“I can’t believe this,” I said, clutching it to me. It felt cold against my chest.
“Do you know about this?” she asked, lifting out some bundles of correspondence Lucy had received while she was abroad.
“Yes,” I said, “I think I do.” The air in the musty room had suddenly gotten lighter; there was a thin smell of something like fresh flowers.
“Well, then, maybe you can help with all of it,” she said, replacing the letters and dusting off her hands. “It’s not fair to Lucy to leave it here like this.” She smiled warmly, no longer tentative toward me. She must have known that I, too, had cared for Lucy. “Say,” she added, “want a beer?”
That was the beginning of our friendship. And the beginning of the end of my search.
Epilogue
Maybe I don’t need to tell you the rest. Somehow, it all seems anticlimactic. Everything that had happened in the last year had just been leading up to that moment in Sophia’s storage room, when I stood embracing that package and taking in the smell of Lucy. I didn’t have to look at the wrapped manuscript to know it was Lucy’s novel, the one she’d outlined and started to write about her and Harriet. Somehow, I just knew it. She didn’t want me to write it, she just wanted me to find it. Why hadn’t she published it? Time, maybe, or circumstance. Shyness, after all. Insecurity about its value or her talent. She probably wouldn’t have known about the lesbian publishing houses that would have killed each other for such a find. In death, she realized it had to see the light of day and not be tucked away at Barnard. And she knew Sophia needed some help.
The box held a lot of secrets, and Sophia, Catherine, Bea and I went through it together. I took some pictures of us doing it, for posterity. Copies of all the magazines that published her stories were there, rare, almost delicate issues from the early 1920s. Manuscripts of stories she wrote in the 1940s and 1950s were arranged neatly in envelopes. There were several volumes of her journal documenting her travels through Europe and Asia in the thirties. Lucy had heard Hitler speak in Berlin; she was in Vienna when the Anschluss occurred. She had a brief affair with a Jewish woman in Amsterdam, whom she never heard from again, though she wrote of trying to locate her after the war. Her life was full and rich, not one of despair over Harriet. Clearly, someone had to publish the journals in book format and to gather together a collection of the short fiction. It was enough to occupy me for some time into the future.
When we came across the volume of Lucy’s journal that revealed why she had lived out of touch with her family for so many years, Bea broke down. It hadn’t made sense to me that Lucy had written off her devoted and budding lesbian niece. But it had happened that Lucy returned to New York just after the war began and tried to get her papers, photographs, and journals back from her sister in Glens Falls. In a fit of homophobia, Edith told Lucy that she had destroyed everything. In fact, I remembered Letty King telling me that her mother had wanted to get rid of Lucy’s things, but that Bea had stopped her. A spiteful woman, Edith had never accepted her sister’s life. Her daughter, Letty, had apparently taken after her in that. Furious with Edith, Lucy broke off contact with her but tried to keep in touch with Bea. Her letters to her niece, however, came back in the mail, presumably Edith’s doing, but Lucy thought that Bea, too, had been turned against her. We found the letters in the box.
Bea held them to her chest and cried. She cried, I guessed, all the tears she had stored up for fifty years. She didn’t read them in front of us but took them home with her and never shared their contents. We never asked. It was, we all thought, an invasion of their relationship.
“She told me she never came back,” was all Bea ever said about the incident. “How could Mother lie to me like that?” I wondered if Edith had guessed that the niece was taking after the aunt.
Lucy had lived in New York all that time, writing her journals and stories and teaching English at a private girls’ school on the West Side. There was also, of course, the magnum opus about her life with Harriet. She kept up her friendship with Sarah Stern until Sarah’s death, and saw Elinor only sporadically after that, since in her later years, Lucy had severe arthritis, and didn’t get out much. She’d asked them both not to reveal her whereabouts to her family.
Lucy had given up her Eighty-fifth Street apartment when she left for Europe, and when she returned, she found a place close by at Eighty-third and Amsterdam. When her old apartment became vacant in the early 1940s, she moved back and lived there until her death, first alone, then with her companion, Martha. Their relationship, though lengthy, clearly didn’t have the fire of hers with Harriet. In describing Martha, she spoke of stability and strength and steadfastness. Was that what she wanted, I wondered, after the whirlwind of Harriet? Or could she not imagine trying to duplicate the sparks that had characterized their life together?
