The Education of Harriet Hatfield

by May Sarton

  “Mine is Shawn Fleming. Everyone knows me around here. I used to run a secondhand furniture store, so if you need anything let me know. And a good morning to you, Miss Hatfield—or,” he catches himself, “is it Mrs.?”

  “No, Miss.”

  Now he smiles for the first time. “You escaped prison, did you, just like me. I wasn’t about to be tied down for life to someone who can’t make as good a cup of coffee as I do.”

  “Do you like living alone?” I really wish this curious creature would stay and talk some more.

  “Well, I don’t, you see. I have a black cat called Timothy. That’s why I got so mad when I read about your dog. Why, if Timothy died I don’t know what I would do.”

  He is at the door and now slips away. Joan and I agree it is amazing that someone has come out of the blue like that to express condolences.

  “I told you,” Joan says triumphantly, but we have no time to discuss Mr. Fleming because it is noon and Angelica is at the door.

  22

  Angelica wants to take me right away from the neighborhood but agrees on my insistence that we go to the French restaurant nearby since I must be back at two to release Joan. I am afraid of the emotion Angelica brings with her. I dread her tears and mine. A perfect stranger is easier to take at this point and I quickly tell her about Mr. Fleming to ward off the too personal and raw, but Angelica is too full of her own anger and grief to stay away for long from the subject, and over a glass of wine while we wait for our soup, bursts into tears suddenly.

  “She was such a gentle soul,” she says, “the way she looked at one, such fondness in her old eyes. At least she was old,” she says, wiping her eyes, “and had had a very good life.”

  “I can’t talk about it,” I say.

  “But what is going to happen now? What are you going to do now?”

  “Jonathan is getting a private detective, so until he finds one—and I want a woman if possible—”

  “Are there women detectives?” Angelica interrupts.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Why can’t the police handle it? After all, that’s what they’re for!”

  “One would suppose so, but I have been harassed for months, Angelica, as you know, and they are simply not interested or have been bought off long ago.”

  “You are cynical.”

  “Maybe. The brouhaha over the Globe article taught me something at least—and that is that the police are not out to defend homosexuals.”

  “Oh.” Angelica ponders this.

  “Besides, there must be more than an old woman involved. How would one old woman steal a cord of wood all by herself?”

  “I keep forgetting how much you have had to take of threats and actual attacks. It is appalling.”

  “I am sick and tired of it! There is so much I want to do with the store. We are just beginning to make a go of it, and more and more young people are discovering that we exist. It is frustrating, I must say, to have to spend so much energy on anxiety and grief.” But even as I say this I feel grief swallowing me again. “Oh, Angelica, poor Patapouf has somehow opened the door into all I need still to mourn about Vicky. That is the real thing that has happened.” I push the soup away, feeling suddenly sick. “She would feel it is my fault—that I killed our dog,” I say, as cold as ice.

  “Try to be sensible, Harriet. I know you are under frightful stress and if all this has brought you to mourning, more than a year after Vicky’s death, perhaps that is a good thing. You held back the mourning, but sooner or later it has to be experienced or it becomes a wall between you and your life. I have wondered sometimes how you could launch yourself into a wholly new life as rapidly as you did—extraordinary of you. Such strength, Harriet, strength and imagination!” This is the Angelica of the deep steadfast caring, and I cannot meet her eyes, I am so close to tears. Still it is true, and I sense it is true now, that sometimes things can be said in a public place that could never be uttered in a silent room.

  “I don’t understand how I was able to do it, but you see, what I am finding out is that as long as I had Patapouf, I somehow still had Vicky, and now I am alone. I could not know till now how hard that would be.” And I have to add, “I feel she is angry with me, disapproving of all I have done. Oh dear, I sound quite crazy.”

  “No, not crazy, but I think grief makes one a child again, terribly lonely. That is how I felt when my sister died. It is as though loss after middle age takes us very deep down, back perhaps into early childhood or even infancy. It takes with it a whole past, a kind of deprivation one cannot even believe for months.”

