The Education of Harriet Hatfield (8 page)

“May I suggest that you convey the information Miss Hatfield has given you to the person who brought the complaint?” Joan says.

“I’ll do that.” He is no doubt relieved to be able to do something. Then he smiles at me. “I had somehow expected some young dyke in trousers with a bow tie. Not,” he adds with a patronizing smile, “an elderly lady like you.”

Somehow it gives me a clue. “My guess is that that anonymous letter was written by an elderly lady.”

“Elderly dames don’t wear blue collars,” he shoots back. So it was a man, after all. As I had feared. “My advice is to take some of those queer books off the shelves, at least for a while.”

“That’s not advice I can take,” I answer. “I try at least to be open-minded.”

“Well, have a good lock on your doors, and good luck to you. Call us if you need us.”

So we go back to the store to find Martha waiting to hang her paintings, and two newcomers, an elderly woman and the stunning young black woman who had come the first day.

“Your dog has been defending the store,” Martha says.

“That’s a pretty forceful bark,” the black woman says, and laughs as I unlock the door. “Do we dare come in?”

“Oh, Patapouf gets scared when she is left alone, not to worry,” and indeed Patapouf is now wagging her tail as they troop in after me. It all feels so jolly and safe. It’s as though the letter has been a bad dream. I remember suddenly that Sergeant O’Reilly did not give it back. Just as well. But when I mention it to Joan she offers to go back and get it.

“We might need it as evidence.”

Back in the store, back in my own world, I am elated. It is good to be with three women who seem happy to be there, the elderly woman absorbed already in the poetry shelves. The black woman, whose name is Nan Blakeley, offers to help hang the paintings and that absorbs all our attention for a half-hour. Now that they are on the empty wall and I stand and look at them, I find I like them a lot more than I expected to.

“Beautiful,” says Nan beside me, and turning to Martha, “Aren’t you proud?”

“Sort of,” Martha admits. “It’s the first time I have shown my work, so …”

“I’ve always wanted to be a painter,” says Nan, who strikes me as someone able to connect quickly, as she obviously has with Martha.

“Now you have worked for your keep,” I say. “What can I do for you, Nan? I know you were here before. What are you especially interested in?” I feel it is a clumsy question and a little condescending. When will I ever learn? Learn the right tone, be at ease as Nan is?

“Oh, first of all black literature, especially autobiography by women. I saw that you had quite a lot when I came in the first time but I had to leave. So if I may, I’m just going to burrow in.”

“I thought about putting all the black writers together and then thought that all good writers should be placed together, not separated by race or even sex. Was that right?”

“Absolutely,” Nan says. “Of course.” She has taken Alice Walker’s
In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens
off the shelf and is sitting beside Martha, who seems lost in a trance, looking at the paintings. “What a wonderful title that is,” she says.

“It’s essays, actually, and very good they are.”

“I guess I’ll have to take it, along with Toni Morrison’s new one—you must have that.”

“On the table in front.”

When she comes to the register with the two books she lays them down for me and then kneels down to pat Patapouf, who is asleep now under the desk. “Such a dear old thing,” she says.

Somehow that gesture makes it possible for me to ask what I have been dying to ask. “I’ve been trying to guess what your profession is. Is that indiscreet of me?”

She laughs then. “You’ll never guess!”

“A psychiatrist?”

This makes her laugh again. “No, I’m a housewife, mother of two little girls, so an amateur psychiatrist maybe. My husband is a physicist at M.I.T.”

Martha hears this and comes over. “But what did you do before?” she asks.

“I was a journalist. Wrote a column for the small-town newspaper where I grew up in New Jersey.”

“How could you bear to give it up?”

“It didn’t seem important,” she says. “I guess I just wasn’t that involved.” She is looking at Martha with real interest, trying to figure out perhaps why all these questions. “It’s not like being a painter. Are you married?”

“Yes.”

“Any children?”

“I don’t want children. I know it sounds crazy and wrong … that’s what my husband says. He says I’m not natural.”

“You’re in a tight spot,” Nan says gently. “I don’t envy you.”

“It’s tough enough being a woman artist. Children might make it impossible,” says Martha with a slightly aggressive tone. She adds, “Where are your children now?”

