The Education of Harriet Hatfield

by May Sarton

  As the champagne cork pops I say, without thinking, “Pop goes the weasel!”

  “Hey, it’s Mumms, no weasel. Have a taste!” and he hands me one of the now old-fashioned wide champagne glasses I much prefer to the fashionable flutes around these days. For a second as we lift our glasses, I meet Andrew’s eyes, those very dark eyes, and we look rather than speak a toast.

  “Pure bliss,” I say, setting my glass down.

  “You know, you are looking extremely well, Harriet. Has anyone told you that?”

  “People don’t make personal remarks to the manager of a bookstore,” I say demurely, “but at sixty one comes into one’s face at last. I was, you have to admit, a rather plain person in the old days. Whereas you, Andrew, were always tantalizingly handsome and I envied you.”

  “And now I’m a seedy old man,” he says with sudden bitterness. “Sic transit …”

  “Nonsense. I still envy you that tall slim figure. Women must be crazy about you as they always were.” But of course that is the wrong thing to say, the habitual trite thing people in our society say without a thought.

  “Men no longer are,” he says, frowning and drinking half his glass down. “In the bars I’m treated like an old professor who is patted on the back and chivvied.”

  “Then why go to bars?”

  “Because that is where gay men meet sexual partners. Honestly, Harriet, you are an innocent old body, aren’t you?”

  How many people have called me innocent lately? It is getting to be a bore, and the tone this time is not charitable, “old body” indeed. “Can’t you meet men at your job? I mean, does it have to be bars? I’ll tell you one thing, Andrew, I am proud of having been part of a gay marriage, a marriage that lasted thirty years.”

  “But at what cost?” he needles.

  “Don’t put me on the defensive. That’s over. I’m leading a wholly different life.”

  “Exactly. After being in prison for thirty years you’re out in the real world.”

  “True.” I have to grant it.

  “We may be brother and sister, Harriet, but you have to realize that men are different from women. Thank God we can talk about it, but the gulf is there—when I can I pick up a young man for the night, or with luck, for a month or so, but it doesn’t last.”

  “Hasn’t AIDS changed that—that easy casual sex?”

  “Yes.” Andrew fills my glass and his and sits down opposite me, stretches his long legs out, and looks over at me having apparently dropped his aggressive stance.

  “It seems so wasteful,” I say. “I mean, to get involved for such a short time.”

  “Oh, but one is not involved,” he says quickly. “It’s the lure of the stranger, it’s the perpetual adventure.”

  “You miss then what a long-term marriage is all about and I can assure you that it is not primarily sexual.”

  “It sounds boring,” Andrew says. “You know all about each other. What is there to discover? What do you go on learning?”

  I do not have a quick answer to that question so I am rather relieved when Andrew says he had better get the Dover sole into the broiler. “I won’t be long, so just relax and look around.”

  I want to look at the books, a whole wall of books to the back ceiling, with an elegant English ladder with which to reach the top shelves. The books make a statement about the homosexual writer and artist. Gide is there in the beautiful Pléiade edition, Julian Green’s journal, E. M. Forster, of course, all of Virginia Woolf, Vita Sackville-West, W. H. Auden, Isherwood, Ackerley. When Andrew comes back I am up on the ladder in order to examine all of Proust, beautifully bound, and his biography, and have taken out, to glance at, a collection of Proust’s essays on art, in French.

  “So there you are,” he says, bringing in a plate and laying it on the table in the corner next to the kitchen. “What an agile sister I have!”

  “The ladder is wonderful and the way one can shift it along.”

  “Yes, I designed it myself. I like to rove around the library, as you can see.” He smiles up at me. “But now you must come down. Dover sole is on the table.”

  “My brother appears to live very well,” I say as I sit down to a blue linen cloth, matching napkins, elegant glasses on long thin stems. “You make me see what a lower-class existence I lead these days.”

