I say. “A lot of what we do at Barker is based on the idea that if you think hard enough, nobody’s unforgivable—no matter what he did. Otherwise we’d throw all our guys out. Plenty of them have been violent.” I stop to see how he’s taking it. It’s central to everything I think. “This matters,” I finish.

  “Well, that goes without saying,” Olive says, but Zak interrupts her. “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” he says, much too loudly; I see a couple of heads at other tables turn in our direction. “Would you let that go, please, that forgiveness shit? Forgiveness doesn’t help anybody. Would you like to be”—his voice becomes loud, even nasty—“forgiven? I don’t want anybody’s forgiveness for anything I’ve ever done.” He glances at Joshua.

  “But why not?” Olive says. She has calmed down. “If Helen were alive today—and I wish she were—well, I don’t know about forgiving, but I think we could all work out a way of understanding. . . .”

  “You understand what Helen did?” Joshua says, suddenly turning his head to look straight at Olive. “You understand?”

  “Maybe not quite forgive, maybe not quite understand,” she says, “but . . .”

  “Okay, Zak,” I say, because Olive seems to have fallen silent. “How about understanding? If you don’t want forgiveness, don’t you want understanding for—for whatever you’ve done?” Of course, I’m thinking about what he did to Olive and Joshua’s daughter, and I know he is, too. And so are they. Why doesn’t Zak want them to forgive him? Can it be true that he doesn’t?

  “I don’t want forgiveness or understanding,” Zak says. “I lead a fine life. Nobody needs to judge it.” Then he says, “I bet Helen Weinstein didn’t want forgiveness either.”

  I’m mystified, stung by the sarcastic way he repeated “forgiveness.” Is he dismissing what I do for a living—which I believe in as I believe in nothing else? “Wait a minute,” I say. “Wait one minute.”

  Zak turns in his chair to look at me. We’re too close, physically, for ordinary talk: that close, people murmur or shout. He pulls back a little, but the table is small. “I mean it,” he says. “About me. I don’t know much about Helen Weinstein.”

  I say, “Look, I don’t go to your medical office and tell you how to be a doctor.”

  “What does that have to do with it?” he says.

  “I put it wrong,” I say. “What we do at Barker makes sense. Paulette makes sense.”

  “Of course, of course,” Zak says. “You’re a great woman, Jeanie—but forgiveness is sentimental crap. Let’s all hang onto our crimes.”

  Joshua looks supremely uncomfortable. The waiter hovers with the check. But Zak’s body relaxes, and he turns to face the table and shrugs. The waiter puts the little folder on the table, Joshua picks it up and looks inside, and Zak hands him a credit card. Joshua takes out his own and puts both of them into the folder. I retrieve my purse from the floor and reach into it—Zak doesn’t usually pay for me—but both men wave it away.

  When they’ve paid, Olive and I mumble in what I think we both hope is a friendly way. I am pleased to learn that their car is in the opposite direction from mine.

  “What was that about?” I say, after a block of silence. “Of course you want them to forgive you!” We get into the car, and Zak says nothing for half a mile. I say, “I’m dropping you off at your place.”

  “My bike,” he says.

  “You can get it another time.”

  He is silent for another half mile. Then he says, “I want them to say I don’t need forgiving.” He sounds like a boy.

  Olive Grossman

  After the first days, Helen’s crime—even Raz’s killing of the security guard—was no longer a front-page story. I bought the paper every day. Before the internet, you had to turn all the pages. Sometimes I’d find a relevant item, a short column near the bottom of a page, and I’d read it again and again. A gun that had been used in the holdup turned up. The injured policeman was released from the hospital. A ceremony honored him. After that, I saw nothing for weeks, months—well into 1971.

  I was embarrassed on Helen’s behalf—had she made so little difference?—and angry at her for having an unrealistic idea of what kind of difference even a violent crime could make. I was fundamentally at a loss. Alone in our tiny New York apartment, I sobbed uncontrollably more than once for the dead security guard, his kids, his wife. I’d stop where I was, unpredictably, sit on the floor, cross my arms over my head, and sob. I sobbed for Helen too, and for me. I’d start crying for the guard and end up crying for myself. Whatever happened, I would never have Helen back. I was too scared to imagine in detail what might happen next.

