by May Sarton
“Oh yes, old friends turned up, of course. We did a roaring business.”
“You do seem to be in your element.”
“I am,” I say firmly. “I think Vicky would be pleased. After all, books were her passion.”
“The books she published anyway.”
“It’s just a marvelous place,” one of the girls says as she comes over to the table. “I didn’t know a lot of these books existed. May I sit down and have a cup of tea?”
“Of course. Your friends too.”
“Do take my seat,” Jonathan says, getting up. There are three girls and only four chairs. What else can he do?
“Just bring the desk chair over, then we can all sit,” I suggest.
Of course Jonathan’s presence makes the whole tea party a little stiff and wary, so much so that after everyone has settled in with a cup and a cookie, I find myself trying to explain him as he sits there rubbing Patapouf’s back. “Mr. Fremont is my financial adviser,” I say. “He is afraid this is a crazy thing to invest in, and has come to see what is going on.”
“Oh, we must all buy lots of books,” one girl says, “though we are dead broke, of course.” And the other two burst into laughter.
“But we are so happy that you have come,” says the solemn one of the three.
“And we want to help in any way we can,” the third chimes in.
What more can I ask? It has occurred to me before this occasion that the people I most want to reach will find buying even paperbacks expensive. Nevertheless it is an expansive moment and I am enjoying it and Jonathan’s air of quizzical curiosity.
“Aren’t there plenty of bookstores in Cambridge already?” he asks.
“Well, there’s the Grolier, you can browse there,” the solemn girl grants.
“But nobody really cares, you know. I mean, you can’t sit down in most bookstores.”
“And they don’t carry what we want. I walked in here and was positively dazzled. My God, all I could think of was ‘and the saints came marching in!’” That is the articulate one, the first one to speak.
“I don’t quite understand,” says Jonathan. “Who are the saints, then, so prevalent and accessible in this room?”
“Gertrude Stein, Adrienne Rich, Margaret Atwood, Susan Gubar …”
“Oh,” says Jonathan.
“We want to learn about ourselves. We want to find role models.”
“What are your names, by the way?”
Edna, Elizabeth, and Cynthia are their names. But now they are eager to look around in peace and do so while Jonathan helps me with the tea things.
“Good luck, Harriet,” he says and shakes my hand. “I’ll look in now and then.”
The atmosphere changes as soon as he has left. Edna, the articulate one, comes over to my desk and says, “He’s a creep.”
“Gross,” says Elizabeth.
“Oh, but harmless, I assure you. After all, this is rather wild and … Well, I inherited the money to do this and he is the executor of the will. It’s all very odd to him. Old women are not supposed to go on wild goose chases, especially with recently acquired money.” I suddenly begin to laugh at myself and the girls catch my mood and are laughing with me.
“You’re not old, are you? Why call yourself old?” Cynthia, the solemn one, inquires. She has several books of poems in her arms.
“Old enough to know better in Jonathan Fremont’s view, I guess.”
“It’s nearly five, we’ve got to run,” Elizabeth says, looking at her watch, and with a flutter they are on their way, the books of poetry left on my desk, and not a single sale made.
“We’ll be back!” is Edna’s last word.
“Thanks for the tea!” Elizabeth adds.
I am alone for a few minutes and a little at loose ends, but now Angelica comes in, bringing me flowers from her garden—so like her—while Patapouf emerges again barking her delight. “There’s my friend,” says Angelica.
“Sit down. Oh, I am glad to see you!”
“You are surviving?”
“A lot of life has already come and gone, Angelica. It is fascinating!” And I tell her about Martha, the painter, and about the old woman who came to sit down and who despised women who read Gothic novels, and that Jonathan turned up.
“Did anyone buy a book?” she asks, teasing me.
“Well, yes, Sylvia Townsend Warner went out with Martha. Oh dear, a whole afternoon’s sales, one book!” The balloon of excitement goes limp. “It looks as if I have an impecunious clientele so far. And that is going to be a problem.”
