Which became my undoing. One evening at dinner, in front of Mrs. McClelland, Mr. Carmody, a young and unmarried banker, and Harriet and her cousin Priscilla, who was Harriet’s age, Mr. McClelland, in a confrontational mood, told the story of a secretary in his office who made an error typing some figures and caused the bank considerable embarrassment vis-à-vis an important client. “So,” ended Mr. McClelland, “it is clear why women do not deserve the same treatment as men. They simply do not have the heads for grave matters such as finances or politics.”
I would have smiled wanly, to keep the peace, and hoped the topic shifted quickly, had he not attempted to engage me in the discussion.
“Given this example, don’t you agree, Miss Weir?”
I swallowed noisily and glanced for help toward Harriet, who was well aware of my political leanings. I had described to her in depth my first political rally, a mass meeting three years before at Cooper Union on the subject, “What Is Feminism?,” where I had met Marie Howe, the founder of Heterodoxy. How I had thrilled to hear such wonderful speakers as Crystal Eastman and Floyd Dell divulge their thoughts on the meaning of feminism! Marie Howe’s words had echoed with me for days: “We intend to be our whole, big, human selves.” What was I to say to Mr. McClelland, given how I felt?
I replied honestly that I did not agree, could not, that I failed to understand how he could make a generalization about women from one incident. I went on to discuss women’s numerous competencies, as proven in the war effort. Where, I questioned, would the country be without the women ambulance drivers, the female munitions workers? What would come from women’s war work, I hoped, was the recognition that they did indeed deserve every political and economic right and privilege afforded to men.
Mr. McClelland grew red in the face, his wife rang the bell for the maid to clear, even though Mr. Carmody was still eating. Harriet smiled at me sheepishly. She knew all too well what would follow. I was not to be invited back. Harriet was restricted from seeing me, on the basis of my “radical and inflammatory” ideas. My calls to her went unanswered. I wrote her letters that were returned unopened, though, I knew, Harriet had never seen them. For several weeks, we both endured this torment.
It was in sheer desperation one evening that Harriet arrived at my room, carrying her leather suitcase, the one her parents had given her when she left Saratoga. Her eyes were red and blotchy and she kept pulling a handkerchief out of her sleeve to blow her nose.
“My parents want me back in Saratoga,” she whimpered. “They say New York is bad for me, that it makes me despondent. But I am only so because I can’t see you!”
I found strength for both of us. I held her tenderly in my arms and calmed her as best I could. When she stopped crying, we sat quietly on the bed, her hand in mine so small and cold, and we discussed the only possible solution. That is how Harriet left home, and how we came to live together, first in Greenwich Village, and later on Eighty-fifth Street.
22
The sun was just coming up as I finished reading. I had read and reread the August 1930 installments hungrily and happily, content in and thrilled by the knowledge that Lucy and Harriet had been totally in love at the beginning. Her words brought the two of them off the page to me in the same way the photographs had. I was suddenly there with them in Saratoga, at the next table, watching the two shy women fall in love over chicken and roast beef. I had chosen the chicken also and was eating it in tiny, quiet bites, so conscious that the sound of my own chewing could drown out their hushed voices. At the moment Lucy whispered, “Write me something beautiful with it,” I swallowed so loudly I was sure they would turn to stare at me. But they were so absorbed with each other they never heard me, never saw me, in fact I think I must have only dreamt that I was there. Yet in the light of the new day, I had a curious taste in my mouth, like baked chicken.
I had not been up and around so early in a long time, yet I couldn’t fall back asleep. After the second installment in the journal, there was tucked a thin, yellowed envelope, containing half a dozen photographs. They were not of the Eighty-fifth Street apartment, which I had seen in the scrapbook, but of Harriet and Lucy in a much smaller place, which was labeled on the back of the photos as “Bank Street.” Probably, I reasoned, their first apartment together. The pictures showed them in a crowded parlor, with books lining the walls and floors and several overstuffed chairs circling a small tea table. The wallpaper was an old-fashioned and gaudy Edwardian print that clashed with the upholstery of the chairs. A heavy curtain hung on one wall, probably separating the parlor from the bedroom. But both of them looked out at me happily from the pictures, cramped but obviously in love.
Also in the envelope were several receipts from the early 1920s, showing income Lucy received from selling stories to magazines—not famous ones, but obscure names like The Listener and The Ladies’ Library. She was prolific, and the checks amounted to several thousand dollars. I wondered if they had been their ticket to a larger apartment.
I read on in the journal, but the story of Harriet and Lucy was abruptly broken off. What followed were heavily edited essays about the craft of writing. The journal seemed to be a catchall, not just for reminiscences, but for all sorts of ruminations. Needless to say, I found them less interesting than the breathtaking writing about Harriet.
So after a while, I called Catherine. She was still sound asleep, and she was too groggy to recognize my familiar “Hi.” I had to add quickly, “It’s Susan.”
“Hi, Susan,” she repeated, still asleep, though within seconds I could tell she had woken up and realized she had the receiver in her hand. “Oh, Susan,” she yawned in recognition. “What time is it?”
