The Education of Harriet Hatfield (7 page)

“Joan, when I dreamed up this bookstore I dreamed of it as a nourishing place where women of all kinds could come. It never occurred to me that the women were bound to be feminists, and some of them lesbians.” And suddenly I laugh. “The obvious never occurred to me. That is the joke.”

Joan smiles and lifts her glass. “Astonishing woman,” she says.

“I’m not even a feminist, I suppose. Not a militant one anyway. So here I am, the founder of a club which I don’t belong to myself.”

“Hoist on your own petard,” and Joan laughs now, an affectionate laugh.

“So what?” I ask her and myself. “I have avoided commitment for six decades of my life, but I’m in for it now, aren’t I?”

“I guess you are,” she says soberly.

“We’ll ponder this dilemma, if it is one, over chocolate mousse. It was Vicky’s favorite.”

Over coffee we talk about the shop from the point of view of business. Only the paperbacks are selling in any quantity. Who can afford twenty bucks for a novel? We are losing money in part because of reordering. For each of us this shop talk is a rest. And after supper Joan offers to go with me for Patapouf’s evening walk. I accept gladly. In the daytime the neighborhood is friendly and peaceful but after dark I sometimes feel a little afraid.

“I love looking at the lighted windows, don’t you?” All through the neighborhood top floors of houses seem to be rented to students, or so I imagine, as I look up and wonder what they are studying.

“I suppose so. I confess I am nervous,” says Joan.

“I’m nervous sometimes, but it is exciting, too. A whole new world after dark—a metamorphosis.”

Joan has been thinking, meanwhile, about the shop and before we part she suggests that I try to reach my Chestnut Hill friends who would, after all, buy twenty-dollar novels.

“Well, they know where I am,” I say. “Not many came to the opening.”

“Your friend Miss Lamb has bought about two hundred dollars’ worth, you know.”

“She’s a real friend,” I say. “The others have dropped me, more or less. After all, I have literally moved out. Vicky was the drawing card.”

“And it’s a long way to go.”

When I have washed the dishes I go to bed and lie awake a long time, watching the electric clock jerk from minute to minute. Bleeding time it looks like. I feel confused about myself and my life for the first time since Vicky died. I wish she were here beside me and I could ask her advice. Now whom can I ask? I have got myself into a job where I do not choose the people I see or talk with. They choose me. In the adventure of the first week I am far too involved to realize what that means. What I do realize is that to those who wander in I come through as friendly, someone to whom they want to tell their stories. Impersonal as I am, not involved as a family is, or even as friends are, I suppose it is quite natural that I have become such a target—and of course I am in most cases old enough to be their mother or even grandmother. Who is it who teased me about becoming an amateur psychologist? That certainly put the fear of God into me!

Yet a great deal in these first days has been illuminating and valuable, and whatever Joan may think, the confiding has not been chiefly by lesbians. No, I comfort myself. The store has brought in a wide range of women and a few of them, no doubt, will become friends as time goes on. Life itself has a way of sorting things out.

And finally I sleep with nothing solved. How can it be? But now I have a better sense of where things stand, less confusion and more hope.

6

It has been agreed that Caroline would like me to come at eleven this morning. I set out with a bag of five carefully chosen books, including Georgia O’Keeffe to look at, hoping one or the other will be the right one. I have not spoken with Caroline herself, so I know nothing yet about her state, but have promised the nurse to stay no longer than a half-hour.

There she is, on a chaise in the garden under a parasol, smiling and waving. Dressed in a flowery wrapper, covered by a white silk Chinese shawl, she is lying beside a small border of lilies and late roses, radiant in the autumn light. It all looks like an Impressionist painting, and I tell her so.

“A flowering moment of glory,” she says. “Friends have been absolutely angelic about gardening for me.” She has sat up to be kissed and to welcome me, but now she lies back on the pillows and I see that she has lost weight and looks wan, dark circles round her gray eyes, although they are as luminous as ever. “I hope I live long enough to see the gentians flower. I planted them last autumn.”

“Dear Caroline, let us hope so.”

