by May Sarton
“But aren’t you up against a rigid hierarchy just the same?” Sue Bagley is a little too aggressive, I decide. “Is that an indiscreet question?” She turns to me. “You look as though it were.” But before I can answer she proceeds, “I am awfully curious. Can’t help it. Have to use my mind somehow. Make discoveries, you know. This bookstore is a discovery.”
“Do you have a job?” I ask.
“Now that,” she says, “is an indiscreet question. Of course not. I was a public accountant, then I nursed my father till he died, then … well, it was too late. So I lead a rather placid life and am hungry for experiences like this.”
I feel a certain dread because it is clear that Sue Bagley will be coming in often. For the first time I realize what I am getting myself into, but that is because I do not really like her, whereas I felt drawn to the two nuns at once.
There has been so much coming and going this first week that there is hardly time to finish any of the many conversations made possible by these four comfortable chairs. Now I see that a voluble constant customer could become a problem. Am I to be chained to Sue Bagley’s aggressive questioning for life? I am in the middle of this reflection when her rather strident voice rises above the murmur in the room to ask, “For instance, you, Miss Hatfield. Whatever made you open a women’s bookstore at your age?”
I am not about to give this time, and I answer in my own circuitous fashion. “People do what they want to do, don’t they? I had always dreamed of doing this and last year it became possible—because of an inheritance.”
“You’re going to have a problem with all these lesbians trooping in,” Sue says, rather obviously referring to a couple of women, not young this time, in pant suits, who are eagerly looking over what I think of as “my table.” Have they heard? The elder of the two, with short-cut gray hair and wearing a bow tie, looks up. So I get up in case they have, go over to them, and introduce myself.
“She doesn’t know what she’s getting into,” I hear Sue Bagley whispering loudly.
“She knows,” says Chris. “And now I’m afraid we have to be off. Nice to meet you.”
Do I dare? After the two women congratulate me on the choice of books and introduce themselves as Alice and Patience, I suggest they come over and sit down and have a cup of tea. Sue Bagley, observing this, has evidently decided to follow the nuns out and waves a goodbye to me at the door.
“Just about enough for two cups.” I empty the teapot.
“Thirty years ago,” says Patience, the younger of the two, her red hair not yet tinged with gray, “we used to hang out at Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare and Company in Paris. There has been nothing like it, around here anyway, but you do create an atmosphere …”
“In spite of that insulting woman who just left,” says Alice. “I heard her warn you.”
“Oh well, she’s lonely and eccentric. I pay no attention.” But I want to answer Patience’s kind remark. “What do you mean about ‘an atmosphere’?”
“Oh, I don’t know. How does one define an atmosphere?” Patience looks over at Alice, inviting her to define it, I suppose.
“Intelligent, welcoming, and not commercial.” Alice is clear-cut. “You won’t make money, I’m afraid, but you’ll make friends.”
“Good. That is what I hope. Already in this first week so many strangers have dropped in and stayed to talk, I am amazed.”
“But what do you do when someone drops in and stays and stays?” Patience asks.
It makes me laugh because I have been asking myself that very question. “God knows. I suppose one can pretend to be very busy filling out nonexistent orders.”
“It must be fun,” Alice says. “You look as though it is.”
“I’m almost afraid of everything going too well,” I answer. I feel these two are in tune with me and I am enjoying this rapport. “What is lurking in the background that will erupt later on?”
“Homophobia,” says Alice. “You just had a taste of that when we came in.”
“Oh well,” I shrug, “who cares?”
They exchange a look and then Patience says, “Maybe you are not involved, immune as it were.”
“Involved? Immune?” I am taken by surprise. Why not be frank? “I lived for thirty years with a woman you may have heard of, the publisher Victoria Chilton.”
“Yes, of course. A distinguished imprint,” Alice reacts at once.
“She died last year and I inherited a small fortune. So here I am!”
“I suppose money does give one a kind of immunity,” Alice muses.
