Olive Grossman

After the first days, Helen’s crime—even Raz’s killing of the security guard—was no longer a front-page story. I bought the paper every day. Before the internet, you had to turn all the pages. Sometimes I’d find a relevant item, a short column near the bottom of a page, and I’d read it again and again. A gun that had been used in the holdup turned up. The injured policeman was released from the hospital. A ceremony honored him. After that, I saw nothing for weeks, months—well into 1971.

I was embarrassed on Helen’s behalf—had she made so little difference?—and angry at her for having an unrealistic idea of what kind of difference even a violent crime could make. I was fundamentally at a loss. Alone in our tiny New York apartment, I sobbed uncontrollably more than once for the dead security guard, his kids, his wife. I’d stop where I was, unpredictably, sit on the floor, cross my arms over my head, and sob. I sobbed for Helen too, and for me. I’d start crying for the guard and end up crying for myself. Whatever happened, I would never have Helen back. I was too scared to imagine in detail what might happen next.

But first and daily and in every part of me, I was stymied. Helen had not been insane or even mistaken when she couldn’t eat the hot dog because Norman Morrison had immolated himself, and she had been right to seek ethical choices on those windblown walks, deciding what to do next, and next, and next. She had wept when Daniel, her first boyfriend, spoke of violence, and only after intense inward scrutiny and the passage of years had she concluded that he was right. I never put much credence in what Mallon or Raz said, but Helen—though I didn’t agree all the time, and I still thought Adeline had the right to wish for a color TV—was subtle, thoughtful, scrupulous. What should she have done—what should I have done—to end the war? What should we have done instead? To say “nothing” would condemn us to complicity.

Yet the logic that had led Helen from step to step—the exercise of conscience—had killed a man who had not caused the war nor fought in it nor, for all we knew, approved of it. I didn’t know how Helen had come to think that the bank holdup made sense, but I knew that because she was Helen, she had concluded it was regrettable but necessary.

I pretended interest in my graduate courses as a courtesy to the professors, but I felt no conviction, not because I had stopped loving the nineteenth-century novels that had seemed to offer a legitimate life’s work, not because I was bored or even—as before—unable to think about anything but the war, but because I was distracted by my sense that something incomplete could not be completed. I lived in a parenthesis that did not close. Griff—the person whose arms and legs, whose noises and silences, were the climate I now lived in—was, again and again, a startling presence. I never forgot Helen, but I sometimes forgot that I lived with Griff, and would wonder at the sound of a key in the door. I was surprised when I woke in the night and heard him breathe in his sleep. Surprised but thrilled, as if he were a present I had forgotten I’d received. How had I come to be paired with this other person now of all times? Did I even know him? Helen’s crime made me, by turns, shyer with Griff, needier, warier. He was a good man who didn’t deserve to be dragged into my life; he was a man from a persecuted race who deserved more than I could give; he was an intruder in the bed. Sometimes he was just an ear, and that was useful. Often I couldn’t stop talking—speculating, justifying, working out possibilities and trying to find one that ended well, arguing out loud all sides of all questions. Griff often didn’t answer. Sometimes he’d pick up a magazine or a newspaper, and I’d say, “No, listen, this matters, listen!”

“I’m listening,” he would say. “You just said, ‘But she won’t.’” I often imagined out loud that Helen might suddenly appear in our studio apartment, where we’d have to hide and shelter her—which presumably could land us in jail. And how would it be possible? But indeed, I’d always end such speculations with “But she won’t.”

This was a few weeks after the crime, around the time when Griff was having frequent phone conversations and a few meetings with the volunteer lawyer about the charges against him. I became more and more anxious in the days before he learned that the charges would be dropped. One afternoon I came back from the library and heard the phone ringing from the hallway outside. It took too long to dig out my key, and whoever it was hung up. I always expected Helen to call. Maybe the lawyer had called—maybe with good news, maybe with bad news. I sank into a chair we had bought. When I moved in, it had soon become clear that we needed another place to sit and read, or to face the bed and talk to someone sitting on it, and with a sense of great consequence we chipped in on a chair in a junk shop. It was soft and gray, and I loved it. I sat back in it and could not move even a finger. Griff came in quite a while after that and found me still in my coat, still with my bag at my feet and my key in my hand.

“What?” he said.

“The phone rang.”

“Who was it?”

“I didn’t get it in time.”

“It will be all right.”

“Maybe not.” I’d never changed my mind about Griff’s crime. He had been defending people who were being attacked; he was as justified as he could be, and the law should let him go. It was too bad he had to do it—but he had to do it. And also, I didn’t want this man—this young teacher, this idealist, my lover—to experience anything bad, anything that would take him away from me. He had a way of crossing the room diagonally in my direction, a certain way his arms and shoulders looked—vulnerable and not, at the same time—that made me want to seize him and hold him close. Sometimes I did, knocking him a little off his feet. He’d laugh and stroke my head and hold me in his turn.

Now I didn’t stand up and seize him. I had never been so tired in my life. He looked at me, then turned away. He went into the bathroom, and I heard the toilet flush. He opened the refrigerator. Griff, unlike most people I knew, shopped once a week as his mother did and kept food ready to turn into meals: frozen vegetables, hamburger meat. With his back to me, he was taking things out. Minute Rice. He said, “She wouldn’t have done it if it weren’t for me.”

“What?” I said.

“Helen.”

“I know who you mean.”

