Conscience

by Alice Mattison

  “I’m going with Helen Weinstein,” I said.

  “You knew about it? Why didn’t you say so?”

  “Want to come with us?” I said, hastening past the embarrassing moment. Helen, I tried to persuade myself, would be glad to hear that Val was antiwar.

  “Sure. It starts at six,” she said. She announced that we’d go straight into the city after school, so as to eat first. I—even I—would not have thought of food, and it would have been a matter of principle for Helen to remain hungry.

  Explaining all this the next day, I talked fast. “You can have a glass of water while we stuff our faces,” I said—surely a mistake. We didn’t acknowledge that Helen didn’t eat.

  She was silent. “It’s not a party,” she said then. “Does Val think it’s for fun?”

  “That’s not fair.”

  “Go with her.”

  That made me angry, but I understood. Protest was sacred. If Val was involved, it would be an ersatz protest, a glamorous protest that serious people should ignore. I agreed with Helen—but compromise seemed easier than trying to explain to Val how Helen and I felt.

  “Anyway,” she continued, “my parents need me in the store after school. I’ll see you at the Waldorf.”

  I knew they didn’t need her in the store, but I gave in, remembering that if Helen and I went together, I would get no supper.

  Helen was exhausting but correct. The rally was not trivial. Vietnamese people were being killed, and their villages were being destroyed—the trees knocked down, the land left bare. The boys in my class who didn’t have the grades for college were grim with the approach of graduation, knowing that without student deferments, as they turned eighteen they’d be drafted and quite possibly killed.

  Still, it was a relief to go with Val. Bundled in scarves and hats, we took the subway into Manhattan, and she led me to a luncheonette where we ate hamburgers and drank Cokes. I forgot to leave a tip, and Val sent me back. By the time we reached the Waldorf, others surrounded us—small groups with printed posters or homemade signs. I didn’t see Helen.

  I thought we might spot President Johnson getting out of a limousine and going inside, but someone said he had been brought in the back way. It was hard to believe he was there.

  When it was almost over and Val and I were moving stiffly toward the subway, I saw Helen standing by herself, staring at the door of the elegant hotel. I took Val by the arm and dragged her to Helen, then linked my other arm through hers. Helen resisted, but I didn’t let go, and we took the subway home together. Val found a seat, but Helen and I stood, and then Helen dropped her face into my shoulder and cried. I was holding the pole with one hand, steadying my big bag with the other, but I tried to make my arm enclose her, and my fingers stroked her curls.

  “We accomplished nothing,” Helen said the next day. Four thousand people had attended the rally, she said, but Johnson had never seen us. She’d read in the paper that he’d seen only one man—carrying a sign that read “Bomb Hanoi.” The newspaper had printed the president’s speech, in which he explained why objections were incorrect: the war would merely prevent North Vietnam from taking over South Vietnam. Our country would nobly help the South Vietnamese remain democratic.

  I thought Helen was wrong—that gradually people would come to agree with us—but she was right. The war worsened for many years, though protests forced Johnson not to run again in 1968. Nixon won, and the war continued.

  Two weeks after Griff had contrived to lose my copy of Bright Morning of Pain, I had done nothing to replace it, and despite his protestations, neither had he. Either of us might have procured a cheap old copy that would arrive packed by hand in a used, cut-down carton. I was writing about some novels written in England after the First World War, but I ordinarily acquired whatever I needed for other projects promptly and established off-center piles on the big table in our living room. I continued enjoying the delusion that if my copy of Bright Morning was gone, I couldn’t write about it.

  Griff was busy, certainly. He was invariably overcommitted at school and served on two boards, both going through changes requiring extra meetings. He was often asked to speak at public events. But I thought his tardiness might have to do with how far he’d read when he lost the book: he had been near the end. He had stayed up late, then gone to bed when the suspense was greatest. I didn’t remember the structure of Val’s book precisely, but I knew what happened at the end. Griff was afraid to finish Bright Morning of Pain.

  During those weeks, he was often gone for dinner or even breakfast. He’d get up early, buy coffee on his way to school, and have time to work in his office before anyone else arrived. When Griff was absent, I ordinarily reveled in solitude—or solitude with dog. Not this time. I wanted him to worry about me, I noticed one morning, while I ate breakfast by myself. I wanted solicitous inquiries about whether the loss of Val’s book was ruining my work life, whether the deadline for the essay was imminent. I wanted him to be curious about what I was working on—the novels about which I was writing an essay, the book I was editing for my job. I wanted the approval conferred by curiosity.

  And then, as I had these thoughts, I heard his key in the lock, his step in the hall. Our kitchen had a small square table shoved into a corner, and two chairs. When we ate meals together, we sat at right angles to each other, on the sides of the table that weren’t against walls, with an imaginary diagonal line separating our personal plates or mugs from the box of cereal, the coffeepot, or the platter of food. Alone, I spread out, the dog at my feet. When he came in, I was sitting with my feet on his chair. My food, as well as the New York Times, covered the entire table.

