The Education of Harriet Hatfield

by May Sarton

  “It’s hard in El Salvador, but,” Chris hesitates, “how can I say it? The people we work with anyway are so moving, they have so little, but they sing all the time, even in the jails they sing, and they hope. How can they hope? I sometimes don’t know. After Cardinal Romero was murdered the hope flickered for a time. We saw it flickering, and very nearly flicker out.”

  Their faces are so serene and so alive that for a moment I envy them.

  “But,” Mary intervenes, looking at her watch, “we want to know about you. Have there been any more incidents?”

  “No, as a matter of fact. And my lawyer tells me insurance will pay for the wood. But I am in suspense for I can’t believe whoever they are will be satisfied with stealing wood.”

  “I know,” Chris says, “that is why we hate to leave.”

  “I’m going to miss you. You have been a wonderful support from that first day of the opening when Chris had the wit to take the guest book around and get it signed.” This makes them smile. “And,” I add, “in a way I envy you. You know you are going to be useful. You go where extreme need exists.”

  “Yes, but we can do so very little when you come right down to it. It is often terribly frustrating,” Mary says. “Whereas you are in the front line right here. You don’t have to go to El Salvador to know you are needed.”

  “Can you believe this bookstore is needed, needed enough to justify my selfish desire to own it?” I ask. “For goodness’ sake!”

  “For goodness’ sake, yes,” Chris says, half laughing. “In the times we’ve dropped by we have seen a lot happening—that young painter, for instance, and that fine woman who is setting up a caretakers’ organization. They all gravitate here and meet here, meet each other.”

  “And,” Mary says, “you are a haven for the frightened gay people, the women full of guilt and dismay because they love a woman. We have seen that, too.”

  “You have seen a lot with your bright eyes. I still have my doubts. One of my best friends has more or less withdrawn since that newspaper article.” It would hurt to say Angelica’s name, and I do not. Now I ask what I have wanted to ask for weeks. I turn to Chris, the elder, “Do you really believe it is all right for a woman to love a woman?” Is it a mistake to ask it? I hardly dare look at either of them.

  “We do believe it is all right,” Chris says and adds with a rueful smile, “although doctrine is adamant on this subject.”

  “How do you reconcile yourselves with that?”

  At this Mary laughs. “We don’t.”

  “The Church is a patriarchy, after all,” Chris says, “and so has to be wrong about some things.”

  “Such as women priests.”

  “Of course.” She is thoughtful, not smiling now, and takes a last sip of her sherry before setting the glass down and saying, “Oh dear, I wish we could talk on, but we have to get going. We leave very early in the morning. Only,” she changes her mind and decides to speak out to me and I am grateful, “in a way, homophobia seems rather like the fear of communism. Both are rooted in pathological distortions of reality. It seems only natural that an evil dictatorship like that of Somoza should be followed by a shift to the extreme left and if we had supported that shift maybe they would not have appealed to Russia for help.”

  “I see that, but, Chris, the gay world is something else. They are not going to change radically, are they? But why is the fear pathological? I wish I understood.”

  “Because,” Chris says quietly, “it is a fact that one-tenth of all creatures from the worm up are homosexual. God created the world as it is. Did He not know what He was doing?”

  “Dear heart,” Mary says, tugging at Chris’s sleeve, “we have to go.”

  There is just time for a warm hug from each of them and they run down the stairs.

  I live these days in a state of perpetual astonishment and the last few minutes have been astonishing. I suddenly remember something that Ramsey, the Archbishop of Canterbury, said years and years ago and that I copied out. It was: “It is a mistake to believe that God is chiefly concerned with religion.” It makes me smile with pleasure now as it did then and while I get my supper together I feel happy and relieved.

  It is the right end to this good day when the phone rings just before I go to bed and it is Angelica’s voice I hear: “When are you coming over for supper, Harriet?”

  “I began to think you were shutting me out.”

