Wish number three. I just wanted proof he was thinking of me. Hannah rushed gladly toward the picture, only to have it fade and then vanish altogether in the four seconds it took to cross from pay phone to sink. The portrait was gone. There was no proof.
Steps in the hallway outside reminded her that at this late hour she was trespassing illegally and had better skedaddle. The security guard was approaching.
She stood absolutely still for a long moment, and then tiptoed out of the bathroom and out the side exit she had propped open earlier. The Metro was still running, and she joined other late-working Washingtonians wearily peeling off Capitol Hill and outward toward suburbs. The usual single-tracking delay gave her a few extra moments to wonder what had just happened.
There’s a connection— first bleeding, last cycle, womanhood, paper. I raged against my period for keeping me from hiking. But we who came of age with second-wave feminism were radically essentialist, hiding under the covers with copies of Our Bodies, Ourselves, looking at the diagrams of our own vaginas, writing in our diaries about the drama of our first periods . . .
That was it! Suddenly Hannah remembered her dream from weeks before, inspired by the conversation with her friend Efren: the vision of an underground river made up of book dust and women’s handwashing. In that river she saw the ashes of burnt diaries, girls’ thrown-away diaries, the embarrassed, destroyed truth-telling of generations. That, too, was a literature flushed away, hidden and yet shimmering with life. Those ashes mingled with other book dust. Hannah had saved her own journals, but too many other young women had been terrified of discovery, of being outed if their diaries were found. This was a lost genre flooding global waterways, tiny bits of paper, badly burned school pads, shredded confessions. How much magic lay in those tender pyres? Where did it all end up?
Am I supposed to reconstitute all the lost lesbian diaries of the world? Return them to their original owners? Crawl into the sewers of D.C. and catch the pages being burned as they’re flushed down? Oh, no. Not that. Surely not that. Please, Sappho!
She buried her head in her arms.
• • •
Later, at home, she threw off her clothes, grabbed a cookie and called Isabel. “So let’s say Sappho’s poems were burned by angry Christians offended by her desire for other women,” Hannah began.
“That’s one way to start a late-night erotica call,” laughed Isabel. “Good to hear your voice, too, my darling!”
“I know. I’m a failure at phone sex. There’s too much on my mind. But honestly, did you ever think about where those ashes ended up? Suppose not all her work was burned completely and some fragments could be reconstituted into poems?”
“That is what happened. That’s how we have some of her surviving work today. You know that.”
“Yes, but . . .” Hannah struggled to sound coherent. “If the ashes wound up in the rivers where ordinary women dipped their water pails, that means that generations of Greek and Roman and Turkish girls were . . .”
“. . . drinking Sappho,” Isabel finished.
Hannah paused. “And in this country, we’re still drinking from rivers and waters that contain writings burned by women. Or even women burned as witches . . .”
“Go on. Puzzle it out.”
“We are Sappho!” Hannah shouted, never minding a sleepy bang on the wall from her neighbor in the adjoining apartment. “We are the witches. We are the books. We are formed from the women in the water. We are the naiads!”
And far away in the distant city that had been home, where her lover the mystic still lived and ran the bar, she heard the joyous chuckle erupt from Isabel’s throat, so loving and yet terrifying with power. And Isabel whispered, sounding so close by, “Hannah, I am the mixologist to your Overheard. What do you think a lesbian bar really is? A place where we reconstitute ourselves, across time, as all the women who have ever been challenged and survived. And we drink to those women, and we drink of those women, and we continue in every generation as those women. Their lost words, their essence. Do you understand, now, that this is the essence I’ve been mixing into those drinks? It is the essence of every lesbian across time that I have stockpiled in my wine cellar.”
Chapter Six
A Reception for the Banned
“Someone must have come by while you were at lunch,” said Aurora. “They left what looks like an invitation on your desk. Well, I’m off. Cheers!”
