“No,” she said. “We don’t want an election.” She sat up again. “It will either confirm what we already have or make it worse. Have a little faith, Olivia. The American people . . . Look, the way you see it, we’re helpless. But the American people can put together something better than this!”
I didn’t answer. She sounded idealistic—like a patriot—but what kind of anarchy was she talking about? Finally, I said, “Can you agree that there is a twenty-percent chance that the war will end if we work to elect a peace candidate?” Even twenty percent—if there was that kind of chance, I thought we should stay with what we had: campaigns and elections. Helen laughed.
My food was gone, and I reached for Helen’s plate and went into the kitchen, keeping my eyes closed for a minute after I turned on the light, hoping the cockroaches would disperse. There were other dishes in the sink, and I washed them all, piling them next to the sink, because Helen and her roommates didn’t have a dish drainer. Maybe Helen was a radical and I was not. I knew—I was not proud of this—that when I had my own place to live, one of my first purchases would be a dish drainer.
I wanted to be a radical. I wanted to believe the American people would somehow come together and create a new, just government. Did it prove I wasn’t a radical if I wanted a dish drainer?
I stayed in the kitchen until it was clean, not just to discourage the bugs but in the hope that Helen would fall asleep. But when I came back I could see the outline of her thin body sitting up once more. In the dark she looked like a little girl, and the words of a Bob Dylan song pounded in my mind. She was leaning forward, waiting for me, I saw, so she could speak.
“You didn’t answer.”
“Didn’t answer what?” I said.
“What I said. You don’t agree. You’re still trying to change things by writing letters to the editor.”
“I never write letters to the editor!” I said. What I did—marching, shouting, singing—wasn’t that more than writing a letter to the editor of a newspaper? I lay down on the sofa and pulled the blanket up. The kitchen had been cold, and I relaxed into the scratchy warmth of the wool blanket.
“I’m going to Chicago,” Helen said.
“What?”
“The convention. In August. I’m going to disrupt the Democratic convention.”
“Disrupt it?” I hadn’t yet heard of plans like this.
“The convention is tainted. Humphrey’s going to win, and he’s as bloody as Johnson. More of the same if he wins, more of the same if Nixon wins. Or some other Republican who’s even worse.”
“I think McCarthy has a chance,” I said, weary to be starting up all over again. “Or Kennedy.”
“Don’t be a fool,” she said. “This is boring, anyway. Wouldn’t you rather do something that makes a difference?”
“Like, what, shooting people?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“I thought you were for nonviolence.”
“I didn’t say shooting.”
“So what kind of disruption are we talking about?”
“Just whatever we can do,” came the voice out of the dark, sounding almost wistful. “Breaking things, smashing things. Getting our heads bashed in so people will know what’s what.”
“Can we sleep, Helen? Please?” I was frantic with exhaustion.
She ignored me. “What else is going to work?” she said. “Don’t tell me singing.”
I knew as I lay there that singing was good for me, good for me and Patrick—but that it would not work. The antiwar movement would change the government, I thought, but so slowly that it was beside the point.
I need to make clear now, all these decades later, how bad it was, how the war in Vietnam was different, worse than every other military operation of my life. We knew so little—but enough to see that something had gone sickeningly wrong. The My Lai massacre had happened in March. An American company that had been scrambling through the jungle for months, taking casualties at times from snipers but seeing no combat, walked into a tiny village supposedly cleared of civilians—so anyone they found, it seemed, would be Vietcong—and found 504 old people, women, and small children. They drove them into three ditches and systematically bayoneted them. This wasn’t public knowledge for a year and a half, but at the time, we knew something like that was likely to happen.
“You’re right,” I said to Helen, and turned onto my stomach to cry, like a child who has just learned she can’t have what she wants most. I didn’t know if Helen would ever swing a baseball bat or break a window, like radicals I’d read about, and I didn’t think I could—maybe I should?—but something had to change. Helen could not compromise with truth, no matter where truth took her, and people who have that incapacity are finally convincing.