  “I’ve been frightfully busy, as a matter of fact. We have to get a new director for the Cambridge settlement house and there have been a lot of interviews.” After a brief silence when I think we might be cut off, she says, “I was troubled, I admit. But we are friends for life, aren’t we? I don’t shut friends out.”

  “Neither do I, even when I am chastised for being myself.” I can’t help saying it but wish I had not.

  “Maybe friendship has to accept the unacceptable sometimes. Do you agree? I’m an old-fashioned critter, Harriet, and you seem to be way off somewhere in a new age.”

  I have noticed before that sometimes it is possible to say things on the telephone one would not say face-to-face. “I wish that were true, but I can’t see much progress as far as tolerance goes. The new age remains totally old-fashioned about some things—blacks, for instance, and gays. Being in a minority sets one up for persecution of one sort or another.”

  “That is rather extreme.”

  “No doubt it is. But let’s talk, Angelica. How about if I bring Patapouf over tomorrow night?”

  “Splendid.”

  “I’ll bring a bottle of Vouvray.”

  17

  I woke at five this morning, in a state of extreme anxiety, of tension I could not control, so it is no surprise when the phone rings at eight and it is Peter, Caroline’s son, to tell me that she died in the night, peacefully in her sleep. He and his brother Alan had been with her earlier in the evening and she seemed extremely tired, so they had tiptoed out before nine, and were called at midnight by the night nurse. Peter is quite calm and voluble, and he agrees with me that she has had a wonderful death.

  “And that is surely partly due to having a doctor for a son.”

  “Yes, I could monitor pain. She suffered very little except for shortness of breath. We couldn’t do very much about that.”

  “When is the funeral?”

  “At two tomorrow afternoon in Appleton Chapel. There will be only music by her wish,” and he adds, “Of course we hope you will come back to the house afterwards—just family and the dearest friends.”

  “Thanks, Peter.” I put the receiver down and stand here by the table for a long minute. One is never prepared, is one? I feel as though the whole geography of the island on which I live has been changed.

  I arrange with Joan to change shifts with her tomorrow. Now there is nothing to do but go on living, but as I drink a cup of coffee, make my bed, tidy up, get dressed, and take Patapouf out for a short walk, I keep asking myself questions. Why was Caroline so precious? so rare? I have no other friend like her, none as admired, as cherished for what she was. And that, I tell myself, is partly because she was so open to life, never judgmental, and hugely amused by some things that might shock most women. She was an observing participant, and maybe that is rare: to be both involved as she surely was and also detached. And where has she gone? so peacefully in her sleep?

  The last time I saw her before her illness was at Vicky’s funeral and it all comes back to me, the strange inappropriate yet supportive bustle immediately after a death. Caroline brought three dozen madeleines. The house was filled with formal arrangements of flowers so it did not feel like our house at all and I wandered in it, suddenly a stranger, not knowing what to do, receiving endless sympathy and not myself able to shed a tear. I felt guilty because I enjoyed the madeleines so much. The only person remaining in Vicky’s family was an ancient aunt whom I hardly knew, whom we called on about twice a year in her vast Beacon Street house filled with bad nineteenth-century paintings. She seemed
as lost as I was that day and I corralled Andrew and Fred into taking her under their wing and seeing she was introduced to anyone they knew. But my family had not been close to Vicky—my parents were also dead by then—so the hundred or more people who showed up after the funeral came out of respect for Vicky as publisher: other publishers, agents, authors, but hardly an intimate among them, except for Angelica. I felt abandoned, Vicky’s life finished, and I left dangling with no life of my own to take refuge in. It did not help that Patapouf, not used to such large numbers of people invading her territory, barked almost without ceasing, and even though she was tied up outside it was irritating.

  At that point I was near to tears, not of grief, but of exhaustion and nervous tension in that busy scene which did not really concern me. That was when Caroline caught my desperation and whisked me off to a corner of the library where we sat down, and I managed to drink a cup of tea and devour a madeleine.