Hannah waited until she was certain she was alone— the other staff were at a budget crisis meeting— and then, glancing into the hall to be sure of no impending interruption, sat down at her desk. The invitation had her name embossed with a soft green type the likes of which was not used in her time, and seemed to be a card scroll tied in a fabric ribbon. The ribbon had clearly once been used for some other purpose, with a single long white hair clinging to its frayed fabric. Whose hair? An invitation from whom? From where?
She unrolled it. The elegant handwriting (Whose handwriting? Whose ink?) was a summons. It read, Miss Hannah Stern is requested at the Reception for the Banned.
That was it. No time, place, date. But wait— even smaller letters added, RSVP. How was she supposed to respond?
She found herself heading to the women’s bath-room on the ground floor. It would be very crowded at this hour. There’d be docents, tourists, school field trips and church youth groups, library staff reapplying lipstick after lunch, security guards on break. It was risky. But she had to make an attempt. It wouldn’t look odd anyway, to anyone paying attention, if she went to the pay phone and dialed for information. Would it?
Luckily for Hannah, there were only three women in the lounge when she entered, all washing their hands and laughing about a previous night’s TV episode. She hesitated, then picked up the pay phone receiver and fumbled in her pocket for quarters, not sure what number to dial. She needn’t have bothered. Before she had even attempted to deposit a coin, there was a voice on the line, distant and watery, intoning one word: “Go.”
“Um, hello,” Hannah sputtered, and then collected herself. “If I am speaking to the right party, I just got your . . . invitation. Where is this . . . reception?”
Silence. Whooshing like an ocean wave, which grew, and swelled, and passed. Then: “We’re dining up there, now. Won’t you come and see us? We’ll be waiting.” The line quieted to silence. Then the loud blare of a phone left off the hook.
Up there! Was this a summons from She, the Overhead? No, this had to be something else. Some sort of library mystery occasion. Hannah returned the phone to its holder and backed away. Now, dining “up there.” There was in fact a dining area, a café, on the top floor. It would be closed for the after-lunch cleanup, wouldn’t it? And thus used for some other purpose without much notice. What about the kitchen workers, though? Were they possibly in on this “reception”? She headed to the elevator on wobbly legs. Then, as she rode up to the top floor, it occurred to Hannah to take out her hairbrush and sweep it over her head, to tug her blazer into place, pull up her socks. When summoned by unknown entities to a party, it was always good to look your best.
She felt something strange but recognizable transforming her posture as she rode up one more floor: her hips, legs and shoulders were shifting into what the photographer Joan Biren had called in her lesbian slide show, “the look, the stance.” She was standing with one hand on her hip and one eyebrow up when the elevator opened, presenting not just as a scholar but also as a dyke.
The cafeteria had vanished. Hannah found she was in the foyer of a richly tapestried restaurant. At the entrance, holding a golden clipboard, stood a small gray-haired figure she recognized— a writer she’d met and corresponded with, and who had only recently passed away: Nancy Gardner, author of the young adult novel Annie on My Mind. “You got your invitation!” said Nancy, gliding toward her on sneakers that hovered just about half an inch above the gleaming hardwood floor. “This way.” She pulled aside a beaded curtain, and a roar of conversation and tinkling
glassware greeted them, along with delicious smells. Poached fishes, roasted potatoes, partridges in sauce, wines, rosewater puddings . . . egg creams? Wait a minute. This menu comes from some of my favorite books!
“‘The lunch on this occasion began with soles, sunk in a deep dish, over which the college cook had spread a counterpane of the whitest cream, save that it was branded here and there with brown spots like the spots on the flanks of a doe,’” Virginia Woolf quoted herself as she floated toward Hannah.
“Why on earth would they ban us when we mostly wrote about food?” demanded Gertrude Stein. “They fear our sensuality, the power of the senses to arouse.” She handed Hannah a glass of absinthe. “And this was banned as well, after our time.” She sighed.
“Because it had elements certain to trigger madness in the soul,” explained Renée Vivien. “I should know. I stopped eating and only drank absinthe.”
