Читать книгу Lover - Bertha Harris - Страница 16

Parke Bowman wanted nothing to do with the presses. The radical politics, the nonprofit status of most of them, their collective organization—it all smelled strongly of the left wing to Parke. Parke got involved in publishing women writers because she was in love with June Arnold.

Daughters Publishing Company, Inc., was not a press. Both partners, June Davis Arnold and Parke Patricia Bowman, were rather touchy about the distinction. “Publishers of Fiction by Women” (eventually, they would reluctantly include some nonfiction), their writers got contracts, advances, royalties, royalty reports, etc., identical, according to Parke, to those issued to writers by the mainstream houses. Parke and June referred to all mainstream publishers as “Random House.”

Parke’s stated goal was to run Daughters as if it were Random House and thereby compete with Random House in the marketplace. To Parke, Daughters was strictly a business whose business was profit-making. She wanted to publish novels with both literary merit and commercial appeal, and if the works were perceived as feminist, so much the better. But from the start she made it clear that she would never agree to publish a novel for political content alone.

June idealized the back-breaking labor at the presses, and she was in complete agreement with their political sentiments. June claimed that Daughters’ reason for being was to publish the novel-length fiction which the presses could not afford to publish. As soon as Daughters was founded, June began looking for manuscripts in keeping with the spirit of the poems, short stories and nonfiction of the presses: deep-thinking personal revelations about the nature of oppression.

In 1972, June believed wholeheartedly that a full-scale feminist revolution was at hand. With the patriarchy (and mainstream publishing) in ruins, Daughters would replace Random House, and the works published by Daughters would sell like hotcakes in the new world of empowered women.

Parke enjoyed the idea of Daughters’ replacing Random House, but the last thing on earth she wanted was a feminist revolution, or any connection whatsoever with “prerevolutionary” women’s presses, which she more or less privately referred to as “a bunch of damn dumb dykes.” The way to beat Random House was through the tried-and-true methods of cutthroat capitalism.

Throughout the life of Daughters, Parke longed to have a quiet, deeply closeted life with June. What Parke had in mind was something closely resembling a standard upper-class heterosexual monogamous marriage. She would eventually get just that, but not until June’s hopes for a women’s world, and her own personal ambitions, had been severely disappointed.

From the start, therefore, the partners were at odds about the aims of the company. Throughout Daughters’ brief life (less than a decade), June and Parke went through an ongoing struggle to dominate the company and realize their opposing views. Compromises were grudgingly made, or else one or the other of the partners would back down and wait for the next time. It’s a miracle of a sort that the company lasted as long as it did. The miracle, of a sort, was money, lots of it.

At first, I was only another of the Daughters’ novelists. Then I became their “senior” (their only) editor. Officially, my relationship with the company ended there. Unofficially, I was the third side of a triangle that rivaled the old Lesbian Gothicks in terms of booze, blood, tears, madness, violence, and operatic grand passions—so much so, I often wonder if Daughters wasn’t something I wrote instead of lived.

For a while, I loved Daughters and Daughters loved me. I applied—I misapplied—three tenets of feminist doctrine to the way I loved Daughters: that trust, solidarity, and strength arise from making oneself totally vulnerable to women; that one may trust women totally, but never men; that male oppression is the sole cause of mental and emotional ill-health in women, and feminism the sole cure. It’s difficult for me to confess to something so banal, but here goes: I needed a good mother.

Founded in 1972, Daughters published its first list in 1973. By 1979, Parke and June had dissolved Daughters in the manner of any publishing company going out of business. All titles abruptly went out of print; rights reverted to the authors; leftover copies of the books were distributed among the authors and to remainder houses. Parke sold the townhouse in Greenwich Village that had been company headquarters. June and Parke severed their connections with feminism and their authors (including me), and retired to an insulated haute-bourgeoise life in Houston, June’s home town. At the time, June was fifty-three and Parke was forty-five or forty-six. I hoped never to see either of them again.

Late in 1975, I had rented, along with the feminist theoretician Charlotte Bunch, space in the Manhattan loft building June owned and where she and Parke lived on the top floor. After midnight, in late December of 1977, my phone rang. It was June, in one of her classic rages. She shouted into my ear that I had to be off her premises no later than the next day, my lease notwithstanding. The person I was in bed with, she announced, was an FBI agent who was sleeping with me for the sole purpose of gaining access to Daughters in order to destroy the company.

The person I was in bed with had about as much to do with the Federal Bureau of Investigation as I did with professional ice hockey. June’s accusation was so very far off the wall that I wondered for an instant if the time had come, finally, to phone for the guys with the straitjackets. I got my breath back; I told June that it was my distinct impression that whoever went to bed with me—including that time back in 1910 (or was it 1902?) when it was J.Edgar Hoover himself, in full frontal nudity, lusting after me—did so to gain access not to Daughters but to my body, okay?

June told me to start packing. I was gone the next day, as ordered.

After June’s death, Parke would confess that it was she, not June, who’d wanted me out of the building, no holds barred. That made plenty of sense to me, for two reasons: The FBI had had a strong grip on Parke’s imagination for some time before the night I was caught in bed with J. Edgar Hoover. And Parke had been in love with me since the day we met. If she couldn’t have me, nobody could. Rita Mae Brown, with admirable succintness, once described Parke as a femme in butch clothing, and June, vice versa. She was right. June had to evict me on Parke’s behalf because Parke didn’t have the necessary machismo.

After the fiasco of my eviction from June’s building, I never expected to hear from either Parke or June again. But in 1979, June telephoned from Houston and rather warmly told me that she and Parke would love to see me, would I come and visit? I said yes. My nearest and dearest suggested that I was out of my mind to go near Parke and June again. I replied that I was certain that Parke and June must want to apologize, heal old wounds, effect a reconciliation: did that sound like I was out of my mind?