“I gave her permission. I taught her. I shouldn’t be allowed to teach.”

“That’s not how it happened,” I said. “That was one conversation.” I was too tired to remind him of the years of arguments and discussions, of Raz and Mallon, of all that made up the Helen who had done whatever it was she had done.

“You don’t know how it happened,” he said.

“I don’t know? Who would know if I didn’t know?” Helen was mine.

“No,” he said. “Baby, no. I did it.”

I didn’t have the energy to argue—didn’t know how to prove what I knew. And he was my boyfriend, my fairly new boyfriend, so instead of making me angry, his ignorance of the topic touched me. It gave me the energy to put my key back into my bag, take off my coat. Griff began patting chopped meat into hamburgers.

That fall, a classmate asked me to join a women’s consciousness-raising group. All my life, women had been joking and griping about the ordinary insults we lived through, from nasty remarks about “women drivers” to the assumption that women would do little except clean and care for children. Even politically active women were relegated to typing and sex. We didn’t need to raise our consciousness: as soon as it became customary to talk about sexism, our consciousness swelled like rising bread. In our group were students and teachers, as well as wives of students and teachers. Four women in the group left their husbands that year.

At the first few meetings I said little, partly because I hadn’t felt much discrimination personally. I was grateful to have time off from thinking about Helen and the war—to have a political topic that wasn’t cause for despair—and I listened with interest to stories in which men had failed to respect women or women had failed to respect themselves.

I was silent too, because I couldn’t talk about my own, unrelated trouble. At one meeting, I caught myself silently glorying in my connection to Helen. I was horrified. I hadn’t had the courage—or the passion, or whatever the hell it was—to risk my life as she had. But now I was preening on my connection to someone who took action—while I continued to disapprove of her. I missed part of the discussion, sitting there scolding myself. When I returned, I was humbled, which made it possible to speak: for once, I didn’t need to be sure that what I said was relevant, accurate, and fascinating all at once.

“I live with a black man,” I began, not sure how this fit, and two black women—sitting next to each other—looked up at me sharply. A few sentences later, a white woman interrupted me. “You’re not black,” she said, “so you can’t speak to the double discrimination black women feel.”

I hadn’t been about to complain. Nor did I want to talk about Helen—and lately Griff and I talked little about her. If I mentioned her, his face clenched. I wasn’t sure how the topic I wanted to talk about related to feminism—or to Griff’s race—but I had a feeling it did, I told my friends.

One morning, I said, Griff had emerged from an intense silence and asked, “Do you believe in God, Ollie?”

I was looking for my lipstick. “God?” I said. “I guess so.”

“You don’t know?”

I explained. Jewish prayer repeats, again and again, the information that God is God, that there is only one God, that God is good, and that it is good that God has commanded us to do whatever we are about to do or has given us whatever we have. I had been brought up hearing those prayers—not often, but enough. Jewish observance, in my mind, was for periodically reflecting that it was good to be alive. If you wanted to call the giver of life God—this is what I said to Griff, and now to the women’s group—then I did believe in God and was grateful. If you thought of life as a result of certain physical and biological processes, what I felt was more like awe.

“I am not sure I still believe in God,” Griff had said solemnly, when I finally shut up. I thought Helen’s crime had something to do with his problem—or the war, as it had led to Helen’s crime and his own. I had not taken God seriously enough before to disbelieve now, but in Griff’s mind, God was so irreconcilably attached to justice and goodness that if things got bad enough, it was impossible to imagine God.

“But then nobody would ever believe in God,” I said. “The Black Death, slavery, Hitler . . . If people believed despite all that, why can’t you believe now?”

“I am not them,” he said—a rare grammatical lapse. He went off to teach.

After that, he and I asked, as a household, frequently, whether Griff believed. I’ve met others in interfaith marriages who have had similar experiences: they and their spouses may not be religious, but religion is often what they are thinking about. The women’s movement, diverting as it was, was background. Maybe the women’s movement gave me permission to keep whatever belief or disbelief I had, instead of adopting Griff’s position.

I ended what I said to the women’s group with the comment that sometimes I pictured God—the God of Griff’s childhood, whom I saw as a wrinkled black man—leaning on an elbow in suspense, listening to find out if his servant Joshua still believed in him. Then I stopped talking, and there was coffee and cake and departure. Nobody answered me, but I was glad I had spoken. I’d told a coherent story to myself and apparently to them—leaving out Helen—of what my life was like. It even related to feminism.

My life, come to think of it, centered in many ways on what Griff thought. Every day he came home talking about his pupils—the troublemaker, the slow one, the sad one. I talked little about my classes. So we were one of those households in which the man’s job matters more than the woman’s activities, and I was as responsible as he for the disparity. What Griff did was more useful than what I did. Reading novels meant ignoring the big stuff, even if the great books I read were about the big stuff. Griff loved to teach, and teaching was not ignoring the big stuff—yet it was also not protesting the war. Protesting the war had become unbearable, and teaching was a kind of solution. I didn’t want to teach kids. At the time, I thought I was preparing for a career teaching college students, though I was never excited about that prospect either, and except for a short stint as a teaching fellow, I never did it.

I asked myself, in those months, whether I loved Griff for the wrong reason, because he was a bit exotic. My parents worried about me, as his did about him, but the two sets of parents worried differently. My mother worried that I wouldn’t find a teaching job after graduate school or I’d find one in a distant place. Neither she nor my father thought Griff was the right boyfriend for me, but not—they earnestly repeated—because he was black. My mother said she feared that the racial difference might finally keep us from getting married, and by then I’d be too old to marry someone else. My father worried that my reputation would be ruined because I was living with a man I wasn’t married to.

