“I’ll help you with that, Mama,” I said. “Just let me show Miss Hartt where everything is.”
“You got to have food,” Mama insisted, although Clio had shaken her head at the first offer. “I won’t take no for an answer!” And indeed, my mother didn’t, setting us up at the kitchen table with two plates of turkey breast, cornbread stuffing, biscuits, and candied yams.
“I don’t know how I could possibly eat all this,” Clio said, looking alarmed.
“Miss Hartt doesn’t eat much, Mama,” I said.
“Well, I’m not surprised! What is there to eat in that city anyway? When I ask Liv about food, she’s always talking about Chinese this and Cuban that. What kind of food is that? You must be starved for down-home cooking.”
My mother had hit an important truth, judging by the way Clio approached her meal, with measured bites that grew into confident forkfuls. Although she didn’t finish her plate, Clio ate generous amounts of everything, more than I would have thought possible.
My mother didn’t join us at the table, instead calling out pleasantries over her shoulder from the sink as we ate. Much of her small talk made me cringe with embarrassment (“So Livvie says you’re a famous writer?”), but Clio replied with the old-school politeness I’d seen her summon up many times. I kept waiting for her to tire of it, but she didn’t seem to. The meal revived her, and she even agreed to tea and a piece of chess pie. “Just a sliver, mind,” she instructed.
I waved off the dessert, but “I’ll have a sliver with you,” Mama said with a girlish giggle. “Don’t tell anyone, but I had one earlier.” Her weight had crept up each year since her fiftieth birthday, and in profile now I noticed her second chin.
“This was about the finest meal I’ve ever had, Mrs. Bliss,” Clio said, and Mama beamed. This would be a story for her church friends, for sure— a famous author from New York City, albeit one she’d never heard of, had come to supper and complimented her meal to the heavens. “And she lived in Paris once!” I could hear Mama bragging.
Clio’s energy finally flagged as Mama trotted out stories about her grandkids opening their toys. Even I could only tolerate so many anecdotes about Pokey and Fletcher and the littlest ones, and Clio’s eyes took on a glassy sheen as Mama droned on. Finally, I reminded Mama of the trying day we’d had. My mother sputtered out her apologies for “yammering on” and helped Clio settle in to Sue and Bren’s old bedroom.
Although Clio brushed me away, she didn’t seem to mind Mama helping her into her nightgown, pulling the covers up over her, and turning out the light. “I will remember your kindness for a long time,” Clio said in a reverent voice.
“Sleep tight!” my mother called out as she pulled the door closed.
I grinned at my mother from across the hall, where I was waiting to hit my own bed to give Zami another try.
“What?” she asked, as if she’d never seen me smile.
“Thank you, Mama. That was real sweet of you.”
“Just bein’ folks,” she said.
• • •
For our trip back the following morning, my mother had prepared a hearty breakfast of eggs, Jimmy Dean sausage, and cornbread. Clio looked rested and ate heartily again. It was likely just my imagination, but her cheeks seemed to fill out in two meals’ time. My mother was delighted with the positive reception of her food. “I may just have to send you some care packages from home, Miss Hartt.”
On the drive to the airport, Sue’s eyes avoided mine in the rearview mirror, and I could tell she was disappointed with me, even though my excuse for missing dinner was airtight. We’d had very little time to talk sister-to-sister, except for those few hours on Christmas Eve.
“Miss Hartt, I am just so happy you’re feeling better,” Sue gushed, trotting out the charm.
“I’m afraid I kept your sister from her family,” Clio said.
“Don’t you worry,” Sue replied. “We’ll get her back here for Easter.”
After we’d settled Clio into her wheelchair for boarding, Sue tugged at my coat sleeve. “I mean it about Easter,” she whispered in an urgent tone. “I’m due April 20, and it would mean a lot to have my baby sister home in case there are any, you know, complications.”
I thought of Aunt Sass, and how she’d been lured home from New York in 1950 by news of my mother’s miscarriage. But this was the 1980s, and Sue had popped out three healthy babies over the past eight years without a problem. It had never occurred to me until that moment, when I saw a hint of fear in her eyes, that Sue was still not at ease with childbirth.
“You’ll be fine,” I assured her, patting her hand. The Blisses weren’t the most openly demonstrative folks, and although my next words felt unnatural, I said them anyway: “You are one of the strongest women I know”— which made her face soften. We hugged as best we could over her rounded belly.
On the return flight, Clio didn’t reach for my hand, even during takeoff. I tried to make chitchat, and she offered that she had liked my family, especially my mother, but her tone was crisp and she didn’t meet my eyes.
And then, when we must have been over Pennsylvania, she popped the latch on her handbag.
“I was looking for Ivy’s phone number last night,” she said, “and imagine my surprise when I realized my bag had been looted.”
A sip of Coke went down the wrong way, and I choked on it. Clio reached behind me and gave me a hard thump on the back. I didn’t see how it was possible that she’d noticed, as I’d been so careful to replace the clipping of Flora’s obituary where I found it and to slip the holder back into its pocket.
“My, what a fuss,” she remarked about my coughing fit. “Now my bag . . . it wasn’t ever out of your sight in the hospital, was it?”
