Conscience

by Alice Mattison

  I had heard about this. “I thought having an entrance at the bottom was a good thing,” I said. “So it’s not just for students.”

  “Yeah, separate entrance for the ghetto, so they can lock it when they get tired of black faces. Tearing up the park for the benefit of outsiders.”

  I felt a moment of embarrassment for Helen—did she have a right to use the word “outsiders”?—but put my feelings aside, watching her methodically adding milk and honey to our tea. I pulled a chair out from the table, arranged my coat around its back, and sat down.

  Before, when we weren’t out in the wind, Helen and I were in school, in public places, or in our parents’ apartments. “I love this,” I said too loudly, waving an arm. The tea was hot, strong, and sweet, and I wanted to move in. Maybe throw Angie out. But I didn’t want to think about those photographs and what we had to do to stop the war or about a gym that would be bad for Negroes or blacks or Afro Americans or whoever they were. I wanted us to be happy people drinking tea in a warm apartment. We were finally adults.

  The doorbell rang before the banana bread was done, and Helen admitted Daniel. He was a boyish, light-skinned black man with a big Afro that was brown, paler at its edges, so he had an ethereal look. She led him into the kitchen (“This is Olivia,” she said firmly), and he smiled at me while reaching from behind her to take her into his arms, then turning her shoulders so she faced him, pressing her face into his chest. It was the first time I saw Helen touched by a man, and she was a strange mix of child and wanton woman. She pushed back instead of burrowing in, but I thought it was not distaste but a need to take charge herself, and then, indeed, she turned again and drew his hands in front of her, where they might have chastely hugged but instead lay on her breasts.

  Daniel, at first glance, was the perfect boyfriend for Helen—like her, someone who had never been a teenager, having moved directly from childhood to adulthood. The tea made me want to love everything, and I was moved by the way he touched her. He spoke in a hurried, intense whisper: “I am really glad to meet you.” Or, “I most definitely want banana bread.” It came out of the oven, and we waited just until it was cool enough that Helen could take it out of the pan. We ate it. Angie ambled back in and nodded at Daniel. She picked the crust from the pan and ate it.

  I assumed the second roommate wasn’t home until she appeared, a tall girl, also with glasses, but with coiled hair. “I overslept,” she said. “Now I have to get out of here.” She stood next to the table, ignoring Daniel and me, breaking off pieces of banana bread and nibbling. “I have to write that thing.”

  “What are you writing?” I asked.

  She looked at me. “You mean who the hell am I, or what am I saying about the war that I didn’t say yesterday?” She wore a heavy black sweater—big enough for a large man—on which the sleeves had been rolled several times. Her arms were long and thin, with narrow hands she frequently raised to brush hair off her face. When she did that, the clumsily rolled cuffs dropped along her forearms, and without noticing, she would shift one of the sleeves a little, or unroll and reroll the cuff.

  “The second,” I said, though I didn’t know who she was, besides being Helen’s roommate. It turned out that she wrote pamphlets for the local chapter of Students for a Democratic Society. Maybe she thought I should have heard of her. I wasn’t angry or hurt by her tone, just curious—admiring her air of significance, her looks. She was not rushing out, but she didn’t sit down.

  “Those photos will keep me busy for a while,” she said, more to Helen than to me. “Reaction from Europe, all that. We’re putting the worst one on a pamphlet.”

  She stretched out her arm toward Helen’s head and mimed aiming a gun, and as if it appeared behind her thin arm with that big, lumpy woolen sleeve hanging off it, I saw again the black-and-white photograph I’d seen in the newspaper and on television the week before: the unbending arm of a South Vietnamese general stretching a pistol toward a young Vietcong prisoner with mussed, straight black hair and a checked short-sleeved shirt, his face tense but not terrified. In the previous picture, an American Marine guards the man in the checked shirt. In the following picture, the man in the checked shirt crumples, dead.