I didn’t meet Griff’s parents for months. He phoned them often and would lie stretched on our bed, his shoes removed, the phone to his ear. In an hour I’d hear only murmurs, and after he hung up, the silence persisted. He did tell me that he talked mostly with his father—if his mother answered, she passed his father the receiver. She was a kindergarten teacher, but they didn’t talk about teaching.

I began to ask to meet his family. He’d met mine: we’d eaten polite dinners, carefully planned and cooked by my mother. “Soon,” he’d say. “You’ll like them.” Like Helen when we first met, Griff was always making sure I was fair to people, and maybe he thought I didn’t expect to like them. I did assume they were scolding him for having a white girlfriend, but when I finally asked, he said, “Of course not!”

Once, during yet another argument about whether the Vietnam War ought to make the idea of God untenable, Griff sighed and stood up. This conversation had started as I was straightening clutter on a Saturday morning, and now he was sorting a pile of mail and newspapers, so when he stood, he clutched papers. He sat down again. Then he spoke: “I’ve told my father about my doubts.”

“You told your father you don’t know whether you believe in God?” I would never have a conversation about God with either of my parents.

“I had to.”

“How long ago?”

“Month, couple of months.” I slowly grasped that all these phone conversations had been about God.

“What does your father think?” I said.

“He has doubted,” Griff said. “My father has doubted, too.” That a father and son had talked for months about uncertainty was hard to imagine. I envied it. My parents had only certainties. I couldn’t imagine these conversations, which apparently were both more and less personal than any talk my parents and I ever had.

Christmas was coming. With only a little guile, I began saying that I’d enjoy meeting his family when everyone came together for the holidays, that I could bring his mother something—maybe a calendar with photographs of children from around the world. He liked that. After one or two more phone calls, we were invited to his parents’ home in New Haven for a few days, beginning on Christmas Eve. They wouldn’t have room for us along with his brothers—two, both married, one with a baby—so we’d stay, in separate beds, with Griff’s aunt. I’d have the spare bedroom, Griff told me, and he’d sleep on the sofa. He was embarrassed that we couldn’t be together, but I wasn’t surprised. All my single friends were engaging in plenty of sex, but nobody’s parents felt at ease about it, except a few old Communists who’d never believed in marriage in the first place. My parents might have let me sleep with a man in their house, but their embarrassment would have ruined the occasion. I preferred the Griffins’ confident prohibition.

On Christmas Eve, we drove to New Haven in Griff’s VW Bug. Everyone I saw as we got out of the car in the late-afternoon sun, not far from downtown New Haven, was black. I was ashamed to notice that and, when we got inside his parents’ house, to notice that both of his sisters-in-law were light-skinned. For a moment, I thought they were white.

His father met us at the door—as distinguished as I’d imagined but shorter. “This is my father, Reverend Griffin,” Griff said.

The reverend shook hands. Griff’s mother came forward, saying, “I’m Sally.” She kissed me, and starting then I loved her until she died—a good thing, because she often drove me crazy. She was barely shorter than her husband and had straightened gray hair and a face that often looked as if she didn’t know what would happen next but thought she’d like it.

Within moments of surrendering my coat, meeting the brothers and their wives, and admiring the first grandchild, a little boy crawling around on the rug, we talked about Hanukkah. I had done nothing about it, but Sally and her kindergartners had constructed paper menorahs. That was the last year I didn’t light candles at Hanukkah, and since Hanukkah is actually a minor holiday, logic required me to observe, in some fashion, Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, and Passover. The Sabbath matters too, Sally often pointed out, but I couldn’t change my behavior for something that frequent.

After a few minutes, Reverend Griffin offered to show me New Haven, as if Griff might have been inadequate to the task. He led us to his large car and drove slowly through the streets. Later, Griff told me his father didn’t see well anymore and probably ought to quit driving but would not consider it.

Passing the Green, I said, “New Haven’s beautiful!”

“Parts,” said both father and son at the same moment.

I liked the Christmas Eve church service. In the morning, there were modest presents, for me a pair of pink woolen gloves. Sally liked her calendar. She was a terrible cook. The oldest brother and his wife weren’t unfriendly, but they were shy, which amounted to the same thing. I exchanged glances and smiles with Henry and DeeDee, the next oldest brother and his wife, whom I liked. I also liked Griff’s aunt, with whom we stayed. The Griffins’ house had solid, dark, old-fashioned furniture; at his aunt’s, everything was plaid. She worked as a bookkeeper at a hospital.

Griff’s sense of humor had temporarily dried up. His father was similarly serious, and Sally’s anxiety squelched her sense of humor—I learned only later that she had one. The day after Christmas, I proposed leaving. My period was due; I had a paper to write—I wanted to be home. But Griff didn’t want to go.

In the late afternoon on the twenty-sixth, I persuaded Sally to let me make a pot of coffee and serve it with Christmas cookies; they’d received several tins, some homemade, from parishioners. What was different, I understood now, as we sipped coffee in the living room, was that the brothers had left. I suspected the middle brother, Henry, agreed with us about the war, but the oldest brother had been in the army and was a hawk, so nobody had brought up the topic. Now I thought maybe we’d talk about politics. I was pretty sure Sally and the reverend were antiwar, but I knew they had been horrified by Griff’s violent crime. Would they scold, or argue, or continue to avoid that topic entirely?

