The Education of Harriet Hatfield (30 page)

“It’s not ‘only a bookstore,’” I react quickly, “it’s a special bookstore, a feminist bookstore, and so a lot of what I sell is offensive to some people. I have been accused of running an obscene bookstore, for example. People took a sample to the police and complained.”

“I am utterly in the dark,” Anna says. “You just have to tell us more.”

“When the threats began, the
Globe
sent a reporter and the interview was headlined ‘Lesbian Bookseller in Somerville Threatened.’” I say this too loudly, I realize, as though I were addressing a crowd. “The whole attack took me by surprise. I lived with Vicky for thirty years. We were lovers, but somehow we never thought of ourselves as lesbians. It was a dirty word to me and, I feel sure, for her. We simply did not face the fact that we had set ourselves on the fringes of society and were lucky enough and rich enough not to pay the price.”

I am not embarrassed now. I am glad to be able to tell them all this. It is a new sort of freedom of which I had a taste last night with Nan and Phil. “While you told about your lives I listened with a kind of envy, I suppose. You seem so safe even when you are, like Anna and Jennifer, dealing with dangerous subjects, subjects around which a lot of emotion and irrational fear and prejudice gather.”

“The embalmed middle class,” Tuffy murmurs.

“It must have been an enormous step you were, in a way, forced to take,” Anna says meditatively, “and how anxiety-making at best.”

“But shooting your dog!” Jennifer gets up and comes round to lay a hand on my shoulder. “By golly, that you can’t take, can you? I mean, something has got to be done.”

They are all listening to me intently, but I know I mustn’t say anything about the detective, so I evade the subject as best I can. “Something will be done,” I assure them. “My brothers, by the way, have been very supportive through all this, especially the younger one, who is gay himself. One good thing that came out of that
Globe
story is that he came over next day to talk about himself. We had never been close, so it seemed an amazing joy to be able to talk freely and be at ease with each other.” I turn to them now and ask, looking from one to the other, “I suppose a great many people feel they have to conceal their true selves. I don’t have to do that any more and it feels comfortable,” I laugh, “when it doesn’t feel dangerous.”

“At sixty maybe we all have the right to be whatever we feel we are,” Anna says. “My husband was very much against my going into therapy with child abusers. The whole subject filled him with such horror and disgust he hated for me to get involved …”

“But the point now is,” Jennifer breaks in, “what can we do to help Harriet, isn’t it?”

“I don’t know that there is anything specific,” I say quickly. “It’s been a huge lift to have you turn up and to be able to talk as we are doing. I do get rather lonely at times, I must confess. I miss Vicky. I miss that kind of companionship. In the store I meet all sorts of people and they pour out their stories and I listen. That is what I dreamed would happen, that I could help make a real center for women. It’s amazing the variety of people who come back again and again: nuns, kids from the colleges, old women, but then there is no one to share it all with. I do have an awfully good associate who takes the store in the mornings. I don’t know what I would do without her. She bearded the police when the first threatening anonymous letter came. She is a lionheart all right. So you mustn’t think of me as in sore need.”

“Oh we don’t,” Tuffy says quickly. “It’s we who are in need, not you. Somehow or other you are at the center of life in a way that none of us seem to be.”

“That is so strange,” I say, leaning my head on my knuckles, thinking it out, “because I have been trying to get accustomed to being on the periphery, on the fringe, where it is quite hard to stay in balance.” I look over at Anna. “What has been staggering is to meet such hatred—hatred and fear, I suppose.”

“They surely go together,” says Sandra, who has been silent, I realize, until now.

“Will there ever be a change?” I ask. “I suppose people need someone to hate and look down on. Is that it? Or …” I pause to feel sure I am saying what I mean, “is the homosexual ordeal partly that it threatens almost everyone. If you are black, you are black and it is quite clear that you are, but if you are homosexual you can rather easily live a completely secret life—as my brother Andrew does. And how many people do? How many husbands stop at a bar on the way home, for example?”

“They may have done, but AIDS is changing all that, thank God,” says Jennifer.

“How many women, then, feel for another woman a passion they have never experienced with their husband?”

