I don’t know why I was seized with such a desire to go to Mexico. Ever since I could remember Mexico had been the accessible land of color and fantasy and delight, full of sun, music and song. And from civics and geography in grade school, I knew it was attached to where I lived, and that intrigued me. That meant, if need be, I could always walk there.
I was happy to learn that Jean’s boyfriend, Alf, who was in Mexico painting, would soon be coming home.
When I returned to New York after my father’s death, going to Mexico became my chief goal. I saw very little of my mother. Where I would have expected grief for my father, there was only numbness. I stayed with Jean and her friends in a West Side apartment while I hunted for work. I eventually went to work as a clinic clerk in a Health Center, and moved in to share an apartment with Rhea Held, a progressive white woman who was a friend of Jean and Alf’s.
No matter what emotional scrapes I got into that summer, the idea of Mexico shone like a beacon that I could count on, keeping me steady. The money I was saving from work, together with the small amount I had received from my father’s insurance, would make it possible. I was determined to go, and that determination was fed by the deepening political gloom and red-baiting hysteria.
I became deeply involved in working with the Committee to Free the Rosenbergs; even so, the months in New York between my return from Stamford and my going to Mexico were very much a sojourn to me.
Rhea Held and I lived quite well together in the bright, sunny seventh-floor walk-up apartment on Seventh Street on the Lower East Side, now becoming known as the East Village. It was at times difficult and new—learning to live with Rhea, learning to share space with anyone, and a white woman, too, especially since I had no deep emotional bonds with her, only warm and casual pleasantries.
The work at the health center was interestingly medical and the hours, not tedious. I felt set apart from the other women with whom I worked, by virtue of their lunch-talk about weekend dates (while my noontime fantasies were still filled with the remembered joys of Ginger’s bed).
Spring moved to summer. We demonstrated, picketed, stuffed envelopes, rang doorbells, and went to Washington for the Rosenbergs.
The second time I came to Washington, I traveled by bus. The trip took six hours and we boarded the buses at Union Square at 6:00 A.M. on a Sunday morning. It was not a pleasure trip, this time. We were seeking life for the parents of two little boys who traveled on the same bus in which I was riding. The Rosenbergs were about to be sacrificed, and this was a last-ditch visit to the white house to beg for a stay of execution.
Sunday morning, drizzly and cold for early June. I marched up and down with Jean and Rhea and the other women I had come with, hoping it would make a difference, still not really believing that any country I was associated with could murder these children’s parents and call it legal. And they were white, too, which made it even harder for me to believe.
This time, whether or not I could eat vanilla ice cream at a soda fountain never came up. I had neither the money nor the time to find out. We picketed the white house, sang our brave little songs, handed in our petitions of mercy, and then climbed back into the buses for the long wet ride home.
One week later, President Eisenhower signed into law an executive decree that said I could eat anything I wanted to anywhere in Washington, D.C., including vanilla ice cream. It didn’t mean too much to me by then.
In the evenings after work, I saw Jean and Alf, who were now married, or went to meetings with Rhea. Meetings where frightened people tried to keep some speck of hope alive, despite political disagreement, while all around us was the possible threat of dying like the Rosenbergs, or at least the threat of losing jobs or being fingered for life. Downtown at political meetings and uptown at the Harlem Writers Guild, friends, acquaintances, and simple people were terrorized at the thought of having to answer, “Are you or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?”
The Rosenbergs’ struggle became synonymous for me with being able to live in this country at all, with being able to survive in hostile surroundings. But my feelings of connection with most of the people I met in progressive circles, were as tenuous as those I had with my co-workers at the Health Center. I could imagine these comrades, Black and white, among whom color and racial differences could be openly examined and talked about, nonetheless one day asking me accusingly, “Are you or have you ever been a member of a homosexual relationship?” For them, being gay was “bourgeois and reactionary,” a reason for suspicion and shunning. Besides, it made you “more susceptible to the FBI.”
