The Education of Harriet Hatfield (29 page)

“We do have quite a lot in common,” says Phil. “Nan said we did, but I had to see for myself. We have some white friends, of course, but no one like you.”

“No one on the front line, Phil means.” He has gone to fetch my coat and Nan slips an arm through mine while we wait. “You know, I forgot all about dessert!”

“Just as well,” I say quickly.

Phil insists on seeing me to my car and I promise to call them when I am safely home. “Next time I’ll come and get you,” Phil says. “I don’t like your going home by yourself.”

“Thanks, Phil. Thanks for everything.” I wave as I back the car out and toot my horn as I take off.

The apartment feels cold and dismal when I let myself in. It was such a good evening with Nan and Phil, but now I am home and alone, terribly alone without my dog. I wonder how I can go on without a companion, without someone to love and to be loved by. Seeing their swift exchange, the way they tease each other, the way they smile at each other has driven home that this will never happen to me again, for Vicky and I teased each other and exchanged a judgment or our enjoyment of a guest with a single glance, and mostly there was the comfort of lying curled around each other in bed, that tender loving sharing of the night. I am lying in bed and it all comes back and I can’t shut it out. But at least for the moment the storm of tears is over. I am simply in a state of extreme loneliness and depression.

So it is a good thing that when the phone rings now it turns out to be Earl Cutler, quiet and assured, to tell me he has learned quite a lot this first day and expects to have some real news soon.

“What I can tell you now is that the shooting of your dog has, ironically enough, done you a lot of good. They were talking about it in that bar down the street and people expressed outrage. Besides which, one very red-faced burly man said, ‘That’s not the way to get that woman to move on. She’s a stubborn old thing and she has guts.’ A young man who looks like a carpenter or something of the sort asked, ‘What harm is she doing? What do people have against her? What can you buy in that store? Crack?’ The only answer was, ‘Obscene books, and she’s a queer herself—brings the wrong kind into this neighborhood.’”

I interrupt Cutler to spare myself the rest. For some reason I don’t want to hear these things, to see myself in the eyes of the neighbors as a kind of caricature. In some ways it is worse than a physical act of aggression. “All I long for is a little peace of mind,” I say before wishing him luck. I find it hard to get to sleep.

25

It is fortuitous that, because Fanny and Ruth are not available, I am working in the shop this Saturday. Four former members of my class at Smith turn up. I have had no response so far to an ad I put in the Smith alumnae magazine, so this is heartening.

“Tuffy! Anna! Jennifer! and …” For a second I can’t remember the name of the fourth one as she comes over and hugs me.

“Don’t you remember Sandra Hoffman? I lived across the hall.”

“Am I glad to see you! Of course I remember!”

“We are hoping you can come out with us for a drink or something,” says Tuffy, who looks amazingly as she always did, her red hair tousled.

“Well, I don’t close ’till six, so maybe we can settle for a cup of tea right here.”

“What an amazing store it is!” Anna has left the group and is pulling books out of the shelves on “herstory.” “I had no idea there was so much. Look at this whole row on nineteenth-century black women, Jennifer. Wow!”

“Make yourselves at home while I put the kettle on. I so hoped someone from Smith would show!”

Their enthusiasm is a tonic and I take my time arranging a plate of English cookies because I want them to have a chance to find out what the store is all about. Sandra already has three or four books of poetry in her hands when I come back with the tray. “Do you still write poetry?” I ask her.

“Oh, I don’t know. I used to think when the kids left home I’d get back to it but I’m in such a groove of committees and stuff, there’s no time.” She lays the books down on my desk. “I want to take these home with me. Don’t let me forget.”

While they browse and exchange finds—Tuffy is delighted to find the Sylvia Beach biography, Anna seizes on O’Brien’s Willa Cather—I try to bring them into focus in my memory. I did recognize them by name, but from below the conscious level, since they have changed—except Tuffy. It must be nearly forty years since we have met! And none, not even Sandra across the hall, was among my best friends.

It is wonderful to hear their excited chatter and real response to what the store is and represents. Who before now has appreciated it in just the way they are doing?

“You can have no idea how happy I am to see you,” I say when we are finally seated around the table and I am pouring tea. Tuffy, since there are only four chairs, has hauled out Joan’s stool. “It could be a dorm,” I note. “Never enough chairs.”

