Conscience

by Alice Mattison

  “What?” I said.

  “Helen.”

  “I know who you mean.”

  “I gave her permission. I taught her. I shouldn’t be allowed to teach.”

  “That’s not how it happened,” I said. “That was one conversation.” I was too tired to remind him of the years of arguments and discussions, of Raz and Mallon, of all that made up the Helen who had done whatever it was she had done.

  “You don’t know how it happened,” he said.

  “I don’t know? Who would know if I didn’t know?” Helen was mine.

  “No,” he said. “Baby, no. I did it.”

  I didn’t have the energy to argue—didn’t know how to prove what I knew. And he was my boyfriend, my fairly new boyfriend, so instead of making me angry, his ignorance of the topic touched me. It gave me the energy to put my key back into my bag, take off my coat. Griff began patting chopped meat into hamburgers.

  That fall, a classmate asked me to join a women’s consciousness-raising group. All my life, women had been joking and griping about the ordinary insults we lived through, from nasty remarks about “women drivers” to the assumption that women would do little except clean and care for children. Even politically active women were relegated to typing and sex. We didn’t need to raise our consciousness: as soon as it became customary to talk about sexism, our consciousness swelled like rising bread. In our group were students and teachers, as well as wives of students and teachers. Four women in the group left their husbands that year.

  At the first few meetings I said little, partly because I hadn’t felt much discrimination personally. I was grateful to have time off from thinking about Helen and the war—to have a political topic that wasn’t cause for despair—and I listened with interest to stories in which men had failed to respect women or women had failed to respect themselves.

  I was silent too, because I couldn’t talk about my own, unrelated trouble. At one meeting, I caught myself silently glorying in my connection to Helen. I was horrified. I hadn’t had the courage—or the passion, or whatever the hell it was—to risk my life as she had. But now I was preening on my connection to someone who took action—while I continued to disapprove of her. I missed part of the discussion, sitting there scolding myself. When I returned, I was humbled, which made it possible to speak: for once, I didn’t need to be sure that what I said was relevant, accurate, and fascinating all at once.

  “I live with a black man,” I began, not sure how this fit, and two black women—sitting next to each other—looked up at me sharply. A few sentences later, a white woman interrupted me. “You’re not black,” she said, “so you can’t speak to the double discrimination black women feel.”

  I hadn’t been about to complain. Nor did I want to talk about Helen—and lately Griff and I talked little about her. If I mentioned her, his face clenched. I wasn’t sure how the topic I wanted to talk about related to feminism—or to Griff’s race—but I had a feeling it did, I told my friends.

  One morning, I said, Griff had emerged from an intense silence and asked, “Do you believe in God, Ollie?”

  I was looking for my lipstick. “God?” I said. “I guess so.”

  “You don’t know?”

  I explained. Jewish prayer repeats, again and again, the information that God is God, that there is only one God, that God is good, and that it is good that God has commanded us to do whatever we are about to do or has given us whatever we have. I had been brought up hearing those prayers—not often, but enough. Jewish observance, in my mind, was for periodically reflecting that it was good to be alive. If you wanted to call the giver of life God—this is what I said to Griff, and now to the women’s group—then I did believe in God and was grateful. If you thought of life as a result of certain physical and biological processes, what I felt was more like awe.

  “I am not sure I still believe in God,” Griff had said solemnly, when I finally shut up. I thought Helen’s crime had something to do with his problem—or the war, as it had led to Helen’s crime and his own. I had not taken God seriously enough before to disbelieve now, but in Griff’s mind, God was so irreconcilably attached to justice and goodness that if things got bad enough, it was impossible to imagine God.

  “But then nobody would ever believe in God,” I said. “The Black Death, slavery, Hitler . . . If people believed despite all that, why can’t you believe now?”

  “I am not them,” he said—a rare grammatical lapse. He went off to teach.

