The Education of Harriet Hatfield (27 page)

“Brave of you.”

“Yes, it has gotten me into a lot of trouble lately.”

“What kind of trouble?”

“Well, I am accused of running a pornographic bookshop, and the fact that I came out in an interview as a lesbian has not helped.”

“How is that hazard ever to be stopped?” she asks, and it is obvious that she has had an experience, hard to handle in the same way as mine, and for the same reason.

“I don’t know. Enlightenment on the subject faces formidable barriers.” I risk a direct question. “I gather you have faced trouble of the same kind.”

“Yes. It was two years ago actually, but it stays with me. I guess I had never before faced what being a lesbian means, what violence it may elicit.”

“What happened?” I ask. “It helps to learn what other women have gone through.”

“Well,” Emily waits a moment and brushes a strand of hair back from her forehead. Maybe she doesn’t want to talk about it, but then she begins and tells it almost as though it were a hair-raising story about someone else.

She was then living in Brookline and was coming home from a gay and lesbian march about discrimination against gays in housing. Her friend was away that weekend so she was alone, walking back from the march along the curb to avoid the crowd. Suddenly a roadster came toward her dangerously near the curb and she felt an arm and hand around her neck and she was being dragged. There were two voices, one saying “Go forward, go back” and “that’s the way” and for some seconds she thought they would break her neck. Unconsciously she rubs it with her right hand as she talks. When they let her go she could hardly stand she was so terrified, and they rode away laughing and shouting “Gays stay out of the street.”

Emily tells me she was dazed but managed to ask whether anyone had seen what happened and two men offered to be witnesses and wrote down their names and addresses. “All I wanted was to go home,” she tells me, “but I felt I must go to the police. It had to be reported. I was in shock and naive enough to think the police would want to know that such things happen.”

“But they didn’t, I must presume?”

“They didn’t even ask me to sit down,” she says, “and when I said there were witnesses they asked if they were gay and when I said I thought they were, they simply dismissed the whole story. My neck was hurting a lot and I knew I had better get home. I guess that was the loneliest walk I ever took. I felt dizzy and angry and hurt.”

I swallow the bitter taste of her story before I speak. “Six months ago I would have found it hard to believe. Somehow, Emily, we have to find a way to bridge the two worlds and I keep hoping the store may help in doing just that, although at the moment it simply appears to be a target for the worst element.” I did not intend to speak of it, but the words come out. “Yesterday the homophobes around here shot my dog while we were on our evening walk.”

“You don’t mean it?” Emily looks at me, visibly wincing. “Why, for God’s sake?”

“Because they are determined to drive me and the store out of this neighborhood.”

“Oh dear, it seems so strange and inhuman. What is happening, that there is so much hatred? It hurts, Miss Hatfield. What have you done to deserve it? I wish I could understand,” and she adds, “Oh your poor dog,” and puts her hands up to her face as if to blot out the cruelty.

“I’ll tell you something cheerful at least. Somehow the dog’s death has caught people’s imagination. I have had a lot of support today and from people who have never come into the store till now. Dear old Patapouf, perhaps she is building a bridge …”

“You really are a remarkable person,” Emily says.

“No, not really,” I am quick to answer, “it has all somehow happened since I lost my friend. I have been catapulted into a position where I have to fight. It’s not courage but necessity, as I see it, for I am a very ordinary old party who is lucky enough to be able to afford a wild dream.”

“You are paying a high price for it,” she says.

“Now we must see what books we can find for that course of yours. Are the students responsive?” I ask. “A lot of young women pile in here lately. That at least is a heartening sign.”

Emily thinks a second. “They are curious, fascinated often, but uninvolved. Sometimes I find it hard to deal with girls who really haven’t a clue as to what I am talking about.”

“And why is that? They must have crushes themselves now and then.”

“Oh they are so afraid of those feelings, you see. They never relate all this to themselves, except here and there a lesbian who would never admit that she is one. They are back in the days of
The Well of Loneliness
,” and suddenly Emily laughs. “They imagine lesbians dress like men.”