The Rosenbergs were electrocuted on June 19, 1953—two weeks after we had picketed the white house. I walked away from the memorial rally in Union Square Park into the warm Village night, tears streaming down my face for them, for their sons, for all our wasted efforts, for myself—wondering whether there was any place in the world that was different from here, anywhere that could be safe and free, not really even sure of what being safe and free could mean. But it did not mean being lonely, disillusioned, betrayed. I felt like I was thirty years old.
I ran into Bea coming out of a music store next to Rienzi’s Coffee Shop. I was grateful for her face, familiar yet different from the ones with which I had shared the grief and intensity of the last few weeks. I invited her home to Seventh Street for more coffee. Rhea had left for the weekend, seeking her own solace for the failure and grief we both shared.
Bea and I had met at Bennington College the year before in spring when I was visiting Jill. Bea was also there visiting a friend. Our eyes had met several times during that crazy drunken weekend, and once at 2:00 A.M. in the cafeteria, Bea and I had talked while the others slept, deciding that she and I felt separated from the other girls because we were both a few months older, and we lived alone; that is, we were responsible for ourselves. There was some brief, guarded intellectual conversation about a shared appreciation of so many beautiful girls in one dormitory. Since then, Bea had broken up with a lover and was living in Philadelphia with a group of other women who had rented a house together. In the meantime, I had been to Stamford and met Ginger.
We walked east across town holding hands, my tears and her sympathetic silence both mute memorials for Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. I began to feel eased. It was obvious to both of us that in the past year we had each moved beyond investigative discussions about loving women. I felt this—something in the frankness with which we held each other as we walked.
That night, I invited Bea to stay over. The rest was surprisingly easy. I made love to a woman for the first time in my very own bed. This was home, feeling the physical tensions of the last months of hope and despair loosen inside of me, as if a long fast had broken. The sense of relief was only lessened by Bea’s unresponsiveness. The quiet stillness of her sculptured body was disappointing beside the remembered passion of Ginger.
For the next few months, outside of work, I concentrated my energies on preparations to go to Mexico and being long-distance lovers with Bea. We saw each other every other weekend, on the average, alternating between the YWCA in Philadelphia and New York. Bea had roommates and I had Rhea, who determinedly knew nothing of my sexual life. More often than not, I went to Philadelphia since the Y there was cheaper and had better beds.
Meeting other lesbians was very difficult, except for the bars which I did not go to because I did not drink. One read The Ladder and the Daughters of Bilitis newsletter and wondered where all the other gay-girls were. Often, just finding out another woman was gay was enough of a reason to attempt a relationship, to attempt some connection in the name of love without first regard to how ill-matched the two of you might really be. Such were the results of loneliness, and this was certainly the case between Bea and me. For starters, our backgrounds and outlooks on important issues could not have been more different. Her family was old, mainline, white, and monied. Psychologically, she had left very little of them behind. Most importantly, our attitudes toward sex were totally different.
Sexual expression with Bea was a largely theoretical satisfaction, a very pleasant pastime, and one to which she had great intellectual commitment but apparently little visceral response. It was hard to believe her protestations and assurances that this had nothing to do with me. Whatever fears of reprisal from her upper-class family had turned her off, they had been quite successful. Despite our hours of love-making, our most impassioned shared connections were our love of guitars and old music.
I would take the night train to Philly and then a bus to the Arch Street YWCA, where Bea would have rented a room for us for the weekend. The rooms were small and plain and all alike, with single beds.
Bea’s face was square and rosy-cheeked, with a rosebud mouth whose corners always pointed down. She had wide, light blue eyes and strong beautiful teeth. Her blonde body was smooth and without fault—small-breasted, long-waisted, with sturdy hips and long smooth legs. It was a body not unlike the ivory statues I used to buy in Oriental import stores when I was in high school, with the money that I stole from my father’s pants pockets.
At first, I looked forward to our weekends with wild anticipation. The hope that this time it was going to be different. Bea’s acknowledged gayness was some connection, some living reality within the emotional desert around which I existed. And she was always quite honest about what she didn’t feel.
So weekend after weekend, in YWCA bed after YWCA bed, I ran my hot searching mouth over her as against a carved mound of smooth stone, until lip-bruised and panting with frustration, I fell back for a brief rest.
“That was really nice,” she would say. “I think I almost felt something.”
