The Education of Harriet Hatfield

by May Sarton

  “I’m not laughing because it is so like you to be anxious about someone who has done you so much harm. That is your way, Harriet, and it does make me smile.”

  “If only I could somehow get to meet her and have a talk, you know?”

  This time Angelica does laugh. “You may be irresistible in some instances, Harriet, but I fear in this one you might find yourself hopelessly at sea!”

  I know she is right, but Rose Donovan is becoming an obsession. “Angelica, I feel at sixes and sevens and that is the truth. If only Sue Bagley is right. She came in this afternoon to tell me she heard Rose may be moving out.”

  Angelica sighs. “It’s just too bad that your first months with the bookstore have had to be like this. Have you ever thought of moving to a different neighborhood?”

  “Never.” Her question makes me feel badgered and cross. “It’s been two months of revelation. In some ways it has been exactly as I imagined—all sorts of people discovering the store, all kinds of women discovering each other, and even Fred and Andrew turning into real brothers. I never thought of that as a possibility.”

  “That is the positive side,” Angelica says, but other things are on her mind and I can guess what they are.

  “As for the threats and attacks, I must admit that there have been times when I felt pretty low in my mind.”

  “But not frightened?”

  “Oh yes, frightened, but, Angelica, the frightening, upsetting things are really part of the whole experience. I am learning a lot about myself, you know. I am being stretched as a human being every day. What is the word? I come on it everywhere these days—‘self-actualization.’”

  “Oh, one of those words,” Angelica says lightly. “What it means God only knows.”

  “I think I do know,” I answer. “I mean I am living it now, this year, in this time, in this place. I have changed. Have you noticed?”

  She looks at me quizzically. “I can’t say I have really. Except,” she ponders this, “except that you seem surer of yourself, I suppose. It quite amazes me how you handle the store and everything else. I couldn’t possibly do what you do.”

  “I’m carried along on a kind of excitement. I never know what is going to happen next.”

  “I would hate that,” Angelica says. “I like my steady routine. Besides, it must be exhausting. How do you ever get to sleep with so much buzzing around in your head?”

  “It’s much harder without Patapouf.”

  “You must get another dog. I’d like to give you one.”

  “Dear heart,” I say quickly, to prevent any such idea from being acted upon, “I don’t want another dog. Patapouf was my dog. Vicky was my love. And that is that.” We sit in silence for a moment, the good silence when two people can think their own thoughts, and mine are of Angelica herself. “Of course you have been the saving grace, Angelica. I’ll never forget that cake you had made for the opening, the way you are always there when I need help.”

  “But you seem to forget that I do not approve of everything you have done, Harriet. I am not always as supportive as I would like to be, I’m afraid.”

  “That is where that word comes in. I know what upsets you is what you think of as my exposure as a lesbian. You hate the word, as I used to, don’t you?”

  “The word itself seems to me an invasion of privacy.”

  “Yes, I would have agreed with you a few months ago, but when the Globe interview came out, and I had to face what and who I am, I felt free as I never have before. I felt ‘I can be my real self’ and even more than that, I felt connected in a wholly new way with all minorities—with blacks, for instance. Nan has become a real friend, and when I was invited there to dinner we talked a lot about what it does to a person to be conspicuous and possibly unwanted, disliked not for oneself, but for the color of one’s hair, if you remember your Housman. That would never have happened if I had been in Nan’s and her husband’s eyes simply a white lady who could not possibly understand what it is to be forever an outsider. Although I have only known them for a short while, I feel that Joe and Eddie have become real friends of mine. All that is a whole new story you do not know, Angelica. But Andrew came to me after the Globe interview and hugged me and talked about himself as homosexual. We have never been friends, that brother and I, until now.”

  “You are saying, and I hear you, Harriet, that you are somehow leading a new life. Your own. I find that moving. Thanks for telling me all this. Thanks for being my friend and trusting me with it.”