  “Really? Do you feel déclassée, as it were? I am fascinated.” He is teasing, as I had been, but as he pours the Vouvray, which happens to be my favorite white wine, I am thinking about this.

  “What I have been discovering since I opened the store is that that whole world of Chestnut Hill, which resembles this elegant table, is something I have left for good.”

  “Why leave it?”

  “Because it feels limited finally. Or perhaps not quite real.”

  “This table is very real,” he says, teasing again. “Does reality have to be poor and ugly? What’s unreal about Dover sole and Vouvray?”

  “It’s delicious, Andrew. I’m a spoiled old creature, spoiled and awfully glad we can talk.”

  “Even though you bring out the worst in me?”

  “Do I? How so?”

  “The snob, I suppose. The slightly superior person, at least in his own eyes, who has a penchant for garage mechanics and sailors.”

  “I wonder why? My new friends Joe and Eddie come to my mind because Joe is a psychiatrist and upper class, I suppose, and Eddie is a garage mechanic. As I told you they have lived together for years and create a marvelous atmosphere. They are the ones who jog every morning and wipe off any obscenities people have written on the store windows.”

  “Very nice and clean. But you see I have no wish to harbor forever the men I pick up in bars.”

  I feel that Andrew is daring me, is asking for scorn or contempt, and why that is I cannot understand. His face looks pinched suddenly, and old. What I see in it is something close to despair. And here we are across the blue linen, the light shining on our glasses, but despair has joined us in the last few seconds, and for the first time I feel at a loss. Andrew has become a stranger with whom I cannot make contact. “Only connect,” but that is what he seems unable to do in his life and I, at the moment, seem unable to do in regard to him.

  “Forster’s great love, I think I read somewhere, was a policeman.”

  “Yes indeed, that is common knowledge.”

  Andrew, his eyes half closed, has become a turtle I think, but now he decides to break the spell. “I wonder what it would be like for me if my private life was exposed to public view as yours has just been—what it would do. Of course the first thing would be that I would lose my job, not exactly a hilarious matter. How did you feel when the thing exploded in your face, Harriet? You seem almost unbelievably unscathed, secure, glad even, to be who you are.” I don’t know how to answer this right away and he breaks my silence himself. “Please try to talk about it.”

  “The best thing about it, or next to best, is that it brought you over, that you wanted to tell me about yourself. Isn’t it rather wonderful to be sitting here like old friends?”

  “Yes,” he says, filling our glasses. “I’m amazed that you are here, that I am suddenly not alone, that there is family.” I see tears in his eyes. “But tell me now what the best thing about it is—granted that this is the next-best thing,” and he lifts his glass in a toast.

  “The best thing, I suppose, is the sense of freedom. And the way people have reacted. I was bowled over by the support, the way people came to the store, many who have become old customers by now, and treated me as a hero. Every homosexual these days feels in some way at risk. Maybe when an old lady comes out it makes them feel less isolated. I don’t know. What I do know is that I myself am in the clear. And I’m well aware that I am partly because I am not now associated with anyone. I don’t have to protect Vicky from malicious gossip, for example. For me it is good to be as old as I am, and alone.”

  “And your own employer, as well,” Andrew nods. “I can’t help envying you,
I must say.”

  “I live in a much wider circle than I have ever known. Oh Andrew, I’m almost ashamed of how good it feels—my life, I mean.”

  “Yet you are in some ways at risk yourself. That is what seems admirable and brave.”

  “Yes. I get anxious at night. But there is Patapouf, you know. She would bark.”

  “Do you really think those goons, as you call them, are going to leave you alone eventually?”

  “Joe, who is a black belt by the way, knocked one down the first time he and Eddie caught them writing on the windows.”

  “How satisfactory that must have been!”

  “Yes, for him. But I expect it created rage and someone will pay. I just have to put it out of my mind, and luckily that is easy, except at night, because I am awfully busy.”

  “And at night?”

