Conscience

by Alice Mattison

  I’m not supposed to see Zak for a few days. The night after the meeting, I ask a friend out for a drink, and she listens while I cry about Zak’s faults at a table in the back of Archie Moore’s. I run out of tissues and blow my nose on scratchy toilet paper from the women’s room. It’s that kind of rage I’m feeling, the kind that is part shame, because I should have known—I did know—that Zak was capable of doing what he did. I know he did it innocently, because he simply didn’t—couldn’t—know that what I said was confidential. Why didn’t I keep quiet, in that case, or at least explain exactly what he must not repeat to whom?

  I don’t expect to see him until Thursday, but on Wednesday, he leaves a message on my phone, and I listen to it at work. He wants to come over that night. I text him. It’s too hard to do more than set a time.

  Takeout? he texts back. Will bring.

  He doesn’t know we have a problem. If I tell him to eat before he comes, I’ll have to cook something for myself, and then he will come without eating after all, because he never has time to eat, and I’ll end up feeding him. If he brings takeout, at least there will be food. I don’t look forward to a breakup without food. Also, this way, we’ll start with eating instead of sex; it would be impossible to break up after sex. OK, I answer.

  He comes bearing Chinese food, smiling and hurrying with his plastic bag of hot containers—shrimp, vegetables, rice, pork. Dumplings to start. It’s hard to break up with Santa Claus. He leans over to kiss my lips domestically and begins arranging his boxes on the kitchen table. I go for plates and beer.

  “Something happened,” I say, my back to him, as I open the fridge.

  He doesn’t hear or doesn’t pay attention. For once, he talks about his work. “Four kids in the hospital,” he says. “But everybody’s going to live,” he adds, “except the crazed parents.”

  At last, I sit down at the table, my plate in front of me, and open a beer. I take one sip and start to cry, push my plate aside, and put my face down.

  He sits down, still in his coat. “What? Sweetie, Jean, what?”

  “I can’t,” I say. “I can’t.”

  “Can’t what?”

  I get up and go to the sink to wash my face, then turn back. Standing there, my back pressed against the rim, I say, “You told Joshua Griffin everything I told you about work.”

  “I did?” He doesn’t even remember.

  I describe the meeting. I tell him I was against third-floor overnights and now I have to make them happen so as not to betray Paulette—I had to claim she was heroic to avoid demonizing her, or so it seemed at the time. He listens. At some point, he takes off his coat—a corduroy jacket that’s too light for the weather (it’s November) and too casual for a grownup doctor—and goes out of the room (I know he’s putting it on the same chair where he always leaves it) and returns. Then he begins eating. So I do, too. I’m hungry.

  “Are you breaking up with me?” he asks. I guess he’s turned a little pale, because I’m suddenly aware of his black hair and eyebrows in contrast to his face.

  I don’t speak for a long time. Then I say, “Yes.”

  But I’m not sure. I haven’t planned on his agreeing with me, but he does. “Oh, my big mouth, my big mouth!” he says more than once. He’s no longer the innocent who arranged to have Martha Griffin—and himself—photographed; he has learned that he can get into trouble for failing to respect secrets and privacy. He’s like a longtime member of Alcoholics Anonymous who keeps relearning that he will trick himself into drinking if given a chance. It’s hard to be angry with people like that—they are on the same side as you, while the scamp who did wrong is rejected by all.

  Also, I want the tasty food, and he’s paid for it—somehow that figures into it. It’s like I’m remembering some long-ago instructions from my mother about how to behave toward a visitor who brings a present. We eat; we go to bed. I’m not happy.

  I tell him—again—that I don’t really want to have overnights in the Barker Street respite rooms, and now Zak sounds a little less innocent, a little less surprised by his own badness. “I knew you didn’t,” he says. “I can’t say I figured out what would happen—but maybe I thought Griff would talk you into it, in a backward kind of way.”

  He was meddling. Now we finally have a fight—a real argument, with shouting, the kind of fight that people have who are not fighting to break up but fighting to persuade the other person. When he leaves the next morning, I’m still angry.

  But we’re having overnights at Barker Street. Paulette hugs me. She thinks she talked me into it; in a way, she did. Jason is quietly pleased.

  We set about planning and conferring with officials, and they have us make a few alterations. The first week we let in six people a night, twelve after that, with a signup sheet. I expect demand to be low because there won’t be food or socializing—you have to stay in your room—but people sign up right away. Privacy may not mean much to Zak, but it means something to our clients. We carefully check everybody’s pockets and bags and rarely turn someone away.

  “All right, it makes sense,” I say to Zak after the first full week. This is around the time I realize that I haven’t seen Arturo in a while.

  I ask Paulette about him, and she says, “I fired him. He’s drinking again.”

  “Does he have a place to live?” I ask.

  “Who knows? Not with me, I’ll tell you that much.” Which makes me realize she was his girlfriend after all.

  Paulette wants to talk not about Arturo but about heat. The furnace at Barker is old and weak. The landlord does what he can, but the building is poorly insulated, and in cold weather, it’s never warm enough. We now pay more to keep it warm at night, but it still isn’t as warm as people want it to be. I keep my house at sixty degrees at night, and that’s what we try, but we don’t have blankets warm enough for rooms that cold. Paulette says it isn’t quite sixty anyway, and the landlord promises to make some kind of repair.