“Six twenty-nine,” I said, wondering what I was going to say next.
“Six twenty-nine,” she said after me. “Is something the matter?”
Something was the matter, wasn’t it? Why wasn’t she sleeping next to me? Why wasn’t her soft hair fanned out over the pillow, and where were her endearing sleep noises? What had happened to us? And most importantly, was there any way to stop it from continuing? Could we be equal partners and accept each other’s take on life without losing ourselves?
“I just read two parts of Lucy’s journal,” I said, in a burst of emotion. “She wrote them in 1930, maybe as a sort of autobiography, about how she and Harriet met and fell in love and began living together. There are pictures of them in their first apartment together. It all made me think of you, and I wanted to tell you.”
“Oh, Susan,” she said, and I could tell she was sincerely touched. “That’s very nice.”
“Do you remember when we met?” I asked. “How I fumbled around after a meeting, asking you out, and you said no?”
“But I apologized and said yes later,” Catherine elaborated. “I was a little intimidated by you. All those degrees. Obviously a different class of girl. And I was ashamed of liking someone in business school. Like it was morally wrong or something. But secretly, I thought it was great to be so at ease with numbers, when I never was. I was terrified of money.”
That was the first time Catherine had ever let on that I had impressed her as much as she had me. I suddenly felt flushed.
I couldn’t help myself; I had to go on now that we’d started. “I’m not sure what went wrong with us, but I’m willing to try to figure it out,” I blurted out. “I’d . . . do you think.., do you want to have a date this week? A real date? Maybe Wednesday?”
I could see her smile through the telephone wire. I could see her twisting her hair in thought, now totally awake, trying to decide what she should do with this crazy lover who talked to dead women and had become, in a few short months, a pathological liar. I could see her tottering on the brink of indecision, tempted yet knowing better. Finally, she crashed over the edge and landed, feet first, as always.
“Friday would be better for me,” she said simply.
“Then Friday it is,” I said, and we hung up soon after. It was the beginning of one of
the more hopeful days I’d had recently.
• • •
When the mail came that day at the shop, there was a letter from Mrs. Roger Timberlake. It was on heavy, light blue vellum paper with her name embossed in coordinating dark blue ink. She wrote in a small, precise hand:
Dear Miss Van Dine,
Your visit stirred many memories for me of my late husband. After you left, I went back through boxes I hadn’t touched since he passed away. I found in our attic the scrapbook I told you about, the one he kept with clippings of his Aunt Harriet. I have looked through it carefully, and I suspect it would be of great interest to you. I have a sincere distrust of the mail and am hesitant to let the book out of my sight. As you can guess, because my husband kept it as a boy, it has great sentimental value. If you would like to see it, please call me and perhaps we can arrange a time to meet on one of your next trips to Saratoga.
Sincerely yours,
Evelyn Timberlake (Mrs. Roger)
I was tempted to jump in the station wagon that day, but it was Tuttie’s day off and I was clearly supposed to make an appointment with Mrs. Timberlake in advance. The trip would have to wait, maybe as much as a week. But the existence of Roger Timberlake’s boyhood scrapbook buoyed me: the pieces were going to slip into place, and it remained to be seen what picture the finished puzzle would make.
• • •
“Tuttie,” I said on Friday afternoon, “I’m nervous as a kid before her first date.”
“Getting back together is hard, sweetie,” she said. “I did it once, with Leonard Rosenthal. We went together for a year or two, and I broke if off because I thought he was getting too serious, you know, like he was gonna propose. But I missed him a lot, so after a couple of months, we hitched up again.” Her voice trailed off, even though it seemed like there was more to tell.
“What happened?” I prompted.
“Oh, babycakes, you don’t want to know that,” she said, flushing a little, I thought. She was probably thinking her story wasn’t such a good idea after all.
“Sure I do,” I persisted.
“Well,” and she cleared her throat, “it only lasted a week. Maybe two, tops. But it was a swell time,” she added hastily. “Non-stop whoopie—if you know what I mean.” She winked conspiratorially, and I smiled in spite of the message of her story. “Not that it won’t last for you and that little dumpling of yours. You got something much more than me and old Lennie had.”
“Yeah?” I said, brightening. “What?”
“Chemistry,” she said. “Just the right kind. H20. CO2. You know, cupcake, the stuff that makes the world go ‘round.”
I was beaming, but more from my affection for Tuttie than from her words of encouragement. At that moment in time I considered myself truly lucky. I had known Margielove. I had been lovers with Catherine Synge. And I counted among my best friends Tuttie Posner.
Catherine insisted that I pick the spot, and I chose the White Horse Tavern in the Village, because it was the first place I thought of when I thought of romance. Not because of its decor or menu, because it really was just an old tavern with ponderous wooden tables and frosty mugs of beer. But I associated it with great literary figures, the giants of literature who had drunk themselves into a stupor there, like Dylan Thomas, whose favorite table is commemorated with a plaque. Catherine was amused at my choice and said she was hungry for a hamburger, so it was a good choice. She thought it appropriate that I’d selected a place haunted by literary ghosts.