She said something else then, and it meant neither of us would sleep that night: “I’ve dropped out of school.”
Jean Argos
Dinner at Joshua Griffin’s house is on a rainy night at the end of April. Driving over, I’m not nervous, just pleased to be invited out, and by someone from Barker. The old president would not have let me through his front door. I’ve brought a bottle of wine. I’m wearing jeans but with a white shirt and a blazer. Only thing is, I’m in too good a mood. I look at myself in the rearview mirror and say, “You behave yourself!”
“Rain!” I say too cheerfully to the young, light-skinned black woman who answers the door. I hold up my closed but dripping umbrella. I say, “I’m Jean!”
“I’m Martha,” she says.
Joshua comes toward us, saying by way of introduction, “You are good to come! My daughter.”
He takes the umbrella and my wine bottle, and Martha and I both say what we should. A black dog approaches too, a thick, short-haired boy with a glossy coat. He wants to lick my face and I lean over to let him, since he is too polite to jump. At the near end of a long room, a table with eight chairs is set for dinner.
Guests are gathered at the other end, on a dark oval rug that covers part of the wooden floor, making a living room. There’s Ingrid, with her barrettes still in place but her hair trying to work free. She’s standing, holding a wineglass. Laughing. She has a rusty laugh. The substantial white woman listening to her must be Olive.
“I’m Jean,” I say, while Ingrid says, “This is Jean,” and Olive says, “Olive Grossman,” and we shake hands. Olive has gray hair cut short and glasses with big frames.
“You know Lorna?” Olive says, and I turn and see Lorna from the board with what looks like a glass of water, wearing a red dress and sitting on a red sofa. The dog lies down on Lorna’s feet. “Red?” Olive asks, and I manage to say yes to red wine without commenting on the red sofa and Lorna’s red dress.
Lorna and Ingrid, they tell me, came together in Lorna’s car. We agree that it’s raining. Martha Griffin brings me wine. “I didn’t know you were in town,” Ingrid says to her.
I remember that Ingrid knows Joshua a little, and apparently also his family. Martha says she lives in New York. She’s getting a doctorate in history, teaching part-time at two different colleges. She’s sturdy, like her mother, but doesn’t wear glasses. Maybe she wears contact lenses.
The three of us—Ingrid, Martha, and I, all drinking red wine—stand around Lorna. She beams at us, stroking the dog. Martha says, “I needed a weekend away from the city, and it turned out they were doing this.” She says when she was a child her parents had people in often, but it hasn’t happened lately. She claims to be glad she’s here for her parents’ party. Nice daughter.
“In the seventies, I knew how to cook,” Olive says, joining our group. “But that kind of food doesn’t count these days, and I never learned anything else. You’re getting a seventies dinner.”
We all say we’re grateful to have any sort of meal cooked for us.
“This is happening only because Dad can’t say no,” Martha says. “No offense—you guys are the reward.”
“Oh, I bet he knows how to say no,” I say.
> “Maybe to some people,” Martha says.
I wonder whether the mysterious guests who won the dinner will mind Olive’s presumably plain cooking. “Imagine if nobody bid. . . .,” I say.
“I am told the item did well,” Martha says airily. “I am told by my dad, who may have reason to lie but never does.”
“So who’s coming?” Lorna asks.
“Yvonne Something and Guest,” Martha says. I’m more at ease with her than with either of her parents. Olive brings in a plate, which she places on a table in front of the sofa I think of as Lorna’s. “Dad doesn’t think he knows her,” Martha says.
“Maybe she won’t come,” Olive says. It’s a plate of huge bright-green olives, cubes of cheese, and crackers. We fall on it.
Suddenly, I remember Bright Morning of Pain. “Oh, did you want me to bring the book?” I say. “Are we going to talk about it?”
“What book?” someone asks.
“Yes, you had my book!” Olive says, a little tartly, as if I did the whole thing on purpose—which was Joshua’s attitude as well, I recall. “I don’t suppose you read it.”
“Of course I read it,” I say. “Wasn’t it an assignment?”
“Hardly.”
