by May Sarton
“Because they’re cowards,” Earl says coldly.
“Which Rose Donovan is not.”
“Right.”
“Is there anything else you have to tell me?” I ask. I am now anxious to get home. If only Patapouf were there! I need to take something loved in my arms, I feel so lonely and tired suddenly. And full of tears I must not allow to flow. Patapouf had to die so the hatred could be healed. It seems freshly cruel after all I have just heard.
“It’s been hard to say all I have,”. Earl says, “but if you can bear with me for another minute, I do have something to tell you and perhaps I should have done so in the beginning.”
I prepare myself for shock by quite consciously shutting down the capacity to feel. I light a cigarette. “What, then?”
“As you have gathered, I have made it a point to get into conversation with every Tom, Dick, and Harry on the street, in the bars and joints, in lines at the IGA. Now and then your dog came up, and from there, some talk about what kind of woman you are. I was quite amazed at how often what came through was a sort of reluctant affection. People said things like ‘Well, she’s a fighter all right. She can’t be scared off.’ Or, once a tough young construction worker said, ‘She’s doing what she thinks is right, against the odds, you might say. Doggone it, you have to give her that.’”
“It’s those people, non-readers I presume, whom I wish I could reach. There’s been little substantive talk at the store, Earl. It’s mostly people telling me their lives.”
This made Earl laugh. “All this and substantive talk too?”
“Oh very well, I’m a dodo.”
“You’re not a dodo,” Earl says, “but just what you are I do not know. One of a kind, that’s for sure.”
Before we part it is agreed that Earl call Jonathan and arrange a meeting to talk things over. “Maybe better if I am not there,” I suggest. “Right now I feel chiefly bewildered and must confess I haven’t a clue as to what should or can be done at this point. Though my dog has been murdered I am still a lesbian, Earl. There is still homophobia in this community. Won’t it rise again in some other way?”
“No doubt it will, but a small change has taken place in some minds and I call that a victory. By that I mean that some people no longer simply label you. They think of you as Harriet Hatfield, a specific person who is grieving for her dog. The stereotype has, at least in some cases, given way to a real person whom they know.”
“You are comforting, Earl. You do not seem at all like a detective.”
“I do smoke a pipe, however,” he says, taking his out and filling it.
“So you do, but, Earl, I must get home now.”
“Of course. Sorry,” and he puts the pipe back in his pocket while I signal the waiter to bring us the bill, and when I have paid it, he takes me back to my car and we say goodbye.
My head is buzzing with undigested images and facts, but my chief reaction to Earl’s tale is one of irritation and letdown. Once more, I think to myself, the human situation is so much more real than any ideology or preconceived interpretation that it staggers me. Here I have been imagining myself on the frontier against homophobia and it turns out to be chiefly one woman’s jealousy because I wear expensive shoes and have an upper-class way of speaking. Damn it all!
I must call Joe and have a talk with him. Even though it has been only three days, it seems ages since we have talked. I do not even know how Eddie is doing. Andrew has not been in to see me, and I need to talk to someone who understands why what is good news upsets and depresses me. The only thing to do at present is laugh at myself because now that catastrophe may have been averted, I feel limp, and somehow disappointed. It is called, I remind myself, falling on your face.
27
In the last two weeks there has been time to live a little, to look around me, to enjoy talking to the people who drop in, to be leading at last a more or less normal life. There has been a respite even from facing decisions to do with Earl’s uncovering of the culprits, and no call from Jonathan to tell me what is going on. For a little while I am allowed off the hook.
One day I went to the animal hospital and fetched Patapouf’s ashes, such a small light box to contain such a precious life! Now I need to bury her safely in Angelica’s garden and presume that can be accomplished soon. That is on my mind but very little else. I have not even called Joe lately, knowing that Andrew is there a great deal and there is little, if anything, I can do.
Then Joan tells me when I come down for my afternoon stint one day that Andrew has called to say he may drop in later this afternoon, and I hope there will be better news.