Griff took a last sip of coffee, placed the cup and saucer on a coaster, and told his father that he was finally sure he no longer believed in God. He apologized.

“Oh, for heaven’s sake!” I burst out, and quickly saw how wrong that was. I looked at my shoes, hoping I’d be ignored, and I was.

“I’m sorry to hear this, son,” the reverend said. “I don’t know if I’ve ever told you, but I too have doubted.”

I glanced up, saw that Sally seemed to be suppressing a smile, and quickly glanced down again, feeling slightly better. But the next time I looked, I saw that Sally, in her corner of the sofa opposite Griff, was crying, and I understood why she’d been anxious—why everything had been tense through these days. The trouble had nothing to do with me. Reverend Griffin went on, “But I’m not sure you’ve truly . . .,” and Griff said, “I have, I truly have . . .,” and they began to discuss—yet again—the question. No one else spoke; no one left.

“God has tried us before, he has tested us before,” Reverend Griffin said.

At last, Griff stood and said he wanted to take me to Blessings, a Chinese restaurant he thought I’d like (at the time, the name seemed hilarious). His parents looked relieved.

On the way, he was talkative. “He’ll keep at me,” he said, “but I feel so much better!” He then asked, “How are you?” as if he’d just noticed I was there.

I said I had to get back to New York. He thought he’d better spend another day or two at home.

“Just to make sure everybody feels as bad as possible?” I said.

“We both need it,” he said, and I recognized that he was probably right about anything he claimed about his father, whom he resembled. His brothers were different, and I guess that was why Griff was the one they had expected to go into the ministry. It hadn’t seemed to be a question for the oldest, Isaac, who was learning how to repair televisions, or for Henry, who worked in a law office and studied law at night. As we approached the restaurant, Griff reached for me, and we stopped just outside the door to put our arms around each other. We’d barely touched for days. He kissed my ear before we stepped into the lighted room.

The next morning, I took the train to Grand Central, glorying in solitude. When I finally walked into our apartment, I sat down on the nearest chair in my coat, my bag at my feet, and didn’t move for an hour. Finally, I felt my period start and stood to go to the bathroom.

When I came out, I saw a piece of looseleaf paper near the front door, a little to the side. I had walked on it without noticing it; there was a footprint on it. Sometimes flyers were pushed under the door, or notices from the landlord. I picked it up and brushed it off, turned it over. In blue ink it read, I miss you so—love forever—HW.

I sat down where I was, on the floor. Had Helen come on Christmas Day? Did Helen even know about Christmas? Regardless, I had missed her. I might never see her again. I struggled to my feet, took some pills for cramps, and went to bed in my clothes. I slept for hours, and when I woke, it was dark. I cooked some spaghetti, ate it plain with butter—all I wanted—unpacked my bag, and went back to sleep.

I never wrote a doctoral thesis, but I spent a second year in graduate school: teaching, taking seminars, and compiling notes that eventually—two babies and two editing jobs later—became the book about Edith Wharton. Living was cheap, and Griff and I managed on the modest sums we were paid. As a year passed, it became harder for me to imagine a life without Griff, or Griff’s life—and his family’s life—without me.

Helen did not reappear, not in my life and not in the news. Everyone but me seemed to have forgotten her.

And there must have been a pinhole in my diaphragm, because in late winter, a little more than a year after that Christmas visit, I found myself pregnant. I said to Griff, “I went to the doctor,” and he looked up from the newspaper, his dark skin deepening, and dropped the paper on the floor. “Yes,” I said, crying, and he rushed at me, seizing me and placing himself around me as if to keep me still. “The next Griffin,” I said. The baby was the next Grossman as well, but my family didn’t think in those terms, exactly.

Griff and I hadn’t said much about marriage, but we both knew it would happen. Once, he had said, “I suppose we’ll be married for ten years before we replace this chair.” (It was the shabby gray one we’d bought together.) When he said that, I had looked hard at him. He’d said, “What? You don’t marry schoolteachers? You don’t marry atheists?”

“Under certain circumstances, I marry them,” I had said.

These, apparently, were the circumstances, because we started talking about a wedding the day of the doctor’s visit. For Griff, of course, a wedding involved God, whether he believed in Him or not. God was a kind of absentee landlord who’d abandoned the building.

At times I found all this fuss about religion irritating, but mostly it moved me. It was a sign of Griff’s scrupulous moral sense. My boyfriend—unlike the men many of my friends were involved with—regarded a coming baby as a gift, if not quite from God, and a pregnant girlfriend as a wife, a wife for all time. Griff doesn’t believe in divorce either—it’s inconceivable to him—and I know he will never quite forgive and forget the years we lived apart. I’ll get to that.

I listened patiently while he considered and reconsidered out loud all our options. The clerk in the Municipal Building—my suggestion—was unthinkable. “I can’t ask my parents to witness something like that!” he said. I didn’t like the rabbi of the synagogue my parents paid dues to and attended on the High Holy Days. He wouldn’t ask whether Griff or I believed in God, but I was pretty sure he wouldn’t marry me to someone who wasn’t Jewish.

“My father knows rabbis,” Griff said, and that turned out to be the solution. Active in the antiwar movement, Reverend Griffin knew an array of liberal clergymen. This was before clergywomen.

