Lover. Bertha Harris
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most women who were single mothers led—and still do lead—lives devoted to acquiring the bare necessities—neither had directly experienced those disquieting conditions: so they resisted and ignored them. As well, it bewildered, and often downright aggravated them, to see women who had some discretionery money spending it on a night out, in company, instead of on Daughters’ books. They also avoided looking at the bottom line: that most people, men as well as women, would rather do nearly anything than read unless the book is “useful” nonfiction or escapist fiction; and it’s cookbooks and children’s books that are the entirely dependable sellers. The war against Random House was being constantly lost.
Given their temperaments—Parke and June were highly competitive, ambitious, and proud; they were quick to take offense, they often perceived offense where none was intended; and they did not easily tolerate frustration or disappointment—it isn’t surprising that the partners were frequently in a state of emotional turmoil which too often was directed at outsiders in the form of insults and hostile confrontations. Many of those outsiders were people who could have done Daughters and its authors considerable good.
Part-time editorial work, for which I was fairly paid, soon began to include unpaid labor: witnessing the often violent personal fights between June and Parke; monitoring their often combative meetings with writers; trying to con people whom the partners had insulted into believing that they hadn’t really been insulted; and consulting with the partners over their growing enemies list. The “enemies” I knew of were those who had disappointed or frustrated the partners by not buying June’s lesbian-feminist party line—and then, having been offended by the partners, offended them in return.
By the time the partners dissolved Daughters, the enemies list included all of mainstream and women’s publishing, the entire membership of the women’s movement, and last but not least, the only good Indian, me.
Almost from the beginning of our association, every move I made away from June and Parke, no matter how slight or temporary, met with their displeasure, then with suspicion (consorting with the enemies), and with charges of “disloyalty.” My heros, friends, publishers, and employers were underneath it all a creature known as folie à deux, which consciously, and conscientiously, never stopped trying to turn itself into an à trois. It’s hard to find good help: but Batman, perforce, needs his Robin, the Lone Ranger his Tonto, and even seething paranoids crave someone to lean on.
Soon I was seeing my friends on the sly; after a while, I woke up one morning and realized that I never saw my old friends any longer—and that I didn’t know how to see them without Parke and June finding out. I couldn’t understand why I was afraid of their finding out, nor did I yet understand why it was so crucial to them for me to know only the two of them. They once berated me for inviting the eminent scholar and critic Catharine R. Stimpson over for a drink without first asking for their approval, and for not asking them over as well. I waffled. By “berated,” I mean the sort of loud, infuriated name-calling and sin-listing inquisitorial attack known as verbal abuse. I was afraid that Parke was going to hit me; more often than not, when words failed to score the point she wanted to make, Parke used her fists.
The truth was that I didn’t want them to become acquainted with my friends any more than they wanted me to have any friends other than the two of them. I was afraid that one, or both, would lash out at people I cherished. I had learned my lesson early on when I invited June to meet my dearest friend, the painter Louise Fishman. I don’t recall the preliminaries but in short order after the introductions, June was, unprovoked, raging at Louise, insulting her life, her work, her background, while reserving special (and mysterious) contempt for the fact that Louise had played basketball in high school. Louise’s response was sensible. She put on her coat and quietly went out the door as if she were backing away from a barking, potentially dangerous, dog.
I put the scene out of my mind. Unless I wanted to walk out behind Louise—and to my eternal shame, I did not— I would have to, at all costs, avoid thinking about June’s assault. I put it out of my mind—and kept it in that overcrowded “out there” —until now: that is to say, their tyranny over me, and my cooperation in being tyrannized, survived their deaths. June has been dead, at this writing, for ten years; Parke died in February 1992, less than a year ago.
Beneath the fragile gift-wrap of her professed politics, June Arnold regarded herself, by virtue of her socialite Houston upbringing, as a singular aristocrat; as such, she tended either to patronize or lavish disdain on any woman (or man) without class characteristics she could honor. It was as simple as this: Louise had played basketball; June had grown up riding her family’s horses. Poverty irritated June; she understood that one might be born poor but to go on being poor into adulthood, she felt, demonstrated either an annoying weakness of intellect, or some pre embryonic poor judgment in not getting oneself born an heiress, or some perverse refusal to grab hold of the legendary bootstraps and give them a good yank.
It was, however, the “common” woman who was being canonized by radical and lesbian feminism in those days: the more victimized by sexism or by patriarchal institutions, the more, so to speak, sainted. There was an unspoken taboo against personal ambition. “Using” the movement to achieve individual goals was tantamount to committing the mortal sin of “betraying the revolution,” or betraying the women’s movement, or all women. It was also a time in feminism, coincidentally, when mothers, as opposed to fathers, could do no wrong—a response to the Freud-inspired years of blaming mothers for everything.
Daughters, to some extent, practiced the politics June preached, by publishing literature by women overwhelmingly trapped in circumstances beyond their control— Born to Struggle by May Hobbs, for example, and A True Story of a Drunken Mother by Nancy Lee Hall, and I Must Not Rock by Linda Marie.
But in real life, June was dealing with her feminist embarrassment (not guilt: good feminists had nothing to feel guilty about) over hiring a maid and having the money to pay her well, by tying a big pink ribbon around the new mop she’d bought her, as if it were a gift.
Without money, class, or horses, I could only assume that what separated me, in June’s view, from the common feminist herd was my small literary distinction. But it wasn’t enough. June wanted me cut out of the herd absolutely. June decided, and Parke went along with it, that it would be better all around if I came from a more socially acceptable background, one rather more like hers or Parke’s.
June’s politics were by and large for public consumption only. She swore, for example, by one of the most fundamental tenets of the women’s movement, the one on which consciousness-raising, the first step towards liberation, was based: that one woman will unquestionably believe what another woman discloses about her life and the nature of her background. Privately, however, June persisted in reverting to type. In one of my most memorable encounters with the partners, I learned that after close and careful consideration, June had decided that I must be lying about the circumstances of my birth and upbringing in order to gain movement credentials. Nobody, said June, could be as bright, as educated, as good a writer, as well spoken and well mannered (and so forth) as I was—yet come from the deprived circumstances and cruel mother I had only very slightly, and very casually, filled her and Parke in on. It’s impossible, said June, we do not believe you.
While I was profoundly moved and impressed by women such as Linda Marie, who could tell the story of her horrific childhood in clean, spare, glowing language (in I Must Not Rock, which I had the honor of editing), I was myself so ashamed of being my mother’s victim, and of my helplessness in her power, I made every attempt to conceal the facts of my early life even from intimates, even from myself: I had, for example, spent most of the first four years of my life in a crib which was, in effect, a cage; my mother had ordered a sixth side carpentered for it, a hinged “lid” that locked me inside for most of the day and all the nights. One day my father was moved to take me out of the cage and destroy it. Within the hour, he began teaching me his dance routines. I did not think of myself as a victim; I thought of myself as incredibly lucky. I’d escaped, I’d survived; I was therefore undamaged: wasn’t I? If anything, I had embellished my childhood for June and Parke to make it seem reasonably “normal” to them —more eccentric than awful.
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