The Education of Harriet Hatfield (16 page)

“Miss Hatfield, I’ve been trying to get back to this heaven for days, but little Serena has flu. She’s the one who is only four, so I couldn’t. Then my mother flew in from New York and she’s reading nursery rhymes to Serena. I want my kids to grow up with poems in their heads right from the start.”

“Well, I was hoping to see you again,” I say.

“Good. I looked at the window. It’s stunning. There are so many women’s lives I know nothing about. Do you have extras for sale? I wouldn’t want to spoil that window!”

“Of course. What is your pleasure?”

“Maybe that big fat biography of Willa Cather.”

“That I can provide.”

“I read a lot of her in college—I went to Hunter—but somehow not a biography, though I suppose it’s clear that the Nebraska novels, anyway, have elements of autobiography.” She is standing by my desk as we talk. “I’m babbling away, I’m afraid, interrupting your work. You just can’t imagine the relief it is to be in an adult world for a half-hour! Talk about books! Oh my!”

“I’m not working. It’s been a humdinger of a day so far and talking about books is what this old body needs. Come over and sit down, why don’t you?”

“You can’t imagine how sustaining this store is. It does me good just to know it’s there when I get to cooking macaroni and cheese or even making a milkshake—all poor Serena will eat. I’m a good mother, I think, but oh dear me, I’m not a good housekeeper! And the things I like to cook are not the things small children like.”

“But your husband does, I trust.”

“Oh yes. Phil, he comes home ravenous and we eat after the children are in bed—late—but then we open a bottle of wine and we feast.”

“Sounds good to me,” I say, basking in this happy, buoyant woman’s presence.

Now I see her hesitate and look at me for a second as though she were making a decision about something. “Somebody told me you had been threatened. Or is that just gossip? And if not, why would anyone threaten you? I’m curious. Maybe I shouldn’t ask.”

“Some goons in this neighborhood think I’m a bad influence who sells obscene books.”

“You must be kidding!”

“Well …” I wonder how much to explain. “You may have noticed that some of the women who come here are couples. And maybe you saw that interview in the
Globe?
”

“No, I must have missed that. We read the
Times
. I buy the
Globe
only once in a while.”

I glance over at Joan and she shakes her head. Oh dear, what can I say? “In a nutshell, Mrs. Blakeley, homophobia is the answer. I lived for thirty years with Vicky Chilton until she died. I’m a lesbian.”

Nan takes this in and frowns. What is she thinking? “I see,” she says, and meets my eyes, such a questioning warm look we exchange. “I suppose sometimes that must be something like being black. I’m black and I know what it is to arouse curiosity, pity, and sometimes hatred, or even worse, being patronized. You just have to grow a tough skin or the shell of a turtle,” and she smiles that warm smile that touched me from the first moment I laid eyes on her. Now she says, “You must miss your friend a lot. I wish I had known her.”

“She was a powerful woman dedicated to publishing books she believed in.” I smile at her. “And like you I was glad to take care of things and not be a professional. The publishing house was, I suppose, our child. Never thought of that before, but I see it’s quite true. I miss Vicky but I am rather enjoying not being anyone’s housekeeper, gardener, and general factotum anymore. Does that shock you?” for I catch a questioning look in her eyes.

“Not at all,” she says. “I admire you for being able to build a new life.”

Because I catch some ambivalence in this answer I think it over. “Sometimes I think I haven’t even begun to mourn Vicky. I plunged into the whole business of the bookstore a few months after her death and it has been so absorbing, so enriching, Mrs. Blakeley.”

“Do call me Nan.”

“Then I’m Harriet, and we are friends.”

“You must come over some afternoon and see the children and maybe Phil could get home early for a drink. That would be fun.” She looks at her watch. “Heavens, it’s nearly five and my mother will be dealing with some kind of uproar. I must run.”

I persuade her to wait a minute while I find a copy of the Cather biography. “It’s expensive, I’m afraid.”

“Never mind, I’ve earned it. I tell Phil my salary as a home-maker should be at least ten thousand dollars and he has to agree though he doesn’t want to.”

When she has left I say to Joan, “Joan, I’m a wreck. But isn’t Nan a wonderful woman? I do enjoy her.”

