But then the serious purpose of the evening resumed, and the little stage was set with a reader’s high stool and lectern, candlelit and ringed with folding chairs. “Your turn, Hannah,” said the Radclyffe-of-ceremonies at the mic, handing Hannah a leather-bound first edition. “Page one, have a go.”
“Don’t fuck it up, now, Yank!” another Radclyffe bellowed good-naturedly from the bar.
She read the first page, blushing, hearing breaths and bottle-openings and the clink of drink around her, hands adjusting monocles, the smack of stolen kisses, pages flipping, pub grub passing around with forks for cake. “Now read a favorite page,” instructed burly Radclyffe-at-the-mic. “And don’t give us that same old ‘that night they were not divided’ part; every baby dyke picks that. We know she did it—in fiction as in life. No argument. But find some short passage that spoke to you and only you.” So Hannah turned automatically to the paragraph she always read aloud to her own students:
And now quite often while she waited at the stations for the wounded, she would see unmistakable figures—unmistakable to her they would be at first sight, she would single them out of the crowd as if by instinct. For as though gaining courage from the terror that is war, many a one who was even as Stephen, had crept out of her whole and come into the daylight, come into the daylight and faced her country: ‘Well, here I am, will you take me or leave me?’ And England had taken her, asking no questions—she was strong and efficient, she could fill a man’s place, she could organize too, given scope for her talent. England had said: ‘Thank you very much. You’re just what we happen to want . . . at the moment.’
There was silence after that. Then someone said, “There’s gaydar for you, in 1918.” Another voice called, “Valour.” The close-packed audience buzzed and wept. Some applauded. And Hannah saw one older woman fingering a medal on her breast. The red poppy.
It was too much. No birthday had ever been better. She mentally ranged through hideous or merely disappointing birthdays from age three upward, a catastrophe of humiliating images, some appallingly recent. The time she’d thrown up on the classmate she’d expected to seduce. The time her date broke up with her and left her by the side of the road with no underwear. The carrot cake that made everyone sick. The guest who wanted all of Hannah’s friends to boycott the hotel where they were heading to dance. The old boyfriend who showed up, stoned on Ecstasy. The fire in the kitchen stove that sent two terrified mice blundering over her mother’s legs. This made up for it all. How had Isabel pulled it off? Why was she being so good to Hannah?
Embarrassed by her own display of emotion, Hannah pushed through the applauding dykes to the rear of the bar, fervently hoping for a bathroom stall in which to blow her nose and compose herself. Another Radclyffe Hall lookalike smiled and nodded to her as Hannah barreled into the loo and, observing Hannah’s crimson face, extended a perfectly starched handkerchief from a blazer pocket. “Here, Miss.”
“Sorry,” Hannah sniffled, abruptly remembering that London’s better public venues often hired a ladies’ washroom attendant and that, having left her wallet and passport with Isabel, she now had no money in the pockets of her own costume. “I . . . don’t have any change for the toilet.”
The Radclyffe, amused, reached into another pocket and brought out a handful of coins Hannah had never seen before. Seeing her confusion, the handsome woman said “An American, is it? That’s a ha’penny, that’s a tuppence, that’s threepence.”
“Man, you went all out,” Hannah blurted, admiring the coins long vanished from England’s updated currency system. “You even dressed in the change Radclyffe would have carried around.” But the woman regarded her with probing, hooded eyes, and the temperature in the bar bathroom abruptly dropped to the chill of a tomb’s air as the stranger dipped long fingers into yet another pocket and slowly, slowly drew out the slip of paper Hannah had pushed into Hall’s tomb earlier that day.
It was unmistakable. It was Hannah’s handwriting. It still bore the creases from being rolled like a joint and shoved through a slender tomb keyhole.