“I wouldn’t worry. It sounds to me as though word was going to get around, as though, dear Harriet, you have your finger on the pulse of a real need. And that, after all, is the important thing, isn’t it?”
She has come, she announces, to take me to her house for dinner after I have closed up, and bring Patapouf with me.
In the final hour several customers turn up and actually buy books, including a couple of young men, much to my astonishment. And by six I am tuckered out but too keyed up to relax, so I quite enjoy the fairly long drive to Chestnut Hill through the traffic. It becomes a way of resting, with Patapouf’s head on my knee. Driving has always been one of my ways of relaxing. When Vicky was alive I sometimes took off in the car by myself and called it playing hooky.
I pick up a bottle of Vouvray for Angelica and look forward to a peaceful evening’s talk with her. A nourishing friend in every way. How rare that is! And when you come right down to it aren’t friends what we need most, more even than lovers? Is Angelica such a rare friend because she has never been a lover? Never been obsessed by one person? Always managing to have a clear open space for anyone who needs it?
5
For some reason I am not able to define why Joan does not attract the confidences that pour in on me every afternoon. Perhaps shyness breeds shyness and her rather dour outlook on life may seem forbidding, especially to the very young. When I ask her what has happened that morning the answer is often “Nothing much. A few sales.” She needs my advice about reordering. How are we to decide what must be reordered and what should not be? I simply trust a hunch in that case. Joan exerts subtle pressure to try to develop my business sense. There she is an optimist.
Our routine is working well, however, and I wake up in the morning eager to start the day. When I walk Patapouf the neighbors begin to be aware of my existence and say hello. A frazzled old woman walks her corgi at the same time, around half-past seven, and we greet each other, the dogs straining at their leashes. I like the neighborhood because it’s such a mixture of people. At that time in the morning hard hats are off to work. There are more men than women on the street. The men congregate at a lunch counter which is jammed till eight or so and I wonder why they spend money on breakfast, such an easy meal, until it occurs to me that that counter is their club away from their wives and children. That kind of joint is what women often lack. Perhaps the bookstore around four can become that.
I find that the people I love best are those who come in to browse, the silent shy ones, who are hungry for books rather than for conversation. There are several whom I have already seen. Eventually perhaps we shall meet. But meanwhile I am busy at my desk and try to let them feel free, unpressured, to take it for granted that they are welcome.
Martha Blackstone has come back with a portfolio of strange imaginary landscapes—watercolors. I am simply not equipped to judge a work of art. I find them not exactly pleasing but interesting and original. She uses very somber colors, and towering distorted trees loom over black streams or are reflected in a still pond.
“What do you think?” she asks, for I am taking my time to look and try to see what she is after.
“They are strange,” I say, “a little nightmarish. I don’t know why.”
“I guess they are dreams,” she says. “I begin and then this landscape I have never seen takes over.”
“The trees are so ominous,” I say. “I am troubled by th
eir root system.” In two of the landscapes the roots are spread out under the earth but visible. “Why don’t you hang two or three on that wall? Let’s use the store as a gallery.” I want to do it, yet I am a little troubled that I do not really cotton to her work.
“If only we could see people like that, with the roots visible,” she says.
“I’m not sure I want to,” and I laugh.
“Do you really want to hang them?” she asks, frowning.
“Yes. In a way they are happenings. That is what I want for the store.” The landscapes are matted, not framed, but we agree to hang them first as they are. “What happens if someone wants to buy one?” I ask.
“That would be great. A hundred dollars apiece. Is that okay?”
The old woman who needs a place to sit has come in while the landscapes are spread out on the table. She eases herself into a chair with a sigh, her packages around her. “I guess I’m interrupting something,” she says. “Is it all right if I sit for a little while?”
“Of course.” Martha is packing up and says she will be back tomorrow with hangers.
“You never told me,” I say to the old woman, “what you like to read; not Gothic novels, as I remember.”