“No, ma’am.” I took a smaller sip of Coke to steady myself. “Is something . . . missing?”
“No, it isn’t that,” she replied. “I have nothing to steal, really. The things I have mean something to me, but not to anyone else.”
I waited, not wanting to push her too far in the direction of identifying me as the culprit.
“I had a newspaper clipping,” she said slowly. “It was put back in the wrong place.”
“I am so sorry, Miss Hartt,” I confessed, hanging my head a little. “I was looking for your sister-in-law’s number, to let her know how you were doing, and I just sort of stumbled onto your photo holder. And then I saw the obituary, and I just couldn’t—”
“Resist prying into my personal belongings?”
“In my defense, it was printed in a newspaper—”
“Then you should have gone to the library to read it!” she said. A deep, sorrowful sound spilled out of her, almost like she was keening. “You might have torn it, and then what would I do? What would I do, Miss Bliss? Tell me that! I have some photos, a few mementos, and that scrap—”
The flight attendant stopped at our row, appearing out of nowhere with a tray of drinks. “Are you all right, ma’am?” she said, leaning in toward Clio. “Would you like some water?”
She shook her head. “No, nothing. I am sorry for your trouble,” she said, waving her off impatiently.
I knew she still loved the long-gone Flora, but until this moment, I hadn’t understood how deep the river of her feelings flowed. There were so many questions I wanted to ask, but in her current state she was unlikely to give up the answers. Flora felt like her private possession, something she kept as close as the worn obituary.
Her bag closed with a solid snap. “I told you things in the hospital. If you had asked . . . but now I feel . . . invaded, really. It will be hard for me to trust you again, Miss Bliss.”
Her compatriots in the Paris generation remembered Clio not just for her intellect and wit, but for her startling beauty, especially her chiseled nose and china blue eyes. “Those eyes saw into your soul,” Natalie Barney recalled in 1970.
A distinctive taste in clothes accented Clio’s features and statuesque height. She rarely went out on the stree
ts of the Latin Quarter without a hat, high-heeled boots, and a sweeping cape, the overall effect rendering her even more imposing.
“She cut a handsome figure,” Barney said. “She might have had anyone, man or woman, but she was Flora’s.”
—from Dismantling Clio Hartt: Her Life and Work, by Ingrid Coppersmith
Chapter 22
New York City
January 1984
When we got back, Clio was pleasant with me, often even warm, but then soon after New Year’s she threw a grenade between us.
“I want to go back to our old schedule, Miss Bliss,” she said.
“Which schedule was that?” She’d added days to my weekly visits over the months, so now I was sometimes stopping in six days out of seven.
“I don’t see the need for you to be here so much. Certainly not on weekends. A young woman like yourself doesn’t need to be fussing over me. You have a life of your own to live.”
Her consideration would have been touching if it were sincere. Instead, I assumed the change was about what I’d privately come to think of as “the handbag incident.” I hadn’t confessed my crime to anyone, not even Thea.
“I don’t see it as fussing, Miss Hartt,” I insisted. “Besides, Bea’s approved it and wants me to be here.”
“I will call Beatrice then and tell her it isn’t necessary.” She sighed, deep and full of bother.
My stomach lurched at the thought of Clio disclosing my transgression. “Oh, I can tell her. Don’t trouble yourself. I’ll tell her today.” I knew what Bea’s first question would be, though, so I asked it myself: “But what about your book? We’ve been making such good progress. You have a pretty tight table of contents for the older pieces, and then there are the new ones.”
Her second sigh had even more air to it. “I don’t know as I want to continue with that book,” she said. “Or any book, really.”
It had occupied so much of our time, and she’d enthused about it every time I saw her. She had finished one story and made headway with another. I couldn’t believe she’d just give up, and I said so.
“You’re feeling a little blue. Our trip was hard. The ER, and seeing your brother like that—”
“—was devastating!” she finished for me. “My little brother, reduced to that.” She tucked a few errant strands of hair back into her bun. “But no, that isn’t it. I don’t have the desire for it anymore. I don’t see the point.”
My mouth popped open, but I closed it. A writer who was down was one thing; a writer who no longer wanted to write was another.
“I can pare back to three days a week. How about that?” I said at last. “No pressure on you or the book. And we can assess after a few weeks.”
“We might get by with one or two days. Afternoons. For an hour, maybe.” She hunkered down into her armchair as if she didn’t intend to leave. Since we’d been back, I’d noticed that the papers on her desk hadn’t moved, and the notebook she’d taken with her to Asheville was nowhere in sight.
“Miss Hartt, I know I upset you,” I said. “I truly did not mean to. I would hate to see you give up on your book because of something I did.”
She let out a sharp cackle that cut like a piece of paper, a shallow slice you barely notice until it hurts like the devil.
“Miss Bliss, you have a grand idea of your powers. This has nothing to do with you.”
“Oh,” I said, both relieved and mortified.
“You know very little about me.” Disappointment darkened her face. For a moment, I wondered if she’d looked at Flora this same way. “Someday I may tell you more. Things that will clear up everything.”
“Ma’am?”
“For the record. Because you know they’ll be snooping around my papers after I’m dead.”
