Conscience

by Alice Mattison

  “He won’t do,” Griff said.

  “He’s not the kid he was,” I said. He didn’t answer.

  In November 1976, Martha was almost four and Annie was a year old. We’d moved to a larger apartment, not far from where we live now. I was working at a press in northwestern Connecticut that specialized in books about American history. I had my driver’s license, and we bought a second used car so I could go back and forth two days a week to the office, leaving a bottle of breast milk behind, returning with piles of manuscripts. On the other days, I worked at home. The kids went to a lefty day care center in a church basement. I’d forgotten my rage about the war—I was sometimes ashamed to realize that. People who had opposed the war, back at the start of the movement, were often those who cared about social justice: legal aid lawyers, social workers, teachers. When nonviolent protest began to seem pointless, those who resisted the turn to violence by the Weather Underground and lesser-known groups like Helen’s returned—maybe hardly noticing the shift—to social justice. I had been atypical, with my love of moral subtlety and ambivalence in old novels. The women’s movement had made even childcare political, so I could tell myself I was still in the struggle just because we’d joined a cooperative day care center, in which fathers were required to work a few hours a week along with mothers. Griff and I both put in hours taking care of the children, he after school.

  Meanwhile, the United States had signed the Paris Peace Accords in 1973 and Saigon fell to North Vietnam in 1975. The war was over. As all this happened, I wondered where Helen was and what she and her friends thought. Now I know from books that their opposition to the American government was so general that it didn’t matter what the government did.

  One Wednesday, Griff went to work as I was sleepily nursing Annie in bed. He liked to be in his classroom well before the children. Annie was an even bigger baby than Martha had been, and she crawled and walked later, content to rock her hefty middle back and forth from her perch on her hands and knees. After I nursed her that morning, I showered and dressed, hauling her around, putting her into her crib when I needed both hands. Griff had fed Martha breakfast, and when he left, she was playing on the floor of our bedroom in her pajamas, singing about a giraffe who couldn’t fly. I got her dressed and then gave her a second breakfast—this was her routine most days—while Annie sat in the high chair with toast cut in squares. I sat down with my mug of coffee and my own toast. The weather was still warm, and I enjoyed the children, as well as the knowledge that I wouldn’t have to look after them all day, nor drive to work: I’d walk them to day care in our big stroller and come home to the manuscript I was editing. It was about women in the Revolutionary War.

  I remember it all so many years later not because anything particular happened that morning but because when something did happen—later that day—it was the thought of the peaceful morning, the solid, rumpled bodies of my children (somebody nonchalantly leaking pee, shit, snot, or drool) that I went back to: this was the story I told myself, trying to sleep that night.

  Working at home, I kept a leisurely schedule, and at day care, nobody cared if children were dropped off late; that day I was slow. Eventually I got everybody going and pushed the stroller to the day care center. It was a windless, warm day. A few leaves were left on the trees. Martha was still singing about a giraffe. I left the stroller and my daughters after kisses and squeezes, a little conversation with the people on the turn, then walked home unencumbered, poured another cup of coffee, and settled down to work.

  I didn’t talk to anyone all day, as often happened. I spent those hours in the solitude of engrossing but not terribly difficult intellectual work, stopping only for food or more coffee.

  When I was approaching the day care center at five that afternoon, I saw one of the other mothers, a woman with a loud voice and emphatic opinions that she told you before you knew what the topic was, so you found out which side she—and presumably you—were on (anti, generally) before learning what you were against. She had no sense of humor. She wasn’t a bad person, only irritating.

  I caught up to her, and we walked along together. I wanted to tell her something funny her son had said to me that morning, to see if she might laugh, but before I could speak, she said, “So how exactly are they bringing down the military industrial complex by robbing a suburban bank and shooting three cops? Tell me that. It’s a tragedy, a stupid, stupid tragedy. That girl!”

  “What girl?” I stopped where I was. “What girl?”

  “The one who got killed. It was on the radio just now.”

  “I don’t know about it. What happened? Who got killed?” I was shouting.

  “Not around here, nobody you know—someplace in Pennsylvania.” I fought down panic. Nobody I knew lived in Pennsylvania. She went on, “The same radical politics we all believed in—up to a point! Up to a point. They make me madder than the assholes in Washington.”

  She touched my arm lightly, as if to say, “So much for that,” and started walking briskly toward the gate. Once inside, we couldn’t talk about a bank robbery. I stopped, dropped my purse, and seized her forearm, squeezing so hard it must have hurt. “You have to tell me!” I said. “I don’t know what happened.”

  “Easy, take it easy,” she said. “A bank robbery. But a girl got killed—a Jewish girl from Brooklyn. One of the radicals.”

  I would have to go inside, take my children, behave as if everything was fine. This could not be done.

  “Do you know her name?” I asked.

  “Something like Weinberg.”

  “Please, stop,” I said. I was whispering, helpless and not caring who saw or knew it. “Was it Helen Weinstein?”

  “Maybe,” she said, and at that moment, Griff’s car came to a stop beside us and he jumped out and seized me in his arms, sobbing. Whatever happened to Griff and me later—the long separation, the strangeness between us, still, at times—we were joined indissolubly, married for real, at that moment.