  After that, he and I asked, as a household, frequently, whether Griff believed. I’ve met others in interfaith marriages who have had similar experiences: they and their spouses may not be religious, but religion is often what they are thinking about. The women’s movement, diverting as it was, was background. Maybe the women’s movement gave me permission to keep whatever belief or disbelief I had, instead of adopting Griff’s position.

  I ended what I said to the women’s group with the comment that sometimes I pictured God—the God of Griff’s childhood, whom I saw as a wrinkled black man—leaning on an elbow in suspense, listening to find out if his servant Joshua still believed in him. Then I stopped talking, and there was coffee and cake and departure. Nobody answered me, but I was glad I had spoken. I’d told a coherent story to myself and apparently to them—leaving out Helen—of what my life was like. It even related to feminism.

  My life, come to think of it, centered in many ways on what Griff thought. Every day he came home talking about his pupils—the troublemaker, the slow one, the sad one. I talked little about my classes. So we were one of those households in which the man’s job matters more than the woman’s activities, and I was as responsible as he for the disparity. What Griff did was more useful than what I did. Reading novels meant ignoring the big stuff, even if the great books I read were about the big stuff. Griff loved to teach, and teaching was not ignoring the big stuff—yet it was also not protesting the war. Protesting the war had become unbearable, and teaching was a kind of solution. I didn’t want to teach kids. At the time, I thought I was preparing for a career teaching college students, though I was never excited about that prospect either, and except for a short stint as a teaching fellow, I never did it.

  I asked myself, in those months, whether I loved Griff for the wrong reason, because he was a bit exotic. My parents worried about me, as his did about him, but the two sets of parents worried differently. My mother worried that I wouldn’t find a teaching job after graduate school or I’d find one in a distant place. Neither she nor my father thought Griff was the right boyfriend for me, but not—they earnestly repeated—because he was black. My mother said she feared that the racial difference might finally keep us from getting married, and by then I’d be too old to marry someone else. My father worried that my reputation would be ruined because I was living with a man I wasn’t married to.

  I didn’t meet Griff’s parents for months. He phoned them often and would lie stretched on our bed, his shoes removed, the phone to his ear. In an hour I’d hear only murmurs, and after he hung up, the silence persisted. He did tell me that he talked mostly with his father—if his mother answered, she passed his father the receiver. She was a kindergarten teacher, but they didn’t talk about teaching.

  I began to ask to meet his family. He’d met mine: we’d eaten polite dinners, carefully planned and cooked by my mother. “Soon,” he’d say. “You’ll like them.” Like Helen when we first met, Griff was always making sure I was fair to people, and maybe he thought I didn’t expect to like them. I did assume they were scolding him for having a white girlfriend, but when I finally asked, he said, “Of course not!”

  Once, during yet another argument about whether the Vietnam War ought to make the idea of God untenable, Griff sighed and stood up. This conversation had started as I was straightening clutter on a Saturday morning, and now he was sorting a pile of mail and newspapers, so when he stood, he clutched papers. He sat down again. Then he spoke: “I’ve told my father about my doubt
s.”

  “You told your father you don’t know whether you believe in God?” I would never have a conversation about God with either of my parents.

  “I had to.”

  “How long ago?”

  “Month, couple of months.” I slowly grasped that all these phone conversations had been about God.

  “What does your father think?” I said.

  “He has doubted,” Griff said. “My father has doubted, too.” That a father and son had talked for months about uncertainty was hard to imagine. I envied it. My parents had only certainties. I couldn’t imagine these conversations, which apparently were both more and less personal than any talk my parents and I ever had.

  Christmas was coming. With only a little guile, I began saying that I’d enjoy meeting his family when everyone came together for the holidays, that I could bring his mother something—maybe a calendar with photographs of children from around the world. He liked that. After one or two more phone calls, we were invited to his parents’ home in New Haven for a few days, beginning on Christmas Eve. They wouldn’t have room for us along with his brothers—two, both married, one with a baby—so we’d stay, in separate beds, with Griff’s aunt. I’d have the spare bedroom, Griff told me, and he’d sleep on the sofa. He was embarrassed that we couldn’t be together, but I wasn’t surprised. All my single friends were engaging in plenty of sex, but nobody’s parents felt at ease about it, except a few old Communists who’d never believed in marriage in the first place. My parents might have let me sleep with a man in their house, but their embarrassment would have ruined the occasion. I preferred the Griffins’ confident prohibition.

