Conscience

by Alice Mattison

  I listened patiently while he considered and reconsidered out loud all our options. The clerk in the Municipal Building—my suggestion—was unthinkable. “I can’t ask my parents to witness something like that!” he said. I didn’t like the rabbi of the synagogue my parents paid dues to and attended on the High Holy Days. He wouldn’t ask whether Griff or I believed in God, but I was pretty sure he wouldn’t marry me to someone who wasn’t Jewish.

  “My father knows rabbis,” Griff said, and that turned out to be the solution. Active in the antiwar movement, Reverend Griffin knew an array of liberal clergymen. This was before clergywomen.

  My parents considered themselves enlightened; they’d have been fine with the clerk in the Municipal Building. Abortion was still illegal—Roe v. Wade came a year later—but in New York, it wouldn’t have been difficult to end a pregnancy, and my mother delicately asked. I clutched my stomach, burst into tears, and declared that Griff was the man I loved, the man I’d always love, and I loved my baby, too.

  “Okay, okay! Now I know!” she said. She and my father became bubbly—all but drooly—about the coming grandchild. And, in fact, about their son-in-law. Maybe it was true that they had worried primarily about my chance to become anybody’s wife.

  We were married in New Haven, by a rabbi assisted by Reverend Griffin, in an ugly room lit by fluorescent lights at a community center, in the presence of about forty people, most reveling in the interfaith aspect. Our families turned out to resemble each other—well-behaved, cordial people who shunned ostentation. The gathering wasn’t jolly, but it was friendly. Sally and my mother hugged. My sister was my maid of honor. I missed Helen. My parents had offered to pay for a wedding trip, but Griff and I were too busy. We drove back to New York and resumed our lives.

  While we ate supper one night that spring—I was getting big; we had been thinking about neighborhoods where we could afford a bigger apartment—Griff sat up straight in the way he did when he had something important to say, some moral requirement he had recently detected: a need to invite my crabby professor to dinner, for example. This one was larger.

  “Can you write your dissertation away from campus?” he asked.

  I was fairly sure I wasn’t going to write a dissertation. I was trying to think of what I might do if I didn’t become a professor, but I hadn’t talked about it. “I guess so. . . .”

  “I must teach in New Haven,” he said.

  I felt a swirl of unreasoning panic. I was angry—and had no idea why. As he talked about the poor black community in New Haven and his obligation to make a difference there, I grasped at the only argument against moving that came to mind—that New York was my home, the only place a reasonable person might live. New York is comprised of people who dream of getting out—replacing subway commutes with driving, walkups with sprawling lawns, snow and slush with warmth—and those who can’t imagine living anywhere else. Even when I expected to become a professor, it didn’t occur to me that academics find jobs where they can.

  It was our first bad fight. I screamed. He accused me of not wanting to be part of his family. It was true that I was doubtful about living near Griff’s complicated family, but I was also tempted. It was like being offered a job, maybe a job I wouldn’t always like but in which I’d have a certain usefulness. I was already the Jewish Daughter-in-Law, supposedly an expert on certain topics. I was also the woman who’d kindly married their beloved and impossible youngest son. I was the expert on Griff.

  Finally, a few days later, as I walked through the aisles of our neighborhood grocery with a basket on my arm that kept bumping into my belly, I realized why I didn’t want to leave New York—why I’d even been wondering if the baby might fit into our tiny apartment if I just shifted this, got rid of that. If I lived elsewhere, Helen could not find me. I began to sob in the grocery store, put down the basket on the floor, and fled. I went home and crawled into bed, then returned to the store, where I found the shabby canvas basket just where I’d left it, still containing the rice and soup I’d chosen. Someone had added cornstarch.

  It’s hard to remember now how difficult it used to be to find people one had lost touch with. Or to be found. Before Facebook, the internet, and email addresses (which don’t change just because someone moves), the only way was a phone book or calling Information in a distant city. You had to know which city, know your friend’s married name, maybe. In the seventies, it was new for married women who weren’t actresses to keep their birth names. Helen could find me through my parents if we moved, but I knew she wouldn’t. I had kept my name, but our phone number in New Haven would be in Griff’s name.

