for Vicky had been rather violently antifeminist. Like many powerful women with successful careers she was apt to identify with men rather than women and felt a little superior, perhaps, to women. “Any woman who proves that she can do successfully what men do, in her case running a publishing house, is by her action rather than her belief, a feminist.” It was said vehemently out of my own convictions, but once said, I saw the humor of it, and laughed. “No feminist she, but don’t you see she taught me to be one by being what she was?”
“My little sister is growing up,” Fred said then.
“Yes, Fred, she is,” and I looked him straight in the eye.
“It is going to be an interesting experiment, Harriet, and I wish you well, wish you what your heart desires.”
That was my first confrontation about the bookstore. And I felt that I had won, won at least my own self-respect. How long would it be before I could put my dream to the test?
It soon became clear to me that I am not a practical person, so at times in the next year I was in a state of panic because of a whole lot of business affairs that had to be concluded. Here I have to admit that Mr. Fremont was a helpful watchdog. The hardest thing was breaking up our house, selling furniture, for instance. But I kept Vicky’s big desk for myself, a kind of anchor for me in the bookstore part of the house, and was able to furnish my apartment upstairs very comfortably.
Angelica Lamb stepped in with an excellent suggestion of a young architect to draw up plans for the bookstore. Most of our friends were supportive even though most of them had no real sympathy with what I wanted to do. Angelica really behaved like a sister and without insisting made several other good suggestions. One was to draw people in with something other than books—cheese and wine, for instance. But I disagreed with her on that. I felt sure that once the shop existed and could be seen it would draw women in little by little. I also balked at her idea that I might have poetry readings, for I am not very interested in poetry. Vicky was, and I always felt ashamed that I just could not react as she did. In college at Smith I had majored in history and I had been fascinated for years by all that was coming out about “herstory,” how much had been buried about women’s lives in the past and was now being discovered.
Slowly my rather vague ideas were coming into focus. There must be a table or set of shelves devoted to what has become a kind of canon in the women’s study programs. There must be a large selection of paperbacks, of course.
But even Angelica raised doubts about the emphasis on women. “Why does it have to be limited at all? A good bookstore should be open to all literature,” she felt.
But here I was adamant. In the women’s bookstores I visited in Philadelphia, Washington, and New York I always had the sense not of limitation but of a door that had been opened and always I saw a great variety of customers.
I suppose the hardest day was when Vicky’s and my house in Chestnut Hill was emptied. It had sold for a very handsome price but I had not somehow faced the actual uprooting and every time a piece of furniture was carted off, I felt a sharp pang, as though it had become a piece of my own flesh. Then there was the garden. There would be no garden in the new house, no seed catalogs and plant catalogs; only book catalogs would come to me from now on. Would the new owners care for the garden? the tree peonies? the old-fashioned roses?
“Oh Angelica,” I cried out, “what am I doing?”
“You simply must close it off,” she said, “you can’t look back now. You can’t afford to, Harriet.” And she had dragged me off at five for a drink and supper at her house where I would find dear old Patapouf, our ancient Labrador retriever, waiting for me. Angelica had offered to take her in until I could have her back. And I hugged her and sat down beside her for she was