“What did you say?” Hannah whispered, and the breath of ages came back to her again in her own language, stilted with effort. “You.” A breath. “You. Pushy. Woman. You. Keep. Pushing.” Then silence. Hannah pressed closer, fearful of looking at that huge faceless being, but also fearful something had gone wrong.
The infant was pulled forward, handed to and immediately suckled by two waiting mothers, while a third woman with breast milk trickling thinly used a sharp stone to cut the umbilical cord.
And as Hannah watched, as the stone cut through the cord, the giant cave-filling mother turned to stone herself.
She was pulled out of the cave by many warm hands. Further confounding Hannah, the vigil-keeping tribe now melted into the recognizable features of her former students, both male and female. They lifted her above their heads and passed her forward, as if she were crowd surfing at a rock concert. She was aware that below her were the first women’s studies students she had ever taught, as a graduate teaching assistant years and years ago. Then the star students from that tough first course on reproductive rights. Forward into her own time she rolled, over class after class, graduate after graduate. Frances, who had died young. Lisa, who became a top United Nations lawyer for global women’s rights. Andi, the sculptor. How she had pushed them to work harder, to write better, to read more, to speak up and act and advocate!
I am a rock star. I am surfing Neolithic feminism. The rock is the mother and the rock is the Neolithic, the New Stone Age. The children of the daughter born today will worship the Goddess and carve her image and leave it, forever, inside that cave. “Push,” whispered the students of Hannah’s past. “You pushed us. You stay pushy. You keep pushing.”
“Dr. Stern. Are you okay?” Three of today’s freshly minted graduates stood over Hannah, their dark mortarboards blocking the sun. Manicured hands reached down to pull Hannah up from the damp grass. “Oh, that’s a shame! Did you break your necklace?” Terry Wong, that year’s star student, took the Venus pendant and chain and carefully placed them into the small box that had earlier held her class graduation ring. “There! That should keep it safe, at least until you get it fixed. Wow, I’ve seen you wear that in class a thousand times! I guess today’s the last time I’ll ever see you decked out in your goddess gear.”
“God, Terry, are you going to start crying again?” The other students smiled at Hannah. Terry beckoned to an older woman whose scarf shimmered with blue and gold strands. “Dr. Stern, this is my mother. She wanted to meet you.” Hannah tried to remain steady on her feet as the proud mom introduced herself and expressed thanks for Hannah’s mentoring. “We’re very proud that Terry chose this major—her other mom and I,” and now a second woman came forward to shake Hannah’s still-trembling hand. “It’s a moment we never thought we’d see or celebrate. We had so much difficulty just bringing her into the world . . .”
“Mama! Dana! Not that story again,” Terry groaned.
“Just such a difficult birth,” the co-mom reminisced, ruffling the hair of her healthy, now-grown daughter. “Thank God we had that visiting woman doctor, because we had no legal rights as a couple in those days.”
“Right, they wouldn’t let Dana stay with me in the birthing room, or touch me or help me; and I was desperate. I had to push, and push, and push . . . Yes, Terry, it’s all worth it today. All worth it to see you so grown up. And a women’s history graduate!”
They stood around her, beaming.
She parked shakily in the lot behind Sappho’s and entered through the back door, the hall that emptied into the bar’s open space. Like tumbling down the birth canal. She wanted that feeling, now, on Mother’s Day. A party was in progress, of course, with local lesbian moms and their progeny snacking on cookies and milk (and stronger beverages for some of the mothers) as Isabel played soundtracks in celebration of mother-hood. Hannah put the box containing her broken necklace on the bar and took a cup of milk from the party platter, surprised by its odd flavor—perhaps another one of Isabel’s mystic herbal concoctions? —until Melissa shouted “Wait! Hannah! That’s my breast milk. I pumped it out for Jiji earlier. I’m so sorry, I forgot all about it!”