There were a few photographs of them together. Martha was a handsome woman, with an intelligent face, and unlike Harriet, she didn’t try to dominate the pictures. There was something in the way she looked at Lucy that told me Lucy was the love of her life. How much had she known about Harriet? In the box, there was, after all, a framed photograph of Harriet, one Lucy probably kept out somewhere. It was as Lucy must have liked to remember her—not posing flirtatiously or clowning for the camera, but looking elegantly beautiful and happy on the platform of a train station. Coming home.
Lucy’s writing continued into the early 1960s, and throughout, she remembered and made references to Harriet. Obviously, she had been as haunted as I had.
Of course, once I found Lucy’s novel, wrote a literary introduction to go with it, and acquired a publisher, I was no longer haunted. My own creative writing block cracked, and I started a novel about the group Heterodoxy. Catherine helped with the research. Oh, on occasion, when I sat writing at my desk on the third floor, I felt something in the room, a sudden chill, even though the windows were closed, or heard a door creaking when no one else was around. But I never saw Lucy again. Harriet, too, had disappeared after I unraveled the circumstances of her death. I missed them. Sometimes I sat in the shadows of dusk, waiting for them, staring at their pictures, but they were gone. Their faces in the photographs were flat now, one-dimensional.
Then, a few days ago, I was sitting in my office, marking the galley proofs of Lucy’s book and wondering which photograph we should use on the cover. I had the most likely candidates lined up in a row in front of me across the top of the desk, and I was able to narrow it down to my two favorites—one from the cliffs at Montauk, the other in front of the hotel at Saratoga. I was leaning toward the Montauk one, rather selfishly, because the Saratoga photo reminded me of my indiscretion with Harriet. I stared at the two for hours before I decided to leave the selection up to my friends. I would be seeing Bea for our weekly lunch the next day, and Tuttie had invited me to her apartment to meet Albert Rose, her new boyfriend. I would also run the pictures by Catherine and our dinner guests for the evening, Sophia, and her lover, Ana, who was as short as Sophia was tall, if you can imagine the pair of them.
After the four of us devoured the curried chicken Catherine made, I went upstairs to get the pictures. I was in a good mood, because I had had a few Indian beers, and we had been discussing a trip to Provincetown together. I was a little giddy at having a gang of my own. I practically ran up to the third floor. In fact, I tripped on the last step. Laughing at myself and out of breath, I switched on the light and went to my desk. And though no one had been in that room since I had left it four hours earlier, I could not find the Saratoga picture anywhere.
“Honey?” I heard Catherine call up the steps. “Suze, you okay up there?” She must have heard me stumble.
I took the Montauk picture and stared at it, and briefly, just briefly, I thought I felt the wind on the cliffs whip around my ankles. It took me by surprise, pushed me forward slightly, and I fell against my desk and back into the present. And there I was, standing in my office, alone, with a picture of four lesbians in my hand, a
nd the faintest smell of the ocean in the air.
Paula Martinac is the author of three novels, including the Lambda Literary Award-winning Out of Time and the Lammy-nominated Home Movies. She has also written three nonfiction books, half a dozen short plays, a full-length play and hundreds of articles. Her unproduced full-length screenplay, Foreign Affairs—about the relationship between journalist Dorothy Thompson and novelist Christa Winsloe—took second place in the POWER UP Screenplay Contest in 2004. After two decades in New York City, she now works as a journalist and nutrition educator in Pittsburgh, Pa., where she lives with her partner of 20 years. She is currently writing a memoir.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My thanks go to the following people for their help at various stages in the writing of this novel: the women of the Lesbian Herstory Archives in New York City, particularly Deb Edel, for helping me locate source material on lesbians in the 1920s and Judith Schwartz for her inspiring book, Radical Feminists of Heterodoxy: Greenwich Village, 1912–1940; Suzanne Seay, for her meticulous typing and retyping of the manuscript, for catching all those embarrassing inconsistencies, and for her encouragement and support; Maureen Brady for a thoughtful reading at a transitional stage; and Barbara Wilson and Faith Conlon of Seal Press for the time they took to help me shape this book. I am also grateful to the friends whose hospitality gave me a change of scene and made the revising process easier: Pete and Barbara Seay in Guilford, Connecticut, and Nancy Kraybill in Venice, California.
Copyright © 1990 by Paula Martinac
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