I was out of my mind. June met my plane; Parke waited in the car. June drove and pointed out the sights. Parke sat in stony silence. June told me that they lived in Houston’s most fashionable suburb. It seemed like any fashionable suburb to me—spookily silent, absolutely white-skinned, so rife with self-protection the entire neighborhood seemed to be wedged inside an invisible condom. Their house was hidden behind a locked fence. It was long, low, enormous, and replete with many faux Tijuana-hacienda touches which I recognized because I’m chief of the aesthetics police. Outside, surrounded by a rose garden, there was a swimming pool that passed my inspection.

Parke disappeared in the house. June showed me a guest room approximately one city block’s length from their bedroom, then she disappeared. I hung out in the guest room for a few hours. Then Parke showed up and told me to give her five dollars; she was going out for burgers, five bucks should cover my share. I gave her five dollars.

We sat at a table in a dining room suitable for Kiwanis Club banquets and unwrapped dinner in silence. For some reason I wasn’t hungry, so I decided to make conversation. I introduced the subject of combat women in the military, a controversial topic in the news at the time, and asked whether they thought it was a feminist thing for women to turn themselves into cannon fodder—or did they think that turning women into cannon fodder was just another male plot to get rid of uppity women?

That broke the ice. Instantly, Parke and June flipped from restrained hostility into the active kind: unlike me, they weren’t lily-livered pacifists. They believed in their country. They were one hundred percent behind any war their president cared to wage. Young women as well as young men should be prepared to die for their country, and any other point of view on the matter stank of communism.

Okay, I said. I figured they still thought they were dealing with J. Edgar Hoover’s girlfriend, complete with wires. I considered congratulating them on being, as of that moment, completely in the clear with my superiors at the agency. I kept my mouth shut.

The next day June told me she’d asked me to visit because she needed help on her new novel, Baby Houston, hadn’t I understood that? No, but. June handed me the manuscript. I sat down in the extraordinarily decorated living room, which was about one-third the size of the New York Public Library’s main reading room, and got to work. Parke dropped in at regular intervals to collect for the next meal.

I stayed in Houston with Parke and June long enough to urge June repeatedly to replace the pretty writing in Baby Houston (“Baby” was her mother) with the rage she was so far keeping between the lines (“You’re wrong,” she told me), and to experience a representative slice of how they were living their new lives. June spent her days working on Baby Houston, swimming and gardening; Parke watched movies on TV, swam, gardened, worked the Times crossword, and read English novels. They visited with June’s girlhood chums and played a regular bridge game with some of them in the evenings. They shopped a lot at Houston’s glitziest mall; they were compiling new wardrobes of French designer clothing. From the neck down, June looked sleek and chic, but her face looked haggard— stressed and grim, as if, inside, she was grieving. Her face would have more appropriately accessorized sackcloth and ashes. Parke’s threads were as upscale as June’s, but were still in Parke’s favorite understated color, merde. I was still in my basics—basically my only basics, except for the vintage evening dresses I reserved for dates with J. Edgar —which were, then as now, white shirts and black jeans. One night, when we were about to go out to dinner with one of Parke and June’s new friends, June said, “I’m so glad to be here, where I can dress in nice clothes again. It’s hard for me to even look at that New York movement drag any more.” I quickly changed into my basic variation on my basics, white jeans and black shirt.

Houston had grown some lesbians since June’s early life there (when, she once asserted, there weren’t any), but except for one or two, all of June and Parke’s close women friends were heterosexual; the one or two lesbians they hung out with were wealthy. They no longer felt comfortable among people too different from themselves. Too much difference, I surmised, was too little money. They had never felt comfortable among people different from themselves.

The last time Parke asked me to fork over, I made bold to ask if by any chance they needed a loan to tide them over. Parke fearlessly stepped on the irony. She told me that from now on they were keeping every penny strictly for themselves; they’d had enough of getting ripped off by the women’s movement.

I wasn’t the women’s movement. Far from ripping off Daughters, or Parke or June personally, I had, minute by minute, inch by inch, paid my own way during my friendship with them and my time with the company. Parke had insisted on it, down to the last dime, even when I was traveling with the partners on Daughters’ business exclusively. She justified this un-Random House-like exploitation of an employee by impressing on hand-to-mouth me that she had to save up for her old age.

I gave her money for the next meal. I don’t keep score; I’d rather be ripped off. And I was, as ever, afraid of Parke’s barely suppressed anger. Evidently, Parke had either demoted me into the “damn dumb dykes” category, or was possessed by the idea that I was so deeply in her debt (though for what?) that I had to make some recompense by paying for my own food while I was a guest in her house working on June’s novel.

Parke was as uncommonly stingy with money as I am cavalier. Which may go some distance in explaining how she, with June’s knowledge, could break the most fundamental rule of hospitality: but it doesn’t begin to explain the rage that accompanied her demands for money. I’ve finally remembered how I actually felt each time I was faced with both her anger and her open palm: I had been invited to Houston to experience humiliation.

I did what I could with Baby Houston. June thanked me and drove me to the airport. I chalked the monetary and emotional costs of the trip up to being out of my mind.

Within two years after Parke and June returned to Houston, June was diagnosed as having cancer of the brain, the incurable kind. I thought, when I heard the bad news, of the trope—the human brain; cancer of the brain —I’d used in Lover. I had a nightmare about fiction’s being able to assume an extraliterary life of its own to do things its author never intended.