  On Christmas Eve, we drove to New Haven in Griff’s VW Bug. Everyone I saw as we got out of the car in the late-afternoon sun, not far from downtown New Haven, was black. I was ashamed to notice that and, when we got inside his parents’ house, to notice that both of his sisters-in-law were light-skinned. For a moment, I thought they were white.

  His father met us at the door—as distinguished as I’d imagined but shorter. “This is my father, Reverend Griffin,” Griff said.

  The reverend shook hands. Griff’s mother came forward, saying, “I’m Sally.” She kissed me, and starting then I loved her until she died—a good thing, because she often drove me crazy. She was barely shorter than her husband and had straightened gray hair and a face that often looked as if she didn’t know what would happen next but thought she’d like it.

  Within moments of surrendering my coat, meeting the brothers and their wives, and admiring the first grandchild, a little boy crawling around on the rug, we talked about Hanukkah. I had done nothing about it, but Sally and her kindergartners had constructed paper menorahs. That was the last year I didn’t light candles at Hanukkah, and since Hanukkah is actually a minor holiday, logic required me to observe, in some fashion, Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, and Passover. The Sabbath matters too, Sally often pointed out, but I couldn’t change my behavior for something that frequent.

  After a few minutes, Reverend Griffin offered to show me New Haven, as if Griff might have been inadequate to the task. He led us to his large car and drove slowly through the streets. Later, Griff told me his father didn’t see well anymore and probably ought to quit driving but would not consider it.

  Passing the Green, I said, “New Haven’s beautiful!”

  “Parts,” said both father and son at the same moment.

  I liked the Christmas Eve church service. In the morning, there were modest presents, for me a pair of pink woolen gloves. Sally liked her calendar. She was a terrible cook. The oldest brother and his wife weren’t unfriendly, but they were shy, which amounted to the same thing. I exchanged glances and smiles with Henry and DeeDee, the next oldest brother and his wife, whom I liked. I also liked Griff’s aunt, with whom we stayed. The Griffins’ house had solid, dark, old-fashioned furniture; at his aunt’s, everything was plaid. She worked as a bookkeeper at a hospital.

  Griff’s sense of humor had temporarily dried up. His father was similarly serious, and Sally’s anxiety squelched her sense of humor—I learned only later that she had one. The day after Christmas, I proposed leaving. My period was due; I had a paper to write—I wanted to be home. But Griff didn’t want to go.

  In the late afternoon on the twenty-sixth, I persuaded Sally to let me make a pot of coffee and serve it with Christmas cookies; they’d received several tins, some homemade, from parishioners. What was different, I understood now, as we sipped coffee in the living room, was that the brothers had left. I suspected the middle brother, Henry, agreed with us about the war, but the oldest brother had been in the army and was a hawk, so nobody had brought up the topic. Now I thought maybe we’d talk about politics. I was pretty sure Sally and the reverend were antiwar, but I knew they had been horrified by Griff’s violent crime. Would they scold, or argue, or continue to avoid that topic entirely?

  Griff took a last sip of coffee, placed the cup and saucer on a coaster, and told his father that he was finally sure he no longer believed in God. He apologized.

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake!” I burst out, and quickly saw how wrong that was. I looked at my shoes, hoping I’d be ignored, and I was.

  “I’m sorry to hear this, son,” the reverend said. “I don’t know if I’ve ever told you, but I too have doubted.”

  I glanced up, saw that Sally seemed to be suppressing a smile, and quickly glanced down again, feeling slightly better. But the next time I looked, I saw that Sally, in her corner of the sofa opposite Griff, was crying, and I understood why she’d been anxious—why everything had been tense through these days. The trouble had nothing to do with me. Reverend Griffin went on, “But I’m not sure you’ve truly . . .,” and Griff said, “I have, I truly have . . .,” and they began to discuss—yet again—the question. No one else spoke; no one left.