But Nan’s visit is not, as I hoped it might be, the end of a demanding day. For just as I am about to go upstairs Patience dashes in for a minute to ask if it is all right if Carl delivers a load of wood tomorrow morning and charges seventy dollars. “That’s good news,” I say, “I paid a hundred and forty dollars for what was stolen. Great day! Joan will be here and can pay him when he comes.”

“Good, Alice is out in the car, and I must run.”

“There appear to be quite a few guardian angels around,” Joan says. “It’s not such a bad neighborhood after all.”

“Well, yes and no. The enemies have not been routed.”

“Shall I call you around ten to see if all is well?”

“I expect to be fast asleep by ten, so don’t worry.”

As usual, at around five, people begin to pile in to buy books, and for once I am glad to make my escape.

I lie down on my bed with Patapouf beside me and let the waves of anxiety and fatigue rise and fall inside my head. I almost never think about myself as sixty years old, but lying here, it comes to me that I am driving the old body rather hard. I am stiff from lifting and arranging the books. And under that irritating pain, which makes it impossible to get comfortable, is—and it really can’t be kept at bay—anxiety. What are those goons plotting now to try to drive me out? Smashing the windows of the store? Setting it on fire? The possibilities are endless. I try to shut them out by calling the Quality Inn and asking to speak to Martha. She has checked out an hour ago. So presumably David has persuaded her to go home with him and perhaps Joe has helped with that decision. In the end there is nothing to do but get up, make myself a stiff drink, and take a look at the news on television. And this I do.

But these days the news is hardly soothing—a black man beaten up in the South End, the terrible starvation in Ethiopia, another rocket blown up on its way, though that perhaps can be considered good news. Finally I make myself a cheese sandwich and drink a glass of milk. Now at last I go to bed but I keep waking to listen for any strange sound and there is so much traffic it is hard to tell if some truck braking might not be someone with evil in mind. There is the sound of broken glass now and I hurry downstairs in the dark. But it turns out to be from a collision of two cars down the street.

This will never do, I tell myself severely. Either you learn to live with anxiety or it will drive you nuts. Finally I fall asleep, only to have a strange dream about Vicky. She is shaking me awake and is very angry and keeps saying, “You fool, you fool, don’t you have an atom of common sense?” But what her anger is about is not clear. And I suppose my aching arms are at the root of the nightmare.

I wake up crying and can’t stop. I do not cry often or easily so it upsets me to feel so weak and defenseless, with even the Vicky of my dream turning against me. And maybe for good reason. It is true what I said to Nan. I have not really mourned her. I have buried our life together deep in my unconscious. I do not want to think about her. And no doubt the unmourned get their revenge, which is guilt.

12

After the tears, I must have slept hard because I wake up at half-past seven, late indeed, as I often wake at five and like to have time, unhurried time, in which to pull myself together. But the morning after my nightmare about Vicky I do not want to get up. I want to lie in bed and think, and so I do, grateful that there is no reason not to, since Joan will be opening the shop and my stint won’t start till two. Patapouf is still fast asleep under the bed, a late riser in her old age.

I make some coffee and take it to bed with a hard roll and marmalade. It is the first morning since the store opened that I permit myself the luxury of breakfast in bed. But it is not exactly pleasure after all, rather a need to think about Vicky and me, and our relationship, to look at it from the point of view of the new Harriet, one she did not know, I realize, for the more I consider it the more I see that I have changed in some fundamental ways since Vicky’s death. Whatever guilt I feel must be from the idea that I have been leaving her all these months, that I have cut myself off almost entirely from what she and I shared for thirty years.

Instead of looking back with nostalgia to our ritual tea by the fire with Patapouf and the old cat who has since died, I am engaged in pouring tea for total strangers, women off the street, anyone who happens to be around when the water is boiling. Instead of ordering an expensive but glorious tree peony—Vicky always teased me because when we went over garden catalogs my mouth watered, as though we were ordering food—instead of that self-indulgent pleasure, I am ordering books, tons of books, many of which she would have referred to as by “another one of those loony lesbian feminists.”