Not long after June died, I acted like a Manhattanite and went to a psychiatrist. I felt disabled; I felt that I was disappearing, and neither love nor work nor sex was helping me. The psychiatrist was tall, fat, and mid-fortyish with a little-girl hairdo. She was so white she looked like an Easter bunny. Her clothing led me to believe that in her professional opinion dainty pinks-on-pinks was a good cure for what ailed her patients. She wore a lot of showgirl makeup—glitter on her eyelids, lashings of pancake, and fifties-red lipstick, and she had flat feet. She wanted me to hold rocks which she described as “crystals” while I talked; she encouraged me to attend events at which a woman entered a trance and then, in a voice belonging to an Egyptian from the Old Kingdom dynasty, answered questions from the audience: “Should I buy General Motors?” and Cheops would answer, “Go with the flow.” I spent most of my energy during sessions with her trying not to show how thoroughly her mind and body revolted me. In no time, she had me driving her around New York, feeding her cats, and moving her from one apartment to another. I was paying her top dollar; we did not have a bartering arrangement. After a year of this, she urged me to give the little girl inside of me a great big hug. I suggested that she go fuck herself and, at last, departed.

I might have filed a complaint with the psychiatric police, but I couldn’t imagine what nature of complaint I could file against my mother, or Parke and June. I spent the rest of the eighties virtually a recluse, one who cannot be had because she is not available to give herself. I avoided old, genuine friends; I felt contaminated, therefore unworthy of their friendship. It doesn’t surprise me in the least that I’ve been unable to complete the four novels I’ve written since life with Daughters.

By 1975, the year before Lover was published, Parke had given up even the pretense of being a feminist, but June was still avidly talking lesbian-feminist politics. Neither of them had yet gone mad—or, if they had, I was so enchanted by being in service to Daughters, I ignored the symptoms. When others suggested to me that something might be seriously wrong with Parke and June, and therefore with the company, I became their apologist and defender. But after a while even I became aware of some serious contradictions between what June was publicly saying—the politics du jour (the personal is political, etc.) —and what she was privately doing: to me, in particular.

June and Parke were the first wealthy people I’d ever been close to. I thought it exotic, at the very least, that June swore by politics which, if they were successfully put into practice, would be the ruin of the sources of her money. But I didn’t say so. I didn’t want to spoil the loud party, I didn’t want them to be disappointed in me. My mother got a lot of mileage out of telling me how disappointed in me she was. Nonetheless, I did wonder if June had found a solution to that tiresome riddle, the one about how much easier it is for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than it is for a rich man [sic] to enter the kingdom of heaven.

Our closeness, which would end in my near-imprisonment, started when Parke went after Lover, insisting that I sell it to Daughters even though she hadn’t read a word of the manuscript. Parke told me that she had read my first two novels and that she’d been impressed (Parke later brought Confessions of Cherubino, my second novel, back into print). This is how Random House operates, she said; they buy sight unseen too if a writer’s earlier work suits them.

The partners took me to dinner. They were charming, amusing, and warm; every few minutes, Parke would say something hilarious. In the middle of this love feast, June explained that publishing with the “male” houses would brand me as “male-identified;” I would be just another one of those feminists, so-called, who did exactly that with their books. Parke said that Daughters was not a feminist house, that it had no political definition whatsoever beyond “Publishers of Fiction by Women.” June said Daughters was feminist. Then Parke threw her glass at the restaurant wall, and we were asked to leave.

I was delighted. I was finally in the cast of an opera; somebody definitely throws a glass against a wall during La Traviata. In the street, Parke told me to swear that when people asked me why I published with Daughters, I would not tell them it was because Daughters was feminist; I was to say, instead, that I published with Daughters because, like Random House, Daughters gave big advances. I understood her point. Parke was equating feminism with impoverishment; I was ashamed of being poor. I swore to defend big advances to the death.

About ten days later, they took me to dinner again. They explained that what I would get by publishing with Daughters was a guarantee that Lover would never go out of print; none of their titles, they promised, would ever go out of print. No publishing company on earth could offer that guarantee but Daughters.

I more or less fell on my knees and cried, I am thine! Most writers will understand how I felt, though few are as naive as I was. I knew, of course, that Lover wasn’t going to be a bestseller, or even come near bestsellerdom: effeminate aesthetes like me don’t write bestsellers. But I hoped that given time, plenty of time—maybe twenty or thirty years—a first edition might be bought out. Daughters, according to the partners, guaranteed that time. When the euphoria wore off, questions occurred to me. How could Daughters make that promise? If, just for example, the partners died, then what guaranteed the future of the company promising in-print eternity?

Parke and June laughed my questions off. I was too unworldly, they told me; I didn’t understand how businesses operated. They were right. I was unworldly, possibly even other-worldly. Far from understanding how businesses worked, I did arithmetic by counting on my fingers. I was ordered to stop worrying. I decided to stop worrying and become a true believer. I felt safe with June and Parke, as if my time for being a beloved child had at last arrived. I was happy to let them have Lover; I feared that neither Lover nor I was good enough for them.

The only regret I had in publishing Lover with Daughters—and I suppressed it, it seemed audacious—was that Lover would not be reviewed by the New York Times, whose policy then, and for some time to come, was not to review original trade paperbacks. But the physical beauty of the Daughters’ editions was well worth the loss of the Times. The elegantly designed covers and the dimensions (eight and a half by five and a half) of Daughters’ paperbacks have now been adopted by nearly every good publisher—Virago, for example—both here and in Europe, but it was Daughters’ designer, Loretta Li, who created the look.

When I finished Lover, Parke and I had dinner again. I handed over the A&P brown paper bag containing the manuscript and Parke gave me a company check for ten thousand dollars, the same advance, Parke assured me, that Random House gave its authors of third novels. Harcourt, Brace’s Hiram Haydn, in 1969, had given me one thousand, six hundred dollars for my first novel Catching Saradove, and two thousand three years later for my second. I was giddy with the thrill of big bucks at last. Parke suggested we do some drinking and dancing over at Bonnie & Clyde’s, a movement bar on West Third Street, to recover and celebrate. After a few hours, we realized that we didn’t have Lover; one of us had left the only complete copy of the manuscript under the restaurant table. We found our waiter reading it. “Hot stuff,” he said.