  Meeting a high school or college friend in the street was thrilling, and these reunions, just because they were so chancy, meant more than they should have. After Helen’s crime and disappearance, I kept expecting to run into Val, but I didn’t. Then she phoned me, sometime in my second year of grad school, though she had to call my parents first to get my new number. As always, I felt a mixture of relief, curiosity, and annoyance talking to her. How could I have kept Val and lost Helen?

  “All right,” I said to Griff that night. “Let’s move to New Haven.” I’d had a vision of Griff and me—stooped, gray, wrinkled—stuffed into this one-room apartment with several aging children. Helen hadn’t earned this hysterical loyalty, and she didn’t want it. Immediately I felt better: in that apartment, I was always poised for a knock. Somehow, I didn’t think Helen would ring the doorbell.

  Griff quickly found a job in a New Haven high school. I would work on my dissertation—I had decided to try writing one. A professor had hired me to help research a book, but I could work at the Yale library and meet him in the city occasionally.

  We began spending weekends in New Haven, looking for an apartment, sometimes going to church, then eating Sally’s Sunday dinners. Griff’s sister-in-law DeeDee was pregnant too, and we joked about little Griffins taking over the world. I pretended to feel more comfortable than I did with this family—I guess all brides do that—but now and then I felt at ease with Sally, who was straightforward and who wanted to like me. I was lucky in my mother-in-law.

  Griff relaxed a bit too; being an official atheist was easier than becoming one. Sometimes the reverend—I had learned that his first name was Isaac, like his oldest son’s, but I called him Reverend, like everyone else—looked at Griff sadly. But he gave me generous, somewhat distant smiles, and he told me each time he saw me that he was excited about our baby—also that he understood that I probably wouldn’t want him baptized, which made me feel guilty. Their neighbors told me the baby would be a boy—something about the way my stomach tilted. It was a few years before ultrasounds made it possible to know.

  I listened for Helen’s knock during the weeks before we moved. The war was a steady, depressing fact that suddenly, now and then, became unbearable once more. One day in June, we all saw for the first time the famous photograph of the naked, burned, screaming Vietnamese girl running with others from napalm. President Nixon had been reducing the presence of American troops on the ground, and there were peace proposals, but air strikes increased. It was an election year again, and we were for George McGovern, the peace candidate.

  We moved in July, with help from friends. We filled Griff’s VW, and somebody had a pickup truck. I looked for Helen on the block as we drove away. Then I got interested in living in New Haven and fixing up the apartment we’d found. The Helen part of my life was over, I decided—and so was the Val part, apparently. I didn’t let her know where I’d gone. But one day that fall, when I took the train to New York to see the professor for whom I worked, I thought I recognized Mallon from the window of a bus and jumped off. I ran back a block on Broadway, searching for the tense shoulders and reddish hair that I had seen, peering into stores, not wanting to go inside lest I miss her.

  “Olivia,” a low voice said behind me, as I hesitated. Mallon had come out of a grocery store with a pack of cigarettes. She paused to light one, offered it to
me, then said, “I see you’re—,” nodding at my stomach.

  I told her I was married to Joshua Griffin. “I thought you were in hiding,” I said.

  “I’m mostly not in New York,” she said.

  “Is Helen all right?” I asked.

  “I’m not with them,” she said.

  “You know where she is?”

  “I know where she is.”

  “Can you—can you tell her I’m living in New Haven? Can you give her my address?”

  “I can’t promise,” Mallon said.

  “I understand,” I said.

  “I don’t think you’ll hear from her,” she said.

  “Okay,” I said weakly. I just wanted to see the piece of paper I handed her disappear into a pocket. She turned away, and I was sorry I’d chased her. Now I had reason to be anxious again, to wait again. I heard nothing.

  The fall continued. Nixon won reelection in a landslide—which was depressing until Watergate, just a few months later. Griff and I got ready for the baby. One day, alone in our second-floor apartment, staring out a window at a bare, wintry backyard, I felt certain that I’d never see Helen again, never know what had become of her, and I felt a certain calm—what people nowadays call “closure.”