  “The surprising thing,” I say, taking a last swallow of my scotch, “is that what must look to you like an intrusion of disaster, a time-consuming, energy-depleting irrelevance, all this trouble and harrassment, has not taken me away from the central purpose of the bookstore. That is what talking with you so peacefully, and even burying Patapouf’s ashes, has made me see this evening.”

  “Explain that, if you can,” Angelica says. “I am totally at sea, and,” she adds, “awfully hungry suddenly.”

  I look at my watch. “Good heavens, it is nearly eight. Let me help you put things on the table and then I’ll try to explain.”

  “It’s Alice’s night out so we’ll have dinner on trays by the fire. She left a casserole, and it’s in the oven. Come and help me open the wine.”

  The trays are set and the salads all prepared in the refrigerator so there is little to do. Angelica puts another log on the fire, and as it falls on the red core of the burning logs, it shoots out sparks, and we watch it for a moment before settling in to our supper.

  “So why has all this brouhaha not obtruded into your vision of what you want to do with Hatfield’s bookstore for women? I am dying to know.”

  “Quite simply, it has been an education I never got at Smith. I have been shocked into consciousness and at a little over sixty. That is surely all to the good?”

  “I suppose it is—at high cost, however.” She looks across at me and meets my eyes. “But consciousness of what?” she asks.

  “I guess the kind of loneliness and isolation anyone who deviates from the norm goes through. I am part of a minority, and I never took that in while Vicky was alive, so I understand a lot I never understood ’til now. Some of it is painful.”

  “A lot of it is painful, I should think.”

  “Yes, but not all. The attacks, the threats have brought me real friends. By the way, Joan is wonderful. Suggesting her is another thing I must thank you for.”

  “I had an idea she would be a help. She is so cool and efficient.”

  “Yes, that’s the surface, and she is very good for me because she teases me about my more extreme fantasies and acts, but she went to the police with me, you know, after that first anonymous letter. I think of her as a partner rather than an employee and must consider making that legal. I couldn’t possibly manage without her now.”

  It occurs to me that I have not yet told Angelica about the Smith alumnae who turned up the other day and what a lift they gave me, and so I do. “I didn’t have to make a bridge, you see. We are the same sort of people—at least in most ways. We had so much fun. I felt lonely after they left.”

  “You see,” Angelica pounces, smiling across at me, “there’s no substitute for old friends.”

  I do not answer, for I see that it is both true and untrue, and I don’t want to explain. It has been such a good exchange this time.

  30

  I have not seen Joe for days and, as I look across the table at him, buttering a croissant, for he has come for breakfast, my breath is caught by the exhaustion so clearly written on his face. What can I say to this man whose lover is dying and who spends his days helping people who come to him for psychiatric counseling?

  “It’s been such a difficult autumn for you,” he says. “I wish I could have been of some help.”

  “Oh Joe, you have enough on your mind—and what could you have done anyway? You and Eddie were the first people who came to help—washing obscenities off the windows. I’ll never forget th
at!”

  For the first time Joe smiles. “Eddie loved it when I knocked that astonished oaf down with a flick of my wrist! We did have a good laugh.” That remembered laughter has pain in it and it shows in the way Joe gulps down half a cup of coffee.

  “Andrew tells me Eddie is worse.”

  “It’s torture,” Joe says. He lights a cigarette. “But I didn’t come here to talk about it. It’s no good anyway. Talking just makes it worse. I came here to celebrate what I hope is the end of the torment you have lived through—and,” he pauses and pours himself more coffee from the pot on the table, “to tell you about Andrew.” This is said so gravely that for a moment I wonder what Andrew has done wrong.

  “Is there something wrong? I know he is with Eddie a lot. Maybe that is not a good idea.”

  “No, no,” Joe says intensely. “You have misunderstood.”

  “Andrew is changing.”