“You wrote to me twice,” said the real Radclyffe Hall, “both times knowing I could not possibly write back, for all I am is temperature and dust, no longer temperament and lust.” And then she smiled. “But keep trying. For as you read aloud just now from my old pages, we still recognize one another, do we not?” She leaned one hand lightly on Hannah’s shoulder, and the icy breath of tomb surrounded them. Hannah, suspended in disbelief, panicking, thought to herself, But I can’t kiss the dead, though she dimly recalled somehow making love with shimmering figments of Miriam and Eve and Lilith at some recent Passover Seder, and hadn’t that been the impossible made real? Could there be a livelier birthday gift than making out with the ghost of Radclyffe Hall? But then wouldn’t Lady Una’s ghost haunt her forever? These thoughts were interrupted by Hall’s competent writing hand, which began stroking history and savvy into Hannah, soon fiercely pushing pressure into her velvet costume breeches, a cold pressure of wartime and rejection and scandal and superiority and ink that grew to a spread of heat at its circling point, and Hannah smelled good horses, polished leather, men’s cologne, the threads of costly hatbands, old tobacco, and the secret hidden sweat of one of history’s greatest butches, and Hannah felt the impossible waves of a ghost-given orgasm start to unfold, and Hall was saying, “They all hate me now. They say the book depresses them, that it’s full of self-loathing. They all want other writers now, the young and the tutors alike. They hate me now, as they did then, but you—you keep assigning me, and keeping me alive—and if they hate you, I will haunt them. Remember that. Write your truth, as I did, and when the critics lash you, as they will, know that I will haunt them; until they read you more—”
Then Hannah heard herself quote from Hall’s own letters, breathing into the older woman’s elegant neck her famous words: “‘I do not like notoriety, it embarrasses me and makes me feel shy, but I realize that it is the price I must pay for having intentionally come out into the open, and no price could ever be too great in my eyes—Nothing is so spiritually degrading or so undermining of one’s morals . . .’”
“—As living a lie, as keeping friends only by false pretences,” finished Hall, and pressed again into Hannah, whispering in her ear, “Now. Write this down, my dear.”
The toilet flushed, and Isabel came out, adjusting the tie of her Radclyffe suit. She looked at Hannah standing there, swaying, moaning, holding onto nothing, and gently said, “Love, you might want to wipe that graveyard dust off your rented boots,” and exited the bathroom. Hannah opened her eyes to find the bathroom mirror steamed over in dripping streaks, with one long handprint that was not Hannah’s slowly evaporating. And clutched in Hannah’s own chilled hand was something cool and slim. Where had that come from? It was a fountain pen.
Seduced by the lesbian past, she thought. Happy birthday to me.
Chapter Five
Memorial Day
Hannah woke up smiling. School was over until fall, the air turning lush but not too warm yet, and Memorial Day weekend loomed. That was a special holiday for the regulars at Sappho’s: not a celebration of the dead but of the living, although bar regular Shoni often set up a traditional sweat lodge to honor female warrior ancestors. The weekend focus was an annual campout at the property of two women who had built their yurt-style cabin retreat on several wooded acres just outside of town. The cabin was just luxurious enough (glass doorknobs, a flush toilet) to reassure the anxious, who slept inside; the outdoor setting just wild enough (no Internet reception, hawks and fox cubs) to satisfy the working women who couldn’t afford a more expensive “nature” getaway. Everyone brought sleeping bags and partied long into the night, enjoying a barbecue, campfire songs, s’mores, Isabel’s signature cocktails (or, if preferred, cheap wine coolers). Those woods had seen their fair share of spontaneous hookups, over the years. Janey and Amy had a cozy treehouse fort, built over the site of an old house foundation, and one year Ha
nnah had spent the night making passionate love in that treehouse with a ruddy pest control manager named Flick.
When Hannah arrived on Friday afternoon, she made sure to sign up for the Saturday morning sweat lodge, which required that any participants stay clean and sober for twenty-four hours beforehand. Content to take in chocolate squares and gooey marshmallows as her only stimulants for the first night, she headed down to the campfire circle. There, the welcoming scent of woodsmoke mingled with spring blossoms, damp grass, and burnt graham crackers, with a faint undercurrent of mothballed sleeping bags and after-workout butch cologne splashed on buff limbs. Hannah’s arrival had apparently interrupted a mild argument about the correct observance of the holiday.
“I stopped to put flowers on the grave of the unknown woman soldier,” Moira was explaining. “And I’ll probably ride in the parade on Monday with the other female vets. Got the bike tricked out, but will any of youse be there? Yvette? Dog? You know, you guys—it is Memorial Day weekend.” Everyone looked down uncomfortably. Yvette started to say something, but Joanna shoved a marshmallow into her mouth.
