A Life in Motion

18. Sustaining Friendships

— 499 — For happiness she required women to walk with. To walk in the city arm in arm with a woman friend (as her mother had with aunts and cousins so many years ago) was just plain essential. Oh! those long walks and intimate talks . . . . Grace Paley,“Midrash on Happiness” Perhaps it’s a function of being eighty. But somewhere in the middle of writing about the Feminist Press, I realized that I was leaving out half my life, the half represented by the many people who had made the life I led possible. The entire list is long, but there were four women who were especially close to me over a significant period of time. When each of them died— Elaine Hedges in 1997,Tillie Olsen and Grace Paley both in 2007, and Marilyn French in 2009—grief set me to writing about them. Tillie and Grace both thought of me as a writer, one who should cease being an activist-publisher and begin writing.Marilyn French encouraged me to write this memoir. Elaine Hedges Elaine and I were best friends for forty years, though I left Baltimore in 1971. Together we worked on feminism at the Modern Language Association and on the development of women’s studies, the founding of the Feminist Press, and its restoration 18 Sustaining Friendships — 500 — of women writers. Through my chaotic, peripatetic life, especially after my father’s death in 1966 and my mother’s move to Florida in 1972, I regarded Elaine’s houses—in Baltimore and New Hampshire —as my“homes.” She was the only person who knew the circumstances of all my marriages and who had actually known my last two husbands. By the mid-1990s, we had begun to talk about growing old together, perhaps even living together. Then, suddenly, unexpectedly, in June 1997 she became critically ill, and I rushed to Baltimore, where, the morning after I arrived, I held her hand as she died. From the first, I was attracted to Elaine because she was both brilliant and beautiful. Through our long friendship, I often envied her looks and especially her figure, which seemed effortlessly slim. When she told me that she had not dated all through her college years at Barnard, where she was a nonresident scholarship student, because she couldn’t bear having some man take her home to Yonkers , I assumed that we had working-class shame in common, that her childhood had been as impoverished as mine. But I was wrong, for both her father and mother were high school graduates, and her father worked as an auditor for the Yonkers Board of Education. So the shame had some other source, and though she never told me what it was, I can see now that it might have been alcoholism. After her death, Elaine’s sister wrote that Elaine’s head“was always in a book,” even through meals, separating her from the rest of the family. We had both escaped from our families, it seemed. Elaine graduated summa cum laude from Barnard and went on to become the first woman to hold a teaching assistantship at Harvard in the History of American Civilization program where, in 1950, she met William Hedges, a Second World War veteran and the only son of a prominent historian at Brown University. They married in 1956, the year I married E. Elaine went on to have two babies—Marietta in 1961 and Jimmy in 1963—yet managed to finish her dissertation before the end of the decade. Thus she fulfilled the mandate I had set for myself but never achieved. She had the babies and the PhD. I had the job. What might have divided us Elaine Hedges at the Feminist Press gala, 1995. Photo: Midge Mackenzie. — 502 — didn’t,for I loved her babies as though they were my own.We joked often, with a kernel of truth, that I’d rather have had the babies and she’d rather have had the job. Very early on, she named me as godmother to both children, and in her will named me as the one legally responsible for them should she die. I always assumed that her marriage was a perfectly joyous one, but I neglected to consider that she might resent Bill as much as Goucher for the loss of her Wellesley job. In 1969, dissertation in hand, she took a job at Towson State...