Conscience

by Alice Mattison

  Then someone asked Griff for the first time about “that guy Harry in that book,” and he came home barely able to speak. At last, I told him the whole story of what I’d said. “You didn’t do wrong,” he said tensely, when I wept and apologized and wept again. “It’s true. It was my fault. People may as well know it.”

  He was silent for an hour. “It will kill my father,” he said. It didn’t. I’m not sure Reverend Griffin or Sally ever heard of the book. He was a reader, but, like his youngest son, not of novels. Sally read novels—but not that kind of novel.

  Bright Morning of Pain was shortlisted for a couple of prizes. It was attacked both for glorifying antiwar violence and for failing to glorify it enough. Some critics thought the writing was bad; some were entranced. It was called a feminist book—it was called sexist. As all this happened, I wasn’t entirely miserable. My feelings about Val had always been full of contradictions. At some moments, I was thrilled that she’d actually gone and done this big bold thing. And I liked some things about the book. The second half trivialized Helen, if you thought of Hannah as Helen, and trivialized women, even if you didn’t. But it was exciting to read. As for the other issues, I continued to believe in freedom of the imagination, in Val’s right to use the material I gave her as she wanted to use it. I didn’t think she had a right to lie about the letter she claimed Helen had written her, but I was so prone to self-doubt at that time, that sometimes I wondered if I had misunderstood Helen all along, if she’d really wanted to quit. I wanted to be happy about everything to do with Val’s book, as a friend should be.

  And it’s a thrill to have anything to do with success. Like Val herself, her success made new enterprises seem more possible. I told my friends about it without disclosing everything, chuckling ruefully at Val’s wide-eyed soul, the omission of the politics, but dropping her name, regardless. It was fun—but I’ve never been good at fun. I agreed—only sometimes cringing inwardly—with the friends who told me how special the book was for me, in particular, for someone who was close to both Helen and Val. I was asked to reminisce in a women’s magazine about high school with Val and wrote a short, pleasant piece about Sidewalks and how the principal did whatever Valerie Benevento wanted.

  Meanwhile, Martha started school while Annie continued at the co-op daycare. Griff’s father had a heart attack—it was a frightening time, during which I at last began to feel close to the Griffin family. My mother had a heart attack—again, we worried, and we both became closer to my family. The last thing our parents needed was children with troubled marriages, and without consulting each other, Griff and I decided so definitely that we would not have trouble, that we stopped arguing for a while. In retrospect I see that we began then to establish the habit of having little to do with each other. I was startled to realize one day that I’d told two friends I’d finished my book about Wharton and—on the advice of the professor I had worked for—had mailed it to a publisher, but I hadn’t told Griff.

  I didn’t tell Val either. She and I were out of touch again. I didn’t seek her out, and she was always more interested in men than in any woman friend and maybe a little nervous about remarks she’d made in interviews, hints about Helen, not to mention her claim about a letter. “My sister babysat her,” she said in print once. “I wouldn’t say I was at her side every moment during the war years, of course.” Being close to a criminal was apparently good for book sales, good for Val’s reputation.

  A couple of years after Bright Morning of Pain came out, I was asked to write an essay of some length about it by a friend from graduate school who edited a small literary journal, The Rocky Hill Review, which was connected to a university. I was delighted. The journal is long gone now—one of those earnest, slightly stodgy but witty and well-written magazines that one suspects is read only by the contributors and their best friends. This was long before the internet, so I could say what I liked without being afraid it would go viral. No one would take me to task no matter what I said, not even Val.

  By then I’d published the Edith Wharton book. It sold modestly; I got a few respectful reviews in academic journals. I was asked to speak about Wharton at libraries and some small colleges, and when I paused for questions, people who’d discovered that I’d gone to school with Valerie Benevento sometimes asked about her. Nobody asked me about Helen Weinstein, who was regarded as Val’s friend, not mine. Asked about Val, I again and again described the literary club and how we put out a magazine and published her stories. I admitted to some conversations with Val when she was writing, and I was praised for helping her.

  So when my old friend asked for an essay, I was ready to tell the truth. I had something to say about Bright Morning of Pain itself, but I didn’t yet know what it was. In my essay for The Rocky Hill Review, I told the story of my friendship with Helen—our closeness, her transformation, my grief—and my relationship, early and later, with Val: how Val, as a young woman working in publishing, reconnected with me, how I told her the story of my friendship with Helen, and how she used our friendship in the book, putting a character who resembled herself in my place. I saw my piece as comparable to essays I found in dusty bound volumes of literary journals about long-dead novelists: an eyewitness account of how an author went about writing what she wrote, a modest, secondary account that someone might find useful. I didn’t say Val claimed to be Helen’s friend, nor that she wasn’t Helen’s friend, only that I was.

