Conscience

by Alice Mattison

  “I was sure Helen didn’t like Val when we were in high school. I don’t think they were friends.” I paused. “I’m not sure.”

  “Oh, poor Val,” Jean said.

  I felt a little better. “Helen would have told me not to talk to her at all.”

  “Why did you?”

  “I was lonely. Griff—Griff is a great man but little help in a crisis,” I said, and Jean smiled. I picked up my chopsticks again. “Val was never as bad in reality as in my imagination. I’d think of her as shallow, and then she’d say something that wasn’t shallow. It was—” I paused to stir wasabi into my soy sauce. “It was not deep, you understand. Being with her was not like being with Helen—plunging in over your head and thinking you might drown, every time she spoke. Still, Val’s remarks were not puddles. They were—” I paused.

  “Up to your chin?” Jean said. She had eaten most of her sushi.

  “Mmm, no, not chin. Rarely chin.”

  “Bosom?”

  “Bosom. Showing cleavage. She had a lovely bosom, and Helen didn’t,” I said.

  We were silent, appreciating that.

  “I like Hannah in the book,” Jean said. “Your friendly local revolutionary. She doesn’t mean to kill anyone. She shoots the cop because he’s aiming at the man she loves. She gives him back to her friend. She’s noble.”

  “And you want me to talk to a nice, friendly audience like that,” I said, “with what’s her name’s daughter saying her mother loved the book and everybody nodding—you want me to say that Helen was a terrorist and I loved her anyway, and Val should have made Hannah a terrorist? I couldn’t say that.”

  I couldn’t say it at the friendly panel discussion—but at last I knew what my essay would say. Months of indecision gave way. I smiled at Jean, who had no idea why, and was still arguing.

  “You’re as bad as Joshua,” she was saying. “You’ve got some wrongheaded idea and you won’t let it go.”

  I wondered if it was now permissible to talk about Griff—and about Jean herself. But it was pleasant to discuss my own concerns. I was planning my essay. She hadn’t convinced me that I should have spoken differently at the panel, but though I remained someone who believed in the imagination above all, I knew now that Val had lied about her subject. She wasn’t just imaginative; she told lies. The alternative—the truth—was not something Val could have written. Helen was lovable in life but hard to like, especially when seen from the viewpoint of the twenty-first century, when principled people whose beliefs permit them to perform acts of violence against uninvolved parties are not the semi-familiar enemies of the Vietnam era but the Boston Marathon bombers and the people who perpetrated 9/11. Helen Weinstein was my principled, lovable friend, I was thinking—and she killed a man on purpose.

  So it was probably with feeling leftover from the other topic that I said, “You’re so sure you’re right and Griff is wrong?” I hadn’t quite made up my mind about that. I didn’t like the way he talked to Jean and about her, and I didn’t like his threatening to fire her, but I thought he was probably correct that she shouldn’t run overnights on her third floor.

  She ate her sushi. She used more wasabi in her soy sauce than I did. She used it up.

  “I’m right, and Griff is wrong,” she said. “I know what I’m up to, and the board doesn’t get it.”

  “The man died,” I said.

  “But not because of the third-floor program,” Jean said “Because of Dunbar. We didn’t train him properly. We didn’t supervise him properly. The program works.”

  “I’m sure it’s good,” I said quickly. “But don’t you think—well, don’t you think it’s just not possible to do it now?”

  “You don’t know how this simple thing we do makes a difference,” Jean said, “and there is absolutely no reason why what happened before should happen again, or why anything should happen again.”

  “You said yourself that everything’s harder at night.”

  “But I learned something. Dunbar learned. Paulette learned—Paulette! She’ll never be the same. Arturo was her lover. She’s wrecked. If I didn’t let them all figure out ways to do what we have to do—”

  The next thing I knew, we were in an argument—almost as if I were Griff.

  “But what if someone else—What if something else goes wrong?” I said.

  “It won’t.”

  “Jean, that’s too hard, to be so sure.”

  “One accident and it’s all over?”

  “If it were me, yes,” I said, “because two accidents and you’d all go to jail.”

  Her voice got quieter, as Griff’s does when he’s extremely angry. “Then I guess you’d put a lot of issues ahead of our clients,” she said. “If you and Joshua Griffin have other priorities, maybe you’d just better stay away from us.”

  We were almost finished eating, and, apparently, I’d just destroyed a friendship. She looked around—she was going to signal for the check.

  “I don’t want to choose between you and Griff,” I said.

  “Well, it’s clear whom you’d choose—not that I blame you for siding with your husband.”

  “It’s almost unheard of in my marriage,” I said. “Will you let me think a minute?”

  “What’s the point?”

  The waiter put the check on our table. “Can I have another glass of wine?” I said. “Jean?”

  He picked up the check, apologized, and stood there waiting for her answer.

  At last, I reached across the table and touched her arm. “I’m tired,” I said. “I’m not thinking well. Give me another chance.”

  “Tea, please,” she said to the waiter.

  “No problem,” he said.