“We simply lived our lives in Chestnut Hill and took ourselves for granted.” I am now on the defensive but do not understand why. “It was our life and we did not feel connected to other women couples or even know many.”
“Didn’t you ever meet slurs or raised eyebrows or something like that?” Patience asks.
“I’m not aware that we did,” I answer. “Tell me something about you. Did you live in Paris long?” They have to be older than they look—at least seventy to have been in Paris before 1940.
“Patience was studying at the Sorbonne and I was working at the Bibliothèque Nationale and the Cluny on my doctorate. That is where we met.”
“In front of the lady and the unicorn tapestries,” Patience says, smiling with the happy memory of it.
“We ended up living in a small town in Ohio where I was teaching medieval history,” Alice says.
“But you live here in New England now …” I am sewing it all together like a tapestry in my mind.
“Yes, I’m retired and Patience teaches at the Winsor School in the French department.”
“Oh.” I sense that we are on the border of some revelation, but once more a crucial conversation is interrupted while I add up several sales and greet two or three newcomers. Sometimes the business of being a bookseller provides me with an escape from a long-winded, lonely person like Bagley, but sometimes it is frustrating, and I hope Patience and Alice will come back.
For the moment I have other things on my mind. I invited Joan to have supper with me in my apartment upstairs and it is about time to rescue Patapouf and close up for the day. I had left her upstairs as she seemed to long to be left alone and to sleep, the dear old thing. By now, however, she will be feeling restless, so I lock up a little early for once.
We go out into the autumn dusk, walking together among all the people coming home from work or out to shop for their suppers, and I am happy to stop whenever Patapouf wants to for her endless sniffing of trees and hedges, for then I can stand and drink in the light, especially as the setting sun lights up a beech tree turning it a startling gold. At that moment I miss Chestnut Hill badly, our garden and our beautiful trees. But I remind myself that I have exchanged all that beauty for the human scene around me, for the friendliness of a city neighborhood where people do not shut other people out with high gates and fences. There are compensations.
“Will she bite if I pat her head?” a very dirty little boy asks me. Patapouf is wagging her tail very hard. I have been in a reverie and have not noticed the boy or his friend.
“First let her sniff your hand,” I suggest, “then she’ll know you are a friend.” And pretty soon he is kneeling down and patting her head quite gently while Patapouf wags her tail. The other little boy meanwhile has decided to pat her back but does not know quite how.
“Patting is not hitting,” I suggest. So he stops and gives me a disgusted frown.
“Come on Peter, this is boring,” he says, and off they go, Peter looking back once to wave goodbye.
How can Martha not want a child, I ask myself. I have been thinking quite a lot about her and wonder when she will come back, and whether anyone will buy a painting.
Now it is time to hurry home and put the meat loaf in the oven. I look forward to a talk with Joan. She will be my first guest for a meal. Vicky and I had a cook, Emma, who mothered us and spoiled us. Cooking, too, is a new exercise for me. I have squash, the frozen kind, m
elting in the double boiler and shall add sour cream and brown sugar when it has melted. But as I set the table in a corner of the living room, I feel suddenly tired. Joan can open the wine, I decide. I made chocolate mousse yesterday, so I can sit down for five minutes, and I do, feeling the tension flow out of me as I stroke Patapouf’s silky ears.
Joan sits by the fire, which she has lit for me, drinking her martini, and I sit opposite with my scotch. I realize how much I have wanted someone to talk with, someone I know and who is part of the enterprise.
“Do you get awfully tired?” I ask. “Today suddenly I feel done in.”
“Actually, no. I find it fun,” she says.
“So many people, so many lives.”
“That’s your side. I keep busy at the register.”
“How are we going to find a Saturday person?”
“Maybe someone will turn up. I don’t mind doing that for a while, though.”
“Really? But you don’t want the store to eat up your life.”
“I don’t have a life.”
“What did you do before?”