  As I wrote and revised my essay, I asked myself only two questions: Was it well-written? And was it true? I worked on it carefully and mailed it to the editor of the Review. I didn’t show it to Griff before I sent it. I rarely showed him anything I wrote, because his intensity about anything that touched on him, even remotely, kept him from judging my arguments on their own terms. But when the magazine arrived, I was excited. I left it in our living room. That night, while I was putting Martha and Annie to bed, Griff found and read my essay. I was singing to the children when he came into their bedroom, probably some sixties song by Joni Mitchell or Bob Dylan. Griff came in with his arms held stiffly at his sides, one hand grasping the journal, a finger acting as a bookmark. He thrust it in my direction, interrupting me. “You shouldn’t have done this, Olive.”

  “I’ll be out in a minute,” I said—furious—and he withdrew.

  When I came into the living room, before I could speak, he said, sounding like the principal he hadn’t yet become, “I know why you were tempted to write this, and I don’t blame you for being tempted, but you shouldn’t have done it.”

  “What do you know about writing essays?” I said.

  He was sitting and I was standing, always a bad arrangement. “Nothing,” he said. “But I know that I shouldn’t embarrass a friend.”

  “She’ll never see it.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Nobody will see it,” I stupidly insisted. I pointed out that I hadn’t condemned Val in the essay, only said what happened. It was about me—about knowing Helen and helping with a book. Writers and readers might find it interesting.

  “It was selfish,” he insisted. Like Helen, he was good at blaming himself—and like Helen, he held friends and family to the standards to which he held himself. He expected more of his daughters than they could manage, and now he was expecting more of me. I suppose he was hurt that I hadn’t told him.

  We spoke in harsh whispers, with the girls still awake in the next room. “How do you know it won’t be read?” he said.

  I was wrong about Rocky Hill Review, which was not read only by the contributors and their best friends. Or maybe somebody’s best friend had connections. Harper’s ran a piece on little magazines. It mentioned a poem here, a story there, and then it quoted my essay.

  The next thing I knew, I was on the phone with a New York Times reporter. “Yes,” I said. “It’s true.” My biography of Edith Wharton, published by a respectable press, made me reliable. Val, when told about my essay, said it lied both about my friendship with Helen and my co
nversations with Val—but I must have seemed more believable than she did. I’m sure that my editor, if asked, would have said I didn’t have enough imagination to invent such a story. I imagined her saying, “Grossman’s as honest as dust under the bed.”

  The media enjoy discovering that successful people are not what they have claimed to be. Suddenly, widely read articles pointed out what I’d always known: that Valerie Benevento invented Hannah Cohen, that Helen Weinstein had a political agenda, not just sexual desire, that Valerie Benevento had let the public think she was a former revolutionary when she was nothing of the kind. By then, it seemed, it was not reprehensible to be a former revolutionary, it was exciting; it was reprehensible to have pretended to be a revolutionary. For a couple of weeks in the eighties, Val Benevento was everyone’s favorite scoundrel.

  After I got over being astonished, I was furious with myself—again—for not realizing what I had been doing. I have never allowed myself to be quite that self-deceived since. I didn’t regret writing the essay, but I regretted doing it without having the courage to know I was doing it.

  Val called me up and told me I was evil, that her book was a work of the imagination and she had never said it wasn’t, that I was an envious bitch and she would have nothing further to do with me. She never did.

  Griff blamed me again, just when I most needed reassurance. “Anything in print may be read,” he pointed out with impeccable logic—though only a writer knows the extent to which what is in print, or even on the Web, nowadays—may be unread. Now I became, in Griff’s mind, not only unkind but reckless. I had risked Val’s happiness. I remembered Val’s plea, back when the book came out, to let her pretend Helen was her friend. I didn’t think I’d prevented Val from pretending—but maybe I had. The more I worried that Griff might be right, the angrier I was with him. It crossed my mind to wonder if it was Griff who’d sent the journal to the writer of the Harper’s essay, just to prove his point—and the fact that such an idea came to me shows how far we’d gone.

  I felt terrible about what I’d done, though baffled—didn’t I have some kind of right to describe my own life? How long could Val exploit Helen and me—endlessly? Val said I had humiliated her in public because I was self-righteous. When I had written the essay, I’d felt not morally superior, only misunderstood. I was someone too, and the wave of fame that had washed over Val had touched me negatively. I was officially nonexistent—there was no character in the book who resembled me, and the one who was closest was being taken as Val herself.

  Worse, my intensely principled friendship with Helen had become, in the book, a gossipy connection between two women who loved a man and thought of little else but him, while the political, moral, and philosophical issues Helen and her friends had struggled with were colorful background. The book offered the familiar, easy view of the sixties as a time of free love, patched jeans, music, and peace symbols stenciled on T-shirts. The war itself was missing from the book.

  Soon my essay and I were forgotten, but Val became publicly interesting again a year later, because—of all things—she died. She had been trying unsuccessfully to write a second novel, interrupted by a tempestuous life. There were men, some who were minor celebrities, some who hurt her. One or two were mildly unsavory; she was photographed, for example, with a politician who was accused of taking bribes. Then she got involved with a charity in Africa that rescued young girls from sex slavery. Val had made money from her book. She had a kind, sentimental heart. Since she couldn’t write, she had spare time, and she craved adventure. She agreed to go to Africa and serve as a spokesperson for this charity. Somewhere in central Africa, on a rutted road in the rain, she was killed in a bus accident.

