The Education of Harriet Hatfield (22 page)

“Anyway, I feel better for having told you,” Angelica says, and as Alice hovers in the doorway, she murmurs as she gets up, “The problem is sex, isn’t it?” It is such an obvious conclusion that I can’t help laughing. “Oh I know I’m an old fool. And come to think of it the first time a young man kissed me, I felt just as upset as when Emily did.”

Later on, over a demitasse in the library, we talk about Caroline and decide to go together to the funeral, which is tomorrow.

“Nothing shocked Caroline, did it?” Angelica asks me when we have settled and Patapouf has been given my dessert plate to lick. “How did she learn not to be shocked? I feel like such a dodo because I am shockable, as you see.”

“What a splendid woman you are!” I am happy that we can talk again, that we are friends after all. “As for Caroline, perhaps she was unshockable because she had allowed herself to experience everything without questioning, accepting what she felt. It was so beautiful when it came to dying, wasn’t it? She became as open to death as she had been to love all her life.” I would like to tell Angelica that Caroline had loved a woman, but I refrain. I have had enough of this conversation, I think, and it is time I go home and face entering the dark house alone. “You know what I think, Angelica? Simply that everyone is capable of many kinds of love. It’s all there waiting in each of us for that magic touch that wakes up everything we have in us.”

“Yes, and it is something I have not known—the magic touch. Sometimes I mind. I feel deprived.”

“But you mustn’t,” I say quickly. “You have given to friendship all your life what some people can only give to a lover, to a husband. I love you for it.”

She is embarrassed and laughs her embarrassed laugh. “So I’ll see you tomorrow. We’ll meet in front of the Coop and walk over to the chapel together.”

It is a comfort to have Patapouf sitting beside me, her big head staring out the window, as we drive homewards. If there is anyone lurking around she will bark, I tell myself. But when I draw up into the parking place to let her out, the person who is waiting for us is Joe. “Good heavens, Joe, were you waiting for me?”

“Maybe I was. I went out for a walk and ended up here but didn’t see a light upstairs and your car wasn’t here, so I thought I’d hang around, see you safely in. Want me to take Patapouf for a short walk?”

“Dear Joe, I’ll come with you.” It is clear that Joe has something on his mind. He does not talk and I am silent as we wait here and there for Patapouf to perform. Finally I have to ask, “Is anything on your mind, Joe?”

Now he faces me and hesitates before he says, “Harriet, I hate to lay this on you, but I know you are a real friend. Eddie has been diagnosed as having AIDS.”

I am silent, too shocked to utter a word. I look down at the pavement, then reach out and take Joe’s hand and squeeze it hard. “But how could it happen to Eddie? Is he on drugs?” I don’t know what to ask or to say and no doubt am blundering.

“Not that I know of,” Joe says.

We walk on in silence. “Of course maybe they’ll find a cure in time.”

“I doubt that. There is a drug that appears to prevent the pneumonia that in the first years was one of the most common causes of death.”

“That is something anyway.”

“It costs one hundred and eighty dollars a week. We are lucky to have that kind of money. Think of all those who don’t.”

I am quite aware that Joe is holding back on something he may not want to talk about. “Dear Eddie. It’s not fair, Joe. That’s all I can think,” and then, as he is still walking along in silence, his head bent, and we have turned now toward home, “Can Eddie still go to his job? I mean, can he, at least for a while, lead a normal life?”

“We’ll learn that. He is at present very difficult to live with and very angry.”

“Oh.”

“You might as well know, Harriet, that Eddie has always cruised around, picked up men in bars, and when I began to love him, not just want him, I had to accept that.”

“How can one accept that?”

“One accepts what one has to accept. I am ten years older, Harriet. I thought he would outgrow the obsessive desire for conquest. I was betting on the long run … and now,” his voice is hard, “love can’t win after all. There’s no time.”

“He needs you, Joe, and it is going to be dreadfully hard.”

“I know something about that—a third of my patients either have AIDS or their partner has it. I dream about it in my sleep.”

“It’s no fair,” I say again. “It’s no fair.”

“I get the answer from all sides, anger at the heteros who use AIDS as a stick to beat gays with. I handle that every day.”