  But first and daily and in every part of me, I was stymied. Helen had not been insane or even mistaken when she couldn’t eat the hot dog because Norman Morrison had immolated himself, and she had been right to seek ethical choices on those windblown walks, deciding what to do next, and next, and next. She had wept when Daniel, her first boyfriend, spoke of violence, and only after intense inward scrutiny and the passage of years had she concluded that he was right. I never put much credence in what Mallon or Raz said, but Helen—though I didn’t agree all the time, and I still thought Adeline had the right to wish for a color TV—was subtle, thoughtful, scrupulous. What should she have done—what should I have done—to end the war? What should we have done instead? To say “nothing” would condemn us to complicity.

  Yet the logic that had led Helen from step to step—the exercise of conscience—had killed a man who had not caused the war nor fought in it nor, for all we knew, approved of it. I didn’t know how Helen had come to think that the bank holdup made sense, but I knew that because she was Helen, she had concluded it was regrettable but necessary.

  I pretended interest in my graduate courses as a courtesy to the professors, but I felt no conviction, not because I had stopped loving the nineteenth-century novels that had seemed to offer a legitimate life’s work, not because I was bored or even—as before—unable to think about anything but the war, but because I was distracted by my sense that something incomplete could not be completed. I lived in a parenthesis that did not close. Griff—the person whose arms and legs, whose noises and silences, were the climate I now lived in—was, again and again, a startling presence. I never forgot Helen, but I sometimes forgot that I lived with Griff, and would wonder at the sound of a key in the door. I was surprised when I woke in the night and heard him breathe in his sleep. Surprised but thrilled, as if he were a present I had forgotten I’d received. How had I come to be paired with this other person now of all times? Did I even know him? Helen’s crime made me, by turns, shyer with Griff, needier, warier. He was a good man who didn’t deserve to be dragged into my life; he was a man from a persecuted race who deserved more than I could give; he was an intruder in the bed. Sometimes he was just an ear, and that was useful. Often I couldn’t stop talking—speculating, justifying, working out possibilities and trying to find one that ended well, arguing out loud all sides of all questions. Griff often didn’t answer. Sometimes he’d pick up a magazine or a newspaper, and I’d say, “No, listen, this matters, listen!”

  “I’m listening,” he would say. “You just said, ‘But she won’t.’” I often imagined out loud that Helen might suddenly appear in our studio apartment, where we’d have to hide and shelter her—which presumably could land us in jail. And how would it be possible? But indeed, I’d always end such speculations with “But she won’t.”

  This was a few weeks after the crime, around the time when Griff was having frequent p
hone conversations and a few meetings with the volunteer lawyer about the charges against him. I became more and more anxious in the days before he learned that the charges would be dropped. One afternoon I came back from the library and heard the phone ringing from the hallway outside. It took too long to dig out my key, and whoever it was hung up. I always expected Helen to call. Maybe the lawyer had called—maybe with good news, maybe with bad news. I sank into a chair we had bought. When I moved in, it had soon become clear that we needed another place to sit and read, or to face the bed and talk to someone sitting on it, and with a sense of great consequence we chipped in on a chair in a junk shop. It was soft and gray, and I loved it. I sat back in it and could not move even a finger. Griff came in quite a while after that and found me still in my coat, still with my bag at my feet and my key in my hand.

  “What?” he said.

  “The phone rang.”

  “Who was it?”

  “I didn’t get it in time.”

  “It will be all right.”

  “Maybe not.” I’d never changed my mind about Griff’s crime. He had been defending people who were being attacked; he was as justified as he could be, and the law should let him go. It was too bad he had to do it—but he had to do it. And also, I didn’t want this man—this young teacher, this idealist, my lover—to experience anything bad, anything that would take him away from me. He had a way of crossing the room diagonally in my direction, a certain way his arms and shoulders looked—vulnerable and not, at the same time—that made me want to seize him and hold him close. Sometimes I did, knocking him a little off his feet. He’d laugh and stroke my head and hold me in his turn.

  Now I didn’t stand up and seize him. I had never been so tired in my life. He looked at me, then turned away. He went into the bathroom, and I heard the toilet flush. He opened the refrigerator. Griff, unlike most people I knew, shopped once a week as his mother did and kept food ready to turn into meals: frozen vegetables, hamburger meat. With his back to me, he was taking things out. Minute Rice. He said, “She wouldn’t have done it if it weren’t for me.”