“Hey, professor!” welcomed Letty, her arms draped around a tough-looking grown daughter and two grandkids. “School’s over for the year, right? Graduation day up at campus? Yeah, baby! You’re done. You can come out of your cave now and join us.” But Letty’s kind words “join us” sounded, to Hannah, like “Venus,” and she looked down at her feet, where the rough clay of an actual cave still stuck to her damp shoes. Isabel looked, too, and saying only “Wipe your feet,” she handed Hannah a small towel with a smile. An instant later, when Hannah had cleaned her shoes, she lifted her head and saw that Terry’s little ring box had popped open like a gesture of proposal, on the bar. Inside, her silver necklace chain was perfectly intact, the links in a solid circle, and the Venus pendant polished as if new.
Chapter Four
Birthday Week
“I’m going to England next month,” Isabel said. “My annual vacation time.” Hannah knew that Iz took only ten days off each year, the only time she felt she could close the bar: mid-May. That was right at the point when all the university students had graduated or cleared out of town for summer, but before the many festivities of Memorial Day and Pride Month, which brought in the regulars and locals. Isabel paused, then looked up at Hannah: “I have a two-for-one flight, and I know it’s your birthday that week. Would you like to accompany me to London?”
Would she! Dozens of emotions played across Hannah’s face: surprise, gratitude, thrill, panic, and anticipation. “You look like one of those children’s flipbooks, where thumbing the pages speeds up the character’s changes of expression,” laughed Isabel.
“Yes, you have animated me,” Hannah teased back. But it had been a dream of hers for so long: ENGLAND. To walk in the streets that gave birth to the English language, which after all was her medium, her literary tongue, her wordlife. This was a particularly important birthday, too: FORTY-FIVE, and she’d had no plans, still being single. Now the plan peeled open around her like a tantalizingly sweet onion. A pilgrimage to Radclyffe Hall’s grave.
Once, doing research in San Francisco’s gay and lesbian archives during a Pride Month trip, Hannah had been allowed to look at an old letter Radclyffe Hall had mailed to another lesbian author. Sealed in a protective sheet and kept in a climate-controlled archive room, the letter was paired with its original envelope, and Hannah had carefully copied down the return address: 37 Holland Street, Kensington W8, London. Later she’d written the long-dead lesbian novelist a long letter, expressing clumsily what Hall’s life had meant to her, and impulsively mailed it to the London address with no return address of her own so that it couldn’t be sent back. I wrote to a ghost, thought Hannah. Now I can set flowers on her grave.
“I’ll be with you as far as Heathrow,” Iz was saying. “Then I have a side trip to meet up with some mixologists—sort of a retreat for those of us in the bar-wench profession.” She smiled as she wiped down the bar with a clean towel. “I’ll let you prowl in London for a few days, then I’ll be back and meet up with you for a night or two of fun before we fly back.”
“Oh. Sure. Are you going to another part of England? Some brewery village?”
“No, somewhere and something else,” said Isabel, and with no further comment she handed Hannah a slim folder containing a plane ticket.
Highgate Cemetery was green and glowing that May afternoon. If there were any pilgrims seeking the grave of Karl Marx, the most famous permanent resident of Highgate, they weren’t in evidence. At least, Hannah saw no cluster of day-tripping socialists as she alighted from the London bus. But almost immediately she found herself in an argument with the grim attendant at the front entrance, who demanded an enormous admission fee for the “group tour.”
“I’m really fine just walking through on my own,” Hannah tried to explain, thinking, I’d rather put out my eyeball wit
h a shrimp fork than join a tour group for my secret moment of homage. But the matron snarled, “Ye can’t poke about on yer own. We can’t have it, visitors tramping up and down. Ye stick with the guide and no wandering off the path or it’s out yer go, see?” So Hannah presented the right number of pounds, and only after receiving a stamped admit ticket remembered to ask, “Will the tour take us to the tomb of Radclyffe Hall? That’s who—that’s the site I’ve come to see.”
“No promise,” snarled Matron.
Obviously grave desecrations by cranks, and the risk of damage or graffiti from vandals, could only be avoided by sensible restrictions on all visitors, Hannah realized. But the meek young man who led their eventual small party to historic tombs responded to Hannah’s desperate pleas with “Right. Then. This is the tomb of Radclyffe Hall, a famous lady writer. Quite controversial really.” He wiped his sweating pate with a pocket handkerchief, and then turned to the next tomb up the path.