  “Yes,” I say. It is, beyond words, comforting to hear all this from Angelica.

  “When will you come and find a place in my garden for the ashes?” Angelica asks, as the bill comes and we get ourselves together.

  “I’ll call when I can fetch them, and we’ll decide on a day.”

  So that is decided and when, after our walk back, we see how many people are gathered in the store, we say goodbye on the street. “I don’t know how you meet all this, day after day,” Angelica says, peering in.

  “It’s rarely a crowd,” I murmur. “Oh dear …”

  “Force et confiance!” she calls as she gets into her car. That is something we used to say years and years ago. In fact it was a phrase of Vicky’s which she had read in a biography of Eleonora Duse. Fortified by it, I push open the door.

  Joan comes over from her desk to explain in a whisper, “It’s Patapouf.”

  I recognize the three Lesley girls as they hurry over, then stand, blushing with embarrassment, not knowing what to say. “It’s because … your dog … we heard about it. We just want to say …” They all speak together.

  Then one says, “She was such a dear dog. We can’t stand it.”

  “We want to kill the person who shot her,” says another.

  Sue Bagley has been listening of course, as usual. “A lot of good that would do,” she says, then turns to me. “I told you it is a bad neighborhood. I knew from the start you couldn’t make a go of it.” This is so typical of Bagley, who is a genius at putting people down, that I almost laugh.

  “But I am making a go of it,” I say gently, “and I have no intention whatever of leaving.”

  “You don’t?” Sue Bagley is amazed. “I thought this brutal act would be the last straw. Your poor dog …”

  I manage to push myself through the gathering and take refuge by sitting down at my desk where Joan joins me to ask if I would like her to stay. “It’s been like this since you left,” she says.

  “No, you go along. It’s really rather heartening, isn’t it?”

  “In a way, but people are so upset they aren’t here to purchase.”

  “It’s Patapouf’s funeral,” I whisper.

  “What can we do?” someone asks quite loudly after Joan leaves.

  “Oh, Martha!” Here she is in her black hat, looking animated for once. “What can you do?” I glance around at the eager faces. “Nothing, my friends. It’s your coming that is doing something. It’s your support. Thanks.” I find it a little hard to be stared at with so much eager compassion. I have not, after all, let these people into my private life … or have I?

  Now I do have an idea. “I hope those of you who live in the neighborhood will tell me if you hear anything that might give us a clue. I’ve about had it now as far as harassment goes.”

  “Murder,” says one of the Lesley girls passionately, “is more than harassment surely.”

  “Are you here alone at night?” someone I do not remember now asks.

  “My brother Andrew insisted on staying last night. He slept in the store in his sleeping bag. But I am all right—except—except,” and with awful inevitability I feel the tears rising, “I listen for the dog’s breathing and it isn’t there,” but I catch myself and say, “I must not begin to cry or I’ll never stop. Look,” I say, shuffling some papers around to save face, “it is awfully kind of you to come, but …”

&
nbsp; “She needs to be left alone, for God’s sake,” says Bagley’s harsh relentless voice. It is her way of helping of course, but I wish she could do it with a little grace.

  “Goodbye, goodbye,” the air is full of goodbyes and before I know it, they have all gone like a bevy of birds taking flight and I am alone.

  It has been quite a day so far and I wish I could go and lie down somewhere and sleep, but there are three hours to go before I close up shop. Fortunately a young professor from Wellesley comes to ask me for advice about books in women’s studies she has not been able to find. She has limp, fair hair tied in a bow, a very broad face with wide-apart gray eyes, wears a very long skirt, high boots, and a dark blue vest over a ruffled white blouse. Her name is Emily Woods.

  She and I sit down for a half-hour and share a cup of tea. This visit does more for me than anything. It is my normal life, and what I mean it to be. Besides I find her congenial and eager to talk. She is impressed by the stock and finally dares to ask me whether I am breaking even financially.