Hannah looked around. A Reception for the Banned. These were the women whose books had been banned, censored, excoriated by shocked critics, denounced at public trials by pompous judges, hounded from the shelves of libraries, criticized at PTA meetings and school board hearings, in news-paper reviews and editorials, from the pulpit, in evangelical literature, in the Catholic List. Regardless of the quality of their writing, which ranged from admittedly awful to superbly crafted, these women had borne the sting of rejection simply due to subject matter— and because of who they were. Not all at this gathering were gay. But all were women of their time in ways that had shocked and prodded and opened up society. Independent women, intellectual women, lesbian women, feminists, bluestockings . . .
“Oh, there were plenty of other words to describe us,” said Gertrude Stein, and Radclyffe Hall added: “I am indeed a congenital invert, myself.” Hall quoted from James Douglas, the editor of the Sunday Express: ‘I would rather give a healthy girl or boy a phial of prussic acid than this novel.’ Really!”
“You could be swept off the shelf no matter how many prizes you’d accumulated if parents disliked your tone,” snapped a woman with short hair and a Southern accent, and Hannah stood with head bowed before her favorite children’s book author, Louise Fitzhugh. “Parents objected to my Harriet the Spy because she described people in her notebook. She seemed to operate independently of adult authority. Well, welcome to the twentieth century!”
“That was the only children’s book I ever had where the main character wanted to be a writer,” Hannah said. “And it took me years of research to confirm that you were gay.”
Fitzhugh shrugged. “Most of the kids who wrote me said their favorite characters were Harriet, and Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird.” She jabbed a thumb in the direction of a little woman eating a slice of cake. “Nelle still won’t cop to being lesbian, though it’s always been so obvious to the rest of us. But no question about her being invited to the reception: Mockingbird was banned, and banned, and banned again.”
In this stellar crowd of ghostly stars of literature, all of whom had felt the sting of rejection by both family and censors, waitresses circulated with elegant trays of every food lovingly described in all the authors’ books. Women stood in threes and fours, graciously nodding to the ghostly waitstaff, accepting aperitifs and hors d’oeuvres, laughing and flirting, the living and the dead: Jane Rule, Maya Angelou, Radclyffe Hall. Judy Blume, Alison Bechdel, Madeleine L’Engle. Alice Walker, Lesléa Newman, Lillian Hellman. A large glass-topped centerpiece, set up amid thirteen linen-covered tables, displayed yellowed newspaper clips and journal pages detailing the banning or removal of each woman’s book. Fascinated, Hannah turned toward this exhibit, much of which was very familiar to her from the American Library Association’s “Banned Books Week” project. During the 1990s, some of the most frequently banned books included Heather Has Two Mommies, The Color Purple, Annie on My Mind, and almost everything by Judy Blume. Also in the display were several copies of the lesbian magazine Bad Attitude.
“That last one’s mine,” said a woman Hannah didn’t recognize. “Were you part of the sex wars, sister?”
“I— no,” stammered Hannah, remembering too late that this was a political term for the standoff between pro- and anti-pornography feminists in the 1980s. Women Against Pornography and the Feminist Anti-Censorship Task Force had spent bitter years WAP-ing each other in the FACT. But no, it had not been funny. At all.
“Yep,” affirmed the woman, who wrote erotica. “You know that women like Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon worked to pass anti-pornography statutes in major American cities and even joined forces with some right-wing groups to ban porn as harmful to women. Well, Canada paid attention. In 1992 my Canadian Supreme Court declared that even ‘sex without violence that is degrading and dehumanizing’ toward women could be banned. And within six weeks the Toronto cops seized this magazine from our women’s bookstore and arrested the manager, who happened to be a woman I loved, and then what? Then what?” A sturdy team of Canadian lesbian ghosts, all in ice hockey goalie shirts and holding double-double coffees in Tim Horton’s cups rather than champagne, now surrounded Hannah. It hadn’t occurred to her that Canadian ghosts could be threatening rather than friendly.
“You took away our erotica,” these spirits moaned.
“The Ontario court allowed for censoring all lesbian literature and held it at the border. Said that lesbian love, like gay love, was ‘devoid of any real, meaningful human relationship.’ Anyone who mailed us books had their shipment seized, and the bookshop owners were all charged with obscenity. What a loss for our readers!”