“What you need is a couch,” Tuffy says. “That is the only thing missing.”

Anna has been silent and sits leafing through Willa Cather, but she is listening and, looking around as she lifts her head, breaks into a warm smile. I recognize the smile and the very pale blue eyes.

“How shall we ever catch up on everything?” I ask.

“How can we catch up on forty years?” Jennifer says.

“Organize …” That is so like the old Tuffy, the most disorganized person I ever knew, who talked always about organizing, that I burst into laughter.

“Let’s just tell a little about ourselves, one at a time,” says Anna. “You start, Jennifer, and we’ll go around the table and end with Harriet, for of course,” she turns to me, reaching out a hand, “it’s you we want to hear about, Harriet. You’re the extraordinary one.”

“You’re the one who is doing something remarkable,” Tuffy adds.

It is absurd to enjoy their praises as I do. After all, they are old friends and we share the bond of Smith, but I have been starved for such praises and the feeling of being included instead of being off on the perimeter.

“I don’t have much to show for forty years out in the world,” Jennifer says, and I remember how modest she always was, brushing aside all the honors she pulled down. “I did not go into a daring career as a political scientist. I married one instead and did a lot of typing and proofreading for Ben and … well, we had four children, two boys and two girls, and I’m a grandmother three times over. That, I have to tell you,” she says with a laugh, “is the most thrilling and exhausting thing in my life at present!”

“Hear, hear,” murmurs Sandra.

“I bet you a dollar you’re holding back on something,” I tease. “Jennifer as the happy useful housewife and mother and grandmother just isn’t enough. Come on now!”

She is actually blushing. “Well, I’m rather active in the whole abortion business, the right of choice, you know. And just now in the last year I am helping to organize a chapter of Hospice to provide help for babies with AIDS. We live in Watertown—Ben is at Brandeis—and I am finding it a rather bigoted community. We have only a small center now—five beds. The need is simply enormous. One can have no idea until one gets involved. I guess that is my King Charles Head these days, trying to raise money, blood from a stone.”

I am stunned to think of all Jennifer manages to do, and we are all silent for a moment before Tuffy breaks the mood. “After a short pause in honor of our friend, it is my turn to exhibit my total failure and lack of anything at all to tell you that could possibly be of interest.” But she says this with a toss of her wild red hair and is simply greeted with laughter. “You may remember,” she says, her hands clasped on her knees, and she is suddenly in earnest, “that I wanted to be a writer, the new Katherine Mansfield, though I do not have t.b., a big mistake.”

“But you do have talent,” Anna breaks in. “No doubt about that.”

“Do I? It seems so long ago since I believed that.” She pauses to push her hair back. “Well, I wrote three novels after I left Smith and one got published by Houghton Mifflin, but they turned down the other two and so did every publisher you ever heard of. I worked in all kinds of stupid jobs, as a typist, for a time as an assistant editor at
Yankee
. I consistently fell in love to no good end except a couple of abortions.”

“Oh, Tuffy,” Sandra sighs, “how awful.”

“I’ve been in therapy of course and what comes out is lack of self-esteem. And why not, for God’s sake? Your work is rejected, you are rejected as a woman—and so how are you still supposed to stand like the Statue of Liberty, torch in hand, singing ‘O say can you see’ when all that is to be seen is a woman who has failed completely to be anything but a dud?” And as Tuffy always used to when telling bad news, she bursts into laughter. “A soap opera,” she laughs, “incarnate.”

Anna gets up and puts an arm around Tuffy. “You can’t let your talent go, Tuffy. You just have to keep at it.”

“But I’m sixty-one, Anna, after all.”

“How do you manage, Tuffy? You are so resilient,” Jennifer says. “Who but you could laugh at so much misfortune?”

“I’ve always thought humor could be the saving grace,” Tuffy says, “but the
New Yorker
doesn’t see it that way. They consistently turn me down like everyone else.”

“How do people handle so much rejection?” I wonder aloud. “To me it seems heroic.”

“When my pop died I inherited just enough so I can live without a job. So it’s not half bad now. And who knows? Maybe it will end with that wonderful title of Mansfield’s, ‘Not for Nothing Did the Chicken Sing.’”