“Is Eddie’s anger about that?”

“No. His anger is against me because I don’t cruise and am safe, or so he imagines.” Joe gives a bitter laugh. “I’m the cross he bears, the well man whom he has to live with. Christ, what a mess!”

We have reached my door and I ask him to come up but he explains that he has to get home. “By now Eddie is sorry for all he has said to me, I expect, and needs a little TLC.”

“You are good, Joe. He is lucky to have you, and I must say that I have held you and Eddie in my heart as an exemplary couple. You have been a comfort to me. Tell Eddie that.”

“He likes you,” Joe says. “Give me a hug and I’ll be off.”

I feel a great warmth in that solid, unsentimental hug, and I feel honored that Joe has felt he could confide in me. There are, after all, advantages in being an old person. If you can be a rock and not fall apart.

I remind myself that I must not forget to give Martha that psychiatrist’s name, but I don’t dare call now as David presumably is there. Tomorrow morning. I write a note to myself and leave it on the breakfast table where I can’t fail to see it. And also remind myself that I am to be in the store tomorrow morning so Joan can take over for the afternoon of Caroline’s funeral.

But once in bed I can’t sleep. I listen to Patapouf’s snores and for a while breathe in and out in their rhythm but that does not help. I am simply out of breath. What would Caroline say about Joe and Eddie? Is fidelity essential to a viable relationship? I should have thought so. Without fidelity how can one feel secure? Once in the thirty years I lived with Vicky she went away for a month to Paris, pretending it was a business trip, so our friends were told. I knew that she had fallen in love with a Frenchwoman who ran a bookstore. Oh why do I remember it now? Until now, I have buried all that. It was ten years ago or more. I couldn’t eat and lost twenty pounds in that month. I learned that jealousy is the most destructive emotion there is, because it can’t be sublimated. It is simply a poison. Vicky wrote me almost every day and often wrote “Have no doubts, I’ll always love you.” That was like acid on a wound. I could not even cry.

When she came back I felt like a prisoner, walled in. It took a year for me to unlock myself and begin to have faith that she meant it when she told me it was finished with Claire. A long awful struggle, but she won me back in the end, of course. I worked things out in the garden, which was splendid that autumn. I took refuge in the housekeeping routine. I slept alone. When we finally made our peace and could lie in each other’s arms we both cried with relief, and though the crack in the glass could not be mended, the glass did not break and we drank from it. In any good marriage one or two excursions may take place, but at a very high price, as I learned, and I think Vicky learned. But what if I had had to accept a whole series of brief attachments, one-night stands? What if she had said, “That’s the way I am”? I could not have accepted it. I know I could not.

How does Joe achieve enough detachment to accept? How many gay men have to and do? Their physiological makeup is so different from a woman’s. It is not
vive la différence
, but
hélas la différence
. Vicky used to tease me because I had never wanted to be a boy whereas she had even coaxed her mother into letting her wear boys’ sailor suits in the summer. That was long before jeans and must have caused a sensation on Mount Desert. But now with all I have been reading lately I see that she was old-fashioned. Lesbian women today talk about being whole women, not about being imitation men like Radclyffe Hall. It is a different universe we live in now, thank goodness.

I am taking refuge in the past, I tell myself, in order not to have to take in what is happening to Eddie. I cannot even imagine such a death as his is bound to be. And finally at 3
A.M.
I sink away from it into troubled sleep.

19

I feel blurred this morning, unready for the day, but there is the note reminding me to call Martha and at about nine, when I have had breakfast and taken Patapouf out for a few minutes, I make the call. No answer. Well, she may have gone for a walk, who knows? I keep thinking about Eddie and that blocks everything else. I must learn more about AIDS. I must try to understand what Joe and he are facing so that I can find ways to help. I wish Bettina would come back. Maybe she has had an experience with AIDS, or knows of a support group, although Joe of course will be looking into that. Someone is being poisoned right around the corner and there is nothing we can do. All I can think of is Camus’s
The Plague
and what fear can do to a city when the plague enters. I must have it somewhere. Vicky and I felt it was the greatest work of art to come out of occupied France. AIDS is our plague and it is moving in.