I thought Daughters was hot stuff. Parke and June thought Daughters was hot stuff, and with good reason. As far as I know, they were the only women around at that time who were putting so much money where feminism’s mouth was.

I’m extravagant in my affections while they last. Compare me, if you will, to Tosca or to the family dog: I’m the very model of the cheap date. Parke and June led me to believe (that is, they lied to me) that they were gambling every cent they had on Daughters. Parke, for instance, had given up her law career to work full-time for the company’s success. I imagined what June had given up; what I imagined her giving up was what I would have spent a fortune on if I’d had one: Europe, with special attention to Italy and France. My eyes glazed over with hero worship. When people started complaining to me that June tried to ram her politics down their throats and slapped them upside the head, in a manner of down-south speaking, when they failed to swallow her very hard line, I would try to explain away their indignation by urging them to look, June could be whiling away pleasant hours in Paris right now, or soaking her tootsies in the Bay of Naples, or lounging in a gondola—but instead … so the least we can do is be tolerant. Nobody swallowed my line either.

After I gave June and Parke Lover, I gradually handed over most of my life to them and to Daughters. I justified my self-abandon by maintaining that I was merging my personal with my political in an area (writing and publishing) for which I was most suited. I thought how lucky I was that they wanted me.

Since 1972, I’d had full-time employment at Richmond College of the City University of New York, where I taught in the Women’s Studies program. I had other serious, time-consuming responsibilites, both professional and personal, as well. I had been, except emotionally, a self-sustaining adult since I was sixteen. But in 1976, shortly after Lover was published, June asked me to take on all her editorial work so that she could write full-time. Without pausing to consider when, with both a full- and a parttime job—and a life—I would find time to write myself, I accepted. My mother’s chief contribution to my upbringing had been to beat my legs and back with a walking cane every time she thought that I was, in her words, “showing off” or giving the appearance of believing that I was “better than other people.” By the time I met June and Parke, I had become so adept at self-effacement that I could make myself disappear at will. My mother told me that because of me, she’d been cheated of everything she ever wanted. I am, to this day, very careful never to compete with other women; I will go to any amount of trouble to help a woman get what she says she wants; if I must sacrifice something I want in the process, so much the better. Sometimes this behavior is mistaken for feminism; it is penance.

I understood immediately that it was more important for June to write than for me to write. June, I would eventually realize, also thought that it was more important for her to write, so much more so, in fact, she would have preferred that I stop writing altogether.

After a while, Parke and June began pressuring me to resign from my assistant professorship at Richmond College and work exclusively for Daughters. Neither offered me an ordinary reason to do so, such as a salary equal to what the City University paid me, health insurance, a pension—nor even an extraordinary reason. I was supposed to do it simply because they wanted me to do it. No mundane consideration prevented me from giving them what they wanted, it was rather a fear of being eaten alive combined with the twitchings of some half-paralyzed adult instinct for survival that kept me full-time at Richmond until 1976. But I wondered why they wanted me around full-time, and for what? Daughters simply didn’t have enough work to justify my full-time employment unless I added most of Parke’s work—bookkeeping, mailings, dealing with the printers, etc.—to my editorial duties, and this was clearly impossible. As we all knew, I was inept with money and the arithmetic that handling money demands; Parke, furthermore, would never have put the secrets of the company’s account books into my hands.

But in 1974, when they were leaning heavily on me to say it out loud—I am thine! —I was, in any event, nearly always on duty at Daughters in one way or another when I wasn’t teaching. Parke was running the ordinary day-today business of publishing with intelligence and keen competence; distribution, however, was an on-going problem for her, fraught with stress and anxiety. Except for gay and women’s bookshops (and there were then relatively few), other, general-subject book dealers and their customers were still wary of taking a chance on such unfamiliar, sometimes openly lesbian, writing. The grand design for Daughters that June and Parke had conceived—beating Random House at its own game—was being continually frustrated in the marketplace.

Nor were women, movement women, living up to the partners’ expectations as book buyers. I think now that it’s possible that neither Parke nor June, sheltered as they were from the exigencies of ordinary women’s lives, ever fully understood that, for most, buying books was an unconsidered luxury; although both June and Parke knew the facts of life—that women were (and still are) paid considerably less for work than men, and that 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.

I began very gradually re-entering the world three years ago in my own circuitous, aberrant fashion, through extremes of physical exercise. After a while, I remembered that the one thing during my childhood that I’d loved (beside beauty) was dancing with my father. So I added a dance class to the extremes of physical exercise. My teacher is the dancer and choreographer, Beth Easterly. There are more ways than one to exit a cage. In my case, it has taken more than one dancer to unlock the lid and help me out. I’m out; I am, for instance, writing this introduction to Lover and one of my novels-in-progress, You, is nearly complete.

When June declared that they did not believe me she was within her rights, but for the wrong reasons. I did not fight back, although I might have used the opportunity to tell Parke and June the unvarnished truth; but within the topsy-turvy context of June’s disbelief (that the earth’s disinherited cannot acquire manners and education, or be gifted), the truth would have worsened my position because the truth was much worse than the “eccentric” half-truths I’d told her. And when June was convinced that she was right nothing could persuade her that she was wrong. And under certain kinds of attack, if the attacks come from women, I become paralyzed. I was paralyzed. I felt that June, and Parke with her, had unscrewed my head and filled my body with buckets of melancholy. I felt as helpless as a beaten child. I had no words. I don’t recall how I replied to the charges. Apologetically, no doubt.

On the other hand, I couldn’t bring myself to commit a version of suicide on June’s behalf. I clung to the identity I had disclosed; it wasn’t much, but it was all mine. June never stopped disbelieving it.

Aside from the stunningly classist (and positively un-American) attitude built into June’s disbelief, there was the partners’ ongoing conviction that if they battered long enough and hard enough at what I had indeed come from, and still was (despite the renovations I’d done on myself) they might eventually erase my difference from them—my origins, my memories, my history, and my people.