Before she leaves I ask her, “How are we getting on with a window about people and animals, by the way?”
“Not very well. There are lots of books about pets but rather little on the subject that I would call literature.”
“Ah, I’ll get back to that list,” I murmur. “So long, Joan.”
I am jotting down titles, and in a state of objective bliss as I note Flush, by Virginia Woolf, the biography of Beatrix Potter, and, with some hesitation, My Dog Tulip. I am thinking about Ackerley’s book and wondering whether I really want it on the list when Andrew wanders in. I see at once that he is upset. He looks quite white and throws himself down in a chair by the table in a rather dramatic way, which is unlike him, his head leaning on his hand.
Since he says nothing, I say, “It’s good to see you, Andrew. How are things with Eddie? I take it you have come from there.”
“They’re horrible,” Andrew says. “He is suddenly much worse.” Then with a groan he adds, “Joe says he is lucky that Eddie is already so ill, with a high fever at times, pain everywhere, because the worst is when AIDS takes a year of suffering. I can’t see how Eddie can last much longer.”
“You are there a lot?”
“I’m there when Joe can’t be, which is often most of the day.”
“What about your job?”
“I told them I had to have time off. It did not go down very well and the chances are I won’t have a job when this is over. Harriet, you understand, don’t you?” he lifts his head and looks at me intensely. “I can’t leave that boy to die alone, to die such a dreadful death alone.”
“Have you been able, you and Joe, to get someone from Hospice?” I am thinking, of course, of Bettina Morgan, that wonderful woman who sang songs to her patient all night to help her die.
“I don’t think Joe has been in touch with Hospice, but I’ll ask him. At least he is with Eddie all night, and when he is at his office I’m there. It works out.”
“You have changed, Andrew.” I have been observing him closely since he walked in distraught and flung himself into the chair.
“Have I?” He pretends to be surprised and then throws that mask away. “Of course I have. I have to be more than I can be. I can’t sleep, trying to erase the images of pain, the ugliness of pain. Eddie has open lesions inside his thighs now. He talks about being a leper. He hardly has strength to curse as he did at the beginning. Anger is being tortured out of him.”
“Impossible to accept. How do you handle it?”
“I was doing pretty well until today. Today Joe told me their landlord is trying to get them evicted. Their lease has six months to go but the landlord says they are a threat to the community’s health. Can you believe the meanness of people?”
“I have reason to.”
“Of course you do. I’m sorry, Harriet. I guess all this blots everything else out. Has that woman who shot Patapouf been found? Where does all that stand?”
But he is not really able to listen and I am not in the mood to talk about it. “Surely the landlord can be sued if he breaks the lease?”
“Maybe, but those two guys don’t need a legal battle at this point. Joe is on the thin edge of breakdown. He becomes so furious at small things you can imagine his black rage. I am terrified that he’ll let go somehow and give the landlord a taste of what karate can achieve. I had literally to ho
ld him down just now when he told me about it.”
“That doesn’t sound like Joe,” I murmur. “Joe always seems so serene and wise and on top of things.”
“He is when it comes to patients. I should say he still is, but where Eddie is concerned he’s an open wound himself.”
“They’ve lived together so long and in such amity, it doesn’t seem fair.”
Andrew lifts his head and there is such pain in his eyes I have to look down while he strikes his clenched fist on the table. “A few casual encounters in a bar, and now all those years of real caring go up in smoke. That is what Joe is facing, and the inability to talk it out with Eddie is eating him up. Can you blame him?”
“Eddie or Joe?”
“Joe, of course. He watches his lover die because of sexual encounters that didn’t mean anything at the time. He sees a man committing suicide, one might say, in brief moments of lust. Joe has become bitter inside, but so far he has held the demons down. He’s a disciplined person. I do admire him, Harriet.”
“But somehow you identify with Eddie—that is what I sense. I may be wrong.”