I do find four or five books that Emily has asked for and finally it is nearly time to close and she leaves.

When I finally slip into bed I keep busy making lists of books I can summon in my head about animals in relation to human beings, such as Mowat’s
Never Cry Wolf
, Carrighar’s
Wild Heritage
, Lilly’s
Man and Dolphin
, and Maxwell’s
Ring of Bright
Water
. There must be something about how good it is for old people to have an animal to care for. I go to sleep dreaming about writing a book about Patapouf for children, well aware that I shall never do it. I am not a writer and must prepare my mind, not for a work of art, but for a detective tomorrow morning. Jonathan calls at nine when I am half asleep to say he has found someone, not a woman, but what looks like a sensitive and efficient youngish man, called Earl Cutler.

So tomorrow is on the way. No way to stop the rush of time like white water over rocks. I am borne along willy-nilly, but at least there was real comfort in Emily, a new friend. I feel sure I shall see her again.

23

I wake expecting Patapouf, and then it is a shock to realize that she is not waiting to be let out, that she is not here and will never be here again. This day of the detective’s coming I am slow and a little confused. What will happen exactly? And is it really a good idea?

I wander around getting dressed and drink a cup of coffee without sitting down to a real breakfast. The truth is I am not prepared for this detective who is about to enter my life and pry into its corners.

It is better when I am downstairs in the more formal atmosphere of the store and I am kept busy washing teacups, dusting the shelves, and have just settled in to go over yesterday’s mail when I see Jonathan’s car draw up and a rather tousled young man in a duffle jacket get out and look up at the store windows with concentrated attention. They come in and Earl is introduced.

“Happy to meet you, Miss Hatfield,” he says. “You certainly have a nifty store here.”

“Take off your coat,” I say, “and we’ll sit down and get to business.”

Jonathan coughs his usual cough. “I’ll just run along and leave you to it,” he says. “I’m due at the office.”

“Thanks, Jonathan.” I follow him to the door and we shake hands.

“You should be out of this mess in a week,” he says, smiling. “Earl is a wizard.”

“That would be good news if I could believe it,” I say, sitting down and giving Earl an appraising look.

He is not what I expected, looks rather like a graduate student, is not at all solemn or, for that matter, businesslike, for the first thing he asks is, “Do you enjoy living in this neighborhood?”

“Very much. I chose it deliberately. You know, Mr. Cutler, until I was sixty, I led a very sheltered, and I suppose one could say privileged life. I wanted to know all kinds of people. I wanted the store to make bridges, to help people understand each other.”

“And has it done that?” he asks, a touch of irony audible.

“Yes, in a way it has.”

“But I gather you have also made enemies. Perhaps you had better tell me all you can about that, from the beginning to the tragic murder of your dog.”

Slowly I put together the whole puzzle for Earl Cutler, from the obscenities on the windows, to the anonymous letters about the books I sell, to the stealing of the firewood, and finally the brutal murder of Patapouf. Laid out like this in about fifteen minutes while Earl has his tape recorder going, I am embarrassed that it is not even worse than it is, and so I ask, “Am I stupid to be upset? Until Patapouf died I thought I could just muddle through. Friends have rallied, you know.”

“Miss Hatfield, you have every reason to try to stop this sort of harassment. I hope we can fit the pieces together soon. As I listened to you talking, my first reaction was that there seem to be two different people or groups involved. I must certainly see your friend Joe, who had an encounter with the two men who were writing obscenities on the windows. But then, weeks later, someone says they saw an old woman with a rifle who presumably shot your dog.”

I feel I have told him all I know, but as he asks more and more questions I realize how much one forgets—for instance, the ostentatiously nosy women from the church, and how far the church may have fostered the hostility. As far as possible, I have put all this out of my mind as the only healthy way to handle it.

“It is too bad the police retained that second anonymous letter threatening you,” he says, looking up from the pad where he seems to be chiefly doodling. After all, we are being recorded on his tape.

“At that time I imagined they would try for an arrest,” I say. “More fool I.”