“Silly as all get-out. What I like to read is history, not made-up stories, but real things, how people lived in the olden days. It cheers me up,” she chuckles. “It’s a bad world, but it was worse in the sixteenth century, especially for women.” She squints at me through her glasses as though she is bringing me into focus. “I can’t afford to buy those books. Social Security leaves pretty little over, and my husband is sick, Parkinson’s.”
How I have misjudged her! “That’s hard.”
“It’s the medicine,” she confides. “That’s what leaves us broke every month.”
At this moment unfortunately the phone rings. “Excuse me,” I say, “this won’t take long.”
It is my old friend Amelie, and it is a shock. She is calling to ask if I know that Caroline is dying of cancer. “It is a strangely wonderful death,” Amelie says, “for she has no pain, knows it is incurable, and, how shall I say it? is simply seeing her friends one by one, lies with her old cat on her lap. Why I am calling is to ask you to make up a bundle of books she might like to have around, even if she can’t read for long at a time. I’ll pick them up tomorrow. Would you like to see her? I think she would be happy if you could drop by.”
“I’m in shock,” I answer. “Caroline seemed so well.”
“She is eighty, you know. No one lives forever.” It is so like Amelie to be quite matter-of-fact.
When I put the receiver down the old woman has left and I am sorry, for I had been going to offer to lend her a book.
I feel quite shaken. I had hoped that Caroline might come to the opening. Now I know why she didn’t. What would the world be like without her? So alive, so aware of other people … At least I can put together some books for her. It is difficult to decide what. Nothing to waste reading time, something with style. Well, of course, the collected essays of Virginia Woolf for one. Only the first volume is out, but it is just the thing. Freya Stark, I think, and go upstairs to find a small book of selected essays by her. I am so absorbed in this task that I hardly notice that the store has filled up during my absence.
The white-haired woman who had objected to the idea of a women’s bookstore is standing at my desk with a pile of books. “You are trusting,” she says. “I might have just absconded with these.”
“I’m sorry I kept you waiting.”
“No problem. Will you accept a check? I don’t carry cash any more. My purse has been stolen twice in the last year.”
“Good heavens! Of course I’ll accept a check. You live in the neighborhood, do you?”
“Not really. I live on Memorial Drive. Somerville is unknown territory.”
It is satisfactory to tuck a check for sixty dollars into the drawer and of course I look at her name, Marian Tuckerworth. “Thank you, Miss Tuckerworth.”
“Mrs.,” she corrects me. “My husband died last year. I confess I was quite fascinated by your opening, such a motley crew, and you yourself so unlikely.”
At this I laugh. “I suppose I am. I’m a newcomer to Somerville myself, as you no doubt guessed.”
“Then why here? How did it all happen? Or am I being disgracefully curious?”
What I sense in the penetrating way she looks at me and in something abrupt and defensive about her is that here is a person of primary intensity. That is a phrase of Vicky’s. She used it about women in a pejorative sense. Men don’t suffer from that affliction, she used to say.
“I suppose in a way I am a widow like you. I lost my friend and companion of many years, Victoria Chilton, last year and felt rather at loose ends until I thought of the bookstore. Then everything speeded up. I found this house. I want the store to seem like a home, to welcome the odd lonely person, to be a meeting place in a way.” Am I talking too much? But why not, after all? And I really want to know how she is dealing with being alone herself. “Let’s sit down,” I say. “It’s just about time to put the kettle on and take a break.”
But two of the four chairs are occupied by silent browsers so she sits on the end of my desk. “I really must be getting home.”
“Did you find it hard to be suddenly alone?” I ask.
“In some ways, but my husband died after a long illness, so in a way I chiefly felt relief. And now I am too busy trying to organize an association to relieve home caretakers; so often elderly women are slaves to a sick husband, helpless because a nursing home seems out of the question. Loyalty, you know, a sense of having to be responsible.”
“What a splendid thing to be doing!”
