The Education of Harriet Hatfield (17 page)

There is now the welcome sound of wood being stacked in the cellar and I hurry down to thank Alice and Patience’s friend. He proves to be a grizzled man in a red shirt with a boy with him who looks only about thirteen. They introduce themselves as Carl and Mike.

“How about a cup of coffee and a piece of coffee cake?” I ask, but they are anxious to get home and refuse the offer.

“The other lady gave us a check,” Carl explains.

There is something comforting about a cellar well-stacked with wood and I tell him how grateful I am, what a lift it has given us to be able to replace right away what has been stolen, and at such a good price.

“Glad to oblige.” He explains that the top layer is seasoned and what is under that had better be given six months before it is used. “You could start a fire all right, but it takes some skill. In the top layer there’s some apple. That’ll make a sweet-smelling fire for you any day now.” And Mike, eager to have me notice it, points out some white birch.

The woodpile has taken on during this talk a personality, a reality all its own, and I savor it. When we part we shake hands and Carl gives me his phone number and says to call when I need another load.

When I go upstairs to the store, there is Martha, who rushes at me and gives me a warm excited hug. “I’ve just sold a painting!” she says. “I can’t believe it—a sort of bag lady, dragging in parcels. She wanted to buy it and I let her have it for ten dollars a month.”

Of course I recognize the woman, she who does not like Gothic novels, but her buying a painting does surprise me. “She’s quite a character … comes in often to sit down and wait for her bus.”

“She said it was the roots of the trees that fascinate her, the thought that trees are as wide around under the earth as above it.” For me there has been a nightmarish quality to those roots. How wrong my perception of them is! “She said it was an archetypal image. Oh she talked on and on, and then I drove her to her apartment because she really couldn’t carry it and all those parcels. She lives with her husband who is bedridden, a terribly depressing place, filled with books and magazines and the hospital bed taking up half the living room—her husband, a wrinkled old baby, whimpering in his sleep. I couldn’t wait to get away, but I must say she has guts, that woman. Imagine living like that, and all they have is Social Security plus a very little in savings they have to draw on, she says.”

The last thing I expected was to see Martha in a state of euphoria, interested in someone besides herself, and I am struck dumb.

“Oh Harriet, I am so excited I forgot to tell you the most important thing. David came to the Quality Inn before four and persuaded me to go with him to Dr. Hunter’s. At that point I didn’t know who I was or what I wanted, so I agreed. I was awfully glad to see David, to see him not angry for a change, and very subdued.”

“The world appears to be turning right side up again. We have wood and Martha is all right,” I say, turning to Joan, who gives me a surreptitious wink. “How did you like Dr. Hunter?”

“I liked him. He wants us both to go back next week. He doesn’t say much. I guess I talked a lot and he listened, but his listening was very supportive. I mean I didn’t feel he was judging me or David and when it came to David’s hitting me so hard, David cried. Nothing is settled but we are going to try to be gentle and not argue for a week.”

“That,” I say, “is optimistic.” I am slightly irritated by Martha’s state of mind, so positive and on top of things, when I remember what she put me through yesterday.

“I know,” she says, giving me a wary look. “I don’t know what I would have done without you. You saved me from despair, Harriet. I’ll never forget it.”

“I’m glad if I was of help, but now, Martha, I really have to have a talk with Joan about business matters.”

I feel ashamed when she has left and I turn to Joan. “How do psychiatrists manage not to be bored?”

“My guess is they sort of black out until a real clue is uttered and then they wake up.”

“I made that up about a business talk.”

“But,” Joan says, “it’s high time we did have a talk. So much has been happening lately I didn’t want to add another anxiety or burden, but we have been losing money. That big sale on Saturday after the
Globe
mess just about saved us.”

“Oh well,” I say, “I told Jonathan we would probably lose money for a year at least, so he is prepared.”

“But are you prepared?”

At this I have to laugh. “Of course not. I hoped I might be wrong. Now we must think about getting the store known. What about a small ad in the
Globe?
”

“Worth a try.”

“What about a poster we could pin up here and there? At Sage’s, for example?”

“That might work. Do you know anyone good at that sort of thing? What we need to think about is a logo or some kind of device.”