  Again, Val and her book made headlines, and this time she was exonerated from her crimes. The public decided that creative people, however erratic, mean well. Valerie Benevento’s behavior in dying had been both noble and risky, and she was retroactively understood as someone who’d always been noble, if unthinking: writing her novel, she had wanted to have befriended a troubled young revolutionary so badly that she’d imagined that she had done so. Nobody blamed me, exactly. Insofar as anyone remembered my essay, I was too dull and methodical to understand the Vals of the world—which isn’t far from the truth.

  I had regretted that Val was angry and unhappy, and, of course, I felt worse when she died. And confused, because I was also glad she was dead. And grief-stricken. I would never figure out how to be friends with either Helen or Val. Griff made it all worse. These were the years when Griff became first a coordinator of programs for gifted children and then a principal, though he didn’t yet have the small and highly effective school for troubled kids that he eventually founded, a place where he could be creative, not just hardworking and rigorous. He had done well in his profession, and his reward, during the years of our bad time, was more paperwork, more long meetings downtown—often with cynics and time-servers, whom he loathed. At home, he was suspicious of me—uncomfortable with my literary concerns, uncomfortable with my friends. His parents would never value his teaching as much as they’d have valued the ministry—or so he thought. He still didn’t read Bright Morning of Pain, and in his imagination, the character of Harry was someone violent without cause who had indirectly killed a promising young woman.

  So once Val was dead, Griff and I, according to him, were all but murderers together: he’d killed Helen, and I’d killed Val. Though he didn’t quite say it, he made clear that he thought that if it hadn’t been for the controversy, Val would have been quietly at home writing a novel instead of riding on that bus. I thought it was unlikely that Val would ever have written a second novel.

  I’d always loved Griff for his courage and his moral sense as much as anything, but when that seriousness was turned against me, it looked like pride and a wish to control. I almost hated him. He was the same Griff, but not in a way I could use. He often worked evenings, leaving me alone with the children. He was stern with them and spoke to me, I told a friend, as if I were an incompetent employee. “What do you want?” she said, and I said, “I want him to go away.”

  He didn’t want to separate. “I love you,” he said solemnly.

  “It doesn’t feel like it.”

  “I do, though. I do.”

  Maybe he did love me, but I couldn’t trust or love him after he made me ashamed of that essay, which was not shameful. That I might write what I had soberly decided I should write was part of what was holy to me. It makes me angry all over again to think of him telling me I should not have told that truth. It may seem like a strange fault to cause a long marital rift. Griff was sexually faithful, except when we’d both decided not to be, when he lived elsewhere. He was honest and hardworking, and he didn’t drink or hit me. But he made me feel ashamed of that essay, and I told myself that was why we separated. The real reason was related but different. Helen killed someone and died; Val told the world that what Helen had done was trivial. I blamed Griff so I wouldn’t notice how bad I felt about Helen and how Val had made it worse.

  After months of argument about whether he loved me, I insisted on a separation. He said he couldn’t do this to his parents, and that was one reason that when he at last went, he moved upstairs, where the apartment happened to be vacant. His family didn’t have to know.

  The girls told their grandparents immediately, of course, and the Griffins weren’t surprised. Griff’s actual parents were more observant than the ones he thought he had.

  I made him buy a bed and a table and helped him move. I gave him dishes and pots. He kept following me back down, and I changed the locks. At last he saw that this was real, and he bought beds for Martha and Annie, who were ten and seven in 1983, the year Val died. A few months later, Griff moved out. The children liked climbing the stairs to Daddy’s house, which they did on their own, with a parent watching at each end. They stayed with him Friday and Saturday nights and spent Saturdays with him. I’d hear them coming down the stairs, the back and forth of inte
nt conversation, sometimes laughter. Alone with them, his sense of responsibility took over, and he was apparently kinder and more fun than I’d dared to hope. I expected to be lonely when the kids were upstairs and tried to be out of the house in the evenings, but there came a day when staying home was the most tempting option, and I discovered that I loved hearing the girls’ footsteps above my head. I knew they were fine, but I was free.

  I didn’t miss Griff or the children. Like many parents, I had a solitude deficit: loneliness wouldn’t be an issue for a long while. I remembered the years when I thought I should be in Helen’s apartment and also wanted to leave, to forget the war and read nineteenth-century novels. I recognized that same wish for solitude and the delicious feeling when I finally got it.

  Griff had never wanted to be apart and still didn’t. He had too much pride to ask me, each time I saw him, whether he could move back. It wasn’t a topic to discuss with the children around, anyway, and the children were nearly always around. He didn’t mind giving me money. He earned far more than I did; I think it was a comfort that I needed him financially. The house remained his as well as mine, and we each contributed to the mortgage payments, but he put in more.

  One day, when we’d been apart for a year, Griff asked if we could have dinner alone together. I hired a sitter, and we met at a restaurant where the tables were far enough apart that we could talk. I thought he’d suggest getting back together, but I’d misjudged him. It was an Italian place, and he studied the spaghetti he twirled on his fork before saying that he was moving out of the upstairs apartment. “I would like to have the chance to ask a lady to dinner,” he said.