The Education of Harriet Hatfield (35 page)

“You know, Joe, the strangest thing for me to witness in all this is that there has been a significant change in the atmosphere around me and the store since Patapouf was shot. It fascinates me to think that there is a residue of compassion around that suddenly comes into view where an animal is concerned, as though the only pure thing left in this corrupt, hate-filled world is the love of animals.”

Joe, I can see, is glad to have the subject changed and shows immediate interest. “The
Zeitgeist
affected by a dog’s death! Amazing.” He thinks it over. “Yet I can understand it. This is something they can wholly understand. Homosexuality is something they can’t understand at all—hugely troubling, causing fear and hatred. It was easy to love Patapouf.”

“It seems so cruel that it took her death to arouse some sympathy for me. People sometimes stop to tell me how sorry they are for what happened, and a little girl brought me a painfully written note of condolence. The trouble is that these people will never come to the bookstore and will never read anything that might trouble their minds. The store is an island in the middle of a rough sea.”

As I speak, the image comes to me of how I felt about Martha’s paintings when she brought them to hang in the store. For me there was something nightmarish about the network of roots under the earth around each tree. It hit me somewhere below the conscious level. Now I suddenly understand why I felt so strongly and explain the whole thing to Joe. “I think I understand now,” I tell him, “why I was so upset by that image. I think it is because the roots are what the tree lives on; they cannot be changed. They are there until the tree dies, inherited roots of fear. The homosexual apparently attacks those roots.”

Joe takes this in thoughtfully. “Yes, I see what you mean. But after all,” he adds, “we are really not attacking the roots, are we? We are quite content to let the trees alone, to flourish each in its own way and form, as long as we are left alone to flourish in our way.”

“Oh well, like so many metaphors, if you run it into the ground—no pun intended—it suddenly doesn’t quite work. People do change. Andrew has, after all, but trees do not. Now I feel confused, as usual.”

“We might as well play with images that don’t quite work, Harriet, as long as we survive. You are the living proof of that.” He is laughing with me now, and it is a good, relieving laugh. Joe himself is startled by it. “When I came in here I would not have thought I could laugh, Harriet. You are a magician.”

“Mostly bewildered, as you well know, mostly in the dark, Joe. I wish I could help with Eddie.”

“I am the one who needs your help. Invite me for breakfast again, will you?” He is standing, ready to leave, and comes round the table to shake hands, holds my hand hard in his, and then takes me into his arms for a warm hug. “Thank you, dear woman, for being here.”

Perhaps, I am thinking, after the door closes behind him, that is all we can do for each other, be available, be here, the door open. That is what Joe does for his patients and what Andrew does for Eddie. In my own awkward way, it is what I do here in the bookstore.

I am startled now by a sharp knock at the door. “It’s me.” I hear Joe’s voice and open it at once. “Halfway to my office I had to come back.”

“Sit down, what’s on your mind?”

Joe puts his head in his hands and after a moment there is a harsh sob, as harsh as his laughter had been when he first came in for breakfast and talked about Eddie’s casual pickups, but when he lifts his head he is himself again.

“Harriet, I had to come back because I realized how unfair to Eddie I was just now—blaming him for getting AIDS as though he had done it on purpose.”

“It didn’t sound like that to me. Is it possible to come to terms with the plague? You are bitter, but how normal that seems. Why should this happen? How can it happen?”

“I said it happened to Eddie because he went in for brief encounters.”

“Yes, you did say you resented that. Why wouldn’t you?”

“He is much younger than I am and at that time his needs were different. I accepted that. The trouble is, Harriet, that now I can’t accept it.” He slaps a fist into his other hand. “I am jealous now as I was not then. And it makes me sick.”

“I don’t have any answers, Joe.”

“I came back to try to tell you what I have again managed to deny. Eddie is the love of my life. Seeing him suffer, being unable to prevent this horrible death, I guess it makes me a little crazy. I guess I came back to tell you I know that, to ask you to pay no attention when I go right off the beam. There is no one except you to whom I can talk at all. Just remember the love when pain obscures it, will you?”

I hesitate to ask, but feel I must. “It would be so easy to run over for a brief visit. Would Eddie like to see me?”