“I suppose I love Eddie. He is like a piece of me. I told you when we first talked about my world that I don’t want a permanent relationship, that I prefer to pick someone up for one night.” Saying this he gives a short bark which is, I presume, a laugh. “Not possible these days. Too dangerous.”
“I have to admit, Andrew, that I don’t understand it and never will.” I soften this by quickly adding, “But I think I do understand that there has been an earthquake in your orderly surroundings.”
“Yes. It was time for an earthquake.” He smiles at me at last, coming back to normal, some of the stress melted away for the moment. “I’m learning quite a lot, Harriet. A lot that is painful, as you can imagine.”
“Yes, I can. I’m learning a lot, too, these days.”
“My remarkable sister.” He is smiling at me in an almost fatherly way, as if I were the younger one.
“I have observed that people treat me often as you seem to, as a slightly retarded person who manages somehow to live a normal life. There are liabilities to being an innocent.”
My response is not what Andrew expects and he is taken aback. “I didn’t mean it that way, for heaven’s sake! What’s got into you, Harriet?” He studies my face very intently. “I think you are one of the bravest people I ever encountered, and I honor you for it.” Now he smiles a mischievous smile. “Fred, of course, does think you are mildly off your rocker.”
“All I can say, Andrew, is that most of what I hoped would happen for the bookstore is happening—I mean as a human endeavor. I am still ignorant about a lot of things I should know, still haven’t read two-thirds of what I should, but it is all immensely interesting. I am never bored and, as I said just now, I am learning a lot about other people and about myself.”
“And what more can one ask?” He is still smiling at me, but then he frowns and settles back in his chair and rubs his forehead. “I’m not as lucky as you are, Harriet, for what I am learning about myself is not very pretty, I must say. Getting to know Eddie and Joe is forcing me to change everything or almost everything about the way I am living and have lived. It’s almost gruesome.”
“Really? Of course growth is painful. You are being forced to grow, aren’t you? It seems like a religious conversion. Forgive me if that sounds stupid. It’s what happens when one begins to think aloud. But what’s so good is that we can think aloud with each other. Would you ever have imagined that when you put thumbtacks in my chair and knocked down my snowman?”
“It’s awesome to think how horrible I was.” But both images as we remember them make us burst into laughter.
“Pretty hard to take.”
“You used the word ‘conversion.’ It’s not unlike that in a way. I am confronted over there by something I have never imagined possible.”
“What? True love?”
“Not exactly. The phrase that haunts me is ‘exemplary lives.’ On the whole gay men do not lead exemplary lives. There is too much tension about sex. The drive to indulge that side at the expense of every other is too powerful, I suppose. Things like Joe’s fidelity are new to me and the responsibility gays have toward each other. Joe is such a compassionate person, Harriet. I watch him with Eddie, the way he takes Eddie in his arms and leans Eddie’s head against his shoulder and just stays there for a long time, and sometimes Eddie goes to sleep. Sleep is the best present he can be given now. Sometimes when I am reading aloud he falls asleep and I keep right on for fear he may wake up.” Now Andrew’s eyes narrow and he leans his chin on his right fist. “When he wakes, all hell breaks loose. Pain is always there, and fear, the fear of dying. Sometimes he cries and I wonder when Joe will ever get home to rescue me. That’s how selfish and inadequate I am.”
“It sounds to me as though you have become as necessary as some relieving drug. What would they do without you, Andrew?”
“That’s what Joe says, but for Eddie I am mostly a receptacle for bitterness and woe. To me he can let off steam and curse when he wants to.”
“And that spares Joe. They are lucky to have you and I think you must occasionally put a laurel on your head and admit that. Otherwise you would be a saint. Who wants that?”
“I don’t, that’s for sure. What I want is the kind of love they have but I don’t suppose I’ll ever find it.” Now he looks up, a bright quick glance at me. “You and Vicky had it, didn’t you?”