  One cold night close to Christmas, I stay overnight at Zak’s apartment and my phone rings around 4:00 a.m. It’s near the bed, in the pocket of my jeans, on a chair. I grope for it in the dark and find it before it goes to voicemail. Sitting up in bed with my jeans on my lap and Zak sitting up, alert as always, beside me, I glance at it—Jason—and answer.

  “Trouble,” he says, and he sounds awful.

  Zak leans back on his elbows, looking questioning and amused, while Jason tells me quickly that Paulette has just called him, because Dunbar has just called Paulette. “He’s hysterical,” Jason says.

  “What happened?”

  “A fire.”

  “Upstairs?” I scream the word.

  Zak says, “What? What?” and I slap him.

  “No—he got them out,” Jason says. “They’re all fine; it’s not that. The smoke alarm—he got them out.”

  “Where was the fire?”

  “In the kitchen. Dunbar called nine-one-one. Arturo’s in the hospital.”

  “Arturo? I thought Paulette fired him.”

  Paulette fired Arturo, and Arturo was homeless. He spent a couple of nights on our third floor—I don’t learn this until later—but there was no room that night. Since the back door was securely locked—thanks to me—Dunbar simply let him in the front door. Arturo was cold, apparently, and tried to light the oven in our ancient and dilapidated stove. I guess he was drunk. I guess the stove was hard to light, and he lit match after match, too drunk to do it right, if there was a way to do it right, clumsy in his winter coat, which was probably donated and too big, even for that big, clumsy man. At last, Arturo got the gas to light—and set his hair—and then his coat—on fire.

  Olive Grossman

  Grieving for Helen should have been my full-time job for a year, but there were two small children in my life, one old enough to ask questions. “Mommy’s friend went away,” we said. Griff didn’t think we should say “died” about someone my age, but Martha screamed in nightmares anyway. I couldn’t get through the days wi
thout crying, and she must have heard me.

  A reporter learned that Griff and I had known Helen, but we refused to speak to her. I felt abruptly terrible that I had neglected Helen’s parents all these years and tried to call them. I reached her brother, but he wouldn’t talk and wouldn’t put me in touch with his parents.

  In the first stages—weeping and patting backs—it was a relief to have Griff, the only person I knew in New Haven who had also known Helen. But then we began talking. Responsibility comes first for Griff. “I made violence a reasonable moral choice,” he said.

  “Helen thought about violence long before meeting you,” I said.

  “But she resisted it,” he said, and that was true. Helen had sobbed in my presence when her first boyfriend talked, over banana bread, about carrying a gun. Griff was the first person—the only person I knew—who had said out loud that he would use a gun, and then used one. Maybe he had somehow provided an option, and maybe that made his suffering greater than mine, but all I knew then was that he was turning the conversation back to himself—his misdeeds, his grief. I wanted to talk about Helen. Or me. The long, intense friendship. The enormity, not just of losing her but of losing her in this particular way. In odd moments, I had bittersweet fantasies: Helen dying from illness, accident, even suicide, or as the victim of a crime. Dying of anything that would allow me to approve of the woman I still loved.

  I too felt responsible: my choice to live my private life instead of devoting myself to protest had left Helen free to be influenced by Mallon and Raz. If I’d stayed at her side . . .

  But when I started to say these things—in bed at night, or when we’d hired a sitter and gone out for pizza or Chinese food—Griff would shake his head and keep silent. “Words won’t help,” he seemed to say. Which was true—which is true of all tragedies, I guess. But I needed to say what we both already knew, to say it and hear it until it was boring.

  There had been no funeral—or none that I knew of. No inadequate prayers. No clichéd condolence cards. I wished for what I’d ordinarily scorn.

  Griff and I also disagreed about Helen herself. I was horrified by her crime—frantic; sick—but I still respected her determination to figure out what she thought was right, and do it. The more I didn’t understand it, the more I respected it. When I first met Helen, her morality stunned me, and when I didn’t agree with her—long before she was violent—I suspected she was right because she had always been right, even if she was too stern and strict for me. The deficiency was mine. Now that I’m almost old, I am sure Adeline had the right to want a color TV if she damn well pleased, but when Adeline was an issue, though I said something like that, at some level I assumed that Helen must be right, just because she was Helen. Maybe there should have been a moment when I faced our differences and proclaimed that Helen was no longer my friend, but there hadn’t been. I was always, somehow, expecting her to make clear to me why she was right. Or expecting her to discover she was wrong.

  Griff—who later became so compassionate toward students, even when they did wrong—was disgusted by what I said. “Evil does not become good when one’s friend becomes evil,” he said again and again. He had not forgiven himself for shooting Carlin Lambeth, so he could not forgive—or understand—any criminal. He deprived me of Helen, in all her many forms, by turning her into someone we should abhor. I condemned Helen—of course I did—but I still loved her. Her crime created a mystery, a mystery I have spent my life trying to solve.

