Lover. Bertha Harris
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It was late in the life of Daughters, which was, by 1977, becoming more of a armed camp than a publishing company. The screws were tightening on Parke’s paranoia, which she had lately begun to express as a fear that “something might happen” to June if June didn’t withdraw from public view.
By then, however, June was up to little more than talking old-fashioned lesbian-feminist cant at nothing more dangerous to her health than Modern Language Association Conventions. I once listened to June say at an MLA seminar—which was perhaps entitled Whither Clit Lit?— “We’ve [Daughters and the feminist presses] gotten rid of harsh expressions like screw and spread your legs … and reclaimed fat and wrinkled as adjectives of beauty.” Parke was fat, June was wrinkled, and leg-spreading in their bed was on the wane. Parke sat beside me during June’s presentation checking out the audience, some of whom, she’d warned me, would be FBI agents masquerading as academics and writers. Anyone who couldn’t look her in the eye was an FBI agent.
I hadn’t taken Parke’s fixation on FBI infiltration seriously because more often than not she made a joke or a game out of it. I was therefore surprised when the partners initially resisted my desire to publish M. F. Beal’s Angel Dance: in which a strong-minded feminist revolutionary, who’s survived the male left of the sixties, fights her way through sinister attacks from both the left and the right, and ultimately enjoys sex with a women’s movement star in a snowbound cabin. There was nothing wrong with the politics of Angel Dance that I could see, and it was also a heady novel of suspense written with confidence, ease, and sophistication.
When I (wrongly) persuaded Parke and June that Angel Dance was going to be a bestseller just because I loved it, they let me go ahead and write M. F. Beal a letter of acceptance. Working with M. F. Beal was an interesting change from the usual. As soon as M. F. Beal returned her signed contract, Parke told me that she’d had word from Beal that while I was working with her on the book, I must under no circumstances send anything in writing to her through the mails; all editorial work had to go on over the phone, but it had to be over a public pay phone, never a private one.
What?
Parke hinted darkly that the plot of Angel Dance might be based on the author’s real-life experiences, which (Parke suspected) were replete with dangerous emissaries from the right, and desperadoes from the left, and roughnecks from the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
True to form, I did as I was told by the boss. Parke liked me to call her the boss. I enjoyed getting out of the office, even when the local street nuts tried to horn in on my pay-phone conferences, but nothing in my conversations with M. F. Beal gave me reason to believe that she was anything but a good novelist who wanted the best for her book.
It took me a while, but eventually I understood why Parke was buying surveillance equipment, adding locks to the company doors, and regularly inspecting its telephones for taps: government taps. I got it; Parke wasn’t playing cloak-and-dagger games, she was dead serious.
With considerable braggadocio and swagger, Parke had gone up against “Random House” when she’d entered into the Daughters’ partnership. She had, for years, precisely followed the rules of capitalism to achieve success for Daughters, and had openly showed her contempt for the feminist presses for not being intelligent enough (or rich enough) to do the same. But, in her view, she had failed; “Random House” had won. Daughters, Parke felt, had earned little more than a small succès d’estime —and that, only when she was talking to the right people: who were never the “right” people, who were the New York literary establishment.
Inspired by Angel Dance, Parke looked in another direction for grandeur of another kind. If the FBI was seeking to find incriminating evidence against Daughters, or to plant some, then Daughters was important. There-ore the FBI was after Daughters because Daughters had to be important. It was true, of course, that the FBI had routinely monitored feminist meetings and individuals since the sixties; and certain of the sisterhood who entered the women’s movement after working for left-wing causes were loathe to give up their dangerous-character identities.
But we were, as I pointed out to Parke, entering the late seventies; I suggested to Parke that it must be common knowledge, even to the feds, that feminism as a fomenting revolutionary force was now a back number if it had ever been a number at all. Guilt by association, Parke answered, now that we’re publishing Angel Dance. They’re going to try to nail us.
Angel Dance was published in 1977. That same year, the Women in Print Conference that June had organized among women’s presses, large and small, nationwide, took place during a heat wave and a plague of grasshoppers in a deeply rustic Girl Scout camp surrounded by cornfields outside of Omaha, Nebraska. June was responsible for that choice of location. It was central to all the presses; fairness was the issue, not comfort. Neither Parke nor I wanted to summer in a hot cornfield; I had wasted three days of my extreme youth with the Girl Scouts trying to get a close look at some eighteenth-century “chewed paper” chairs, so I hated the thought of a Girl Scout camp. But the Women in Print Conference was June’s most ambitious stab at achieving movement esteem. A Nebraska cornfield, a Girl Scout camp—Nebraska itself—would serve to demonstrate that she could be a common woman with the best of them.
I told June that speaking as a common woman, I myself preferred hotel rooms in San Francisco or New Orleans to cornfields in Nebraska. Parke told me to shut up, we’d get a kick out of slumming—besides, if we didn’t go along with June “something might happen to her” out there in the alien corn all by herself.
At least a hundred women in print showed up. We all had to take turns going into Omaha to shop for food, then cook it in the unrelieved heat. Some of the hundreds were vegetarians; some, macrobiotic; some spat out anything with sugar in it. The politics of food was under constant discussion. I don’t cook. I was finally coerced into representing three-personed Daughters at the stove, so one night I fried fish and wrote on the chalkboard menu that it was fried grasshoppers—free food, therefore the most feminist food.
There was a major cornfield abutting the cabin where Parke, June, and I slept. The first night of the conference, while June was out working the camp, Parke had a look at the cornfield, then tiptoed over to me and whispered this: The cornfield is full of FBI agents. I laughed. Then I looked at her. She was trembling with fear, tears were in her eyes. It got worse: The FBI, she was certain, had been monitoring feminist presses, and the single feminist publisher, for a long time. Now that everybody was corralled in one place, they’d have an easy bust; any minute, the feds would be slapping the handcuffs on every “pinko” woman in the Girl Scout camp, but they’d take June and her first because they were the most important—and because June was a well-known “ringleader.” She and June were going to the slammer, they’d be locked in separate cells, she was never going to see June again. Parke began weeping.
I was afraid of all that high-as-an-elephant’s-eye corn myself, but then I’d always been an indoor type. I made light of the corny agents; I tried to reel Parke back in by reminding her that what Daughters did— all Daughters did—was publish fiction by women: therefore nobody, but especially the FBI, took us seriously. Fiction wasn’t taken seriously, I said, women were taken less than seriously; fiction by women? Just a big joke.
Wrong. Women were dangerous, lesbians were even more dangerous, books about dangerous women … and so forth.
If June, and Daughters, could get famous no other way they were going to get it as Most Wanted. Parke refused to sleep or eat. She crouched under a window and aimed her binoculars at the corn. I went to find June. I told her that Parke thought that the FBI was hiding in the cornfields and that I thought Parke was having a nervous breakdown. June seemed indifferent; her expression was blank. She said that if I thought Parke was having a nervous breakdown, then I must feel free to take her back to New York; then she returned to the business of Women in Print. I returned to Parke. On my way, it struck me that June’s response to my announcement was eerily calm; my news, I saw, was old news to her. By the time I regained Parke, I was convinced that June had traveled to Nebraska hoping for agents in the cornfield. More than one woman whose ideals and personal ambition had been disappointed by the women’s movement half-hoped