“Yes, I think we did, but it wasn’t perfect, Andrew—no relationship is.”
“You must miss her terribly.”
“I do.” I wonder whether to go in a little more deeply to prevent Andrew from building up an illusion of perfect love. Why not be honest? “Especially at night, or when I am dying to talk something over, I feel awfully lonely. Now that Patapouf is not here—she was the last link between us—it is worse. But, Andrew, I am more myself, I am more of a whole person now than when I was a kind of appendage to Vicky. She dominated our life and I willingly went along with it. We were happy and peaceful, but we were also shut off from a lot of things. So it is not so much mourning and missing her now as building and moving forward into what feels like my real life.”
“I am too old for all that,” Andrew says. “I’m an old man, Harriet.”
“Nonsense, you’re ten years younger than I am!”
But Andrew is not in the mood for teasing. “Do you really believe that in any successful relationship one person dominates?”
“It looks that way. Joe dominates Eddie, partly because Eddie is so much younger. The strange thing is that I think Mother dominated Father.”
Andrew chuckles, “At least he let her think that was true.”
“It doesn’t matter, does it? I mean, if the relationship is life-giving for both parties, who cares who dominates?”
“No doubt that is wisdom, but I don’t buy it, Harriet.”
“You sound like your old self, Andrew, always putting your sister down.”
“Frankly I don’t understand how you can say first that Vicky dominated your lives and that seemed perfectly fine, and then say that you are now able to live your real life. It doesn’t make sense. What is your real life, anyway?”
Spoken like that, so rationally, I have to admit that it does not make sense, but I can try, for my own sake as well as his, to answer the last question. “I’ll try to tell you, Andrew. Maybe my real life has to do with other people, with being available to other people, with stretching to meet lives totally apart from mine. Here in the store there are no walls. Vicky and I lived very happily not caring what was happening beyond our walls, you see. Maybe we did not want to know, did not want to get involved …” I must be honest, I tell myself. “At least Vicky did not want life in any disturbing shape to knock at our door.”
“She was quite a person,” Andrew muses. “She terrified me, of course. I expect she didn’t much like having your family around.”
�
�I think she may have been a little jealous. After all, she was an only child, and in a funny way she demanded that I be an only child.”
“Curiouser and curiouser.”
“One thing I am learning is that people are stranger and more mysterious than one can imagine.” I am tempted to tell him about Rose Donovan but feel I had better wait till Fred and Jonathan and possibly another lawyer have met with Earl. Not telling Andrew cramps my style. I hate not telling him, and he no doubt senses some barrier and gets up to go. “I hate to see you go, Andrew. At least give me a hug.” The hug is warm and very satisfactory. “Whatever I may say, I do get awfully lonely. So when you come it’s always good and nourishing. I guess it’s lonely for you, Andrew.”
“I don’t know why.”
“Because they are two and you are one, but you are the needed one. Not easy, I should think.”
“It’s hell,” he says, letting me go. “So long, Harriet. Enjoy your real life.”
28
After I’m in bed Earl calls to say there will be a meeting at Jonathan’s office to hear and discuss what he has to report—at eleven o’clock tomorrow. I am glad to think that something will be decided, but I wonder what, and how Rose Donovan and her sons can be tamed or removed, at least for a while, from the vicinity. It flashes through my mind that Joe would be a wonderful person to talk with her, but I guess it is too much to lay that on him at the moment. I go to sleep finally, uneasy and undecided.
I decide to be a little late and call Fred to warn him and explain that I’ve heard the whole strange story from Earl so there’s no point in my being on time at the meeting. “He is quite a wizard to have found out all that he has. I am impressed and awfully glad you and Jonathan persuaded me to get a detective.”
So when I walk in at a quarter to twelve I find the three men I know and a fourth, a Mr. Firestone, who turns out to be a lawyer Jonathan asked to join us to “give us his wisdom,” as Jonathan explains. Firestone is a heavyset, square-faced, owlish man.