  “I am dead tired. And I go to sleep more often than not almost at once.” I don’t really want to talk about fear, so it is my turn to change the subject. “I wish you were not so lonely, Andrew.”

  There is no answer to this. Andrew busies himself clearing the table and bringing on dessert, chocolate meringues with some sort of special raspberry ice cream. It is awfully good and I tell him so, and say no to coffee when he asks if I would like some. “If permitted I’ll smoke a cigarette when we move back to the library.”

  Andrew is pleased. “Still crazy, after all these years,” he sings. “It makes you more bearable. Otherwise you are a little too good to be true.”

  “Oh come on, Andrew.” I get up and we move back to the comfortable chairs. “Before I forget, we’ve got to make the store known in some way. I’m looking for a logo and someone who could design some really smart posters. I wonder if you might know someone. Maybe at your firm?”

  “Let me think about it. But how in hell can you advertise a bookstore for women and make it attractive?”

  “It is Hatfield House: A Bookstore for Women. What’s wrong with that?”

  “Nothing, I suppose,” but “everything” is clearly in his tone. “HHBW—maybe a design could be made around the initials. Why not let me have a try?”

  So we part with something to be created and that seems to me a good augury. Andrew insists on following me home in his car to be sure everything is all right. I am grateful because I rarely go out at night, partly because opening my door and going in alone is a little scary. But when Andrew waves goodbye and shoots off in his BMW, and I have taken Patapouf for a very short run, I sit down in the living room, a little amused to contrast its utilitarian look with Andrew’s elegance, but I do not feel happy about him.

  Patapouf comes and begs for her evening treat of a dog bone while I smoke a last cigarette. How easy it is to keep a dear dog happy, to know exactly what she wants, and how hard and complex the needs of a human being! On the surface Andrew is leading a pleasant enough life, if a rather self-indulgent one, but what emptiness and self-disgust there are just under the surface I can only imagine. When he smiled at me and teased me he was his old self and looked ten years younger than his fifty years, but the minute he was serious his face looked taut and unhappy. He is not, I decided, at home in himself. And I wonder why I am. Is it, I wonder, harder to come to terms with male homosexuality than female? And if so, why?

  But now I remember Joe and Eddie and what seems a very good life they lead together. Maybe it is easier to be an old gay woman than an old gay man. And why is that? Maybe because it doesn’t matter as much to a woman to become physically less attractive? Do women feel rejected by the young of their own sex in the same way? How am I really to know? It all comes down to Andrew’s having failed to make any lasting connection with a lover. He is floating along on the surface. I had Vicky all those years as my loving companion and dearest friend. And I realize that the last thing I want or need now at sixty is another such intimate relationship. What I have felt since I opened the store is a lot of admiration, more certainly than I deserve, and real affection on the part of the nuns, the young lesbians, the two friends who come on Saturdays, Eddie and Joe. How lucky I am!

  What makes me sad, I realize, once I’m in bed, is simply Andrew himself, gay or not. Living alone is not the easiest thing in the world, but doing it with grace is a matter of character, no doubt, not sexual preference. Angelica, for instance, comes to mind like a burst of sunlight. She manages to balance out solitude and even loneliness against a passionate interest in what is going on in the world. One may laugh a little at all the volunteer work, the committees, the endless meetings she attends, but her gray eyes widen when she talks about the homeless, or the need for planned parenthood, and she is vibrantly alive. She works much harder than many professionals do.

  It makes me wonder whether Andrew has not settled for a job that means security but after some years is no longer a challenge. He has all those marvelous books. Has he dreamed of being a writer himself? I see that I have a lot to learn about Andrew. At sixty I seem to be learning a lot, chiefly learning, in fact. Growing up! It may appear humorous to some people, people who tease me about my innocence, but it makes my life extremely interesting. What more can one ask at sixty?

  So I go to sleep finally, on a wave of, not exactly happiness—what then?—fulfillment of a rather special kind.