“Maybe, but it is at present chiefly endless paperwork to try to get funding. Some of it is rather like Hospice, I suppose. One has to depend on volunteers a lot, and it’s not easy to find them.”
“I must have a bulletin board,” I say at once. “Then you could advertise!”
“Where do you get all this energy?” She is smiling at me now, a warm smile illuminating her rather austere face.
“It’s such an adventure, you see. I never know who or what will turn up.”
We are interrupted now by a young girl who has picked out a book of Adrienne Rich’s poems, and, while I go back to the cash register to make change, Marian Tuckerworth vanishes with her heavy pile of books. Of all the people who have come to the store so far I have not liked anyone quite as well. Maybe because I feel we could connect. There appear to be no barriers.
It is time to put the kettle on and when I sit down at the table fifteen minutes later, my companions turn out to be the two nuns who had been so helpful on the opening day. They seem like old friends and tell me their names, Sister Mary Smith and Sister Christopher Baker. After I pour the tea there is a moment of silence.
“There’s nothing like tea, is there?” Mary says, drinking down half the cup in one swallow. “My mother couldn’t have managed without her cup of tea at five every morning, and then in the afternoon when Dad came home from the machine shop. They were Irish, newcomers you know. Tea at five with a boiled egg or a bit of ham made it feel like home.”
“Have you ever been in Ireland?”
“Well, I want to go.” She looks over at Christopher. “But as Chris knows we are pulled southwards these days. So I’ve never been to Dublin or Cork, but I know Managua and a few remote villages in El Salvador very well.”
“We are on leave after six rather grueling months working with prisoners in El Salvador,” Chris explains.
“Oh.” I am flooded with shame at my own ignorance. I ask myself, Whose prisoners?
“The prison camps are filled with rebels captured by Duarte’s soldiers. We bring in medicine and clothing,” says Christopher.
At this Mary suddenly laughs. “We improvise. Everything is needed there, so we can’t go wrong.”
“After six months we get two months at home. It takes a while to
get rested. They stuff us with vitamins and treat us altogether far too well.”
“What heroes you are!” I say. I feel quite awed.
“Oh no, the prisoners are the heroes.” Chris is fingering a small cross brightly painted with flowers. “See this. It’s carved out of a bone. An old man gave it to me. He had made it there in prison. Now we bring them paints when we can. They want color so badly. It is so deadly gray and brown in the shacks called prisons. They are starved for color as well as for food.”
As they talk their eyes are shining. Theirs is a chosen life. They are doing what they want to do. And it is beautiful to see, to share in for a moment over a cup of tea. There is something I am burning to ask, but don’t quite dare. Perhaps someday I shall if they come back.
We are joined at this moment by Sue Bagley, whom I recognize, luckily, and who accepts a cup of tea and sits down with us, gobbles a cookie, and peers at us with extreme interest through her thick glasses.
“Let me introduce Sister Mary and Sister Christopher—this is Sue Bagley.” I hate to have the talk about El Salvador interrupted, but it is a game of musical chairs and what can I do? “If I remember, you are a neighbor, Miss Bagley.”
“Right down the street in one of those dilapidated three-story apartment houses.”
I leave them to take money from two customers who are waiting at the register, sure that Chris and Mary will know how to talk with Miss Bagley, or rather, it turns out, listen to her, for she is voluble and is in the middle of an impassioned speech about how much she distrusts and even hates our present administration. Sentiments with which the sisters naturally are in perfect accord.
“Nuns,” Sue Bagley announces, “are the most radical women in America these days. It’s quite extraordinary. Did you know that?” she asks me as I sit down again. “Are you aware of that?”
“Oh dear, there is so much I don’t know,” and I cannot help laughing. “The bookstore is my higher education, I guess. But is what Miss Bagley says true?” I turn to Chris.
“There have been radical changes, certainly, since Pope John the Twenty-third opened the doors,” she answers smoothly. “When we were permitted to take off the habit and look less like—what did we look like?—medieval ghosts, things began to happen very fast.”