My parents considered themselves enlightened; they’d have been fine with the clerk in the Municipal Building. Abortion was still illegal—Roe v. Wade came a year later—but in New York, it wouldn’t have been difficult to end a pregnancy, and my mother delicately asked. I clutched my stomach, burst into tears, and declared that Griff was the man I loved, the man I’d always love, and I loved my baby, too.

“Okay, okay! Now I know!” she said. She and my father became bubbly—all but drooly—about the coming grandchild. And, in fact, about their son-in-law. Maybe it was true that they had worried primarily about my chance to become anybody’s wife.

We were married in New Haven, by a rabbi assisted by Reverend Griffin, in an ugly room lit by fluorescent lights at a community center, in the presence of about forty people, most reveling in the interfaith aspect. Our families turned out to resemble each other—well-behaved, cordial people who shunned ostentation. The gathering wasn’t jolly, but it was friendly. Sally and my mother hugged. My sister was my maid of honor. I missed Helen. My parents had offered to pay for a wedding trip, but Griff and I were too busy. We drove back to New York and resumed our lives.

While we ate supper one night that spring—I was getting big; we had been thinking about neighborhoods where we could afford a bigger apartment—Griff sat up straight in the way he did when he had something important to say, some moral requirement he had recently detected: a need to invite my crabby professor to dinner, for example. This one was larger.

“Can you write your dissertation away from campus?” he asked.

I was fairly sure I wasn’t going to write a dissertation. I was trying to think of what I might do if I didn’t become a professor, but I hadn’t talked about it. “I guess so. . . .”

“I must teach in New Haven,” he said.

I felt a swirl of unreasoning panic. I was angry—and had no idea why. As he talked about the poor black community in New Haven and his obligation to make a difference there, I grasped at the only argument against moving that came to mind—that New York was my home, the only place a reasonable person might live. New York is comprised of people who dream of getting out—replacing subway commutes with driving, walkups with sprawling lawns, snow and slush with warmth—and those who can’t imagine living anywhere else. Even when I expected to become a professor, it didn’t occur to me that academics find jobs where they can.

It was our first bad fight. I screamed. He accused me of not wanting to be part of his family. It was true that I was doubtful about living near Griff’s complicated family, but I was also tempted. It was like being offered a job, maybe a job I wouldn’t always like but in which I’d have a certain usefulness. I was already the Jewish Daughter-in-Law, supposedly an expert on certain topics. I was also the woman who’d kindly married their beloved and impossible youngest son. I was the expert on Griff.

Finally, a few days later, as I walked through the aisles of our neighborhood grocery with a basket on my arm that kept bumping into my belly, I realized why I didn’t want to leave New York—why I’d even been wondering if the baby might fit into our tiny apartment if I just shifted this, got rid of that. If I lived elsewhere, Helen could not find me. I began to sob in the grocery store, put down the basket on the floor, and fled. I went home and crawled into bed, then returned to the store, where I found the shabby canvas basket just where I’d left it, still containing the rice and soup I’d chosen. Someone had added cornstarch.

It’s hard to remember now how difficult it used to be to find people one had lost touch with. Or to be found. Before Facebook, the internet, and email addresses (which don’t change just because someone moves), the only way was a phone book or calling Information in a distant city. You had to know which city, know your friend’s married name, maybe. In the seventies, it was new for married women who weren’t actresses to keep their birth names. Helen could find me through my parents if we moved, but I knew she wouldn’t. I had kept my name, but our phone number in New Haven would be in Griff’s name.

Meeting a high school or college friend in the street was thrilling, and these reunions, just because they were so chancy, meant more than they should have. After Helen’s crime and disappearance, I kept expecting to run into Val, but I didn’t. Then she phoned me, sometime in my second year of grad school, though she had to call my parents first to get my new number. As always, I felt a mixture of relief, curiosity, and annoyance talking to her. How could I have kept Val and lost Helen?

“All right,” I said to Griff that night. “Let’s move to New Haven.” I’d had a vision of Griff and me—stooped, gray, wrinkled—stuffed into this one-room apartment with several aging children. Helen hadn’t earned this hysterical loyalty, and she didn’t want it. Immediately I felt better: in that apartment, I was always poised for a knock. Somehow, I didn’t think Helen would ring the doorbell.

Griff quickly found a job in a New Haven high school. I would work on my dissertation—I had decided to try writing one. A professor had hired me to help research a book, but I could work at the Yale library and meet him in the city occasionally.

We began spending weekends in New Haven, looking for an apartment, sometimes going to church, then eating Sally’s Sunday dinners. Griff’s sister-in-law DeeDee was pregnant too, and we joked about little Griffins taking over the world. I pretended to feel more comfortable than I did with this family—I guess all brides do that—but now and then I felt at ease with Sally, who was straightforward and who wanted to like me. I was lucky in my mother-in-law.

Griff relaxed a bit too; being an official atheist was easier than becoming one. Sometimes the reverend—I had learned that his first name was Isaac, like his oldest son’s, but I called him Reverend, like everyone else—looked at Griff sadly. But he gave me generous, somewhat distant smiles, and he told me each time he saw me that he was excited about our baby—also that he understood that I probably wouldn’t want him baptized, which made me feel guilty. Their neighbors told me the baby would be a boy—something about the way my stomach tilted. It was a few years before ultrasounds made it possible to know.