She smiles at me then. “No one tells me how long I have. Perhaps they don’t know. But of course Peter has been wonderful and assures me there will be no pain.”

“Lucky you, to have a surgeon for a son!” I have never liked Peter but it is good to know he is very much on the job.

“A perfect dear.” She has turned away. “But, Harriet, you understand this. My real comfort is the crits, those two old cats who purr at the foot of my bed through the rather tedious nights. How awful it would be to die away from home.” And then with a sudden mischievous smile she adds, “We need fur.”

There is a pause now. I feel she has come and gone, energy flowing back after a moment of ebbing and I am happy to sit beside her in perfect peace, resisting the impulse to hold her hand.

“Dying is interesting,” she says now, “for me so far a long farewell celebration of some sort. So many dear friends who come to tell me they love me. So I feel,” and she smiles again, “it really must not go on too long!”

“Everyone feels privileged to have known you.”

“Nonsense. Why, for heaven’s sake?”

“I see yours as an exemplary life.” For some reason the whole atmosphere permits this sort of statement, which I have not made before, but see clearly, as pale gold leaves fall one by one. “You manage to hold so much life in a single cup: helping Winston, bringing up the boys, gardening, giving wonderful dinner parties, and—what so few people know—working full time as a psychiatric social worker. How did you manage it all? Vicky always said you were incomparable, far too good to be a role model, as they say these days, because who else could have done what you did with such warmth and grace?”

Caroline shuts her eyes, much to my dismay. Perhaps she has fallen asleep. A truck comes roaring past and after the noise has stopped she says, “All that seems far away. Thanks for telling me, though! I’ll try to remember who it was I managed to be all those years. But now,” she says quietly, “I am somewhere else and enjoying making no effort at all.”

“I must go,” I say. “I mustn’t tire you out.”

“Oh, not before you have told me about the shop! I’m dying to know. You must indulge me, Harriet, so I can think about it after you leave.”

“What can I say about the shop? It’s an absolutely new, rich, and terrifying world.”

“Terrifying?”

“Yes, because I am not ready for all the lives that pour in. It’s what I wanted, Caroline, it’s what I dreamed of, people talking, women coming in and meeting each other.”

“Then why terrifying?”

It takes me a second to find the answer. “I’m finding out that my life with Vicky—such a good life it was—was walled in somehow. I had no idea what a lot has been going on, what problems these women face.”

Caroline smiles. “Vicky herself was a kind of castle, wasn’t she? Way up on a hill of her own invention, the publishing house.”

“Yes, exactly. So we really only saw people rather like us. Vicky never considered herself part of any group, perhaps even a little superior to any group, such as feminists, for instance, and, God knows,” I hesitate before the word, then utter it, “lesbians.”

“And I can imagine lesbians and feminists flock to your store. All to the good, I should think. You are brave to do this, Harriet. I admire your undiminished zest for life, your courage.”

“No, not really. I’m afraid of all the labels and the way women talk about everything. A young woman introduced her friend as ‘my lover.’ I was dumbfounded. I didn’t like it, you see. I’m terrified because all my defenses are being beaten down, or simply disregarded,” and I laugh. “I am an old fool. Oh dear,” and I laugh again, “all I can think of is Philip Cabot saying of his brother Richard, ‘There are fools, there are damn fools, and there’s my brother Richard’! I’m brother Richard.”

“Hardly. If I remember, brother Richard had outraged Philip by insisting that doctors must tell terminally ill patients the truth. He did so and made at least one painful mistake. He told a woman she was dying so she left her job, put her mother in a nursing home, and it all turned out to be a mistake.”

“But really he was right; I mean Richard was. Peter told you, after all.”

“I wanted to know, so I asked him. But he has not told me how long I have. How can he know?” She seems at the moment so much her old self that it is hard to imagine that she is dying, and again I feel the wall go up inside me, the wall against knowing something I do not want to know, that seems too painful to take in.

But Caroline changes the subject mercifully. “One thing about dying is that one can say anything, ask anything. One is immune from all the usual discretions and social necessities.” She is now perceptibly a little out of breath and I know I must leave soon. “We’ve never talked about loving women. Did you feel guilt?”