The scenario was always depressingly the same. We were both strong, physically healthy young women with lots of energies. Starting Friday night, I would make almost non-stop love to Bea for two days on our single bed while she sighed sadly. By Sunday noon, distraught and ravenous, I would come up for air, raving like a maniac, a sex fiend, a debaucher of virgins. We would dress to music—Bea had perfect pitch—and then essay forth, blinking, into daylight. Companionable in our spent frustrations, hand in hand, we would go to the Rodin Museum and then get something to eat in a diner before I caught my train back to New York. I grew fond of her forthrightness and her wit. And in a way, we even grew to love each other.
Sometimes to this day, whenever I think of Philadelphia, which is as infrequently as possible, I think of it as a boring grey-stone backdrop to a well-worn triangle, circumscribing the Arch Street YWCA, the Rodin Museum, and the 30th Street Station.
Across the table from me, Bea chewed each mouthful thirty-two times and told me how much she looked forward to our being together again. I was beside myself. Every Sunday night, I got onto the train vowing to myself that I would never see her again. That’s the way it would be for about a week. Then she would call me or I would call her, and one of us would be on the next Friday train to or from Philly. The prospect of breaching that insurmountable calm endlessly sparked my desire.
By Thanksgiving, we were planning to go to Mexico together. I knew this was a mistake, but I did not have the strength to say no. Finally, two weeks before we were planning to leave, on the way to the station one Sunday evening, I told Bea we had to stop seeing each other. That I was going to Mexico alone. No explanations, no preliminaries. It was self-preservation on my part, and I was horrified at my own cruelty. But I did not know any other way to do it. Bea stood in the gateway of the 30th Street station and wept as I ran for my train.
When I got home I sent her a telegram. It said, “I’M SORRY.”
I had believed that if I could bring myself to say it, harsh as it was, that would be the end of it, and I could go off and be guilty in private, as I made last-minute arrangements for my trip. But I had reckoned without Bea’s thoroughness and determination.
The whole disastrous affair terminated with Bea coming to New York the following day and camping on the steps of our seventh-floor landing outside the apartment, trying to catch hold of me. I was hiding out at Jean and Alf’s place, having been warned by an incredulous Rhea that a weeping girl was trying to find me. Rhea ran interference, making excuses to Bea as she went in and out of the apartment to work. Luckily, I had already quit my job at the Health Center, for Bea had gone there first.
Bea sat on the landing for two days, with quick forays downstairs to the corner foodshop for Cokes and trips to the john. She finally gave up and went back to Philadelphia.
She left me a note saying that what she really wanted to know was why, this way. I couldn’t tell her; I didn’t know why myself. But I felt like a monster. I had made a desperate bid for self-preservation—or what felt like self-preservation—in the only way I knew how. I hadn’t wanted to hurt anyone. But I had. I promised myself never to get involved like that again.
Guilt can be very useful.
For the three days this went on in the hallway, Rhea was her usual quizzical and accepting self. I had to tell her about the affair, couched in the fact that it was now over. What she thought about Bea I never stopped long enough to ask, but what she said made good sense to me.
“Just because you’re strong doesn’t mean you can let other people depend on you too much. It’s not fair to them, because when you can’t be what they want they’re disappointed, and you feel bad.” Rhea was sometimes very wise, just not for herself.
I never forgot that conversation, and we never discussed Bea again. I left for Mexico a week later.
It was eleven months after I had come back from Stamford, and two weeks before my nineteenth birthday.
I leaned back in my airplane seat, in the first skirt I’d bought in two years. The Air France night flight to Mexico City was half-empty. Rhea had made a surprise going-away party for me the night before, but even so I had been hounded by nightmares of arriving at the airport with no clothes on, or having forgotten my suitcases, or my passport, or neglected to buy a ticket. Not until I looked down and saw the lights of the city spread like electric lace across the night, did I actually believe I had gotten out of New York in one piece and under my own steam. Alive.
In the back of my head, I could hear Bea sobbing disconsolately in the stairwell. I felt like I was fleeing New York with the hounds of hell at my heels.
The stewardess was very solicitous of me. She said it was because this was my first flight, and I was so young to be traveling so far alone.