  “Not quite,” I have to answer, “but I expect to within a full year. It takes time to develop a clientele, you know, and I am off the beaten track.”

  “You certainly are. Why did you choose such a rundown community? Why not Wellesley? There is no longer a good bookstore in town these days.”

  “Why not Wellesley?” The very idea repels me but I can’t say that, of course. “I guess I wanted an environment which contains various kinds of people, not just my kind.”

  “Brave of you.”

  “Yes, it has gotten me into a lot of trouble lately.”

  “What kind of trouble?”

  “Well, I am accused of running a pornographic bookshop, and the fact that I came out in an interview as a lesbian has not helped.”

  “How is that hazard ever to be stopped?” she asks, and it is obvious that she has had an experience, hard to handle in the same way as mine, and for the same reason.

  “I don’t know. Enlightenment on the subject faces formidable barriers.” I risk a direct question. “I gather you have faced trouble of the same kind.”

  “Yes. It was two years ago actually, but it stays with me. I guess I had never before faced what being a lesbian means, what violence it may elicit.”

  “What happened?” I ask. “It helps to learn what other women have gone through.”

  “Well,” Emily waits a moment and brushes a strand of hair back from her forehead. Maybe she doesn’t want to talk about it, but then she begins and tells it almost as though it were a hair-raising story about someone else.

  She was then living in Brookline and was coming home from a gay and lesbian march about discrimination against gays in housing. Her friend was away that weekend so she was alone, walking back from the march along the curb to avoid the crowd. Suddenly a roadster came toward her dangerously near the curb and she felt an arm and hand around her neck and she was being dragged. There were two voices, one saying “Go forward, go back” and “that’s the way” and for some seconds she thought they would break her neck. Unconsciously she rubs it with her right hand as she talks. When they let her go she could hardly stand she was so terrified, and they rode away laughing and shouting “Gays stay out of the street.”

  Emily tells me she was dazed but managed to ask whether anyone had seen what happened and two men offered to be witnesses and wrote down their names and addresses. “All I wanted was to go home,” she tells me, “but I felt I must go to the police. It had to be reported. I was in shock and naive enough to think the police would want to know that such things happen.”

  “But they didn’t, I must presume?”

  “They didn’t even ask me to sit down,” she says, “and when I said there were witnesses they asked if they were gay and when I said I thought they were, they simply dismissed the whole story. My neck was hurting a lot and I knew I had better get home. I guess that was the loneliest walk I ever took. I felt dizzy and angry and hurt.”

  I swallow the bitter taste of her story before I speak. “Six months ago I would have found it hard to believe. Somehow, Emily, we have to find a way to bridge the two worlds and I keep hoping the store may help in doing just that, although at the moment it simply appears to be a target for the worst element.” I did not intend to speak of it, but the words come out. “Yesterday the homophobes around here shot my dog while we were on our evening walk.”

  “You don’t mean it?” Emily looks at me, visibly wincing. “Why, for God’s sake?”

  “Because they are determined to drive me and the store out of this neighborhood.”

  “Oh dear, it seems so strange and inhuman. What is happening, that there is so much hatred? It hurts, Miss Hatfield. What have you done to deserve it? I wish I could understand,” and she adds, “Oh your poor dog,” and puts her hands up to her face as if to blot out the cruelty.

  “I’ll tell you something cheerful at least. Somehow the dog’s death has caught people’s imagination. I have had a lot of support today and from people who have never come into the store till now. Dear old Patapouf, perhaps she is building a bridge …”

  “You really are a remarkable person,” Emily says.

  “No, not really,” I am quick to answer, “it has all somehow happened since I lost my friend. I have been catapulted into a position where I have to fight. It’s not courage but necessity, as I see it, for I am a very ordinary old party who is lucky enough to be able to afford a wild dream.”

  “You are paying a high price for it,” she says.

  “Now we must see what books we can find for that course of yours. Are the students responsive?” I ask. “A lot of young women pile in here lately. That at least is a heartening sign.”

