Page 7 of Upstate

It’s been fifty-nine years since I first clapped eyes on you, but I remember the moment like it was yesterday. You were striding along the shore of Panther Lake, short hair tucked behind your ears and trousers loose around your long legs. Anne was hustling to keep up, pointing out various aspects of the camp as you took notes on a reporter’s pad. Ruth trailed behind, their German shepherd (his name was Mickey, do you remember?) dashing back and forth between his two mistresses. I went so weak in the knees at the sight of you, I tripped pulling my canoe onto the beach and got a dunking. I’d have hated for you to see me looking like a drowned cat. Luckily, you didn’t turn around.

When did you catch your first glimpse of me? I overheard you tell Pat Highsmith, once, that you’d fallen in love with me at first sight, but I know for a fact you were at Camp Kokatosi for an entire day before you noticed me. Not that I blame you. I wasn’t especially athletic or entertaining or clever, and I certainly wasn’t one of the prettiest girls there. If I stood out for anything, it was for being among the youngest. The advertisement I’d clipped out of the May 1956 Journal of Education described Camp Kokatosi as a place where “the mature woman and girl of twenty-one are equally at home,” but I hadn’t expected there to be so few girls my age. I supposed, once I got there, that a camp catering to “business and professional women” tended to attract those who were further along in their careers. I hadn’t even started mine yet. I’d just graduated from the College of Saint Rose with my teaching degree, but I did have an offer in writing to become village librarian in Schuywich come September. That must have been professional enough to satisfy Ruth Day when she reviewed my request to vacation at the camp.

Mother certainly didn’t like the idea of me gallivanting off to Maine for the entire month of July instead of helping with the gardening and pickling and canning that kept her tied to the house all summer. I told her it was my graduation gift to myself, paid for with the money I’d saved working nights and weekends in the college library. I’d planned on using my nest egg to set myself up in an apartment once I got my first teaching assignment, but when the librarian quit, I decided to put off my independence a few years longer for the sake of my little brother, who’d had a hard time at home while I was in Albany for college. Before I knew it, I went from bunking in a girls’ dormitory to being back in my childhood bedroom without ever having had a chance to live on my own. Camp Kokatosi, I decided, would be my consolation prize.

Besides, there was something about the wording of the advertisement that intrigued me. After spending my entire life under either my parents’ roof or the watchful eyes of the Sisters of St. Joseph, I was drawn to the promise of a “different vacation, free from the restrictions typical of resorts.” Mother sarcastically called it a spinsters’ paradise, but the ad’s use of the word “different” made me reach for the Modern Library edition of Lillian Hellman’s plays I kept hidden in plain sight among my schoolbooks. I reread the lines I didn’t dare underline even in pencil, the lines that had sent chills down my spine when I saw Patricia Neal in The Children’s Hour on my freshman-year theater trip to New York City. After Karen tells Martha other people aren’t destroyed by the sin they’ve been accused of, Martha says it’s different for those who believe in it, who want it, who choose it for themselves.

I still remember the recognition that dawned on me in the Coronet Theatre that night. I’d never heard anyone put into words the strange way I felt about women and men and marriage. When Martha realized the false accusation that had ruined their lives inadvertently named the truth about what was wrong with her, I hardly had time to think, That must be what’s wrong with me, too, before Martha ran offstage and shot herself. In the minute before the inevitable suicide that allowed plays about lesbians to be produced on Broadway back then, I saw a reflection of myself alive on that stage. That was the night I realized I was different, too. I couldn’t be certain the ad for Camp Kokatosi was using the word in the same coded way as Lillian Hellman had, but at the very least I’d enjoy a few weeks’ respite among unmarried females making their own way in the world.

That a summer camp in Maine counted as my big adventure must have sounded pathetically provincial to you. By the time you were my age, you’d graduated from Bennington College, joined the Marine Corps Women’s Reserve, and been stationed to Hawaii. You’d even gone on a fact-finding mission to Korea, while the farthest I’d ever ventured from home were the chaperoned trips I took with classmates to Manhattan. To this day, I’ve never been on an airplane or crossed an ocean. We used to talk about going abroad, but in the end, we never went anywhere more exotic than Provincetown. I didn’t mind, though. As long as I was with you, I was exactly where I wanted to be.

