Conscience

by Alice Mattison

  “You insist on working in the living room. You make me uncomfortable in my own home.”

  Eventually, I stopped shouting and began to plan and cook. Martha, it seemed, had told Griff she might come. Good. Someone would talk to the strangers. He had invited Annie, too, but he said she texted that she didn’t like faking friendship with people she didn’t know. As if I did. I knew Griff would not quite join the party. When I had offered to cook, I was accepting the entire emotional load.

  The dinner I then figured out would have been fine for family or old friends but wasn’t much for strangers—strangers who had paid enough to buy the fanciest meal in the city. I prepared spinach lasagna, salad, and roasted vegetables. The single task I gave Griff—buying wine—defeated him. Even in his drinking days, he didn’t drink wine.

  On Saturday, once the food was ready, I cleaned. I drove to Marjolaine for a cake. I piled my books and papers in my study—where I rarely work—so we could eat at the long table. But then I couldn’t work, so I cleaned some more. Martha, who is an adjunct professor, arrived with papers to grade and spent the afternoon working in her sister’s old bedroom.

  Griff had invited one guest I knew: Lorna Anderson, from the board of which he was now president. I’d met her at innumerable Griffin family events; she’d been at our wedding. She would report to Griff’s family what I cooked and how well, and they’d wonder why they hadn’t been asked. Still, I liked her. A serious churchgoer, she had room in her cosmology for me, the offhand Jew, and even for Griff, who had felt required, in his twenties, to inform his father that he was an atheist. Back then, Lorna had defended Griff to his mother.

  After I changed my clothes and was surveying the living room, I got mad all over again about Jean Argos, the woman in whose office Griff had mislaid Bright Morning of Pain. Presumably she already considered us fools.

  “I don’t see why you had to include that woman,” I said, passing him on my way to the living room with napkins.

  “What woman?”

  “The woman who had the book. Jean Argos.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s one more thing, Griff,” I said. “It’s as if you tried to make this as hard as possible—adding in more and more people.” This wasn’t fair, and I knew it. I’d been glad to add Martha. It wasn’t the numbers and the food that mattered as much as the time it was taking from my work. Now that it was going to happen, I should have put aside these issues and made the best of things. Maybe Jean would be pleasant, or at least interestingly peculiar. But once I began to complain about the numbers, I kept at it.

  “You shouldn’t have offered,” he said. “What kind of a meal is spinach lasagna?”

  “Now you say it.”

  “I’ll leave. How about that? You don’t want me here.”

  It was true; he was one of the difficulties: his imperious emotions interpreted all events as potential tragedies, requiring desperate acts that, carried out, made minor occasions worse. But I said, “Don’t be stupid.”

  “You want me out of here.” He turned away and then turned back. “Maybe we should turn the house back into two apartments. Maybe I should move upstairs again. That’s what you want, isn’t it?” His voice shook.

  I turned and looked at him. “Yes,” I said. “Yes. You get harder all the time. Maybe you should.”

  The doorbell rang.

  And in they came. Lorna—in uncharacteristic red—was unexpectedly bashful. She came with another board member, also silent. Into this dullness walked Jean, a robust woman of fifty with flying yellow hair, a determined smile—for which I was grateful—and gray eyes too close together. She never stopped talking. I thought she and Griff would talk shop, but he hid in the kitchen. Martha emerged, smiling and in a pretty dress, and drew a group together. The mystery guests were late. If both were women, Griff would be the only man, and he’d flee to the bedroom and get under the covers.

  I hated the mystery guest, partly because she was late and partly because, when she did arrive, she looked apologetic. The only way to carry off having bid all that money on a dinner supposedly cooked by the principal—and then coming late—would be to take command. She should have exclaimed over the room, house, and dinner with either joy or dismay, preferably the latter. Wasn’t it her task to be rude, so we’d unite in opposition?