Doing away with my difference, the stuff of my human individuality and of my art, would also serve another vital purpose. Separate a writer from her typewriter and she’ll find a pencil; separate her from her autobiography, through disbelief, and she will become silent: and June knew it. The patriarchy had been successfully employing the technique for a long time.

June and Parke had filled my days and nights with personal and professional crises; nonetheless, I was still writing. Furthermore, Lover was receiving the sort of critical attention June had craved for her second novel, The Cook and the Carpenter and for her third, Sister Gin. Worse, I was the second novelist published by Daughters who, June felt strongly, had gotten more attention than she deserved.

June and Parke became lovers in the late sixties. The first half of Daughters’ life was located in Plainfield, Vermont, where June owned a farm. Later, June and Parke moved into the top floor of June’s Manhattan loft building, but kept the farm. Parke bought the townhouse on Charles Street in Greenwich Village to serve as company headquarters; the Charles Street house also gave Parke a place absolutely hers to escape to when the fights with June, which were usually over June’s involvement with lesbian feminist politics and presses, began to escalate. Parke called sleeping at Charles Street “running away from home.” June had her own escape hatches. She would retreat to the farm or rent small apartments in the Village, where she wrote and saw movement friends privately. June’s politics had always made Parke nervous: that’s how Parke put it, “They make me nervous.”

Ironically, June’s politics are what brought them together. June was one of a group of women who, in the late sixties, took over a long-abandoned city-owned building on East Third Street and made it, rather comfortably, a shelter for women and a day-care center. When the city ordered them out, they resisted; the cops dragged them out. Parke was one of the lawyers who went downtown to get the women out of jail. Parke told me how June’s firebrand temperament initially thrilled her; how glamorous she seemed. But Parke’s romance with June’s temperament, and the politics which inspired it, was soon replaced by “nervousness,” which in fact was a fear (which would graduate into paranoia) of June’s drawing fire at the two of them from both the society at large and from parts of the movement June was at war with, which eventually included most of the women June had been with in the Third Street action.

June has been written about frequently, sometimes within the context of warm feminist praise for her fiction and her politics. Once in a while, a few details of June’s life are woven in with discussions of June’s books. It always interests me to find that the writers generally assume that June, with sterling altruism, deliberately turned her back on her Houstonian social rank and discontinued any immoderate personal use of her wealth once she became a feminist and a lesbian-feminist and a publisher of books by women: as if she had pulled herself down by the bootstraps.

In fact, June risked nothing, and lost nothing, when she left Houston for New York and the women’s movement. She had absolute control over her fortune, and very sensibly she never neglected to foster it. She never felt the cost of Daughters, nor did her generous handouts to feminist enterprises ever make a noticeable dent in her wealth. She enjoyed the enviable position of being able to indulge in charity (and buy alliances) without feeling the pinch of self-sacrifice. She once told me that she was always very careful not to give to feminist causes any of the money she meant her children to have. Her mother, she said, would want her grandchildren raised as much as possible as she had been, and well taken care of after her death.

When the partners decided to terminate Daughters, and retreat from New York into Houston, they might have sold the company to other women. That they did not allow Daughters to continue, in new hands, publishing women’s writing which might otherwise never see the light of day, was their revenge, their particular Tet offensive, against women in general and the women’s movement in particular.

As well as money, June brought to a movement determined to create equality not only with men, but among women, a profoundly inbred sense of superiority and a bottomless need to be recognized as an exceptional woman.

Born in South Carolina, October 27, 1926, June was raised in Houston, where she was a debutante; she went to Vassar but after a year transferred to Rice University back home in Houston. According to June, the Vassar girls were “snobs;” they didn’t regard Texans as their social peers. Attending Vassar was June’s first attempt to gain status in the Northeast: where status counted. Leaving Vassar was her first flight back to established, albeit provincial, status. June had all the well-known vanities, and thin-skinned pride, of the Texas millionaires. She often spoke of how “cultured” (despite the fact that they were Texan?) her mother, and her mother’s family, the Worthams, were. The family money was made in cotton and insurance. In Texas, cotton and insurance counted as “old” money. The parvenus were into oil.

After college and a tour of Europe, June married and bore five children, one of whom died in early childhood. She eventually divorced Mr. Arnold because, she told me, he was using up so much of her money in business failures. But not long afterward, according to what she told me, she went to New York and married a “Jewish psychiatrist” whose role as her New York husband, she said, was to give her an excuse to live in New York, away from her mother. June took her second husband down to Houston to meet the family. At the big barbecue thrown to fete the newlyweds, June’s new husband fell in love with all things Texan and refused to return to New York. So she divorced him too. Otherwise, June told me, she’d had lots of male lovers before she met Parke: which is the way it was, she explained, for pretty and popular Houston socialites in her day; she would rather have been a lesbian, of course, but she couldn’t find any lesbians to be a lesbian with.

One of the biggest and loudest fights the partners went through in my presence was about sex. It was bad enough, according to Parke, that June had had sex with men but she also suspected that a woman lover was lurking in June’s past. Parke hated the fact that June had had any lovers, male or female, before her. Sometimes Parke could, in a self-satirizing way, joke about her jealousy. I remember some madcap murderous schemes she came up with to punish June’s first husband for ever laying a hand on her.

I often felt that June, after the honeymoon wore off, was not at all happy with Parke sexually. Parke was a romantic and she had a romantic’s need for June to be the romantic’s ideal of womanhood, the chaste-and-malleable-maiden part of the ideal especially.

Ruinously at work in Parke and June’s relationship was Parke’s enormous need for the kind of security which demands an all-encompassing monogamy, historical as well as current. They joined forces to demand of me “monogamy” with them. Long before they caught me in bed with J. Edgar Hoover, they had more than once heavily hinted that I might be better off without lovers. As I write this, I realize that it wasn’t Louise Fishman’s high school basketball playing that made June attack her, it was because I’d had an affair with Louise, and had been in love with her, and continued to love her.

