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