“But you fought it in the courts,” Hannah recalled.
“Till we ran out of money. Did you ever know any feminist bookstore owners with bottomless pockets? These are some of the reasons those bookstores went out of business. And you did that! You American feminists!”
“It wasn’t me!” Hannah cried. “I, I only went to one anti-porn rally! It was in opposition to that image of a woman in a meat grinder! I never meant for love stories to be confiscated at the border!”
“Yes, welcome to the reception for the banned,” and ghostly bookshop managers in maple leaf jackets swarmed over Hannah’s body like angry bees. “It begins any time just one woman’s writing is banned. More writing gets banned than anyone planned. Understand?”
“She gets it. Leave her be.” It was, again, Radclyffe Hall, the writer Hannah had “met” once before in a ghostly birthday encounter. Hall and Virginia Woolf regarded one another over Hannah’s head. “Hullo, John,” murmured Woolf.
“I was banned.” Hall stood in the center of the room, brandishing the stem of her champagne glass. “I was defended by Vera Brittain, you know, the author of Testament of Youth. She told the press, ‘Persecution and disgusted ostracism have never saved any difficulty in the world.’ Yes, and despite her support— and Vita’s,” she gazed at Woolf again, taking her measure, “I was taken to court, on trial for obscenity, mind, starting on November 9, 1928.”
“And I can’t for the life of me see how,” jeered Fitzhugh. “Where is the obscenity in that novel? Where are the hot parts? The whole book rambles toward that one line, ‘and that night they were not divided.’”
“Naw— there’s infidelity in there. And adultery. ‘Took her and kissed her on the lips, as a lover.’ That line caused trouble; but didn’t that line warm up your cave? It did mine,” said Dorothy Allison.
Hall looked pained to have her magnum opus debated as arousing or not. She pulled from a waistcoat pocket her notes on writing The Well of Loneliness and quoted herself. ‘What happened in England was a Government prosecution, two Police court actions both of which we lost in truly amazing circumstances, and as a result the suppression of the book which, however, was published again in Paris unabridged and in its original language within one month of that suppression. Had I required proof of the blind and bitter antagonism that exists against the inverted, and which in itself shows the vital necessity that existed for the writing of my book, then I had that proof
as I sat in the police courts and listened . . .’
Margaret Sanger interrupted. “Yes, we know. But consider what I went through! My birth control advocacy, printed in my magazine The Woman Rebel, was duly seized by U.S. postal authorities and banned as obscene well before the Great War, oh so many years before your Canadian debacle. I had to leave the country and take up residence in Holland. And when I returned, arrested again! I went on hunger strike, only to be force-fed. My sister Ethel and I . . .”
Woolf, who had defended Hall in England, pointed out, “But, dear Margaret, recall that the New York police also invaded the office of Hall’s American publisher and confiscated 865 copies of Well of Loneliness. We have, so many of us, tasted humiliation.”
“I prevailed,” boomed Hall. “Oh, you Americans, for whom I have such gratitude! American law, yes, federal law of 1929, held up literary merit as evidence! Literary merit prevailed! I was found to deal with ‘a delicate social problem’ and all charges were dropped!”
“I don’t know about her literary merit,” whispered Woolf to Vita Sackille-West.
“I heard that,” snapped Hall.
“But then why would you go backward in time to those repressive 1920s by setting up a climate for banning dyke lit in Canada?” the contributor to Bad Attitude challenged Andrea Dworkin, who had materialized in full battle dress— her beloved denim overalls.
And pointing to Radclyffe Hall, she said: “You’re no better. You looked down on the lower classes and the working class women who wrote steamier scenes than you dared. You preferred, and I quote, ‘The worthy among the inverted— those fine men and women whom Nature has seen fit to set apart as variants from the more usual type. . . . I do feel very sad when I read some of the books that have rushed through the door over my dead body, books giving a completely distorted idea of true congenital sexual inversion . . . worse still, books written with an eye to sales, dirty, unworthy, lewd little books . . . stressing only the physical side and thus throwing the whole picture out of drawing.’”
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