Conscience

by Alice Mattison

  That wasn’t how I remembered either of them, and I said so.

  “Well, she was quiet,” Val said, “but she was so funny—that sense of humor could be wicked. Remember those imitations?”

  I didn’t remember imitations. Val said that at lunch, she and Helen and a couple of boys we knew used to imitate some of the teachers. “Maybe you weren’t there,” she said. “Helen used to do that math teacher who would lose track of what page we were on? Remember her?”

  I remembered the math teacher and remembered laughter, kids in the cafeteria fumbling with textbooks, saying, “No! Not fifty-one, sixty-one! No, seventy-one!” But I didn’t associate Helen with any of that. Where would she have been? We usually ate together. It made me a little uncomfortable. Had I forgotten something important about Helen? I had imagined that Val and I might touch hands and weep at the lunch table, brought together, at last, by tragedy. But she and I had never seen anything important in just the same way, and we wouldn’t start now.

  “The FBI infiltrated all those groups,” Val said, when we got to the subject of Helen’s crime. “She’d never have done what she did—shooting someone! It was entrapment.”

  “No, it wasn’t,” I blurted out. “For one thing, when it’s entrapment, don’t they arrest the person before the crime? And it would have come out. And Helen—” All Helen had was that crime. It was her career, her husband, her child.

  “It didn’t come out,” Val said calmly, “because for some mysterious reason the agent didn’t arrest them and they did do it. Nobody knows why. There’s speculation on the radio, late at night.” She paused. “I sometimes listen. There are nights when—well, you know. . . .” She gave me a look that suggested degrees of sexual risk and pain I had never contemplated.

  I still didn’t guess why she’d invited me. One fantasy was that she’d ask to see the biography I was writing, then offer to show it to an editor. Though I mentioned my work, she wasn’t curious; I didn’t know houses like hers didn’t publish that sort of book. Eventually, I decided it was true that she missed me, that she wanted my friendship, and I was pleased—I’d always been pleased when Val wanted my friendship, even when I didn’t approve of her.

  Over coffee, she sat back, pushed her chair back. “I’m writing a novel,” she said. Her blue eyes sought mine, and she blushed a little. She smiled. She waited to see what I’d say.

  I was awestruck. How did one even begin? “That’s wonderful!” I said. “What’s it about?”

  “I need your help,” she said. “I really need your help. Will you help me?”

  “Of course!” I said. “Is it about children?” I was an expert on Lamaze breathing during childbirth, on breastfeeding, on bathing a toddler. . . .

  “It’s about—well, it’s fiction. It’s about a made-up person.”

  “Yes,” I said, as if agreeing that novels are fictional.

  “It’s about Helen.”

  My first emotion, I’m ashamed to say, was jealousy: Why hadn’t I thought of that? I could write a novel! Surely I could. But I quickly suppressed that reaction in favor of dismay. We had no right to write novels about Helen! “Isn’t it,” I said quietly, my voice shaking, “isn’t it—I don’t know how to put this—none of our business to write about Helen?”

  “Nonsense. That’s what novelists do,” Val said. “Don’t worry, it will be fair—it will come out on her side. Well, insofar as that’s possible. I’ll immortalize Helen Weinstein.”

  “You’re going to use her name?”

  “Of course not,” she said. “In the book she’s Hannah Cohen.”

  Val had just bought me lunch, I slowly understood, because she wanted me to talk about Helen. To refuse would have led to hard feelings—and I’d just said “of course” about a favor. Besides, I wanted to talk about Helen, and Griff wouldn’t let me. Val would let me talk.

  Before we parted, we set another date. She offered to come to New Haven, but I insisted it would be hard to talk with my family around. So we planned a dinner in SoHo, where she lived. It was followed by many more.