So off I went to Camp Kokatosi. A week later, you appeared: a glamourous writer from New York City working on a piece for Mademoiselle magazine about summer camps for professional women. Did you understand the moment you met Anne and Ruth that they were a couple? You must have. In Greenwich Village, Anne’s slicked-back hair and pleated trousers would have labeled her a butch from a block away. Up at camp, though, where we all dressed for comfort in cotton shorts or dungarees and no one wore makeup or curled her hair, it took me a few days to figure it out. I’m not sure if the campers who really were spinsters turned a blind eye or simply didn’t know the word for what they were seeing on dance nights when Anne and the other women dressed in drag led ladies in skirts through a polka or waltz. We all had fun, and we were all friends, and what happened between cabinmates after the music ended was nobody’s business.

“May I have this dance, Hazel?” Those were the first words you said to me, do you remember? Mother always criticized me for being an oafish girl, but with your arm around my waist and my hand in yours, I felt as light-footed as Ginger Rogers. By the end of that dance, I knew the river of my life had jumped its bank to run along the course you set.

The next day, I asked my cabinmate if she’d mind moving into the main lodge, where you’d been staying, so there’d be an empty bunk beside mine. Anne and Ruth, who were delighted to help my cause by playing Cupid, suggested you might be more comfortable sharing my quiet cabin. I knew you’d seen through my ruse from the mischievous smile on your face when you came in clutching your portable Smith-Corona.

We spent that first night talking until dawn. By the second night, there was nothing left to say in words. My inexperience made you think you ought to move slowly. I wanted everything all at once. Your hands on me. Your mouth. Your weight. Though you were the one who wore trousers by day, we didn’t divvy things up butch and femme in bed. You had to show me a few things, sure, but my pleasure was never complete until I heard you cry out, too. I staggered through those summer days like a zombie, purple circles deepening around my eyes as if we spent our moonlit hours prizefighting instead of making love. They used to call women like us “unnatural,” but when you touched me, it felt like the most natural thing in the world.

For a fortnight, we conjured our own little world in that cabin on Panther Lake. Then came the day when you packed up your typewriter to return to the city. It took every atom of energy in my being not to bawl like some brokenhearted bimbo. I wasn’t expecting any promises when we said our goodbyes. After all, what would a worldly woman like you want with a hick like me? You taught me more than I’d ever imagined about what love between two women could be, but you never led me on with that word. Like a bee drunk with gathered pollen, all I could hope was that the love we’d made together would be enough to nourish me the rest of my life.

I spent a sad week moping around camp before heading home to Schuywich. Your letter inviting me to visit you in New York arrived the same day I did. You were careful not to put anything incriminating into words, but simply holding a piece of paper you’d touched the tip of your pen to made my heart beat so hard Mother grew suspicious. Billy begged me not to leave again so soon, but I told my little brother he was almost ten years old now and ought to be able to take care of himself. Daddy put an end to the discussion when he announced he needed to pick up some supplies in Saratoga Springs and might as well drop me off at the station. I felt like Nellie Bly embarking on a life-changing journey as the train chugged down the Hudson.

I didn’t recognize you on the platform at Pennsylvania Station looking like a lady in your silk blouse and fitted skirt. Then you smiled, and the picture of your face fit the pattern drawn on my heart. “It’s such a nice day, Hazel,” you said, “why don’t we walk?” We linked arms and hoofed it all the way down to Washington Square, you carrying my Samsonite suitcase, me ignoring the bite of my new shoes. By the time we got to your tenement apartment, flaps of skin were hanging from my bloody heels. It felt like a baptism, the way you bathed my feet in warm water before taking me to bed.

I filled scores of pages in my diary with details about the week I spent with you, but I don’t like reminding you about your life in Manhattan. I worry, even now, that in some corner of your mind you harbor regrets about the choice you made. Suffice it to say, the cafés where we ate, the clubs where we danced, and the people we met were all a revelation. I used to think I was a freak for feeling the way I did, but in Greenwich Village there were hundreds of women just like us living fabulous lives practically in plain sight—well, except for the unfortunates locked up in the Women’s House of Detention, their barred windows overlooking the streets where we felt so free.

I’ll never forget how you held my hand in the dark while we watched The King and I (in CinemaScope!), or how you surprised me with those tickets to see Julie Andrews in My Fair Lady. You took me to a party at Pat Highsmith’s where she made a pass at me, do you remember? I was flattered by the attention, alcohol fueled as it may have been, but even more flattered by the way you came to claim me as if I were your prized possession. Is that where you introduced me to the couple who’d been together since they met as children in an orphanage? I thought that was the most romantic thing I’d ever heard, until romance turned to tragedy when you whispered in my ear that one of the women (the one with red hair, wasn’t it?) was dying of cancer.