We can’t help laughing, and Tuffy laughs the loudest. Her laughter is a kind of triumph. What a lovable woman and how strange that she did not marry after all. These days I see so much pain everywhere. And now here it is again being overcome. I have tears in my eyes and hope no one notices. I am so afraid a customer will come in and break the spell that I turn quickly to Anna. “Your turn,” I say, “and I am dying to hear. It’s a piece of luck that no customer has interrupted us so far.”

“Especially,” Anna says, “because what we really want to know is all about you, Harriet, so I’ll be brief.” She thinks for a moment, her chin in her hands, and I register once more what a presence she is, how quietly she makes herself felt, and wish I had known her better in college. “I don’t know how I do what I am doing these days, it is so complex—a little like opening Pandora’s box and after all the devils fly out finding there is another box inside that one, and then another and another. I’m a social worker, working with abused children and the parents or others who abuse them. It’s complicated and confusing a lot of the time. We can rarely get an open-and-shut case. What is depressing, of course, is how much child abuse there is—and in all levels of society. I work mostly with small children in nursery schools, children whose parents are middle class, educated, and fairly well-off.”

Having said this Anna breaks off and looks round at us. “I could talk about it for hours, but I’ll spare you and simply add that my husband is a pediatrician and we have two grown-up sons, one of whom wants to be a psychiatrist, and the other is now at Harvard Business School. My problem appears to be how to detach myself enough from my job. It is devouring and frustrating, a poor combination.”

“Yet,” I say impulsively, “you seem so serene, so full of some quiet assurance and—yes—power.”

“It’s a professional disguise,” Anna says, but to me that sounds like an evasion.

“It’s tantalizing to hear all these things so briefly, isn’t it?” I say. “Now it is Sandra’s turn.”

“Well, I am the perfect example,” says Sandra with a smile, “of the intelligent woman who wanted to write poetry but instead has let herself get involved in God knows how many causes, from better housing for the old, to birth control, to cleaning up waste, to helping plant new forests in areas completely deforested in Africa and elsewhere. Sometimes I do feel useful, which I never did as a poet. My husband and I divorced years ago. Luckily we had no children. So there it is. The slogan around my Cambridge friends appears to be ‘Let’s ask Sandra—she has time.’”

We all recognize this state of affairs and the smile goes round the circle, and is then interrupted by Jennifer, who demands that I at last tell them about myself.

“We know that you lost your publisher friend, Vicky Chilton, and that you opened this bookstore. What an adventure at sixty!” Tuffy breaks in.

Now the attention is focused on me I realize that I do not have the vaguest idea how much to tell, how much to let go. None of these women apparently ever loved a woman. It doesn’t sound as though they were aware of what has been happening and I feel rather like a person on the moon trying to make contact with normal people going about their business on the earth. “I’m really afraid of shocking you,” I murmur.

“How could you possibly do that?” Jennifer asks. “This bookstore is clearly an enormously enriching and life-giving place.” She hesitates. “Isn’t it?”

“Sometimes when I think of all the friends I have made since I opened it, I do think so, and I am kind of proud of the mixture, all sorts of women dropping in and talking with each other—just as I dreamed.”

“So what is wrong, then?” asks Anna, giving me one of her penetrating looks, the professional look that requires an honest answer.

“What is wrong is that some half-crazy locals are out to force me out of this neighborhood. Their threats and actions against me and the store have been going on for weeks.”

“Aren’t you frightened? After all, you are alone here, aren’t you?” asks Jennifer.

I sense their real concern. They are involved. They care. “I live upstairs alone and until my dog was murdered I felt quite safe because she would have defended me, although she was old, but she had a very loud, dangerous-sounding bark.”

“Did you say your dog was murdered?” Sandra asks, her eyes very wide.

“Apparently, by an old woman with a rifle. I was taking Patapouf on our evening walk.”

“It doesn’t seem possible,” Tuffy murmurs. “I mean, why are they, whoever they are, trying to drive you out?”

“And why do you stay under such circumstances?” Jennifer, who is quite pink with emotion, asks. “It’s too dangerous, it seems to me. I mean, after all, it’s only a bookstore and you could move to a different neighborhood.”