Parke Bowman was intrinsically shy, passive, and fearful of every kind of rejection. She showed every sign of being deeply inhibited sexually; her personality was the opposite of June’s. Both, however, got a kick out being verbally abusive (they called it “honesty;” what I heard was sadism), and Parke also enjoyed becoming physically violent. I find it probable that Parke felt that beating up a woman was somehow more “decent” than having sex with a woman. She smiled while she was doing it; she seemed orgasmically blissed afterward.

In one blistering scene I was privy to, June argued that any woman—Parke, for instance—of her generation who had not gone to bed with men back in the days when there weren’t enough lesbians to go around wasn’t sexual enough to be a real lesbian. There was a lot of more-lesbian-than-thou one-upmanship going on in the movement then: the fewer the men you’d gone to bed with, the more lesbian you were. But June was not so much regretting Parke’s lack of heterosexual experience as she was marshaling a defense against possible movement charges that she wasn’t lesbian enough to understand and write well about lesbian experience. As far as I know, those charges were never made against June or her writing. But New York feminism was electric with charges and countercharges during the seventies. June couldn’t exactly pretend to be a poor woman, not with her real estate and her publishing company, but she wasn’t about to have her extensive heterosexual past, which included four children, used against her.

With a few well-chosen words (including, “The reason you screwed guys so much is because you’re a slut”) Parke responded to June’s charges that she wasn’t lesbian enough by redefining insanity and sanity: Insanity, Parke said, was a woman with the morals of a slut who thinks that the way to become a lesbian is to go to bed with a lot a men; sanity, however, was a lesbian who controls her animal urges until she finds “true love”: as she had.

I always had a hankering to get into some serious legal trouble so that Parke could win my case in court.

Parke had enjoyed consummated “true love” in only one relationship with a woman before she met June. She was by nature deeply conservative and conventional; she voted a straight Democratic ticket mainly because she hated Richard Nixon’s guts. “True love” meant marriage for life.

But “animal urges” sometimes overwhelmed Parke’s high moral tone. On many occasions, Parke decided that I was her true love. I am reasonably certain that each was preceded by a quarrel with June. Compared to June, I was easy to control and manipulate; and Parke was a control freak of the first water. But I was not so much controllable during my life with Daughters, Inc., as very agreeable, evasive, and diplomatic. I was the unreconstructed feminine (or the unreconstructed daughter of my mother); I was vulnerable to bullying, I would do nearly anything to please. One night, I was at home alone writing Lover. Parke rang my bell, marched upstairs, smashed a vermouth bottle against my kitchen stove, and got down on her knees and declared that she was in love with me, would I run away with her? I replied, evasively, diplomatically, that sex and running away together would destroy our friendship. This answer seemed to mollify her. Another time (we were closeted in the Vermont farmhouse pantry whose shelves displayed a survivalist’s supply of canned petit pois), she insisted that I promise her that when I turned fifty—not before, not after—I would “marry” her. She was serious. She said that June would probably be dead by the time I was fifty—a miserable prediction that miserably came true. I was in my midthirties at the time; June was eleven years older than I was. I don’t recall what I answered; possibly I lied, and said Why not? I loved Parke’s charm and humor; it was her body I was rejecting, but I couldn’t bring myself to insult her body. Parke feared rejection, I feared rejecting.

I was not as diplomatic as I thought I was; Parke knew why, in the first instance, I’d said no, and in the second, the reason for my evasiveness. She never forgave me, yet she never stopped, behind June’s back, trying to seduce me. With every rejection, her hostility grew and expressed itself in ways that ranged from the mean (such as refusing to let me get some laundry done in the washer and dryer at company headquarters), to attacks on my friends, then straight on to eviction.

One of Parke’s favorite forms of revenge was turning me, when she could, into the company’s scapegoat. Midway during the company’s lifetime, June commissioned a novel from a woman in San Franciso, and, I suppose, gave her an advance. When the completed novel arrived, neither partner thought it was any good. I wasn’t allowed to read it. The writer had published some fine short stories, so I suggested that they send the manuscript back and let the writer turn it into a collection of stories or replace the novel with original stories; I reminded June that mastery of short fiction did not necessarily mean ease with novellength fiction.

But June was embarrassed by the impulse that had made her commission the work; she had committed, in her mind only, a shaming lapse of judgment. She wanted the whole matter to disappear, as if it had never happened. Parke told me that in order to protect June’s reputation, I had to return the manuscript and write a rejection letter to the author which she herself would dictate to me. Parke stood over me, I typed. The letter was scathing and insulting; it was designed to demolish the author’s ego and make her resist any rash inspiration to show it around to her friends and associates. Then Parke told me to sign the letter I’d typed; my name alone would be at the bottom of Daughters’ stationery: whereupon the worm turned and suggested that we write another kind of letter, the sort that points out to a writer that many novels commissioned by many publishers sometimes—very often, in fact—don’t pan out. If we send your letter, said the turned worm, this woman is going to hate us for the rest of her life. Parke replied that I, not “us,” was going to take the rap; I owed it to the company—for example, Lover had not earned back on sales the ten-thousand-dollar advance she’d paid me and probably never would. June added that the writer deserved the letter for pretending, during June’s visit to her home, to be too poor to afford a television set when everybody (and everybody knew it) could afford TV.

The letter Parke had dictated was sent, with my signature only. Amnesia has mercifully erased all memories of the responses I got for that letter.