I snorted without meaning to at the word snooping. I imagined Thea and other academics with magnifying glasses and Sherlock Holmes hats.
“I’m glad I amuse you.”
“I’m sorry. It’s just . . . Well, you’re famous, Miss Hartt. Scholars will want to write about you. It’s their job.”
She raised an eyebrow. “A silly job, if you ask me.” But then she favored me with a smile. “Like writing novels.”
“Or buying groceries for novelists,” I added.
The joke pleased her and deepened her smile. I thought she might have forgiven me for trespassing in her bag.
“Go now,” she said. “Enjoy whomever it is you’re with. You are with someone, aren’t you?”
Thea’s face came to mind. “I am.”
She sighed again, but this time it was slow and measured.
“Her name is Thea.”
Clio’s eyelids flickered like hummingbird wings, as she worked to take in the information I’d offered.
“The godly one,” she said. By the time I understood she was referring not to Thea the woman but to Thea the name, she put her head back and closed her eyes and looked for all the world like she’d fallen asleep.
• • •
Thea and I had been “enjoying” each other pretty much nonstop since my return. That included my first-ever romantic, adult New Year’s Eve. Ramona was out of town so we had the grand Gramercy apartment to ourselves. Thea cooked coq au vin, a dish I’d never heard of until she presented it on Ramona’s grandmother’s china.
“Where did you learn to cook like this?” I asked as the tender chicken fell off the bone and into my mouth. It was an innocent question, and one I hadn’t intended to embarrass her with, but Thea’s light skin flushed rosy when she admitted it was Diane’s recipe.
“But I have always wanted to make it for someone special,” she added.
After dinner, we strolled to Cinema Village and a D. H. Lawrence film festival, a double bill of Women in Love and Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Even though the movies were aimed at heterosexuals, they got us heated up just the same, and we raced back in the early morning hours of 1984 to a chilled bottle of Freixenet and a marathon of lovemaking.
Within days, reality intruded: Thea’s on-campus interview at Hamilton College. In an atlas kept at the agency for reference, I looked up the little town of Clinton and let the inches between it and New York City sink in. Hamilton’s history went back almost two hundred years, and I knew Thea was beyond excited about the prospect of teaching there.
“I’d be their second dedicated Black Studies professor!” she said. “I could help shape the program.”
“Are there many black students in western New York?”— a fair question, I thought, but Thea’s response sounded ticked off.
“Well, no, not now. But having a strong program with courses about women writers would give them an edge in recruitment.” She divulged this on the A train as we made our way uptown to her apartment. Thea had avoided telling Vern about our relationship and had asked me to casually show up with her and spend the night so we could “out” ourselves without a lot of fuss.
We were pressed close together on the subway seat, our thighs and shoulders touching, and I noticed the middle-aged white woman across the aisle from us had a twisted look of revulsion on her face— because we were lesbians or because we were different races? If I’d brought Thea’s attention to it, she would have done something provocative like sticking out her tongue or grimacing right back. So I forced my eyes away from our fellow passenger and toward Thea’s slender fingers entwined with my own.
Vern was drawing her comic strip, which had started running regularly in the local feminist newspaper, and my appearance with Thea that evening was barely a blip on her radar screen. She called “hey” over her shoulder and later even declined Thea’s offer to share our takeout pasta. It wasn’t until the following morning when I emerged from Thea’s bedroom and faced Vern in the kitchen that the new turn in our relationship sank in.
“Hey,” she said, pouring coffee into a Snoopy mug.
“Hey, Vern,” I replied. “I didn’t get a chance to tell you last night, but I’ve been loving your strip. I can’t wait to pick u
p WomaNews and see what Jazz gets up to this month!”
The compliment floated in the chilly air between us as she slurped her coffee. I reached past her to pour some into a Cornell mug for myself.
“Maybe an editor will see it and want a whole book,” I added. She’d already thanked me several times for asking around and helping her make the connection to the paper, and I wasn’t fishing for another thank you. I just honestly didn’t know what to say. I kept stealing glances at the hallway, hoping Thea was out of the bathroom and on her way to the kitchen.
“Yeah,” Vern said. “Believe it or not, somebody from Ms. called and asked me to do a cartoon for their June issue.”
“Wow, that’s terrific, Vern! What of?”
“Dunno.” It wasn’t clear if she really didn’t know or just wasn’t interested in talking to me about it. I heard the whine of pipes, which suggested Thea had just turned off the water and would be finishing her grooming.
But before Thea could come to my rescue, Vern faced me, her eyes registering hurt. “So, you lied to me, huh?”
“You mean about Thea? No, no. It’s a new thing, I swear. It kind of caught us both by surprise.”
“I trusted you, man. I thought we were friends.”
“Oh, we are, Vern! I’m sorry Thea and I didn’t tell you. But like I said, this thing . . . it’s new. We would have told you last night, but you were drawing and all.”
She nodded, like some part of my apology and explanation had finally penetrated her consciousness.
“The last thing either of us wanted to do is hurt you.”
She opened the refrigerator and brought out a carton of half-and-half, which she sniffed first, then passed to me. “You take it light, right?”
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