It is comforting to go down and open the store, but when I unlock the door and open it I find an envelope has been slipped under it. Inside on a large sheet of paper in large red printed words it says: “You feel safe, but we are going to get you.” So, it is all beginning again! Things have quieted down lately, a remission, but this other plague has not abated. I feel the sweat on my upper lip. It’s Joe I need to speak to but God knows he has enough on his mind without my problems. I call Joan who says she’ll come right over. “There’s nothing you can do,” I say.

“I can take that sheet to the police station,” she says. It is a relief to know she can and will do that. I am in no state to confront the police this morning. Besides, I am tending store.

The first arrival is Bagley and I cannot say that I am glad to see her, but for once she turns out to be enthusiastic about what she has been reading, one of the Amanda Cross mysteries, and wants to try another. I suggest
The Question of Max
and she gets out her purse, murmuring, “Books are too expensive, Miss Hatfield.”

“I know. It’s awful, but as it is I am not yet breaking even.”

“You should have a rental library the way they used to have in England.”

“Well, you know, I have thought of that but I don’t know how Joan and I could manage it as well as everything else.”

“Plenty of people come here. When I go past there is always someone talking with you, and I presume buying.”

At this I smile. “Well, sometimes they are buying. Sometimes they just want to talk.”

“I see that and sometimes I think you are simply a sucker for any odd person who needs an ear.” Sue Bagley has to have an ear herself, I am thinking, but chiefly for purposes of complaint, or setting herself up against most of what she sees. A form of ego, I suppose, a small exercise of power.

It is not a good thing that at this moment Martha walks in, luckily not visibly upset for once. “Oh, you’re the painter,” Sue greets her. “Have you sold any?”

“Yes, I have sold one. Isn’t that amazing?”

“Congratulations,” Bagley says grudgingly.

I interrupt, fearing she may have something derogatory to add, by handing Martha the note with the woman psychiatrist’s phone number on it. “The friend I told you about gave me this last night. I hope you will act on it, Martha.” She slips it into her purse without saying a word.

“Miss Hatfield is up to something,” Bagley says. “I wish I knew what is going on. Nobody ever tells me anything.”

“Sometimes what is going on is none of your business,” Martha says.

Sue Bagley laughs at Martha’s angry tone and says, “The only business I have is other people’s business.”

I find I cannot be cross for long with Sue Bagley. Together we watch Martha, who has gone over to look at her paintings and is standing there, her hands on her hips, thinking heaven knows what.

“You’re a damn good painter, Martha, so have no doubts about that,” Bagley says in very good humor now.

It’s not being connected that makes her often so difficult, I decided long ago. She has to crash in because no one invites her in, an elephant in a china shop. And now they both sit down at the table and Martha, in a very fragile state of balance, I realize, asks, “Do you really think so? You’re not just saying that to be polite?”

“I’ll tell you, Martha. When I first saw the paintings I didn’t like them at all. They bothered me, but every time I dropped in here I looked at them again and they began to grow on me, so today I came with the idea I might buy one.”

“You did?” Martha’s eyes fill with tears. “I can’t believe it.”

“I’m surprised,” Bagley says. “If I had a talent like yours I wouldn’t have any doubts.”

“That’s what people think,” Martha says, “but I guess most artists and maybe writers, too, live in a perpetual state of acute anxiety. Is this worth doing? Have I the right to do it? Shouldn’t I be doing something positively useful, like working in a hospital?” I have not heard this side of Martha before. It is rather a relief; for once her insistence on herself as
the
important thing is opening out a little. Is this what the ordeal of her pregnancy is doing? She turns to Sue now with great intensity. “If you had a talent, Miss Bagley, would you go so far as to abort a pregnancy because you feel your work must come first?”

Sue is flustered. Who would not be? It is a direct challenge and one rather hard to meet or to parry. “How am I to answer that? I am a spinster and have no talent except as an accountant,” but she stops now and looks straight at Martha. It is a compassionate look, one I have not seen in her eyes before. “That is your problem, is it?”

Without looking in my direction—I am now sitting at my desk pretending at least to work—Martha says defiantly, “I took care of it yesterday. I had an abortion.”