  He walked away, and she turned to me. “What?” she said.

  “I hate ‘no problem,’” I said. “Of course it’s not a problem! He pours wine and brings tea all evening.”

  “He didn’t mean anything bad.”

  “I know that. Sorry.”

  “So, I have to sit here and drink tea and continue this argument for what reason?” she said.

  I lowered my face and closed my eyes. “Swear you’ll be my friend and I’ll let you go home.”

  “I’ll be your friend,” Jean said. How long had Helen been dead? I had finally found a friend I couldn’t do without.

  “But you just said—”

  The wine and tea came and made a difference. Jean, with her scraggly hair and aging forehead, was brave, I saw. What had happened was a series of accidents—it would be superstitious to stop because of that.

  “I care about you more than I love your clients,” I said. “I don’t want anything bad to happen.”

  “Thank you,” Jean said. “But you’ve got to trust me. Don’t tell me I’m doing the wrong thing.”

  I gulped some more wine. “Okay,” I said.

  Then Jean sat back. “I think Griff—mind if I call him Griff?”

  I smiled.

  “I think Griff wants me to do it, whatever he says.”

  I too moved my chair back a little, as if for a wider view.

  “Do you know it’s his fault that we started the overnight program?” she said. She explained how at a board meeting, at which she didn’t put the issue on the agenda, didn’t even mention it, Griff had insisted on discussing it—having been informed by our nefarious Zak that Jean’s staff wanted such a program. He got her so incensed that she defended the idea, and other board members joined in. “It’s his doing,” she said.

  “He blamed himself when that man died,” I said.

  “Arturo,” Jean said. “Yes. Nobody I know is blameless.”

  “What was he like?” I asked. “Arturo.”

  “Oh,” Jean said, “he was odd—one of those people who seems dense and may be dense, but maybe not. The first time I saw him, I was afraid of him. He was sober but went back to drinking. That’s the tragedy.”

  “What did he look like?”

  “Big,” she said. “A white man. Bulky. M
oved slowly—sweet, once you knew him. In his fifties.”

  We both fell silent. She looked at me, and an expression I didn’t recognize crossed her face. “What?” I said.

  “I think I convinced you,” she said. “I rarely convince anybody of anything.”

  “This time you did.” In fact, she’d convinced me twice.

  We sat there looking at each other, not speaking. Jean’s tangled hair was more rumpled than usual, and now and then she brushed it out of her eyes. Her eyes looked happy. The place was quiet, and I realized that two talky groups had left, one after the other. Behind Jean, I saw the waiter wipe down their tables with care, first one, then the other, bending solicitously over them. His back was to me, and I couldn’t see what he used—a sponge, a rag. Beyond him was the big front window and light from streetlamps. Jean touched my arm and nodded, and we signaled to him. It was time to go.

  I drove home and had another argument with Griff, about the third floor of Barker Street and whether he should try to fire Jean. But the renovation in our kitchen was almost done, and we needed to choose a color for the walls, so after a while we stopped arguing. Pale yellow. The next morning, Barnaby ran to greet the carpenters, getting set for their workday in the kitchen, but they all—there were four of them—could be heard making much of the dog. Over breakfast at the big table in the living room, Griff said, “I was hasty. You’re right. I’ll cancel that board meeting.”

  That day, the carpenters made a racket, so I took my laptop to the communal privacy of a coffee shop. I bought a medium house blend and a cappuccino muffin and began writing my essay.

  Author’s Note

  Warm thanks to Sandi Shelton, Donald Hall, April Bernard, and Edward Mattison, who read drafts and offered useful suggestions; to my loyal and brilliant agents, Zoë Pagnamenta and Alison Lewis; and to my editor at Pegasus Books, Katie McGuire, who understood what I was trying to do, and seemed to see through my sentences to what I had so far omitted to put into them. My thanks too to Derek Thornton at Faceout Studio, who designed the cover.

  New Haven people and organizations in this book are imaginary, except for the Institute Library and the New Haven Independent. The Independent’s actual stories are checked more carefully than the one mentioned in this novel.

  In the late 1960s, I briefly met an idealistic young social worker. I next saw her name a few years later in newspaper headlines, when her resistance to the Vietnam War had turned violent. I never met her again, but this novel results in part from my lifelong curiosity about how such a transformation might occur, and what its effects might be on people who knew and loved the revolutionary.

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  CONSCIENCE

  Pegasus Books Ltd

  148 West 37th Street, 13th Floor

  New York, NY 10018

  Copyright © 2018 by Alice Mattison

  First Pegasus Books hardcover edition August 2018

  Interior design by Sabrina Plomitallo-González, Pegasus Books

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in whole or in part without written permission from the publisher, except by reviewers who may quote brief excerpts in connection with a review in a newspaper, magazine, or electronic publication; nor may any part of this book be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or other, without written permission from the publisher.

  ISBN: 978-1-68177-789-4

  ISBN: 978-1-68177-840-2 (e-book)

  Distributed by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.