  14

  It seems fortuitous when Caroline’s nurse calls me this morning to say that if I can, this is the day to come and see Caroline briefly at around half-past ten. I have been so busy for the last ten days that I have hardly thought of Caroline and I am appalled, as though the dying are kept alive partly by the thoughts of others. Or death is eased by those thoughts. I am very relieved that I can see her once more, beloved woman that she is. I want to bring her flowers, something light and airy, that tiny yellow orchid on a long spray, if I can find them. The local florist is not very sophisticated, but I’ll go to Harvard Square. Strange how just thinking of Caroline makes time that has been clobbering me lately quiet down and I feel I am on the slow peaceful ebbing of Caroline’s tide. It’s a chilly dark day so we won’t be able to sit in the garden. Those days may be over for her, I am aware.

  The atmosphere, when the nurse comes to the door, is subdued. “You must stay less than a half-hour, Miss Hatfield. Doctor’s orders. I’ll take the flowers and put them in a vase for you,” she says.

  “Thanks, something small, Nurse. You can cut the stems.”

  Suddenly I feel panic stricken. I am opening death’s door as, according to my directions, I open a door on the second floor and there is Caroline in a big bed, sitting high up on pillows piled behind her. “Darling, I am glad to see you. I wanted so much to come out but didn’t quite dare.”

  “Thank you for the books.” Caroline looks wan, her eyes the only thing in her face that has not changed, yet they are circled in shadow. I am amazed that her voice is the same as ever, as though a voice could be like a heartbeat, what remains when the body itself is diminished, is fading away. “I liked Freya Stark,” she says, “maybe because I could read it a paragraph at a time—and because she deals with all the things I have been thinking about,” she stops a moment to catch her breath and then says, “except one.”

  I have been standing. Now I pull a chair up close to the bed. “And what is that one?”

  Caroline reaches out and just touches my hand gently where it lies on the counterpane as I lean forward. “Why women love women. Will you talk to me about this?”

  I am flustered. “The trouble is, Caroline, dear Caroline, that I have thought much too little about it!”

  At this she smiles. “Admirable. You have lived your life rather than thinking about it, but when someone sticks a label on you that sets you apart from most of the rest of us, isn’t it difficult to handle?”

  “Oh, you read that Globe interview.” The light is dawning.

  “Susan Whipple, who comes and reads to me, brought it along one day.”

  “What did she say?”

  Caroline smiles a mischievous smile. “You can imagine and I’m
not going to repeat.”

  “I am learning to get used to the label, Caroline, but of course most people I know can’t deal with it at all, and perhaps that is partly why I decided to open a bookstore as far from Chestnut Hill and all it represents as possible.”

  “Yet I am told that you are getting threatened in that new neighborhood. Your Chestnut Hill circle might not approve but they would not threaten.”

  “Somehow, maybe for Vicky’s sake, I don’t want polite evasions. I’d rather have a rock thrown at the window.”

  “I can’t help being anxious about you, Harriet.” She settles back on her pillows, a little out of breath. “I would like to manage to live till things down there are settled, till I know you are safe.”

  I feel a lump in my throat as I say, “They will never be settled, Caroline. That is the fact.”

  “You are brave, dear woman, very brave,” and she sighs.

  “You must think of me as happy and—if I say so myself—useful. All sorts of amazing things happen every day. After that Globe piece Andrew came for breakfast the next day to tell me that he is gay himself.”

  “Surely you knew that?”

  “We were never close. I suppose I didn’t think about it much one way or another.” I see Caroline look over at the clock on her bedside table. “I mustn’t tire you out.”

  “I do use up my little bubble of energy rather quickly,” she admits, “but I so want to go back to my question, the one you did not answer—why women love women.”

  I answer it first with a silence, then I ask, “Maybe you can answer it better. You have been in love with a woman.”

  “My guess, Harriet, is that a multitude of women have felt the attraction, the need, whatever it is, and cannot face it, so bury it and pretend it never happened.”

  “And they are the furies,” I say.