  Martha, a big girl who looked like the reverend—he was light-skinned, paler than Griff, and she was the same, and also had his placid dignity—was three months old and spring was coming when I saw a short, blond woman cross the street toward me as I bumped the carriage down the porch steps of our three-family house. I knew the woman mattered. Her elbow bent slightly as she mounted the curb on my side of the street; I saw that she was Helen, Helen in makeup and black pants she’d never wear, false breasts and a tight black sweater with sequins, and that wig. She had dressed up as a parody of what she most passionately opposed. But it was Helen. I couldn’t speak.

  “Olivia,” she said.

  “Mallon gave you the address?”

  She was carrying a map of New Haven. She had come on a bus from downtown—I don’t know what, before that. “What do you think?” she said. “She’s not a bad person, Olivia. You could have trusted her.”

  I embraced her and started to cry. She shook off my hug and said, “I have to see my nephew.”

  “Niece,” I said. “Martha.”

  The baby was asleep. Helen crouched at the side of the carriage and put her hand on Martha’s back through the blanket. In those days, they told us to put babies to sleep on their stomachs, not their backs. Martha’s face was sweetly turned to the right, and her thumb was in her mouth. Helen slowly traced Martha’s shoulders, her head, her face, her thumb, with her own forefinger (she wore dark red nail polish), grazing my daughter’s edge so lightly that Martha stayed asleep, just worked her thumb a little harder.

  Then Helen stood and we walked, as we always had. “Don’t call me by my old name,” Helen said. “I’m Mary.”

  “That doesn’t sound Jewish,” I said.

  “I’m not Jewish. I’m Mary Walsh. I’m risking my life to tell you this.”

  “Not your life,” I said. “Maybe your freedom. But I won’t tell.”

  “My life,” Helen said. I suppose she meant that if the police came for her, there would be shooting. Maybe she carried a gun. “And you have to promise not to tell my family you saw me.”

  “I promise.” I felt a pang of guilt.

  “I had to see the baby.”

  Mostly we were silent. I couldn’t ask the obvious questions. I still don’t know where she was living, who with, what her plans were. At last, I said, “Helen, I wish it hadn’t all happened. I wish I could have you back.”

  She shook her head and was silent. Then she said. “We have to do hard stuff, Olivia.”

  “Oh, Helen!” I said, forgetting to even consider saying “Mary,” but when I looked, she wasn’t Helen at all—or so I thought for a moment of excruciating embarrassment. She was quite well disguised, and the disguise made me as sad as if she really had become someone else.

  She wouldn’t come upstairs with me, wouldn’t tell me how she’d come or how she’d get wherever she was going. She said, “I wish I could tell you to tell my parents I’m okay, but I can’t,” and I wondered as she hurried down the block whether she meant I was supposed to tell them after all. I decided I couldn’t risk it. Maybe someday she and her companions would decide they could come out of hiding, that nobody cared anymore. I would hope for that. I yanked the carriage up the steps.

  After our Indian dinner with Jean and Zak, I didn’t see Jean for a few weeks; I supposed she had broken up with him and wanted nothing to do with people she’d think of as his old friends. I was angry with Zak for driving Jean away from me. He wasn’t an old friend, more like an old enemy.

  I was trying to write my essay on Bright Morning that fall. I wrote openings that were far too personal, stopped in mid-sentence, opened a new document, and started again. Griff was busy at school and spent his evenings upstairs.

  One late afternoon, I took Barnaby to the park and met Zak, running in baggy shorts, on a trail near the river. He stopped and stood wiping sweat off his face. His hair flopped on his forehead. “Olive!”

  “Hi.”

  “Wait,” he said, though I had stopped, too. He bent to pet the dog. “I was a prick that night,” he said. “At the restaurant.”

  “Did Jean break up with you?” I allowed myself to ask.

  “No,” he said. “Break up with me? Did she say that?”

  I should have known Zak would get what he wanted. “I haven’t seen her. You were such a pest, I figured she might have.”

