by May Sarton
“At sixty maybe we all have the right to be whatever we feel we are,” Anna says. “My husband was very much against my going into therapy with child abusers. The whole subject filled him with such horror and disgust he hated for me to get involved …”
“But the point now is,” Jennifer breaks in, “what can we do to help Harriet, isn’t it?”
“I don’t know that there is anything specific,” I say quickly. “It’s been a huge lift to have you turn up and to be able to talk as we are doing. I do get rather lonely at times, I must confess. I miss Vicky. I miss that kind of companionship. In the store I meet all sorts of people and they pour out their stories and I listen. That is what I dreamed would happen, that I could help make a real center for women. It’s amazing the variety of people who come back again and again: nuns, kids from the colleges, old women, but then there is no one to share it all with. I do have an awfully good associate who takes the store in the mornings. I don’t know what I would do without her. She bearded the police when the first threatening anonymous letter came. She is a lionheart all right. So you mustn’t think of me as in sore need.”
“Oh we don’t,” Tuffy says quickly. “It’s we who are in need, not you. Somehow or other you are at the center of life in a way that none of us seem to be.”
“That is so strange,” I say, leaning my head on my knuckles, thinking it out, “because I have been trying to get accustomed to being on the periphery, on the fringe, where it is quite hard to stay in balance.” I look over at Anna. “What has been staggering is to meet such hatred—hatred and fear, I suppose.”
“They surely go together,” says Sandra, who has been silent, I realize, until now.
“Will there ever be a change?” I ask. “I suppose people need someone to hate and look down on. Is that it? Or …” I pause to feel sure I am saying what I mean, “is the homosexual ordeal partly that it threatens almost everyone. If you are black, you are black and it is quite clear that you are, but if you are homosexual you can rather easily live a completely secret life—as my brother Andrew does. And how many people do? How many husbands stop at a bar on the way home, for example?”
“They may have done, but AIDS is changing all that, thank God,” says Jennifer.
“How many women, then, feel for another woman a passion they have never experienced with their husband?”
“Many, many more than any of us have any idea exist,” Sandra says. “I am one of them and it’s wonderful to be able to say so for the first time in my life. How I envy you and Vicky,” she turns to me.
“But I now feel we had it a little too easy. We didn’t have to fight. No one could put us out of our house. As far as society goes, Vicky’s money and her prestige as a publisher protected us.” Could I dare say it to these old friends, so far so supportive and dear? “I am glad that I have to take my place among the persecuted. I am proud to be who I am, ‘still crazy after all these years,’ as Simon sings it.”
Almost unbelievable that no one has interrupted our talk so far. Nearly five now, and someone will be sure to come. I can’t help wondering who it will be, but I do hope someone will come to show the store in action, to make it all come alive in the way it is meant to be.
Unfortunately, the first person to push in is Sue Bagley, ever curious. “Such a crowd!” she says, taking my friends in. “It looks like a party.”
Of course now I introduce her all around and explain our connection, on both sides. “Sue is a neighbor and a great reader.”
“So you all went to Smith,” she says, taking off her gloves, “but I bet none of you is anything like Harriet Hatfield here. I sometimes think she is out of her mind.”
“Why?” Anna bears down hard. “This is a fine bookstore. I would consider her a public servant of a rather extraordinary kind.” This conversation pleases me very much. I have not been defended in such an intelligent way before. My chief defense has been to laugh at myself.
Sue Bagley looks over at me and launches into one of her monologues and there is nothing I can do. But my friends drift off to find books they may want to buy and Sue is left high and dry, though still voluble. “It is this mixture of people,” she explains to the air, “so many gay people, such queer old women, so many nuns. You never know what or who you will see when you open the door.”
“And I suspect,” says Anna, who is sitting down and listening, or pretending to, “that is why you come in—to see what is going on, to be part of such combustion.”
“Combustion!” Sue Bagley seizes on the word and repeats it loudly with a guffaw. “This woman is turning the neighborhood upside down. After they shot her dog things began to happen. It’s like a small war only people are changing sides.” She ends triumphantly, giving me a significant look.
“How do you know, Sue?” for now I am really interested.
“Well, you know, down at the grocery, you wait in line and people talk. I hear things like ‘Whoever shot that poor woman’s dog is a criminal,’ whereas I used to hear, although I never told you, ‘Why doesn’t that crazy woman take her dirty books somewhere else?’ Things like that.”
“That’s good news.” I am amazed to hear it, actually. “And I’ve always said it would take time …”
“Only that poor dog had to be murdered. I have nightmares about it,” Sue says. “Things aren’t the same now she is not lying there under the desk at your feet.”
It is too soon for me to talk about Patapouf’s death.
“Harriet, we are going to have to tear ourselves away,” Jennifer says.
“Of course. It’s nearly six, but I am so glad you came! Somehow I feel I am back in my real country with you. I’m not quite the outsider I was …”
“We’ll come back. It’s been a great day!” Jennifer says.
