by May Sarton
“Thirty years.”
They all react to this at once, leaning forward.
“That’s amazing,” Erica says. “Thirty years …” She drinks some champagne.
“What made you decide to have a bookstore like this?” Veronica asks.
“I don’t know how to say it, but I wanted to create something on my own. Now and then Vicky and I had been into women’s bookstores here or there when she went out to drum up trade. I liked the atmosphere. I felt at home in it. People like us—I mean Vicky and me—don’t have that many places where they feel at home. She hated any feminist talk herself, but somehow she did connect with the women we met in the bookstores. It seemed logical to me—an adventure—a vita nuova—a challenge.”
“It took some guts, I’ll say,” the one with red hair smiles. “You are some brave lesbian.”
That word always makes me wince and somehow cuts me off now. And I look over to Joan, still busy at the counter. Help. I do not utter it but I feel desperate.
“You don’t like that open word, do you?” Red Hair pursues me. “Why not?”
“Vicky hated it. But anyway, apart from that, do people have to be labeled? It seems to create distance rather than intimacy. It sets one apart.”
“Oh,” Veronica ponders this, “it’s a way out for you, but you see, it’s not for us. It’s a matter of honor.”
“You have to remember that I’m old enough to be your mother, or even your grandmother.”
“You don’t seem old,” says Erica.
“Well, you must come back and educate me. It’s time now that we close up.”
“Oh we haven’t had time to look around and buy books,” says Red Hair, whose name I still do not know.
“All right, we’ll wait fifteen minutes. How’s that?” I go over to Joan to explain. “You must be dead, but you’ve certainly been adding like crazy.”
“We’ve done well,” Joan says.
I lean against the high counter, watching the girls fluttering around from tables to bookcases and cannot help smiling. Will they come back? They do buy, each one paperback, and dash away like birds in flight, all suddenly gone. I can hear Erica’s terrier barking.
I lock the door. Joan begins to collect champagne glasses and what is left of the cake to stow it in the small downstairs fridge. “Come on, Joan. I’ll do that later, for God’s sake. You must be ready to leave this place and relax. I’ll just take Patapouf out for a short walk while you sit down and rest. Won’t be a minute.”
But when we come back she is at the counter and announces, “One thousand dollars in the till, Harriet.”
“Not bad for the first day.” Tired I am, but this vast sum creates a spurt of adrenaline. “Patapouf will be quite all right here,” I say. “Let’s go.” We go out by the back door, the door that leads right up to my quarters, leaving Patapouf to guard the shop. “Let’s try that little French place down the street. My party, of course.”
“Not ‘of course.’ That is kind of you.”
Seated at a window table in the corner, we look across at each other and I, at least, feel the relief of not being among strangers and so visible. “Nice here,” says Joan.
We decide on coq au vin and I order a bottle of Beaujolais Villages. “Ah, now we can relax.”
I am looking around at the clientele, delighting to see that it could not have been a restaurant anywhere near Chestnut Hill. There are mostly students, as far as I can tell, several men sitting together, several older women sitting alone. Then I come back to Joan, who does look rather white and exhausted. “Are you regretting that you ever came into this crazy business? You must be exhausted.”
“Exhausted, maybe. Regretting it, no.”
“It’s wonderful to be with someone a little more mature than those girls. But you know, Joan, you are the most discreet person I have ever known. I realized the other day when we were shelving the books that I know almost nothing about you, except that you are on a committee with Angelica.”
“Just as well.” She frowns now and unfolds her napkin.
“You are married, are you?”
“Was married.”
I wait for more, but it does not come. Instead the wine comes and is uncorked for us. I take a sip and when our glasses have been filled, raise mine to her and meet her eyes, perhaps for the first time, and see how dark they are, and how somber. “Did your husband die?”
“No, we divorced last year, my fortieth year.”
“It sounds like a tough year for a separation. Do you have children?”
“No.” Joan drinks half her glass of wine. The atmosphere after all our jolly work together becomes strained.
“I guess I’m asking questions you really don’t want to answer. Forget it. Only I have grown to admire you, Joan, and want to be a friend, that’s all.”
“I find it very hard to talk about Martin,” she says, “or about myself. I envy you that you can.”
“Well, I was taken aback, I must confess, when those girls near the end began asking personal questions.”
“I was too busy to be aware of that, but you looked quite at ease. And I imagined that this is the atmosphere you have said you want.”
“True. I’m in for it. But, Joan, when one of them, Veronica by name, introduced the one who brought her dog in by saying ‘This is my lover, Erica,’ I can’t describe how bothered I was. And later the word ‘lesbian’ was bandied about.”
“Dear Harriet, you are an innocent, aren’t you?” This fact seems to delight Joan and for the first time she smiles.
“I don’t know. Vicky and I never talked about those things. But you have to remember that I am a grandmother in relation to people of nineteen or twenty. Can one close the generation gap? I wonder.” For I feel suddenly old and abandoned, way off somewhere on an island of time, untouchable. “They seemed amazed that Vicky and I had lived together for thirty years. Is that so odd?”