I listened for Helen’s knock during the weeks before we moved. The war was a steady, depressing fact that suddenly, now and then, became unbearable once more. One day in June, we all saw for the first time the famous photograph of the naked, burned, screaming Vietnamese girl running with others from napalm. President Nixon had been reducing the presence of American troops on the ground, and there were peace proposals, but air strikes increased. It was an election year again, and we were for George McGovern, the peace candidate.

We moved in July, with help from friends. We filled Griff’s VW, and somebody had a pickup truck. I looked for Helen on the block as we drove away. Then I got interested in living in New Haven and fixing up the apartment we’d found. The Helen part of my life was over, I decided—and so was the Val part, apparently. I didn’t let her know where I’d gone. But one day that fall, when I took the train to New York to see the professor for whom I worked, I thought I recognized Mallon from the window of a bus and jumped off. I ran back a block on Broadway, searching for the tense shoulders and reddish hair that I had seen, peering into stores, not wanting to go inside lest I miss her.

“Olivia,” a low voice said behind me, as I hesitated. Mallon had come out of a grocery store with a pack of cigarettes. She paused to light one, offered it to me, then said, “I see you’re—,” nodding at my stomach.

I told her I was married to Joshua Griffin. “I thought you were in hiding,” I said.

“I’m mostly not in New York,” she said.

“Is Helen all right?” I asked.

“I’m not with them,” she said.

“You know where she is?”

“I know where she is.”

“Can you—can you tell her I’m living in New Haven? Can you give her my address?”

“I can’t promise,” Mallon said.

“I understand,” I said.

“I don’t think you’ll hear from her,” she said.

“Okay,” I said weakly. I just wanted to see the piece of paper I handed her disappear into a pocket. She turned away, and I was sorry I’d chased her. Now I had reason to be anxious again, to wait again. I heard nothing.

The fall continued. Nixon won reelection in a landslide—which was depressing until Watergate, just a few months later. Griff and I got ready for the baby. One day, alone in our second-floor apartment, staring out a window at a bare, wintry backyard, I felt certain that I’d never see Helen again, never know what had become of her, and I felt a certain calm—what people nowadays call “closure.”

Martha, a big girl who looked like the reverend—he was light-skinned, paler than Griff, and she was the same, and also had his placid dignity—was three months old and spring was coming when I saw a short, blond woman cross the street toward me as I bumped the carriage down the porch steps of our three-family house. I knew the woman mattered. Her elbow bent slightly as she mounted the curb on my side of the street; I saw that she was Helen, Helen in makeup and black pants she’d never wear, false breasts and a tight black sweater with sequins, and that wig. She had dressed up as a parody of what she most passionately opposed. But it was Helen. I couldn’t speak.

“Olivia,” she said.

“Mallon gave you the address?”

She was carrying a map of New Haven. She had come on a bus from downtown—I don’t know what, before that. “What do you think?” she said. “She’s not a bad person, Olivia. You could have trusted her.”

I embraced her and started to cry. She shook off my hug and said, “I have to see my nephew.”

“Niece,” I said. “Martha.”

The baby was asleep. Helen crouched at the side of the carriage and put her hand on Martha’s back through the blanket. In those days, they told us to put babies to sleep on their stomachs, not their backs. Martha’s face was sweetly turned to the right, and her thumb was in her mouth. Helen slowly traced Martha’s shoulders, her head, her face, her thumb, with her own forefinger (she wore dark red nail polish), grazing my daughter’s edge so lightly that Martha stayed asleep, just worked her thumb a little harder.

Then Helen stood and we walked, as we always had. “Don’t call me by my old name,” Helen said. “I’m Mary.”

“That doesn’t sound Jewish,” I said.

“I’m not Jewish. I’m Mary Walsh. I’m risking my life to tell you this.”

“Not your life,” I said. “Maybe your freedom. But I won’t tell.”

“My life,” Helen said. I suppose she meant that if the police came for her, there would be shooting. Maybe she carried a gun. “And you have to promise not to tell my family you saw me.”

“I promise.” I felt a pang of guilt.

“I had to see the baby.”

Mostly we were silent. I couldn’t ask the obvious questions. I still don’t know where she was living, who with, what her plans were. At last, I said, “Helen, I wish it hadn’t all happened. I wish I could have you back.”

She shook her head and was silent. Then she said. “We have to do hard stuff, Olivia.”

“Oh, Helen!” I said, forgetting to even consider saying “Mary,” but when I looked, she wasn’t Helen at all—or so I thought for a moment of excruciating embarrassment. She was quite well disguised, and the disguise made me as sad as if she really had become someone else.

She wouldn’t come upstairs with me, wouldn’t tell me how she’d come or how she’d get wherever she was going. She said, “I wish I could tell you to tell my parents I’m okay, but I can’t,” and I wondered as she hurried down the block whether she meant I was supposed to tell them after all. I decided I couldn’t risk it. Maybe someday she and her companions would decide they could come out of hiding, that nobody cared anymore. I would hope for that. I yanked the carriage up the steps.

After our Indian dinner with Jean and Zak, I didn’t see Jean for a few weeks; I supposed she had broken up with him and wanted nothing to do with people she’d think of as his old friends. I was angry with Zak for driving Jean away from me. He wasn’t an old friend, more like an old enemy.

I was trying to write my essay on Bright Morning that fall. I wrote openings that were far too personal, stopped in mid-sentence, opened a new document, and started again. Griff was busy at school and spent his evenings upstairs.