  “It’s been so sudden, Harriet, hasn’t it? No time to get used to Vicky’s dying. I do feel for you.”

  Vicky died of a massive heart attack in the ambulance on the way to the hospital. As I remember it today I have prickles up and down my legs and arms. “I can’t even cry,” I had said. “I’m just dangling somewhere up in the air. I can’t seem to land.”

  “People keep saying to me what a wonderful way to go.” Caroline had reached over and taken my hand. I still remember the warmth of that hand clasp and how it somehow brought me back to reality. “But,” she went on, “in a way it is to be deprived of one’s death, of experiencing it, if you will. I myself would like to have time to say goodbye.”

  “Vicky hated saying goodbye, you know. I think for her it was best. What am I going to do, Caroline?” and it was not grief but terror that possessed me at that moment, holding Caroline’s hand like a drowning person. “This huge house, servants … I can’t maintain it of course. My own income is minimal. Where shall I go? What shall I do?”

  “You’ll find out, darling Harriet. After a while you’ll know what it is you really want to be and do. But for now you must try to be patient with your inner self, not make quick decisions, let life do it. Life is rather good at filling up the gaps, as I discovered when Winston died.”

  “But you had the boys.”

  “Yes, and very little money to bring them up on. So, because I had to earn, I got into a job I really love, social work, of all things! It never would have occurred to me that I could be good at that, and love it. It has changed my life in a radical way.”

  “How?”

  “It balances off the social side of me. It makes me feel human and useful. Now when I give a dinner party for Mrs. Elliot and Robert Coles and the Marshalls I feel I have earned it.”

  We were interrupted by Andrew, who suggested I had better come into the drawing room and say goodbye to the aunt, who was being helped into her coat. But the moment with Caroline had saved me from drowning and I shall never forget it.

  The aunt, on the other hand, kissed me coldly on the cheek and said, “I always thought Vicky would kill herself with that publishing business. She worked much too hard,” and she had looked at me with a penetrating glare, as though I were somehow responsible.

  I had wanted to say, “It’s not my fault.” Instead I had murmured something polite. “She loved her life. She had what she wanted, after all.”

  “And paid a high price for it.”

  “As people usually do for a great life like hers.” And then Andrew had come to my rescue.

  I have not felt close to my brothers but I have to admit that they were an enormous help that day—an interminable day which ended by Mary bringing me supper in bed.

  Here I have been wandering off into the past and it is high time I pull myself together. Caroline was right that life would fill the gap. I could not have imagined how right at the time, nor what a sea change I have been experiencing, what a different person I have become to that one who wandered a big house in total panic and who later said goodbye to a garden with tears pouring down her cheeks as she picked a sprig of mint, of lavender and lemon verbena, and crushed them in her hands. Leaving the garden had felt like a little death. How could I know what a rich adventurous life I would find, or what I would become?

  It is strange how close I feel to Caroline, as though she were at my side or somewhere very near. And I think she will always be there. Who was it who said to me long ago, “the dead help the living”?

  Late this afternoon I am downstairs in the store, when Martha, whom I have not seen for quite a while, comes in. What’s wrong now, I ask myself, and not altogether kindly, because I’m in the midst of writing an ad for the Cambridge Chronicle. “Well, hello!” I say, not getting up from my desk. “How are things? Haven’t seen you for ages.”

  She sits down and throws her large black hat on the table. She looks pale but not hurt at least, and maybe I am imagining that something must be wrong. “Are you busy?” she asks, standing now at one of the book tables and picking up books at random. One turns out to be absorbing and she sits down to read. I go back to work, making it clear, I hope, that I am busy. “I have something to tell you when you can spare a moment. No hurry. I’ll just read.”

  But in a moment someone else will push open the door and make it harder to talk, so I get up and join her at the table. “So what’s on your mind?”

  “I’m pregnant.” She says it in a small cold voice.

  For a second I really do not know what to say or how to react. But of course Joe is the answer. “Have you talked with Joe about this?”