“He said it’s your favorite book.”
“Something like that,” Olive says. She sits down next to Lorna, and though she’s making me feel somehow in the wrong, I like a hostess who doesn’t fuss at her own party. Like me, she has on a blazer and jeans, but I like her tan blazer better than my black one. The doorbell rings, and Joshua, who has not been in the room, shows up and answers it.
“I’m sorry we’re late,” a breathy voice says. “I’m Yvonne. . . .” But the rest of what she says is obscured, because Joshua and the man who has come with Yvonne are both exclaiming.
“No, no,” Joshua says, “Come in,” but they are already walking toward us, still in wet coats. They don’t have umbrellas. They are maybe forty, both white. The woman has long blond hair and a rain hat, and close up she’s older than forty, but the man is the one I notice: he has laughing eyes. He’s happy, not apologetic, though he apologized. “I recognized the street,” he’s saying, “but I didn’t think it was the same house . . . and I didn’t know you guys still live here.”
“Why wouldn’t we?” Joshua—following them—says sharply. Olive, a cracker in her hand, is scrambling awkwardly to her feet, resting a hand on Lorna’s shoulder to push herself up. We all stand up, even Lorna.
“Forgive me,” the man says, reaching two hands, which must be wet, to take Olive’s.
“Zak,” Olive says. She looks more flustered than I knew people that confident can look. “What are you doing here? What in the world are you doing here?” She sounds—well, maybe happy.
“I live in New Haven now,” he says. “I’m a physician.”
“I heard you went to medical school,” Martha says, coming toward him. She shakes hands with the woman. “I’m Martha Griffin.”
“Zak Lilienthal,” Martha says to all of us, and then says our names—all but mine. “I’m sorry. . . .,” she says gracefully.
I step forward. “Jean Argos.” Martha is less flustered than her mother.
“Zak Lilienthal,” he says, unnecessarily. I feel attractive when he looks at me—my short blond hair, my white shirt. I’m reasonably good-looking, though not as attractive as Martha, who impresses the hell out of me—her calm, her charm, her good looks, and her comfort with her parents and herself, despite her ragged life running from classroom to classroom in New York, and whatever surprise this arrival entails. Zak seems to add more than one person’s presence to the room. Do people like that move their arms more than the rest of us? They are not always tall—Zak is tall—but if not, they seem tall.
When asked, Zak says he’s a pediatrician. “I just moved to New Haven,” he says, “and I’m working in my old pediatrician’s practice! I have to remind myself not to take off my clothes!”
He has nothing to do with Aspirations High—the embarrassing name of Joshua’s school, which Zak pronounces with joy—or the auction. He knew “the Grossman-Griffins” when he grew up in New Haven, he says, but he didn’t know where “Griff” works these days. “Yvonne just said ‘dinner at the principal’s house.’” He widens his eyes theatrically and waves a hand at Joshua. “The principal!”
Yvonne is the foster mother of two kids at the school. She stands there silently, not quite up to the phenomenon of the man she’s brought. She’s definitely older than Zak, maybe my age.
“We’ve met,” she says to Joshua. Another foster child was in the school some years earlier. Joshua smiles and nods with fake but polite agreement.
The conversation turns to foster children. Lorna has opinions on this subject, and when she speaks from her sofa, we turn toward her, but Olive calls, “Let’s eat.” She and Martha have been carrying food in.
I sit next to Ingrid at dinner. The dog inserts himself under the table and lies down near me, and now and then I slip my foot out of my shoe and stroke him. He lays his head on my knee. There’s spinach lasagna, salad, roasted vegetables, and bread. More wine.
“Are you a vegetarian?” Yvonne asks Olive.
“I figured somebody would be,” she says. I take a big piece when the lasagna comes my way. The spinach has a little bite, still, and the noodles aren’t leathery except at the edges. The tomato sauce smells wonderful.
I hear about Joshua’s school and Yvonne’s kids. She’s funny. She likes being a foster mother, and I wonder if she’s always been single. I feel a thrill of admiration, thinking I may try to make friends with her. If we got together, maybe I’d see Zak again.