During the span of a single week, you opened my eyes to a different kind of life that made my future as a small-town librarian look pathetically bleak. I was thrilled when, on the last morning of my visit, you nuzzled my neck and said, “There are plenty of teaching jobs in the city, Hazel. You’ve got your degree in education. There’s enough room in my apartment. Why don’t you come live here, with me?”

I wasn’t sure if you were inviting me to be your roommate or your partner. You still hadn’t said you loved me. In fact, I bet I could count on my two hands all the times you’ve actually said those words to me and still have a couple of fingers left over. Don’t worry, I’m not complaining. You’ve never been demonstrative that way. But while I rode the train back up the Hudson, my only intention was to quit my job, pack my things, and run off to live the life you’d offered as fast as the New York Central could carry me along its tracks.

When I wrote to say I couldn’t move in with you after all, I was crying so hard my tears soaked through the paper and smeared the ink. I kept starting over, searching for the right words to explain, but all I said, in the end, was that I couldn’t leave my family. You didn’t know, then, that while I was with you, my father and Billy had gone to shoot squirrels in the woods, where the sound of his own gunshots set Daddy off. The next thing Billy knew, Daddy thought he was a prisoner of war again and my little brother was a fellow soldier he was saving from a Japanese guard. The more Billy struggled to escape Daddy’s bone-crushing grip, the more Daddy clawed and screamed and cursed until Billy, desperate to get away, swung the rifle around and smacked Daddy in the head with the stock. Billy ran home in hysterics, only for Mother to slap him across the face for hitting his father.

Daddy never mentioned a word of this when he picked me up at the station. I kept my big news about moving to New York to myself the whole drive back to Schuywich, figuring I’d tell my family all together over supper. I had no clue what had happened until I saw the cuts across Billy’s face, the bruises on his arms, the tears in his eyes.

I didn’t expect you to understand why I had to stay. You’d emancipated yourself at sixteen and never given another thought to the family you left behind in Vermont. I wasn’t like you, though. Mother had neither the time nor the patience for parenting, not after Daddy came back from the war half the man who’d shipped out to the Pacific. I’d been pretty much stuck raising Billy since I was twelve years old. When I went down to Albany for college, he clung to me so hard I had to pry him off like a barnacle. I came home as often as I could, but it was never enough for him. Now I was afraid of what would happen if I deserted him for good. That night at supper, I floated the idea of Billy moving to New York with me, but Mother recoiled at the notion of losing another boy after the way she’d lost baby William. It broke my heart to send you that tearstained letter, but I didn’t have the backbone to leave the three of them mired in their misery while I ran off to indulge my “unnatural” desire for you.

Do you still have my letter squirreled away someplace? I never have figured out where you hide the things you don’t want me to see. Anyway, I’d written that I hoped we could still be friends, that we might meet in Maine again next summer, or you could visit me, if you ever found yourself upstate. As much as I wanted to move to Manhattan, I wrote, it simply wasn’t possible for me to leave Schuywich.

I ran out to the mailbox every day, hoping you’d write me back but not really expecting that you would. You had a glamorous job in the big city and were friends with famous people like Patricia Highsmith. You were probably relieved I’d let you off the hook for a rash offer you already regretted making.

By the end of August, Billy’s cuts had scabbed over and his bruises were fading, but he still skulked and startled like a kicked dog. Thanks to him skipping a grade because I taught him to read so early, my little brother was about to be the youngest, scrawniest sixth grader in Schuywich. And me? I was preparing to become the village’s spinster librarian. My heart was sore as a hammered thumb but your silence helped me realize our affair had never been as serious for you as it was for me.

It was August thirtieth, just before supper, when a car skidded to a stop in our driveway. Mother splashed sauce out of the pot she was stirring. Billy dropped a plate he was setting on the table. Our dog, Charlie, let out a howl. Daddy sent me to see who the hell was honking the horn like they were in some kind of damn parade.

There you were, leaning against the hood of your Jeep, looking suave as Cary Grant.

“Evelyn!” I ran out and threw my arms around your neck. “What in the world are you doing here?”

You squeezed me tight, then pushed me back as the squeal of the screen door let us know my family was watching. You waved a jovial arm while speaking out of the side of your mouth so only I could hear.

“This is where you are, Hazel,” you said with a wink. “Is there somewhere else I ought to be?”

Happy New Year, with all my love, Hazel

Chapter 6