We didn’t get Dylan Thomas’ table, but we had a nice table in the corner just the same. We ordered burgers and mugs of Bass Ale and sat nervously playing with the condiments on the table, both afraid of why we’d come together like this.
“Cath—”
“Sus—”
They came out at the same time, and we both laughed and tried again. Since the evening was my idea, Catherine deferred to me.
“This is hard,” I smiled, not sure if I meant the moment or the whole evening. The waitress plunked our beers down, and we had something else to distract us from talking. I took a long drink of beer and started again.
“I don’t know why this is so hard,” I said, weakly, and Catherine broke in to save me from my own ineptitude.
“I’ve missed you, Susan,” she said sadly. “And every day I ask myself why I miss you. You’re so weird and fucked up. You talk to dead women, and you’re convinced they talk to you. You’ve lied to me more than anyone ever has. You’re not especially political, and you’re privileged and over-educated. It’s not just sex either. I know it’s not just sex, because I’ve had great sex with other people. I just don’t know why, but I have this overwhelming desire to be with you. It’s like I’m compelled to, or something.”
Did she really say all that, or have I dreamt it? Did my greatest fantasy really come spilling out of her like that? Or was I the one who did the gushing? It hardly matters now, though I like this way of remembering it. The reason it doesn’t matter is that we ate and drank slowly, like people with all the time in the world. We talked about many things, especially how people in relationships become consumed with each other and how we needed to try to prevent that. How we had to find some way to accept each other’s world view. How I had to assert my own thoughts and feelings more. Like people who know each other very well, we let the pauses come naturally and we didn’t panic and rush to fill them in. Later, I went home with her. And later still, in the weeks that followed, we began our search for an apartment we could share.
• • •
“She was unfaithful, of course!” Elinor blurted out on Sunday to my direct question about why Lucy had been worried enough to trail Harriet upstate and across New England. It was what I had always known, from the time in Saratoga, when Harriet took me into her confidence. “But she’s faithful to me,” Harriet had said with a smirk of pride that made me both hate and adore her. Still, I was stunned to hear it from someone else, someone living, someone who couldn’t be brushed aside as the figment of an overactive imagination.
The truth is, I had painted an idealistic picture of Lucy and Harriet’s relationship from the first day I’d seen the scrapbook. It had seemed the height of romance, these lesbians with arms entwined in resort towns, on sand dunes, in the quiet of their parlor. With their two best friends, their gang, they made a quartet I’d envied. I wanted such a group. What did it all mean if The Gang was only together to please Lucy, if Harriet and Lucy were not the Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude Stein of the Upper West Side, if one of their closest friends disliked one and felt sorry for the other? I remembered what Lucy had told me the other night, and I approached the topic now, looking for some last way to salvage the beautiful picture I’d had, which was yellowing and curling at the corners. Elinor was rambling on, rattling off the names of Harriet’s many indiscretions.
“And Lucy,” she finished, “was too lovestruck to care.”
“And if she didn’t,” I asked, as politely as I could, “why did you?”
I didn’t mean it to sound so confrontational, but it did, even in my ears. I knew as soon as I said it that I’d gone too far. Catherine tried to mend the break.
“What Susan means is . . .” she started, but Elinor raised up on her high horse.
“Don’t you care when your friends are taken advantage of?” she said forcefully. “Don’t you ever feel protective of someone you care for? I’m telling you, Harriet was practically without ethics. She would have had my Sarah, if Sarah hadn’t had such a strong moral code!”
I touched something tender, I knew, a spot still raw sixty years later. And, though I wondered if she had ever tried to like Harriet, I sympathized with Elinor. I wouldn’t like it much if a friend of mine hit on Catherine.
Fleck cleared her throat loudly, and it seemed to be time to leave. It was apparent from the set of Elinor’s jaw that I’d angered her by questioning her loyalty and ethical code. And I had to admit to myself, I’d overstepped the bounds of good interviewing t
echniques.
“I guess,” Catherine said, as Fleck stood to show us out, “we’ll see you next week.” But even Catherine, the hopeful and tactful facilitator, couldn’t patch it up.
“I’m finished talking about Harriet Timberlake,” Elinor growled. “You needn’t come back.”
“But we still need to know . . .” I began, but she cut me off.
“You want something I can’t give you,” Elinor said. “I suggest you look for it elsewhere.”
About Lucy, I wanted to finish. What happened to Lucy?
23
The leaves had almost finished falling the day I drove to Saratoga to visit Evelyn Timberlake. I went in mid-week, early in the morning, with plans to return that evening. Tuttie was ill with a head cold, so I had had to close the shop for the day.
Mrs. Timberlake was ready for me. She had laid out a tempting breakfast of coffee and Danish pastries, and the scrapbook she had promised me rested invitingly next to me on the sofa. We ate first, as she described her search for the scrapbook. Since he had lived in this house all of his life, her husband Roger had never had occasion to prune his possessions, as other people do when they move from home to home. She had come across booties he had worn at one, hair he had had trimmed at four, teeth he had lost at six, valentines he had received at eight, exams he had taken at twelve. She had had to wade through his entire childhood to find the treasure I wanted to see.
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