“Brooded.”
“I expect your friends asked you over for dinner, knowing you must be at loose ends.”
At this Joan shakes her head, implying that I am a little crazy. “My friends were our friends, you see.”
“I don’t understand.”
“A divorced woman, Harriet, is not a social asset.”
I must look bewildered, as bewildered as I feel. It just seems to me unbelievable that friends would drop a friend who is suddenly single.
“Couples invite other couples … I suppose one becomes a threat.”
It does occur to me now that some of our friends, Vicky’s and mine, have not been very attentive since her death. But that, I decide, is because she was the attraction, not I. “Well,” I lift my glass, “here’s to a new life for you, too.”
“I am not a people person like you,” Joan says thoughtfully, “but I enjoy working here.”
“We make a good team.”
“I’m glad you think so.”
“The only trouble is I feel I’m on a roller coaster—and way behind on reading all I should be reading. You know, Joan, the women who come in here know so much more than I do about feminism. They ask for books I have never heard of!”
“You don’t have to cater to everyone’s likes and dislikes.”
“I’m humiliated by my ignorance,” I say, as the timer rings to tell me it is time to take out the meat loaf and doctor the squash.
Joan follows me into the kitchen and opens the wine for me, a Chateau Neuf du Pape of which she appears to approve. “Has it occurred to you that you are going to be inundated with lesbian women, by the way?”
“How do you know they’re lesbians?” But it is true that Alice and Patience had seemed to me obviously a couple. And I wonder why.
“I know by the books they buy,” Joan answers.
“But I don’t like this word ‘they’ as though lesbians were some breed apart from other human beings.”
“I’m sorry,” Joan says quickly. She is blushing. “I didn’t think.”
“I don’t think of myself as labeled and stuck in a closet as someone outside the pale, you see.” I feel quite hot, not with shame, but with my own blundering unconsciousness.
“You do not label yourself so no one labels you,” says Joan.
“Someone who was in the shop today said money was a protection.” I stop to think about this. Joan can take silence. That is one reason I feel at home with her.
“Good meat loaf,” she says.
“Thanks.” But I am upset and cannot come to terms yet with why that is. Maybe Joan’s blush was because she had forgotten that I was one of the “they” we were discussing. Maybe I am upset by the idea that I have been sheltered and still am by Vicky’s money. Or maybe by Bagley’s obscene warning. Yes, it all ties together suddenly.
“Joan, when I dreamed up this bookstore I dreamed of it as a nourishing place where women of all kinds could come. It never occurred to me that the women were bound to be feminists, and some of them lesbians.” And suddenly I laugh. “The obvious never occurred to me. That is the joke.”
Joan smiles and lifts her glass. “Astonishing woman,” she says.
“I’m not even a feminist, I suppose. Not a militant one anyway. So here I am, the founder of a club which I don’t belong to myself.”
“Hoist on your own petard,” and Joan laughs now, an affectionate laugh.
“So what?” I ask her and myself. “I have avoided commitment for six decades of my life, but I’m in for it now, aren’t I?”
“I guess you are,” she says soberly.
“We’ll ponder this dilemma, if it is one, over chocolate mousse. It was Vicky’s favorite.”
Over coffee we talk about the shop from the point of view of business. Only the paperbacks are selling in any quantity. Who can afford twenty bucks for a novel? We are losing money in part because of reordering. For each of us this shop talk is a rest. And after supper Joan offers to go with me for Patapouf’s evening walk. I accept gladly. In the daytime the neighborhood is friendly and peaceful but after dark I sometimes feel a little afraid.
“I love looking at the lighted windows, don’t you?” All through the neighborhood top floors of houses seem to be rented to students, or so I imagine, as I look up and wonder what they are studying.
“I suppose so. I confess I am nervous,” says Joan.
“I’m nervous sometimes, but it is exciting, too. A whole new world after dark—a metamorphosis.”