We are now approaching the crucial question, and I dread it. “In your own mind, do you lay the attacks on you to the allegedly pornographic nature of the books you sell?”

“I don’t know. That is how it all began, with, as I have told you, someone taking
Pure Lust
to the police.”

“Yes, I understand, but it seems as though the woman who shot your dog may have been motivated by a more personal hatred or whatever it is, a fanatic of some sort, that she, in fact, may have entered the scene later.”

“Homophobia, perhaps. I told you that an article appeared in the
Globe
calling me a lesbian. ‘Lesbian Bookseller in Somerville Threatened’ was the headline.”

“There was at that time a change in the atmosphere around the store?”

“This will surprise you. There was indeed. A great many people charged in the next day to give their support, and I was actually treated like a hero.”

“And that, no doubt, only added to some people’s wish to harm you,” he says with a smile.

During this conversation I am becoming aware of Cutler as someone I can trust. He is after the facts and makes no comment when I provide them. I like that. He is very professional without ever putting me down, or for that matter sympathizing overtly with me, and I am grateful. If someone has to pry into my affairs I am glad that it turns out to be Cutler.

Until now we have talked alone and had time to establish, it seems, a mutual regard. Now Joan comes in and I realize it is ten and we have been talking for an hour. I introduce them and suggest that Joan join us at the table. If customers come in Mr. Cutler and I will go upstairs, but he suggests that we do so now. “It will make my work a lot easier if no one sees me with you. Is there a back door I can leave by?”

“But you will want to talk with Joan, won’t you?”

“Mrs. Hampstead, could I call on you at your home, perhaps?”

“Of course,” and she jots down her address and phone number and suggests he come at four today.

When we are settled upstairs in the two comfortable armchairs opposite the fireplace, it is my turn to ask questions. For some reason the greater intimacy of the apartment makes me feel self-conscious, as though I am suddenly required to talk about myself and not simply “the situation.” “You see, Mr. Cutler, I never intended the bookstore to become a lesbian bookstore. The interview in the
Globe
set that one element in high relief and it has been, I must confess, embarrassing.”

“Naturally. No one likes to be labeled and here you are living alone and suddenly in a spotlight you had not even imagined.”

“How do you know?” I ask now.

“Well, your lawyer filled me in somewhat, at least as to the loss of your friend of so many years. After such a long rich relationship it must be offensive to be hauled before the world as some sort of monster.”

“It has been in some ways excruciating, but I have to admit that it is giving me an education I had missed. It has forced me to be honest about myself. That is a salutary thing. I can identify for the first time with any persecuted minority and”—here I can’t help laughing—“I know it is absurd, but I am proud of being in the front line. Because, you see, I am safer than most gay people are. By that I mean I am more or less self-supporting and no one else, except Patapouf, has been intimately involved. So I can dare without fear of hurting.”

“You are really admirable,” Mr. Cutler says.

“But my dog paid the price,” I say, “and now for the first time I want those goons to be caught, and punished.” There is a short silence. “How are you going to go about this?” I feel it is my turn now to ask the questions.

“First of all, by getting to know the neighborhood. I’ll find a furnished room. I’ll have to feel my way, and I’m not good at explaining how, but I expect to have sleuthed out a fair amount of information in a few days. Meanwhile, don’t tell anyone that I have been engaged.”

“But if you do find out who is involved, then what?”

“If I can find enough witnesses, we could go to court.”

“More publicity, more newspaper stories. That is what I dread.”

“Expensive. And, considering the neighborhood, you might even lose the case.”

This is a sharp blow. It never occurred to me that if it came to court, I could lose. “Is there any alternative?”

“Of course I can’t tell yet, Miss Hatfield, but there is always hope that things of this sort can get settled out of court. I can’t promise, but that is what we would be aiming at. A threat is a two-edged sword.”

“And shooting a dog, an old, good, and quiet animal … that must be treated, mustn’t it, as a crime?”

“At present we are in a thicket of possibilities and impossibilities.”