“No. You see Vicky swept me off my feet. It all seemed part of her world, into which I was being taken by love, passionate love.”

“I have more than once been in love with a woman,” Caroline says. “I didn’t feel guilty. As you say, it seemed so natural. Why I am telling you this is because I think all of us have it in us to be moved by the same sex and for a woman it is very different from loving a man passionately. It is not a choice, one or the other. Not for me, at any rate. Life is always more complex than we want to make it.”

I am listening with all my being. While she has been talking, she has been looking away from me at the flowers. Now she turns and looks right into my eyes. “And so perhaps is dying, but Harriet,” she says, “don’t be terrified. The open door may be terrifying but it does lead somewhere. Right now it is leading you into unknown territory, just as dying is leading me. Let us rejoice.”

“You marvelous woman. I must go now and let you rest.” I lay the books on the table beside her. “A few books just in case you get bored and want a little distraction.”

“I’m never bored,” she says at once, “only I do get tired. I hate to say goodbye but, yes, it is time we parted.” And she adds as I bend to kiss her, “Come back soon.”

But I know in my heart that this may be goodbye. And I know, too, as I sit in the car, unable to leave the place, the street, Caroline, just yet, that she has said what she did to support me, to say I should accept myself and the world around me, the multiple lives, all the doors opening, and not close them ever again.

It is strange after that moment of truth and illumination that when I get home there is an anonymous letter among all the spring book catalogs from the university presses. When I lay it down I am shivering. It reads:

Dear manager or whoever you are,

This was a clean blue collar neighborhood until you and your ilk arrived. Now it is full of filthy gay men and lesbians. This is a warning. We do not want your obscene bookstore and we will do everything we can to get you out.

A neighbor

I run down the stairs and find Joan preparing to leave as it is nearly two. “Read this,” and I hand her the letter.

“Not unexpected, is it?” she says in her cool clipped voice.

“I’m scared, Joan. What do I do now? Wait for someone to burn the place down?”

“Take it to the police. I’ll go with you.”

“You’re a trump,” I say, thinking fast. The moment of terror is over and I am very angry. “We’ll lock up and pin a sign on the door to say we’ll be back soon.”

“Good.”

All police stations no doubt have the same dank smell, the same brown walls and battered desks we found in Somerville and, at least around Boston, the same Irish policemen, blustery, kind, and congenitally prejudiced against anyone deviating from the norm: black, Hispanic, or gay.

“Sit down,” says the middle-aged sergeant in charge, looking us over with shrewd, not unkindly eyes. “What is the problem?”

“This is the problem,” I say, handing over the letter.

He takes his time reading it and seems a little uncertain. Then he coughs and says, “Your activity has been brought to our notice,” he says. “The people in your neighborhood are pretty square.”

“But so are we,” Joan says tartly. “A liberal feminist bookstore is a public service.”

It sounds a little pretentious, but, after all, why we are in Somerville is not the point. “I came here to ask for protection from what looks like the lunatic fringe and I expect that fringe is in every community these days,” I say as calmly as I can.

“Yes, well … Miss Hatfield, what can we do? I can’t afford to have an officer patrolling the block day and night. If you call us, if there is some sort of attack, we’ll come at once.” But he does not look at me or smile at me and I sense that he is troubled by something. “What did the person who called our activity to your attention say?” I ask. “What is behind a savage blundering attack on two innocent booksellers?”

“Well …,” he pauses and frowns, “I was given a book bought at your store.” He opens a drawer and brings out the evidence, Mary Daly’s
Pure Lust
.

“Oh.” I exchange a look with Joan. It is a rather anxious moment.

“It may interest you to know,” Joan says, “that the subtitle of Daly’s
Pure Lust
is
Elemental Feminist Philosophy
and that she teaches at Boston College in the department of philosophy.”

“She does?” Absorbing this is as difficult as if Joan had called her a murderess. The sergeant, whose name I notice is Kevin O’Reilly, is clearly in a state of bewilderment.

“I think you would find it on the shelves of any reputable bookstore,” I offer. “It has not been censored.”