“Many, many more than any of us have any idea exist,” Sandra says. “I am one of them and it’s wonderful to be able to say so for the first time in my life. How I envy you and Vicky,” she turns to me.

“But I now feel we had it a little too easy. We didn’t have to fight. No one could put us out of our house. As far as society goes, Vicky’s money and her prestige as a publisher protected us.” Could I dare say it to these old friends, so far so supportive and dear? “I am glad that I have to take my place among the persecuted. I am proud to be who I am, ‘still crazy after all these years,’ as Simon sings it.”

Almost unbelievable that no one has interrupted our talk so far. Nearly five now, and someone will be sure to come. I can’t help wondering who it will be, but I do hope someone will come to show the store in action, to make it all come alive in the way it is meant to be.

Unfortunately, the first person to push in is Sue Bagley, ever curious. “Such a crowd!” she says, taking my friends in. “It looks like a party.”

Of course now I introduce her all around and explain our connection, on both sides. “Sue is a neighbor and a great reader.”

“So you all went to Smith,” she says, taking off her gloves, “but I bet none of you is anything like Harriet Hatfield here. I sometimes think she is out of her mind.”

“Why?” Anna bears down hard. “This is a fine bookstore. I would consider her a public servant of a rather extraordinary kind.” This conversation pleases me very much. I have not been defended in such an intelligent way before. My chief defense has been to laugh at myself.

Sue Bagley looks over at me and launches into one of her monologues and there is nothing I can do. But my friends drift off to find books they may want to buy and Sue is left high and dry, though still voluble. “It is this mixture of people,” she explains to the air, “so many gay people, such queer old women, so many nuns. You never know what or who you will see when you open the door.”

“And I suspect,” says Anna, who is sitting down and listening, or pretending to, “that is why you come in—to see what is going on, to be part of such combustion.”

“Combustion!” Sue Bagley seizes on the word and repeats it loudly with a guffaw. “This woman is turning the neighborhood upside down. After they shot her dog things began to happen. It’s like a small war only people are changing sides.” She ends triumphantly, giving me a significant look.

“How do you know, Sue?” for now I am really interested.

“Well, you know, down at the grocery, you wait in line and people talk. I hear things like ‘Whoever shot that poor woman’s dog is a criminal,’ whereas I used to hear, although I never told you, ‘Why doesn’t that crazy woman take her dirty books somewhere else?’ Things like that.”

“That’s good news.” I am amazed to hear it, actually. “And I’ve always said it would take time …”

“Only that poor dog had to be murdered. I have nightmares about it,” Sue says. “Things aren’t the same now she is not lying there under the desk at your feet.”

It is too soon for me to talk about Patapouf’s death.

“Harriet, we are going to have to tear ourselves away,” Jennifer says.

“Of course. It’s nearly six, but I am so glad you came! Somehow I feel I am back in my real country with you. I’m not quite the outsider I was …”

“We’ll come back. It’s been a great day!” Jennifer says.

“But we’ve got to pay for our books,” Anna says, smiling. So they come to the register, settle up, and go off with the pile each has accumulated.

“You made some money,” Sue says, after the door has closed behind them.

“The books I have to sell here are not that easy to find in suburbia. This visit gave me back some sense of what the store is about. It did me a lot of good.”

“I understand that all right. I should think you’d get sick and tired of all the loonies and queers who pop in and out—that bag lady who sits for hours waiting for the bus …”

“Oh Sue, she’s a friend! And she bought one of Martha’s paintings, you know.”

“She did?” Sue is not pleased to hear this, I know. She wants to be the only amateur of art connected with the store. It has taken the wind out of her sails that a poor old woman has managed somehow to buy a painting.

“She is fascinated by those roots,” I explain to Sue.

It is time to lock up, and I make it clear by thanking Sue again for telling me about what people are saying, standing at the door.