  “All I can say is he is learning about love, and he is, as far as Eddie is concerned and I am concerned, teaching us something about it by his presence in our lives—what is left of them.”

  “He really was a rather selfish person, wasn’t he?” I venture. “When we first talked after I came out and he rushed over here to embrace me and welcome me into his world, I found him lovable. It was an epiphany for each of us.”

  “Yes, he talks about that.”

  “But then when I went to his place for dinner and everything was so elegant, I felt bewildered. He talked about not wanting a lasting love affair; he talked about the excitement of brief encounters. I suppose I should have understood better than I did. I’m afraid I already thought of you and Eddie as living exemplary lives together. Andrew did not fit into that image.”

  Joe has been listening intently but at the phrase “exemplary lives” he laughs a bitter laugh. “If Eddie had not gone in for casual encounters he would not be dying, Harriet.”

  “Oh.” As usual I have rushed in where angels fear to tread. “That is hard.”

  “Killing!”

  “What changed Andrew then? How did it happen?”

  This time it is Joe who is silent, puffs at his cigarette, looks over at me, then says, with half-closed eyes, “What Andrew is learning, I think, is something about intimacy without sex, something about tenderness without passion. The words look easy, but what he is actually doing is amazing. Eddie is sometimes very difficult. He is too weak now to indulge in a tantrum, so he turns his face to the wall.”

  “And how does Andrew handle that?”

  “By never going away. By always being there, present. I can’t do it. I have to get away a lot. My patients are sometimes simply an excuse not to be there.”

  “But you and Eddie were so close, and have been for so many years, it is harder for you, much harder.”

  “God knows I see enough about guilt where the family of the dying are concerned. Who can do enough?” Again he looks at me intently. “Your brother Andrew does enough. I wanted you to know.” Now Joe smiles and reaches across the table rather unexpectedly, to take my hand and hold it hard for a long moment. “That kind of grace appears to run in your family, Harriet. And I did come to be in touch with you, you know, to tell you what admiration ripples out from all you have withstood during these months of tension and anxiety.”

  “What else could I have done?”

  “I’ll tell you one thing you could have done and that is to have cried more and laughed less. People who come into your store go out refreshed and it is partly because you often laugh at some outrageous thing—that is refreshing.”

  “I’m an ordinary woman and I guess I laugh to break the tension. Did you know, by the way, that rumor has it that Rose Donovan, the woman who shot Patapouf, is leaving town?”

  “Well, that is good news for a change!” Slowly, as we talk, Joe is letting go a little, relaxing a little, and that is good to see. Now he gives me his full attention, almost, I think, as though I were a patient. “How does it feel, Harriet, to be free at last? Not to wake at night wondering if some mouse in the wall is someone trying to break in?”

  Because I feel that his interest is real, I have to be honest. “I’ll never feel safe, Joe. I’ll always be afraid.”

  Clearly he is surprised. It is not what he expected to hear. “Why, Harriet, dear Harriet, why?” and he adds quickly, “I think you are safe now. I think you have won.”

  “Not while your landlord is trying to put you and Eddie out, for God’s sake! Not as long as people snoop around my store and look at me like some peculiar animal!” And now I do laugh aloud because what I am saying is so painful. “It is laughable to think how innocent I was, how pleased with myself to come out as I did in the Globe interview, and how little I could imagine what that will cost me for the rest of my life. It’s worth it, Joe—I think it is, but …”

  “You have opened a door that cannot be closed,” Joe says quietly. “You call yourself an ordinary woman, but ordinary women do not do that.”

  It is my turn to pause and think for a moment. “What I have to hold fast to and never forget when things get tough again, as they are bound to sooner or later, is what immense human riches have come to me through that open door. The store is proving to be a true dream.”

  “What’s a true dream?” Joe asks, smiling.

  “One that can stand reality, that can be acted out, I suppose. I sometimes wonder of course what Vicky would think about it. After all, it’s her money that has made it possible. I like to imagine that she would be surprised and proud, but that no doubt is wishful thinking. Many of the people I have come to treasure she would have disliked or looked down on.”