  He steered me to the car, and we sat and cried there for quite a while, seeing people emerge from the day care center, leading or carrying or pushing children. We were the last to pick up our kids, but the woman who’d told me must have finally worked out what was going on and told the parents on the shift. When we went inside, Martha and Annie were being quietly read to by one of the fathers. He hugged me, patted Griff on the back, hoisted his own little boy to his shoulders, and left us alone to get ourselves and our children out of there.

  We had many chances to learn the whole story, and people still remember it because it was one of the few times during those years when a radical white woman died. Helen had carried a concealed gun. She had gone into the bank and quietly approached a teller with a note. When the teller gave a signal and a security guard approached Helen, she took out the gun and killed him. Cops rushed in; her companions shot at them. A cop killed Helen with one shot.

  The photographs in the paper, which I stared at for hours, were bizarre. It was one of those ugly little banks where customers are greeted with insincere platitudes and halfhearted ornaments wish them whatever is appropriately wished at the season. There was a picture of Helen, an old picture of the girl I knew. And there was a picture of the place where the crime had taken place, after it was cleaned up. Above the spot where Helen died, a string of limp letters hung in an arc between two pillars, spelling out “Happy Thanksgiving.”

  Jean Argos

  Zak doesn’t make a distinction between getting along and fighting. As I’m driving him home after our disastrous dinner with Olive and Joshua, he says, “Griff still loves me.”

  “I’m not so sure,” I say.

  “Paranoia by proxy,” he says. “Let’s fuck.” We’ve reached his house, and he’s just about to get out of the car.

  “We already did.”

  “Hours ago.”

  I’m thinking that if I had any sense, I’d break up with him. Even before Olive told me what he did, he was too good to be true, too ebullient and cur
ious and sensitive not to be a bad guy. And, indeed, someone else’s boyfriend—too good and too bad at the same time. I imagine he is still someone else’s boyfriend, and sometimes I still feel a pang of guilt about that, though mostly I figure she knows whom she’s dealing with. Sometimes I think I’d have preferred to have Yvonne for my friend instead of her boyfriend for my boyfriend. But now I go inside and we go to bed, though I’m feeling sleepy and angry more than sexy, and I have to work tomorrow. After a while, of course, I’m aroused, and I watch Zak’s flexible arms and legs roving my body. His big, hard penis plunges into me.

  The next morning, my phone rings while we’re drinking coffee, he in his bathrobe and I in one of his T-shirts. The phone is in my purse in the living room, and Zak runs for it, as if the call might be for him. He hands it to me. Jason.

  “I got here early,” he says. “A cop just came by. Somebody was in our building last night.” He pauses, and his voice takes on a slight, humorous edge. “They called your house, but you weren’t there.”

  “My private life is private,” I say, teasing back. I haven’t told anyone at work about Zak. My staff doesn’t run into Joshua.

  Zak is staring at me, still poised for an emergency, mine if not his. I shake my head: we won’t need a pediatrician in the next ten minutes.

  Jason says the cop on the beat saw a light, walked around, and found an open door—but nobody was there. Whoever it was woke up and hid, in or outside the building. It wouldn’t be a priority for the police, but I’d given my phone number to the cop we know best and told him I’d be grateful for a call. Apparently I gave him my landline. Jason sounds guilty, or maybe he’s just uncomfortable about catching me away from home.

  I hang up and say to Zak, “I’d better go home and change.”

  “You let them push you around,” Zak says, as I hurriedly put on the dress I wore last night.

  “No, I don’t,” I say. Zak doesn’t notice that I’m annoyed. It will be days before he says to me, “I was awful that night. Griff must hate me. What should I do?”

  At work, I ask Jason how the intruder got in this time.

  “Same door,” he says.

  I try to remember what he told me the last time. “Didn’t you replace the lock?”

  “I did.” He still seems uneasy. I assume that with our customary stinginess, he took a lock from an unused door lying around in our basement or his house instead of buying a good one, so the replacement was as easy to pick as the original. I should have checked. I should have insisted that he spend the money on a decent lock. One difficulty of running a nonprofit is that available money from the government or foundations is mostly for new programs, like our third-floor respite rooms. But if a program works, it’s no longer new, and it’s hard to get money to keep it going and harder still to get money to keep the lights on and the rooms painted.

  I don’t get another call, and then I forget the back door—and even forget about Zak’s drawbacks for a week or two—because the third-floor respite center opens at the start of September. Paulette does well. She’s hired a couple of the people who worked on her summer yard project to help with painting, moving, and setup. One, I’m surprised to see, is the man called Arturo.

  “Wasn’t it Arturo who was sleeping in the building?” I ask Jason. “The first time?”

  “He has a place of his own now,” Jason says.

  Arturo is often around after that, a thick guy with an odd expression but a great willingness to work. He’s useful, but—

  “But stupid?” Zak says, when I think out loud with him about Arturo. We’re together for the first time in a while, eating pizza we picked up and brought to my house.

  “Not stupid. I think he’s smart. He gets jokes.”