One late afternoon, I took Barnaby to the park and met Zak, running in baggy shorts, on a trail near the river. He stopped and stood wiping sweat off his face. His hair flopped on his forehead. “Olive!”

“Hi.”

“Wait,” he said, though I had stopped, too. He bent to pet the dog. “I was a prick that night,” he said. “At the restaurant.”

“Did Jean break up with you?” I allowed myself to ask.

“No,” he said. “Break up with me? Did she say that?”

I should have known Zak would get what he wanted. “I haven’t seen her. You were such a pest, I figured she might have.”

“We did have a fight,” he said. “I didn’t even register that Griff kept looking at me like I should be taken out with the garbage. The next day, all I could see was that look. I hadn’t seen that look since . . . since you know when.”

It was funny that he said that about the garbage, because at the moment he smelled of sweat—but fresh, vigorous sweat, and I was not repelled but attracted.

Zak said, “Olive, I’ve missed you!” It was the first time we’d been alone together since he’d returned to New Haven.

I had liked him so much back then that I couldn’t feel as angry with him as I knew I should, as Griff felt. Griff had loved him but had withdrawn all his affection when we learned what Zak had done. I stared at him, there in the woods, but didn’t say I’d missed him, too. I began to walk, and he fell into step beside me. Our feet crunched leaves. The leaves still on the trees were sparse, but some were yellow, and the sun shone through them. The river glinted. The dog sniffed bushes and tree roots.

“It wasn’t that I was in love with you,” Zak said finally.

“What?”

He was silent again. Then he said, “Of course, you have to know that I’ve spent the last twenty years of my life trying to figure out why I did it. Why I filmed Martha like that.”

I didn’t know what to make of that—I had not thought this. I thought he’d spent the time justifying it to himself. “But you said you don’t want to be forgiven,” I said.

“Hmm. No, I don’t.”

“But why not? If you think you did the wrong thing, why not be forgiven? If possible.”

“Oh, forgiveness.” He was hugging himself. “I meant that. It takes away who we are. I’d rather be me.”

“Are you cold?” I said. “Do you want to run?”

“I’m cold, but it’s okay.” He sounded like a boy. “I shouldn’t have been so disgusting, but it’s not forgiveness I want.”

“Then what do you want?” I asked.

We came to a narrow footbridge, and though the wind had come up, he paused and looked upstream, leaning over the railing. Barnaby watched ducks. I patted his skull, pressing it into my leg. Clouds were gathering, and now the river looked dark.

“I thought you’d be interested, back then,” Zak said. “I did it to get your attention.”

“You thought I’d be interested? In pornographic photographs of my daughter taken without her knowledge?”

“I think I knew Griff would be angry,” he said, “but I thought you’d be different. What I imagined—I know this is incredible, but what can I say? I was a kid. I imagined Martha complaining to you, and you reassuring her, telling her it was like the sixties, like the way you all lived back then, that it was advanced to do things like that, like John Lennon and Yoko Ono, like . . .” He paused, then said again, “Like the sixties.”

There’s nothing quite like discovering what someone has been thinking when it’s unlike anything you ever imagined. “The sixties weren’t—” I didn’t know how to put it. “We were serious.”

“I know. I’ve read Bright Morning of Pain—after our dinner, I got hold of it.”

Now I had no idea what to say or do. That book was his idea of the sixties? Of seriousness? Wasn’t that the problem? Wasn’t it many people’s idea of the sixties? I wanted him to read the book I might have written.

“My dog needs his supper,” I said.

“I’m sorry,” Zak said.

He didn’t start running again; we continued walking together. I had a mad idea that I could make him understand everything—what I’d done in the sixties, what I felt about Bright Morning of Pain, what effect his act had had on Martha. But I said nothing.

When we stepped out of the woods a few minutes later, he said, “Not telling Martha seemed incidental. If I asked her, she’d say no, but if I just did it and then told her about it, she might love it—and if she didn’t love it, you’d help her love it. I do see that was crazy. I saw that quickly. Griff and my film teacher made me see that.”

We were in College Woods then—the only part of the park that is not woods—and in this more public place, with wide paths and benches and playgrounds, our conversation became general. Zak was still appealing—a thought that felt disloyal to Martha. I said goodbye, and, dismissed, he began to run again. I went home and fed Barnaby. Griff came home; he went upstairs. I could hear bits of the PBS NewsHour, so I went up and watched with him. I didn’t tell him the whole story, just that I’d met Zak, that Zak and Jean hadn’t broken up.

“He won’t do,” Griff said.

“He’s not the kid he was,” I said. He didn’t answer.

In November 1976, Martha was almost four and Annie was a year old. We’d moved to a larger apartment, not far from where we live now. I was working at a press in northwestern Connecticut that specialized in books about American history. I had my driver’s license, and we bought a second used car so I could go back and forth two days a week to the office, leaving a bottle of breast milk behind, returning with piles of manuscripts. On the other days, I worked at home. The kids went to a lefty day care center in a church basement. I’d forgotten my rage about the war—I was sometimes ashamed to realize that. People who had opposed the war, back at the start of the movement, were often those who cared about social justice: legal aid lawyers, social workers, teachers. When nonviolent protest began to seem pointless, those who resisted the turn to violence by the Weather Underground and lesser-known groups like Helen’s returned—maybe hardly noticing the shift—to social justice. I had been atypical, with my love of moral subtlety and ambivalence in old novels. The women’s movement had made even childcare political, so I could tell myself I was still in the struggle just because we’d joined a cooperative day care center, in which fathers were required to work a few hours a week along with mothers. Griff and I both put in hours taking care of the children, he after school.