  Griff had met Val only that one time in New York, when he and I ran into her shortly after we began living together. He decided from her clothes and manner that she wasn’t a serious person, certainly not an antiwar activist—she was someone our government had tricked into complacency about the war, or relative complacency. Val was against it, I assured him, but he said she wasn’t against it in a way that counted. Now he was baffled that I’d take time from the book I was writing to help her write hers—which he thought of as a foolish project that would go nowhere. I was glad to talk with Val about Helen because Griff wouldn’t talk about her at all, so I wasn’t surprised when he dismissed the whole plan. If he thought I was somehow choosing Val over him when I left him with extra childcare, he was correct.

  I loved my trips to New York. My new editing job was not full-time: I had negotiated a day a week to work on my book about Edith Wharton. I went to New York instead. My book waited while Val wrote hers. I felt bad about that, but seeing Val was a solution to a different problem and an opportunity. Sometimes I took the commuter train to New York in the morning and went shopping or met a friend or visited an art gallery. It embarrasses me to remember how, despite everything—the Perrier, the commercialism, the false enthusiasm—I wanted Val’s friendship and valued the times we spent together.

  We always met for dinner at an old Italian restaurant. We hugged briefly, then ordered. She’d take out a yellow legal pad and a ballpoint pen and ask a question. It was flattering to think the story of my life—the part connected to Helen, at least—was of interest. I liked again what I had always liked about Val: her conviction that she could do what she wanted to do, her practical courage, her impersonal warmth. We sat in that restaurant or lay around in Val’s apartment with wine and sweets—Val liked cookies and pastries and cakes—talking, talking, until I’d rise and stretch and hurry to the subway and a commuter train that would get me to New Haven late at night, so I’d be grouchy and sleepy the next morning.

  I told Val everything, without considering. I told her about Griff’s crime and his belief that he was responsible for Helen’s turn to violence. It was something like talking to a therapist. I didn’t really imagine a book, a book people would read. When, occasionally, I became nervous, she assured me that I wouldn’t be in the book. The only time in those early months when I said anything negative was when she told me her title, Bright Morning of Pain. “That sounds like a trashy book,” I said, and Val laughed. I don’t know what I expected—maybe that I’d be a heroic figure in her book, despite her assurances. I’d be a wonderful character, Helen would be accurately depicted, and Val and I would be friends forever, even if nobody paid much attention to her book.

  It was written more quickly than I would have thought possible. I assumed there would be a long period of revision, but Val knew agents through her job, and over the last of our dinners she said in an offhand voice that several were eager to see it. I figured she was exaggerating, but a month later she phoned to say she had just come from the post office, where she’d mailed copies of the manuscript to an agent she had a good feeling about, and also to me.

  Again, her call had come while we ate supper. When I hung up (“Hey, good luck!” I said), I was disappointed and ashamed of being disappointed. I had imagined seeing the manuscript before anyone else did, making suggestions to which Val would listen gratefully. I’d go into greater detail about events she hadn’t quite understood. The book would make Val and me friends forever—Val would grow up a little—even if it were never published. When I now turned from the phone, the children were at play in the next room, their food still on their plates. Griff was reading a magazine while finishing his dinner.

  I hauled the kids back. Griff watched, expressionless. “You might have said you’d call her back,” he said. “Of course, the children felt neglected.”

  “They didn’t feel neglected!” I said. He was silent. “And if they ne
eded something, where were you?” He didn’t answer.

  That night, I thought things through and decided the agent would surely turn down the manuscript and Val would be hurt. It would be my job to console her, maybe to help her improve the book after all, so the next agent would be more receptive. Even if she didn’t know it, she still needed me. So a few days later, when the children and I came home to find a package from Val, wrapped in brown paper and tied with string, I seized it eagerly. The children were disappointed that the package wasn’t for them and watched me open it, still hoping. Inside the brown wrapping paper was a box that had once held a ream of typewriter paper and was now three-quarters full of a manuscript.

  Griff wouldn’t be home until late that night. I cooked supper for me and the children, while they colored on the brown wrapping paper. Annie scribbled over Martha’s drawings of people and flowers; Martha hit her. We ate. I bathed them and put them to bed. At last, I began to read.