  Barb—someone said her name—held her arm stretched out for a while, and Helen looked up and returned to drinking her tea. Her hands were around the mug, not on the handle. Her feet were on the seat of her chair, her knees drawn up. Helen had sliced most of the banana bread but hadn’t taken a piece, which didn’t surprise me.

  They were all talking now. Not paying close attention, I looked at the walls, which had cracked yellow paint that looked like the topmost of ten or twelve layers. The windows looked painted shut, but a draft came past the edges of the steamy panes. There was cracked green-and-yellow linoleum on the floor. Years earlier, it had been new, and a grandmother had cooked soup for her large family in this kitchen. She spoke what—Italian? Spanish? Yiddish?

  Angie said, “But we’re saying something. They don’t hear us, but we’re saying something.”

  “I get that, I get that,” Daniel said. Then he said something different. “We have tried that.”

  I waited to find out from this young man with his innocent look what they had tried and who had tried it. I thought Daniel was our age, but as I listened, I realized he was older, a veteran of the Civil Rights Movement who had taken time between high school and college. What they had tried, I slowly understood, what had not worked, was nonviolent protest. Daniel was thinking about carrying a gun.

  “That’s stupid,” Helen said, looking up sharply.

  “Baby,” Daniel said.

  “Yeah, you’ve tried everything else, but you can think of new things. Or you can try everything else again.” Helen leaned forward, her voice raised. “That’s just what they want. Carry a gun, someone shoots, you all get killed. We all get killed. End of protest.”

  “Oh, don’t give me that,” Angie said. The argument was more complicated than I had thought, and I figured it out only later. Angie didn’t like Daniel and thought he was simpleminded about guns, but she too was tired of nonviolence. She was interested in protesters in California, who smashed windows and committed other acts of vandalism but didn’t carry guns.

  “Are the cops around here violent?” I said. “They’ve been peaceful when I’ve marched.”

  Nobody answered and I felt like an idiot. Helen was crying. Her nose ran and her eyes streamed, but she didn’t dig in her pocket for something to blow her nose with. She didn’t even wipe her face with her arm. Then, as she cried and snuffled, she reached for a piece of banana bread. It broke as she took it, and she ate what was in her hand quickly, put the fragments that had fallen onto the table into her mouth, and then reached for another piece.

  I stood. “Don’t go!” Helen said.

  I didn’t want to be there. “Where’s the bathroom?” I said, an excuse for standing up. I did need a bathroom. Barb said, “I’m leaving. I’ll show you,” and I followed her from the kitchen and saw where she pointed down a hall. In the living room, Helen’s things were crammed behind a sofa: a single mattress, a bookcase made of bricks and boards. The bathroom was like the rest of the apartment: thirty years earlier, someone had been proud of it. The floor was tiled in chipped black-and-white trapezoids in concentric circles.

  I washed my hands and tried to decide which towel was Helen’s. It seemed unpleasant to use the towels of her combative roommates. If I stayed, I’d have to let myself think freely about the war. I had dealt with my horror by trying not to think about it much or about how little I’d done. We all felt a responsibility then, though in retrospect it seems foolish that we ascribed so much power to ourselves. I’d never thought about the questions these people were debating, never thought to question the tactics that were announced by the leaders of organizations I joined, never wondered who started a group or why. When I marched, I thought we were spontaneously expressing rage. Now I saw the obvious: someone had decided that rage might
best be expressed by marching, and not some other activity. Helen’s towel, I decided, was the fluffy green one, the one that looked as if it might have come from her parents’ apartment.

  When I returned to the kitchen, I intended to pick up my coat and put it on. But Barb—she had not left—was sitting in my chair, opposite Helen. She’d turned the chair at a right angle to the table, and her long legs stuck out into the room. When she did leave, her legs seemed to announce, she would go fast. My coat was squashed behind her, and it was too hard to claim it. Angie was in another chair, and Daniel sat on a high wooden seat with steps that swung out, a contraption I’d seen in my grandparents’ apartments. It was painted in scratched and marred yellow paint. The four of them, it seemed, had been left by ancestors—somebody’s ancestors, anybody’s ancestors—as the unlikely responsible parties, the people who now had to make things right. For a moment, before my skepticism and irony returned, I was awestruck by their willingness.