“Huh! Did I say something wrong?” Moira stretched her legs toward the campfire, although it was a very warm day. “Did you know that Janey and Amy have some Civil War history right in their backyard here? Letty’s grandkids found it.”
“Come on, this is upstate New York,” Dog protested.
“Yeah, and you’re sitting right on the map of the Underground Railroad. Where do you think escaping slaves headed to? If not here, through here, to Canada. Where do you think Sojourner Truth began her life? Enslaved in this state.” Moira reached for the bag of chocolate squares, tossing a handful to Hannah; one fell onto a burning log and melted dramatically, with a hiss of rich dissolving sugars. “I know, I know, Yvette and Hannah think all women should be pacifists and never take up arms or fight in uniform. But if you knew you would be sent to free women from slavery, wouldn’t you sign up? I know I would have. Over in Bosnia, where they sent me as a peacekeeper resettling women from all those rape camps, I thought I could be a freedom train. For someone. That’s all I’m saying.”
“I don’t think women should be passive in the face of slavery and genocide, if that’s what you mean,” Hannah heard herself join in. “I know women passed as men and went to war in the American Revolution, and the Civil War, and there was an all-women’s battalion in Russia in World War I, the Battalion of Death. And there’s Joan of Arc and even Hannah Senesh, who I’m named for, who parachuted into Nazi territory to rescue Jews. You know I teach this stuff.” She turned to the other women. “I had Moira in as a guest lecturer during Women’s History Month. They loved her.”
“So, historian—would you fight? If you had to?” Moira waited. Hannah looked around the now-silent circle. She could hear Yvette chewing, Letty wheezing.
“I would fight like a historian,” Hannah answered at last. “Like Rose Valland. She was the curator at the Louvre Museum who kept coded secret lists of what the Nazis were stealing—great art, the treasures of France. Just a mousy little woman no one paid attention to, who helped the French resistance. She helped recover some, but not all, of the art collections the Nazis stole from museums and from Jewish families. And without firing a single bullet, she was awarded the French Legion of Honor and even the Presidential Medal of Freedom from the U.S. And there was that New Zealander, Nancy Wake, the courier no Nazis could capture. The Gestapo called her the White Mouse.” She took a swig of limeade, thinking: I bet I could have done something like that. My best friend and I used code to pass love notes to each other in tenth grade. We would have been hassled and shunned otherwise. Every lesbian learns the art of concealment, espionage, coded letter-writing. I wish the students I’m teaching now didn’t have to fight like we did. But so many of them still do . . .
“She’s brave enough,” volunteered one of Hannah’s university colleagues. “I mean, hey, I’m closeted. I can’t be out; in my department they’d make my life a living hell and find a way to fire me. Hannah stands up to the dean, the provost, everyone. She assigns her students the complete works of Lillian Faderman. She takes them to poetry slams!” Yes, thought Hannah, but I don’t think my relatives who fled Poland would see standing in front of a lectern as an act of valor.
“Can you give it a rest?” begged Zoe. “I mean, school is out. This is party time. Pass the beer, please.” She snapped the cap off with her sharp white teeth and raised the bottle high. “I’ll say it. Here’s to women warriors!”
“To women warriors,” they all said, but Tina poured some liquor on the ground, murmuring ancestors.
After a dinner of barbecued chicken and veggie kabobs, they set up the annual volleyball game. A drunken match began, with bumps and spikes directed everywhere but over the net. Cries of “Watch it!,” “Ow!,” and “You moron!” resounded between shrieks of laughter. Yet another misdirected shot sent the abused volleyball rolling into the bushes. “I’ll get it,” yelled Hannah, who had returned to the campfire pit and was trying (and failing) to muster spiritual preparation for the sweat lodge. She kicked off her Birkenstocks, enjoying the coolness of soft lawn underfoot, and ambled after the lost game ball.
What was bravery? She couldn’t decide. Her own wartime heroines were peace activists: Jeannette Rankin, the first woman ever elected to Congress, a pacifist suffragist who had dared to vote against America’s entry into World War I. On April 7, 1917, she had declared in the Roll Call of the U.S. House of Representatives, “I want to stand by my country—but I cannot vote for war. I vote NO.” And Hannah’s lectures typically valorized nurses and healers who transcended barriers of hate—like Susan King Taylor, the African American nurse and former slave who served with the 33rd U.S. Colored Troops during the Civil War, teaching Union soldiers to write—whether they were black or white.