Then Zak asks me what I do, and I talk about Barker, explaining my connection to Joshua and Lorna and Ingrid. Zak looks interested, so I don’t stop talking, as I surely should, and I tell everybody about the third-floor project. By now our committee has worked out a clear plan for permission to use the new rooms, and maybe I describe it in more detail than is necessary.
“There’s a freight elevator we’re fixing up, too,” I say, in case anyone is wondering about accessibility for the disabled. I say—still unable to stop—that we’ll put disposable sheets on the cots and throw them away after each use. The community service people will clean the rooms. A staff member will always be up there in the corridor. The rooms will not lock, and the cots will be narrow, to discourage sneaking in sexual partners. Maximum allowed use will be four hours.
“Not overnight?” Yvonne says.
“No, not overnight,” I say. Then something makes me say, “At least not yet.”
“Never overnight,” I hear Joshua say in a low, clear voice. Then he says it a second time, with even more emphasis. He’s at the end of the table away from me, sawing grimly with his table knife at a crisp brown curl of noodle.
I look up and laugh—because he makes me nervous—and try to make it sound as if what he’s said is charming but not relevant. He doesn’t look up from his plate, and Zak asks me who comes to Barker Street. I describe the bag lady who doesn’t eat.
“That’s sad,” Martha says.
“It is sad,” I say. We don’t usually think of that woman as sad, just atypical. I drop out of the conversation for a moment, trying to decide whether I should have handled my conversation with Paulette differently.
Maybe that’s not why I drop out. Maybe I need a moment to come to terms with the fact that I have talked too much and the president of my board has said something hostile and bossy at a dinner party at his house, at which I am a guest. I try to believe he’s just nervous: it’s an odd party—first, because it’s happening only on account of that auction, and second, because of the mix of guests, and third, because of Zak, whatever his history is with Joshua and Olive. Still, it’s a friendly gathering, and that makes the anger in Joshua’s voice more upsetting.
When the subject of Bright Morning of Pain finally comes up—Olive tells how Joshua lost the book and found it on my lap—Ingrid says she
read it. “Of course I read it. Everyone did. The Vietnam War . . . feminism . . .”
“Feminism?” I say.
“It was regarded as feminist,” Olive says drily, “because a woman shoots someone to protect her man, instead of a man shooting someone to protect his woman.”
The ending. I hadn’t thought of it that way.
“Did you ever read it?” Zak asks Martha, who’s near him. “Your mother talked about it plenty.”
“I did,” Martha says. “The way kids in high school read the books their parents make them curious about. I may have skipped some parts, but I found the sex.”
“It sounds good,” Lorna says.
Joshua looks up. He has cleaned his plate and laid his knife and fork straight across it. “That was delicious, Ollie,” he says, and the rest of us join in, though we have praised the food before. Olive ignores us.
Joshua rises to clear the table. He’s wearing his napkin tucked into the neck of his shirt. Olive takes the lasagna dish into the kitchen. “Can I help?” Lorna says. She carries in plates. I stand.
“Sit, sit,” Joshua says.
“I think only Yvonne and Zak should sit,” I say, “since they bid on the dinner. They have to get their money’s worth.” I see that I am dealing with my regret for talking too much by continuing to talk too much. I’ve had plenty of wine, too. I carry the salt and pepper into the kitchen so I can say nothing else for at least a few moments.
Lorna and Olive are talking about Lorna’s family, and I realize that she belongs to the church where Joshua’s father was the pastor and knows the family from way back. In some ways, New Haven is a small town. The people in the living room are talking again about Bright Morning of Pain. Olive and Lorna take their time with coffee and dessert—maybe they need a break—so I go back to my seat.
Joshua is saying, “I don’t care if the characters were real people or not—that’s not my objection. What difference does it make? It’s a story.”
“I loved that book,” Ingrid says. “I kept on loving it even when there was that trouble—remember, about what Valerie Benevento said in interviews?”
Conscience Page 11