“No. But perhaps rare even among heterosexual marriages. What are the figures now? Half of all marriages end in divorce?”
“Why?”
“At around fifty men fall in love with young women,” she says coolly but it is clear to me that she is speaking of her own experience.
“I suppose the first fine careless rapture goes out of any intimate relationship quite early on. But isn’t it possible to have been building some kind of foundation meanwhile—shared interests, responsibilities?”
“Yes, but it is strange what an earthquake a passionate encounter may make; the foundations simply break down.”
How lucky I am, I think, because Vicky and I were so settled in together that a passionate encounter was not in the cards—or only once and briefly.
There is a silence. One of the things I like about Joan is that I can be silent with her and she with me. Out of the silence she speaks with unusual intensity.
“There is a huge emphasis these days on happiness, on being fulfilled—I believe that is the word—whatever the cost to anyone else. People are greedier about sex than even about money, as I see it. Enjoyment, taking what you want, has become a kind of imperative.” This is a lot for Joan to utter and I ponder it for a moment.
“Excess and then what?” I ask. “It looks from my side of things like a deliberate self-indulgence and then the punishment that implies, wild swings …”
“Some people don’t get punished,” Joan says bitterly.
“They manage to ‘adjust,’ if that is the word, to their own needs.”
“They love themselves as they are,” Joan says.
“You do sound bitter.” It pops out, for I had not meant to expose her at all.
“Well,” her eyes open wide, “I am. Martin got what he wanted and in the process left me nearly penniless.”
“It was a no-fault divorce?”
“Yes. How women have been conned by that statute, or whatever it is. After twenty years of marriage, being the housekeeper, cook, cleaning woman, and chauffeur for Martin, I got half of what our hous
e was worth and that was all.”
“How unfair!” I am really shocked.
“It’s fine for men. They don’t have to pay alimony these days. They get off more or less free.”
“Oh Joan, I hope I can raise your salary by the end of the year.” But as soon as I say that I know it is the wrong response. She does not want pity.
“You’d better wait till you know what all this adds up to. It will be interesting to see whether the next week brings in more people. After all, the first day had to be exceptional.”
And for the rest of the meal we talk about the store, both a little relieved at this point to move out of personal matters into what we share.
It is after nine when I get home. I did not dare hug Joan goodbye though I wanted to. Such a stalwart aid! In bed at last, with Patapouf beside me breathing deeply and giving an occasional muffled bark, I lie awake a long time. Warm September air blows the white curtains at the window gently in and out and I can see the ash tree lit up by a streetlamp, the only tree in my domain and already precious.
I do not need to look at Vicky’s photograph set up on the night table, I feel her presence so keenly. It seems strange to have no one with whom I can share all that is taking place. Of course she would have sneered at those girls and shut them up at once had she been I. Why hadn’t I?
Because being open is the foundation I am building all alone. I realize how vulnerable that makes me. But I need to enlarge the place of my tents, and this afternoon I saw how it would happen. I have to be prepared for shock and not turn away. But in spite of the slight panic these thoughts bring with them, deep down I feel happy. I feel ready for whatever may happen. I am glad I am sixty and more or less grown-up.
But before I fall asleep I wonder for a moment why Jonathan Fremont did not come to the opening.
4
We had agreed, Joan and I, that the shop hours would be from ten to six, and that she would come in the morning and I would be on hand in the afternoon. I would be there from 2 P.M. on. But there were problems. For one, the salesmen from publishing houses were apt to turn up in the late morning and it was up to me to do those interviews and decide what to buy. It is not a task I enjoy, although the salesperson is sometimes a woman. Candace Smith from Norton, for one, is congenial and quick to see what I am after. But how am I to know so soon what will be my needs in late fall and for Christmas and then in the early spring? The number and variety of books presented to me are immense, and sometimes I feel swamped and dulled into passivity by the weight of the decisions. The leitmotif becomes “Let me think this over.”
Thanks to Joan we do have a system. She places a card in the last one to sell of any book, a card which is then removed and a reorder set in motion. At least that is the idea for the nucleus of books I mean to keep in stock, classics like Out of Africa and The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas.
Joan rings me upstairs if a salesperson appears but if I am out he or she simply has to come back. I have it in mind to find someone to work on Saturday mornings so that Joan can have the weekend. I myself would like the weekends too, and perhaps eventually we can arrange for replacements for both of us. One problem is that I have to read so much. I am not going to sell books I know next to nothing about! And Vicky and I used to joke about booksellers, that they never read books, only sold them. It would be fine to stay in bed late on Saturdays and read.
The first week will be exciting, of course, because we can have no idea what will happen, whether a reasonable number of customers will drop in, whether my idea of tea in the afternoon and elevenses in the morning will take hold.
The day after the opening, I sit down at my desk with Patapouf lying beside me, feeling rather like a spider waiting for a fly. The first wanderer-in takes me aback because she looks at first like a bag lady, laden down with messy packages, a torn slip showing under an ancient long skirt.
“May I help you?” I ask, wondering whether to get up or not.
“I’d like to sit down,” she says.
“You are welcome. That’s what those chairs are for.”