Joan has been thinking, meanwhile, about the shop and before we part she suggests that I try to reach my Chestnut Hill friends who would, after all, buy twenty-dollar novels.
“Well, they know where I am,” I say. “Not many came to the opening.”
“Your friend Miss Lamb has bought about two hundred dollars’ worth, you know.”
“She’s a real friend,” I say. “The others have dropped me, more or less. After all, I have literally moved out. Vicky was the drawing card.”
“And it’s a long way to go.”
When I have washed the dishes I go to bed and lie awake a long time, watching the electric clock jerk from minute to minute. Bleeding time it looks like. I feel confused about myself and my life for the first time since Vicky died. I wish she were here beside me and I could ask her advice. Now whom can I ask? I have got myself into a job where I do not choose the people I see or talk with. They choose me. In the adventure of the first week I am far too involved to realize what that means. What I do realize is that to those who wander in I come through as friendly, someone to whom they want to tell their stories. Impersonal as I am, not involved as a family is, or even as friends are, I suppose it is quite natural that I have become such a target—and of course I am in most cases old enough to be their mother or even grandmother. Who is it who teased me about becoming an amateur psychologist? That certainly put the fear of God into me!
Yet a great deal in these first days has been illuminating and valuable, and whatever Joan may think, the confiding has not been chiefly by lesbians. No, I comfort myself. The store has brought in a wide range of women and a few of them, no doubt, will become friends as time goes on. Life itself has a way of sorting things out.
And finally I sleep with nothing solved. How can it be? But now I have a better sense of where things stand, less confusion and more hope.
6
It has been agreed that Caroline would like me to come at eleven this morning. I set out with a bag of five carefully chosen books, including Georgia O’Keeffe to look at, hoping one or the other will be the right one. I have not spoken with Caroline herself, so I know nothing yet about her state, but have promised the nurse to stay no longer than a half-hour.
There she is, on a chaise in the garden under a parasol, smiling and waving. Dressed in a flowery wrapper, covered by a white silk Chinese shawl, she is lying beside a small border of lilies an
d late roses, radiant in the autumn light. It all looks like an Impressionist painting, and I tell her so.
“A flowering moment of glory,” she says. “Friends have been absolutely angelic about gardening for me.” She has sat up to be kissed and to welcome me, but now she lies back on the pillows and I see that she has lost weight and looks wan, dark circles round her gray eyes, although they are as luminous as ever. “I hope I live long enough to see the gentians flower. I planted them last autumn.”
“Dear Caroline, let us hope so.”
She smiles at me then. “No one tells me how long I have. Perhaps they don’t know. But of course Peter has been wonderful and assures me there will be no pain.”
“Lucky you, to have a surgeon for a son!” I have never liked Peter but it is good to know he is very much on the job.
“A perfect dear.” She has turned away. “But, Harriet, you understand this. My real comfort is the crits, those two old cats who purr at the foot of my bed through the rather tedious nights. How awful it would be to die away from home.” And then with a sudden mischievous smile she adds, “We need fur.”
There is a pause now. I feel she has come and gone, energy flowing back after a moment of ebbing and I am happy to sit beside her in perfect peace, resisting the impulse to hold her hand.
“Dying is interesting,” she says now, “for me so far a long farewell celebration of some sort. So many dear friends who come to tell me they love me. So I feel,” and she smiles again, “it really must not go on too long!”
“Everyone feels privileged to have known you.”
“Nonsense. Why, for heaven’s sake?”
“I see yours as an exemplary life.” For some reason the whole atmosphere permits this sort of statement, which I have not made before, but see clearly, as pale gold leaves fall one by one. “You manage to hold so much life in a single cup: helping Winston, bringing up the boys, gardening, giving wonderful dinner parties, and—what so few people know—working full time as a psychiatric social worker. How did you manage it all? Vicky always said you were incomparable, far too good to be a role model, as they say these days, because who else could have done what you did with such warmth and grace?”