  He said, “Hi,” and began rummaging in the cupboard. I took my feet off his chair. Griff likes instant oatmeal. He put water into a bowl without measuring, shook in the oatmeal, put it into the microwave, and punched buttons. I would never touch that stuff. “I told you I’m running for president of the Barker board, right?” he said.

  He hadn’t told me. “You don’t need that!” I stood, as if to act, then sat down again.

  “If I don’t, the present guy will stay. A good man, but terrible. This smiley Ingrid wants to do it, but I don’t trust her, and anyway, he’d win. He won’t bother to run if I want it. So, I have to.” The microwave chimed. “Nobody else will stand up to Jean Argos.”

  “She’s so bad?” I tried to remember if I’d ever met Jean Argos. I’d heard him say the name often enough.

  He laughed. “Oh, she’s scary. Drives down the hill at you with her high beams on and her horn blasting.” He put milk, brown sugar, and raisins on his oatmeal. “That’s not fair. But no executive director should push any board around.”

  “You push everyone around. Is she fiercer than you?”

  “Much,” he said.

  “Have I met her? What does she look like?”

  “Like anyone. Dyed blonde, fifties.”

  “Like anyone?”

  “A classic director of an agency.” He tucked a dish towel into the neck of his shirt, arranging it like a big apron, then ate his oatmeal standing up, though I had taken my feet off his chair. Instead of making him look silly, the dish towel bib made him even more dignified.

  “A lesbian?” I said. Several women I knew with jobs like that were lesbians.

  “I never asked her.”

  He left quickly—as if he’d come only because our house was the most geographically convenient source of microwaved oatmeal—and I was disappointed in myself. I had wasted our first conversation in days by talking about what didn’t matter. I didn’t care about Jean Argos. Griff and I both knew too well how to be offhand, but that tone was an inaccurate measure of what we were. We had fallen into sharp chatter, like people who only just happened to share a kitchen, as if we had no right to strong opinions around each other. It was appalling.

  I didn’t want Griff to extend himself still further into the doing of good, which already used up too much of him. Educated, civic-minded black peop
le in New Haven are much in demand—on boards and commissions, as spokespersons, candidates, campaign managers, and board presidents—and he’d told me he had to be careful not to feel flattered when someone phoned to say he was the best person for some job. What had become of that rueful, insightful grasp of his place in our city? Griff did matter, and I was glad he knew that. But when he decided that he was the only one who could do something, I’d learned to be suspicious. I was angry that he hadn’t talked to me about this. He hadn’t even remembered whether he had or not. It was the opposite of wanting to borrow my book—and more like losing it. I surprised myself by thinking that I should have burst into tears. I don’t cry much. Thinking about it, I actually did cry—didn’t burst into tears, but enough to have to wipe my eyes. Not only had Griff lost it, but after initial dismay, he seemed to have forgotten he’d lost it.

  I stood to wash my mug, feeling even worse—though enjoying the slight satisfaction that comes from understanding what’s wrong. The mug was handmade, dark blue, with ridged circles around the outside, a present from an author whose book on ceramics I’d edited.

  Then I left for work. I was working on a book about weaving. While I work on a book, I become an expert, and shortly after I finish, I again know nothing. I’d been hired originally at this house that specializes in books about crafts because in addition to being literate, I could truthfully say that I knew how to knit and sew, though I remarked even back then that I hadn’t done either for years.

  “You never forget,” the woman who hired me said, but the last time I picked up my daughter Annie’s knitting project, I had forgotten.

  The spring when Griff lost Bright Morning of Pain, I could say a good deal about warping a loom, and because weaving was even more complicated intellectually than some of the crafts about which I edited books—I was astonished at how many ways there are to weave—I found this book particularly challenging and engrossing. Because I thought about weaving techniques all day, I was free to think freshly of literature at night or on weekends, and now that I had cut back my hours at the job, I could have spent a couple of days a week on my own work. I should have been able to do it well. But I wasn’t able.

  Joshua Griffin

  Wouldn’t it have been reasonable to purchase a larger table years ago? We’re not rich, but that rich we are. The kitchen is small, but there is room for a larger table. Or it would be possible to eat at the table in the living room, if it weren’t covered with books and papers 98 percent of the time. She has a room upstairs to work in, but she works at the big table in the living room—and I understand that. I like that. But we could have bought another table—either for the kitchen or the living room. I might have said, I will no longer perch on a corner of the table. Or we could break down the wall to Martha’s old room, have a good big kitchen and get a good big table. A likely idea.

  Sometimes I look to see if she’s taking the clothes she puts on out of a suitcase. I hang my clothes on decent wooden hangers in a decent closet, because I know where I live and I own my house, but her clothes are in piles on the floor, as if she’s getting ready to travel. The basics, the basics—is it a quirk of mine, a quirk of mine as a black man to say here is the proper way to live, let us live in the proper ways, cleaning ourselves and our possessions, making room, smoothing what is rough until we get no splinters, or else we dishonor ourselves?

  Making a kitchen in which we can drink coffee while facing each other, with room for bowls and spoons.