It was too much. She’d come all this way. No: she’d come out all this way. “Lady writer”? Hall had to be spinning in her tomb. “Sir,” Hannah interrupted, “I’d like to add a few words about this one. I’m a women’s history professor, myself. If you wouldn’t mind.” “Ooh!” one of the other patrons in the tour group exclaimed, and their guide gave a quick, reluctant nod.
So Hannah launched into the familiar homage she knew by heart from class lecture notes, used over and over every fall, every spring, every year.
“Okay, so this is the tomb of the famous lesbian author, Radclyffe Hall, whose novel The Well of Loneliness became the central lesbian classic of the twentieth century,” she began. “Published in 1928, the book was instantly banned and vilified in the English press. It received the same treatment across the pond in America. Obscenity trials painted the book as dangerous to youth, and one judge famously said, ‘I would rather give a healthy young woman a phial of prussic acid than this novel.’ The heroine, Stephen Gordon, is a rich and privileged butch girl forced to leave her family’s estate, who falls in love with a rather clueless young woman against the backdrop of World War I.
“Lesbians across many generations have found the book disappointing, due to its self-loathing portrait of an outcast ‘invert.’ It’s not at the top of the list of what you’d call Gay Pride literature, and there sure aren’t any descriptive sex scenes, for all that the book was a scandal. The one line that left critics gasping was something like ‘and that night, they were not divided.’ But overall, millions of women smuggled paperback editions home, to read at least one in-print testament to lesbian love. And the book raised questions about everything from homophobia to disinheritance to cross-dressing to lesbians’ roles as ambulance drivers on the wartime French front. So some of the most enlightened feminist educators and social scientists of the pre-World War II era read and debated the book. It trickled down to curious readers of all backgrounds and ethnicities.”
She swallowed. “Like many a young lesbian, I read The Well of Loneliness during my coming-out period, although by that time there were women’s history classes and lesbian literary critics interpreting the book for me. I understood that, for all its flaws, this once-banned book was part of my cultural inheritance as an English-speaking lesbian. That’s why I’ve traveled to Hall’s gravesite today—to pay homage to her—on my birthday,” she finished weakly.
There were a few automatic mumbles of “many happy returns.” Other members of the tour group had grown restless by now; a few looked downright embarrassed and resentful, although one tweedily dressed woman was taking notes on a green file card. But the guide put a trembling hand on Hannah’s forearm. “You know, Miss, this tomb is indeed the most visited spot in Highgate. Young ladies regularly leave bouquets here. I’m grateful for the expertise you shared. Quite frankly, I’m not up to it.”
“I didn’t mean to show you up,” Hannah apologized. “It’s just that I came all this way only to see her tomb, and worried that we’d pass it all too quickly.”
Her guide regarded her from behind stiff brown-rimmed eyeglasses. “Well . . . it’s in violation of our rules, really, but I see you’re sincere. If I can trust you to behave yourself,” he added with a surprising amount of twinkle, “would you like a few moments alone at this tomb? I have to insist that you rejoin the group within five minutes. No more than that. Agreed?”
“Agreed!” Hannah couldn’t believe her luck. Yes! Whoopee! Alone with Hall. The instant the guide moved tactfully away (the other tourists having scattered far ahead), Hannah fumbled both her journal and camera out of her knapsack and began wildly sketching and photographing Hall’s tomb. There wasn’t much to see: an imposing rusty door, with a tenderly inscribed plaque attributed to Hall’s longtime partner Lady Una Troubridge: “I will but love thee more.” Hannah made a quick pencil rubbing of this plate, moving so fast that she accidentally tore a bit of paper from her journal.
Then she noticed the keyhole. There was a keyhole in Radclyffe Hall’s tomb. Whatever for? Who went in and out? Karl Marx and the other ghosts of Highgate? But they wouldn’t need keys. The matron, the shy tour guide? Did they come in and tidy the dust of a lesbian life? Drink with Hall, after work? Her mind raced through the macabre possibilities. But the tour guide was waiting. Quickly, before she could change her mind, Hannah wrote on the scrap of torn journal paper Radclyffe, you are not forgotten, and she rolled it into a slender joint-like arrow and pushed it through the keyhole. Into the tomb.