“But we’ve got to pay for our books,” Anna says, smiling. So they come to the register, settle up, and go off with the pile each has accumulated.
“You made some money,” Sue says, after the door has closed behind them.
“The books I have to sell here are not that easy to find in suburbia. This visit gave me back some sense of what the store is about. It did me a lot of good.”
“I understand that all right. I should think you’d get sick and tired of all the loonies and queers who pop in and out—that bag lady who sits for hours waiting for the bus …”
“Oh Sue, she’s a friend! And she bought one of Martha’s paintings, you know.”
“She did?” Sue is not pleased to hear this, I know. She wants to be the only amateur of art connected with the store. It has taken the wind out of her sails that a poor old woman has managed somehow to buy a painting.
“She is fascinated by those roots,” I explain to Sue.
It is time to lock up, and I make it clear by thanking Sue again for telling me about what people are saying, standing at the door.
“I keep my ears open,” she replies, and I sense that she would have liked to sit down for a good gossip, but I am not in the mood. I want to think about my Smith friends. Why did I imagine they might be shocked or not cooperative? I suppose because I remember them as they and I were in our twenties when homosexuality was a taboo subject except for some jokes about “pansies” and Bea Lillie’s song “There are fairies at the bottom of the garden.” However bad things may be now, it was far worse then because we lived in total ignorance. And in any case we had lost sight of each other for thirty years or more. The women I saw this afternoon have changed, just as I have.
I climb the stairs to my flat with unaccustomed peace of mind. “All shall be well” I murmur aloud.
Only when I am sitting smoking a cigarette in the armchair and about to turn on the news, what Sue said just now, of the change of heart about me, floods in and makes me sit up straight with the shock and relief it brings me. Is it truly possible that a reaction as irrational, after all, as the reaction to the bookstore in the first place is turning the tide? The death of my dog? I cannot quite believe it, but it is in
teresting, to put it mildly.
The phone rings and it is Earl, who suggests that we meet at a motel in Lexington where we can talk. “I have news that will interest you,” he says.
“Good heavens. I can’t wait. Let’s say noon, before the crowd. I just might have something that will interest you,” I add.
It occurs to me as I put down the phone that Earl has been on the job for only two days. And he had said it would take him about a week.
26
Earl is late, which I find irritating because I hate waiting in public places and being stared at. When Vicky and I lived together this sort of exposure never happened as we were always together, shielded by each other. Only now since her death am I learning what Joan often talks about, the lack of identity of a person alone, and the vulnerability. “A woman alone is not invited out,” she tells me. “No widow or divorcee expects this so it is quite a shock when it happens.”
I sit uncomfortably on a straight chair, not daring to smoke until Earl, full of apologies, arrives. He got stuck in traffic on Route 128 after an accident. Finally we are seated at a corner table among the artificial flowers in a huge, almost empty dining room. I am waiting for the curtain to rise. It rises when the waiter brings us two scotches and takes our order. There is a slight pause.
“Miss Hatfield,” Earl says, lifting his glass, “I know who shot your dog and I know why she did it. That is the interesting part—why she did it.”
“Tell me,” I beg, “first, who this old woman is.”
“She’s a very pent-up grandmother who lives in a three-decker with her married son and his wife and small daughter and her own unmarried daughter. There is little space. It is noisy, crowded, and the atmosphere is full of rage. This is a very angry woman.”
“No doubt.” I am living myself into her situation, trying to imagine. “How do you know she did it? It seems so strange.”
“I know she did it because her son blurted it out in a bar.”
“He told you?”
“Well, he gathered I was not from the neighborhood, on my way west, I explained, so he felt safe. And it became clear that his mother, whose name is Rose Donovan, is now very scared, as though you had threatened her—an interesting reversal of roles.”
At this point I want the facts, not interpretation, so I say sharply, “I suppose she is afraid of being arrested or taken to court, and it is worse for her because she knows she is guilty.”
“Her son, Jerry, wants to have her committed.”
“He does?” At once I am on Rose Donovan’s side. “She’s not crazy, is she? But what angered her so much? Why did she shoot my dog? You haven’t told me that.”
“You sound quite cross,” Earl says. He is as baffled as I am, apparently.
“I’m sorry, but from what you tell me her son is hardly simpatico. It might be better for him and his wife and baby to move out than to have his mother committed because she is in the way. Yes, I am cross. Women never get a break.”
Earl goes on with his story. “When I asked Jerry, over a third beer, why she shot your dog he mumbled something about the gun first. It had belonged to her husband, his father, and she won’t part with it. He is afraid of the gun in the house, and with good reason.”
“All he has to do is take it and sell it,” I suggest.
At this, Earl, for the first time, relaxes a little and smiles at me as he explains, “He is more afraid of her anger than of the gun, you see. There is such a thing as a holy terror, and she appears to be it.”
“But why did she shoot my dog? You still haven’t told me.”
Unfortunately at this moment food is served and there has to be a short pause with a fill-in of small talk.
“Why did she shoot your dog?” Earl looks at me meditatively. “I can’t be brief,” he says. “It’s complicated.”