  As Val had promised, I wasn’t in the book: the character who was supposedly Helen—Hannah Cohen—had only one friend in high school, and she was a version of Val, called Violet Bonning—I noted Val’s initials. I read about the incident Val had mentioned: Hannah Cohen arguing with a teacher, Violet feeling shocked. But then I came to the day when Hannah wouldn’t eat a hot dog because she was upset about the man who immolated himself to protest the Vietnam War. I’d told Val that story. In the book, Violet Bonning buys hot dogs—two, not one torn in half. Eventually she eats them both.

  But something more important had also changed. Hannah was not upset just about the stranger who had died. She’d been told about the death by a boy she liked. Hannah had said something to the boy that she regretted. She was afraid he wouldn’t like her anymore. And secretly, Violet liked the same boy. These were attitudes Helen and I would have scorned at the time, serious little virgins that we were, but reading, I thought we’d have done better to like boys, to be more normal, to be more like Val. Helen and I hadn’t had the nerve to live the life Val had imagined for us—or for Helen and Val herself. Helen would be alive, I found myself thinking, if she’d been Val’s friend instead of mine. Maybe she really did imitations of the math teacher. Why had she stopped? Could Val have helped her continue if I hadn’t been in the way?

  When I began to dislike Val’s book, as I read that night, I didn’t let myself know it, partly because I couldn’t admit to Griff what was wrong with it. When he found me in bed reading the manuscript, I said it was “pretty good.” I moved to the living room, wrapped in an afghan Griff’s mother had knitted, and read compulsively into the night.

  Some incidents were just as I’d described them. Some were invented or invented except for one detail, which I’d suddenly recognize. The blue beads. But the tone was consistent, the message. Hannah—the woman who supposedly was Helen—was well-meaning but confused, distracted by sex, love, and jealousy, and thus forgivably mistaken, like the heroine of many books about girls growing into women, books in which the girl gets things straight, finally, at the end—and gets the guy. This book was new in one way: it ended just before Hannah came to see how wrong she’d been. But there were hints. And, of course, Hannah didn’t get the guy. Violet Bonning would get the guy—a different guy, by then. Right after the last page.

  First, I was angry with Val. Then I understood what an idiot I’d been. She had told me she was writing a novel. I told her the story of Helen and me, knowing she was writing a novel, knowing she wanted help with her novel. But Val wasn’t a ghostwriter, hired to write the novel I’d have written myself, if only I’d thought of it first and been brave enough. What I knew mattered to Val, but she didn’t care about my viewpoint. Why should she? The viewpoint, inevitably, was Val’s, and I had disappeared into a character who was a version of Val, living our story as she would have if she’d had a best friend something like Helen. Violet had Val’s personality but, at least in the first part of the book, lived my life.

  The invented action mostly had to do with men. I had told Val that Helen and I both slept with Eli, and rivalry over a man became the most prominent theme. The second half was much more fictionalized. Hannah has committed a crime and disappeared, but in the novel, Violet Bonning participates in the first crime, though neither she nor Hannah does anything violent. She disappears with the rest of them. Living together in a safe house, they again love the same man. When Val imagined herself as me, she imagined a braver, sexier, and more reckless me. This character was something of a reproach to me—the book seemed to ask me why I wasn’t always at Helen’s side. Except in Val’s book, all the political action feels safer, more glamorous, less morally suspect than it was: a fantasy.

  Then, Harry arrives—the character based on Griff. Val transposed him from the period in which he really turned up in our lives—before Helen’s first crime—to the period when the group are fugitives from justice. Some of the less attractive men in the group have shot and wounded people, but the women have done nothing more than dump blood at draft boards. It is Harry, the black man from Hartford, son and grandson of clergymen, who commits a violent crime and persuades Hannah to do the same.

  Meanwhile, Violet Bonning and her boyfriend agree that the boyfriend will pretend he loves Hannah, so as to draw her away from the part of their group that is planning to use guns. It will turn out that they’ve been infiltrated by someone from the FBI (as in the rumors Val reported), who is urging them to become more violent. This man has fooled the FBI and is an actual revolutionary—which is why he lets the crime take place instead of arresting those planning it. Violet Bonning’s boyfriend tries to keep Hannah out of it but then is conned as well. Even Violet has a gun in a drawer, though she doesn’t use it. It’s a sexist plot in which women do nothing unless urged and taught by men, but—as people remembered at our dinner party—at the end, when a cop aims at Violet’s boyfriend, Hannah shoots him. Val left it ambiguous whether Hannah (or the policeman) lives or dies.