  But I hated her primarily because she brought Zachary Lilienthal—Dr. Zachary Lilienthal—who had broken my child’s heart twenty years earlier, who had broken, for heaven’s sake, my stupid heart, and who would never have done what he did if he had it in him to experience remorse. I saw quickly that he had not told his companion that he knew us. When Griff saw Zak, I was afraid he’d walk out, since he was incapable of throwing anyone out of his house, any more than he’d throw a student, however nefarious, out of his school.

  I didn’t want to walk out. At last, I had an interesting reason to stay. Evil doesn’t bother me quite the way it bothers some people, and Zachary Lilienthal’s crimes didn’t make him less fascinating. Griff withdrew even more. When somebody began talking about Bright Morning of Pain at dinner, he started an argument with me, just as I was struggling to serve dessert with no help except from Lorna, who had finally turned human. I was excited to see Zak—and terrifically upset.

  And then I tore a ligament in my ankle, falling over a chair leg or my own feet or somebody’s hair ornament. The dinner ended, and Jean and Zak and Martha drove me to the hospital.

  Joshua Griffin

  Zak Lilienthal humiliated my daughter twenty years ago and didn’t understand why what he did was wrong. I hadn’t seen him since, until the dinner tonight, when I now note that he apparently doesn’t know that it’s wrong to take advantage of an unforeseeable coincidence and walk uninvited into my house. If he doesn’t know that, he can’t possibly be a competent doctor, so he would not know if Olive needed immediate help or not. Olive could have been dying.

  Yet I turned to Zak. I asked his advice. I scurried upstairs when Olive dismissed me. I am pacing in the dark in Annie’s old bedroom, then lying down on the bed, standing up again, thinking about the reckless plans of the irresponsible director of Barker Street—an agency for which I am now responsible—and the pain in Martha’s eyes when she saw that even her parents’ home was not safe from the man who hurt her all those years ago.

  I don’t want to finish reading that book, because I know what’s coming. I know what book Val wrote. I know what happened. I didn’t read this book for years and never should have. I knew what to do about this book for the rest of my life, and I didn’t do it.

  I am not turning on the light because as long as I pace in the dark, I can talk to myself about the failure that was my dinner party and not have to consider the ultimate failure: that the woman I love—the woman I have always loved, will always love—sent me away when she was in trouble and in pain. Sent me away while Jean smirked; I know she smirked. Sent me away—and had made clear, before the party, that she doesn’t want me in her life.

  The children are grown. Maybe there’s no reason to stay with her, if my presence is painful, if she doesn’t love me. She took me at my word when, in a moment of hyperbole, I proposed dividing the house again. It’s what she wants. It could be done—there’s a bathroom on each floor. I could cook up here with a microwave. A door with a lock could keep me out of her domain. Those years I lived in that apartment in West Haven, near the water—where I was always afraid the children would drown, afraid every hour, but it was the only clean place I could find in a hurry—she taught herself to be separate from me, and she is separate from me, whatever my address, whatever she cooks.

  I am twelve years old. I am twelve years old! And I am the principal, which means that I don’t even have the comfort of being known as a fool when I am a fool. I am known as the principal.

  I heard them bring her outside. They must have taken her to the hospital. They didn’t come up and tell me what they decided. They forgot I was here. Even Martha. I am lying on the bed in the
dark. I won’t turn on the television while Olive lies in the emergency room without me.

  I won’t forgive her for wanting to be apart from me, all those years ago. No, wrong terminology—I won’t forget. I won’t stop arguing inwardly with her choice, even though she took me back four years later. I knew that, ultimately, she wanted me out because I could not forgive myself for what I had done. I still haven’t forgiven myself, and so I cannot read a version of it in Val’s book. Cannot endure to learn Olive’s idea, what Olive knew or remembered—as told to Val—of what I did. It’s between us every day.

  The first time I saw Olive, she was walking ahead of me, looking down, in a dull blue dress. That heavy hair was loose, but it was a hot day, so she swept it off her neck, let it go, swept it off again, as if she didn’t notice what she was doing, as if, notwithstanding all the talk and shouting, Olive had nothing to say. She walked forward, and maybe the war would end if she didn’t stop.