I light a cigarette. I can’t eat. “Make it long if you must, but begin somewhere.”
“Rose’s son’s friends boasted that they were going to drive you out after some woman from the church discovered Pure Lust in the store and took it to the police. From then on the gossip about you spread like wildfire. You were running an obscene bookstore and with the Globe interview headline they felt more and more justified in harassing you.”
“To the point of murdering my dog?” I am not convinced, ugly as it all is to hear.
“Rose Donovan had at last found a rationale for her rage, but I feel sure she didn’t imagine shooting your dog at first, and in fact did not enter the scene until verbal attacks against you were the stuff of gossip all over the community.”
I feel nauseated. Put bluntly, as Earl does, it is sickening that I have been pilloried and jeered at in bars. “What explains her violence then? What went on in her head? I don’t get it.”
“Jealousy,” he says laconically.
“Jealousy? How can she be jealous of me?”
“Because, don’t you see, you have stood your ground, and not been scared off, because you are rich and can do whatever you want to do, because you are a lady.”
“Oh stuff and nonsense!”
“I’ll try to explain. I know it sounds crazy. In the first place, the young men who began it all by writing obscenities on the store windows and later stealing your firewood boasted that they were going to have you out of there in a few weeks, then some guy who was jogging past attacked them and using karate or something knocked one of them flat with a twist of his wrist.”
“Yes, that was Joe. He and his friend Eddie used to stop and clean up for me when they went jogging every morning. I suppose those boys were pretty mad. But I am puzzled. What started them writing obscenities in the first place?”
“The typical antagonism toward a stranger. I don’t believe they care a hoot about what books you sell. But later they capitalized on latent antagonism and even fear.” Earl stops to light a small cigar and looks at me as though sizing me up. “Miss Hatfield, I got an earful in all those hours I spent in bars and joints. Homophobia seems to be the local obsession.”
“So they are out to get me.” I swallow what is left of my scotch. “But from what you said earlier, Rose is scared now herself. Shooting my dog was a rather stupid thing to do.”
“Yes, it was. But by then she was furious because you had not been scared off and she decided to take things into her own hands. You and what seems to be your immunity to threats and active antagonism made her boil. What the boys could not do, she was jolly well going to show that she could do. What mere men could not achieve, she, an old woman, would achieve.”
I could see it all so clearly now that it made me laugh, and then feel as though I were going to cry. “I think I had better have some coffee, Earl. All this is rather a lot to take in.”
“I am sorry,” he says, signaling the waiter, “but you have to know.”
“Of course. In fact you are to be congratulated on managing to dig all this out so fast. Go on.”
“The good news is that Rose made a fatal mistake. Somehow or other shooting your dog, an old dog, whom many of the neighbors had seen you walking, changed some minds. Maybe fifty percent of the people who appeared to be rabid about homosexuals were outraged by Rose’s violent act. I sometimes wonder whether if you had been shot they would have reacted as passionately. ‘An innocent old dog,’ I heard one workman say, ‘that woman is a monster.’”
“It is all so upside down,” I murmur, “so irrational. How does one handle the irrational?”
“That,” Earl says with a smile, “remains to be seen.”
“How is she to be stopped? I guess what troubles me most is that I have been attacked in so many ways for so long, ostensibly because I am a lesbian and run a bookstore which contains dangerous feminist books, and now it appears that all this is a kind of game. I am not attacked as a righteous cause, but simply as a rich woman who can be baited and perhaps driven away. It makes me sick.” I am not smiling and he senses, I hope, that humor on his part would make me furious.
He is ver
y quiet and waits a moment before saying, “‘How is she to be stopped?’ you ask. I can’t really answer that, you know. My job is to get the facts and after that decisions can be made by you and your lawyer and your brother.”
“But what do you think?” I press him.
“If you’ll promise to keep it under your hat, I’ll tell you what I think. Rose Donovan is being harassed and attacked whenever she goes out and must be close to a nervous breakdown. It is possible that if your lawyer and your brother had a talk with her, she could be persuaded to give up herself, go away somewhere for a while.”
“Rose Donovan give up? You’re kidding!” For by now I have imagined a Rose Donovan with whom I feel a certain bond. It happened when Earl told me her son wanted to commit her. “I guess it sounds crazy, but in some peculiar way I find myself on her side. I wish I could see her and have a talk with her, make friends …”
“There, Miss Hatfield, I’m afraid you are a sentimentalist. You have become, for various reasons, the channel for her anger, an obsessive anger. It’s quite possible that if the case goes to court she might be taken under observation. A nice little talk, in which your very way of talking would be an affront, your expensive shoes, your whole upper-class manner, could make matters a lot worse than they are.”
I had never been aware of any of these things—upper-class manner? “I guess I can see that I am unforgivable.” This whole conversation has been so unexpectedly painful, so baffling, I feel I have stepped on a hornet’s nest.
“By the way,” I ask, as it whirls up in my mind, “why did those goons not go after Joe after he threw one of them down?”