  “From what you have told us about your friend, I have the sense that she loved power and also that power was linked up for her with class. You do not love power. I wonder why? Eddie and I have talked about it.”

  “Yes, I’m delighted when I can hand power over to someone else, and thus be free to do what I want. Power in a curious way restricts, closes the door on a lot, as you might say, Joe,” and since he does not answer, “don’t you agree?”

  “I guess I am thinking that you do have power, Harriet—for one thing you have money—but you don’t want to recognize it. Nothing wrong with that!”

  “Yes, money—I forget about the money,” and it feels like a shadow crossing my face. “Vicky empowered me, made it possible for me to do what I wanted to do and had it in me to do.”

  “But you could have chosen to go on expensive round-the-world cruises, after all. You could have bought a villa in Florence and entertained the famous.” He is laughing at me. “But you empowered yourself to open a bookstore, so …”

  “So you are letting me off the hook?”

  It is a moment of vulnerability for both of us and because it is we smile at each other, then laugh. In the middle of that laughter I know that Joe is close to tears. “You took your life into your own hands and were honest. But we never did and now that it is known around that Eddie has AIDS, we have come out in spite of ourselves, forced out, as it were. I hate it.”

  “But Joe, I did not make any big decision. It just happened, you remember, because the interviewer recognized a news angle and used it! I am really not holier than thou, so don’t give me credit for some heroic act I never made.”

  “The landlord is going to court on the grounds that we did not tell him we are gay and that now his premises are being poisoned.”

  “That is disgusting,” I say passionately.

  “It’s a pretty lousy world, isn’t it? Sometimes I envy Eddie who will soon be out of it.”

  “You know, Joe, the strangest thing for me to witness in all this is that there has been a significant change in the atmosphere around me and the store since Patapouf was shot. It fascinates me to think that there is a residue of compassion around that suddenly comes into view where an animal is concerned, as though the only pure thing left in this corrupt, hate-filled world is the love of animals.”

  Joe, I can see, is glad to have the
subject changed and shows immediate interest. “The Zeitgeist affected by a dog’s death! Amazing.” He thinks it over. “Yet I can understand it. This is something they can wholly understand. Homosexuality is something they can’t understand at all—hugely troubling, causing fear and hatred. It was easy to love Patapouf.”

  “It seems so cruel that it took her death to arouse some sympathy for me. People sometimes stop to tell me how sorry they are for what happened, and a little girl brought me a painfully written note of condolence. The trouble is that these people will never come to the bookstore and will never read anything that might trouble their minds. The store is an island in the middle of a rough sea.”

  As I speak, the image comes to me of how I felt about Martha’s paintings when she brought them to hang in the store. For me there was something nightmarish about the network of roots under the earth around each tree. It hit me somewhere below the conscious level. Now I suddenly understand why I felt so strongly and explain the whole thing to Joe. “I think I understand now,” I tell him, “why I was so upset by that image. I think it is because the roots are what the tree lives on; they cannot be changed. They are there until the tree dies, inherited roots of fear. The homosexual apparently attacks those roots.”

  Joe takes this in thoughtfully. “Yes, I see what you mean. But after all,” he adds, “we are really not attacking the roots, are we? We are quite content to let the trees alone, to flourish each in its own way and form, as long as we are left alone to flourish in our way.”

  “Oh well, like so many metaphors, if you run it into the ground—no pun intended—it suddenly doesn’t quite work. People do change. Andrew has, after all, but trees do not. Now I feel confused, as usual.”

  “We might as well play with images that don’t quite work, Harriet, as long as we survive. You are the living proof of that.” He is laughing with me now, and it is a good, relieving laugh. Joe himself is startled by it. “When I came in here I would not have thought I could laugh, Harriet. You are a magician.”