“The smaller is in preschool. The other is in elementary school.” She looks at her watch. “I guess I had better be off to fetch them. It’s later than I thought.” But she does not hurry out without turning back at the door. “Good luck!” she says. “Good luck to the painting!”

I am thinking what a charming woman Nan is as I go over some orders. My desk is a bit chaotic. Somehow I do not notice when Martha leaves. It is very quiet now in the store, but I am not alone and, remembering that warning letter, am rather glad not to be. But in a few moments the elderly woman has paid for Amy Clampitt’s new poems, and now I am alone.

I look around the shop: books in their brilliant jackets, Martha’s paintings, light and air. How can some brute want to destroy this? Already the atmosphere has changed for me. It has become a fort instead of an open, human place. But even as this thought crosses my mind I push it away. “They” are not going to change the atmosphere, I say to myself. We are going to hang on here.

For the next hour, with no customers to interrupt me, I manage to clear away most of the bills, and that helps. “Compose the mind,” as Vicky used to say. Making order out of chaos does it for me. But remembering Vicky is not the best thing for me to do at the moment. She would be upset, horrified at what is happening. No doubt she would blame me for exposing myself as I seem to be doing without even realizing what a women’s bookstore would involve, how much I would be asked to face in myself. Though she would have called that nonsense. Vicky did not want to think about what labels like lesbian, queer, deviant meant. We were as we were and to hell with everyone else would have been her attitude. But she would have approved of Joan—aloof, embittered, coping with a divorce and an unfair settlement. Vicky would have been quick to sympathize with her.

I wonder whether I am a coward not to have said to Sergeant O’Reilly that I am a lesbian, although—and here I cannot help smiling—a lady. For that might have changed his image of us a little. Yet, I know that I could not do that. To some women who have come into the store as a pair, I have talked about Vicky. But that is different, that is simply sharing.

Shall I tell Fred what is happening? The very idea makes me physically uncomfortable and I get up and get a dog bone for Patapouf as some kind of gesture to keep the devils at bay. My family had seemed to take for granted that Vicky and I were partners and had never asked an embarrassing question. And Vicky would have lied if they had probed. But if only the obvious, the exhibitionist, the aggressively role-conscious women “come out,” how is a bridge ever to be made? And is it not precisely that bridge that I had envisioned, though not consciously, when I dreamed of a women’s bookstore? As though somewhere deep down I want to be counted in, to be an active part of what is going on, want to make known where I stand in a discreet, unobjectionable way?

I wish there were someone I could talk to. Caroline! But Caroline is dying. I cannot drag her back into life. No, there is no one, and so I am thinking when Angelica walks in. “Oh Angelica!” I cry out fervently, going to greet her.

“Yes, Angelica … you sound marooned,” she says, sitting down. “Nobody here, I see.”

“They come and go. Today has been rather quiet. I even managed to clear my desk.”

“Bravo!” She gladly accepts a cup of tea and I go out to put the kettle on while she talks to Patapouf, who has emerged from under the desk to be petted.

“Well, you seem to be well launched,” Angelica says when we are settled with cups of tea. “It’s a delightful atmosphere. What are those strange paintings, by the way?”

“A young woman brought them in. She’s having a hard time being an artist and not wanting children, as her husband does.”

“So you offered to hang her work? Of course you did.”

“Yes. I am not crazy about it, but she needs support. If someone buys one, that will be great. And, besides, I am on her side.”

“It’s all happening, just as you dreamed it would,” Angelica says warmly.

“Yes, but …,” and of course the story of the anonymous letter and Sergeant O’Reilly, all of it has to be told.

“Mmmm,” Angelica says, not looking at me, a little shy, I think. “A dirty business, Harriet.”

“The last thing I expected,” I confess. “It really shook me up.”

“An alarm system?” she says then.

“No, they always go off by mistake. I shall have stronger locks put on, and then we’ll wait and see.”

“Rather like sitting on a keg of dynamite. Why don’t you and Patapouf spend the nights at my house for a while?”

That is so like Angelica, but it is not a solution, not really. “I can’t run away,” I explain.