“I keep my ears open,” she replies, and I sense that she would have liked to sit down for a good gossip, but I am not in the mood. I want to think about my Smith friends. Why did I imagine they might be shocked or not cooperative? I suppose because I remember them as they and I were in our twenties when homosexuality was a taboo subject except for some jokes about “pansies” and Bea Lillie’s song “There are fairies at the bottom of the garden.” However bad things may be now, it was far worse then because we lived in total ignorance. And in any case we had lost sight of each other for thirty years or more. The women I saw this afternoon have changed, just as I have.

I climb the stairs to my flat with unaccustomed peace of mind. “All shall be well” I murmur aloud.

Only when I am sitting smoking a cigarette in the armchair and about to turn on the news, what Sue said just now, of the change of heart about me, floods in and makes me sit up straight with the shock and relief it brings me. Is it truly possible that a reaction as irrational, after all, as the reaction to the bookstore in the first place is turning the tide? The death of my dog? I cannot quite believe it, but it is interesting, to put it mildly.

The phone rings and it is Earl, who suggests that we meet at a motel in Lexington where we can talk. “I have news that will interest you,” he says.

“Good heavens. I can’t wait. Let’s say noon, before the crowd. I just might have something that will interest you,” I add.

It occurs to me as I put down the phone that Earl has been on the job for only two days. And he had said it would take him about a week.

26

Earl is late, which I find irritating because I hate waiting in public places and being stared at. When Vicky and I lived together this sort of exposure never happened as we were always together, shielded by each other. Only now since her death am I learning what Joan often talks about, the lack of identity of a person alone, and the vulnerability. “A woman alone is not invited out,” she tells me. “No widow or divorcee expects this so it is quite a shock when it happens.”

I sit uncomfortably on a straight chair, not daring to smoke until Earl, full of apologies, arrives. He got stuck in traffic on Route 128 after an accident. Finally we are seated at a corner table among the artificial flowers in a huge, almost empty dining room. I am waiting for the curtain to rise. It rises when the waiter brings us two scotches and takes our order. There is a slight pause.

“Miss Hatfield,” Earl says, lifting his glass, “I know who shot your dog and I know why she did it. That is the interesting part—why she did it.”

“Tell me,” I beg, “first, who this old woman is.”

“She’s a very pent-up grandmother who lives in a three-decker with her married son and his wife and small daughter and her own unmarried daughter. There is little space. It is noisy, crowded, and the atmosphere is full of rage. This is a very angry woman.”

“No doubt.” I am living myself into her situation, trying to imagine. “How do you know she did it? It seems so strange.”

“I know she did it because her son blurted it out in a bar.”

“He told you?”

“Well, he gathered I was not from the neighborhood, on my way west, I explained, so he felt safe. And it became clear that his mother, whose name is Rose Donovan, is now very scared, as though you had threatened her—an interesting reversal of roles.”

At this point I want the facts, not interpretation, so I say sharply, “I suppose she is afraid of being arrested or taken to court, and it is worse for her because she knows she is guilty.”

“Her son, Jerry, wants to have her committed.”

“He does?” At once I am on Rose Donovan’s side. “She’s not crazy, is she? But what angered her so much? Why did she shoot my dog? You haven’t told me that.”

“You sound quite cross,” Earl says. He is as baffled as I am, apparently.

“I’m sorry, but from what you tell me her son is hardly
simpatico
. It might be better for him and his wife and baby to move out than to have his mother committed because she is in the way. Yes, I am cross. Women never get a break.”

Earl goes on with his story. “When I asked Jerry, over a third beer, why she shot your dog he mumbled something about the gun first. It had belonged to her husband, his father, and she won’t part with it. He is afraid of the gun in the house, and with good reason.”

“All he has to do is take it and sell it,” I suggest.

At this, Earl, for the first time, relaxes a little and smiles at me as he explains, “He is more afraid of her anger than of the gun, you see. There is such a thing as a holy terror, and she appears to be it.”

“But why did she shoot my dog? You still haven’t told me.”

Unfortunately at this moment food is served and there has to be a short pause with a fill-in of small talk.

“Why did she shoot your dog?” Earl looks at me meditatively. “I can’t be brief,” he says. “It’s complicated.”

I light a cigarette. I can’t eat. “Make it long if you must, but begin somewhere.”