“Oh.” I ponder this. “‘Good Books for Good Women,’” but as soon as I utter the words I see how ridiculous they sound and so does Joan, so we can’t stop laughing. “Andrew might know someone at that high-tech place where he works. I’ll ask him when I see him tonight. Meanwhile I had better have a look at the accounts.”

Joan suggests that I take them upstairs so I will not be interrupted, and so I do. What becomes clear almost at once is that the big expense is ordering. I have been ordering anything and everything that looks interesting. Two of each except for obvious best-sellers when I order five. Maybe I have been extravagant, but we found early on that publishers are maddeningly slow about refilling an order, so I choose to avoid that by ordering a lot. My instinct is to go on as we have been doing for six months, meanwhile stimulating sales in every way we can.

It is not hopeless but I realize that I have not put my mind on the business and it is high time that I do.

13

When I walk into Andrew’s apartment, high up on the wrong side of Beacon Street, I don’t know what to expect, but whatever I was expecting was not this rather cozy Victorian atmosphere, comfortable chairs upholstered in red velvet, thick tapestry curtains that shut out the traffic, books everywhere. It is a studio, really, with just one bedroom off the big room, lighted chiefly from the large skylight.

“What a beautiful room, Andrew.”

“You’re surprised, I hope. You didn’t think your brother had taste,” he teases.

“I knew my brother had taste, but this seems so …” I hesitate before a word that might offend. I censor
conservative, nostalgic, enclosed, secret
, and finally Andrew supplies the word himself.

“Esoteric?”

“Maybe.”

“I planned it around Father’s English desk. When we divided up the family stuff I got that and the two Victorian chairs.”

“It’s a sort of private re-creation then. I did think of the word ‘nostalgic’ when I was looking for a word.”

“Maybe nostalgic for something that never really existed. You know as well as I do, Harriet, that I never felt at home in that house, so I made this into what feels like home to me now. I love this place,” he says. “Sit down and tell me what you would like to drink. I have a bottle of champagne on ice but if you would prefer scotch or a martini, that’s available too.”

“Champagne of course. This is a celebration, Andrew, isn’t it?”

Suddenly he smiles his warm smile which lights up his narrow dark face as though in smiling a mask slides away and the young ardent boy under it looks out. “It is for me. I never in my wildest dreams thought you and I could have anything in common. You appeared to live somewhere far away on a peak with Vicky, so serene and safe. There was no room for misfits.”

As the champagne cork pops I say, without thinking, “Pop goes the weasel!”

“Hey, it’s Mumms, no weasel. Have a taste!” and he hands me one of the now old-fashioned wide champagne glasses I much prefer to the fashionable flutes around these days. For a second as we lift our glasses, I meet Andrew’s eyes, those very dark eyes, and we look rather than speak a toast.

“Pure bliss,” I say, setting my glass down.

“You know, you are looking extremely well, Harriet. Has anyone told you that?”

“People don’t make personal remarks to the manager of a bookstore,” I say demurely, “but at sixty one comes into one’s face at last. I was, you have to admit, a rather plain person in the old days. Whereas you, Andrew, were always tantalizingly handsome and I envied you.”

“And now I’m a seedy old man,” he says with sudden bitterness.
“Sic transit …”

“Nonsense. I still envy you that tall slim figure. Women must be crazy about you as they always were.” But of course that is the wrong thing to say, the habitual trite thing people in our society say without a thought.

“Men no longer are,” he says, frowning and drinking half his glass down. “In the bars I’m treated like an old professor who is patted on the back and chivvied.”

“Then why go to bars?”

“Because that is where gay men meet sexual partners. Honestly, Harriet, you are an innocent old body, aren’t you?”

How many people have called me innocent lately? It is getting to be a bore, and the tone this time is not charitable, “old body” indeed. “Can’t you meet men at your job? I mean, does it have to be bars? I’ll tell you one thing, Andrew, I am proud of having been part of a gay marriage, a marriage that lasted thirty years.”

“But at what cost?” he needles.

“Don’t put me on the defensive. That’s over. I’m leading a wholly different life.”

“Exactly. After being in prison for thirty years you’re out in the real world.”

“True.” I have to grant it.