“Thanks. I do my shopping and then there is nowhere to sit while I wait for the bus.”
I go back to listing some books I want to order.
“What kind of books do you sell?” she asks. “Women’s books,” she says with heavy irony. “I suppose that means those Gothic novels. All the same, that’s what women read.”
At this I wake out of my passive stance. “Ah, you are a different kind of reader then. As a matter of fact we don’t have those novels you dislike. No market for them really in a store like this.”
“Oh.”
“Why don’t you look around … when you have rested.” And I add, “There’ll be a cup of tea at four but I don’t expect you’ll want to stay that long.”
“Oh no. Jackie—that’s my cat—wouldn’t stand it if I stayed away that long.” Then she notices Patapouf. “You have a dog. Doesn’t he get bored here?”
“It’s a she and she is very old.”
We are interrupted before I can ask what she does read by a very tall thin young woman bubbling over with curiosity. “What a splendid bookstore!” she announces. “Am I glad you are here! I just moved into the neighborhood with my husband—he’s at Harvard—a month ago. I’m dying to get at some of the books. May I just wander around?”
She has on high black riding boots and a stunning black, broad-brimmed hat and wears heavy black-rimmed glasses. They add to her look of surprise and delight, I observe. “Where are you from?” I had guessed San Francisco, but I am wrong, of course.
“Lawrence, Kansas.”
“So you are a long way from home.”
“Oh it was never home,” she answers. “David was a lowly instructor there. We were captured, you might say, like wild animals and put in the academic cage.”
“Harvard is not a cage then?”
“It’s a lot better now we can afford a car.”
She has pulled out a book from a shelf of novels and begins to read. I wonder what she has chosen. It turns out to be Sylvia Townsend Warner, that new paperback with four of her novels in it, and I can’t help being pleased by her choice.
When she asks me about Warner, I explain that when I first discovered her with Lolly Willowes I felt she was a true original. “You may have seen her stories in the New Yorker.” But of course she is too young. I have to laugh. “At sixty I forget that some things are ancient history to someone your age.”
“I’m thirty. That’s not young.”
But now she is silent and sits down with the book. I go to the shelf of biography and letters and pull out Warner’s Selected Letters, one of my favorites. “You might like to glance at this,” I say, laying it on the table.
The old woman is saying goodbye at the door. “I’ll be back,” she says. “Thanks for letting me sit down.”
I could not have been more amazed after the door closes than I am when I hear, “The big problem is whether we should have children. David wants to be a father but I … I’m not sure.”
“What do you want of your life?” I venture to ask.
“I don’t know. I’m a painter actually, a painter with no success.”
It would be a fine sentence with which to open a novel, it occurs to me, as I sit down beside her. But what could make someone blurt out such a painful quandary to a total stranger? I had envisioned the store as a kind of haven, but I am not setting myself up as an amateur psychiatrist, although Joan has teased me that the big risk will be just that. People need to talk to someone … and why not be the listener after all?
“It’s the pressure,” she is saying. “At thirty I have to make up my mind, don’t I?”
At this I smile. “You’re asking me and I never married and never wanted children, so what can I say?”
“I don’t feel maternal, you see. It’s as though that had been left out of me. I never even played with dolls when I was little, but I always wanted to draw and was quite possessive about th
ose things I did with crayons on paper bags, and once in a while my mother pinned one up on the refrigerator. When she threw several away while she was vacuuming I had a tantrum.”
“It looks as though you had to go on painting, doesn’t it? Success or not. And what is success anyway? From what I hear these days it’s all a gamble.”
Too bad that at this moment a gaggle of college girls pushes in. But I do manage to say, “Why don’t you bring some of your work over? I’d like to see it.” In the back of my mind the idea has come to me that a large stretch of wall on one side of the store might be used to hang works of art.
“That would be great. Thanks. And by the way, my name is Martha Blackstone.”
“And mine is Harriet Hatfield.” On that we shake hands and Martha leaves after paying for the Warner novels.
Suddenly, as it draws near to four, the place is filling up and I am kept too busy for a while, making change and selling books, even to put the kettle on in the kitchen. It is exciting to be in business really for the first time.
So I am pleased that Jonathan Fremont arrives when Hatfield House looks like a going concern. That is a piece of luck.
“Sit down, Jonathan. I’m about to make tea.”
“I think I’ll just look around.”
I go back into the kitchen and set up a tray with cups and the big teapot Vicky and I used so often, a Chinese teapot with a bamboo handle. I set out some cookies and listen to the murmur of voices in the shop. When I come back the atmosphere has changed for, as I soon realize, Jonathan has decided to get into conversation with the girls and find out who they are.
“We’re from Lesley,” one of them is saying, but in a tone that suggests she thinks it is none of his damn business. He is the only man there and a lot older than anyone else.
I persuade him to sit down beside me and pet Patapouf, who has emerged from under my desk and is wagging her tail furiously. She has always been crazy about men. Vicky and I used to laugh about it. I feel shy as I pour out and try to behave like a lady on my own premises.
“It’s quite an investment, isn’t it?” he says with a smile. “Did the party go well?”