  I was student teaching at a high school in Staten Island. Those kids didn’t know there was a war, except that they might be drafted and have to fight, which might be good and would definitely be exciting. They didn’t know what to make of their black teacher.

  The friend I marched with had told me about Olive. He had called her, and they picked a place to meet. We met, we shook hands, shook hands with other people, waited in hot weather, walked. We’d all done it many times, knew how we managed. Someone brought a canteen; someone brought cookies.

  I talked to her. I thought about taking her to bed.

  But for a while, I’d been pretty sure that marching was over, that violence had to happen, that nothing else would work. It was tragic, but it was also exciting. Some boys want to go to war, and this was something like that. I was never good at sports, never in trouble. In part, I wanted some trouble. Or I was open to some trouble. I wanted it, and I thought I could justify it.

  When I bought a gun from a friend who wanted the money so he could buy a bigger one, I was pleased with myself in the way I’d have been pleased if I’d ridden a horse or climbed rocks. It was something like the way I felt the first time I got drunk—and even the tenth time, but by then I was disgusted with that, which should have told me something. Owning a gun was a way of being strong and powerful that was not my father’s way. We had to do it. There were scary and tragic reasons to do it, and we also liked it. My friends, black and white, felt the same way. There was target practice, shooting followed by the drinking of beer, though around that time I switched to Coke. My first two shreds of self-knowledge: not going to divinity school, not drinking beer.

  The protest in upstate New York was not going to be a big deal. The big deal had been the previous weekend, a confrontation at a draft board. I’d lost sleep wondering if I’d shoot—and if I didn’t shoot, would it be because I was a coward? Then it hadn’t come up. The cops had made some kind of decision to let that protest go, and it never became confrontational—and never got the attention we hoped for. But the protest in upstate New York was different: simpler, like what we’d done all the time a couple of years earlier. College students waving signs, chanting, and singing. Someone asked my group to show up in support. So we did—or a few of us did. Half a dozen on a Greyhound bus, expecting to be back in the city early.

  But the students were unusually innocent and disorganized, and the cops had somehow misunderstood. And one cop was stupid or bloodthirsty. When he started bashing heads, another rushed, shouting, to his side, as if he’d been attacked. The kids were suddenly at risk. Nightsticks hit heads, there were screams, blood, a girl was down and trampled, another, another. I looked at the cop’s hand with the stick as if it were a tin can I’d set on a milk crate when I practiced. I took my time. I squeezed the trigger. It wasn’t manly, wasn’t exciting. I thought it was regrettably necessary, and I did it as I might kill a rabid, snarling, matted animal that had been fluffy and sweet before it was infected. The cop lost his hand. I never wanted to touch a gun again—but Helen knew all about it and paid attention.

  Looking at my watch in the light from a streetlight outside, I see it’s midnight. Olive and Martha aren’t back. Martha’s phone goes right to voicemail. It probably doesn’t work in the hospital. I turn on the light next to Annie’s old bed and walk across the hall into Olive’s study, where she’s piled everything that was spread on the long table this morning. It doesn’t take me long to find Bright Morning of Pain. Maybe I can’t save my marriage. Maybe that old trouble—what I did, what Helen did, what Olive thought, and what she said to Val and what Val wrote—can’t be fixed now. But at least I can finish the book. I keep the lamp on and lie down on the bed. But then I stand up again and put the book back where I found it.

  Martha didn’t like the sweater I put on. She picked out a shirt without a sweater, and I was uncomfortable. I thought that shirt should be worn with a necktie, but I wore it anyway, without.

  All right, I said, just before the party. The spinach lasagna was in the oven. I don’t like spinach lasagna, but that is most definitely neither here nor there. All right, then, just let me go. I can’t go now, because I promised the auction committee. But after that, just let me out of here. I said that.

  But I never wanted to leave.

  You understand that well what you do?

  I understand, yes, what I habitually do.