She had never been in a war herself. Hannah had spent part of her 1960s childhood marching for peace, head-banded, earnest, skipping one day in third grade to hold a poster at a vigil with her mom. Then the Vietnam War had ended—or imploded—and America returned to its Cold War against the Evil Empire, the same Russians who had been allies in both World Wars. The 1980s had directed American anxiety to the possibility of nuclear war. But in the streets a different war was raging, too: AIDS and hate crimes, crack addiction, rape. Nearly every one of Hannah’s friends had survived rape or hate violence.
Well, in her twenties she had certainly fought on all those fronts, in those culture wars. Writing, speaking, marching, she had fought alongside dying men, whose wracked bodies filled the unseen trenches of ignorance and fear and rejection. She had marched in every Take Back the Night rally alongside girlfriends too brutalized to receive the gentlest touch in bed from a woman’s hand.
And what counted as bravery in the long war against homophobia? She remembered a night at a different women’s bar, in a tough city neighborhood somewhere in the Midwest, where she had a summer teaching appointment. She was dancing with a friend, but left early, alone, only to find her parked car covered, hood to tail light, with local gang members. They knew where she had been. They called to her, not moving off her car as she walked up with keys in hand. You gay? they taunted, knowing. You a dyke?
“Yes, I am! What would you like to know?” she’d cheerfully sassed back, as if this were a sex ed class and not a confrontation. But even under pressure, Hannah was most comfortably empowered as a scholar. She stood there as if in class. I have the answers to your questions. Raise your hand. They weren’t expecting this. They scrambled, fled, apologizing, sheepish.
“Ow!” Hannah felt a stinging sharpness in her right heel. Almost tripping over a log, she steadied herself against the nearest tree and bent over to see what she had stepped on. It was a porcupine quill, the barb almost but not quite penetrating her spring-tender foot. Great. Now she would have rabies. Hurling the volleyball back in the direction of her barmates, Hannah sat down on a log with a grunt of pain, rocking her foot and trying to remember f
irst-aid approaches to a puncture wound.
“Nyet. I do,” said a voice. Confused, Hannah stood up. There was no one there.
“Sit. I do,” the voice said again, and it was the founder of the Women’s Battalion of Death, the great Russian warrior Maria Bochkareva, who now filled the space of the growing spring dusk with her muddied, sweat-stained bulk. Without waiting for invitation, she bent down and yanked the quill out of Hannah’s foot.
“OW!” gasped Hannah. “Who the—what do you think you’re doing?” For a panicked minute she thought the woman might be a lost deer hunter, but it was the wrong season. It was spring. Wasn’t it? Hannah looked back frantically in the direction of the volleyball party, but there was no longer any sign of the campfire, the cabin, or her rowdy lesbian friends. The sky had darkened to crisp autumn hues. The trees around them were shedding leaves; the leaves that hit the ground rapidly silvered with veins of frost crystals; the earth beneath her other bare foot had frozen and hardened. In the distance, she heard explosions.
Maria uncorked a flask concealed beneath her tunic. “No problem, wodka,” she explained, and then held out her dirty, trailing sleeve. “You bite.” When Hannah did not move, the woman sighed and pointed to a clean spot on the soiled wool. “My arm, you bite it, NOW,” she commanded. Hannah lifted the flesh of the stranger’s well-built forearm to her lips just as Bochkareva bent and splashed a stinging shot of vodka into Hannah’s open wound.
“OY!” Now Hannah readily clamped onto Maria’s arm. “SHIT, that hurt.”
“The foot, ha, is nothing,” sneered Maria, recapped the flask and flopping down beside Hannah on the now-rotten log. “You want howl, you want ugly, you want die, you have belly wound. You have lung wound. You pull icicle out of eye, like my Elena, and keep shooting.” She quickly turned and flung herself below the log, flat, motionless, as a fox scampered through a pile of twigs beyond them. “Get down, idiot city girl. Get head down, rifle up!”
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