  “Evil?”

  “Out of touch.”

  Arturo speaks without an accent, but he seems to not quite understand when we speak to him. At first, I think he’s rude. When we’re setting things up on the third floor, I ask him to carry up a box that’s blocking the staircase and he says, “No.” Just that. Then I realize, from what I hear the others say, that he’s carrying things up in a prescribed order. It just wasn’t time for that particular box. He didn’t explain—but neither did he passive-aggressively obey me when he knew I didn’t understand. The next day, he smiles, and I like him. Like many people who have been homeless, he looks clean enough and wears regular clothes, but he has bad teeth. He has a big, bare forehead; sparse gray hair stands straight up starting halfway to the back of his head.

  We thought the respite rooms would catch on slowly, but right away, people want a couple of hours alone in a room with a cot and don’t protest when we don’t let two people go in together. Maybe some ask to use the rooms only because we offer them, figuring there must be something good about them. Twice in the first week, somebody goes into a room and comes out fifteen minutes later. “It’s like jail,” one man says, though we painted them yellow and put up posters. After he’s proved he can leave, that man comes back.

  We look through people’s stuff to discourage shooting up. We know we can’t prevent it entirely, but finding someone unconscious at the end of his time will not be acceptable. People like being alone, being able to sit or lie down, just taking a break.

  By the second week, we have a waiting list almost every day, so we have to decide whether you can reserve a room in advance. I have a meeting with Jason and Paulette to figure it out. Paulette says, “You let these people sign up in advance, you’re running a hotel. What about no-shows? What if somebody reserves the whole week?” I finally make the decision: we won’t let people reserve, but if you don’t get in on Monday, we bump you to the top of the list on Tuesday.

  “That’s the same as reserve,” Paulette says. As we predicted, menstrual cramps are a big motivator, and we sometimes move women to the top of the list just for that. “I won’t have no cramps tomorrow,” somebody points out.

  Mel and Tommy take turns at the desk on the third floor, and they claim that people who have been in the rooms are more open to other changes in their lives—to referrals for medication, to job training.

  When I tell Zak this, he shakes his head. Counting off on his fingers, he says, “Drink, drugs, sex, stealing.”

  “What?” We’re at Archie Moore’s, eating hamburgers just before the kitchen closes. It’s raining out, and the smell of rain comes into the bar when the door opens. Zak called me when he got off work late, and I’d just gotten off work late, too.

  “When you come right down to it, that’s what’s going on with your clientele,” Zak says. “And one way or another, that’s what they’re doing upstairs.”

  The assumption that I don’t know what’s going on makes me angrier than the slight against my clients. I’m not naïve, and I know that drink, drugs, and sex happen up there occasionally—not stealing; there’s not much to steal. But when they happen, it matters mostly because drink may lead to vomit, sex to used condoms. Our problems have to do with scheduling, housekeeping, laundry—the boring, non-lurid parts of life. We use up more disinfectant than we expected, wash more blankets. Whatever goes on in these people’s lives, whatever makes them poor or likely to die young or go to jail, is not what we contend with on our third floor.

  “Okay,” Zak says eventually. He reaches across the table to eat my French fries, since his own are gone. “It’s not all stuff from the movies.”

  “Correct.”

  I’m tired, and after we pay, we go in separate cars to our separate houses. Sometimes he talks about living together, but that’s silly. Am I going to give up the house where I’ve lived so long? Am I going to let him in, to deal with him daily, hourly? Paulette is loud, and her voice is the soundtrack of my days; talky Zak at home every night would not do.

  In my office, I have plenty of chances to see how Paulette works up close, because she’s always running past me. I’ve never had clients above as well as below me, and the old tenants were few and mostly silent. The respite rooms upstairs are
supposed to be quiet. Clients call them the Quiet Rooms, and I sometimes hear, “I need one of them quiets.” But I often hear Paulette loudly ushering someone up, shouting warnings about quiet—“No radio, no girlfriend, no singing songs!”—in a voice that must be heard by anyone already in the rooms. Some people need the freight elevator—which is noisy.

  There are more readers than I expected, many taking one of the donated paperbacks from a box on the first floor, often without looking to see what it is. Some people make cell phone calls or write something. I think some are writing-writing, as we put it, but most are filling out forms—applying for something, documenting something. As I hoped, giving homeless people something other people have in their houses brings out the ways in which they are the same as anyone else.

  Mostly, getting people to leave isn’t a problem. They get lonely—except for those who want to stay all night. Right away I see that that issue isn’t going away. If you give people a warm, safe room, more likely than not they will want you to give it to them overnight—which is why most comparable agencies are shelters. The first person to make a fuss is a woman with a bad cold. She spends the afternoon on our third floor and protests when it’s time to go. It’s fall, getting dark by the time we close at six. “It’s cold,” she says. “The shelter is across town. I go there, ten people get sick. I stay here, nobody’s sick but me.”

  Jason comes to talk to me about that one, and I tell him no. We don’t have input from the board or permission from the city, we don’t have insurance, we don’t have someone to keep the place safe, we don’t have someone to call an ambulance if she gets sicker. She’d be alone in the building.