I am breaking out of the tight circle in which we lived very happily all those years. I am choosing to ally myself with, in some cases, social pariahs. Vicky, I tell myself, was not really a snob, but she expected the amenities to be observed, and she wanted to see people who shared her own interests. She liked men better than women, and preferred women who held positions of power to her colleagues’ wives.

Whatever would she have made of Chris and Mary, going off to El Salvador to help rebuild the villages destroyed by the army? She might well have said, “Why don’t they mind their own business? There are plenty of needy people right here in Dorchester.” And as for Sue Bagley, she would have given her short shrift, as I sometimes want to do myself. She might, on the other hand, have understood Martha better than I do. “Oh Vicky,” I murmur, and again those tears that shot out of me in the night begin to flow. What is happening to me?

Is it grief, as Nan and so many others would think, those who have commiserated with me in my widowhood? But is it grief I am feeling? No, I know it is not exactly that. Perhaps it is guilt for having been able to cut myself off with such objectivity from a good marriage, as it surely was. Joan, for instance, is mourning what has been taken from her. Maybe death is easier to handle than divorce. I wonder …

I rarely felt anger towards Vicky and when I did she closed the door on it and waited, as she said, for my “mood” to change. It was useless to argue that I was not in a mood but outraged because, for instance, she had just fired the gardener without telling me. He had cut off all the aster buds thinking they were seeds. It was extremely irritating, but it was really not his fault. “We have to have people around who know what they are doing,” she had said.

“The buds do look a little wizened at first,” I had explained. Danny, the fired gardener, was quite an old man and had worked for us for ten years, after all.

“I’m too busy, Harriet. I can’t take time to argue with you,” and she had closed the door to her study.

But why am I remembering that sort of thing and not all the trips we made to Europe together, and the warm family atmosphere she was brought up in and the huge old mansard-roofed house in Brookline? Her father and mother, especially her father, were the only people I ever knew who could tease Vicky and bring her down from her high horse. And they took me right into the family, even to Vicky’s mother saying at the start, “Don’t let Vicky order you around, will you? She is an only child, you know,” and she commended me for the strange reason that I had brothers.

“I’m afraid I’m used to being ordered around … a girl, with two brothers, you can imagine.”

Vicky just smiled and paid no attention. “I am who I am,” was her refuge before any serious attack, “and I’m not about to change.”

What she did do was to treat me always with tender respect, and that was quite new to me and very dear, for I rarely got that at home, except from my father. In some ways, I recognize on this morning of reflection, Vicky was rather like my father, going her own way, but in such a charming and secure manner that it seemed quite all right. After all, who was hurt by that? No one. My father, who had been greatly loved, exuded warmth and good will, and so had Vicky.

“What would I ever do without you, darling?” was often her last word at night, as we curled up together in our bed with Patapouf at the end, and sometimes the cat, Porteous, purring between us. That is what I have lost, and what I miss, the tender loving, the physical closeness long after the first passionate year was over. So very slowly now as I lie here, allowing thoughts to take me where they will, I do come to the place of mourning. There will never again be that kind of sharing—of that I feel certain. I cannot imagine anyone ever sleeping in my bed again. My life from now on will be dispersed among a great many people, friends, strangers, strangers who will become friends like Joe and Eddie, but there never again will be that strong loving arm around my shoulders, and for a half-hour I feel the loss. I let the loss in and don’t lock it out as I have been doing. And I weep good tears.

I know I am weeping partly for me, for me who will never again know that sort of absolute love and security, that fortress against the world that two people who are truly married become. I feel vulnerable for the first time since Vicky’s death.

So with that in mind, I make myself get up and begin to face this day, wondering as I dress what the new Harriet will do with it, and what she will have to meet. And there on my calendar I see that it is Tuesday already and I am to go to Andrew’s for supper. What an occasion! One thing about my years with Vicky was that we did not see much of my brothers after my mother and father died. When they were alive there had been large family gatherings which Vicky only rarely wanted to attend. I was astonished when Fred showed an interest in the store, and now Andrew recognizing the special bond he and I share. I look forward to seeing where he lives, what atmosphere he has created for himself alone, but he is clearly not a happy man, sorry for himself, eating himself up with angers and constraints. We were none of us brought up to handle being outside the norm and Andrew has no doubt walled himself in in order to survive. Well, we shall see.