Meanwhile, the United States had signed the Paris Peace Accords in 1973 and Saigon fell to North Vietnam in 1975. The war was over. As all this happened, I wondered where Helen was and what she and her friends thought. Now I know from books that their opposition to the American government was so general that it didn’t matter what the government did.

One Wednesday, Griff went to work as I was sleepily nursing Annie in bed. He liked to be in his classroom well before the children. Annie was an even bigger baby than Martha had been, and she crawled and walked later, content to rock her hefty middle back and forth from her perch on her hands and knees. After I nursed her that morning, I showered and dressed, hauling her around, putting her into her crib when I needed both hands. Griff had fed Martha breakfast, and when he left, she was playing on the floor of our bedroom in her pajamas, singing about a giraffe who couldn’t fly. I got her dressed and then gave her a second breakfast—this was her routine most days—while Annie sat in the high chair with toast cut in squares. I sat down with my mug of coffee and my own toast. The weather was still warm, and I enjoyed the children, as well as the knowledge that I wouldn’t have to look after them all day, nor drive to work: I’d walk them to day care in our big stroller and come home to the manuscript I was editing. It was about women in the Revolutionary War.

I remember it all so many years later not because anything particular happened that morning but because when something did happen—later that day—it was the thought of the peaceful morning, the solid, rumpled bodies of my children (somebody nonchalantly leaking pee, shit, snot, or drool) that I went back to: this was the story I told myself, trying to sleep that night.

Working at home, I kept a leisurely schedule, and at day care, nobody cared if children were dropped off late; that day I was slow. Eventually I got everybody going and pushed the stroller to the day care center. It was a windless, warm day. A few leaves were left on the trees. Martha was still singing about a giraffe. I left the stroller and my daughters after kisses and squeezes, a little conversation with the people on the turn, then walked home unencumbered, poured another cup of coffee, and settled down to work.

I didn’t talk to anyone all day, as often happened. I spent those hours in the solitude of engrossing but not terribly difficult intellectual work, stopping only for food or more coffee.

When I was approaching the day care center at five that afternoon, I saw one of the other mothers, a woman with a loud voice and emphatic opinions that she told you before you knew what the topic was, so you found out which side she—and presumably you—were on (anti, generally) before learning what you were against. She had no sense of humor. She wasn’t a bad person, only irritating.

I caught up to her, and we walked along together. I wanted to tell her something funny her son had said to me that morning, to see if she might laugh, but before I could speak, she said, “So how exactly are they bringing down the military industrial complex by robbing a suburban bank and shooting three cops? Tell me that. It’s a tragedy, a stupid, stupid tragedy. That girl!”

“What girl?” I stopped where I was. “What girl?”

“The one who got killed. It was on the radio just now.”

“I don’t know about it. What happened? Who got killed?” I was shouting.

“Not around here, nobody you know—someplace in Pennsylvania.” I fought down panic. Nobody I knew lived in Pennsylvania. She went on, “The same radical politics we all believed in—up to a point! Up to a point. They make me madder than the assholes in Washington.”

She touched my arm lightly, as if to say, “So much for that,” and started walking briskly toward the gate. Once inside, we couldn’t talk about a bank robbery. I stopped, dropped my purse, and seized her forearm, squeezing so hard it must have hurt. “You have to tell me!” I said. “I don’t know what happened.”

“Easy, take it easy,” she said. “A bank robbery. But a girl got killed—a Jewish girl from Brooklyn. One of the radicals.”

I would have to go inside, take my children, behave as if everything was fine. This could not be done.

“Do you know her name?” I asked.

“Something like Weinberg.”

“Please, stop,” I said. I was whispering, helpless and not caring who saw or knew it. “Was it Helen Weinstein?”

“Maybe,” she said, and at that moment, Griff’s car came to a stop beside us and he jumped out and seized me in his arms, sobbing. Whatever happened to Griff and me later—the long separation, the strangeness between us, still, at times—we were joined indissolubly, married for real, at that moment.

He steered me to the car, and we sat and cried there for quite a while, seeing people emerge from the day care center, leading or carrying or pushing children. We were the last to pick up our kids, but the woman who’d told me must have finally worked out what was going on and told the parents on the shift. When we went inside, Martha and Annie were being quietly read to by one of the fathers. He hugged me, patted Griff on the back, hoisted his own little boy to his shoulders, and left us alone to get ourselves and our children out of there.

We had many chances to learn the whole story, and people still remember it because it was one of the few times during those years when a radical white woman died. Helen had carried a concealed gun. She had gone into the bank and quietly approached a teller with a note. When the teller gave a signal and a security guard approached Helen, she took out the gun and killed him. Cops rushed in; her companions shot at them. A cop killed Helen with one shot.

The photographs in the paper, which I stared at for hours, were bizarre. It was one of those ugly little banks where customers are greeted with insincere platitudes and halfhearted ornaments wish them whatever is appropriately wished at the season. There was a picture of Helen, an old picture of the girl I knew. And there was a picture of the place where the crime had taken place, after it was cleaned up. Above the spot where Helen died, a string of limp letters hung in an arc between two pillars, spelling out “Happy Thanksgiving.”