  Around that time, our landlord told us he wanted the apartment we lived in for his son, and having to find a new place was a healthy distraction. When Griff and I disagreed about moving, it was about straightforward questions like whether we could manage without a washing machine (I said we could; he said no). I thought our present landlord was uncomfortable with a mixed-race couple as tenants, and Griff said that was nonsense—he wanted the apartment for his son, just as he said. I was starting to understand how the Griffins felt about racism. Institutions were almost inevitably racist; the rage of the Griffin family was too great to talk about or was expressed with a wave of the hand that reminded me of my aunts and uncles acknowledging anti-Semitism and dismissing it as not worth discussing. People, however—individual persons—were rarely racist, the Griffins believed. It took a great deal for them to decide that a particular man or woman was prejudiced—the word we used then—and when it happened, it was a teaching opportunity. Sometimes I felt them teaching me.

  Griff and I rented the first-floor apartment in a former one-family house: the house we now own and still live in. We were tenants, then bought it, continuing to live on the first floor and renting out the upstairs apartment. Our tenants moved out shortly before we separated, so when we did, Griff moved upstairs. Later, he moved elsewhere, and I rented the apartment. It was empty again when he eventually came home; by then, the children were almost teenagers and we had a little more money, so we spread out into the whole house.

  But all that came later. In the late seventies, we moved. Conversations about Helen became less frequent. The children grew. Though life continued, and though in many respects it was a lucky life—I had my health, a husband, children, casual friends, a job, and notes for a biography of Edith Wharton that I would eventually write and publish—I was unhappy and lonely. Of everyone I’d ever known, Helen was the person I seemed to understand most easily, who seemed to understand me best, but she had become the person I understood least well. I mourned the jokes we told, our quirky mutual perceptions. I mourned her conscience.

  I remembered the day she sketched the drawing at the Pierpont Morgan. What had become of that battered spiral notebook? My life was so predictable that I still had a box of notebooks I’d used in college. Her possessions, somewhere, had become trash. As she had become trash.

  Now and then, someone—on the news, at some meeting—would mention her. Her name was not a household word after the first few months, but news junkies and old lefties knew it. Someone I knew would say “Helen Weinstein” without knowing I knew her, and I’d feel it as a punch to my midsection, whether the person spoke with disapproval, gossipy excitement, curiosity, or even a much-qualified sympathy. But nobody thought it was all right to kill.

  One evening, when the kids were maybe two and five, the phone rang as we were eating. I picked up the kitchen phone, and when a familiar voice said my name, for a second I thought crazily that I was speaking to Helen. The voice was from the past, that was what I recognized. Val Benevento. I was wary but glad to hear from her—guilty that I’d let us lose touch—and too rattled to say I’d call her back when the kids were in bed. Val said she’d called to catch up, and I stood near the phone, waving at Griff to carry on without me, though I knew he disapproved of interrupting family dinners—and so did I, for that matter. I was pleased—flattered—as always when Val paid attention to me.

  She lived in SoHo, she said, and was single. “Well,” she said, lowering her voice, as I reached over Annie’s shoulder to take the spoon she was banging on the table and place it next to her plate, “I’m dating my boss. My married boss. You know.” I tried again to catch Griff’s eye, to get him to stop Annie, but he was either oblivious or angry with me for staying on the phone, and she banged the spoon some more. Val worked as a publicist in a big New York publishing house. “Can I buy you lunch?” she asked. “Do you ever come into the city?”

  It was classic: I was the unhappy lady in the provinces with spaghetti sauce dripping down my pants whose life held not a shred of glamour, and my old friend—with glamour to spare—was offering me a sniff of her corsage, a sip of her champagne. I stretched the phone cord so I could step around a doorjamb and not see what the children were doing—now they were starting a quarrel. I leaned against the wall and settled into a conversation, reminding myself how Val always made more things possible. I stuttered with gratitude at the prospect of lunch in New York and agreed to the first date she mentioned. At the time, I was about to leave my job and take one at the plac
e where I still work, because it was nearer home, and I thought that because she too worked in publishing, she might like hearing about my work as an editor or about my manuscript on Edith Wharton. I’d hear interesting gossip about the married boss she slept with and her life in Manhattan.

  At the end of the conversation, her voice turned sober. “And of course we have to talk about—well, you know,” she said. She paused. “I missed you so much when it happened.”

  I had not thought of Val when Helen died.

  I don’t know what, if anything, Val said to her boss to justify treating our lunch as a business expense. We met at a nice place, not fancy but not funky. She waved from a table when I arrived: she was in heels and a snug suit, and she looked the same, or almost. Blonder. I wanted spaghetti or a sandwich, but I imitated Val and ordered a salad. She ordered Perrier, which I considered extravagant and silly, when water was free. Val reminisced about times we’d been together in high school and college. She first mentioned Helen’s name when recalling an argument she said Helen had with a teacher in our high school English class. I didn’t remember that we three had ever been in a class together.

  “I talked about it with her later,” she said. “She said it was nothing. I was shocked, of course—disagreeing with the teacher! I was such a good little girl.”