  I parked the car at the coffee shop, walked in, opened my mouth to ask for a medium coffee and a cranberry muffin, then turned, saying, “I am sorry,” to the baffled barista, who recognized me from yesterday and the day before that, and was reaching for the cranberry muffin. I left the coffee shop, returned to the car, drove to the house, and went inside. Her legs stretched across the chair. Her legs stretched across the chair. As if she was glad to have the extra room.

  How can a man who is helpless before the quandaries of his own life exert influence on children in trouble? The boy yesterday. My father, my father, my father, he said—how he is helpless before whoever this father is. I pictured my own father, but surely his—younger than I, an unjust man who is a victim of injustice, a man with prison in his past—is nothing like mine. I urged and advised, provided reasons, provided rationales, provided solutions. He left relieved. I should have said, Let us mourn together the death of what you want to have with your father, what I wanted to have with my father—who is dead—and what I want to have with my wife.

  If I’m not careful, I’ll be president of the board of Barker Street. My pride disgusts me.

  Olive Grossman

  Helen Weinstein took Latin for the first time as a freshman at Barnard. I had studied it in high school, but Helen, atypically, was afraid. Few students learned Latin even then, but she believed she should, and couldn’t. I assumed Helen regarded me as sweetly inferior in intellect and skills, but when I saw her in those first months of freshman year, it was supposedly to help her with Latin. We both lived with our parents and commuted to college as we had to high school—but one of us was at Barnard, the women’s college at Columbia University, way up on Manhattan’s West Side, and the other was at Brooklyn, a public college inconveniently located, even for many Brooklynites, an hour and a half or more by subway from Barnard.

  “Explain,” Helen would say, thrusting her page of exercises under my nose, and I would discourse on how the farmer, agricola, became agricolae when a horse belonged to him, while the horse, equus, became equum when the point was that the farmer owned it. I wondered what was on her mind for which Latin was the excuse to see me. My college work was not onerous, but despite pretty buildings, Brooklyn College was an insufficient destination: going to class felt like running an errand, not joining a community of scholars. I didn’t know what to do with myself between classes. Living with my family, I had no social life.

  Helen made friends at school, even though she didn’t live in the dorms. At home, I gathered, she was a boarder who came and went, shutting herself in her room to study. Her parents, darting up from the store and rushing back, apparently considered Helen and her slightly younger brother a project they’d finished, except for tuition payments.

  But my brother and sister were in elementary school, so our household still existed primarily for the care of children—inoculations, teachers’ conferences, outgrown shoes. I was an assistant adult. I did homework at the kitchen table or in a big chair in the living room, as I always had, interrupting myself to participate in whatever was going on. I was jealous of Helen’s brooding self-discipline, her distinguished private college, and her adult, solitary days, yet despite myself, I encouraged my family to treat me as someone whose life was still primarily with them. Helen was coming to know Manhattan, the exotic borough, while I was stuck in Brooklyn, the boring one. I preferred not to hear about what she did.

  Inserting my key into the lock in our apartment door, I’d often recognize her voice and discover her watching my mother cook dinner, talking. Helen would insist that I take a quick walk with her, or she’d tell me her news in a corner of the living room. She’d have brought her Latin text, but we’d soon put it aside. Now I can’t forget those unexplained visits. I should have behaved differently—and maybe everything would have been different. I should have had the sense to feel confident about my own life, confident enough that maybe she’d have continued to think that what I thought and did might be something she too could think and do.

  Helen had joined an antiwar group and expressed surprise that I hadn’t. I said, “I’m still figuring out where the library is,” and she made an impatient noise with her mouth.

  She told me less about the political group than about a program she’d signed up for, tutoring poor kids after school. She’d locate their apartments and sit down with the children amid crying brothers and sisters and harried parents, trying to teach them reading or arithmetic. I asked, “Are there bugs?” and she scolded me. Like me, Helen
spent much of her time on public transportation or with children, but she seemed adult, productive, and unselfish, while the same actions—deprived of meaning because they took place in my own neighborhood and my own house—made me pathetic. So I didn’t argue enough.

  I’d hear not just about the children but about their parents. Adeline understood her kids in a way Helen’s parents never could, she told me. Adeline wasn’t afraid to laugh, and once she cried openly. Adeline was the mother of a girl called Tania. There was also a little brother who was not Helen’s charge, but she was teaching him letters and numbers.

  One late fall afternoon, we were perched next to each other on the broad curved arm of the sofa in my parents’ living room. Our arms in their sweaters touched as we gestured, talking while looking out the window at rain. My mother came through the room and said, “Something’s wrong with my chairs?” but we ignored her. We had begun talking where we were, studying the rain to see if we wanted to walk, and there we remained.

  “I could have shot her,” Helen was saying. I hadn’t been paying attention.

  “Who?”

  “Adeline. I said ‘Adeline.’”

  “I’m sorry. I was looking at the rain.”

  “She yelled at Godfrey for coloring a horse green. She said he should know better.”

  “I guess he never saw a horse,” I said.

  “That’s not my point. He knows they’re not green!” Her voice turned sarcastic. “Even black kids know horses aren’t green, Olivia!”

  “That’s the three-year-old? The little brother?”

  “Four. He’s four.”

  “Four,” I said evenly, trying to avoid an argument. “I don’t remember what kids know at four.”