The Education of Harriet Hatfield (31 page)

“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 very 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?”

“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 hold 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?”