Lover. Bertha Harris
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