Another book June commissioned that Daughters never published was Not by Degrees, essays in feminist education collected and edited by Charlotte Bunch. Not by Degrees would have appeared on Daughters’ last list. Charlotte did her work, the book was ready; but it transpired that June and Parke had expected each essay to be a diatribe against Sagaris, a feminist educational institute created by Joan Peters and Blanche Boyd, who was one of Daughters’ authors. Sagaris had enjoyed a groundbreaking life span of one summer during the early seventies in Vermont. I taught writing at Sagaris. One of my students, Dorothy Allison, would later publish her award-winning novel Bastard from Carolina as a consequence of her own courage and talent. Charlotte Bunch had taught feminist theory at Sagaris. Charlotte refused to negate the Sagaris experience by complying with June and Parke’s wishes. Not by Degrees was later published by Crossing Press.

In the early seventies, Susan Sontag was diagnosed as having drastically advanced cancer. The literary community, worldwide, was frightened for her. One of her friends, and mine, spoke of her fears in front of Parke. It was not long after Parke had decided that I would “marry” her once June was dead; Parke suspected (as if I were June) that my friend and I were sleeping together. On the basis of that suspicion, she hated my friend.

When my friend said that she was afraid that Susan Sontag might die, Parke promptly replied that she hoped that Susan Sontag would die. June agreed with Parke.

No matter what I said to June and Parke about this assault on my friend’s feelings, their answer was always the same, endlessly repeated: Susan Sontag wasn’t a feminist, so she didn’t deserve any pity; if Susan Sontag were the literary genius she thought she was, she would have long ago said a few good words about Daughters; Susan Sontag, being “male-identified,” occupied the place in the literary firmament which rightfully belonged to June and if the women’s movement had done its work, instead of screwing around so much, the male literary establishment would by now have been replaced by Daughters, starring June instead of Susan Sontag.

Parke was secretive and close-mouthed about her personal life, her background, and her political beliefs. She behaved as if a sort of House on Un-American Activities, manned by a sort of Joseph McCarthy and Roy Cohn, had its ears to her ground waiting to use anything she might reveal about herself against her. It’s possible that her extreme reserve happened in reaction to the political demands radical and lesbian feminists were making at the time: that class, racial, ethnic, and sexual bounderies separating women could be abolished only by a detailed public disclosure along these lines about one’s own life. Knowledge, in effect, would invariably bring about understanding of the “other,” and understanding would accomplish a united front. It was acknowledged that lesbians, especially poor and/or black and/or disabled (and so forth) lesbians, were the most “other.”

But Parke loathed being identified as a lesbian, and she was deeply suspicious of the “most other,” who, she was certain, would be breaking down the doors to garner for themselves her money and her privileges of skin and class if they were given half a chance.

Meanwhile, June was out there competing for movement prestige by proclaiming herself a lesbian and enthusiastically letting it be known that Daughters was offering the great unwashed half a chance. June made it impossible for Parke to stay absolutely nailed in the closet. When June was addressing women’s groups, or giving readings, Parke kept herself in the deep background: she didn’t want to seem to agree with June’s lesbian-feminist stance but at the same time she wanted to be around to defend June in case the “most other” went for June’s highly privileged throat. No wonder Parke was a nervous wreck.

Parke was born on February 7 in either 1933 or 1934. She told me that she had been raised, for a while, by her parents in New Jersey, where she would eventually go to college and law school. But while she and her brother, she said, were still children, her grandparents decided that they didn’t want Parke and her brother to be raised by “flappers,” so they went to court and got custody of the two children. Parke gave me the impression that her parents were a sort of jeunesse dorée, New Jersey style. Parke also once told me that her father was someone very important with the Atomic Energy Commission. Which is how, Parke told me, she’d learned how to keep her mouth shut; loose lips sink ships, the government had warned the nation during World War II.

Parke told me that the grandmother who’d raised her finally lived in reclusive splendor in a big isolated house in upstate New York and ordered all her food (mostly cans of petit pois) from S. S. Pierce. The conclusion of Parke’s life was not unlike her grandmother’s.

According to Parke, she had severed every connection with all members of her family very early on. She never told me why. She was neutral and cautious when she talked about her beginnings; if she had any feelings for her family, she did not betray them to me. Given the more difficult aspects of her personality—intolerant, hostile, judgmental, unforgiving—I imagine that she was raised harshly. When June spoke of her own upbringing, and she did, frequently and nostalgically, it sounded to me as if she enjoyed endless love and spoiling, especially from her mother.

The first writer Daughters published who got more attention than June felt she deserved was, of course, Rita Mae Brown.

Daughters Publishing Company, Inc., “Publishers of Fiction by Women,” was created in 1972 to disguise, and legitimize, the fact that June was forced to resort to vanity publishing. Her first novel, Applesauce, written while she was still living in Houston, was published in 1966 by McGraw-Hill and was reprinted by Daughters ten years later.

She wrote her second novel, The Cook and the Carpenter, during her first two or three years with Parke in Vermont. Her first version of the work was an explicit tale of lesbian grand passion, a roman à clef of her relationship with the “cook.” That version, had Parke not interfered with it, might have gotten the mainstream publication June wanted for it, although probably not until June had excised the gender-neutral “na” she used and replaced it with the usual pronouns. But Parke, as she would tell me in detail, was appalled to find herself destined to be in print so openly a lesbian. She demanded from June, and got, cuts, rewrites, equivocation, and dense disguises in the novel’s final version. The Cook and the Carpenter was rejected by all the mainstream publishers.

Hence, Daughters, at a time when June still loved the women’s movement, which would, June was certain, recognize her feminist literary masterpiece in return. And so it did—the educated, habitual book-reading part of the women’s movement, in time, did show a proper appreciation for The Cook and the Carpenter —but not fast enough and never, in June’s view, sufficiently. Nor did the “right” women (the poet Adrienne Rich, for example, and Susan Sontag) ever respond appropriately, or, perhaps, at all. What the movement did respond to, immediately, and with love, was another novel on Daughters’ first list, Rubyfruit Jungle by Rita Mae Brown.