Joe is visibly uncomfortable as he answers. “No. It sounds strange for he admires you, but he doesn’t want to be seen. The only visitor, if he can be called merely that, is Andrew. I’m sorry, Harriet.” He looks at his watch. “I’ve got to run. A patient is waiting for me right now, a fellow whose friend died of AIDS two weeks ago.”

And this time no goodbye and no hug. He has rushed out, and I hear the car accelerate and roar off.

This is the way my life is these days and the way it will be. One major problem appears to be settled—Rose is leaving town—and then another problem breaks over my head like a huge wave. But it’s all right, I say to myself. It’s the way things are. It’s the real world and I am fully alive in it.

A Biography of May Sarton

May Sarton (1912–1995) was born Eleanore Marie Sarton on May 3 in Wondelgem, Belgium, the only child of the science historian George Sarton and the English artist Mabel Eleanor Elwes. Barely two years later, Sarton’s European childhood was interrupted by the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and the onset of the First World War.

Fleeing the advancing Germans, the family moved briefly to Ipswich, England, and then in 1915 to Boston, Massachusetts, where her father had accepted a position at Harvard University. Sarton’s love for poetry was first kindled at the progressive Shady Hill School, a period she wrote about extensively in
I Knew a Phoenix
, published in 1959.

At the age of twelve, Sarton traveled to Belgium for a year to live with friends of the family and study at the Institut Belge de Culture Française. There, she met the school’s founder, Marie Closset, who grew to be Sarton’s close friend and mentor, and who was the inspiration for her first novel,
The Single Hound
(1938).

On returning to the States, Sarton graduated from Cambridge High and Latin School in 1929. Although she was awarded a scholarship to Vassar College, Sarton joined actress Eva Le Gallienne’s Civic Repertory Theatre in New York instead, much to the dismay of her father. However, while learning the basics of theater, Sarton continued to develop her poems, and in 1930, when she was just eighteen, a series of her sonnets was published in
Poetry
magazine.

In 1931, Sarton returned to Europe and lived in Paris for a year while her parents were in Lebanon. In large part, Europe provided the backdrop for her encounters with the great thinkers of the age, including the novelist Elizabeth Bowen, the famed biologist Julian Huxley, and of course, Virginia Woolf. After Sarton’s own theater company failed during the Great Depression, she turned her full attention to writing and published her first poetry collection, entitled
Encounter in April
, in 1937.

For the next decade, Sarton continued to write and publish novels and poetry. In 1945, she met Judy Matlack in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and the two became partners for the next thirteen years, during which she would suffer the deaths of several loved ones: her mother in 1950, Marie Closset in 1952, and her father in 1956. Following this last loss, Sarton’s relationship fell apart, and she moved to New Hampshire to start over. She was, however, to remain attached to Matlack for the rest of her life, and Matlack’s death in 1983 affected her keenly.
Honey in the Hive
, published in 1988, is about their relationship.

While the 1950s were a time of great personal upheaval for Sarton, they were a time of success in equal measure. In 1956, her novel
Faithful Are the Wounds
was nominated for a National Book Award, followed by nominations in 1958 for
The Birth of a Grandfather
and a volume of poetry,
In Time Like Air
; some consider the latter to be one of Sarton’s best books of poetry. In 1965, she published
Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing
, which is frequently referred to as her coming-out novel. From then on, her work became a key point of reference in the fields of feminist and LGBT literature. Strongly opposed to being categorized as a lesbian writer, Sarton constantly strove to ensure that her portraits of humanity were relatable to a universal audience, regardless of readers’ sexual identities.

In 1974, Sarton published her first children’s book,
Punch’s Secret
, followed by
A Walk Through the Woods
in 1976. During the seventies, Sarton was diagnosed with breast cancer—the beginning of a long and arduous illness. However, she continued to work during this difficult period and received a spate of critical acclaim for her literary contributions.

In 1990, she suffered a severe stroke that reduced her concentration span and her ability to write, although she did continue to dictate her journals when she could. Sarton died of breast cancer on July 16, 1995. She is buried in Nelson, New Hampshire.

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 1989 by the Estate of May Sarton

Cover design by Mimi Bark

ISBN: 978-1-4976-4747-3

This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

345 Hudson Street

New York, NY 10014

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EBOOKS BY MAY SARTON

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