  The banana bread was almost gone.

  “This is our ally!” Angie said.

  “Yup.” Barb’s voice became louder and more sarcastic. “The general is the guy we’re fighting for. All those dead soldiers—this was the worst week of the war for us, did you know that?” She meant the South Vietnamese general in the photographs, the man who shot the Vietcong soldier. I was startled that she said “us.”

  “So who cares about a fucking gymnasium?” Angie said. It was the first time I’d ever heard a woman say “fucking.” “With this war going on—who the fuck cares?”

  Helen leaned forward so her head was on the table. Then she sat up. “Oppression is oppression,” she said, but she sounded tentative.

  “Look, sweetie,” Angie said, “we’re not going back in time. We don’t have slavery in this country. We have stuff to worry about, sure—and prejudice? well, sure—but it’s not slavery. Get that? Fighting the gym is not the Civil War, get that?” She stood, leaning forward with her hands on the table, then walked heavily from the room.

  “Let’s get something to eat,” Daniel said. He looked at me. “Come with us.”

  Barb, at last, left when we did, but she went in the other direction at the street. It was dark. Helen, Daniel, and I ate eggs at a nearby greasy spoon. Daniel said, “Helen told me a lot about you”—what my mother might have said. I asked Daniel about his family, and he said he was from Baltimore, the youngest of three. He had grown up in a household of cherishing adults. I saw that he’d always feel sure of himself, certain that he belonged wherever he was. How many black men would spend an afternoon with four white women and never look as if he’d rather be elsewhere? I asked myself the question and then I said it out loud in those words, because it was a day for taking chances.

  Daniel laughed. “I always think people want to be with me,” he said.

  Helen looked up from her eggs—she was eating heartily in my presence for the second time that day—and I almost heard her considering that maybe he didn’t like her; maybe he simply liked everybody. He stretched an arm around her and transferred his fork to his other hand.

  “Where do you two go for privacy?” I said, because I suddenly felt in the way.

  “My roommates and I have a signal,” Daniel said. He smiled like a child. After we paid the check, I got up to leave and nobody stopped me.

  Jean Argos

  The outgoing president of my board is a white guy who used to run a shelter, and another board member, Lorna—a black woman, so shrewd and decent you can easily not notice that she is sometimes wrong—used to work with him. They make a little voting bloc. They worry that we’ll be sued, so they try to set standards that would limit us too much. They got us to pass a rule banning anyone found with a weapon. I don’t want guns at Barker, but we can’t frisk people or put them through a metal detector—which we can’t afford, even if I didn’t hate the things—so how will we know? Some sweet lost soul carrying a knife because he’s scared of the shelters is going to drop it on the floor and be thrown out.

  Joshua Griffin is the board member least likely to have a beer or a phone conversation with the rest between meetings. I’ve mentioned Ingrid. The remaining three members are businesspeople. They believe in what we do, but they don’t know the panhandlers by name. The rest of us get distracted from the agenda, bringing one another up to date on whether someone we all know is in the hospital or in jail, has gotten sober, or has died. The businesspeople watch with surprise. For them, the clients are a category. A board needs some members like that.

  When we nervously meet to elect a president, I still don’t know whether I did the right thing when I hired Paulette Strong. But I don’t want any more advice from that lot, so I don’t talk about her. Aside from the president, the agenda is all money. I’ve applied for a grant that would let me rent the soon-to-be-vacant third floor. I don’t know yet whether I’m getting it, and the board had doubts about this project, so I don’t bring it up. There are other money issues.

  Eight members show up, and Jason and I make ten. We’re in the larger first-floor room, around one of the tables. I smell cold cuts from lunch. The president finally says he’s really quitting. Everyone assumes I want Ingrid for president, because we’re friends and sometimes go out to dinner together. And, on the whole, I do. But she doesn’t always agree with me about the departing president, and she may be too close to Lorna—whom I love, but still. Years ago, Ingrid’s kids went to school with Lorna’s grandkids. They tell PTA stories.