  After I finished reading the manuscript, I told Griff a little about it, but not that Val used what I said about him—and not that I said it. I was too ashamed, ashamed of my entire participation in this project. My only hope was that Val wouldn’t be able to publish the novel, which had flaws unrelated to my participation. Scenes were confusing. Description was overly luscious. But despite everything, I couldn’t put down the book, especially once I reached the second, imagined part. The book was large and intense and wilder than anything I would ever write in my life. Val had written about sex and violence when we were kids, and she could still do that—though there was something showy about the violence. Sometimes my words—my side comments, my exclamations—had made it into the book. I was subtly thrilled, and I was sick.

  That first agent grabbed the manuscript and quickly found a publisher. Val got a big advance, for the time. A year or so later, Bright Morning of Pain was published. There was an advertising campaign and a tour. Val was on the Today show. Limousines drew up outside bookstores and auditoriums, and Val climbed out. She quit her job to write her next book.

  Throughout, I pretended I was happy—pleased at my friend’s success, as any nice person would be. I tried to convince myself that I was happy. The book, I pointed out to myself, really had nothing to do with Helen. It was simply an achievement by someone I knew, brought about with my help.

  “So how much of it is autobiographical?” an interviewer asked Val, shortly after the book came out.

  “Well, it’s fiction,” Val said. “You know.”

  “Did you ever have a gun in a drawer?”

  “Let’s not talk about that. As I said, the book is fiction.”

  “Were you close to Helen Weinstein?”

  “We were friends as children, and in high school. We went to a protest together. I remember her crying on the way home.”

  I went to see Val when she read in New York, and listened to what by then were familiar paragraphs. In the question period she said again, “It’s fiction.” And smiled.

 
“What did you do during the war?” someone asked.

  “I was involved,” Val said. “Those were hard times.” She sighed, and then she said, “Helen Weinstein wrote me a letter when she was in hiding. I’ve never told anyone this. She said she regretted her choices and wished she could get away, but she was afraid they’d kill her. She knew too much.”

  Someone asked, “Do you have this letter?”

  “She told me to destroy it,” Val said. “So—no.”

  When Val began signing books after the question period, I squeezed past the line, touched her shoulder, mouthed, “Congratulations!” and left. I took the next train to New Haven and got home before I expected to.

  A week later, I saw the same claim in a printed interview. I phoned Val. “I’m happy for you,” I said. “But of course that’s not true about the letter.”

  Val hesitated. “You can’t prove it isn’t,” she said, “and if you try, you’ll just seem jealous.” Then she said, “Let me pretend she was my friend, Olive, please. I know damned well she wasn’t. And maybe if she’d let me be close to her, she’d be alive today.”

  I’d had the same thought myself. But I said, “Why would she be alive?” My voice was shaking.

  “I’d have known how to talk her out of it.” Val said she had to run. She hung up.

  I didn’t tell Griff about the conversation or the supposed letter. I didn’t tell anyone. I was as stunned and impressed by Val’s cool willingness to lie as I’d been in high school by Val’s bold, embarrassing fiction.

  By the time the book came out, Griff knew I was upset about it, but he thought that was ungenerous of me: that I was jealous of my dopey friend for doing something that I—with what he regarded as my better capacities—had not done. He didn’t read the book. It didn’t matter, he said. There was no reason to read it. What mattered was real life—my memories of Helen, our friendship—which no novel could change. There was always some truth to his arguments, but he never got it just right, and I couldn’t tell him exactly what I’d said to Val or what I felt now, so we were less and less able to understand each other. I couldn’t say—I couldn’t have put into words then—that the book had created a version of Helen devoid of convictions, which were all she had. And that that was my fault.