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