  Joshua Griffin and Ingrid make short statements saying why each of them wants to be president. I expect Ingrid to win, just because she’s been on the board longer, and we just finished with a man, so a woman might seem timely. But Joshua Griffin is elected by secret ballot. I shake hands with him and say I look forward to working together. For a moment I wanted this outcome, and now I’ll find out if I was right to think life would be more interesting.

  As the meeting breaks up, Ingrid puts a hand on my arm. “Drink?” she says quietly.

  “Drink.” I figure she needs consoling. I look at my watch. I need to write three emails. “An hour?” I say. “Meet you—where?”

  “My house,” she says. “I’ve got a bottle of red.”

  I’ve been there often. I squeeze her shoulder, call my goodbyes to the others, and climb the stairs to my office.

  But as soon as I’m alone, I close my office door and drop onto the couch, and for several long minutes I can’t move. I’ve been faking nonchalance. I don’t want to work with Joshua Griffin. Eventually I move my left hand, and it falls on the book—that book by Valerie Benevento. I open it and find the page where I was reading before.

  The Vietnam protester with the boyfriend has emotions so intense she can barely get through her days. She’s a college student and lives with a friend from high school, also against the war. They are in love with the same man. The friend, a dazzling woman—mysterious but lovable—goes to bed with the boyfriend. The narrator suffers. The book holds me. The narrator’s need soothes my own battered feelings. Now and then I see brief comments in the margins, mostly illegible, some in ink and some in pencil. This book held someone else as well.

  The boyfriend teaches the alluring, scary friend how to make a Molotov cocktail. He has firm, muscled arms, and people can’t help touching him. She touches his shoulder. He tells her he’s decided to be faithful to the narrator, but then he explains some political idea. I put down the book for a moment to mourn my own lack of a man, then pick it up again. I read thirty pages. Now and then I look up to imagine inner conversations with the poet who I still think has left it for me. Off to the side of my mind are the emails I should be writing, and Ingrid. I don’t look at my watch because I don’t want to know what it says.

  Then someone pushes open my office door, and Joshua Griffin’s ordinarily well-behaved fingers, with carefully trimmed nails, appear at the edge of my door and open it. I recognize the fingers and the crisp white cuff before the face appears, but I’m alarmed before I recognize t
hem, so I am simultaneously scared that a stranger is sneaking up on me when I thought the building was empty and the front door locked, and furious with Joshua Griffin for scaring me. I’m also furious with him for coming in without knocking.

  “You’re here!” he says in his lively voice—it goes up and down—not apologizing for walking in without leave but maybe laughing at himself for getting caught. I know then that he will never knock and never apologize. “I was making some calls downstairs, but my phone died,” he says. “I came to use your phone.” He looks abashed and says, “If I may.”

  But then, as I stand up, my finger keeping my place, and move the book closer to my body, he says, his voice intense, with a tone I never heard before, “Where did you get that?”

  “Get what?”

  “Let me see it.”

  I look down to see what I have stolen and there is only the book.

  “Where did you get it?” he says again, sharply.

  “It was here,” I say, feeling in the wrong and angry that my other reasons for being angry are now apparently beside the point. “It was on my couch.”

  “Oh my,” Joshua says, and then he bends his head—turns his face down fast to hide it—as if he may cry, which changes everything, as if stage managers grabbing furniture have turned an operating room into a nursery school. It’s suddenly hard not to hug him. I don’t, but I put the book down on my desk—losing my place—and he picks it up.

  “May I sit?” he asks. We both forget the phone calls, and he never does make them. He sits on the chair opposite my desk, and I sit down on the desk chair, so we become the executive director conferring with her board president. But he holds the book close, then riffles through it and puts it on his lap, his hand on it. “I did this once before,” he says. “I came into your office when you weren’t here.”