“Hatred,” Angelica murmurs. “Of course you are frightened.” I sense that she is holding back.

“And confused,” I say, “confused … It is also illuminating in a way. I have never felt like a leper before, an outcast. But huge numbers of people in our society do, of course. Maybe, for all we know, the blue-collars do.”

“Come on now!” Angelica says, quite crossly for her. “You don’t have to become a saint, do you, to stand firm?”

So at last I can laugh at myself and the whole stupid world. “I don’t know,” I say, pouring us another cup of tea. “I probably asked for this without even knowing what I was doing. A women’s bookstore is going to attract all sorts of women. That is what I wanted, after all.”

“But has there been an inundation of women couples?”

“No. A few. All charming so far. All people I want to know. It’s the young who have no doubts, you see. They introduce a friend as their lover. I must say it does amaze me. It even shocks me.”

“I don’t like it, Harriet. It just seems so naked.” And in Angelica’s tone I recognize myself, the self of two weeks ago who has already begun to change.

“I like honesty,” I say. “I like it that they include me. And that’s what I want of this place: an open door and no judgmental values.”

“You’ve come a long way, baby,” says Angelica, mimicking the cigarette ad and teasing a little as she does so. And there it ends for the time being, Angelica insisting that she will call me every evening and that I carry a cane when I give Patapouf a last walk.

After she leaves and it is nearly six, I close up. Patapouf will have to wait until I can pull myself together. So far I have been too busy to be more than superficially afraid. Now I have the odd sensation that I mustn’t move, and with Patapouf at my feet, I sit in the armchair by the cold fire for quite a while. I can hear footsteps on the pavement below, and once a motorcycle revving up and roaring away, people laughing, the grinding roar of the bus as it comes to a halt. These are familiar enough sounds, but I am ultrasensitized to another sound which, if it exists, is being drowned out. But, after all, who would try anything sinister at this time of night? I decide to walk Patapouf while there are still homecomers in the streets.

Whatever “they” will do or not do, they have invaded my life already and changed its atmosphere and that makes me furious. But out on the street with the old dog, and leaning on my cane while she smells every tree trunk, I am suddenly not afraid at all. Several people are neighbors, saying something friendly like, “How are you doing?” If there are enemies among the workingmen on their way, they do not show it. And suddenly the whole affair seems ridiculous. Two young women carrying book bags stop to ask me if I own the bookstore and beg me to stay open one night a week till eight or nine. They cannot know what a godsend they are.

“I’ll think about it,” I assure them, “when I can find an assistant to spell me and Joan. It is so good to feel the bookstore means something to you.”

“We want to come and see,” the tall one says, “but it’s hard in the daytime. You see, I clean houses in the afternoons. I have to have a job. It’s awfully expensive being a student these days.”

“We clean as a team,” the other girl says. “It’s fun in a way.”

“Look,” I say on impulse, and because I like their faces, “I’ll open up now for a half-hour for you.” I have it in mind that they might be the answer to Saturdays, but it is a little soon to act on that impulse. At any rate they jump at the chance to come in and look around and bury themselves at once in silent roving from bookcase to bookcase, taking out a book now and then to look into, then carefully putting it back. Finally the tall one asks, “Do you have a book about those Welsh ladies, the eighteenth-century ones, who lived together in some remote place, but everyone knew them?”

“The ladies of Llangollen.” I recognize them of course and go to the bookcase of biographies to pull out an English paperback. “This is what you are after.”

“Oh my,” the other one says, “how much is it?”

“I’ll mark it down to five dollars. It’s a little worn at the binding I see. Paperbacks do split rather often.”

They exchange a look. “We’ll buy it,” says the tall one, burrowing into her jeans pocket. “Hot dogs for dinner, Fanny,” she says to her companion, “but it’s worth it,” she adds with a smile.

As I make out the slip I am still uncertain about whether to ask them for Saturday help or not. Meanwhile I talk. “My friend Vicky and I went to Llangollen to see the farmhouse. We had a picnic in a field nearby, such lovely rugged country. But the house itself feels empty and strange. I felt that their ghosts had left, even from their big double bed with its dark carved bedposts.”

“Oh, tell us more,” says Fanny.