  Emily thinks a second. “They are curious, fascinated often, but uninvolved. Sometimes I find it hard to deal with girls who really haven’t a clue as to what I am talking about.”

  “And why is that? They must have crushes themselves now and then.”

  “Oh they are so afraid of those feelings, you see. They never relate all this to themselves, except here and there a lesbian who would never admit that she is one. They are back in the days of The Well of Loneliness,” and suddenly Emily laughs. “They imagine lesbians dress like men.”

  I do find four or five books that Emily has asked for and finally it is nearly time to close and she leaves.

  When I finally slip into bed I keep busy making lists of books I can summon in my head about animals in relation to human beings, such as Mowat’s Never Cry Wolf, Carrighar’s Wild Heritage, Lilly’s Man and Dolphin, and Maxwell’s Ring of Bright Water. There must be something about how good it is for old people to have an animal to care for. I go to sleep dreaming about writing a book about Patapouf for children, well aware that I shall never do it. I am not a writer and must prepare my mind, not for a work of art, but for a detective tomorrow morning. Jonathan calls at nine when I am half asleep to say he has found someone, not a woman, but what looks like a sensitive and efficient youngish man, called Earl Cutler.

  So tomorrow is on the way. No way to stop the rush of time like white water over rocks. I am borne along willy-nilly, but at least there was real comfort in Emily, a new friend. I feel sure I shall see her again.

  23

  I wake expecting Patapouf, and then it is a shock to realize that she is not waiting to be let out, that she is not here and will never be here again. This day of the detective’s coming I am slow and a little confused. What will happen exactly? And is it really a good idea?

  I wander around getting dressed and drink a cup of coffee without sitting down to a real breakfast. The truth is I am not prepared for this detective who is about to enter my life and pry into its corners.

  It is better when I am downstairs in the more formal atmosphere of the store and I am kept busy washing teacups, dusting the shelves, and have just settled in to go over yesterday’s mail when I see Jonathan’s car draw up and a rather tousled young man in a duffle jacket get out and look up at the
store windows with concentrated attention. They come in and Earl is introduced.

  “Happy to meet you, Miss Hatfield,” he says. “You certainly have a nifty store here.”

  “Take off your coat,” I say, “and we’ll sit down and get to business.”

  Jonathan coughs his usual cough. “I’ll just run along and leave you to it,” he says. “I’m due at the office.”

  “Thanks, Jonathan.” I follow him to the door and we shake hands.

  “You should be out of this mess in a week,” he says, smiling. “Earl is a wizard.”

  “That would be good news if I could believe it,” I say, sitting down and giving Earl an appraising look.

  He is not what I expected, looks rather like a graduate student, is not at all solemn or, for that matter, businesslike, for the first thing he asks is, “Do you enjoy living in this neighborhood?”

  “Very much. I chose it deliberately. You know, Mr. Cutler, until I was sixty, I led a very sheltered, and I suppose one could say privileged life. I wanted to know all kinds of people. I wanted the store to make bridges, to help people understand each other.”

  “And has it done that?” he asks, a touch of irony audible.

  “Yes, in a way it has.”

  “But I gather you have also made enemies. Perhaps you had better tell me all you can about that, from the beginning to the tragic murder of your dog.”

  Slowly I put together the whole puzzle for Earl Cutler, from the obscenities on the windows, to the anonymous letters about the books I sell, to the stealing of the firewood, and finally the brutal murder of Patapouf. Laid out like this in about fifteen minutes while Earl has his tape recorder going, I am embarrassed that it is not even worse than it is, and so I ask, “Am I stupid to be upset? Until Patapouf died I thought I could just muddle through. Friends have rallied, you know.”

  “Miss Hatfield, you have every reason to try to stop this sort of harassment. I hope we can fit the pieces together soon. As I listened to you talking, my first reaction was that there seem to be two different people or groups involved. I must certainly see your friend Joe, who had an encounter with the two men who were writing obscenities on the windows. But then, weeks later, someone says they saw an old woman with a rifle who presumably shot your dog.”