  “We did have a fight,” he said. “I didn’t even register that Griff kept looking at me like I should be taken out with the garbage. The next day, all I could see was that look. I hadn’t seen that look since . . . since you know when.”

  It was funny that he said that about the garbage, because at the moment he smelled of sweat—but fresh, vigorous sweat, and I was not repelled but attracted.

  Zak said, “Olive, I’ve missed you!” It was the first time we’d been alone together since he’d returned to New Haven.

  I had liked him so much back then that I couldn’t feel as angry with him as I knew I should, as Griff felt. Griff had loved him but had withdrawn all his affection when we learned what Zak had done. I stared at him, there in the woods, but didn’t say I’d missed him, too. I began to walk, and he fell into step beside me. Our feet crunched leaves. The leaves still on the trees were sparse, but some were yellow, and the sun shone through them. The river glinted. The dog sniffed bushes and tree roots.

  “It wasn’t that I was in love with you,” Zak said finally.

  “What?”

  He was silent again. Then he said, “Of course, you have to know that I’ve spent the last twenty years of my life trying to figure out why I did it. Why I filmed Martha like that.”

  I didn’t know what to make of that—I had not thought this. I thought he’d spent the time justifying it to himself. “But you said you don’t want to be forgiven,” I said.

  “Hmm. No, I don’t.”

  “But why not? If you think you did the wrong thing, why not be forgiven? If possible.”

  “Oh, forgiveness.” He was hugging himself. “I meant that. It takes away who we are. I’d rather be me.”

  “Are you cold?” I said. “Do you want to run?”

  “I’m cold, but it’s okay.” He sounded like a boy. “I shouldn’t have been so disgusting, but it’s not forgiveness I want.”

  “Then what do you want?” I asked.

  We came to a narrow footbridge, and though the wind had come up, he paused and looked upstream, leaning over the railing. Barnaby watched ducks. I patted his skull, pressing it into my leg. Clouds were gathering, and now the river looked dark.

  “I thought you’d be interested, back then,” Zak said. “I did it to get your attention.”

  “You thought I’d be interested? In pornographic photographs of my daughter tak
en without her knowledge?”

  “I think I knew Griff would be angry,” he said, “but I thought you’d be different. What I imagined—I know this is incredible, but what can I say? I was a kid. I imagined Martha complaining to you, and you reassuring her, telling her it was like the sixties, like the way you all lived back then, that it was advanced to do things like that, like John Lennon and Yoko Ono, like . . .” He paused, then said again, “Like the sixties.”

  There’s nothing quite like discovering what someone has been thinking when it’s unlike anything you ever imagined. “The sixties weren’t—” I didn’t know how to put it. “We were serious.”

  “I know. I’ve read Bright Morning of Pain—after our dinner, I got hold of it.”

  Now I had no idea what to say or do. That book was his idea of the sixties? Of seriousness? Wasn’t that the problem? Wasn’t it many people’s idea of the sixties? I wanted him to read the book I might have written.

  “My dog needs his supper,” I said.

  “I’m sorry,” Zak said.

  He didn’t start running again; we continued walking together. I had a mad idea that I could make him understand everything—what I’d done in the sixties, what I felt about Bright Morning of Pain, what effect his act had had on Martha. But I said nothing.

  When we stepped out of the woods a few minutes later, he said, “Not telling Martha seemed incidental. If I asked her, she’d say no, but if I just did it and then told her about it, she might love it—and if she didn’t love it, you’d help her love it. I do see that was crazy. I saw that quickly. Griff and my film teacher made me see that.”

  We were in College Woods then—the only part of the park that is not woods—and in this more public place, with wide paths and benches and playgrounds, our conversation became general. Zak was still appealing—a thought that felt disloyal to Martha. I said goodbye, and, dismissed, he began to run again. I went home and fed Barnaby. Griff came home; he went upstairs. I could hear bits of the PBS NewsHour, so I went up and watched with him. I didn’t tell him the whole story, just that I’d met Zak, that Zak and Jean hadn’t broken up.