  Olive Grossman

  I’ve never been celebrated for my looks, but I was never prettier than in the summer of 1968, when I was nineteen. I let my hair grow, and it was thick and dark. When my neck was hot, I took out a rubber band and bundled my hair into a loose knot that looks messy in one photograph, sexy in another, distracting the observer, maybe, from my stubborn nose—as Eli called it—and shiny forehead. Ordinarily, as a young woman, I looked like somebody’s babysitter, somebody’s reliable assistant—a secondary character.

  It was the only time in my life I ever thought more about public concerns than private ones. My predominant emotion was rage at our government—rage about the war and grief over my helplessness. You might imagine the war in Vietnam robbed me of my sexual coming of age, but it intensified my sex life: the personal freedom of the late sixties came in the context of political events. I doubt that the “sexual revolution” would have affected me had there been no war to protest, but the sexual revolution itself would not have happened without the war. Caught up in events larger than the personal, we lost shyness and caution. I slept with a half dozen men that year.

  The summer of ’68, I worked as a counselor in a day camp run by a reform synagogue on Manhattan’s Upper West Side—at last, not in Brooklyn looking after my brother and sister. Responsible for twelve nine-year-old girls—along with my co-counselor, a barefoot Israeli named Tova with fetching black curls—I was distracted, during the day, from national politics and the war, though Martin Luther King and now Robert Kennedy were dead, the nominating conventions were imminent, and the headlines were full of downed planes and bombing raids in Vietnam. Every day, the newspaper named those from the New York area who had died the day before—a short but heartbreaking list.

  I led my campers—chubby, timid kids, thrilled by what they considered an adventure—through Central Park, then hurried them back for swimming. While the swimming counselor kept them busy and Tova swam laps, I lazed in the deep end of the pool, floating and daydreaming. Emerging into the city at 3:30, I still smelled of chlorine, despite a shower. Tova was picked up in a car and driven off to Westchester. Free and alone, itchy-eyed, I was like someone rising from a day in bed, thinking like a child and moving slowly into the hot city.

  Gradually I would remember who I was and what I thought. It wasn’t all political: I was hurt when Patrick told me he wanted to date someone else—only later did I understand that this vague person was a man. Other men disappointed me or hurt my feelings. But it was mostly political. Robert Kennedy had been shot to death in June. The social order might soon vanish. The city was dirty and humid, a troubled place—but mine.

 
Helen had a job in a dark grocery store with intense smells, a grotesque version of her parents’ wholesome and predictable establishment. The groceries looked like dusty props, and strange transactions took place. Her parents hadn’t questioned Helen’s choices when they had to do with Barnard, but they were stunned when she dropped out of school. Her father stopped giving her rent money, but she told me that her mother, apparently with his unacknowledged awareness, handed her folded bills when they met for lunch. They must have hoped the money would help them keep her: even Helen couldn’t live without money. But the store paid her a little, and gradually she stopped seeing her mother.

  When I couldn’t think of anything to do after day camp that summer, before going home to Brooklyn, I would visit Helen in the store, waiting around while she straightened pathetic merchandise and took money from rare customers. In her free time, she was busy with meetings—the job itself had come through movement connections—and sometimes I went along.

  Eli, Helen’s friend and sometime lover, was a presence at these meetings. I had not liked Eli when I’d met him—or maybe I was afraid of him—but now his combination of bluntness and shyness, as if he wasn’t certain he pronounced words correctly, attracted me. It turned out he was an autodidact who had spent only a few months in college. At meetings, he urged reading lists on us, setting up study sessions about political philosophy, and I began attending a Thursday subgroup that Helen didn’t belong to, near his apartment in the Village. The readings were difficult, but I was proud to participate. We couldn’t be accused of superficiality, of arguing for peace because we liked torn jeans and free love. The discussions were earnest and unpretentious—everyone was just trying to get it. Eli would make a point, then look quickly down and up again, his eyes bright, as if he was a little surprised to have spoken. When he suggested, one night, that he and I have “a glass of wine and a bite” after the meeting, I agreed, knowing what was coming, so aroused that brushing against his blue shirt sleeve as we passed through a narrow doorway was erotic.