“We may be brother and sister, Harriet, but you have to realize that men are different from women. Thank God we can talk about it, but the gulf is there—when I can I pick up a young man for the night, or with luck, for a month or so, but it doesn’t last.”

“Hasn’t AIDS changed that—that easy casual sex?”

“Yes.” Andrew fills my glass and his and sits down opposite me, stretches his long legs out, and looks over at me having apparently dropped his aggressive stance.

“It seems so wasteful,” I say. “I mean, to get involved for such a short time.”

“Oh, but one is not involved,” he says quickly. “It’s the lure of the stranger, it’s the perpetual adventure.”

“You miss then what a long-term marriage is all about and I can assure you that it is not primarily sexual.”

“It sounds boring,” Andrew says. “You know all about each other. What is there to discover? What do you go on learning?”

I do not have a quick answer to that question so I am rather relieved when Andrew says he had better get the Dover sole into the broiler. “I won’t be long, so just relax and look around.”

I want to look at the books, a whole wall of books to the back ceiling, with an elegant English ladder with which to reach the top shelves. The books make a statement about the homosexual writer and artist. Gide is there in the beautiful Pléiade edition, Julian Green’s journal, E. M. Forster, of course, all of Virginia Woolf, Vita Sackville-West, W. H. Auden, Isherwood, Ackerley. When Andrew comes back I am up on the ladder in order to examine all of Proust, beautifully bound, and his biography, and have taken out, to glance at, a collection of Proust’s essays on art, in French.

“So there you are,” he says, bringing in a plate and laying it on the table in the corner next to the kitchen. “What an agile sister I have!”

“The ladder is wonderful and the way one can shift it along.”

“Yes, I designed it myself. I like to rove around the library, as you can see.” He smiles up at me. “But now you must come down. Dover sole is on the table.”

“My brother appears to live very well,” I say as I sit down to a blue linen cloth, matching napkins, elegant glasses on long thin stems. “You make me see what a lower-class existence I lead these days.”

“Really? Do you feel
déclassée
, as it were? I am fascinated.” He is teasing, as I had been, but as he pours the Vouvray, which happens to be my favorite white wine, I am thinking about this.

“What I have been discovering since I opened the store is that that whole world of Chestnut Hill, which resembles this elegant table, is something I have left for good.”

“Why leave it?”

“Because it feels limited finally. Or perhaps not quite real.”

“This table is very real,” he says, teasing again. “Does reality have to be poor and ugly? What’s unreal about Dover sole and Vouvray?”

“It’s delicious, Andrew. I’m a spoiled old creature, spoiled and awfully glad we can talk.”

“Even though you bring out the worst in me?”

“Do I? How so?”

“The snob, I suppose. The slightly superior person, at least in his own eyes, who has a penchant for garage mechanics and sailors.”

“I wonder why? My new friends Joe and Eddie come to my mind because Joe is a psychiatrist and upper class, I suppose, and Eddie is a garage mechanic. As I told you they have lived together for years and create a marvelous atmosphere. They are the ones who jog every morning and wipe off any obscenities people have written on the store windows.”

“Very nice and clean. But you see I have no wish to harbor forever the men I pick up in bars.”

I feel that Andrew is daring me, is asking for scorn or contempt, and why that is I cannot understand. His face looks pinched suddenly, and old. What I see in it is something close to despair. And here we are across the blue linen, the light shining on our glasses, but despair has joined us in the last few seconds, and for the first time I feel at a loss. Andrew has become a stranger with whom I cannot make contact. “Only connect,” but that is what he seems unable to do in his life and I, at the moment, seem unable to do in regard to him.

“Forster’s great love, I think I read somewhere, was a policeman.”

“Yes indeed, that is common knowledge.”

Andrew, his eyes half closed, has become a turtle I think, but now he decides to break the spell. “I wonder what it would be like for me if my private life was exposed to public view as yours has just been—what it would do. Of course the first thing would be that I would lose my job, not exactly a hilarious matter. How did you feel when the thing exploded in your face, Harriet? You seem almost unbelievably unscathed, secure, glad even, to be who you are.” I don’t know how to answer this right away and he breaks my silence himself. “Please try to talk about it.”