  “What can he do about it?”

  “What can I?” I say a little sharply.

  “You always seem to be the source of wisdom to me,” she says.

  “This time I’m the source of mere astonishment. I gather you are not happy to be having a baby.”

  “You know I don’t want one,” she says quite crossly. “I told you when I first came in here that David and I were at loggerheads, that he wants a child and I don’t.”

  “That was theoretical, Martha. You could decide not to.”

  “Apparently I couldn’t. We use contraceptives of course. So why did this have to happen?”

  “Does David know?”

  “No.” I take this in and wait for what she might have to say. “I can have an abortion and he will never know.”

  Bravado? Was she really considering that? I remember all I have read lately in my explorations of feminist philosophy. Women are too often betrayed by their bodies. But Martha took precautions and still she is caught. What can I say? “Theoretically an abortion makes sense, but actually does it? Inside yourself does it?”

  “How can I tell? All I know is that I have work to do and if I have a baby I’ll be caught for years.” She sounds definite and hard.

  “If you have an abortion you think you won’t be?”

  “Hundreds of women have abortions, Harriet. You are behind the times.”

  “Yes, I guess I am. All this is new to me. I have never had to face such a decision.”

  “There are advantages to being a lesbian,” says Martha.

  “No doubt there are.” I am not going to be drawn into an argument. “Also I am over sixty, so the whole idea is outside my ken.”

  “I came to ask you to lend me the money to do it.”

  Now I am staggered. I feel a little as though someone had asked me for money to buy cocaine and my reaction is impulsive and quick, “I can’t do that, Martha.”

  “Why not? I thought we were friends.”

  “You say I am a source of wisdom. I do not believe it is wise to help someone do something one can’t understand or believe in. I don’t want to be part of this, a conspirator behind David’s back. I think you must see Joe. I’ll gladly pay for that, Martha, if you don’t want David to know.” I hurry on, as I see she is red in the face, blushing or furious, I cannot read the message. “Joe at least has knowledge and experience to bring to bear. For all I know he may be on your side.”r />
  “He’s a man, Harriet. Men do not understand anything about a woman’s body and what it does when you cannot control it, when you are being forced against your will into a radical change of life, into bondage.”

  Am I wrong? Is she right? Am I imagining she will have regrets when she insists that she won’t? What would Caroline say, I ask myself, she who was so tolerant, so all-accepting? I cannot answer that. I am in the dark.

  “You are silent.”

  “I’m upset, Martha. If you counted on my help and feel let down, I can’t blame you, but …”

  “Very well, you can’t do it. Maybe I just have to fall downstairs or drink something. One reads about such things.”

  “I am not responsible, Martha, for whatever you decide to do and you can’t threaten me.” I am angry now myself. I am being blackmailed.

  “Please don’t be angry,” and she begins to cry, pulls her hat off the table, and uses it to hide her eyes in a violent gesture, rejecting me.

  “Listen, we can find a woman psychiatrist for you. Tomorrow night I’m having dinner with an old friend who will surely know someone you can talk to in confidence. I meant it when I said I would gladly pay for that.”

  “I hate you for being so good,” she murmurs. “You always win, don’t you?”

  “Oh for God’s sake, Martha, it’s not a matter of winning. And besides, I’m not that good,” and I manage a laugh. “No fool like an old fool.” I feel I have made a complete mess of this conversation out of sheer ignorance.

  I am mighty glad when the old bag lady comes in, delighted of course to find Martha there, since she bought that painting. “Oh Mrs. Blackstone, how glad I am to see you again! I brought my ten dollars for you, too. I was going to ask Miss Hatfield to give it to you.”

  “I feel bad to take your money,” Martha says, suddenly genuine and herself because, I suppose, her painting is concerned, not her mixed-up life with David. I am delighted when she calls the old woman by name as she takes the ten-dollar bill and says, “Mrs. Stoneworth, this is the first money I have ever earned. Maybe I should frame it.”