A rush of cold, cold air blew back into her face. Hannah dropped to her knees. It was a still, warm day in May with no wind. But the icy blast came from the other side of that tomb keyhole, a shift in atmosphere and form that seemed to whisper, I received your note. I am reading it now.
Gasping, drenched in cold sweat, Hannah ran to rejoin the tour group, the guide giving her a look that said it all: Now do you understand what we have going on here? She looked back. There was nothing to indicate any tinkering with the tomb. As promised, she had not disturbed the site—just, apparently, the atmosphere.
Isabel’s voice on the other end of the phone sounded amused but not too surprised as Hannah spewed the story of her afternoon at Highgate. “Look, there’s a party at a bar. A bold Radclyffe Hall theme tonight, actually, so I knew you’d be interested. It’s a literary event, everyone joining in a group reading of The Well of Loneliness. Perfect for your birthday night if you don’t have other plans.” She knew Hannah had no other plans. And it was their last night in London.
The bar was called Lady Una’s. Motorcycle after motorcycle (and a few Rolls Royces, too) purred up to dismount party guests, the riders all dressed in the style of Radclyffe Hall, top hats and monocles replacing crash helmets and chaps tonight. All of a sudden Hannah realized this was a fancy-dress party where every invited guest was in a prescribed costume except Hannah herself: the clumsy, underdressed American on the trail of Hall’s legacy. Whether the odd setup was Isabel’s idea of a joke, or a sort of present for Hannah’s birthday, she wasn’t sure. She only knew that she was caught alone in Kensington W8 London wearing her Lucy travel pants, her green walking shoes, and an old polo shirt that felt unbearably out of style.
As she stood uncertainly on the kerb (and it’s called kerb here, she reminded herself) the bar door cracked open and two Radclyffes spilled out, arguing. They glared at Hannah, who was blocking their path. Then, to her astonishment, a real horse and carriage appeared out of nowhere, and the more feminine of the two said to her companion “Really, John, I told you our driver would be here,” and they disappeared into a musty, curtained compartment.
Then Isabel was in the doorway, greeting Hannah with a beautiful, broad smile and a soft string bag containing everything necessary for a Radclyffe Hall costume. She drew Hannah inside. A huge crowd of dapper, rowdy lesbians had assembled for a staged reading of the entire Well of Loneliness, in the style of booklovers’ readings of James Joyce on Bloomsday, or Robbie Burns night celebrations. “This only happens once every few years,” Isab
el was explaining, “and I knew it would correspond to your birthday this time. Everyone’s waiting for you.” “Everyone,” in this case, included several of Hannah’s favorite Brit writers, lesbian icons she recognized despite their varied and authentic Radclyffe Hall drag. Sarah Waters had her arm around Jeanette Winterson, who was goosing Emma Donoghue.
How does she do it? Hannah marveled, watching Isabel’s bar wench gravitas cross cultures into another country altogether. Then she recalled how, back home at Sappho’s Bar and Grille, Isabel kept books on lesbian culture and specialty bottles from global lesbian bars behind the counter. Why couldn’t a London bar have a souvenir from Sappho’s? As Hannah pulled the tweed blazer around her shoulders, admiring both its heft and its weft, the long dark bar packed with Radclyffe Hall look-alikes cheered and roared approval. Then Hannah saw that behind the counter, where at home Isabel kept a first-edition copy of The Well of Loneliness, this dear and mysterious pub called Lady Una’s kept a bottle of American apple brandy—and a hardcover copy of a small-press textbook on lesbian history by one Dr. Hannah Batsheva Stern.
One of her own published books.
Tears sprang to her eyes. She would never be Radclyffe Hall, never host a literary salon beyond the humble state university classroom where she lectured and snarled, but somehow her research was being circulated—and read. Known. Here!
The Radclyffes shouted and stamped their welcome, some calling out “Author!” and others toasting her with whisky and ale. “Many Happy Returns!” “It’s because you’ve honored our Radclyffe Hall in your classes and your writing,” explained one wispy drunk lass. “Paid homage at her tomb, today, now didn’t you?” another praised. “And you teach her life story,” nodded a severely cropped megadyke in tie and tails, offering Hannah a slice of birthday cake.
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