Rita Mae Brown’s first novel is as far removed from the woeful tradition of the Lesbian Gothick as it is from The Cook and the Carpenter’s stylistic mannerisms and equivocation. Rubyfruit is a funny, straightforward tale of the picaresque adventures of Molly Bolt, and Molly Bolt is lesbian mens sana in corpore sano entire. In no time, Molly Bolt became a conquering heroine. To a greater or lesser extent, every woman, gay or straight, who read Rubyfruit wished she could be more like Molly Bolt.

Parke rejoiced in Rubyfruit’s financial success. She had joined in creating Daughters to become a businesswoman. But Rita Mae Brown’s success humiliated June. The popular acclaim June had counted on from the women’s movement had gone to someone else; nor was there any praise forthcoming from New York’s literary community. June’s covert purpose in founding Daughters was annulled in little more than a year. Nearly as demeaning, the same mainstream houses that had rejected The Cook and the Carpenter soon began trying to buy the rights to Rubyfruit Jungle from Daughters. Parke wisely held on to the rights until she got what she considered top dollar in the deal.

Even worse, Rita Mae had unwittingly scored another sort of triumph over June. Like Molly Bolt, Rita Mae Brown was still in her twenties; she was attractive, sexually desirable, and sexually active. Rita Mae’s outrageous mots, and singular fearlessness, coupled as they were with warmth and charm, endeared her to most women. June was old enough to be Rita Mae’s mother. June had, in middle age, the body of a teenage athlete (but so did Rita Mae) but only Parke got to see it. At last a lesbian, June was confined (it was as bad as being a wife) in a relationship with a woman who wasn’t all that crazy about sex but was certainly crazy when it came to sexual jealousy. When June tried to be charming, like Rita Mae, she often came off like a deep-fried version of Scarlett. When she tried to be outrageous, she sounded either pompous or scary. June had a scanty sense of humor; Rita Mae was able to make people laugh. Up from poverty, Rita Mae was a self-made woman. If anything, June’s wealth mititated against her in the women’s movement, which tended, in that era, to equate poverty with political virtue.

Officially, the women’s movement didn’t have stars, but it was composed of human beings so of course it did; and Rita Mae, who had great native charisma as well as political wit, was one of the movement’s first stars. Rita Mae had, in fact, along with Charlotte Bunch, and other members of what was to become the Furies collective in Washington, D.C., been among the first (during the sixties) to posit, and see into print, the politics of lesbian-feminism which June espoused. June had hoped, since the time of the Third Street Building takeover, to be that too: a movement star.

Daughters’ degeneration began with its first list, a year after its founding in 1973, with—as June saw it—the unjust victory of an inferior woman over a superior one. The rest of that first list was, to June, simply high-quality filler.

Parke was proud of Rita Mae’s success. But a united front was crucial to both of the partners. Parke finally, reluctantly, agreed with June that it wasn’t fair.

June and Parke had approved of all my manuscript choices until I presented them with M. F. Beal’s Angel Dance. 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 to achieve immortality in those days by becoming a martyr to the cause—and June wasn’t the first.

I went and scored some speed (I didn’t inhale) from a San Francisco sister, then told Parke that if she would lie down and grab some sleep, I’d keep watch. I kept watch until it was time to go home.

Once we were back in New York, June asked me never to bring up the matter of the FBI in the cornfield again.

Not all of the FBI hysteria bounced off Angel Dance or snaked its way out of the partners’ delusions of grandeur. Shortly, in the fall of 1977, one of June’s favorite “sister” presses, Diana, in Baltimore, would suffer a devastating break-in and subsequently get the fervent attention of every woman in the feminist press movement. The grapevine was hot with rumors: did Casey Czarnik and Coletta Reid, the founders of Diana, do it to themselves? Was it men? A rival press? The FBI?

Parke and June certainly favored the FBI as the villains. Along with Angel Dance it made for an airtight conspiracy theory. June’s frustration and anger grew more intense. She envied the attention Diana Press was getting. Eventually, Parke would arrange for Daughters to be threatened by my lover, J. Edgar Hoover. Throwing me out of the building was also a good way to get even with me for sleeping with somebody besides her.

With Women in Print under control, June, who thought of herself, and Texas, as southern, announced that it was time to take the South. She had by then published her third novel, Sister Gin, whose story was designed to persuade younger women that in spite of the author’s privileged upbringing and wealth, she was not only as politically correct as they were, she was more so: now she was menopausal, she was old. The older the woman (according to Sister Gin), the less the older woman had to lose; therefore the older the woman, the more the older woman was inclined to embrace lesbianism, which is what the older woman had wanted to do all along but when she was young, men had stopped her.

The novel is set in the South. June arranged readings in Atlanta and in North Carolina for her and me. As usual, when on company business, I paid all my own expenses. There was an unacknowledged understanding between me and the partners that because of June’s very generous handouts to feminist presses and other enterprises, I was responsible for picking up the slack. It was only right: they had paid me ten grand for Lover and Lover wasn’t earning back the advance.

The southern sisterhood (the few of them who showed up for the readings) fell hard for June. One extremely attractive sister fell hard for me and the fall was mutual. Parke efficiently blocked every move we made to get an hour in bed together.

In Atlanta, while she was reading to an audience of twelve in somebody’s front parlor, June (rather like Luciano Pavarotti) became suddenly overwhelmed by the sound of her own words in her own voice and began crying. Pavarotti weeps, but goes on singing. June wasn’t so professional. By then, I too craved success for June; my motives were base: anything to shut her up. Without a break in the reading, I put one arm around her shoulder, swept up Sister Gin, and replaced her voice with my own.

Our small audience was deeply moved by what they saw. What they thought they saw was sisterhood in action, a feminist bonding and twinning, one woman taking up where another woman must leave off, an emotional correlative of the political. What they saw in fact—on my part—was a purely theatrical gesture, a professional move deeply instilled in me by my interesting childhood.