  “God has tried us before, he has tested us before,” Reverend Griffin said.

  At last, Griff stood and said he wanted to take me to Blessings, a Chinese restaurant he thought I’d like (at the time, the name seemed hilarious). His parents looked relieved.

  On the way, he was talkative. “He’ll keep at me,” he said, “but I feel so much better!” He then asked, “How are you?” as if he’d just noticed I was there.

  I said I had to get back to New York. He thought he’d better spend another day or two at home.

  “Just to make sure everybody feels as bad as possible?” I said.

  “We both need it,” he said, and I recognized that he was probably right about anything he claimed about his father, whom he resembled. His brothers were different, and I guess that was why Griff was the one they had expected to go into the ministry. It hadn’t seemed to be a question for the oldest, Isaac, who was learning how to repair televisions, or for Henry, who worked in a law office and studied law at night. As we approached the restaurant, Griff reached for me, and we stopped just outside the door to put our arms around each other. We’d barely touched for days. He kissed my ear before we stepped into the lighted room.

  The next morning, I took the train to Grand Central, glorying in solitude. When I finally walked into our apartment, I sat down on the nearest chair in my coat, my bag at my feet, and didn’t move for an hour. Finally, I felt my period start and stood to go to the bathroom.

  When I came out, I saw a piece of looseleaf paper near the front door, a little to the side. I had walked on it without noticing it; there was a footprint on it. Sometimes flyers were pushed under the door, or notices from the landlord. I picked it up and brushed it off, turned it over. In blue ink it read, I miss you so—love forever—HW.

  I sat down where I was, on the floor. Had Helen come on Christmas Day? Did Helen even know about Christmas? Regardless, I had missed her. I might never see her again. I struggled to my feet, took some pills for cramps, and went to bed in my clothes. I slept for hours, and when I woke, it was dark. I cooked some spaghetti, ate it plain with butter—all I wanted—unpacked my bag, and went back to
sleep.

  I never wrote a doctoral thesis, but I spent a second year in graduate school: teaching, taking seminars, and compiling notes that eventually—two babies and two editing jobs later—became the book about Edith Wharton. Living was cheap, and Griff and I managed on the modest sums we were paid. As a year passed, it became harder for me to imagine a life without Griff, or Griff’s life—and his family’s life—without me.

  Helen did not reappear, not in my life and not in the news. Everyone but me seemed to have forgotten her.

  And there must have been a pinhole in my diaphragm, because in late winter, a little more than a year after that Christmas visit, I found myself pregnant. I said to Griff, “I went to the doctor,” and he looked up from the newspaper, his dark skin deepening, and dropped the paper on the floor. “Yes,” I said, crying, and he rushed at me, seizing me and placing himself around me as if to keep me still. “The next Griffin,” I said. The baby was the next Grossman as well, but my family didn’t think in those terms, exactly.

  Griff and I hadn’t said much about marriage, but we both knew it would happen. Once, he had said, “I suppose we’ll be married for ten years before we replace this chair.” (It was the shabby gray one we’d bought together.) When he said that, I had looked hard at him. He’d said, “What? You don’t marry schoolteachers? You don’t marry atheists?”

  “Under certain circumstances, I marry them,” I had said.

  These, apparently, were the circumstances, because we started talking about a wedding the day of the doctor’s visit. For Griff, of course, a wedding involved God, whether he believed in Him or not. God was a kind of absentee landlord who’d abandoned the building.

  At times I found all this fuss about religion irritating, but mostly it moved me. It was a sign of Griff’s scrupulous moral sense. My boyfriend—unlike the men many of my friends were involved with—regarded a coming baby as a gift, if not quite from God, and a pregnant girlfriend as a wife, a wife for all time. Griff doesn’t believe in divorce either—it’s inconceivable to him—and I know he will never quite forgive and forget the years we lived apart. I’ll get to that.